"Why would the top 10% want to dispose of the people who purchase the goods and services which produce their wealth? Why? What is their motivation? I have yet to hear one liberal answer that question..."
Why indeed.
His assumption in the recommendations that follow that statement are that, since it makes no sense, the top 10% couldn't possibly be actively seeking it. And if the poor would simply stay in school, don' have children, save their money, obey every law, and don't job hop, they would prosper.
What we're really talking about here is something I've written about before: namely that the top holders of wealth simply don't have a clue as to the full ramifications of what they are really bringing about with this insane obsession with self interest and ever greater profit margins.
This is the essence of "Supply Side Economics," especially as it's continuance becomes ever more absurd with big money going more and more into financial instruments of various sorts. Why else would The CRomnimbus bill, that a Democratic president ought to be ashamed of, has gutted the Section 716 portion of the Dodd-Frank bank regulations bill. The same president who has instead pushed for passage on the basis that it is a compromise. What a crock.
The original Dodd-Frank was barely what one might call compromise legislation, this was simply full out surrender to the big four banks, and their desire to avoid the higher interests rates that keeping the riskiest types of derivatives
in separately capitalized entities (see Inside Wall Street’s new heist: How big banks exploited a broken Democratic caucus).
Paying the rest of us a truly living wage doesn't have to concern them so much if they get their returns from stocks and foreign investments. That this might make for ever more cracks in the foundation of what supports America in the first place doesn't necessarily have to concern you much either if you have gated yourself away both literally, and metaphorically.
This is where the suggestions that LynnRobb makes start to be seen as the, at least in part, nonsense that they are.
Stay in school? You mean the school your city no longer has the tax revenue to fund properly? The school forced to take in the most challenged kids in the first place? Where there are fewer good teachers willing to put up with such challenges, as well as the lower pay?
Don't spend money on non-important things? If you can barely afford a roof over your head, let alone be able to eat three regulars a day, just how much do you think is going to be left for that?
And lets not forget the racism inherent in thinking that whatever minorities are automatically undisciplined layabouts who always go for the immediate gratification. Like the cliche of white trash, what we are talking about here is a much more complicated combination of history, the cycle of unstable home life, sh_tty, as well as outright unhealthy, jobs, and the ongoing frustration of living in an electrified dream machine that emphasizes having the newest and flashiest; and does so with ever more highly engineered messaging.
Let us not forget that, in many urban settings, if it wasn't for the drug trade, there would be no money flowing at all, and no jobs either. That this only exacerbates the instability of home life to even more horrible extremes shouldn't blind us to the fact of its most important irony. That this business is no less a part of Capitalism than any other production and marketing of a product. And not necessarily a great deal more lethal, or disruptive, than selling cars that kill, or mining and burning coal, or engaging in risky investments that bring the whole system to its knees. And let us also not forget that fighting drugs, as well as crime itself, is simply another burgeoning profit center.
The bottom line for me here is the fact that it never seems to occur to those in power that they are being penny wise and pound foolish in their current insistence on maintaining the status quo. The only way they're going to be able to keep this crumbling edifice going is to go for an ever more authoritarian form of government. And no matter how authoritarian it becomes, there is a quite finite amount of time you can continue with it while insisting that the wage slaves pay for it all in the first place.
You talk about the poor making poor choices. Just another in a long list of hypocrisies. The choice you face is simply this: either you accept that a jobs/consumption for of social organization requires that both sides of the production equation have to accept reasonable limits as to what they get out of it so that consumption can continue increasing; or you recognize the fundamental absurdity that Capitalism has become; that human skill as a commodity, not to mention the insanity of ever increasing consumption, is simply not possible when the means of production increasingly becomes the application of electrified information.
Whether you pay the cost of your choice now or later is going to determine how much "pain," as you folks like say, that will ultimately have to be born. I can gilt edge guarantee you that however much it might cost to make the right choice now will seem like chump change later on from making the wrong choice.
The 6-step process to dispose of America's poor
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