Posted on 03/09/2004 5:35:30 PM PST by Beck_isright
Edited on 05/07/2004 5:22:19 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Among those who apparently didn't listen to the 43-year-old unemployed woman whose recorded message was posted online last week by The Republic were Arizona's Jon Kyl and John McCain, along with 24 of their Senate colleagues, all of them collecting fat government paychecks.
(Excerpt) Read more at azcentral.com ...
Don't be stupid - oh, sorry, too late ...
Exactly, but there's one key difference. Instead of a democracy taking over for france and England (USA), a communist dictatorship (China) or a socialist hell hole (India) will take over for us. Imagine the great protectors of freedom "the chinese" running the world instead of us.
It's only 5.6% because people have stopped looking for work. The real unemployment rate is closer to 10%.
I work for a small company (about a 100 people) and they have benefits: 401K (no matching though), Good healthcare (additional family members are extra), a short commute. Not all small businesses are sole properiterships, but I see your point. There is plenty of upside for good employees though:
1) Access to the highest levels of the company. I go right to the top to ask for a raise bonus etc. There is no middle management to defer to.
2) Less bureaucracy. If you need something you something to make your job easier or the company more money you go right to the top. See number 1.
3) More flexible hours.
4) More money. Small companies know who butters their bread, and are very willing to compensate valuable employees. I make good money as programmer at a small company even when compared to programmers at large companies. (not to mention I still have a job) I make my companies world go round, and the people in charge of the compensation recognize this and reward me. How does this work at a big company?
5) When things get tight the company will decide who to retain based on their value to the company, and they decision makers at the company will have a good idea who that is. In a small company there the principle players have good job security. In a big company it's more of a crap shoot with nameless faceless manager you have never met before who barely know what you do deciding your fate. Small companies consider some employees nearly irreplacable. Everyone is replacable at a big company. I guess this is the biggest reason I prefer to work for a small company.
'Luddite-ism' manifests itself in any number of ways, and I think that socialists *rarely* see themselves as such either. I think the core to your perspective likes more along these two lines more than you think ...
Simple 'job preservation' is dead end. Most people know that; you CAN'T mandate the pace at which technology develops ... I've been involved in more technology than most people can shake a stick at - and in more depth than I'll ever be able to convey *or* explain to someone who's only been down one particular narrow 'avenue' of today's technological world ...
Easy. Sick, old people get social security, pensions, sometimes even disability payments. Many of them have equity in their homes and have savings. If the choice is between spending $50,000 a year on a nursing home, or having a relative take care of you, many will prefer the relative, even if it means supporting them for a time.
So these 8.2 million people in the work force who've can't find work and have dropped off the unemployment roles have all moved back in with their parents or are letting their wives support them.
Some of them probably have become stay-at-home mothers as well. The net result is that peoples' standards of living seriously decline. If they decline too much around November 2004, it *will* become a factor in this election.
Exactly. In a way, being a 40 year old woman and moving back in with ones' 70 year old parents is a form of "borrowing" against the future too. Sooner or later all that old person wealth is going to get spent, and what then? What are the *children* of the 40-50 year olds (dependent on aging parents) supposed to do? What is *their* standard of living going to be like? On the level of Mexico? That's where it's heading.
Some of them probably have become stay-at-home mothers as well. The net result is that peoples' standards of living seriously decline. If they decline too much around November 2004, it *will* become a factor in this election.
Only problem with this is that "peoples' standards of living" are NOT declining.
Average incomes and benefits are UP...and the economy continues to grow.
Thanks for the reply.
Why is it cost effective? Here's why. In many cities it's $50,000 a year for marginally decent nursing home care.
Many elderly people don't need the full service of a nursing home - they need "assisted living" to help them stay in their homes. "Assisted living" means help with shopping, cleaning, and minor "medical" tasks like administering medicine, checking monitors, etc.
When old people get older and more frail and/or delusional, they may need round-the-clock care. They may need more medical services, like checking IV lines or catheters. Paying for all these services can get phenomenally expensive - one *hour* of a visiting RN's time can cost $100.
For elderly people who don't want to spend themselves down into Medicaid, and who want to remain in their own homes, having a middle-aged child move in with them to provide their "assisted living" or even some medical care *is* very cost-effective, when you consider how expensive the alternative is becoming.
As the numbers of elderly increase rapidly every year, don't expect these costs to go down anytime soon, either.
Yes, I'm sure it sounds funny, but that's exactly what widows used to do in the 19th and even early 20th century, until zoning laws and general litigiousness forced them out. They used to run boarding houses. Everyone benefited: single working people found a cheap room to live in while they saved money, and the widow earned badly-needed cash.
One reason this economy *has* hurt the middle class so sharply is because many of these options of former days (taking in boarders, offering private lessons out of one's home, raising rabbits in the back yard) have been legislated / zoned out of the realm of possibility.
LOL. Actually, I just bought 3 pairs of jeans & 5 T-shirts for my husband from Wal-Mart. The jeans were all made in USA and the T-shirts were USA fabric, assembled in Honduras. At least they weren't made by Chinese slaves...
If you look carefully at Wal-Mart you actually can find a fair amount of made in USA stuff - at least I have.
My husband worked for a startup (since gone bankrupt) that had much of its hardware designed outsourced in Bangalore. His bosses had spent months in India, and the general report was that Americans working over there on temporary visas "lived like kings." (They were being paid an American salary but living in India.)
But even professionals in India whose salaries are very low by our standards still have a good standard of living over there, because they have such a large class of desperate poor combined with modern technology (appliances, air conditioning, automobiles, etc.) The poor are willing to work as servants, and even middle class Indians have both cheap help at home *and* the fruits of modern technology.
The problem is that India is *protectionist* - they don't let Americans just move there & get a job. They are *protective* of their own Indian citizens and don't want foreign competition. If we truly demanded that they reciprocate in kind (i.e. allowed a *proportionate to population* number of Americans to work there as we allow H-1Bs), you'd see an end to outsourcing. The Indians scream about any attempt on our part to limit H-1Bs, or cut back on outsourcing to India, but they are very protectionist themselves.
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