By Jeff Salisbury
“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” — George Orwell
Spotted a meme
on Facebook this past week… simple graphic… with the graphic shown at left, by Carmen Spoor via “Storm is Coming” (Facebook group)
For the most part, it’s a pretty accurate meme — though I would take exception to the college debt numbers.
Some reasons why… I wrote here some weeks ago that of all students enrolled in colleges across the country, only about 15% are what we might call “typical” – that is, 18- to 22-year-olds who went straight from high school to college and live in on-campus dorms or other student housing.
The VAST majority of students taking college classes (85%) are non-traditional students — they don’t easily fit into a category… they are from all age groups and all walks of life… some are working part- or full-time and taking classes part- or full-time… others are returning to college as a form of retraining or make a change in careers or GIs whose military careers have ended. Others are taking courses as part of their job to update credentials and so on.
So… we have to be careful to paint “student debt” with a wide brush.
There are certainly students (of all ages and with all sorts of degrees) who are loaded with debt — some have a solid ability to repay the debt load — others are headed for their parents rec rooms. Still others paid as they went along and others are being reimbursed by employers and/or the government through grant-in-aid programs.
That is not to downplay the high cost of earning a four-year degree or graduate school – not at all, but just noting that “the average student…” owes X numbers of dollars, well, there’s much to take into consideration in making such a statement.
For my part, I’d love to see the forces of supply and demand take over. Let’s try not sending so many high school grads directly to four-year institutions. When we are sending 60-70-80 or even 90 percent of some high school graduating classes off to college AND we do so knowing that of the U.S. population over age 35, the Census Bureau tells us that 3 in 10 Americans have ANY kind of college degree, well then, our universities are becoming businesses selling a product most Americans don’t end up owning.
When does a CEO’s salary go from being a whole-lotta-money to too-much-money?
I heard a report this week on NPR that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) “voted 3-2 Wednesday to require public companies to disclose the ratio of their chief executive officer’s pay to the median compensation of their employees. Supporters say the pay ratio rule, which came about as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulation reforms, will discourage excessive CEO compensation. Detractors say the rule will be difficult to implement and have little impact on income inequality.”
When and if CEOs make billions and their full-time custodians qualify for government assistance programs — I have a problem with that. I’ve been told that “one percenters pay most of the costs of the government programs the poor rely on” – which is correct – but that is by design — as we know — the wealthy do pay most of the total individual income taxes. That’s the nature of a progressive income tax structure. In 2013, according to (Pew Research) analysis of preliminary IRS data, people with adjusted gross incomes above $250,000 paid nearly half (48.9%) of all individual income taxes, though they accounted for only 2.4% of all returns filed. Their average tax rate (total taxes paid divided by cumulative AGI) was 25.6%.
By contrast, people whose incomes were less than $50,000 accounted for 63.4% of all individual income tax returns filed in 2013, but they paid just 6.2% of total taxes; their average tax rate was 4.2%.
If we agree that the top 20 or 10 or 1 percent are carrying too much too much of the income tax burden, the way to reverse that trend is to see to it that the bottom 20 or 10 or 1 percent start earning more money so they pay more income taxes.
Monitoring CEO wages vs. average workers is a way to monitor how corporate boards are allocating wages and benefits — bottom up or top down. A corporation hadn’t ought to be rewarding CEOs at the expense of the employees at the bottom.
Again, I go back to my point that if we agree that the top 20 or 10 or 1 percent is paying an inordinate amount of the total income tax revenue, the way to remedy that is to do everything possible to see to it that the bottom 20 and 10 and 1 percent earn higher wages so that they pay more income taxes. Supply and demand, when it comes to employee wages only “works” in theory when there’s an under-supply of workers in a job classification.
The role of the government is to everything possible to keep employers from living out that dream scenario. And one theory being discussed in the link above is to monitor the relative disparity between CEO pay and general employees. Just knowing the disparity and reporting that information just might wake up some board of directors and shareholders.
Of course, you know all that. The LAST thing an employer will do is raise wages. That is a last resort. Where an employer can lower payroll and maintain or increase profits, that’s just what an employer will do.
The one-line joke by comedian Chris Rock about the minimum wage is true… “If I could pay you less than the minimum wage… I would… but it’s illegal.”
Movie Review – short and sweet; no, make that nasty and foul-mouthed
Speaking of comedy (and I use the term loosely in this case) I saw the movie “Train Wreck” over the weekend at my fave theater, The Old Regent in Allegan. What a great title.
It was terrible — one dirty joke after another — like a two-hour, off-color Saturday Night Live skit.
I was glad I only paid 4 dollars.
I am not exactly a prude, but seriously I almost left, but I kept thinking it was somehow going to get better.
The lead actress who I guess is popular is as foul-mouthed of a comedian as I’ve ever heard. She definitely used all of George Carlin’s seven words you cannot say on TV in the movie, that’s for sure.
It could have been cute – honestly – it really had the makings of a sweet little romantic comedy — but it was dreadful.
