Today I'm Thinking About Income Inequality

I read this article earlier.

I confess that I have already seen Inequality for All.  I'm already aware of the issues of income.  I grew up in an affluent area of my community as one of three children of a homemaker and a blue collar union member.  That gave me a unique perspective on the issues of income inequality -- mostly because we were inside and outside the issues of income all the time.  The fees for extra curricular activities were painful at times and, yet, most of my friends never noticed.

As an adult, I have an enormous amount of student loan debt.  I should have been smarter about it.  At the time I signed on the dotted line I wasn't aware that student loan debt is sticky.  I didn't realize that it would follow me or that it would the way it has.  Like many Americans, too, I didn't know that it would be incredibly hard to find a job that would cover that debt and I wish I'd had a little more perspective.

It's also pretty sad that the arguments we're given about why the extremely wealthy don't need more taxation is that they are providing jobs.  Really?  I know very few people outside of a select few industries that really have something they can call a career.

In my area, we have call centers.  I worked at one; it was the customer service call center for a vehicle financing company... except... it was a subsidiary of that vehicle finance company because being an actual part of that company meant that the workers would be covered by a union contract.  So I worked for a subsidiary... and I answered the phone with the parent company name.  And then, when it would have incurred them more taxes, they moved.  First they moved to Kansas and then altogether overseas.   

It is not that a call center job is a terrible thing.  The problem is that dropping in for a few years, providing jobs for a few years and then moving your company to a place where you can pay people less and reap more profit means the people you employed for a few years have to find work elsewhere. The head of the office, a man from the Chicago area who didn't believe that Oregon snow is not quite the same as Chicago snow, even went so far as to say wages weren't higher because our call center wasn't really intended to be a "breadwinner" job but rather a job for a bored spouse.  Who has heard of a bored spouse these days?

When I have looked at politics the past few years I was hoping that we'd get another FDR.  Back in school as a child I loved him.  The older I've gotten the sadder I feel about the difficulties of FDR and Eleanor's relationship, but I am still pleased that he stood up for the little guy.  I feel like we see glimmers of that here and there. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Jeff Merkley really impressed me in this article with how they took the bull by the horns and asked pointed questions about how the financial industry is being handled.  It certainly seems like Washington is bought and paid for but it's nice to see those glimmers - those politicians who aren't quite paid for and certainly can't be bought.