This motto comes from our neighbor France and this is how some folks growing up in this country thought it best expressed what an American citizen felt about his fellow citizen. These days, it is mostly practiced in our military.
I have often wondered just what has set the different levels of income earned by the many different types of jobs we each are employed in doing. You know, the different payscales for being a plumber or computer programmer. Who or what says which is more important to society?
In the military from Private to General the payscale is set and a person joining the ranks knows ahead of time if he reaches different ranks what his pay scale will be with some gains in pay gained by length of service.
Would it not be better if such pay standards were set by the federal government for all the different types of employment needed for our country to be run with? The pay in the military doesn”t change, depending on what part of the country their gender is servicing, like it does for all the private sector jobs do.
Would not the economy be more stable, as well as the housing market, and retail prices, if this was put into place. It certainly would bring down the cost of living in the most expensive places to live and bring up standards of living in the least expensive places to live. It would allow for the American work force to see and plan for the future by knowing and understanding the limits of earnings of the profession they are in and allow many to retrain or plan out changes to their career planning.
More importantly it would allow the re-evaluation of century old professions to be adjusted as to their importance to the nation and either up- or downgraded with such a re-evaluation. One point of being would be periodical adjustments for salaries when the need for one profession becomes greater due to the circumstances of the present day times. The fact is, our sanitarian workers and mail persons are more important on a weekly basis, to the average citizen than a Wall Street sales person.
Jim Hall
Clearlake Oaks
