The Inefficency of Capitalism

Right now there are too many houses on the market.  This is a direct reflection of market inefficiency.  Instead of blaming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, why not blame the home builders, who obviously over built, built houses that were too big and built too many of them.  We need a competing narrative.  Right now it's blame the poor people.  I think we should look the problem in the eye and blame the capitalists.  Instead of taking the growth in productivity gains and spreading the wealth to the people who actually do the work, they put the money in their own pockets.  Then they blamed China for moving jobs overseas.  Instead of designing and making a better whatever , all our capitalists can think about is paying less for labor.  Labor costs are not the problem with our economy.  The problem with our economy is the cost of fat management which is hogging all the profits.  The top 1%  is taking home the pay of the other 99% and then wonders why people aren't shopping.  Duh.  The market is not flawless.  If it were, Goldman Sachs would be out of business.  Wall Street is no longer connected to the business of making stuff.  They are in the business of moving paper around.  They are dangerously disconnected from reality, they don't earn the money they make and have no skin in the game. A teacher is more valuable than a stockbroker, but the market doesn't agree.  Seems to me there is something wrong with the market.

Beware of Limiting Entitlements

When anti-government people start to squawk about entitlements-Watch Out!  They want their friends in the private sector to put a hand in your pocket.  That was the argument they used to get rid of free higher education.  Believe it or not there was a time when you could get a college degree for free in this country.  My father was an immigrant with a full time job who went to night school for years to get a BA and a Master's degree to better provide for his family.  Then they started attacking state and city colleges as a middle class entitlement.  Once students were handed over to the private sector, schools started to become less and less affordable.  It's outrageous the amount of debt young people are saddled with these days. The Right Wing talks about the burden our young people will face in the future because of higher taxes, but most young people are already indentured to student loans which they may never pay off.   My advice to young people is to start working and pay as you go.  Also check out college plus on the web and get as much credit as possible for stuff you already know like a second language.  Also when in high school take the AP classes.  In New York and many other states the state colleges have online programs which are cheaper and which  you can do at your leisure while working. 
Back to entitlements.  Now they are attacking  Social Security.  This has to be the most craven attack by the right wing to date.  Social Security works.  It keeps older people out of abject poverty and allows people after a lifetime of hard work to rest.  I guess the right has never quite gotten over the New Deal.  They want to go back to the old days when people worked as children and died still working.  Social Security is solvent for at least 75 years which means even a 25 year old will be able to collect.  Don't believe the lies.

EDUCATION

They keep raising the bar on education.  Used to be you could learn a job and work your way up.  You could start right out of high school.  It made sense that you could be independent at age 18.  You could start a life and start a family.  When I went to school the bar was raised, you needed a college degree to get a job but they also wanted top typing skills.  Then they wanted a master's degree.  One smart thing I did was to get myself a double master's degree, I never regretted it.  I was able to work part time and still keep a roof over my head and food on the table.  Now the bar is being raised again.  Your super expensive college degree must now be concentrated in science.  If you didn't study science, you don't deserve to have a job.  Now that is crazy and exploitative.  In a way we have things all backwards.  We don't need just the super educated people, we need people who can actually make things.  The ivy league mathematicians were responsible for the fake economy of the 2000's. They had top notch computers skills but lacked common sense, a moral center and a knowledge of history.   Because of avarice they created mortgage instruments that crashed our entire economy.. At the same time jobs for people who made stuff started to be outsourced.  We sent those jobs overseas.   We need to get back to basics.  We need to make stuff and we need to pay the people who actually do the work a good wage, so they can turn around and buy that same stuff.  That's what Henry Ford did, remember?  You can't have falling wages and growth.  You will only have growth if wages start to go up.  I think we should have a shopping boycott until they start paying better wages. Union busting and downsizing has been going on for the past thirty years.  We used to be over 33% union, now it's down to around 6 %. One worker does the work of three. It's time to take our country back from the corporations, not government. We need regulation because people in power and privatized   companies can not be trusted. To get back to zero this country needs a diet and an exercise program. We must all whether rich or poor do our part by having a progressive tax. Time to close the loopholes, cut unnecessary spending, and tax everyone to raise money to build this country up to the superpower it should and could be.

Close your Wallet

I'm cheap and I'm going political.  I'm all for the folks down at OWS.  I think we should have done this long before now.  I used to tell people in my church to occupy Wall Street when they would talk to me about protesting at an abortion clinic.  I thought protesting at an abortion clinic was just silly.  If you really want to prevent abortions then you should be in favor of a living wage.  Pay people a decent salary and then they can afford to raise their kids, but businesses cry that they can't afford to pay more.  My answer to that is, if you can't pay people a living wage then there is something wrong with your business model.  It is hard but at the same time it is simple.  The truth is that the people who actually do the work have been getting screwed since Ronald Reagan.  He was wrong about too many things to go into on this one posting. Ask yourself the question are you better off now than you were in 1980 before we elected an actor to the White House.  I'm old enough to remember that the answer is no.
In response to this thirty year war on the people who actually do the work, I say close your wallet.  If they think they can get along without us, I say let them try.   I'm no Luddite.  I like my technology.  I like getting up and writing a blog for instance, but I have had very little money most of my life. Education has given me a host of skills, not least of which is a clear view of what really matters.  The truth is that we can live without a lot of stuff and just not spend any money.  We can pay our taxes, put food on the table, clothes on our backs and live well with very little.  The reality is that we the people have been through this before.  The same nonsense happened during the depression.  I say: Screw the economy until it stops screwing us.  Give us good paying jobs or we won't shop.  Some folks are out buying guns.  That will just create mayhem.  Close your wallet instead and make your own everything.  Make your own entertainment, grow your own food, fix up and decorate your own clothes.  Paint and repair discarded furniture.  We the people are very resourceful and we can just shut them down if we really wanted to. Bring Back the Boycott!