Month: March 2015

For All Too Many Americans “The American Dream” Is Now The “Impossible Dream”

Periodically “buzz words” catch hold and influence debates and public opinion. Today one of the most powerful and evocative of such phrases is “Income Equality.”

Ask most Americans if they support “income equality” and you are likely to get an immediate affirmative response. Most people think that making incomes more equal would be helpful to them. Of course the one question that is never asked is, “who would be made more equal to whom?”

News reports play up the fact that only a very small percentage of people control a huge and growing percentage of the world’s wealth. On November 8, 2014 a study reported on by the Pew Research Center provided sobering information: “With 41% of global wealth in the hands of less than 1%, elites and citizens agree inequality is a top priority.”

The title of that report may make it appear that the wealthy are benevolently concerned about the plight of their less well-off and, indeed, poverty stricken fellow human beings, hold off your praise for them.

Go back to that question about who should be made more equal to whom and add to it this fundamental question, “how should wage equality be achieved?”

President Obama has said that in the interests of “wage equality” minimum wages must be raised. He has spoken about making the new federal minimum wage $10.10 per hour. To this I respond, do the math!

Presuming that an employee earns the president’s proposed new and improved minimum wage and works 40 hours per day for an entire year, that person’s earnings would amount to $21,008.00 per year. How does this help combat wage inequality? It is insulting to imagine that the president would actually suggest that this is the way to fight wage inequality.

However, let us remember to ask the first question in discussing wage equality – “who would be made more equal to whom?”

Clearly the working poor will remain the working poor! Fast food restaurant workers have demonstrated demanding that they be paid $15.00 per hour. Again we must do the math. If these workers were paid $15.00 per hour and worked a 40 hour work week for an entire year, they would gross all of $31,200.00 annually.

How would even this increase in wages help address wage inequality, especially as the extremely wealthy become even wealthier and costs for essential services and commodities continue to rise?

The answer is quite simple although perhaps not readily apparent. Wage equality has nothing to do with the extremely wealthy or even the moderately wealthy – it is about the gap separating middle class workers from the working poor. However, even with modest pay raises, the gap between the middle class and the working poor will not be reduced simply by increasing the meager wages of America’s poor. However, as outrageous as this is, our political elite and their wealthy campaign contributors (bribers?) have found a way to achieve a reduction in “wage inequality”- by lowering the wages of already struggling middle class, highly skilled and educated workers in the high-tech industries.

If middle class workers earned less money, inequality in wages between the middle class and the working poor could be reduced.

In fact, if this is not sufficiently effective, the next step would be to displace middle class American workers with foreign workers altogether.

This may seem like an insane concept but this is precisely what Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank called for nearly 6 years ago, on April 6, 2009 in his prepared testimonywhen he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security that was at the time, chaired by New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer at a hearing on the topic, “Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2009, Can We Do It and How?”

Here is a quote from Greenspan’s testimony that leaves no doubt as to his concept of what “income inequality” is and how it can be reduced:

“The second bonus (in greatly increasing the number of H-1B visas) would address the increasing concentration of income in this country. Greatly expanding our quotas for the highly skilled would lower wage premiums of skilled over lesser skilled. Skill shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. Quotas have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism. In the process, we have created a privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at noncompetitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals. Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of our income inequality.”

There could not be a more infuriating statement or ultimate goal as concocted by Alan Greenspan at the behest of Chuck Schumer to –  “. . .address the increasing concentration of income in this country” by forcing American workers to compete with foreign workers. This is nothing short of a betrayal of American workers and their families by creating a true “race to the bottom!”

Claims about a lack of an adequate number of highly-skilled and qualified American workers is as false as the unemployment stats that ignore the plight of tens of millions of unemployed and underemployed American workers. On May 16, 2014 Breitbart posted an article with a crystal clear title, Scholars Debunk Claims of High-Tech Workers Shortage, Question Industry’s ‘Free Pass’

On September 16, 2014 the Center for American Progress published an article, “What the New Census Data Show About the Continuing Struggles of the Middle Class” that included this statement:

The clearest indicator of the continuing struggles of the middle class has been the failure of the national median income to rebound to pre-recession levels and its overall decline over the past 14 years. In 2013, the typical middle-class household earned an income of $51,939, which was a statistically insignificant $181* above their inflation-adjusted 2012 income level but still nearly $4,500 below what they earned before the start of the Great Recession in 2007. Of greater concern, however, is that middle-class incomes have been either stagnant or declining since peaking in 1999. As a result, the median household in the United States is now actually earning less than it did in 1989—nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Even while the president cynically dangles the possibility of providing a free two year college education for American students, more American students, including those with 4 year degrees in the STEM (Science, Technology Engineering and Math) disciplines are finding it increasingly difficult to find work in their chosen fields and Americans who had been successfully working in those fields are being laid off. Off course the coincidence cannot be ignored that when those college kids leave college in two years, Mr. Obama will be leaving the White House leaving yet another mess for his successor to have to deal with.

The problem is that whoever succeeds Mr. Obama will likely be of a similar mindset because today, political leaders from both major parties, stand with the mega-wealthy and not with the citizens of our nation who have elected them to their positions, in point of fact, on April 21, 2014 the Washington Times published a succinct but extremely disconcerting article, the title of which says it all: “America is an oligarchy, not a democracy or republic, university study finds.”

On July 22, 2014 FrontPage Magazine published my article, “Immigration ‘Reform’: Engineered Destruction of the Middle Class” -The real reason high-tech titans are lining up behind the amnesty effort.

Meanwhile the administration is providing huge opportunities for “DREAMERS”- illegal aliens who may be as old as 31 years of age, evoking the image of the “American Dream” even as that dream becomes ever more elusive for Americans, especially within America’s minority communities. Such “dreams” are more properly referred to as nightmares for America’s struggling working poor.

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Michael W. Cutler is a former Special Agent with the INS, where his career spanned nearly 30 years. Mr. Cutler has provided expert witness testimony at more than a dozen Congressional hearings. He has testified before the 9/11 Commission and regularly provides expert testimony at state legislative hearings and in trials where immigration is at issue. Michael Cutler can be reached through his website, www.michaelcutler.net that contains his commentaries, Congressional testimony and links to his appearances on national television news programs and other public venues.