PJ Media

Obi-Dumb, you’re a typical mind-numbed lefty hurling talking points. Nominal dollar wage data are meaningless without levelling for cost of living and taxation. Not so long ago whenever I went to pretty much anywhere in the Lower 48 I felt like I’d gone to a Third World country things were so cheap relatively. The whole Ecotopia, Left Coast west of the mountains is like that today; prices are astounding in SEA, SFO, LAX and everyone who lives and works there either makes wages that reflect those costs, commutes from somewhere they can afford to live, or is on welfare. The same is true of the East Coast megaopolis and to a lesser extent for the urban centers in the rest of the Country.

You lefties like to rail about Blue States exporting tax dollars to the Red States. Well, we in the Red States export commodities and natural resources to the Blue States. We could also export a lot of Democrat-voting Blacks, Hispanics, and Indians then you wouldn’t be exporting tax dollars to support them, you could pay for them right at home. There is also the fact that the US owns a lot of real estate in the Red States and has a lot of military presence in them as well. While my state definitely derives a secondary benefit from all the federal land here and from the huge military presence here, the “Blue State money” being spent on it isn’t being spent on or because of my state; that’s stuff the US wants to do.

I’ve been all over the US and is sure seems like there is a lot of middle class out there. The kind of middle class that isn’t out there anymore is the middle class lifestyle, or what passed for it at the time, that you could have with a HS Diploma or GED and go to the same plant every day putting the lug nuts on the right rear wheel, after thirty years of which you could retire and move to FL. You have to have more skills, you have to be willing to change your skill set, and you have to be willing to move. If you go to college for five years to get a four year degree in Angry People Studies and borrow $75K to do it, you’re probably going to be a very poor and unhappy person for a long time. I’ve had young lawyers working for me in $70-$80K jobs who didn’t have anything like the social and physical amenities of much lower paid employees because they were so burdened with student loans.

If you want to make a decent living and not spend the first ten or fifteen years of your working life eating Top Ramen, you don’t go to college, you go into the trades; there’s still plenty of work out there for people who can fix things. And if you really want to go to college to earn a skill other than Angry People Studies, you can go into the military first, serve a couple of active duty hitches, and come out with savings and a paid for education. Oh, I forgot, Comrade Obama is scaling back the military. If the angry little punks of OWS really wanted a decent job, they’d pack up and move to the gas fields in PA or OH or the oil fields in the Dakotas or Alaska, all of which are screaming for help. But that would require giving up their urban lifestyle and expose them to harsh conditions and hard work.

I’m not one of the flatly anti-union Republicans. I am anti-unions in politics and support strict limits on the scope of bargaining and political activity of public sector unions. Frankly, if I can get what I want in a labor agreement, I’d give the union a union security clause and dues checkoff to keep them off my property slithering around trying to get people to join and pay dues and stirring up grievances to make them seem more important. Good management will do anything legal to avoid being organized but if despite your best efforts you are organized, then good management will do everything it can to give the union as little as possible to do.

Today, private sector unions exist only in the legacy industries that rely on government funding, government barriers to entry, or heavy government regulation. In those places the union and the management can “partner” to screw the shareholders and taxpayers with impunity. In the public sector, unions are basically in a partnership with the Democrats to screw the taxpayers and the only way the unions can long survive that game is, with Comrade Obama’s help, have more public employees than taxpayers. Once they get to the tipping point where there are more people with their hooves in the trough than putting food in the trough, the union grip is cemented but the result is that all spiral down into equal misery and tyranny.