The very next line in the piece was that “creating well-paying jobs is though”.
I read that line, which is why my assessment was “stupid entitled white person”.
Why? Because “well paying” is a subjective term. To the unemployed person who dropped out of high school, anything above minimum wage is “well paying”. If you’ve been working for $8 an hour for a year, getting a job at Wal Mart (where the starting no-skill wage is $10.50 an hour) is “well paying”. And once you’re THERE, Wal-Mart’s average no skill wage of $14.50 an hour is “well paying”.
And if you’re a Wal Mart person, you REALLY want to work for Cosco or Hobby Lobby, who start at $15. :-)
Railing against the rich in our society (and the value they bring in job creation) is something those born entitled do. I could give a rat’s ass if “the rich” care about me or not. Economies are not built on emotion, but an increase in value across the supply chain brought by workers who infuse that value. Sam Walton, Ken Langone, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Dan Cathy, Wilbur Ross, and David Green have employed hundreds of thousands of people at various wage levels by fulfilling demand among US consumers, and I am absolutely sick of entitled millennials whining at the rich like they’re some sort of problem just because they don’t hold a preferred social view, vote for the not-preferred political party, or somehow fail to show empathy-on-demand.
If you think these people are a problem, try running an economy without them. Then you’d find out in short order what REAL problems actually look like.
They are working, but the cost of living exceeds what they receive from that time spent working while the owner of that company generates immense profit from that same work.
There are three parts to that equation; you’re focusing on the wrong one. Let’s break it down. Here are the three parts.
- Wage
- Cost of living
- Profit to the company/rich guy
First off, the profit, which gets by far the most attention from the left in order to convince people to vote for them, is the smallest portion by far. Putting aside for a moment that profit is necessary to incent production, if you were to remove ALL the profit from every product and lower the price of those products accordingly, cost of living would STILL be painfully high at the wage levels paid.
Why? Because the largest component of a product’s cost is “cost of goods sold”, not “profit”. Doubt me? Go look at profit margins by industry. The column you want is “Net Margin”, and as you can see from the bottom row, if you got rid of all point of sale profit in the US, the average product would drop in price not even 9%.
But wait, there’s more! That 9% is too high, because it gets increased by higher margins in businesses that the average person doesn’t deal with. What do you buy? Houses, clothes, cars, food….and you need health care and pharmaceuticals. Those are the VAST majority of the average joe’s cash outflows. Let’s have a look. If you get rid of all profit….:
- Food would drop 2.85% in price
- Clothing would drop 1.9% in price
- Cars would drop 1.82% in price
- Houses would drop 7.19% in price
- Health care costs would drop around 2–3%
- Pharmaceuticals around 11%.
If you paid your executives nothing, MAYBE you’d add another percentage point to those numbers. And yes, I know the supply chain has profit in it too, but the POINT is that ending profit doesn’t move the needle enough that everyone would suddenly think their wages were high enough to cover cost of living.
The cost of living problem in the US is substantially more complicated than you make it out to be.
