Low wages = bad economics

Gargantuan compensation for executives and insultingly low wages for common workers skews production. If rich people insist on keeping money in the upper echelons of society, they are doing themselves and society injustice because spending money is how we vote for what we want.

If most of us don't have money, that means we are not able to vote for what should be produced. Instead, the rich spend on items that are outside the scope of reality to most of us -- yachts, mansions, $100,000+ cars, profligate private parties, lavish extended travel vacations, mountains of new designer clothes because they're bored with what they already have. It's like the difference between spending hundreds of millions on fighter jets when a fraction of that amount spend on education would yield huge future results in our general standard of living.

The rich may think it's a good thing to keep a larger amount of their money. What they are missing is that to spend that money on higher wages would put more voting dollars in more people's hands. As those people vote with their larger spending, everything they pick will be of higher quality so we end up producing higher value goods. And if the rich have invested in the means of producing those higher value of goods, guess what. The rich can actually reap higher profits, especially the rich who are savvy enough to divine what people are going to buy at the higher income levels.

Instead, the game is to pay people as little as possible and let us scrabble for a few pennies more an hour in this job or that and keep the majority of the money at the top. We're back to trickle down economics and the law makers are quite happy to help keep the rules set so the money stays at the top.

The US economy is trillions of dollars a year. Yet the finitely small number of people who write and effect our laws are sitting ducks for a paltry micro-percentage of that flow. It is far too easy for a company to do wrong and pay the relatively gentle slap on the wrist fines if they happen to be caught. A several million dollar fine sounds big, until you compare it to billion dollar revenues. And a contribution to a few candidates may be large to the candidates and yet is itty bitty to the rich.

So are there solutions? Perhaps. The solution to the bad economics of the rich keeping their riches and squeezing the rest of us could be rectified by
1) raising the minimum wage significantly to the range of at least $15 per hour;
2) instituting paid training so people can afford to learn what's needed for our increasingly technical production; and
3) leaving more money in the pockets of the lower end of the income scale by returning to the more progressively graduated scale of taxes thrown out by the rich

A question still remains, though. How do we hold high level elected officials accountable to everyone, not just the few ultra rich who find ways to ensure the lawmakers do their bidding? This is just a thought, not a solution, but perhaps there might be a way to ensure we know what our lawmakers' influences are? Suppose every law maker's life was completely, transparently available to everyone by recording every moment of every day from when they begin campaigning for their first office until the last day of service when they retire.

Private citizens may claim the right to privacy, but when there is so much at stake involving so many people and so much money, this country can no longer afford to grant privacy for high level elected officials. The light of day would surely dry up a lot of bad conduct.