Forum Post: Income inequality. Help.
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 11, 2011, 11:43 p.m. EST by Wingnut
(11)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
May I humbly ask a question?
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011012.pdf
74.9% of America completes high school (see table 12). That means 25.1% drop out. I am pretty sure that number drops to about 16% after 10 years of GEDs.
How can we make sure that the 25% of America that is really poorly educated and entirely unskilled get working wage?
With all due respect, tax the 1% isn't going to do much to help this 25%.
This is pretty important if we want to make things better. Ideas?
Stop handing out welfare and food stamps.
We build jails for these? No? And housing projects? Except for the most brain dead manual labor, the 25.1% can't produce much.
Our schools are failing us. I think we have to demand more. Guessing the teacher's union not gonna be so keen on that call for increased accountability.
I want income inequality to stop. It won't happen until we stop accepting failure from our education system.
Perhaps if our schools were run more locally. Not madated "one size fits all" mentality from an office in D.C.. Also would help to provide real education(critical thinking, accurate history, etc) instead of mostly politicaly motivated curriculum.
not always, but usually, poorly educated people have the low paying jobs...for example these are the kind of people who are cleaning the classrooms and restrooms at the universities...by default many of them will need to access food stamps and welfare. if say later on, they get higher education and move up in society, that's great. yet those classrooms will still need to be cleaned by someone... but who?
We don't. If you can't graduate high school in this country, you're not worth helping.
Businesses aren't hiring because they are already meeting demand with the employees they have. Demand isn't higher because the 99% doesn't have any money left to buy stuff anymore. The solution is to directly stimulate the lower-income groups to create jobs. We then adopt a full employment strategy by determining how much labor American industry needs today and revising labor standards to meet it only at full employment.
Easier said than done. That assumes that they want to work, they are capable of working/doing the work, they have required skills, they're in the same locations as the work is, aren't subject to competition by other workers (e.g., undocumented at the low end), etc., etc.
There are lots of jobs out there now, just not necessarily the jobs that people want or can do or are able to move to. For example, even with lots of expedited Federal funding, virtually nobody is actually going to leave Chicago to go lay blacktop for a highway project in Provo, UT. Likewise, at the other end, they're not likely to compete with highly skilled workers in various industries where jobs are available regardless of any realistic training program.
There are complications, but this is a movement of those that want to work and cannot find it, is it not? I admit that I'm keeping it a bit simplistic, but the core idea to take away is that we should not find as acceptable the idea that there is an ideal percentage of people that want work and can't find it to maintain.
I'm not so sure about that given some of the posts here. lol
I can't see many of the people who I've seen involved laying any blacktop or doing much else along those kind of lines. And most of those kinds of jobs are limited duration so when the work and/or money dries up, so do the jobs.
But, yes, there is a normal full-employment rate that we're way under now and that doesn't look to be changing any time soon for lots of reasons and, unfortunately, without any real easy solutions.
I blame the wall street.
Every citizen who slips through the cracks of community comes back to bite the community that failed them....