Traffic plan drives listeners to distraction:
Backlash against Clear Channel in Chicago begins.
notable quotes:
"Erik Slavin: I'd say that Barry Butler should be lobotomized, but it's possible that the operation has already been performed."
"Peggy Trucksis: Evil companies do evil things. I would rather work for the devil than be associated with Clear Channel."
Finally, somebody in the legislature does something smart about the american job market.
If you want to send your jobs overseas, don't come around and ask for any government contracts.
DenverPost.com - LOCAL NEWS
Clear Channel sells out O'Hare in traffic reports
Oh man, this is perhaps the 2nd or 3rd worst thing Clear Channel has done to date. Thank god I 1) don't live in chicago, 2) don't listen to the radio anymore.
Bastards
Bush stops at diner to create jobs
This guy so does not get it. The economic recovery people are loocking for is the kind that creates careers, not jobs. If bush's economic recovery plan is to tell all the laid off airplane engineers at pratt & whitney that they need to go work at a diner then he will surely fail.
The problem is that many well paying, technical jobs have been moved overseas. And at the same time huge numbers of lower level, semi skilled jobs such as manufacturing have been sent overseas.
For example, no Levi's jeans are made in america any more. They close their last american plant this year. So now when the economic recovery comes, and people start buying things that would normally help the economy, We as americans are getting a smaller and msaller share of that dollar back.
We no longer get the manufacturing job. Because the manufacturing isn't done here we have lost the manufacturing manager job, and the Plant Director job, and the materials purchaser job.
Entire segments are disappearing. The plant being gone leads to less business for americans in all realms of shipping. Materials are not being bought from around the world and shiped into the us, assembled and shipped back out. So workers at overseas shipping ports are getting less money in, truckers have less stuff to ship from the ports to the factories.
Then this leads us to the real issue that will destroy bush, and even most democrats have not entirely figured out yet.
It's not the number of jobs, but the location
I moved out of a depressed area to find work. The few jobs created by bush's deficit spending are in 2 places: Washington, DC & suburbs - the age old home of the defense contractors
and Halliburton. The only contractor that seems to be able to rebuild iraq.
What we have again is the typical inequity in American soceity. Not govenrment, but soceity as a whole.
When the rich get money for investments and so forth, they look to give it to their buddies. Not in the sense of giving them a wad of cash, but by using their friend's business, and helping them succeed.
This leads to the problem where the rich get richer, and nobody else gets a chance. And now with bush's deficit spending you could argue he is actually taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich.
I'm sure Halliburton operates in profit. For every dollar that is spent and given to halliburton, the stock holders will probably make a penny or two. Now when you run 87 billion dollars through, even at that low, conservative rate, that's a lot of money to go to some already rich white business men in texas.
It's an election year. And as an independent I find some things very troubling about the way the democratic candidates plan to fix the economy. I always try to see both sides of the issue. Just as in nature, there is a delicate balance between things.
You cannot arbitrarily raise wages without an opposite effect, such as inflation. When you say to an employer you have to pay your people more (without giving them any additional money or assistance), that money has to come out of their operating budget. And they have to make a decision as to what to cut. Do they cut safety, training or staffing levels? Maybe they can make do with 1 less person per shift, reducing everyone's hours, effectively nullifying the mandated
hourly pay increase.
Most businesses do not do this as an attempt to defy the law, but merely as a way to keep their operation in business. Surely as a business owner, it is better to cut a few jobs, than to drive yourself into bankruptcy.
The other option for business owners in this scenario is to raise prices. But in this minimum wage scenario let's think about what companies we're talking about here:
Supermarkets (safeway and giant and so forth)
Fast Food
janitors and cleaning crews in probably every company across the counry
and much more that I really can't think of.
So what happens when grocery stores have to raise their prices to implement a higher minimum wage? The minimum wage that they are now paying doesn't buy as much. It's almost ensured inflation.
The other problem I have with this proposal (by John Kerry) is that as unfortunate as it is that poor people are struggling on minimum wage, there are many more people in this country that are struggling who are not stricly poor, or minimum wage but semi educated, mid level skilled employees. These people will not be helped at a ll by a minimum wage increase. And every day we real people see costs going up that are not counted in the inflation indexes. The monthly costs of our health insurance, and ever increasing co-pays as drug companies gouge the US consumers, and insurance companies.
The rising cost of housing, now that interest rates have been floored in order to try to bail out the economy. Well the effect has been an increase in homeownership. Well I guess that's good, but I don't know any people who can afford to buy a home at today's levels. And those who bought them a couple years ago are drowning in debt and increasing taxes as their home is appraised for more simply because the market is crazy.
I have always hated the way property tax is calculated. It is patently unfair to charge someone an increase simply because they can sell their house for more money. You can't get any more money without selling your house. How are you supposed to pay all these tax increases on the same income? The property tax assesment should be done once - at the time of purchasing the house. (There are of course substantial repurcussions in how much money the government gets because of this, but I will only offer the first part of the solution here)
Then, anyone buying a house has a "set" tax bill. Their property tax is based on the sale price of there house, not on market rises and falls. This will allow people to stay in houses in the typical american fashion. Rather than trying to trade up or down on the market. Also this would be a major win for low, middle and fixed income people such as seniors.
Now I would not propose that the taxes are absolutely fixed. The government could always change the rate per assesed value. This would allow 1 way for the government to account for rising costs of government.
I guess that's good enough for now. I have about a million other thoughts in my head, but I need to solidify and categorize them, so that you don't have to read through 30 pages of me rambling from one topic into the next.
