I saw a headline the other day that got me thinking. It said something to the effect that President Obama is going to make sure there are more higher paying jobs available in this country.
Do we need more higher paying jobs? Haven’t the higher-paying job people put us in this mess? If we think back to after World War II and the guys came home, suddenly we needed more houses, more infrastructure, more hospitals for the birthing of the Baby Boomers and on and on.
Building these things were not high paying jobs, but good, steady work to pay for those new houses in the suburbs along with the tracks and trains for those who worked in the cities to commute on. The soldiers coming home had jobs waiting for them -- not food stamps and unemployment. We needed the steel mills, lumber mills and myriad other jobs that were non-skilled labor jobs.
Today we have outsourced all those jobs to other countries so steel mill towns, many automobile towns as well as many other factory towns are now ghost towns. Unskilled labor jobs are more than scarce and what few that exist are being taken by college educated people unable to find work since their jobs have also been eliminated for one reason or another or by illegal aliens because bosses don’t have to pay them as much nor do they have to give them medical insurance.
In every country, there are always people who are never going to be school persons but who will need to work and make a decent living, in other words unskilled labor.
I’ve heard all the talk about how we Americans don’t want to lower ourselves to doing these things, but I know many people who would do anything just to be employed and able to provide for their families. Yes, they would demand a more livable wage than the illegals but only because they can and should be properly reimbursed for the work they do. The illegal aliens are used by their employers because they are not able to complain under fear of being deported.
There will always be gaps in pay for different services. The higher educated should make more money but not extravagant amounts. Everyone should make a decent living and have access to health care without minimum wages being mandated or unions using strike scare tactics to make employers do the right thing. We need to bring monetary payment for everything back to more sensible amounts. If you can throw a football should you make millions, if you can act in a movie should you get millions to do so? I think not. Especially since many of these people become role models for our children but they live atrocious lives.
Our priorities are so skewed it’s ridiculous.
How you fix all this, I have no idea, but these things are what the president should be working on. I’d rather pay the firefighter who saves my house from burning down, my local police officer who saves my life by catching burglars and killers, my nurses and hospital support staff for saving my life when I am critically ill, and especially teachers for shaping the next generation higher salaries not football players or actors.
I’d rather see them be role models for my child, wouldn’t you?