You know, the scheme to partially privatize our national pension system is simply anti-social. The fact of the matter is that, as people get older and a little feeble, they need more people who can do things for them. The only question is whether the people who provide the goods and services to our elders are going to get paid more or less or, as was the case in the olden days, nothing.
Less or nothing it will be if the latest scheme to move the money from the Social Security trust funds into the hands of stock speculators goes through. Especially since the very same people whom we are going to rely on to serve our elders are the ones whose pensions are likely to be lost in the speculative shuffle of the markets. Their earnings be reduced because the old people can't pay them and their pensions will be eaten up by commissions and fees, if not downright fraud. A double wammy.
Expecting that investments in so-called private corporations will return a higher profit doesn't make much sense, given the track record of our corporate sector. Anyone who's been paying attention, knows that, although pouring more money into the market is supposed to fund an increase in new plants and equipment, more corporate energy is going into the economic version of musical chairs--the consolidation and acquisition of the competition, where the last one standing then looks to play the game elsewhere, preferably overseas.
For more decades than I care to remember there has been one scheme after another to generate subsidies for private enterprise--infusions of money that are supposed to improve their performance and their profits. While many of us are familiar with the inducements dreamed up by local communities and states to assist the relocation of industry from worn-out plants to new environments and newly trained workers doing the old tasks cheaper, and then saw them depart to foreign countries, corporate assistance on the national level continues at a much higher rate.
While reducing the taxes of corporations and high earning individuals, the most prominent and recent scheme to infuse more money into the market was supposed to generate industrial expansion, inovation and increased employment, if it actually happened, it didn't happen here at home. And that it didn't may well be related to the fact that so many government programs are actually directed at making American enterprise easy somewhere else. Think Department of Commerce. Think Department of Agriculture. Think of the State Department and, of course, Defense. All of them are primarly concerned with promoting American enterprise overseas.
It should not, therefore, surprise us that the whole country is well on the way to becoming a bedroom nation and that the only sector of our economy that's thriving is the residential construction industry. We are building a land of homes which, if we actually stayed there, probably wouldn't even need defending because there's so little of any significance going on.
While it may not be the intent, the dispersal of residential units all over the landscape is also fundamentally anti-social. Some people have come to realize that about the suburbs. And yet, instead of reversing the trends and rebuilding our cities into vibrant communities, what's being promoted is even more of the same. Is it because people in their own little cells are perceived to be easier to control? If so, they are also going to be a lot harder to care and provide for and we may have no choice but to do so for next to nothing.
If our response to the reality that dispersed populations are expensive to serve is simply to cut out social support, then it's unlikely that our society will survive, at least not at the level which, until very recently, we still expected to attain.
Posted by Hannah at January 10, 2005 06:19 AM