When the newly-elected governor of Michigan announced last year or year before that he planned on balancing the state budget on the backs of teachers, it made me mad. You know what made me madder? The drive to recall him.
When he rode into office on a wave of "I'll do whatever's necessary to balance the state budget", no one bothered to say "Really? And what are your plans?" If he had said "Well, i plan on cutting the pay, benefits and pensions of teachers", then i'm sure that he wouldn't have been elected. As it is, no one bothered to ask, so he didn't have to tell.
But that's one of the big problems with America today. We don't ask enough questions. Like when Walmart promises that they'll always have the lowest prices. Heck, sometimes they'll drop their prices so low that a competitor will have to go out of business because they can't compete. But it seems like no one asks "How?"
Well, since the majority of Americans today have no idea how retail works, let me explain it to you.
Contrary to what it seems, retailers don't just randomly assign prices to things. It's actually a formula. This isn't exact, but it goes more or less like this... overhead (payroll, electricity, advertising, taxes, etc) plus profit margin equals markup. Markup plus wholesale cost equals the price of the item. I can tell you that in our "get rich or die tryin'" 21st century mentality, profit margin is the last thing to get cut. You know what's usually first? Well, they can't change the amount of taxes that they pay... they can't significantly change the cost of their electricity... i mean they can, but only to a certain extent. So what does that leave? Payroll. The first thing to go in payroll is usually benefits. Like Walmart setting it up so that only about 45% of their employees (most of that 45% being management) have access to health benefits. But we don't have to worry about that because we don't pay for that, right? Except, when one of these people, unable to afford to see a doctor for that cold goes into the ER to be treated for pneumonia and can't pay their bill, who do you think does? You and I. Another thing that they do is pay the absolute minimum that they can for labor. But we don't have to worry about that, either, because it just saves us money, right? Except that a lot of these people end up on government assistance of one sort or another (food stamps, energy assistance, whatever), which we pay for. Another trick that not just Walmart, but a LOT of retailers do (Target seems to be the only one that doesn't do this) is to have one employee performing four or five tasks at once. This doesn't actually cost us money, but think of this the next time that you're in a Walmart and see one employee going crazy trying to process returns, money orders and bill payments and answer the phones all at the same time. These hidden costs are what retailers call "backend" expenses. You don't see them... but they're there.
I saw this first hand years ago when i was working for Costco. A customer said "Why doesn't Costco have bags like everyone else does?" I responded "Because, ma'am, we don't charge you for bags." Her response? "The grocery store doesn't charge me for bags." Of course they do. That's part of their overhead.
And it goes deeper than that, too. Every since the Reagan administration, we've allowed slave labor to assemble our crap. And i don't want to hear that garbage about how anything that we pay them is better than what they could get otherwise. When you look at an outfit like the Chinese company Foxconn, which builds Apple products, and take into account that many of their employees are working sixteen hour days and six hour weeks for almost no pay and no benefits, it doesn't become worth it. When they had five employee suicides in five months because of the working conditions, it doesn't become worth it. When you realize that (i think that the figure is) 40% of the money that we send over there goes to enrich and prop up the Communist government, It doesn't become worth it.
We're full of big talk about how we're working to bring democracy to the world, and that we want everyone to have the same quality of life that we do. But that's all that it is... talk. Unless you mean, like Newt Gingrich apparently does, that we should lower our quality of life to match the average Chinese quality of life. And trust me... most of them ain't living high on the hog. We're really perfectly okay with propping up a repressive government like China as long as we can get an HDTV for $200, or overthrowing a democratically elected government like we did in Iran in the forties or Cuba in the fifties. In both cases, we disliked the duly-elected official, so we performed a coup and put someone that we liked in power. In Iraq it was the Shah. In Cuba it was a bright young up-and-comer named Fidel Castro.
Now. Having said that, i would also like to say that it may be too late to change our massive sell-out of our economy to Communist China. We are so deeply in debt to China that our politicians have to convince us that we're really doing something good over there, because if one of them actually had the balls to suggest that we change the way that we're doing things all that China has to do is call that debt home and our economy sinks like an anchor. The republicans are right... we need to change the way that we're doing things. But cutting the salaries of Americans, denying Americans health care and robbing our teachers and public officials isn't the way to do it.
Peace.
Randal
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