"They say the system works. What they mean is... "the system works for me"."

[hfojvt]

41. but if the system works for ME

then it also works for people LIKE me.

The systems we have - political and economic work fairly well for LOTS of people.

The "thousands of street sleepers" in our country represent a tiny fraction of the 310 million who live here.

The "exploited underclass" is also a minority or a figment. Is the underclass exploited or just left behind? The people who are way down, do not have that much to take. Those who are way down generally don't have jobs. Are people on welfare exploited? Are people on food stamps exploited because of cuts to food stamps?

Society reduced the amount of free food they are given every month, but is a person who gets free food 'exploited'?

How about somebody with a $175,000 a year job? Are they exploited? They are not part of the legendary 1%, so I guess they must be. But most people below the median household income of $55,000 or so, would think they were doing pretty darned good with a $75,000 a year job, much less a $175,000 a year job.

I can even give another example. I ran for the water board, because I read in the paper that small customers were being hit with a 15% rate hike, medium customers with a 3% and big customers with 0%. As I said in my recent campaign, the difference between 3% and 15% is $100,000. A subsidy that the little guys are paying to the big guys. I fought on the board to reverse that and the last rate increase was 0,0,2,2,2. Zero percent for the bottom two rates.

But the other math thing I did not mention - that $100,000 subsidy? For 10,000 customers, it represents - a mere 83 cents a month. That's not a huge amount of exploitation. The difference between 2% and zero percent? That rate increase I saved them from - probably 52 cents a month for an average family customer. Not really enough to motivate them to rush out to the polls and support me.