Journal Barbara, not Barbie's Journal: I see people really liked my submission! 20
Bring back the 40-hour work week.
It would solve the unemployment problem, has been proven time and time again to increase productivity, stimulate the economy, reduce health care costs, reduce stress on families - what's not to like?
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These is another problem that nobody want to address, and I'll have the feminists all over my back for stating it here. It's not only overtime, but also the fact that most families must go and work with two adults to make a decent living. I'm not saying that I'm against women working and they should stay in the kitchen, but isn't it a fact that a family with stay-at-home-parent (May be the man for all I care) is unsustainable in our society.
Our fathers managed alone, with the wife at home taking care of
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Today, despite productivity having doubled in the last 40 years according to Department of Labour stats cited here [blogspot.com], we have a situation where, adjusted for inflation, 2 people working to produce 4x as much are making less.
There's something really out of whack, and it needs to be addressed. Given that bot
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I have no idea... It's an endemic problem and I don't think it is really a conspiracy againt the worker. I might have sounded like that in my original post. I think it is pure market forces that caused this. Think about it:
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I think the switch is already happening - when people realize that, even with two incomes, they're headed to the poor-house, it's a lot easier to say "you know something, we'll get rid of one job, and that means we save on the second car (or maybe just the excessive wear-and-tear, higher insurance, etc.), we save on child care, we save on clothes and dry cleaning an
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The #1 thing that HAS increased way over inflation: TAXES.
Not Federal taxes, federal taxes are lower than they've been since Truman was President. That sales tax increase you talk of is state or local. Hell, they doubled Illinois' regressive, flat state income tax last year.
You could always move to Alaska where the oil companies pay the taxes, or Florida where the tourists pay most of them.
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Moving is really hard, but more and more, it looks like the only option. We already pay the highest taxes in the whole world here, and the budget that's coming down today is introducing new "fees" and other "fee increases" ("see - they're not tax increases, just fee increases, even though everyone has to pay them, even if they don't have any income"). Oh, and we can expect further increases in 2013, 2014, and 2015.
It's clearly way past the point of no return - sort of like in Sim City where every tax i
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I think your analysis was pretty damn good and right on, and combined with Barb's below says almost everything I think should be included.
I just think we should blame women more. Okay, I'm being facetious, but the coupla things I'm thinking of kinda do:
1) The other thing that's helped result in the state-at-home wife being seen as "less" in society is radical feminism (where my personal feminism is "women: do what you want", and Leftist feminism is "women: be(come) like men!").
2) Basically, women have drive
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There's also the problem that men aren't "allowed" to be stay-at-home. Even if they're telecommuting, it's not seen as a "real job" by most people.
I think we're going to see more and more people simply "dropping out" of the economy. I'm not saying they're doing this willingly, but that the economy right now is such that it's leading to a drop in what is known as the "participation rate" - people who are either working or looking for work.
We've off-shored so many of the entry-level jobs that now there's
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It would be nice if we weren't so judgmental and weren't so oriented (/goaded) into prying into other peoples' lives. Why are we telling women and men how they're supposed to be? Or races (like how a "real" Black person must talk/act/dress/vote/think) and regions (like all U.S. Southerners are dumb hicks) and religions (like Mormonism and Catholicism are cults)? We're so fucking unenlightened. Progress is getting to the point where we lea
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Maybe he didn't get paid as he went? My line of thinking about this is more like how developers implement a handful of features ("widgets") each 1- or 2-week Scrum sprint. I would expect to be paid (in full) for these such units of output, in those intervals, under my model of worker compensation here. I'm certainly not in the business of floating my employer money for very long.
In fact, if we're gonna get paid the same no matter how many hours we put in, why shouldn't our wages be paid in advance? Why shou
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I didn't mean to imply that the people dropping out were doing so willingly. I've been tracking the participation rate for over a year, and it's a more reliable indicator of future trends than the unemployment rate, for the simple reason that people who are no longer partic
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One thing in my analysis that is wrong is the amount of extra fees we have in comparison to our fathers. They did not have a DSL bill, they did not have one cellphone bill per family member, gas was still within reasonable prices, and many more
Well, that depends on what generation you're talking about. No DSL bill, but I'm only paying $40 a month for that. Back in the AT&T monopoly, telephone bills were huge compared to today when looked at in comparison to other prices at the time. $15 a month when gas
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1 long-distance phone call to Florida (okay, it was several hours, but still!) - $105.00. And this was after 11pm, for the cheapest rates (3/4 off) That was back when a gallon of gas was 59 cents if they pumped it in for you.
They say talk is cheap, but it sure wasn't true back then!
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We could raise the minimum wage to a par with other industrialized countries. But good luck with that, the Republicans are introducing legislation today to lower the rich's taxes yet again. The don't care at all about the economy or the middle class, as long as the rich get get filthier. It's disgusting.
Bringing back unions wouldn't be a bad idea either.
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Off-shoring becomes unprofitable because then the product doesn't have enough local content to escape tariffs.
So if companies want to reduce their costs, they need to treat local workers better so as to boost productivity. So t
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It won't happen because the elites on both sides of the political spectrum don't want it to happen. The neocons favor big money interests because big money interests give them big money. The Progressives favor big money interests because big money interests give them big money, which they can use to amass big power. So both get what they're most after.
Even tho you're too Left for me, I'd still vote for you over say a Republican career politician. My sister is solid Left on almos
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Thanks for the vote of confidence ... even if it is only because the other choices are worse.
The worst part is that we have the power to change this, but we don't use it. Nobody is willing to come out and say that eliminating tariffs was a good thing, long-term. Business, unlike people, can shift their resources a lot easier, and play off one set of workers in one country against another set in another country - so in the long term, we've had a real race to the bottom.
Henry Ford knew that was a dumb