This dangerous deficit he speaks of simply means we import more than we export. This fact is neutral. Whether it’s bad or good depends upon many variables, but it is not on its face bad. Some things are imported because we cannot make them locally, take diamonds for instance. Other items are imported because a given country is the leading producer and therefore has expertise that creates added value, think Swiss watches. Finally, many items are imported because they are cheaper to import than to make.
Much of this is due to fewer regulations and far lower incomes in those countries. As much as we love ‘American made’ campaigns, many like the lower priced items. For many, the ability to buy items at lower prices is how they survive. When Trump adds a tariff to a particular product, it does nothing for the trade deficit. We still import more than we export. The only difference is those imports will cost consumers more money and the exports will cost more in other countries. As long as there are greater demands for their products than ours, there will be a deficit. The same logic can be used in the income debate.
A common practice of the SJWs when discussing statistics, is to take a number and use it as evidence of their argument, even when the number is out of context and doesn’t make their point. One example of this is their constant reference to CEO salaries as they relate to the company’s average worker. We can thank the Dodd-Frank leftist reform for this. While this makes the CEO look bad and out of touch, it has nothing to do with worker pay or income inequality.
Obviously, they’re trying to say that if the CEO didn’t get millions, the employees could make more money. Let’s look at Wal-Mart again. Their CEO, Doug McMillon, has a total compensation of $22.8 million. According to CNN Money, that is 1,188 times the average worker’s salary of $19,177.137 This is clear evidence of greed in corporate America, right? Unfortunately, this word problem is missing one number. If we add the number of Wal-Mart employees to the equation, 2.3 million, we find that Doug could refuse his salary and divide it amongst the employees and they would each get $9.91. Not exactly life changing money.
This is why you have to remove emotion from the equation and look at labor as a product. With this in mind, everything has a value. A salary is simply the value the customer, the employer in this case, puts on the product he’s purchasing. That value is determined by many factors: skill level, difficulty of work, added value, education, etc.
Just as a customer in a retail store will look at several coffee makers and determine which machine to buy based on price, size, functionality, brand recognition, and many other factors, so too will an employer use several factors to determine who to hire and consequently what to pay them. In both cases, no third party should determine how that decision is made. That’s why the New York Times had it right when they said the right minimum wage is $0.00.138 This was obviously not today’s New York Times.
This would also allow people to take less to prove themselves, lowering the barrier to entry for worker with no experience, formerly incarcerated individuals, and those facing various forms of discrimination. The fight for $15 will cause unintended consequences if accepted. Disabled workers will be hurt by drastic minimum wage increases because most employers, faced with the mandate to pay all workers the same, would opt to keep the most productive employees, the same logic holds for teens in poor neighborhoods.139
Raising wages arbitrarily or by government fiat will help very few. Let’s go to the Logic Board for an example:
We exist in a global economy and are competing across borders. If two businesses operate in the same industry, one in America and one in a foreign country, our business climate will be a major factor in the difficulties the American company faces. If barriers to entry are greater, licensing and regulation processes are more difficult, labor is vastly higher, and the tax burden is greater, the American company is at a disadvantage. If they agree with the first two questions, they must explain how an across-the-board increase in labor costs will help American companies compete. Setting aside any quality differences, if the US company charges $129 for its finished product and the foreign country charges $79, why would anyone buy the product from the US company?
This isn’t just a fairytale that could never happen. It’s been going on for years. When companies laid off call center workers, they did not cease to have a call center. They just moved the operations to India. Call centers were the first to go, but computer programming, IT, virtual assistants, and medical transcription are quickly following. Everyone knows when manufacturing jobs went away that the products did not. Seems like we’re looking to solve a big problem by creating a bigger one.
Another argument is that people should make the same salary for the same work. No logical person actually believes this. Here’s a basic example. LeBron James made $33,285,709 for the 2017/2018 NBA season as a forward for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Larry Nancy Jr. made $1,471,382. They play the same position on the same team. It is safe to assume that they both have to go to the same practices, team meetings and other obligatory events. On game day, they both have to be at the stadium at the same time and are on the court during the entire game, yet no one believes Larry deserves what LeBron makes. The same can be said for every other workplace.
Some people have more experience or more technical skills but they do the same job. They may have the same experience and education but one does a better job than the other or works harder. An employer has to be able to compensate his employees as he deems fit, even if he is occasionally unfair. There is no doubt that some employers will undervalue an employee either because of race, gender, previous salary, or just because they are cheap. As hard as this is for the SJWs to comprehend, this is ok. When faced with this situation, a potential employee should do one of three things:
A) Do not take the job. Hold out for a better opportunity
B) Take the job, prove your worth and petition for a raise
C) Take the job but continue to search for a better one
Employers who purposefully underpay their employees will suffer. Their good employees will be snatched up by their competitors. They will be left with employees who don’t like their jobs and don’t care about the product or service they provide. This will inevitably hurt their business. The only way this doesn’t work is if every employer in a given industry underpays their employees and virtually colludes with one another. This is highly unlikely but if it happened, the employee could just leave that industry.
Another unintended consequence of raising the minimum wage would be the artificial inflation of the dollar. With the dollar worth less, you’d need more of them to buy the same amount of stuff as before. In the end, people would have more money but be in the same financial situation. Simply put, they’d get a 50% raise but the consumer price index would increase 50-55%. All smoke and mirrors. Some will point to past minimum wage hikes and say we didn’t see this problem, but we’ve never had 25% increases before or annual increases over multiple years. What we’re talking about here is going from $7-10 per hour to $15 in a couple of years.
Recently, there has been a cry for a ‘livable wage.’ Bernie Sanders and others have even resurrected the call for a universal basic income. As well-meaning as these ideas are, each has a glaring flaw its proponents have yet to find a way around. Livable wage is simply a talking point. No one knows what that is. Everyone doesn’t need the same wage to live. Using this logic, single people would get paid less than married people; a woman with one child less than one with three. This is no way to set wages.
I like the universal basic income plan. It’s a great way to prove that it won’t work and call the Left’s bluff. The problem is the Left would implement it without making any other changes. My plan would be different. Let’s give everyone a salary, no exclusions. I’d propose calculating the average each state pays out in government assistance and giving that amount, plus a 20% increase, to each resident. The payments would be made in monthly installments. Here’s the rub, I would then eliminate every gove
rnment assistance program and those over the poverty line would pay an increased amount back in taxes.
This will do two things: force people to be responsible for their own funds, and save money in the long run by eliminating fraud and the bloated administration costs associated with these programs. Here’s how it would work.
If the average family in Illinois get $30,000 a year in TANF, food stamps, and housing assistance, I’d give them $36,000. A family in New York that receives $50,000 would get $60,000. Just think they’d get more money and they wouldn’t have to go to that pesky office and fill out all of that paperwork. All you need to do is file taxes. All income up to that amount would be tax free. Everyone over a certain income level would pay the tax rate for that income but would also be assessed the annual state payment, basically giving it all back. That’s the beauty, no qualifications, so no fraud, and no administration fees.
The Left would never go for it because they have to protect public sector jobs. Tens of thousands of people would be out of work at HHS, HUD and the IRS. The SJWs would love it, initially. They would soon notice, however, that when people didn’t manage the money properly, they would have no government outlet for assistance. It seems just giving people money doesn’t solve the problems after all.
The true crisis in America is not income inequality; it is the diminishing work ethic and lack of marketable job skills. This is due to generational shifts that started with the baby boomers. Their parents had seen one, if not two, world wars and the Great Depression. They wanted to make life easier on their kids and were a bit too lax. The baby boomers grew up with free love and free choice. When they got older and had kids, they went one of two ways. They either overcorrected and were really strict parents or they tried to make up for the things they hadn’t done and focused on work or school, leaving my generation to be raised by the TV, creating latchkey kids.
We, in turn, did what our grandparents did: gave our kids everything. Now they’re teenagers and they’ve never had to lift a finger. We feel we’re successful, so we should enjoy some conveniences, but those conveniences are stripping our children of character. We have cleaning people, landscapers, and dry cleaners. Children don’t learn to cook, clean, or do laundry. You don’t just wake up with a strong work ethic, and many parents don’t or can’t teach this to their children. Their mistakes will become our problems.
I began managing restaurants at a young age. I was just shy of 21 and most of my crew were older than me. I had to learn how to get the work done and gain their respect. My biggest lesson was that you have to be firm but fair. I tried bribing or negotiating but quickly realized it led to them always trying to get something from me.
Fast forward about twelve years and now I’m managing teens and people in their early twenties. It should have been easier. I was experienced and older. There should have been a level of respect built in that I had to earn before. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I told them to do something, they resisted or asked why I didn’t get someone else to do it.
The marketable skill shortage is a side effect of the college effect. We all want what’s best for our children and that, so it seems, is a college education. A college-educated child is what owning a home used to be: a status of success. It has been commonly believed for years that a college education is not only the single greatest indicator of economic success, but those without one are doomed to entry-level jobs and minimum wage pay. This is no longer thought to be the case.
Because everyone is being groomed for college, no one learns specific skills. They literally call the program at most high schools, college prep. They are no longer teaching children how to learn and reason. Get them into college; that is the sole goal of high school now. We removed woodworking, shop, and home economics from high school, then totally ignored trade schools to focus on college. But we’re slowly realizing that college is not what it’s cracked up to be.
College tuition has risen exponentially in the past 30 years. This, coupled with the fact that attending college is the expectation—even with no plans to pay for it—leads to a vast number of people taking on student loan debt. In some cases, families put themselves in a financially tight position. In others, the students leverage their future earnings. Either way, much is riding on that education.
If a student drops out or doesn’t choose the right major, it could be a long road out of debt. The schools don’t do much to prevent this. On one hand, they accept kids who barely completed high school knowing they are not mentally or academically prepared for the rigors of the university. They invite them in, cash the check, and sit by as they fade away and disappear. They are left with a few semesters of memories and thousands of dollars of debt.
Then there’s the long con. This affects a greater number of kids. It’s the ever-increasing list of courses and majors designed to enhance the students’ experiences and make them feel good about themselves, while teaching them nothing and filling the coffers of the colleges. Five years later and saddled with $80,000 in student loan debt, students discover that their degrees in Women’s Studies with a concentration in dwarfism during the Elizabethan Era isn’t netting the dream jobs they expected and they hardly find situations to use their specific knowledge when cold calling people to tell them they may have won a trip or discussing race relations while writing names on cups at Starbucks.
You couple this with the culture shift on college campuses we’ll discuss in a later chapter and it’s no wonder many parents and students are looking for alternatives. Opportunities are out there to learn a trade, to get into a company on the ground floor, or to take advantage of a niche career. But those opportunities narrow when put up against the long list of things Millennials won’t do. They don’t want to get up too early or work too late. They don’t want to do work they feel is beneath them, even if they can learn a new skill. People used to start in the mail room of companies; today’s youth would rather collect unemployment or rely on parents. Manual labor is out of the question.
Mike Rowe, host of TV shows like Dirty Jobs and Somebody’s Gotta Do It, has sponsored scholarships for years with the intent of giving skills training in trades like welding and plumbing to willing high school grads. To be eligible for the scholarship, Mr. Rowe places conditions on the application process. Some are not willing to accept them. On a recent episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Mike tells Tucker, “We’ve given away five million dollars over the last five years and yes, every year it gets increasingly difficult to affirmatively reward work ethic.” He went on to suggest that there might be a link between the ‘safe space movement,’ and the expectations associated with it, and those who take “umbrage” with the scholarship’s demands.140
Right now, companies all over the country are dealing with a crisis of their own, but it’s not one that you might expect. They are struggling to fill their empty positions. There are an increasing number of jobs going unfilled; many with salaries greater than $50,000. Trucking companies are reporting an extreme shortage of drivers;141 Daimler Vans Manufacturing even changed its name as a marketing ploy to get more applications.142States complain that they are losing potential tax revenues because these jobs aren’t being filled.143
While these jobs do not require a college degree, they do have other requirements beyond a high school diploma. Some require months of a specific technical training, others demand difficult hours, while others are simply not that glamourous. You may be wondering, with so many people marching for $15 per hour, how there can be tens of thousands of jobs sitting unfilled that pay far more than $15? This is an interesting conundrum.
If the SJWs had their way, they would just have the wealthy subsidize those at the bottom. Their solution will make the situation worse because it doesn’t get to the root of the problem. If we have people with poor work ethic and no marketable skills on one side and greedy corporate executives on the other side, how is redistribution going to fix anything? Soon those greedy executives will cut jobs and
hours to maintain their wealth. When that happens, you’ll have more of those low-skilled people unemployed. Now that they went from minimum wage to nothing, the income disparity will have gone up, not down.
They should stop fighting for income equality. It can never happen. There will always be innovators and inventors. Some people will also work harder than others. Those who show up, do a great job and take on more will be valued by good employers and compensated for it.
Conversely, there will be those who will do the bare minimum, make frequent errors, or be bad for business. They will make less or be relegated to part-time status. It would be more effective to spend the effort teaching people how to dress, act, speak during an interview, and how to perform if they get the job than to try to get them a salary they don’t deserve.
• 5 •
Gender Inequality
I would rather trust a woman’s instinct than a man’s reason
– Stanley Baldwin
Of all the reasons people complain of inequality, gender inequality is the least compelling. While there may be social or cultural differences between people of different races or religions, they don’t have biological or physiological differences. There is no fundamental difference between men who are black versus white, straight versus gay, or Jewish versus Muslim. The same cannot be said of women. The scope is also different. Women are not persecuted or harassed by police like minorities. They suffer from the pains of poverty but it’s not a problem unique to their gender. In fact, men are more likely to be homeless or suffer from unemployment.
We Want Equality Page 10