Week of 08/28/2017

The Very Real Effects of Income Inequality
– by David Matthews 2

So you may have heard this story in your community or out on the Internet.  It certainly became a subject for the Atlanta area news on a few occasions: local law enforcement aren’t getting paid enough to make ends meet.  The men and women that are supposed to keep law and order (operative words being “supposed to”) are having to go on food stamps because they’re so poor.  You know, food stamps... that government welfare program that conservatives and neo-conservatives hate with a venomous passion and think that anyone who needs food stamps should undergo sick, sadistic trials of shame and disgust every time they use them.  And we’re talking sadism at a level that would even make the Marquis de Sade sick.

That should shock you, right?  The very idea that our police officers are needing to go on food stamps.  Well that’s what the law enforcement community want you to believe, and I’m really not going to disagree with them on that.  Quite the contrary… I’m going to side with them on it. 

But I’ll only do so with a caveat: we’re all in the same boat as them.

Or... most of us are.

A recent report from the job-hunting website CareerBuilder says that eight out of ten Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck.  Eight out of ten!  And the disturbing thing about this is that we’re not just talking about people at the poverty level or even the mythical middle class.  This is including people who make six-figure incomes.  And, according to this same report, it is because of the debt they’ve accumulated that they can’t get rid of.

So what does this have to do with the supposedly underpaid police officers?

Everything!

Who do you think really pays the salaries of police officers?  We all do through our various local taxes.  The reason the various law enforcement communities are bitching about being underpaid is so they can guilt us, the taxpayers, into giving them more money through higher state and local taxes.

They certainly can’t go to the retail community and demand more money!  Are you kidding?  They’re falling apart!  The malls are become wastelands!  Wal-Mart is destroying your mom-and-pop stores, and, if they aren’t, then Amazon is, and let’s not forget Sears-slash-K-Mart going down the drain faster than White House credibility.  They can’t cough up the extra money to pay the police.  Ask them, they’ll tell you!  They work long hours and have their people work long hours for low money just to keep the business open.  Not to mention that they’d just have to raise prices to make up the difference, which means that we, the customers, would end up having to pay for it anyway.

And we certainly cannot expect the big-money companies who sustain and employ the community to cough up the money!  If you try to approach them with the bill to pay for higher salaries for police, then they would reply with “You try to stick us with this and we’ll pack up our bags and go find another community.  Maybe even someplace in another country that is more appreciate of us!”  These are the major players that enjoy all sorts of local and state tax breaks for the “privilege” of being there and keeping the masses employed and continue to live paycheck-to-paycheck.  They can’t be “bothered” by paying the police more money.  That’s not “their” problem.  That’s the “community’s” problem.  In other words, it goes back to those “ungrateful” working peons who are “stupid enough” to live paycheck-to-paycheck.

You see, boys and girls, the real villain in this story is a little thing that the conservatives and neo-conservatives and the Donald Trumps of the world don’t want us to talk about, and that is income inequality.

How is it that the economy can be so great and companies can report record profits and yet people are still struggling to make ends meet?  Because the business world has a mad-on fetish for profit at all costs, and instead of rewarding employees for good work, they reward the high-ups for their supposedly “sound business sense”, which just happens to include keeping wages insanely low to cut down on overhead.

And this is not something that can be blamed on Donald Trump or Barack Obama or the Great Recession or George W. Bush, or even Bill and Hillary Clinton.  This has been slowly happening for decades now.  This is a generational swindle.

It goes like this: in order to cut down on overhead and maximize profits, employers pay new employees less and they give the current employees smaller raises, expecting the experienced workers to be overjoyed at getting anything extra.  The problem is, though, if you get a 1.5% raise and the cost of living goes up 7%, then you’re not getting ahead.  You are actually losing 5.5%.  But nobody really notices it because they’re still being told that they’re getting a raise and that they should be grateful about even getting that.

Now if that only happens for maybe one or two years, then that’s okay.  That can be managed.  But this is happening year after year after year after year, during good times and bad, during economic booms and busts.  And we are conditioned to believe that this is okay.  If times are tough, just get a second job, or a third or fourth, or look for new work.  There are supposedly all sorts of jobs out there now, at any given time.  The onus always being put “on us”, the supposedly “ungrateful, lazy, and irresponsible” masses to work two or three jobs.  To quote Bush Junior, that’s “uniquely American”.

And guess what else has been happening while this is going on?  The lifespan of major appliances have been getting shorter and shorter.  A television set used to last us a decade.  Now you’re lucky if it lasts half that time.  And that’s not a coincidence or because of supposedly “sloppy workmanship”.  That means that we have to spend money that we don’t have just for things that used to last but now don’t.

Let’s not forget the script!  The damnable consumption script that tells us that we “have” to get a new car, that we “have” to get a new home, that we “have” to get that new cellphone, that we “have” to go on that cruise or take that vacation, that we “have” to get the latest and greatest and best things for ourselves and our family.  And if money is an obstacle, banks will be “happy to help” by putting us further in debt.

That, my friends, is how someone making $125,000 a year can still end up working paycheck-to-paycheck.  Because they have to pay for that new house and that new car and that new TV set and that new wardrobe and that new cellphone on top of the basic necessities which continue to get more and more expensive while their own pay stagnates.

Let’s not forget that other script – the one recited like a church hymnal on talk radio and Fox News – that says that taxes are too high and they need to be cut and government is too big and too bulky and too cumbersome and it needs to be trimmed.  You cannot regurgitate that mantra and at the same time say that the cops deserve raises.  Where do you think the money comes from?

Let’s get brutally honest here… these are all the long-term effects of systemic income inequality here in the United States of America.  Because greedy companies put profits ahead of people, especially when it comes to their own workers, there is less money for people to pay for the basics, which continue to get more and more expensive, and it also means that there is less money for them to pay the taxes that would keep wages competitive for public employees such as cops and teachers and firefighters. 

Something needs to give here, and it can’t continually be those supposedly “ungrateful, lazy, irresponsible” masses.  History continually shows that when that happens, it does not end well.  The French and Russian aristocracies found that out the hard and bloody way.  And even when it doesn’t get violent, it does lead to things that conservatives and neo-conservatives and Trumpets claim to despise as well.  Things like socialism and communism.  If you really hate these things, then you need to stop being the very reason for these things to take hold. 

This is a problem that cannot be resolved overnight.  We’re having to fight decades of entrenched social scripting as well as a system that rewards profit above everything else.  But we still need to start somewhere, and a good place to start is a new message going up to those on the other end of the income inequality.  The ones at fault; the ones that created this mess in the first place through their blind stinking greed. 

They need to hear this message and heed this message loud and clear: If you don’t want history to repeat itself, if you don’t want to be fighting the encroachment of things like socialism and communism, if you want people to afford the things that you expect them to buy, if you want cops and teachers and firefighters to be paid better, then it is you, the wealthy and the powerful, that have to give something up for once.  You need to give up the greed.