Ripping Off the Young

Okay, young people of America, you know something is wrong with the economy because you either can't find a job or the one you have doesn't pay enough for you to live on comfortably.  You may think this is something new since we went through the financial meltdown in 2008.  This is not true.  The young people in this country have been taking a beating for years, for something like 30 or 40 years in fact.  You don't know this because you are too young to follow all the trend lines and the methods our financial system locked many of you into working, not for yourself, but their benefit.

Here is an example:  Fuel cost in 1965 was about 25 cents per gallon and I was making $2.88 per hour working in the summer in the moving and storage industry.  This was manual labor and a little driving of a truck, not an executive job.  Today that converts to around $4.00 per gallon for fuel and a corrected for inflation of $46.08 per hour wage, based on keeping up with fuel cost. Okay young folks, where is your $46.08 per hour job?

Try this one:  I lived on my own in the summer, which means I paid for housing, food, clothing, entertainment, fixed up my car and put enough money in the bank in three months to pay for a years education at a major state university.  The only thing I had to provide was meals five days a week by working at the university cafeteria.  On the week-ends I paid for my meals out of my own pocket.  All the cost for the university I paid for, no loans, including my dorm cost.  Tell me how much money you would have to save in three months to do this today?  What would your salary be to accomplish that little trick?  Keeping in mind, you could not live at home.

Now you can begin to see a couple of things.  One, no non-specialized manual labor industry has been able to keep pace with inflation.  Even specialized industries have not been able to accomplish this.  Who do you know making $46.08 per hour doing manual labor?  Who do you know who is earning $46.08 per hour?  No one in the neighborhood I am living in.

The next trick they pulled on you is to ask you to borrow money to pay for college.  How many of you still owe money on that drill?  How many of you owe more money than you borrowed on that drill?  Here is the double bad news on that trick.  First off there aren't jobs out there where you can work and pay off the bill and if you think the cost of fuel went up since 1964, you might want to check the rise in college cost.  Look at the pay for the executives in higher education, they are the only one's making money on a college education with few exceptions.  Yet young people by the droves head off to college and borrow money. This is going to cause a huge problem for this country in the not too distant future.

Now the federal government is asking the young people in this country to be forced into a health care system where they have to pay for services they don't need, at the same out of pocket cost as the rest of us.  When are you young people going to wake up and vote all these people out of office?  When are you going to elect someone who will actually look out for your needs?  If you don't this country will go down the tubes.  Get active in what is happening around you and see that some or all of these wrongs are corrected.  No one is coming to your aid except you.