@woken No, because that’s stupid and doesn’t make any sense. Let me give you an example of the world the rich are putting us into.
Lets say I’m born into a lower middle class family. My parents don’t make much money, but enough to live off of. My parents can’t afford private schooling or to have one stay home and home school, so I’m stuck in a public school that may be ridiculously under-funded (thanks to funding cuts put in place by conservatives). But let’s say I’m lucky enough to surpass that based on pure dedication, or just being lucky enough to be in one of the ok school districts.
Now I’m off to go to college, but wait, I can’t afford it. My parents have no money to contribute, they put all their money into raising me and paying the bills. I apply for Federal loans to cover the cost, but much to my surprise the cost of tuition has skyrocketed the last few decades (again thanks to schools losing federal funding, thankyou again conservatives). Where there was a time I could go to school for 5 or 6 thousand a year, now it’s an average of $20,000. My only recourse is to turn to private bank student loans, which often times have ridiculous interest rates. And go figure, these loans are insured by the federal government, so if I default the bank still gets it’s money (I wonder who put that rule into place… hmmm, conservatives again?) Anyways I go through school, get good grades, and graduate with a degree in…. chemistry (a degree I actually hold today).
I go out onto the job market, only to find it’s been massacred. Companies have been shipping jobs overseas because foreign governments will allow them to pay their workers a fraction of the minimum wage in the US, and they don’t have all those pesky regulations to protect the environment. But of course rather than punish those companies by inflicting tarriffs or taxes on the products they’re importing from those quasi-slave camps, our government (under the direction from conservatives yet again), has given these companies tax cuts, and stripped away regulation. As if being able to dump pollution into our waterways here just like you can in China, will change the fact that they can pay their workers in China a few cents a day whilst having little to no concern for their safety and well being. So now the job market sucks, but lets say I overcome… My grades are so incredibly awesome I find a job.
Well the average starting pay in my field is in the mid to upper teens an hour (I started at $15). To my surprise virtually no companies hire in directly anymore, and instead they use temp agencies. They do this so that they can fire me on a whim, and because they aren’t required to give me benefits. Thanks to conservatives they can even claim on their taxes that they are employing another company and helping them make jobs (yep, there’s a tax cut for hiring people through another company). But ok I go to work… But wait I had student loans. On average I owe about $100,000 for 4 years of school. I have to pay nearly $750 a month in those costs alone. Let alone rent, food, gas, etc… and I don’t even have health insurance! I can afford to pay the bills, but I’m not really accruing any savings (there’s no extra money to save). I’m floating by and making it, and someday I’ll pay off my loans… and heck raises will even eventually get me some spending cash. But unless I don’t ever want to have children, I’m never going to do more than just get by.
THIS is the America conservatives right now are bringing you too. THIS is what Big Business using the Republican party like a puppet is slowly dragging us too. We are being held down into modern day servitude and peasantry, for the sake of making the rich even richer.
And this isn’t a dream scenario. My mother was the Valedictorian at the University of Michigan in Organic Chemistry. She just reached the $60,000 a year mark last year, at age 53. She spent her entire life barely paying the bills and providing for my siblings and I. I can’t remember a week in my life that she didn’t wake up at 3am to go to work so she could get off in time to pick us up from school.
And myself. I went to Ohio State and graduated with a chemistry degree. My mom didn’t have the money to pay for my education, so we got student loans. Student loans that had higher interest rates because we didn’t have a lot of money (for all the sense that makes). I owe over $100,000 dollars, and I haven’t worked less than 60 hours in over two years to achieve the goal of paying that back. Even so, short of getting some huge raise, I won’t have my loans paid off until I’m in my early to mid 30’s.
My mother and I didn’t work hard? We didn’t put in the hours and dedication to get an education? We don’t work ourselves to the bone for hours and hours a week without vacation or even weekends?
And all the while, the rich got richer off of our work. Sitting back and trying to think up another way to give themselves a tax cut that will take away from even more of the basic help the government gave me and my mother over the years.
You’ve been blinded by ignorance.
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