John Lennon's Working Class Hero and my previous post

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear

It's only gotten worse since Lennon wrote that. There are fewer ways to make a decent living in this country. The jobs that remain wherein a decent living can be made are fiercely competitive to win. The fear rarely ends with the job; when qualified people who desperately want your job abound, you'd better not do anything to lose it. Like publicly stand up for things that might piss off your boss. Like being your own man. 

As soon as you're born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all.

I was in law. One thing that made me change career paths was realizing that many highly desired jobs in that field have blurred the line between being at work and being off. Young associates are given a firm-specific Blackberry when they come aboard. If that thing starts flashing at 12:30 am, it's time to return to work, even if they don't have to get out of bed to do so. Somewhere, in the back of the young associate's head, they are always at work.

There's room at the top they are telling you still

But first you must learn how to smile as you kill

If you want to be like the folks on the hill

More graduates of elite American universities are going into finance than ever. It's a cushy job compared to law and medicine and they usually make more money while working it. You just have to reinforce a structure that allows financiers to make more while doing less for society than ever before (read finance titan John Bogle's take to get an accurate picture of how finance has strayed from its socially useful function.)

My last post was pretty dry. It was about one way to make things easier on everyone who makes less than millions of dollars a year: make new tax brackets for people that make millions of dollars a year, raise the rates in these brackets and lower them for everyone else.  

It won't bring the middle class back. It won't bring back a world - if it ever really existed - where people weren't afraid to participate in the political process - from speaking out to taking election day off - due to the fear of a bad performance review. It won't make Working Class Hero a description of a past time. But it would - if nothing else - signify that political outcomes are not simply for sale. Because that's the only persuasive reason that someone making $400,000,000 pays the same taxes as someone making $400,000.