Occupy Main Street
Let’s stop building walls and start working toward viable solutions. Lets start an Occupy Main Street where the cause will be in support of the 100% – of Tax Paying Business owners! Those small businesses are what make our country work. If we did that, we would have more workers needed, and thus more jobs would open up… then unemployment would go down!
If the assumption that 1% caused the jobless problems, then what change is the Occupy crowd looking for? According to Wiki, the Occupy Wall Street ‘Demands Working Group’ published its demands in the New York Times in mid-October.
“The plan would involve creating 25 million new public-sector jobs paying union-level wages, providing free public transportation and free university education for all, staffing a single-payer health care system, and pursuing clean-energy research. Their plan would be funded by cutting the military budget in half and big tax hikes on the wealthiest.“
Interesting. The 1% who caused the loss of jobs in the US, are now going to be bilked more in taxes, so that we can have a BIGGER government to employ more public jobs, paying the higher union level wages, with free public transportation and free higher education. What form of economy is this? And we want to have out government hiring MORE people? I must say that the government has a bad record when it comes to running things (Amtrak, Post Office, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Social Security Trust Fund, Medicare, among others).
If I were part of the 1%, I would certainly ask why I should pay for someone elses free ride? Milton Friedman said, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. ” I would rather keep my money and spend it wisely rather than give it to the government to be spent wastefully.
We all are frustrated and some more than others. Just take a look at the headline news: Most of Europe is drowning in debt; the EU may possibly collapse because of the entitlement mentality of some member countries; riots in the streets of Greece; Libya, Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Israel, Tunisia, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan have had significant changes and social unrest in the last year; China owns most of the worlds debt; Japan suffered a devastating earthquake and tsunami; the US took a hit on its credit rating for the first time in history; we have a 14.7 trillion dollar debt and a congress divided and unable to resolve anything; the world stock markets moving up and down 2-4% weekly and sometimes daily; enough regulations to gag any new start up company; too big to fail bailouts and the list goes on.
So yeah, “where is my bailout”, seems to be the rallying cry! I pay my taxes, work hard for a living, try and build a future for my retirement years, but hard to do with the market in turmoil or a government that wants to grow bigger. So why do corporations get my tax dollars so they can keep running? I didn’t vote for that and certainly Milton Friedman would agree that crony capitalism may be the real culprit.
Power and money corrupt and certainly there is no shortage of either, but frankly, envy and jealousy also corrupt. We really don’t need all the rhetoric that incites more anger and vitriolic loathing – let’s start by trying to understand what the problems are and support our local business – Occupy Main STREET!