It’s incredibly difficult for me to approach this subject with any impartiality or grace. I am a white male in his thirties who grew up in a predominately white middle-class working-class family and community in the American midwest before relocating to the northeast before the start of the century. I’ve been accused on many occasions of having privilege of many varieties. White privilege. Upper middle-class privilege. It doesn’t help that I am fat, since we live in a society that judges those who retain weight with being privileged with the position of never missing a meal, compared to someone else who has to. Even this very internet I am using to type this on is a privilege afforded to me through my status as a middle-class person.

But the fact really is, I am not that far off from any other person around me. In fact, I would estimate that in order for me to be put in a position of having to ask for government assistance, either with rent, groceries, or health care, I would have to lose my job, my car, and my home, either all at once, or over the span of one month, maybe two. I own no property, have no hard assets, and effectively finance all but my belongings in my apartment. Actually, a fire started by a cardboard box in the kitchen could substantially set me back. I’ve been living in this danger zone since I moved out of home three years after high school. I’ve been working a job since I was sixteen. I’ve been unemployed an estimated total of three months out of fourteen years. I’ve worked jobs ranging from retail, food service, consumer electronics, before finally becoming an IT engineer. I have no formal education past a high school degree, only a vocational school degree and about five or more years of working experience. I have no children, but am married to a woman who grooms animals for a living, which allows us to at least afford a moderate lifestyle, though by no means extravagant by any means. We buy our big ticket items on discount or sales. We shop at grocery stores like Aldi to save some money on common items. We occasionally shop at BJs for bulk items and household supplies. I spend little to no money on clothes, stretching my laundry cycles to bi-weekly to save money on washing and drying. We eat out seldomly, to save money on food costs. We take one “vacation” a year to a place we volunteer working for a weekend. We don’t leave the country, we don’t take cruises, we don’t even have passports. I donate over two hundred dollars or more to charities and organizations. I volunteer through my job because part of our mission as a social enterprise is to give back to the community, and it’s something I used to do being a Boy Scout as a kid, and slacked off on in my crunchier years, so it’s something I am trying to get back. This list can go on. The point is, I have every right to get on here and be a part of this discussion. I don’t need to be among the poorest Americans in this country to be credible, or have a say in what we should or should not do. My status as a person, as a gender, as an orientation, or anything else, has no relevancy in any of this.

I spent the past hour and a half watching Inequality for All on Netflix, at the pseudo-insistence of my mother. Robert Reich is a convincing speaker, that I will not deny, but by the end of the film, I had more questions than I had answers. That’s a good thing. Every American, regardless of anything, should have questions. If you do not have questions about what you’ve watched, or want to know more about the various topics explained, you are part of the block of people men like Rush Limbaugh refer to as “low-information voters”. You’re the people who listen to President Obama speak and jump out of your chair before the speech ended to tell your friends on Facebook how right he was about whatever it is he spoke about. He knows this. He tailors his speeches and “stocks” the space behind him with people he knows you will identify with and sympathize with their cause. He’ll bring up people to deliver personal stories about whatever so that you connect on the most basic human emotional level and spread that basic human emotional level to everyone else. “Low-information” doesn’t mean you are stupid, or otherwise ignorant of politics, it means you simply don’t care about what’s being talked about. You want your side to win. It’s like a game of football, and the player who makes the plays and shows up on screen as straightforward and human as possible is the person you support. LeBron James is a talented basketball player, but younger fans love him because he “struts his shit” and doesn’t care what other people think. That appeals to boys who enjoy the raw emotional charge of “playing the game”. They don’t care about his career stats, other players’ stats, statistics and trends, or players’ salaries. Major League Baseball tells you that drugs are bad, but it doesn’t seem to hurt their business bottom line, right? There is a lot of information out there, but it takes someone who wants to know more to fully understand it and make their own conjectures.

The thing about income inequality, is that there is very little I, like most people, can do about it. We require money to live, and we have to work to make money. It’s an necessary trade-off. No one likes to work, or if they do, they prefer to be doing something they like. Most people don’t. Most people are stuck doing something that “pays the bills”. Chances are, if you’re one of those people, you’re working in one of the thousands of “minimum-wage jobs” at the center of this debate. I’ve been there. Most people have. The goal of anyone is to leave those jobs behind and climb the ladder of a professional career. I spent ten years in minimum-wage work, from 1999 to 2009, earning at my peak, 13.50 an hour. That’s above minimum wage in Connecticut, but I was fortunate to be working as a line cook at Red Robin, which at the time, was only three locations in the state, and paid above-average. In contrast, Panera Bread, my last food service job before going into IT, paid me just short of nine dollars an hour. That income difference was pretty big. Working for RR, I was able to afford a fairly upscale apartment with my ex. Under Panera, I had to have three people in a place as I could only afford a third of the rent on my own. So it’s not that I am unable to sympathize with the plight of minimum-wage workers, I know how much they make, I filed those tax returns. It’s hard. Especially when you live in one of the most expensive states in the country. If I could make the same amount up here and live in Indiana, for example, I would be living pretty well in a place where the cost is living is nearly half-to-two-thirds less than Connecticut.

In 2008, when the economy crashed, I was fortunate enough to still be working. People still eat, after all, but in economic hardships, they eat out less. I still had a minimum-wage job, but it wasn’t enough. I had previously thought I wanted to be a cook or a baker, but my first passion was always technology. I took advantage of the fact I could apply for government educational assistance by myself without my parents after a friend did with successful results, where he got a job from his internship. I voted Obama, I bought into hope and change, and I went back to school. What I actually did was feed thirteen thousand dollars, the average price of a small car, into a for-profit vocational/trade school that taught me very little above what I already knew about computers. I did the internship at the same company my friend did, but was not hired. I drank the kool-aid, and it was bitter. I eventually found work for a local software company as a technical support rep, and from 2009 to 2013, I busted my ass to climb the pay scale doing whatever I could, learning new technology, and not being afraid to challenge a number of people. By the time I left that company, I was making a little under double what I made at Red Robin an hour, and a little under three times what I made at Panera. All of that in only two and a half years. After being laid off, I went to another company for three months, and saw my pay bumped up a couple thousand a year. After leaving that job, the job I currently have now, saw my pay go up more. I now make roughly double what I made annually in my food service jobs. That was roughly five years ago. All on a vocational school education. Am I privileged? I made a conscious decision to change my life and improve it so I can not make minimum. I worked hard. Now you want to pay these people as much, if not more, than I started at five years ago, and they don’t have to do anything for it? That’s equality?

Trust me, I want nothing more than people to be doing well in this economy, in this society, and beyond. I am not some sort of monster who thinks people should just die if they cannot afford things. To some extent, I even support some of what Obamacare has set out to change. But when you tell me raising the minimum wage will help close this inequality gap, I have to ask you how you think that will work? We live in a global market that continues to ship American jobs overseas at an alarming rate because companies can’t “afford” to employ people here under current rules. Those jobs that do stay here are being replaced by machines made to make processes more efficient. I actually don’t have a problem with the latter, efficiency is the natural result of repetitive motion. Anything you do more than once constantly should be made to be done consistently with the least amount of effort possible. Computer technology has advanced around this concept. Why do things by hand when you can automate a script to do it faster? Why hand-configure ten workstations when you can do one and replicate to the other nine? Work smarter, not harder. It’s something I’ve always lived by. But many people don’t appreciate it. They don’t appreciate it because we’ve equated results and value with how many hours you put into it. It’s not enough that I can do ten things in a day for four hours, I have to justify where the other four hours of my day went, even if there is little to nothing there to do. I have to show up early and leave late to show people I am a good worker. If I can’t prove this, they will say they can get by with five people instead of six, and suddenly I am out of a job. Value is a big thing. You listen to speeches Valve president Gabe Newell gives, and he talks a lot about the kinds of value employees at Valve generate, on top of the content that users generate on Steam. We assign value to a number of things, and one of those things is people. Return on investment. ROI. I used to loathe my parents in my post-high school years, because their expectations of me were always these large grandiose visions of me being this successful person, as if it would either validate their parenting, or provide for some kind of positive ROI later down the road. When people like me lampoon the President as being a “socialist” or accuse him of wanting to “redistribute wealth”, we think that his intent is to take our money and give it to people with “no strings attached”. They get a free ride off our backs. It’s not like how we had to borrow money from someone and pay it back. We’re told our ROI is these people will join the rest of us and contribute to the economy, to all of our upward mobility. It just isn’t the case. Just as trickle-down economics didn’t work, trickle-up doesn’t work either.

I would love for someone with money to simply buy me a house. That’s all I want right now. A house. Just a modest ~200k house. That’s chump change for some of the wealthiest people in the world. No strings attached. Just buy me a house and go on with your life. The problem is, people like this do that all of the time with startup ventures, or other sorts of things. They give money to other people with the expectation, at minimum, that they’ll see a ROI on that investment. They aren’t going to buy me a house, because it’s not a ROI for them. Never mind I could strike it big, sell the house, and become one of them. But if I did, you know what I’d do? Give that house to someone else. Buy someone else a house. Maybe even buy five people houses. Maybe buy an entire neighborhood and give people a house. With so much unused wealth, we could combat homelessness and some of the housing crisis by just buying people houses. But this would be like the government subsidizing your life. That house isn’t yours. It’s theirs. You didn’t do anything for it. You may be able to create value with it, but you didn’t labor for it. We’re simply not that sort of society. Everything is based on expectations, value, ROI, and decision-making.

So what do I think about the six major points from the film?

Raise the Minimum Wage
No. Building a new floor on top of a broken floor only raises the floor. It doesn’t fix the problem, and doesn’t prevent the old floor from collapsing and taking everything else with it. It’s a band-aid solution for a problem that can only be truly addresses by fixing education and providing people with a means of obtaining low-cost skills training for jobs that pay above-minimum wage. There are a lot of them out there, especially in trade skills, manufacturing, health care, and technology. A smarter, more educated workforce contributes more individual value than any corporate board or CEO can. CEOs can’t even read anything that isn’t on a Powerpoint slide or pie chart. No, seriously.

Strengthen Workers’ Voices
While I support workers’ rights to form a union, I do not find all unions to be equally supportive of workers’ rights. Like politicians, CEOs, or anyone in positions of power, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Unions are some of the biggest political contributors to Democratic candidates for office. Liberals cry about the Koch Brothers’ network of PACs, but they were created in response to the powerful union engine that has been influencing elections for decades plus. Both should be equally struck down from being able to steer our political and social policy. Limits should be made on how much pay and benefits can be increased above a company’s operating costs and profits. A company is not a bottomless well of money. Liberals have the hardest time understanding this, because most of them never worked for any sort of business. Non-profits are not businesses, after all.

Invest in Education
Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Why are we behind other countries in education? Why do we under-fund our schools and allow students to fail? But more importantly, why have we turned education into a billion-over-billion business when every cent should be spent on the future of our society, economy, and country as a whole? School buildings built before 1990 should be razed and rebuilt. “Common Core” and all these overzealous testing regimes need to be thrown out. Technology should play a more prominent role in assisting education without it being a dependance or crutch. But above all, programs that gear children for careers should start when they enter high school and allow them opportunities to work with real professionals before graduation, and transition to work with higher-than-minimum-wage jobs after graduation, or continue to higher education for those pursuing higher advancement. Teachers and professors should be paid a fair salary, but have bonuses, tenure, and other benefits linked to performance and results. Not spending money on our children’s education and gearing them for the challenges in this new global marketplace means you are failing as a parent, adult, and frankly, a human being.

Reform Wall Street
The practices that came into light in the Clinton administration and beyond to the Bush Administration that allowed predatory lending, and wild market speculation, need to stop. Every time a loophole is closed, another is opened. I don’t want to see the markets tightly regulated so as to cut us off from the sort of economy we should be championing, but we should always support meaningful reform in order to keep wealthy tyrants from monopolizing the markets.

Fix the Tax System
Herman Cain had one of the best plans for tax reform of any candidate in the 2012 election, but being black and Republican is a big no-no in Liberal Washington. His plan called for a flat tax of 9% federal, 9% personal income, and 9% sales tax. While there would likely be some drawbacks, it would help simplify the tax code, eliminate the IRS, and make paying taxes “fair” for all Americans. Much like the “Fair Tax”, the concept revolves around the fact that most of the lower-class in America, pay little to no taxes already. Rather, the burden of taxes are carried by the middle-class, as the upper-class too enjoy numerous deductions and tax breaks that reduce their higher-than-both-classes tax rate. I know many people think that making poor people pay taxes is a nuclear explosion, but I would argue that with real skin in the game, and using a flat tax similar to a sales tax, they would be helping to contribute back to the services tax money is paying for in the first place. Using the rich as an ATM is not a sustainable solution, all it takes is for these people to either leave, spend it all on nothing, or otherwise implode all-at-once, and suddenly we’re out of money to funnel downwards. Cities like Detroit are bankrupt because those pulling the wagon left, leaving only those who got off or have been sitting in the back. Liberal governments have little to no concept of saving or spending less, they think they can just get money from something or someone easily. A overhaul of the tax code demonstrates that we all are responsible for the things that make daily life possible without bias towards anyone. That should spell equality right there, if nothing else.

Get Big Money Out of Politics
None. Zip. Nada. Not a single cent. I am sick and fucking tired of pay-to-play politics, and it’s this and this alone that keeps politicians in their elite=class status, separate from the rest of us. It’s PEOPLE who decide what we do, not MONEY, and certainly not large corporations or entities. They are people, I won’t refute that, but that means they can vote like the rest of us. We’re a democracy, not a commodity market where bills and pork projects are bought and sold for the elite few’s benefit.

So while this film did a lot to illustrate the problem in this country, it is nothing more than a film that presents you with information and asks you to disseminate that information into logic you can understand. The way I understand, we have a problem that is so complex, no one thing will fix it, but we also aren’t willing to try until we’ve felt so much pain that someone decides enough is enough. The problem is, we haven’t reached that point. We allow ourselves to be charmed by politicians, movie stars, athletes, CEOs, and entrepreneurs who make our electronics, who meanwhile are raking in millions of dollars a day while you labor for a sixty-fourth of that, to the point of exhaustion, and for what, so you can have a couple hours of happiness in a movie or sports game? Happiness in knowing some politicians you don’t know want to thrust the country into an international conflict you know nothing about? Happiness for corporations who see you as a statistic or metric in their focus group testing rather than an intelligent consumer? Is this what happiness is to you?

For any sort of meaningful change to be made, people need to be willing to change. They need to be willing to want more, to be more, to take responsibility, to help others, to give back, and to be compassionate towards others. People need to realize The United States of America is a country of no single nationality, that we’re all here, we’re all citizens, and we all have a voice and a vote in the process. We need to understand that in the absence of a single, unified heritage, that equality means embracing all heritages, cultures, and ideals. We need to work together, solve problems, and work towards solutions that not only fix the present, but preserve the future. Only then will be close the inequality gap and become the strongest nation on the planet. It’s something I think we are capable of doing in my lifetime, and I hope that enough people from all classes and walks of life come to embrace that and push forward for a real United States that stands united. Because I don’t think the American Dream is dead, because it was never something you could obtain, or achieve, it is something you feel, something that represents everyone, no matter who you are. It’s what makes this country special, and not just worth fighting for outside, but inside as well.