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A lot of our problems can be traced to one source: out-of-control capitalism. Too many big corporations are driven by profit at the expense of everything else. They do everything they can to keep wages low and avoid paying benefits to their employees. Keeping their bank accounts fat and their shareholders happy are all that matter \u2013 and everything and everyone else be damned. Little do they know that this is biting them in their backsides. When the fat cats keep minimum wage at rock bottom, more and more of the working class must rely on public assistance such as food stamps and Obamacare \u2013 as in more taxes that everybody has to pay. Also, depressed wages mean less buying power for the Middle Class and the poor, less cash at large to stimulate the economy. Too many CEOs have been hypnotized by the bean counters, and have lost sight of the true purpose of capitalism, namely, to make everybody prosper \u2013 not just the one percent. The business morals of Henry Ford, who made sure that his employees were paid as high a wage as feasible, have been forgotten amid the clatter of adding machines.<\/p>\n
The pay of CEOs has skyrocketed over the last 25 years, while wages for the rank and file workers have creeped up slowly. Congress has increased its own pay many times, yet raised the minimum wage only three times. Our current minimum wage is not a living wage – and has not increased in over 11 years. Most people earning this are not teenagers who live at home under the care of an adult guardian or two, but heads of households who fret over whether they will be able to keep up with utility bills and rent. Many must rely on SNAP and food banks in order to eat and keep their children fed. Sadly, a lot of people who advocate less government also think that wages should be left to businesses. The fact that so many businesses do all they can to keep wages low and avoid springing for benefits shows that you can have decent wages, or minimal governmental interference in commerce, but not both. Private charity could not even begin to take up the slack, any more than one could fit all the passengers on a crammed-full articulated city bus into a Smart car.<\/p>\n
To add insult to injury, while Congress slashes food stamps and refuses to extend unemployment benefits, they still provide huge subsidies to corporations that are making record profits. One-quarter of all corporations do not pay any income tax, thus shifting the burden to individuals and small businesses, which are less and less able to take on such a burden. Wage earners thus get the double whammy, not only having to subsist on less, but also having to shoulder more of the tax burden to pay for corporate welfare. Corporations do not need government assistance when they are in the black.<\/p>\n
Our government allocates more to \u201cdefense\u201d than any other nation \u2013 in fact, we spend a third again more than the next nine nations combined. Our military budget is more than eight times that of China, the second biggest spender. We have military presence in dozens of countries, not for the sake of peacekeeping or maintaining freedom, but for the interests of the defense contractors. Then, when the men and women who served this nation come home, they find poorly run services for veterans, and must wait months or even more than a year for the physical and psychological therapy they need. Far, far too many succumb to suicidal urges. Thousands of veterans are homeless, while the CEOs of defense contractors loll in their mansions.<\/p>\n
Dwight Eisenhower warned of the fearful \u201ciron triangle\u201d that is the military-industrial complex. This monster has taken control of the country and made our government its obliging stooge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A lot of our problems can be traced to one source: out-of-control capitalism. Too many big corporations are driven by profit at the expense of everything else. They do everything they can to keep wages low and avoid paying benefits to their employees. Keeping their bank accounts fat and their shareholders happy are all that […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}