CONSERVATIVES HAVE ALL THE COMPLAINTS, BUT NO WORKABLE IDEAS FOR A FIX

 

... Ms. Parker once again has a problem with no suggestions for a cure.

In dealing with jobless Americans and inequality, the conservatives are totally out of ideas for what to do.

 

Well, the conservative columnist, Kathleen Parker, has done it again. 

Ms. Parker has now criticized the use of the president’s term “income inequality”. 

Apparently, she really believes that the Democrats think that wealth should be taken from the rich and given to the poor, instead of developing jobs for these individuals to work their way into the middle class. I say this because, to quote her directly, she stated,  “Solving our problems [of income inequality] is far more difficult than raising public consensus that the rich should be less rich so that the poor can be less poor, a feat that can only be accomplished through redistribution of wealth….. the poor are not poor because Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are rich. No one thinks that Oprah has caused people in Appalachia to be destitute.”

According to the “Queen of the Conservatives”, to Ms. Parker, the term “income inequality” is “the most brilliant turn of a phrase yet”…. Not one single American, gun to head, would say, ‘I’m for inequality’ or ‘inequality is good.’ “ 

So, I agree that she is correct that no sane person would say “inequality is good”.  But I dare say, the president and the Democrat’s approach is not to take away the incomes of people that have been financially successful, and then re-distribute their wealth to the less fortunate in America.

However, Ms. Parker is correct when she later says that we need a more a more skilled work force for dealing with the high-tech world of today.  But she has no suggestion for how to come up with that skilled work force….?

Unfortunately, the programs that allowed our mothers and fathers to overcome those big financial hurdles in the past such as the GI Bill, Pell grants, low-cost state college tuitions, low-interest government loans, these have not been forthcoming to the current and recent younger American generations. 

So then, how does Ms. Parker deal with this issue?  Here is her bizarre statement verbatim, “Some of the factors contributing to the income gap are, indeed, tough to tackle, and Obama is not, in fact, a God, as he now seems comfortable conceding. These factors include the loss of jobs for low-skilled workers and the apparent inability of this population, for whatever reasons, to become more skilled. Perhaps legalizing marijuana will help. If it doesn’t provide enough jobs, at least more people will care less.”

So, if we just ignore her comment on the use of marijuana, Ms. Parker says she has no idea why, “for whatever reasons”, we have these individuals, and what to do with these unskilled workers. 

Well, perhaps we need to first deal with the likes of bad agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that sent 700,000 American jobs to south-of-the-border locations.  And those jobs required skill sets that do not quite fit in today’s high-tech world.  Now this just might be one of the reasons she needs to consider, but no one on the right is mentioning this issue.

Add to all of this, the kind of expensive student loans that are placed directly on the average American college student’s back today.  This is a big issue unless you happen to be one of those students among the top 2% in American income families.  And this is just one more explanation for today’s continuing unskilled work force.

But Parker is also correct when she adds that, “…a global economy rewards the professional class — lawyers, doctors, engineers and, yes, television talk-show hosts”. 

However, as usual she doesn’t address the 55+ year old American workers that had gone into the work force, right out of high school, and they worked their ways up the ladders in their local town’s factories.  Let’s also not forget that these worker’s dads had worked their ways up in those same factories years before, and those jobs had offered up good middle-class incomes.  That is not the situation in today’s work environment.

Those old factories, due to those aforementioned bad US trade deals, they eventually decided to move out of the country.  So today, what are these American factory workers supposed to do?  Parker has no answers for that issue.  And it’s not a small issue, as according to Forbes Business News, 50,000 American factories closed and 9 million jobs were moved south or off-shore over the past 30 years.  Oh, and yes, these were factory jobs, not high-tech jobs.

As with most of the conservatives, Ms. Parker and her kind apparently do not think that the government should have anything to do for helping these displaced American workers.  And she is dead wrong in thinking that the Democrat's goals are for taking the wealth away from the top 2% and “redistributing it” to the bottom 10%.

What the Democrats want are more US infrastructure jobs and help in re-educating and training the current US work forces.  And if the US government has to get involved for developing training and education and new American job opportunities, as they did back in the days of the Great Depression, then so be it.  We should just do it!

It's been done before and we can do it again. 

It really is as simple as that.

Copyright G.Ater  2014