On one hand, we have a world-wide casino that uses the basic need for shelter for gambling chips — housing. The result in America? According to an admittedly self-interested industry — builders — land and housing has become so expensive that the private sector only build luxury homes, unless government subsidies are provided. And those subsidies will have to be big, because the lack of affordable homes is enormous and growing rapidly.
Unless . . . the building industry does have one other possible solution. Try: Home Builders’ Solution: Higher Wages Can Make Our Products Affordable
Higher wages for everyone can bail us out of our affordable housing crisis. No need for big government doling out big subsidies after all.
Let’s look at those across the board pay hikes that will allow the average citizen to afford the luxury homes that builders build.
The Republican-controlled Congress, hand in hand with President Trump, talked about those pay hikes as they handed them out in 2017. They claimed to hand them to the American people, but not directly. More like the money was handed in trust to people and corporations that are already rich.
Congress permanently cut a trillion or so dollars that had been collected from the rich, while assuring everyone that the money saved would trickle down to employees, raising salaries across the board and presumably making those builder-built luxury homes available to all.
Well, it hasn’t trickled down, and the smartest guess by anybody is that it will never trickle down. And where’s the evidence of that? It comes straight from the mouths of big corporations themselves. Read it and weep at AXIOS: Forget about broad-based pay hikes, executives say
Corporations are clear about their priorities. Only the fittest (highly skilled) of their employees will survive and prosper. High-tech and robots will replace the others. Far from broad-based pay hikes, redundant employees can expect pink slips, loss of health benefits, be unable to afford to housing and presumably die en masse from disease or lack of shelter in cold winters.
This scenario accords with the Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ political objectives of conservative small government. So, what, if anything is the good news?
It’s simple. The wrong leaders are marching us in the wrong direction.
Republican small government that only takes out the trash and paves the roads can’t help shelter America’s population. But a big government can, one committed to survival and prosperity for the people (leaving aside that group of sociopathic ‘people’ called corporations). Big government can build housing more efficiently and economically (Denmark estimates that it can build public housing for 30% less than when using public private partnerships.) Big government has the power to stop land speculation in its tracks for people who cannot afford to gamble.
And big government can tax whoever and whatever to ensure that the prosperity of the nation is shared by all, that people will not go without food, healthcare and basic income for life’s necessities.
Thank you, big corporation executives. Thanks to your freely admitted objectives, the only sensible direction forward is clear.
Big Government is needed. Run by somebody — anybody — else.
