PROGRESSIVE DOUBLESPEAK: IF WALMART DOESN'T PAY A LIVING WAGE, YOU MAKE UP THE DIFFERENCE!
There is this fallacy in America – promoted by the progressive socialist democrats – that every individual is “owed” a fair wage, medical treatment, and outcomes equal to others. In essence the old socialist and communist promise of “equality.” That if you are not living as well as your neighbor, then it is the neighbor’s obligation to re-distribute their wealth so everybody is equal. Never mentioning of course, the corruption among the ruling elite who put forth these socialist/communist tenets to gain or maintain political power.
Progressive socialist democrats will do or say anything to push their political agenda of international socialism forward – including creating and maintaining socialist institutions such as unions to effect political change. Is it any surprise that these unions overwhelmingly fund and support democrats – in return for enforcing labor policies that swell union membership and feed billions into the union-controlled pension funds? Or that union politics is rife with organized crime and thuggery?
Now we find the progressives declaring that you are, indeed, responsible for the behavior of your brothers and sisters and have an obligation to re-distribute the wealth in this nation. How? By putting forth such nonsense that everyone is “owed” a living wage – and it is your responsibility to see that private corporations unionize and pay wages and benefits acceptable to the union.
While the progressives openly advertise the availability of social assistance programs and try to encourage their use – mainly to grow the size of government and use these entitlements to exert greater control over individuals …
It's Time to Do Something When a Corporation Like WalMart Won't Pay a Living Wage: Or Else We All Pay -- Wal-Mart employees are the single largest group of Medicaid recipients in the United States.
Last week, thousands of fast food workers from across the country walked off their jobs to demand a living wage of $15 an hour. Ever since, the Republican talking point machine has been running on all cylinders.
Consider the actual costs. First, the cost to the employee is increased taxation on the new wage – to fund Social Security and other benefits. Second, if the company is unionized, the employee is forced to pay union dues and generally give up their right to be rewarded for their merit; waiting in line for promotion by seniority. Third, and for the employer, it’s not just $15, when you add healthcare and retirement benefits, administration costs of dealing with the unions and their non-productive workrules, it is much, much more. And, the amount is not capped at $15, but will rise year-after-year due to union demands with the threat of a strike looming larger and larger as demands increase. So the company pays more – and then passes the costs along to the consumer – so you pay more! Add to this, the cost of a rapidly expanding government and an out-of-control healthcare system, and pretty soon, goods and services will be priced beyond your reach. You will either shop elsewhere or make do with what you have. Thus, begins a downward spiral into DETROIT – where all of the progressive policies and union antics have played out for sixty years.
According to pundits on the right, giving fast food workers or any other workers, for that matter, a $7 or $8 bump to their hourly wages would cut so much into the bottom lines of “job-creators” that business owners would have to either pass the cost of a living-wage onto consumers or simply stop hiring new workers altogether.
Where is it written that job-creators must invest their time, effort, and money in satisfying the increasing demands of a union or workers. Yes, they need to compete in the labor market for qualified workers and it is in a job-creators best interests to pay an acceptable wage for a given amount of work. But, their fiduciary responsibility is to their owners – the shareholders or the individual that created the enterprise. Why should even a portion of these funds be siphoned off to a parasitical union feeding on an unwilling host. A union that guarantees higher costs, but no increase in productivity.
But lost among all the noise on the right is one very, very important point: getting tax preferences and limitations on liability to do business in the United States is a privilege, not a right. It’s a privilege that we as a society offer to budding entrepreneurs and big business alike in exchange for goods, services, and jobs.
What? The right to earn a living is a government privilege? This is total and complete bullshit. Man has always had a God-given right to exist and do anything in his power to earn his existence. Even though a business may pay taxes to support the common infrastructure, there is no obligation to pay taxes to support your neighbor’s lifestyle. As for tax preferences and limitations on liabilities, these are political devices wielded by government entitites to promote their self-interests; such as attracting a job-creator to their community rather than the community in the next state.
Look at it this way: when someone opens up a business, they’re entitled to all sorts of special tax breaks that most people can’t get. They can write off fancy meals; they can write off nights stayed at five-star hotels; they can write off airfare to anywhere in the world they do business, or even might do business; and they can even write off any legal expenses they incur when they get busted for breaking the law. Drug dealers who push pot can’t write off their lawyer’s fees, but drug dealers at Big Pharma, even when they lie and break the law in ways that kill people, can - all because they’re incorporated.
This is socialist class warfare rhetoric. Anyone in America is free to start their own enterprise and enjoy the tax codes that were created by the corrupt politicians to pander to the special interests who fund their campaigns and provide voter support. Fancy meals and five-star hotels – you mean like government officials traveling on the taxpayer’s dime? And, let’s not conflate drug deals who offer life-destroying drugs with those who offer life-improving drugs. The sad fact is that the government is the promoter and beneficiary of criminal activities. An entire system of unionized law enforcement, incarceration facilities, and the legal profession is dependent on criminalizing drugs for the purposes of keeping the prices high and the profits flowing. To think that high-level politicians do not benefit from criminal activities is naïve.
All these breaks come in exchange for the company receiving these benefits giving society something back in return. Besides a useful service like selling meals or a good product like a well-made car, the single most important thing a business owner can give back to society is a well-paying job with benefits.
Perhaps, you should question why corrupt politicians, pandering to the special interests, have changed patent and copyright laws to disadvantage the public – extending the monopoly on creative works long past the time they should have been in the public domain? And, speaking of well-made cars, has anyone noticed that the unions and the government have done much to destroy the myth of a well-made car. The costs to support union-driven wages and benefits have killed the automobile industry in Detroit, pushing jobs outward to other countries. Consider that good-paying jobs in the automobile industry have now been replaced by former autoworkers fighting to get jobs at WalMart. And, the unions want to repeat their socialist experience again.
A job that pays a living wage isn’t just good for the workers who get to take home a livable paycheck, it’s good for other business owners and the economy as a whole. Businesses need people with a reasonable income to buy their goods. When workers are paid so little that they can barely afford to eat, they can’t spend additional money and as a result, the entire economy suffers. This is economics 101.
Consider the opposite side of the coin. If the government did not spend so much and continue to raise taxes, people could live on far fewer dollars. If the government did not use the Federal Reserve to inflate the money supply, people wouldn’t be forced to pay exorbitant amounts of interest – and they could live cheaper. If there were no unions, a great deal of money could have been preserved for the benefit of the employees.
That implicit contract between society and the business owner used to be common knowledge in this country and, until the Reagan Revolution, was kept intact by businesses. Now, however, corporate America has thrown it out the window.
That implicit contract is being misstated for political purposes. The contract between society and the business owner is you can do anything you want as long as it is not illegal. We know that tobacco use can kill and raise healthcare costs, but the government simply taxes it to provide themselves with life-sustaining revenue. Ditto alcohol. And, possibly marijuana. Hypocrites.
The socialists attack …
Wal-Mart is the most egregious example. The nation’s largest employer is one big corporate welfare scheme for the company’s executives and the billionaire Walton family. Wal-Mart makes nearly $35,000 in profit every minute and, as of 2012, its average annual sales stood at $405 billion dollars.
According to Mother Jones, the six Waltons, whose money comes from Wal-Mart, control an estimated $115 billion dollar fortune. In total, that’s more than a staggering 42% of Americans combined.
And where did they get all that money? They took it out of the business instead of paying their workers a living wage. Thus, at the same time that Wal-Mart executives are raking in the millions and the Walton family’s fortune is ballooning, Wal-Mart employees struggle to get by.
The average Wal-Mart employee makes about $9 per hour, and would have to work over 7 million years at that rate to accumulate as much wealth as the Waltons have. To make matters worse, only some of the company’s employees qualify for its very minimal health insurance plan.
WalMart offers goods and services that benefit Americans – especially those who are on limited incomes. That is the fundamental good. The owners and management have invested the time, effort, and money to build such as successful enterprise. And, now the parasitical union wants to feed on the host. If workers do not want to work at Wal-Mart, let them create their own enterprise. Let them move to a more favorable employment environment. But, it is un-American to tear down an enterprise to make provisions for socialist unions that do nothing to earn their money, except extort funds at the point of a proverbial gun – the strike.
Why not take a look at Hollywood and those billionaire movie stars and hip-hoppers who talk about fairness, but seem to do nothing to reward bottom-of-the-line workers in unionized Hollywood productions. Why isn’t Oprah spending some of the three billion dollars to clean up the inner cities in Chicago – the city, according to socialist thinking – that gave her the right to make that money?
As a result, you and me - and the rest of America’s taxpayers - are subsidizing Wal-Mart by paying for the healthcare costs, housing, and food of Wal-Mart employees. In fact, Wal-Mart employees are the single largest group of Medicaid recipients in the United States.
Read more of this pathetic plea for parasitical unionism at: It's Time to Do Something When a Corporation Like WalMart Won't Pay a Living Wage: Or Else We All Pay | Alternet
Perhaps it is because WalMart is highly organized and offers mostly entry-level jobs, as does McDonalds, that salaries are lower. While there are advancement paths, most people appear to be content to stay where they are. Instead of clamoring for more money, why aren’t these employees taking a second job? Improving their education? Starting a company? Because they can’t or won’t? Many of these people have nice cars, fancy televisions, computers, and cable service – the so-called necessities – but will not invest in their own future or move towards economic prosperity somewhere else. Is it they have grown comfortable and want government and unions to solve their problems? Possibly.
Bottom line …
Perhaps, we should also ask how many people at WalMart are seniors, supplementing their incomes or students starting out in life.
It is insane to believe a burger-flipper or stock clerks should be compensated as well as a computer technician. Or that entry-level jobs should be institutionalized and unionized into family-supporting jobs. Perhaps, some of the workers should stop having children they cannot afford or purchasing luxury goods in lieu of continuing their education.
Belying the fact that social safety nets are short-term assistance to help an individual to become a more productive member of society, the progressives ignore the progressive government’s continuing expansion of entitlements, and then try to convince you that corporations are driving up the costs … when increasing rules, regulations, and taxes are driving the business agenda.
In the final analysis, you never hear the progressive socialist democrats speaking about cutting the costs of government and driving the economy upwards – it’s all about dividing the existing pie and managing scarcity for political power.
And the real bottom line is that if you screw WalMart, you screw yourselves. No more reasonably priced goods and services. And, only the government and their special interests like the unions will benefit. Perhaps, we should all demand that the government not bailout underfunded and mismanaged union pension funds, and allow the union members to hold their respective unions responsible for the companies they killed and the funds they dissipated.
-- steve
“Nullius in verba”-- take nobody's word for it!
"Acta non verba" -- actions not words
“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”-- George Bernard Shaw
“Progressive, liberal, Socialist, Marxist, Democratic Socialist -- they are all COMMUNISTS.”
“The key to fighting the craziness of the progressives is to hold them responsible for their actions, not their intentions.” – OCS "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." -- Marcus Aurelius “A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves, and traitors are not victims... but accomplices” -- George Orwell “Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt." (The people gladly believe what they wish to.) ~Julius Caesar “Describing the problem is quite different from knowing the solution. Except in politics." ~ OCS