American Greed and how it hurts the 99%

I’m not an economist, and this is just my opinion on the state of the US and my thoughts on how to fix it.

If you haven’t read part 1 of this series (insert link here) I gave some ideas on how I think the healthcare and college systems could be fixed. In this part I’ll go more in-depth on how I think the economy can be fixed. These ideas are just that, I hope either someone can fill in the holes or maybe come up with an out of the box idea as well. We need open thoughts to fix the system.

Between poor leadership from the past administration, to racism, sexism and classicism our country is in trouble. In the next two parts I’m going to try and give a couple of ideas I have on how to fix classicism. I believe most wealthy people think they’re better, more deserving and more valuable than the poor and middle class. Is this wrong of them to think? They do make more money than the people under them. Then again, their workers do the labor and without them where would they be? They’d have to clean their own houses and offices, fix their own plumping, cars, electronics...etc. The lower classes may not be coders or engineers, but they do assemble the products that are made. They are the teachers, the drivers, the people who risk their lives to save others and take care of the upper class’ children. I might even say they’re the glue that keeps wealthy homes and companies together. So why shouldn’t they get paid an actual living wage and be able to have some amenities, be able to enjoy life by being able to retire at a decent age (or in some cases be able to retire period)?

What are the wealthy afraid of? The lower class will become middle class and not work as hard, or worse rebel? I think if the working class didn’t have to worry about if they can pay rent, feed their family, pay off their car, get their children cloths...etc., they’d work harder When someone gets paid a good wage (and is treated with respect in the work place), they feel grateful and that feeling would make them work harder. It’s better to have people feel happy about their work then giving them the stick which is the fear that they’ll lose their job if they don’t do a good job.

There are some really big companies out there. We now have trillion-dollar companies and their higher ups are multi-billionaires, most people wouldn’t mind having enough money to live happily without worry. It would be nice to have enough money to live off the interests you make from investments, but as long as a person can make enough to live and to have some left to put aside most people would be happy. They’d be happy to not have to work more than one job, or to have to ask for overtime at their current one.

In a perfect world everyone who works would have a place to live in a safe area, without having to worry about if they can pay utilities, they’d have cloths, a car (not worry about if they make enough to pay for gas), if they have children, they’d be able to take care of their needs and still have money to do fun things, to travel, go out with friends and such. That perfect world seems lightyears away.

Sure, even if people got paid a living wage, some would squander it on things they don’t need, or their addictions, but that would be their fault. Whose fault is it if they can’t keep a place to live? It sure as hell isn’t theirs.

So, how do we get companies to care? How do we make it so companies that aren’t big or mom and pop shops to be able to pay their employees a living wage? It’s not just about getting the rich to care enough to pay their workers, but small businesses usually don’t have enough money to do so.

Well first off getting companies to care. Well, most companies have their money tucked away in an overseas bank and use other loopholes to pay less taxes. How do we fix this?

The idea is to let these companies pay far less taxes, maybe even let wealthy people pay far less taxes (or even zero), but with a stipulation. That stipulation is they have to pay their workers a living wage. They have to pay enough for workers to be able to pay rent (or mortgage), pay car payment, food, utilities, entertainment...etc. and also, extra to be able to save for the future and retire at a decent age.

Now my thoughts on this are that the lower class will become middle class and pay more taxes on the money they make which will be more than enough. Also, they’ll buy more which will strengthen the economy. Now if we can add to this inexpensive education and health insurance the working class could live very happily.

The possible negative of this is if prices of things go up for workers (rent, food, and gas for instance) then it would be up to the employer to give more money which companies won’t want to do. Maybe if starting out with low taxes and as prices fluctuate so does the company's taxes? Say start off at a 5% tax rate and when say rent goes up it changes to 4.75% the employer has to pay? This is the part that I’m not sure of and only en expert could say if this were possible or not.

Another idea is that companies buy housing for their workers and at the minimum wage they live there for free with free utilities, cable, internet...etc. The housing would have to be in safe areas and everything would have to be kept up well. The problem with this idea is how much housing a company like Walmart would have to buy or property to build on.

These are the ideas in my head. If someone more knowledgeable could weigh in that would be nice. I’d really like to have someone open minded to this type of change to read this and give their thoughts. The way things are going now in the US is not working for most of the population.

The final part of this article will come soon.