The Cost Of Living
To be alive. A Perspective.
Recently, I did some research into historic product costs and while doing so came across some pretty sad and desperate thoughts by people suffering under our current financial and social system. Here’s a few things I found.
Between 1974 and 1977 minimum wage was roughly $2.50 per hour. Back then a loaf of bread cost 0.29, green pepper 0.08, onion 0.03, chicken 0.29lb, bulb garlic 0.10, milk 0.99 gal, ice cream 1/2 gal 0.79.
Today those very same items would cost roughly $20.00.
In 1974 rent for a 2bd flat, heat included, was $125.00 a month, today that same flat rents for $1350.00 plus heat.
In 1974 30% of your income went towards shelter. Today it is 40 to 45%.
That 15% difference should be savings of which there is none.
Anyone making $20 per hour today is actually making less than minimum wage in 1977. Minimum wage, based on the price of inflation – THINGS WE NEED TO LIVE – should be roughly $23.00 per hour just to break even.
If you are making $7.50 or even $10.00 per hour you are living in perpetual debt and financially a sub-standard lifestyle.
The Sad Reality
Dungeons and dragons and the blackpill.
Currently, most working people are living on what I call The New Reservation: After the US Army rounded up the Native Peoples, put them on what became known as The Reservation. Those who were “lucky” enough to work off The Reservation received a substandard wage for their labor. The only place to purchase any goods or foods in those areas was a place called The General Store (this model was also used in smaller towns known as The Company Store). Prices at these stores were so inflated the people living there were forced to run up credit in order to survive leaving them forever in debt and stuck on The Reservation.
The majority of us are all living on The New Reservation now, and many are also stuck in The New Plantation.
The New Plantation is the prison system, most of the people in prison are in for non-violent offenses, but rather than have them make fair restitution, apologize, perhaps even seek the help or skills they need to live they are put into the private prison system where it just so happens that their warm-behind-bars-bodies pays well on the floor of the stock market – between $25K to $60K a year, actual human cost for upkeep on that scale, $10k. Further, regardless of the offence in the private system be assured these people serve every single day of their sentence, there is little to no room for good behavior or restitution. Those in prison who work; assembling furniture or sitting in a call-center earn 0.79 an hour for their labor. Again, this segment of society is faced with inflated prices for the purchase of the simple pleasures within the prison system they need or want such as a call home, a pack of cigarettes or a candy bar.
Out here in the real world chances are you have no medical insurance. Even under ObamaRomneyCare, face it, with a $6k deductible, you have no health care. If you are low income you are paying $200 a month for nothing. Let’s follow the money, see where it goes… Connecticut, (you know who you are).
However, if you are low income and can swallow your pride, you might qualify for Food Stamps, or in the new Orwellian-Speak ‘Food Share.’ Still, you are eating highly processed packaged food because you either lack the education on how to eat right, or too depressed to even care.
You also have no savings, maxed out any credit card you may have had at some outrageously high interest rate, perhaps you are even in student loan debt or stuck in some payday loan scam.
You are most likely living in low income housing or rent a run down apartment in an unsafe area wondering how much worse it can possibly get.
Chances are your job, if you have one, is unfulfilling, has no benefits, pension or real future.
You wonder how you even get up in the morning.
Your only source of entertainment and diversion is the internet, if you are savvy enough to operate and own a computer, or you’re bombarded by endless commercials on TV telling you all the things you need that you can’t afford and are subjugated to watching the lifestyles of people, the elite class, your betters, the lucky ones, you’ll never know or be like.
Compared to your parents your life expectancy in the US has now dropped by 10 to 15 years.
At this point you’re too proud to make any new friends because you’re always broke, down and out. You’re too embarrassed to talk to or bother your family, who is also struggling with finances and waking up in the morning to their unfulfilling dead end jobs. In your eyes the word failure is written and everyone can see it, so you keep your head down, get through the day and escape home hoping you don’t get mugged or sick.
Your mind wanders more often to the topic of a quick and painless end, because none of this really matters, and that mindset is reinforced daily by businesses and colleagues who remind you that you’re easily replaced and no one needs your business. This is what’s call the free market, the post-modern world of capitalism, unpersonhood. Darwin in action.
You’re living just a few steps and a paycheck away from homelessness.
By this time many fall into drugs and too often people feel that coming back from an overdose is worse than dying.
THIS is NOT Western Civilization, this is borderline Communism, Corporatism, Plutocracy, Serfdom, Slavery call it what you will, but it is not the struggle for a better or balanced life, it’s simply immoral.
America Is Spiraling
Prison is the New Plantation, Debt is the New Reservation, War is a Culture of Death.
Basic Income changes all that.
All of it!
Basic Income is really just compensation for the last 45 years of deflated wages and massive unfair debt and usury.
If you are counting on your good graces, charming disposition, laurels or luck to get you through life, think again. Those who have lost those 10 to 15 years of life expectancy are dying in massive debt, on average $63k worth of debt on their death bed and that debt is left to you, your children, your grandchildren and their grandchildren. Complete economic and educational control is now in the hands of the few.
The black hole of debt is growing and the bigger it gets the faster is sucks in everything in its path, and it is making its way up the income ladder. You are on that list.
If we don’t start lifting people up their sorrow and misery will collapse the whole damn thing and much sooner than we all think. What we have now will be utterly wiped out, and your quality of life will be armed with a 24/7 watch.
That said, I have a few words for those who say and feel that basic income is a hand-out for lazy people who just don’t want to work, you are wrong, dead wrong, ask a retired veteran, many who volunteer their time in schools, helping the sick, elderly, their brothers in need and for all who were lucky, had the strength to stick it through now live, through our good graces, on a basic income military pension.
If you lean towards the higher moral ground of ‘an honest dollar for an honest day’s work’ those old days you long for do not exists. Let me fill you in on our massive and miserable failure when is came to locking up the crooked bankers, the ending of corporate subsidies to corporation doing nothing important, all that massive crazy foreign aid, unaccountable military debt for endless wars that have absolutely nothing to do with ‘these here United States.’
How can anyone justify all the larceny and theft over an American Citizens basic survival?
There are market solutions beside a basic income: shore-up the 1974 income gap inflation as demonstrated above, cut profits and CEO salaries to level those earnings off and out, but also forbid the creation of robots, because now they are cheaper to run and more reliable than you are. However, to implement these solutions would require massive unrest, a civil war, our politician are owned by the very people these solutions would effect and you can’t stop the progress of technology.
The rhetoric our politicians, over priced corporate CEOs and those who keep looking the other way still longing to hold out for that REAL Capitalism and that REAL Free Market which will fix everything, all that talk has proven to the majority is you are no longer trustworthy, and without trust you got zot!
Trust Is Everything
Everything.
Universal Basic Income is our last best hope to restore some of that trust, it is the injection, the cure, for a peaceful solution in a free society.
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Why they want you dead
Seeds
#GYMAC
BI Wiki
Citizen of Earth
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“Knowledge is power, but it means nothing without the will to act.”
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10/20/17
addendum: If you want to incorporate, or bring back “traditional values,” you’re going to have to back track economically. Making up for decades of lost wages, through UBI, offers the opportunity to present your argument out of freedom rather than force or desperation. If it’s a good argument then people will flock to your cause or philosophy once they have the free time to think about other thing outside of making ends meet. Denying people the choice out of desperation without curbing a good portion of popular culture makes it cruel endeavor. Not everything can be bought and sold in the free market, unless we legalize slavery, again. Do we have the funds to do this? Of course we do. Needless war budgets, wasteful foreign aid, bailed out gambling banks and crooked corporations. We have plenty of money, it’s only a matter of what we support. Currently, we support debt, prisons and wars. Tired of that, yet?
1972
2016
keep in mind also that while the prices have gone up the quality has also declined.
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Utopia – pretend you only die once.
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“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” -R Buckminster Fuller
"no doubt about it that nut's a genius" 