Bowl,
You said that to make it in this world, you only need 35-40k/year.
Unfortunately, this is NOT the case. On a year/year basis, you will be able to feed yourself, and maybe even your family as well on this type of income...but you will NOT have sufficient savings to retire, your dollar will deplete too fast, your social security will not bail you out, and you will be working for the rest of your life.
Medical bills alone can even wear out the retirement of many people who made 100k/year...the average American paid 130k into medicaid during their entire working life. Guess how much they are taking out?
350k.
We have a Boomer population that has just begun to start collecting social security and the government is already stressing out about it. This is a generation that spans over the course of 20 years and is more than TWICE the size of generations X and Y COMBINED.
You now have a workforce that is a fraction of the population it is built into this system to support. The numbers simply don't work for about 96% of people living in this country. What we are headed towards in that sense is what Japan is going through right now. The average citizens age there is already 55 years old. It is a geriatric society that doesn't have the workforce to sustain it's people.
Further, in an ideal capitalist free market society, I am totally in agreement with you. I feel that because of the realities I just mentioned, the ONLY way to be ok in the long run is to not rely on the government. However, where we DIVERGE is that people don't rely on the government because they are lazy.
They rely on the government because that is what our past leaders have told us to do. Ever since the first credit card was invented with the introduction of Diners Club, people have been encouraged and even temporarily rewarded by purchasing things that they could not afford, and leveraging themselves at the expense of others, creating a ricochet effect that ended up being the expense of themselves.
The richest of people---the ones that have successfully created the absolute LEAST amount of sustainability in our society, have also managed to secure so much empty wealth that the collapse of their households would mean the collapse of EVERY household, hence some of the reasoning behind the GREAT Bailouts that occurred a couple of years ago. A lot of people cried foul, and it was in a sense, bullshit, but because we have subscribed to their systems, WE NEEDED THEM to be saved as well.
Let's put it full circle.
When everyone uses temporary solutions for long-term issues and pushes the burden forward, eventually the snowball we have collectively built while pushing it up the mountain of debt will become too heavy to continue to push, and gravity (reality) will start to push back and overpower 'leverage.' The result is, the people at the top will be able to move out of the way, but everyone else won't see the ball coming as it picks up speed and drags them to the bottom.
Wow this sounded a bit conspiratorial, but it's damn true.
As far as the Unions in Wisconsin...not only do teachers (among others) have to deal with Union cuts, they have to deal with a massive $800 mil in spending cuts in the state. The average teacher already spends close to 1k of their PERSONAL funds (which we all know isn't much) to close the gap on school supplies their schools won't provide them with.
If you look over any historical data, there isn't ONE well-educated society that stays broke, but virtually ALL poorly-educated societies are incredibly impoverished. All in all, the money has been spent on things that, in my opinion, are NOWHERE NEAR AS IMPORTANT as education.
My personal story is a perfect example.
I went to Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison because my high school boasts a 100% matriculation to college rate EVERY YEAR, without exception. UW is a pretty good school, and it actually represents the highest number of all schools that my classmates matriculate to overall. 2nd place? Brown. 3rd? Yale. We aren't smarter on average from a capability standpoint, we are just better educated. This was a private school in Chicago BTW. Compare this with the Madison school system.
This year, in ALL of Madison, only 378 black kids graduated high school last year. Of those, a paltry 76 took the ACT. Out of the 76, only 5...that's right, 5 black kids had sufficient scores for decent 4 year colleges.
That's the quality of education in Madison, which is by NO MEANS an impoverished city. FIVE BLACK KIDS TO SEND TO GOOD COLLEGES. With this trend, it is no wonder why only TWO black owned businesses in the ENTIRE COUNTY have 10 full time employees. Owning a McD's franchise would qualify you. With one of the highest bar/restaurant concentrations per capita in the country, only ONE is owned by a black person and it is in DANGER OF GOING OUT OF BUSINESS.
Education is paramount to everything. Sorry to be racial about it, I'm just talking about a parallel between poor education and poor achievement.
Hot Forum Topics
