Sarah Solon

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In response to findings that college graduates' wages are stagnating for the first time in 30 years, the Rural Patriot - a brand new, one-week-old blog we like - examines reasons why this has occurred. The post quotes the 2006 Economic Report of the President: "Graduates are earning less because their ranks are swelling and they face tougher competition for better-paying jobs."

Way to frame young peoples' wage stagnation as your own personal success, Mr. President! Not only have you strengthened the economy, but you've also upped the number of college graduates. Good talking points, sir. By the time we're finishing weeding through the jumbled logic of this celebratory claim, we can almost forget those stagnant wages and all that college debt.

Let's not forget that this is the same President who's Pell Grant cuts kick some 90,000 students from the recipient rolls and affect more than 1 million others.

Here's my talking point: According to Wednesday's NY Post, 48% of college graduates in 2006 moved back home because they couldn't find a job and couldn't afford rent. Thank god for DMI, because without this job I'd be living in a basement in Colorado and arguing with my mom about whether or not I wore my retainer last night.

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There's lots of talk about this slimy, back-door move: In lieu of legislation actually passing that would dismantle the Estate Tax, the IRS has taken matters into their own hands, opting instead to fire 157 of its 345 estate tax lawyers and 17 support personnel - severely limiting the tax fraud investigations that the IRS can undertake. According to the IRS, every hour that their estate tax lawyers work, they catch an average of $2,200 in taxes that people worth $1 million or more are illegally withholding in taxes. That's right, it's about $1.4 billion in lost tax revenues a year.

Rob McKay on the Huffington Post hits the nail on the head:

"One would think that on a practical level, the Bush Administration would prefer to have another billion and a half on hand to pay for military, homeland security and boarder guards. In other words, to fight tax crime in order to pay for fighting crimes likes terrorism and imagined threats of immigration.

But these are costs that the poor, somehow, someway, must continue to cover with their rent money, diaper money, food money, gas money and, when it comes to securing employment by fighting the War in Iraq, their lives."

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We've all heard stories or been victims of rageaholic bosses who grill their workers and put up so many barriers that their employees feel beaten down and overwhelmed. For the last five weeks, Working America has been running a bad boss competition, inviting people to submit stories of their bosses' egregious behavior on anything from refusing to acknowledge overtime or fair compensation practices, to charging an employee for the flowers that a company sends to that employee's father's funeral.

Here at DMI, we believe that democracy works best when our elected officials know we're watching - which is why the major motivation behind our google adwords campaign is to aggressively publicize our Congressmembers' voting records on issues important to their constituents. I love this bad boss competition for the same reason - bad bosses should know that there's a larger audience for their behavior, and when they refuse to respect workers' rights or common decency, this too should be aggressively publicized.

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If your looking for another hole in the anti-immigrant rhetoric spouted by some factions of Congress, a new study in the health-care policy publication Health Affairs delivers. This study found that undocumented immigrants are not the cause of the problems in your local ER or your huge medical bill. Instead - and by a large margin - the greatest contributor to overly crowded emergency rooms, soaring health care costs, and lessening-quality primary care is the trend of more and more native-born Medicare and Medicaid recipients forced to use emergency rooms as primary care facilities. I understand that it's simpler for some to wrongly blame undocumented people for our health care problems than to actually enact the social policies and support systems that could curb this health care crisis, but the crisis won't end until we drop the anti-immigrant rhetoric and begin the tough work of crafting societal supports that actually work.

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Jordon on FireDogLake writes about the need for negations to go well when many UNITE-HERE contracts expire across the country in the next few months. To prove his point, he cites UNITE-HERE's new study titled " Creating Luxury, Enduring Pain, " and says that "hotel workers are 48% more likely to be injured on the job than the typical worker in the service sector. Hotel workers also have higher rates of serious, disabling injuries—those that require days away from work or reassignment to light duty. These disabling injuries occur to hotel workers at a rate 51% higher than for service sector workers in general."

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TexasKos offers a frame that explains the American economy as a Company Town. Identifying the true drains on our ability to stay afloat in ways that are deft and terrifying, the post concludes with:

"The sum consequences of the hour glass economy, predatory credit, declining real compensation and the decline of unions as effective voices for working America is to make the coming of a true, unchallenged Corporate state not just the hype of left wing tin hat types, but a real possibility. If you think we live in Corporate America, now, just give these trend lines another few quarters, years."

The old folk song says it best:

You load 16 tons, And what do you get? Another day older, And deeper in debt. Saint Peter, don't you call me, Cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store

Sarah Solon: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 6:57 AM, Jul 29, 2006 in Blog Stroll
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