A Look at America's Problems

[ysabetwordsmith]

These 8 charts illustrate key problems with America's wealth distribution and how it affects the country.  Link courtesy of my partner Doug.

America now functions more as a plutocracy than a democracy.  A tiny number of super-powerful people control a majority of the wealth.  They are over-represented in the government.  Wealthy people thus make decisions to benefit themselves, while harming the vast majority of citizens.  Many people do not have enough money to live on, which is to say, meet the demands placed on them by the wealthy.  The result is a floundering economy because there is simply not enough money left to the bottom 80-90% of people to keep it going.   Too much of the money is being hogged by too few people who are using it in ways that aren't producing a healthy economy, no matter what kind of smokescreen they try to blow over the disaster.

Comments

Re: Cite evidence, please.

[wolfbrotherjoe.livejournal.com]

What is even WORSE is that money, honestly, isn't that big a deal. It's what money represents which is important - choice.

Going back to the medical industry, which I'm very familiar with thanks to having lots of extended family members in the industry, such as a father who's a low-paid Physical Therapist, or my mom who worked for 30 years as an RN, I am very familiar with the fact that Democrat policies regulating medical care REMOVES a great deal of choice from your health care. Newer procedures - better or cheaper than the old procedures - get caught up for years, and years, and years in legislation to 'authorize' them for use in the hospitals through the medicare system, making it hard for people to get the care they want. In general, the high levels of legislation make it hard for any industry to be as flexible as it could be, since everything has to go through so much red tape to make any changes - and any mistakes are fiercely punished with lawsuits.

What's more, is the Democrat decision to flat-out remove choices altogether to 'eliminate harmful competition'. For instance, hardline phone companies, cable companies, and the like, do not have to compete with each other for your dollars with level of service and low bills - instead, they often just have to complete with each other for the government contract for your area. A government contract which is rarely based on quality of service, but instead is determined by a hueristic based on how many local minority-owned businesses the nation-wide company farms its work out to.

Or, alternatively, as we have here in Wisconsin - if you're in a government union position, you have the chocie of whether or not to be in the union... but not the choice of whether to pay union fees. People who do not want to be in the union end up paying out money to the unions anyway. And so, Democrats legislate that public taxpayer money goes to unions - which the unions turn around and give back to Democrats during campaigns.

Or, as one of Obama's first half-dozen actions in office - removing the right of free speech from Employers... by making it a federal crime to answer employees who are asking questions about unions.

Re: Cite evidence, please.

[wolfbrotherjoe.livejournal.com]

Or, in terms of education - wealthy people have a wide variety of choices in the education of their children. They can choose to send them to a public school, or to private schools, because if the wealthy person loses the money for 'their child' to a public school, it's not as big a deal. Poor people, however, do not have this choice. They HAVE to send their kid to the local public school, because they do not have the spare money to ignore the price of what it takes to education a child.

School vouchers represent the CHOICE that money gives to wealthy people. School vouchers would reduce the gap between wealthy children and poor children in getting a choice in education - but Democrats regularly work against school vouchers, keeping the good schools for the wealthy, and keeping their control over poor people by deciding what schools they are allowed to go to.

And you can look at my livejournal (through ysabet's name) for my personal history with the Milwaukee Public School system. I won't recount the entire thing here - but suffice to say I have excellent reason to see them as caring NOTHING for the education of the students or the conditions they learn in. Seeing as they told me flat out that the quality of work done is not a priority in any way for them.

*deep breath* *lets it out slowly*

And yes. That's the SHORT version.

So in briefer-brief:

They cluster people at the lower end of the spectrum, remove opportunities for people to get ahead through making individual deals and choices by legislating that every employee must be treated the same, price-set vital elements of our economy, and remove our choices.

Re: Cite evidence, please.

[wolfbrotherjoe.livejournal.com]

Something I realized is probably important to say but I forgot to -

I do not believe they are doing this *on purpose* through any sort of conspiracy. I believe it is a series of well-intentioned legislation that was not well thought through past the initial and immediate result - working off the base classist assumption of 'noblesse oblige,' where the noble class is supposed to 'take care of' the worker class.

The problem is that the person who knows most about farming - is the farmer. The person who knows most about business - is the businessman. The person who knows most about medicine - is the Doctor. Being a good and intelligent politician or legislator or administrator does not give the knowledge to regulate these elements, and regulation inherently limits the very necessary agility and flexibility of these elements to respond to the changing world around them.