Warriors both!
1. Oft wondered about the unearned increment-
How does it make sense that everyone rich and poor,
is usually about a paycheck or two from disaster?
2. Because prices on everything go up to suit the people (you and me)
and their sense of entitlement.
You want to hear of an entitlement program I want to see dropped?
Done away with completely?
3. Equity and the time value of money.
The most ridiculous scam in the history of mankind.
1. Rocco, you are simply mistaken. The poor may well be a couple of pay-days away from disaster, but you have led a very sheltered life if you think the rich are paddling in the same canoe.
Come over here for a while and you’ll see villas, yachts, private aircraft and all of the toys you can imagine. Many yachts are up for sale, and some are for sale because of cash-flow, but many are also on the market because the owners want to upgrade. What you notice in that industry is that the middle has vanished. Some small ski boats still sell and so do the big boats, but the medium ones, the "middle-class’s" toys are dead in the water or, usually, rotting up on the hard, uncleaned and virtually abandoned until happier times… There used to be four yards on these islands building the traditional fishing boat: not one exists today.
2. Prices go up because incomes usually go up. From my own memory of the 50s I get the distinct impression, in the UK at least, that prices remained fairly stable until it became fashionable for women to get work outwith the factory-grade jobs. There was a wartime legacy of women in factories because of the needs to retain production during WW2; when the men lucky enough to come back alive tried to get their normal jobs back, they found them filled by many of those women. That created all sorts of labour problems, and one result was to keep female pay lower than male in a move that suited both employers and the concept of the ‘earning male’. Consequently, prices in the shops stayed fairly level for a while, aimed at the ability of a single-earner family to meet those prices, until all the building reconstruction and burgeoning industrial activity let merchants see that more money was available to spend, and surprise! up went prices!
Where did that drive many families? Into the ‘choice’ factor women had, their Shakespearian moment of ‘to work or not to work’ being taken away, the new option being work or the family goes hungry. So, every family (within the lower orders) now had two breadwinners: two salaries to pay for the family fridge, the washing machine. Why price them the same any longer?
3. So how would you expect to be renumerated for your own services? Be given a chicken? The guy with the degree earn the same as the guy with no education? That happens already when there is no new employment; does it make you or anyone else any the happier or better off? I can understand a certain sense of perverted pleasure in the downfall of someone better skilled than oneself, but that hardly makes such situations right. If it did, what would it serve anyone to spend years of their lves in the pursuit of learning? And without that learning, we’d still be living in caves. Imagine! No Internet, no LuLa!
:-)
Rob C