General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: "Struggling to make ends meet" on $174K a year?? Really Nancy??? [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)was a doctor and worried that his pay was going to decrease. He apparently meant that his father felt that if
Obama were elected, his pay as a doctor, would go down.
I said that I agreed, that doctors' pay will probably go down in the not-so-distant future. Why? Because teachers' and everyone else's pay has gone down and when other people's pay went down, doctors said nothing. After all, if their patients are earning less, doctors will be paid less.
The real problem is that we don't make anything much any more. Unemployment is, as a result, too high, and overall everyone's pay, everyone's value for their time, is going down.
These congressmen are quick to talk about reducing Social Security and Medicare payments and not raising the minimum wage and cutting here there and everywhere. The obvious solution is to raise the taxes of the rich to the levels they were in the 1950s and 1960s. We had huge war debt to pay back after WWII, and we did it by building infrastructure, thus employing everyone, sending people to school all tuition, etc. paid (the GI bill) and taxing the wealthy at very high rates.
That's what we have to do now. Nothing else will work. It isn't a question of fairness. It is a question of making sure our country, our society, our civilization, survives.