AGE OF ENTITLEMENT - PART 3
CLASS
WAR
A minimum wage worker is paid in exchange for their labours. What they produce may be worth far more. This is Capitalism, the exploitation of another to gain profit and live off the labours of others in the same way a parasite feeds off its victim. Without a labour force, a company produces nothing. The bonus paid to CEOs is a reward for the productivity and profits generated by the labour force and should, logically, be divided amongst the workers to provide an incentive to keep working hard. The bonus should not be paid to a CEO alone. Hey already get paid multiple times what the workers do and what they produce and ‘earn’ does not come close to that remuneration. Take away the workers who produce what a company sells, and how much do the EOs and CEOs ‘earn’ for the company? Think about that. It’s important.
The working class spend their wages on bills. After taxes, they use their wage to pay for rent or a mortgage, food, a car, all the maintenance and running costs, insurances for home, contents, health and car, utilities, out-of-pocket dental and health costs, school fees for any children they have and so on. Whatever is left is disposable income. This might be invested for the future or spent on commodities like white goods, home renovations, entertainment, or whatever else keeps the economy going. This is where things get hinky and you begin to see where the Trickle-down Economy really fails.
A family comprised of, say, two parents and three kids that relies upon a single income pays the same taxes as an individual on the same income as that parent that works to provide for their family. If the wage is, say, $85K, they each pay around $20K in taxes. The first $18.5K isn’t taxed, but the rest is at a rate of about twenty-eight percent. After tax, they have about $65K left. Not bad for a single person, but divided between five dependents it is reduced to just $13K each. That’s two-thirds the poverty line. That’s a wee bit less than the full Welfare ‘benefit’ for an unemployed person, and about five percent of what a politician on the lowest pay rate gets as their wage before tax and other ‘entitlements’.
Have you seen the problem yet? If not, and you still have the opinion poor people are parasites, then you’re ready to go into politics. A family on a single income has no disposable income. They sometimes even need to borrow money on credit to pay basic bills. This adds to their personal and National debt levels. It makes sure they remain in a cycle of poverty. It also means the economy grinds to a halt. Trickle-down Economics relies on the premise that wealthy people will invest their wealth into the economy and this will provide the jobs and prosperity to keep the economy moving and allow everybody to participate and invest in society. But it doesn’t. It’s been demonstrated as an abject failure over the last thirty years.
The Age of Entitlement is real, and it is a problem, but it is not the unemployed, the disadvantaged, families suffering socio-economic hardship, pensioners, immigrants, women seeking (with every right) equal pay, gay folk seeking (with every right) marriage equality, victims of domestic violence and child abuse seeking (with every right) the dignity of justice, or any one of a thousand things RWNJs and freelance self-centred, bigoted arseholes claim are the cause. It is too many rotten, so-called political representatives, police and public servants that hide behind that entrenched culture of corruption and act as human bollards to prevent the few good ones from doing their jobs to fix this problem.
You cannot reason with unreasonable people. It is a war of attrition with an unarmed foe that only ends in bitter stalemate as your psychotic opponent adopts a policy of scorched earth and unrelenting idiocy. You cannot be part of the solution if you are part of the problem. You cannot begin to fix a problem until you are willing to acknowledge it. The road to hell is paved with self-centred intentions and those who refuse to learn from history will damn others by inflicting those same worst outcomes on them. Those who are silent may be said to condone, but those who force others to remain silent are complicit.
AGE OF ENTITLEMENT - PART 2
And this is where one of the greatest evils is perpetuated. The law is not about truth, justice or equality. The law reduces legal outcomes to a commodity that the most disadvantaged cannot access let alone afford, and it is nowhere more apparent than in regards to Centrelink. Where Don Dale was used to brutalised scores and possibly hundreds of Indigenous kids, and Nixon managed to ignore hundreds who burned to death then demonstrate complete contempt toward them and their loved ones, the Federal Government is able to inflict a living hell on hundreds of thousands of Australian citizens with complete impunity.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/24/punishment-dished-out-to-unemployed-is-on-par-with-our-treatment-of-refugees
Centrelink is a brutal hell-scape of scorched earth and sadistic torments
inflicted by too many so-called ‘public servants’, vindictive, incompetent, and
indifferent bullies enabled and concealed by rotten, corrupt policies and
procedures, while good staff are left floundering and overwhelmed in the River
Stix with the disadvantaged they try so hard to help, caught between life on
the edge and an eternity of damnation. Their funding has been slashed,
austerity measures imposed on those who can least afford them by a ruling caste
insulated from reality and wallowing in a filth of excess, growing fat off
tax-payer funded entitlements, safe in the knowledge that they are Teflon
coated and will never be called to account for the hypocrisy of their morale
and ethical bankruptcy.
The LNP Federal
Government created a fiction where Centrelink was painted as being inefficient,
inept and unable to ‘solve’ the unemployment and Welfare ‘problem’. Suddenly
there was a move to privatise surplus labour with two key ‘solutions’. The
first was a system of Employment Agencies that, in theory, would be used to
provide training and job placement, helping people develop skills and finding suitable
employment. If a supplicant, sorry, client failed to ‘meet’ their ‘obligations’
then the Employment Agency could cut-off their Welfare payments for a period of
up to twelve weeks.
Obviously, twelve
weeks of no income at all means you don’t eat, your power and phone gets cut
off, and you get evicted. Living on the street makes it even harder to get
work. Most people want work and do not want to be forced onto the street,
especially if they have kids. But the Employment Agencies are notoriously
aggressive in their tactics, and there are hundreds of allegations that they do
not even bother to notify the ‘clients’ of their obligations before cutting
them off and getting bonuses from the government for reducing the number of
unemployed claiming Welfare.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/24/punishment-dished-out-to-unemployed-is-on-par-with-our-treatment-of-refugees
You can see
how easily the system can be abused. It’s been going on for decades. Under the
LNP and its ‘Employment Agencies’ it has become even worse. The LNP knows this
but the Employment Agencies are still making money hand-over-fist while
reducing people forced to survive on a maximum of less than $36.5 a day to
survive on nothing for months on end. How does this fascism help? Why would
so-called political representatives inflict further misery, stress, depression,
poverty and desperation on already vulnerable people? What is their motivation?
Consider the second part of the LNP’s Unemployment Solution. Work for the Dole.
Yeah, you read it right. People without a job have to work to receive a Welfare
‘benefit’. If there is work for them to do, then why are they still classified
as unemployed? Well, because this clever little trick allows the LNP Government
to maintain a public service that has no rights to the usual employment
conditions. They must work for below minimum wages, get no Superannuation, no
sick-leave, no holidays, no Union Representation, and can be forced to work
under conditions that violate Workplace Health and Safety agreements. And the
LNP has the audacity to accuse 7Eleven of violating laws concerning Wages and
Working Conditions.
The government has managed
to keep the true scale of the corruption and systemic failures of Centrelink,
Employment Agencies, and Work for the Dole out of the media, limiting exposure
to a few incidents that can be dismissed as ‘isolated’ and concealed by clever
spin, rhetoric, and legalities. When the ALP Home insulation Scheme was implemented
in an effort to negate the worst of the Global Recession, four people died as a
result of shifty sub-contractors who saw this as a means to make quick money while
ignoring Workplace Health and Safety laws. The LNP responded by blaming then
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Three ALP leaders, two of whom had been Prime Ministers, had been raked over the coals and smeared on no more than speculation. The findings regarding the Unions, in particular, were predetermined, delivered with dumfounding confidence despite the lack of evidence to sustain the allegations. It was a farce. And yet the death of 18 year-old Josh Park-Fing during one of the LNP’s incredibly suspicious Work for the Dole programmes barely even made the news. There was no multi-million dollar inquest into his death on the news every day for months on end. There were no LNP leaders dragged before interrogators and accused of all manner of evil without evidence. Josh faded into history, his friends and family silenced and forgotten, and the systemic failures, hypocrisy and corruption continued unabated.
Despite
Rudd having no direct link or responsibility for those deaths, he was hauled
before a well-deserved inquest into the deaths and grilled by LNP stooges. It
occurred at the same time as the long-overdue and, again, well-deserved Royal
Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse which used Terms of
Reference that prevented police and public services from being investigated for
their own systemic failures that ensured the abuse in the Churches went
unreported and was never investigated. At the very same time, the LNP ran the
Royal Commission into the so-called ‘rampant’ Union Corruption, which dragged
former ALP Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and then ALP leader Bill Shorten, in
for questioning.
Three ALP leaders, two of whom had been Prime Ministers, had been raked over the coals and smeared on no more than speculation. The findings regarding the Unions, in particular, were predetermined, delivered with dumfounding confidence despite the lack of evidence to sustain the allegations. It was a farce. And yet the death of 18 year-old Josh Park-Fing during one of the LNP’s incredibly suspicious Work for the Dole programmes barely even made the news. There was no multi-million dollar inquest into his death on the news every day for months on end. There were no LNP leaders dragged before interrogators and accused of all manner of evil without evidence. Josh faded into history, his friends and family silenced and forgotten, and the systemic failures, hypocrisy and corruption continued unabated.
While the
‘unemployed’ are completing their ‘obligations’ to receive what pitiful
two-thirds of the poverty line ‘benefit’ they get, these indentured workers
cannot make real efforts to get ‘real’ work. On top of this, the LNP continues
to manipulate an ignorant, bigoted, or freelance idiot filled Australian public
to convince them that the unemployed are all idle, parasitic thieves who are
stealing from tax-payers. This distraction ensures people don’t think too hard
about the reality. Not that difficult given far too many people are so
monumentally idiotic it is astonishing they survive the transition from bed to
bathroom each morning.
The reality
is very simple. There are not enough jobs for the surplus labour supply. The
government has cut funding to training programs to upskill people and allows
employers to use the 457 Visa scheme to fill jobs rather than hiring and
training unemployed Australians. There is, currently, only one job available
for every twelve unemployed people. There is simply no possible way all of the
unemployed can find employment. Added to his is the high number of
underemployed people seeking more hours or jobs with better pay and longer
hours. The unemployed and underemployed have no control over the economy to
influence the confidence needed to create an employment positive environment.
The government does.
William Mitchell once wrote “by isolating the unemployed,
governments have been able to cut their real benefits and make their lives
hell. Both sides of politics have refused to increase the unemployment benefit
above the poverty line.” He went on to make the point that “Australia could
easily achieve an unemployment rate of less than 2% if the government
reinstated its commitment to full employment and introduced large-scale job
creation programs. The extra jobs would not accelerate inflation and would
deliver a huge boost to our most disadvantaged workers.” Logic dictates that it
would improve the economy.
The real
culprit in the unemployment problem is the Federal Government, currently
controlled by the LNP. These overpaid morons are so prodigiously ineffectual
that they have managed to make things worse rather than better or even just
maintain the status quo. The blame their victims to distract everyone else from
the inescapable fact that it is our plutocratic fascists that are the real source
of the problem. Yes, managing the economy can appear incredibly complex, but as
with all things, it is simply a matter of breaking each part down into
something that can be managed and then trying to find balance.
The first
thing we need to do is remember what politicians are supposed to do. They are
elected to represent us and oversee the public service departments. They are
meant to make sure they function effectively and efficiently. They need to do
this using meritocracy and accountability. They are meant to identify, expose
and use systemic failures to affect positive change, not conceal them and
inflict greater injustice upon he victims they are supposed to represent and
help. They are meant to find solutions that have the best chance to overcome issues
and problems but which do not violate basic human rights.
Unemployment
is a good one to address given just how bad this situation and the conditions
have become. If people can work for the dole, then there is a job for them to
do and they can be employed to do that job. They are, in effect, public
servants. The government has an opportunity to build State Assets that can then
be sold to private enterprise to deliver revenue. This includes infrastructure
and personnel. The opposition to this kind of thinking is as astonishing as it
is idiotic, but think about it.
Private enterprise does this kind of thing. They hire people to provide a cleaning service, or to build homes or hospitals, or mow lawns and complete landscaping tasks, or to run childcare centres or disabled or aged care facilities. Why can’t the government? They have an untapped labour force right there that each receive the equivalent of just under fourteen hours (two days) minimum wages that really should be three days to meet the poverty line. The first thing the government needs to do is change its attitude toward unemployed people and the definition of ‘work’.
Stay at home parents and carers are working. They are doing the job someone else would be paid to do. If a parent stays home, for any time, to raise their children, each child they look after means that child does not require a place in an already over-burdened childcare system. Research has also demonstrated that such children are better adjusted and less likely to become involved in anti-social behaviours that cost the State tax-payer funded revenue to deal with and clean up. Bargain. Those parents and carers get no holidays, sick leave, or Superannuation (which becomes problematic when they reach retirement age).
Where a politician may leave politics after a couple of decades with a multi-million dollar Superannuation package and over a hundred thousand dollars pension a year in addition to the millions they got in wages, a stay at home parent that spends fifty years on minimum wage may only have a quarter of a million dollars Super and a pension barely above the poverty line, and significantly less if they are out of the paid workforce for a few years. Based on that alone, politicians have no right to make decisions that negatively affect those at the bottom of the market because they have no possible way of understanding how hard life really is.
Private enterprise does this kind of thing. They hire people to provide a cleaning service, or to build homes or hospitals, or mow lawns and complete landscaping tasks, or to run childcare centres or disabled or aged care facilities. Why can’t the government? They have an untapped labour force right there that each receive the equivalent of just under fourteen hours (two days) minimum wages that really should be three days to meet the poverty line. The first thing the government needs to do is change its attitude toward unemployed people and the definition of ‘work’.
Stay at home parents and carers are working. They are doing the job someone else would be paid to do. If a parent stays home, for any time, to raise their children, each child they look after means that child does not require a place in an already over-burdened childcare system. Research has also demonstrated that such children are better adjusted and less likely to become involved in anti-social behaviours that cost the State tax-payer funded revenue to deal with and clean up. Bargain. Those parents and carers get no holidays, sick leave, or Superannuation (which becomes problematic when they reach retirement age).
Where a politician may leave politics after a couple of decades with a multi-million dollar Superannuation package and over a hundred thousand dollars pension a year in addition to the millions they got in wages, a stay at home parent that spends fifty years on minimum wage may only have a quarter of a million dollars Super and a pension barely above the poverty line, and significantly less if they are out of the paid workforce for a few years. Based on that alone, politicians have no right to make decisions that negatively affect those at the bottom of the market because they have no possible way of understanding how hard life really is.
Once what
counts as work is redefined, we can place people in appropriate positions and
provide training to help them improved their skills and transition into other
forms of employment. Stay-at-home parents could ‘work for the dole’ in that
capacity while studying something like child care, education, or catering to
move into those roles when their children are self-sufficient. The next step
involves learning what ‘earn’ actually means. What people ‘earn’ and what they
are paid are two different things. If someone responds to a question about what
they “earn” with what their wage is (especially if it is minimum wage) their
efforts, self-confidence, and how they value themselves is demeaned and
undermined. This misconception is also a key factor in how others perceive that
individual, flawed reasoning that does the same.
A minimum wage worker is paid in exchange for their labours. What they produce may be worth far more. This is Capitalism, the exploitation of another to gain profit and live off the labours of others in the same way a parasite feeds off its victim. Without a labour force, a company produces nothing. The bonus paid to CEOs is a reward for the productivity and profits generated by the labour force and should, logically, be divided amongst the workers to provide an incentive to keep working hard. The bonus should not be paid to a CEO alone. Hey already get paid multiple times what the workers do and what they produce and ‘earn’ does not come close to that remuneration. Take away the workers who produce what a company sells, and how much do the EOs and CEOs ‘earn’ for the company? Think about that. It’s important.
The working class spend their wages on bills. After taxes, they use their wage to pay for rent or a mortgage, food, a car, all the maintenance and running costs, insurances for home, contents, health and car, utilities, out-of-pocket dental and health costs, school fees for any children they have and so on. Whatever is left is disposable income. This might be invested for the future or spent on commodities like white goods, home renovations, entertainment, or whatever else keeps the economy going. This is where things get hinky and you begin to see where the Trickle-down Economy really fails.
A family comprised of, say, two parents and three kids that relies upon a single income pays the same taxes as an individual on the same income as that parent that works to provide for their family. If the wage is, say, $85K, they each pay around $20K in taxes. The first $18.5K isn’t taxed, but the rest is at a rate of about twenty-eight percent. After tax, they have about $65K left. Not bad for a single person, but divided between five dependents it is reduced to just $13K each. That’s two-thirds the poverty line. That’s a wee bit less than the full Welfare ‘benefit’ for an unemployed person, and about five percent of what a politician on the lowest pay rate gets as their wage before tax and other ‘entitlements’.
Have you seen the problem yet? If not, and you still have the opinion poor people are parasites, then you’re ready to go into politics. A family on a single income has no disposable income. They sometimes even need to borrow money on credit to pay basic bills. This adds to their personal and National debt levels. It makes sure they remain in a cycle of poverty. It also means the economy grinds to a halt. Trickle-down Economics relies on the premise that wealthy people will invest their wealth into the economy and this will provide the jobs and prosperity to keep the economy moving and allow everybody to participate and invest in society. But it doesn’t. It’s been demonstrated as an abject failure over the last thirty years.
All it did
was make the rich even wealthier, and the disadvantaged even poorer. It’s not
just about money. The poor are disenfranchised, disassociated from
participating in society. They cannot invest financially or personally. They
are denied equality and justice because under Capitalism, those things are
commodities. The economy fails and unemployment, poverty and mental health
issues increase because society’s wealth is controlled by a tiny minority that
do not invest enough back into the economy. The solution is elegant and simple:
Flow-across Economics.
If everyone had an income equal to the poverty line or better, they would be
able to participate in society instead of becoming disillusioned,
psychologically scarred, frustrated, and worse. If the majority had an
increased disposable income, they would be able to keep the economy going
because a lot of small investors could be just as effective as one millionaire
investor, and far more reliable. But that won’t happen without some serious
efforts to overhaul the tax system.
If that income that supported a family of five were taxed based on each
dependent, then each would count as having an income of $17K so they’d pay no
taxes at all. They are normally eligible for about $2K Welfare provided by the
government but would not need it because they would effectively retain the $20K
they currently pay in taxes. The family can then participate in the economy and
that money would serve as a ‘wage’ for the stay-at-home parent. Part of it
could also go into a Superannuation fund. The RWNJs are, I have no doubt,
frothing at the mouth over this idea, demanding to know where revenue will come
from to cover this loss through income tax. The solution is so obvious it’s
embarrassing: tax big business the way it should be taxed. No more loopholes to
evade tax.
Big business is able to crush competition because it makes excessive and
shameful profits and doesn’t pay enough tax. Crying poor while posting multi-billion
dollar, record breaking profits is disgraceful. The LNP insists that the only
way to create jobs is to slash minimum wages, penalty rates and working
conditions. This is absolute, self-serving nonsense. The money an employer
saves will go into its profits. They will not hire more staff they do not need.
Utility costs keep increasing but wages are effectively decreasing. It is not
unsustainable wages that is the problem, it is unsustainable profit margins.
The LNP has demonstrated, time and again, that they simply can’t manage the economy. They do not know what they are doing. Yeah, that’s right, the LNP. All the claims, all the allegations made by the LNP hat they are better than the ALP have been proven to be lies. Only fools continue to believe their propaganda, projection, and rhetoric. The evidence proves that the ALP have consistently managed the economy better than the LNP. The efforts of Hockey alone have increased the deficit from a projected $43.6B o $103.9B, and that’s despite all the idiotic, draconian LNP austerity measures inflicted on those hat can least afford it – if they’ve cut spending, then where the hell is the money going?! Regardless of party, they all rely upon the same Trickle-down Economics model that has led to an exponentially problematic and self-destructive socio-economic outcome every year. It’s like digging down to dig yourself out of a hole.
Yes, there are RWNJs
thrashing on the floor right now, an aneurism threatening to burst in the
vacuous space behind their eyes, but look at the evidence. Thirty years of
Trickle-down Economics. The rich have become even richer. Their tax rate has
plummeted and many don’t even pay that. The poor have become poorer and are
blamed for society’s woes. Right-wing governments insist austerity measures
inflicted on the most disadvantaged are the only way to fix the economic
problems but it just makes things worse. Our politicians and authorities are
infected by an entrenched culture of corruption and have no idea what they are
doing. Capitalist Democracy has become Plutocratic Fascism and it isn’t
working.
The public
are sick of this. They have had enough of a system that isolates and silences
victims. They have had a gut-full of a system that conceals and enables
predators, crime, systemic failure, and injustice. They are fed up with
incompetent and corrupt politicians, police and public servants being cleared
of any blame and effectively rewarded for their ineptitude and dishonesty. They
are sick of struggling to live one day to the next in poverty while being
blamed for economic problems caused by greedy, entitled, self-centred,
incompetent, hypocritical, morally and ethically bankrupt, narcissists. And
they are frustrated with the same problems, the same systemic failures, the
same entrenched culture of corruption inflicting harm year after year, month
after month, day after day because the authorities allow it to fester in plain
sight.
The Age of Entitlement is real, and it is a problem, but it is not the unemployed, the disadvantaged, families suffering socio-economic hardship, pensioners, immigrants, women seeking (with every right) equal pay, gay folk seeking (with every right) marriage equality, victims of domestic violence and child abuse seeking (with every right) the dignity of justice, or any one of a thousand things RWNJs and freelance self-centred, bigoted arseholes claim are the cause. It is too many rotten, so-called political representatives, police and public servants that hide behind that entrenched culture of corruption and act as human bollards to prevent the few good ones from doing their jobs to fix this problem.
You cannot reason with unreasonable people. It is a war of attrition with an unarmed foe that only ends in bitter stalemate as your psychotic opponent adopts a policy of scorched earth and unrelenting idiocy. You cannot be part of the solution if you are part of the problem. You cannot begin to fix a problem until you are willing to acknowledge it. The road to hell is paved with self-centred intentions and those who refuse to learn from history will damn others by inflicting those same worst outcomes on them. Those who are silent may be said to condone, but those who force others to remain silent are complicit.
AGE OF ENTITLEMENT - PART 2
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