Tag Archives: low wages

I'm Out of The Box…Now What?

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I found the following quotes and have been thoughtfully considering the meaning and application:

On Distributism (vs. Capitalism, vs. Socialism)“According to distributism, the ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism) or a few large businesses or wealthy private individuals (plutarchic capitalism).”

G.K. Chesterton said “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.” Continue reading →

Stimulus, Shimulus…Do It Right

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So the stimulus is in trouble. I’m not surprised in the least. There’s too much stuff in this bill in the first place. I attribute this to Democrats not being able to spend on anything for eight years, but this is not the time to cram everything in. So here are the 4 parts that I believe should be the TOTAL stimulus bill of right now.

Break the stimulus into the following parts:

1. Repairing bridges, roads, etc. throughout the country. Hire those laid-off autoworkers, hire engineers and project managers.

2. Give an enormous amount of money to green industry…solar panels, wind power and mass transportation. don’t just give enough for states to keep their existing transit systems…give them more to make the expansion they need due to increased ridership.

3. Restructure the electrical grid. Help fund and give contracts to companies like Better Place, which will send a message to Detroit that there WILL be an infrastructure in place to support the Chevy Volt and other cars when they come out. Oil will only go up.

4. Increase unemployment benefits and let the unemployed go onto Medicare for a time. Find a way to help those who are self-employed and independent contractors…many of whom are illegally paid in this fashion and suffer from extraordinarily high taxes.

This is ALL that should be in this bill. Of course, education reform and health care, etc. are important. My fear is that if we only do half of what is needed in these areas in this bill, when we try to do more, the Republicans will scream “We already spent money on these programs” and we’ll never get it done right.

Democrats, save some bargaining room. Health Care and Education should be addressed later (even in a few months, just to separate from this current bill) and if you dont spend anything on them now, you will have a better place to argue from when you need complete spending to do them right.

Also, let’s get this thing done without the Republicans. Obama needs to stand up to them more…they were not voted in. We wanted a bold, daring stimulus-and this is not it-this is a hodgepodge. It looks like a pot-luck dinner when we wanted and needed 5-star dining. We dont want more tax cuts or credits, either.

College Debt: Consuming Young Americans

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I want to talk about some of the enormous issues we, the young Americans, are facing today (and have actually been facing for awhile now) and, in later posts, write about some things that we can do to change things.

College and Student Loans

Alot of us have gone to college or are currently attending college and the belief was (and still is) that we would pay exorbitant sums of money for our degrees and get good-paying jobs with growth potential once we graduated. But, according to Marcy Gordon and The Seattle Times, the reality is that those good entry-level jobs are drying up.

Other people I know are also struggling to find the jobs that pay off those loans or are taking out more loans to go on to graduate school. My question is…What effect is all this debt going to have on our generation? Liz Pulliam Weston of MSN Money says that, on average, students have well over $20,000 in debt from loans at the age of 23 or 24 and most people I know have far more debt than that.  If your total debt is, say $40,000….thats a down payment on a house, a new car, savings for a young child’s college education, etc.

This debt truly limits our buying power when we can’t find the jobs we thought we would be that would enable us to pay down these loans. No one seems to be talking about this though. When the baby boomers are retired and the country is looking to us to invest, buy homes, take vacations, spur spending, we will still be paying hundreds of dollars in student loans a month.

The Economy

The economy at present is in bad shape and some predictions have it being very slow for 5-10 years. Many writers and reporters are talking about lost jobs in the American economy but almost no one talks about what it means for us, the young Americans. Let’s face it people: if a company is cutting back, going under or merging, what are the first jobs to go in most cases? The entry-level jobs and the early career jobs. These are OUR career paths and they are disappearing and no one is really talking about it. The Seattle TImes did put a couple of good articles in there about the absolutely paralyzing amount of college debt young people have and the drying up of good job prospects.

Ms. Pulliam’s articles from MSN Money on the subject, however, only acknowledge the debt and then go on to give ways to get out of it and stay out of it. Good advice, but if your loan payment is $300 per month (or more), your rent and utilites are, say, $800 a month, car insurance at $80 a month, health care monthly costs around $100 per month, groceries at $200 a month, most of us have credit cards too… how exactly are we supposed to put away for retirement, begin to diversify our portfolios, save for a down payment on a house and also have a “rainy day” type of savings making an average graduate salary of $30,000 per year????!!!! I want to know if other recent graduates are experiencing these kinds of realities!

I also want to discuss what we can do to change it. Obviously, voting is a huge aspect of this and I know we most likely wont see the changes for ourselves. I’m still ready to try to change things for us. I want America, the land of opportunity. I want the chance to apply my hard work and knowledge from my education to this country and make it better and I have some ideas which I will share in another post. What do you think?