Class Warfare

I have had a lot on my mind lately.  It is funny, when I was a kid, I never paid attention to politics.  But now, as an adult I pay a lot of attention.  There is lot of talk nowadays about class warfare, whether or not the wealthy should pay more taxes, etc.  I thought about it, and you know I think it is class warfare, but it started a long time ago.  The first jobless recovery I ever paid attention to was under George W. Bush in the 2001 recession (http://www.forward.com/articles/7308/, http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2003-07-17-recession_x.htm).  I mean, how can you have a jobless recovery?  This is not a blog about blame.  What I noticed is that when these jobless recovery occurred, the middle class and poor took the hardest hits.  Many people never recovered from that time, but the unemployment percentage was still low.  Employers began cutting salaries.  Also, the laws changed for overtime pay, so if you made over a certain amount, the employer only had to pay the employee straight time instead of time and a half.  The plan was to lower employers’ expenses so they could hire more employees, but what ended up happening is that they just asked their employees to work overtime at straight time pay, and since salaries had been cut, the employees worked the overtime because they needed the money.  I didn’t just read about these trends, but I experienced them as well.  As a technical writer, I had one position that paid 39/hr, and all overtime hour was straight time.  My regular salary would have been around 78K, however one year I earned over 120K.  Now you could say that was a great year, but working that amount of hours started affecting my health.  The other thing that I experienced as a writer was more work in job descriptions and training.  Many companies were sending many of their positions overseas and they were hiring technical writers to write the job descriptions and training instructions for their co-workers’ positions and later their own.  This gave a whole new meaning to working yourself out of a job.  This trend continued on throughout the 1^st decade of the 21^st century.  At the same time our children, spouses, and parents who were in the military were going to war.  For some, this was an income increase, but for others it was a strain, because they had to leave their regular jobs.  However, the middle class and poor continued to suffer because many of these men and women had to write to their loved ones for military armor, but when they got to Iraq or Afghanistan it was not available for them.  Many families got a crash course in military armor design, its cost and shipping.  Now as all of these things were occurring the deficit was running out of control and the banks had decided that they could gamble with the economy.  It is funny, all of us were beginning to see people suffer or struggle, but many of us believed our politicians when they said that the economy was sound, especially if we still had a job.  And for many people in the middle class, “we still have a job” was how it was described, because our pay had been lowered, our hours extended, and our job conditions lowered, our basic expenses increasing (gas, rent, utilities and food).  I don’t know if some of you remember, but in 2008 there were riots in 3^rd world countries over the large increase in the cost of food.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_price_crisis, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7331921.stm )  Americans did not riot, but we did notice that our grocery bill increased (http://financiallyfit.yahoo.com/finance/article-113449-10939-1-4-rising-food-costs-that-will-hurt-your-wallet?ywaad=ad0035&nc) and we had to re-evaluate our budget.  So, I guess it is“class warfare” because the poor and the middle class have been getting the crap beaten out of them on a regular basis, for a long time with no relief.  As I would say in my younger days, "not even a reach-around".  So, I think that it would be fair if the wealthy paid more in taxes.  After all, it would only be temporary, because they would find a way to get out of paying their fair share as soon as the economy improved.