POSTED FEBRUARY 2, 2019 RICHARD LEHMANN (Reprinted with permission)
I have little sympathy for billionaires like Howard Schultz and other one-percenters who complain that raising their taxes is unfair while millions of their underpaid employees scrape by paycheck to paycheck. Perhaps if they finally stopped holding the psychological scars of the Great Recession over their workers’ heads and paid their people a fair wage the coming
revolution from the left, right and center could be avoided. For many of these owners and C-suite executives, the recession was the best thing that ever happened to them. It’s the gift that keeps giving. As their profits and ownership stakes have risen while worker salaries have remained stagnant, they and their government enablers continue to falsely proclaim that every dollar they save on taxes is a dollar invested back into society in one way or another. At this point, only an imbecile would believe them.
Are you an imbecile? I doubt it.
But if your salary and benefits haven’t kept up with what it costs you to live a middle class existence clearly your company’s ownership thinks you are. How does your annual salary compare to what it was from, say, 20 years ago? Unless you were new to the workforce back then, it probably hasn’t grown much at all. In fact, if you’re in a position where you’re approaching middle age and you are in the unenviable position of having to look for a new job, you’re no doubt crestfallen to see that the salaries employers are willing to pay are equal to or even less than what you made back in the day. That’s what I mean by the fear left over from the Great Recession: Where any employee who survived it was unwilling to ruffle any feathers and was just happy to have a job. Employers recognized this and used it as leverage to push salaries down and keep workers on edge. I’m all for keeping costs down, but if you do it in a way that abuses employees while your pocket grows fatter and fatter, and then you feel you have a right to complain about paying your fair share in taxes, then you’ve lost me. And just wait until the robotic workforce gets here!
For more on this, check out my song Great Recession …
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