If All The Wealth In The U.S. Were Divided Up Equally ...

Well you just eliminated working in a kitchen, retail, or construction labor & renovations; so how old were you when you first started working and what industry was it in? If your father was a truck driver (of course you made no mention of what your mother did) and you were the first one in your family to go graduate college then I'm assuming you got in with some type of scholarship (perhaps in mathematics because I don't have you pegged for the science type). Which probably meant that you buried your head in books somewhere to avoid getting into trouble. Of course that's all just speculation because although I don't know you personally, but that's how my father was the first in his family to go to college (MIT in his case) and walk out with an engineering degree. Like your father, my dad's father also was in the trucking business (owned a moving company in his case that he inherited from my father's father's father (my great grand father) which he opened in the 1920s (just before the great depression). Both my great grandfather and my grandfather were married to housewives (because women didn't really get to work much or go to school at that time), which was unfortunate because my dad's mother could have easily been a medical doctor. But my dad wasn't even born until after his father returned from WWII and took over the family owned moving company. My dad wasn't allowed to grow up like the rest of the kids because his parents refused to see him walk in their shoes. They pushed every science and math course they could on him, but he did have a paper route (which was paying very little, below minimum wage at the time) which he used that child-money to buy clothes and books (not toy soldiers and train sets). However he only got a one year scholarship to MIT, so he worked at IBM and at the moving company during the Summer (at minimum wage) to pay for the rest of his education. Tuition was only $5,000 back then. So when he came out of MIT with a good education and landed a good job, he wasn't buried under a lot of school debt but he wasn't exactly striking it rich either. He worked exclusively on government contracts (mostly military, like designing the A10 bomber) and also the DNA database, but was only pulling in around $700 a week (this was back in the 1970s). This meant he moved from one of the lowest cost of living (SC), to school in Boston, and then to Washington DC (where he had and raised his family). I was born in Washington DC, but moved to the burbs of Arlington (because it was safer and less expensive than living in the city), and finally out to Fairfax county VA when it was time to start school.

My parents didn't experience the Great Depression the way their parents did. So they didn't want their children to be robbed of their childhoods, like they'd been robbed. Of course they wanted us to go to college and be successful, but they weren't going to imprison us to it and leave us resentful the way they had. There was much more opportunity when I was growing up then there was when they were growing up and the cost of higher education was skyrocketing. 25 years ago (when you were getting out of college) I would have just been entering college. Both of my parents were very well educated, but if my siblings and I wanted to go to college (which we did) we would have had to pay for it ourselves. And with job opportunities only paying $5/hr, we weren't going to pay for it by working for somebody else. I started making my own money very early in life (doing things that are no longer possible today) and I quickly found myself on a path to prison when the rest of my peers were going off to college because of it. So I spent my 20s in prison and came out (at the worst possible time) right after 9/11 (when everyone was being laid off). I did (fortunately) come out with a lot of money in my pocket from business skills I'd learned in prison (but they weren't applicable in the free-world), it took me two months just to land any job. It's kinda hard to find a place to stay, regardless of how much money you have, when you don't have a job. So I spent my first two weeks living in a hotel at $750 a night, until I finally found someone willing to rent me a room (at twice the asking price) if I paid six months up front. And I had to take it so that I could first get an identification card, and second open a bank account. So I took a job in a movie theater as a projectionist, earned $800 a month and paid $600 a month for the room I was renting. At this time two things were happening were I was living. The first is that the DC sniper was shooting people right over my head, and the second was that I couldn't do anything through the mail because their was Anthrax in it. Just over a year later my grandfather died (you remember, the guy with no college education, operating a moving company) and he left my father a very large inheritance. It was so large in fact that my father retired on it (from his college education mandated job). He took the money and left the US. Are you understanding the moral of this story yet?

 

I think you got that part backwards, but it's okay because most people do. What I've learned over the years is that I don't owe an employer anything if they cannot provide me with a living wage for 40 hours or less a week. They can find some other sucker to do that if they want, but I won't be that sucker.

 

No, but he did do some nice work on me a few years back.

 

He thought he could get that anyway. The payroll that was allotted to me I remained within, but he did tell me that anything I came in under he would give to me. During the interview process I found three promising candidates but I could only afford to hire two of them if I wanted something in my pocket and I really wanted all three. The problem was that I already had worked with two of these guys and I knew how valuable they were, so I couldn't get them on a probation income. The third guy had no experience but seemed interested in learning and doing the work, so I could pick him up at a probationary rate with two other guys capable of showing him the ropes. I really wanted all three, so I cut back my own salary (which I needed every cent of) to get them all in the door. When I did this it worked out exactly as I'd hoped, everything doubled, so I thought that after a year I could give the guys a real thank-you raise. But my boss (the owner) had other plans. He came up with a work evaluation meeting to find any reason (complaint) to justify not giving them a raise. But I was fair about it so I gave them their earned raises anyway. This is when my boss started training one of the guys I hired behind my back to replace me. Of course he picked the greediest one. So that guy started short changing everyone and they all left the company. Suddenly, he was back on the employment line and that company was out of business.

 

What kind of business was this?

 

It was a custom carpentry company. We did a lot of closet organizers, offices, entertainment cabinets, crown-molding, simple stuff really. It was a luxury we were providing, not a necessity, but it was also more efficient. We did a lot of doctor offices and work in multi-million dollar homes. Jobs could range between $3,000 to $40,000 each, but each worker was expected to complete $40,000 a day to receive an income around $40,000 a year. I earned $90,000 a year as an installer, but as a supervisor I only earned $40,000 (a year).

 

Were you a full time employee or a contract employee? How about those you hired? And $40,000 a day of what were they expected to complete.

And I was a finish carpentry foreman in one of my jobs many many years ago. I'd like to know how a finish carpentry employee is supposed to complete $40,000 worth of carpentry in just one day? And you contradicted yourself, you said the workers got paid $40,000 a year but you got $90,000 a year.

 

I was beyond I full time employee, 12 hours a day was minimal, but I was not a contractor. Contracting in this industry would violate the non-competition agreement. Typically in industry provided a $40,000 a year salary but many people often earned more. In installation you are an hourly employee, earning at minimum $15/hr to $25/hr but you can work 12 to 18 hours per day. I sometimes worked 40 hours straight as an installed because construction sites don't require regular work hours, thus granting me $90,000 a year. Once I moved over to salary (in management) I still worked the same long hours but I did so at a fixed income rate of $40,000 a year. Yes, a $40,000 a day work order was expected of everyone. It's really not that hard considering that a reach-in rand typically $3,000 and a walk-in typically ran $6,000. A $3,000 installation only took about 30 minutes. Cabinets however were $600 a pop and sped up installation time, plus materials mattered. If we were installing solid wood (instead on melamine) it ran on average of $1,000 a lateral foot. Garages were $6,000 on average, but offices on general were $40,000.

 

Well either you are a full-time, part-time, or contract employee. I don't know what a "beyond" full time means.

Then you were a full time employee who had to report at certain times and provide a minimal number of hours.

C

A construction worker can contract themselves out for a certain job at a certain price and agreement between whom?

If you are a full time employee for that employer. If I contract myself out to trim out 4 apartments for a set amount that's what I get when I get finished no matter how many hours it takes.

I highly doubt that you sometimes worked 40 hours straight at a construction site.

So you made a bad deal then.

$3,000 to trim out a reach in closet....................no unless you just happen to live in the land of fools.

 

Democrats are forever saying share the wealth. Ever see one carrying a sign that say share the work???????????

 

An interesting story no doubt. Tell me......what is the moral of your story ?

To answer your questions...My mother was a stay at home mom. I was a Business Marketing major in college, and no I did not receive a scholarship. My parents saved for my education. I would add that you could have taken out loans if necessary in order to fund a college education. What I was getting at when I asked if you had any idea why I never had to work for minimum wage was the notion that I was clean cut, ambitious, and eager to learn, and later it was because I had a degree. My first job was selling shoes when I was 16 years old. That was an odd job for a 16 year old, and most people were over 18 doing that job. I went to the phone book and called every shoe store within 25 miles. My first question was were they hiring, and my second was would they hire someone 16 yrs old. Almost everyone said you had to be 18, but I finally found one that didn't have that requirement. I knew what I wanted and I was willing to think outside of the box to make that happen. Persistence pays off. I don't recall exactly how much I was making, but the hourly rate was over minimum wage and it paid commission that at least doubled my hourly rate. During college, I valet parked cars and made a lot of money, often making well over a hundred dollars per night as I recall which was a lot of money in the 80s. On the side, I also started a window washing company where I would charge people ungodly amounts of money to wash their windows. This endeavor wasn't one of the 2 companies that I mentioned earlier that I have started (Starting this one consisted of passing out flyers) Why would they pay ungodly amounts of money?.....supply and demand. I now have 2 kids in college, and both of them while in High School made well over minimum wage in jobs that they both found on their own. To me, the notion that an actual adult is working for minimum wage for any length of time is baffling. As I said earlier, if an adult is working for minimum wage for any length of time, they are CLEARLY doing something wrong. You mentioned that you were in prison. I can understand how having a prison record might put someone lower on the supply and demand hierarchy, but I think that fits the description of having done something wrong. Even with that record however, with some hard work and determination, surely one could still show themselves to be a reliable worker that an employer wants to keep around. If an employer truly wants to keep you around, undoubtedly they will pay more than minimum wage in order to ensure that outcome. Having a prison record may make one have to work a bit harder before being recognized, but persistence will still pay off in the long run. Life is a marathon, NOT a sprint. Just because someone does start out at minimum wage does not mean they cannot still win the race or at minimum have a strong finish. It is not an employers responsibility to make sure that anyone they hire for unskilled work can support a family on a 40 hr work week.

 

That is your prerogative, just as it is theirs. Where is the problem ?

 

Nobody is talking about "trimming out" anything? This was not general construction work, only a handful of companies operated in this field across the US, and they all do things slightly different even though overall they all offer the same service. These companies are very competitive, they don't even like union workers touching their products (which shows mandate). If an employee is caught moonlighting between companies they are automatically blacklisted from the industry because their is so much of a return (only desperate start-ups would even consider it but once they are up and going they won't tolerate it). They want exclusive rights to their employees from the sales personnel, to the shop, to the installation team. This is not the first industry that I worked in where working 40 hour straight was possible. I also worked in Traffic Control and Marking Systems. That includes road closers, barriers, signs, pain and thermo. Although I jumped between these different crews (when jobs required additional hands) I was the sign crew leader. That meant I put up all the street signs, built barricades, and still might jump over to the paint crew to help them layout a parking lot or re-lane a street (if they were running behind schedule). These are not 9 to 5 jobs. These are jobs where you picked up work orders and worked them (round the clock) until they were complete. Now you could pace yourself with shifts) and get some rest between shifts, but employees that could get dobs done quicker (by not taking breaks to get rest) were in higher demand because there was plenty of competition and every customer just wanted to know which company could get a job done faster. As far as "taking a bad deal" well, not really. Installation for $90,000 a year requires a driver's licence and is exhausting physically. Its a young persons job, most people after age 40 don't do it. I'm an insomniac so the hours didn't bother me. I enjoyed the go, go, go, start to finish, but I worked such long hours regularly that it was messing with me on a subconscious level. I was constantly driving around fatigued (which is worse than driving drunk), and when I did go home and fall asleep in bed I would wake myself up from nightmares of falling asleep at the wheel. So I stopped driving (accepting retirement) until one day I got a call from a new start-up asking me to come in and work in-house as the shop foreman. They even offered to supply me with a driver and a company vehicle. I set my own price for this and I was generous because I recognized the relief they were offering (which was more appealing to me at that time than the greed of a larger paycheck), however this employer felt I was selling myself sort (the same way you do) because he didn't understand why I was accepting it. I loved the work, but I was overworking myself and if I didn't stop I would have probably killed myself and possibly someone else in a traffic accident. This guy didn't understand that, he just thought I didn't know what I could get paid for the work he was having me do, but I understood what my minimal cost of living was to keep me doing the work I loved to do under much safer terms. Most people don't understand that (don't consider that) unless they work hard physical jobs at long hours and do a lot of driving. It took me 15 years in the field to recognize it myself.

 

I went to prison because I needed supplemental income to make up for lack of earnings by legal means. I had planned to go to school for architecture or chemical engineering, but thought I might get the funding via a GI Bill. All of that went out the window when I went to prison at age 18. Not just because of funding, but because as an ex-con none of that was any longer an option. Think about it, I walked out the door at 28 years old, right after 9/11 and no service branch would take me because of my record. I had to start all over with a new plan when planes were being grounded, airlines were facing bankruptcy, the mail wasn't safe, I was struggling with even getting someone to take my money to put a roof over my head just so I could work on getting my driver's licence back. No amount of money was going to change any of that, but fortunately I did have money that most people coming out of prison (facing the same problems) don't. That's our broken system. It took me two years to get past it, but I did get past it, and once I did I was unstoppable.

 

There is no problem at all for me, because I don't work for slave wages, nor do I pay people slave wages.

 

But we GOT that wealthy in the FIRST place because we DON'T have a Socialist system like you seem to advocate! Move to Cuba and you'll see a utopian socialist system - and they'd probably have, per person if it was equally distributed, about $18.48 per person in wealth. See how that works?

 

I feel for your situation. I truly do.

With that being said, it is unmitigated BS to blame a 10 yr prison stint on your NEED for "supplemental income to make up for lack of earnings by legal means". You wanted to do it the easy way and you got caught. You should own it, rather than shifting the blame on society. I assume that you were probably selling large quantities of drugs. I don't necessarily pass moral judgment on that, but you knew the risk, took it, and then got caught. That decision was nobody's but your own. Something tells me that you would still be alive today if you had not sold drugs and simply worked for minimum wage. You may not have been living the good life, but you would have survived. You weren't forced to illegally supplement your income to save your life; rather you chose to illegally supplement your income because you wanted the easy way out and didn't want to pay your dues. There are no short cuts to becoming a chemical engineer, and it is hard to envision that the mindset that took that much risk for "easy money", would have otherwise magically buckled down and put in the hard work of chemical engineering classes. You may very well have had the brains, but at that point in your life, I very much doubt that you had the intestinal fortitude.

 

That is the beauty of supply and demand. Both sides are able to make their own choice, as well they should.

 

But if the market is being saturated with labor, pretty soon workers will lose the ability to make their own choice. They have to take whatever little money the business owners are willing to pay, because the alternative is starvation.

 

Nope I never sold any drugs (illegal or prescription) in my life. I started out at age twelve stealing cases of soda outside the stores and selling them at 50 cents a pop on a golf course that sold sodas for $2 each. Then I took the news papers out of the newsstands and sold them for 25 cents each. I was very young then and customers did voice their objections, but the bottom line was that they were saving $1.50 on the golf course for soda and the newsstand was empty while I had a paper available right there. This was back in the 80 and we just got a new toll road in the area, so everyone kept change in their cars because it was before EZ Pass. So I started car hopping and clogging up the toll booths, made several hundred dollars a night. But also during the 80 everyone was about their music, their were often $20,000 stereo systems in a teenager's car, and I knew which cars I'd find it in because they drove down the street blasting music to show off. So I'd take those systems, sell 'em to someone else, and charge extra if they wanted me to do a custom install. Then came high school and everyone wanted two things they couldn't get; alcohol and to get into the clubs, so I started making fake IDs (that's what returned me $800 an hour after school each day). But that's not what sent me to prison, it was just putting me on the path to prison. You see when you do stuff like that a lot of people are going to be upset about it, but I was only capitalizing off other people's negligence. I was exploiting them and it wasn't consensual. So I took steps to protect myself and got into the gun trade. I did do business with a lot of drug dealers but I was selling guns to them, no drugs changed hands. Things escalated from car hopping to car stealing, from robing people on the street to garage hopping, to home invasions, to breaking into businesses. It was only inevitable that eventually someone was going to get shot.

Now of course, I made the decisions to do all of those thing, I don't deny that. But the reality is that people that are productive contributors to society that earn enough money to afford the things they want without having to resort to criminal activity, don't just commit criminal acts for the thrill of it. I did meet inmates that held jobs as doctors, probation officers (i.e. respectable jobs) while I was in prison, but they were rare and far between in State prison (maybe not so much in the feds). State prisons are full of people that felt like they had no opportunity. There are lots of ex-military in prison that came home after the first gulf war and didn't know how to re-adapt to civilian life. Most of the people in prison are in there on drug charges, you are correct to assume that, but that was not what I was in their for. I never really took to drugs (using or selling), but nearly all of my school friends did, and the ones that didn't ended up becoming police officers. I am guessing based on you history and mine that I am about ten years younger than you, so when you were in college I was in high school when the crack epidemic and AIDs was blowing up. So I stayed as far away from that as possible. We didn't have shoe stores for kids to work in, we had arcades for kids to hang out in (and spend money) to pick up girls and take 'em to the skating rink. Now in all fairness, there was one decent job I could have taken (at age 1 and that would have been to work maintenance at the golf course, but by the age of 18 it was already too late. Before the age of 18 there were only two types of jobs for an inexperienced youth to take; the food industry or retail (and they both paid minimum wage and were generally only part-time). But I lived in an area that was upper-middle-class, today it is the second wealthiest county in the US with the richest county right next door. This meant that a lot of my peers came from affluent families, so to them the pocket change received to gain work experience wasn't really an issue. They considered those jobs as nothing more than a way to put gas in the tank of the vehicle that mommy and daddy had bought them, while they were finishing high school before they would run off to college. My friend didn't buy his Porsche 911 (at age 16) with money he's earned from working, no, his daddy that was a late-night news anchor bought it for him. All the parties were at the rich kid's houses (because their parents were always away on vacation), but where I grew up the rich and the poor were mixed together like scrambled eggs. So those of us that had to "earn" our own keep had to compete with other kids that were getting handouts. It really doesn't take long to figure out that if you really want money in this world you are going to have to take it from those who have it, because they're always going to find some justification for why you haven't "earned" it despite then never have having to earn anything their entire life.

Now after all of that consider that it cost more to send someone to prison than in does to send them to college. Yes, I'll admit that I was a menis to society that needed to be removed for public safety reason, but I didn't create the environment that created me. I was a product of a dysfunctional system. But I am not claiming to be a victim, because I was fortunately one of those rare cases that was intelligent enough to know how to turn myself around after exiting pit-row. I didn't have fantasies about being the next criminal new-jack. I wanted a normal life, a crime free life, a productive life, but figuring out how to get there as a teenager isn't always as simple as it seems. I learned more about how to be successful in prison (surrounded by criminals) than I ever did in school. I learned about different people that I never would have interacted with if I wasn't forced to live with them, hear their stories, understand their struggles, witness the reality of their final destinations, and recognize the negativity that they caused to society and their loved ones. But I learned the most from the lifers, some of them had already been in prison as long as I'd been alive. I could have ended up like anyone of them, and trust me dying in prison is not a fun way to spend your final days. So as much as it all sucked, I don't regret any of it. I learned valuable lessons in prison that I never would have learned any other way and luckily I was fortunate enough to come out and apply that knowledge in a positive way. I talk to troubled teens all the time now, I don't judge them, I understand them, but I try to teach them what I learned without them having to learn the hard way like I did. If I had somehow skated all that, stayed out of trouble, landed a successful career, I'd never have been able to reach out and help these kids. I wouldn't change that for all the money in the world.

 

Its great that you turned your life around, but I still contend that it is disingenuous to blame society for your poor decisions. I suspect and certainly hope that you aren't justifying your criminal behavior to the youth that you are mentoring.

 

Society promotes crime, that is exactly what I am suggesting. If you can point me to another society out side of the US then I would be glade to analyze it but the US currently leads in crime so I bid you good luck in that endeavor.

 

If you divide up the wealth, divide up the work. No welfare for anyone except the very old the very young and the infirm.

 

In your case, greed was clearly the motivation. You lived in an affluent area while not being affluent. You wanted what everyone else had, but weren't willing to pay your dues in order to acquire the same things. You knew the risk, took the gamble, and lost. You started out with petty crime, and somehow got it into your head that what you earned committing crime, was your market worth in the legitimate world. To blame society because you cant earn in the legitimate world what you can earn committing crime, is a colossal cop out. Society wasn't your problem, YOU were.

 

That might be true in the black community but I see no evidence of that in white or asian communities.