Middle and lower-wage earners are being priced out of life itself, pure and simple.
Megacorporations and the ultra-wealthy have carefully orchestrated the tax code to work in their favor, allowing them to pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. They have enjoyed ever-skyrocketing pay that is, on average, over 200 times greater than their employees’ median salaries. They’ve put every dollar they can into crushing unions,
The data doesn’t lie: We’re living in a new Gilded Age, with wealth inequality surpassing that of the previous Gilded Age. We’re being priced out of life across the generational board:
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Baby Boomers are returning to work in record numbers. Unable to afford the retirement promised to them, workers age 75+ are the fastest-growing age group in the workforce today. (Pew Research)
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40% of Generation X have a grand total of $0 in savings, much like the rest of the United States, where 60% of our fellow Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. (National Institute on Retirement Savings)
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Millennials and Generation Z are completely priced out of the home market, with the vast majority in this age cohort giving up on the dream of owning a home altogether. Moreover, they’re the most debt-saddled generation in history, having been the target of predatory student loans to the combined tune of $1.7 trillion dollars.
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The prices for nearly everything, for every generation, are out of control. Food prices have increased by 5.8% in the past year with more forecasted on the horizon for 2024. (USDA.gov) Food giants like Wal-Mart, Kroger, and many others have used “inflation” as a guise to raise prices as quickly and aggressively as possible. Please, don’t take my word for it. You can read Kroger’s own executive team bragging about their ability to jack up prices and us just continuing to roll over without fighting back: (Source)
What’s the Plan?
The bottom line is that the ultra-wealthy and megacorporations’ rampant greed has to be stopped. They’ll never have enough of anything.
Well, Michigan families and small businesses have had enough of their bullshit. Here’s the gameplan:
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Make Corporations Pay for Exorbitant CEO Salaries: Enact an excise tax on any company that has a 50:1 (or greater) CEO-to-median-worker pay disparity.
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Get Hedge Funds Out of Home Ownership: Ban hedge funds or any large corporation from owning any single-family homes — including mobile homes and/or manufactured homes, and trailer parks — within the state of Michigan and ensure families have priority selection of homes well before any would-be investor could try to snap it up. Furthermore, any hedge fund operating in the state of Michigan would be forced to divest of single-family homes.
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End Corporate Welfare: No large company should get to do business — and reap the benefits of our state’s hard-working people — and pay their workers so little that they can’t afford the basic necessities of life. Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Kroger, Home Depot, and Amazon are some of the nation’s worst offenders. If they’re doing business in Michigan, they need to pay their workers a living wage and end their reliance on Michiganders footing the bill for their greed. (Source)