FINANCES AND SALARIES
Many people today complain that they're not making enough money to stay alive. They will nostalgically tell you about the "good old days" when gas was 40 cents a gallon and going to the movies cost $1.50. At the same time the so-called financial wizards will tell you what today's prices would be in such and such a year's dollars. Are they trying to convince us or confuse us?
Companies feared what would happen in 2014 when Obamacare kicked in at its fullest. Companies with more than 50 employees will HAVE to offer a specific array of medical plans that we WILL have to kick in for by law. I currently have no medical coverage because I can't afford it, just like a lot of other people. Now, in 2018 I avoided that fiasco by a strange turn of events. In 2014, I almost died from a major stroke. Although I had a great recovery, my employer ruled me "unable to work" and I wound up on disability benefits. An old friend helped me out and made it possible to escape the death grip of California. I now reside in Washington, where someone can survive on the money I get from my condition.. Obamacare was a scam that flourished in California and other states. In California, when I tried to apply for Obamacare in order to avoid the proposed fines for not "buying in", every "affordable" option would come up as "not available in your state". The cheapest plan it would approve would have forced me to choose between health care and food.Where else have we heard that before?
Let's look at some of the main culprits in our financial whirlpool:
The main problem today is what I like to refer to as the "Artificial Economy". There are too few people who control too much of the money, and it's basically our fault because we weren't perceptive enough to nip it in the bud when it began. Some examples of the Artificial Economy:
1) Company CEOs and other officials negotiated ridiculously high salaries
2) Athletes began to demand unearthly salaries (mainly through players' unions)
3) Actors jumped on the bandwagon by making people believe they were worth multiple millions per movie or TV show because without them the studios would go bankrupt
4) The oil barons started asking ever-higher prices for gasoline, helped by two oil embargoes which brought untold wealth to both OPEC nations and domestic oil companies while driving up the price of everything else
5) Landlords and real estate agents began gouging the public because of numbers 1 through 3 above. Just because the privileged few could afford $5 million homes, we saw prices skyrocket oh the entire housing/apartment market
THE PROBLEM IS NOT LOW SALARIES---IT'S OVERPRICED GOODS AND SERVICES.
Let's pause a moment to consider this: if no one made a $3 million dollar salary for sitting behind a desk, if athletes weren't making $500,000 an outing for playing a GAME, if actors weren't getting $10 million or more to pretend to be someone else on screen, and if we controlled the price of gas, then maybe everyone else would be able to make a decent living.
NOTE: If the President is the most important and powerful person on Earth, as some people say, then why does an actor or athlete make more for one season or movie than the President makes in two terms (8 years) of office?
I'm not saying that the President needs to make more money. These overpaid people need to be paid less. Our President makes $400,000 a year, plus various expenses. I don't know about you, but at this point if I made only half that much, I would have a great standard of living, which brings us to this fact. If the top allowable salary was half of what the President makes, prices would go down. There would be no $10 million homes or no six-digit prices on cars because no one could afford them. Real estate owners and car manufacturers would have to lower prices in order to sell their products.
Why should a ball player make so much money for such an unimportant act as playing a game while the really important people such as firemen, doctors, and police officers get such relatively meager salaries by comparison?
Let's talk OPEC here. OPEC has 12 members, but there are 204 countries in the world. Why are we letting such a small minority control the price of oil? If all the non-OPEC nations had the brains to band together (almost impossible) and tell OPEC "Hey, you know that oil you've got there? It's worth $50 a barrel and we won't pay any more than that for it", oil prices would go down. Since most OPEC nations have little more than sand and oil as resources, they would have to agree to our price or die because they need our money to buy their survival. You can't eat sand or drink oil---not a healthy diet. As your President, I intend to push the world's leaders to adopt this stance and will create the League of Oil Consuming Countries (LOCC), which will meet and set the price we will pay for oil. I suggest we start at $50 dollars a barrel and that no changes can be made unless at least 60 percent of the members agree to it. Keep in mind that despite the fact that Big Oil is selling less of its product, it keeps making indecently HUGE profits every quarter. The only reason for that is that they are charging too much for their product, case closed. IF WE CONTROL THE PRICE OF OIL, THEN EVERYTHING ELSE THAT DEPENDS ON OIL WILL GO DOWN IN PRICE.