How ironic that you follow up the first statement immediately with one that displays your own ignorance of our country's history. Unions and the labor movement in general were the major force in addressing working conditions and employee compensation from the late 19th through the mid-20th centuries. And the second force in that arena was the free press. It is very telling that both are constantly attacked by politicians who are in the pockets of large corporate entities and industry groups.
Wait, what? I credited unions for those changes. Now the question is why you would focus intently on the fact that I credited them, just not to your satisfaction, instead of addressing what I did say? Also, whether or not politicians attack unions and the press has nothing to do with what I said; I didn't attack either one.
The point that was apparently missed is that unions are not influential at all anymore, outside of the public sector (where they shouldn't exist at all, just ask FDR). And yet companies, the vast majority of which are non-union businesses in the first place, continue to provide competitive benefits. And
@lannister the rich , companies were offering health insurance coverage as a means of attracting quality employees
long before 2008. You also mishcaracterized the situation: employers (50+ employees) have been required to provide health insurance since 2015. The ACA (2008) initially and primarily mandates that
individuals purchase health insurance.
It always strikes me as pathetic that people rail against organizations and governments that try to do something for the working class also reflexively white-knighting for the elites and big businesses that see them only as a resource to exploit, use up, and replace.
You quoted me in this reply but I don't see any of that in my post. Would you like to try again or are you here just to hear yourself type? Very little you've said in this thread constitutes an actual point.
Edit: A bachelor’s degree is required for any sort of good paying job except for that 1 in a million shot at inventing something worthwhile....
This is patently false. I know several people in my field (IT) who don't have degrees; I'm one of them. I learned computer operations in the Army and worked and learned my way from a second-shift entry-level operator to a Senior Mainframe Systems Programmer earning very good money with very good benefits. Most employers value experience as much if not moreso than a degree.
... meanwhile they cost tens of thousands of dollars to get and leave an extremely large amount of people in an ever increasing amount of debt. Yeah, I don’t see anything wrong with that either /s
I won't argue that a college education isn't expensive, but I guarantee that you and I would disagree on the reasons. Suffice it to say that I have a lot of experience in the student loan industry and I can tell you that the stories you see on the news are the outliers, they aren't the typical borrower. The average college graduate owes around $37k at graduation, far from the horror stories we're expected to believe make up the majority of borrowers. You'll also notice they rarely tell you what the degree was for that these people spent $100k+ for. Clearly it wasn't a degree that they can parlay into a living, so I think the blame should be at least partly shouldered by the people who are taking out all these loans.
And the answer certainly isn't more government intervention. President Obama nationalized student loans in 2008, claiming that would bring down costs. But of course basic economics tells us that subsidies make things more expensive, and that's exactly what we've seen in the 11 years since then: college costs continue to rise perhaps worse than before. More government subsidies are obviously not the answer, and yet government is the only answer some people know, for any problem. Even those exacerbated by government to begin with.
