Is the U.S. Economy Sustaining or Extracting Value?
By: Alejandro Cuanal
“People who work for a living are suffering under a system designed to favor those who make their money with money.”
Everyday an average person goes to work at exactly 9 Am. They come home after a long day and are struggling to get by. This statement holds true for every house hold in the U.S. no matter where you live. Workers form Google did not want to live in Mountain View near the highway. They wanted to live in San Francisco because it is a nicer place to live in. So Google made buses for transportation to get employees from the place of where they live to the place of where they work. It seemed like a fantastic idea, workers got their commute made simpler and it was a great commodity for them. However, what is the result of these buses? What ended up happening was that the rent doubled and then tripled. A house that is in front of a google bus stop pays 30% more rent than any other house. Google came in and started to raise peoples rents, local businesses when out of business, and people had to leave. People could not afford to live in San Francisco anymore, it was too expensive for them. Then, you look at the people working for Google. You notice, that the people working as developers in Google are getting crushed as well just in a more indirect manner. They might be getting a higher pay, hungry to get to that 100,000 at the end of the year. However, what ends up happening is that due to the rents and to the higher cost of living they end up being in the same situation as the rest of the population on the United States. They are also trying to survive, living pay check to paycheck. At the end of the year they save very little to no money just like everyone else. They might have better living conditions such as nicer parks, clean streets, restaurants etc. but when you pull everything apart you see that they are just like everyone else. The U.S. is an incredibly wealthy nation who is filled with people who are struggling to survive. Who is the economy benefiting? the answer: people that make money with money. The stock holders are the ones benefiting, they are the ones that put in money and are expecting exponential returns. Due to the fact that companies have to grow as big as possible they are just focused on efficiency and profitability that they do not even stop to think about the effect of their actions. This system is not maintaining wealth it is extracting it in indirect ways. It is favoring the people at the top of the pyramid and only them. Everyone else in the bottom just gets crushed by the CEO's. Even if the people at the top think that they are doing something to help they are not. The great corporate leaders do more harm than good in all scenarios does not matter how you look at it.
