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This was my answer to what someone said to me as well as my coworkers (keep in mind this individual does not even live in the united states, he is just visiting). what do you think of my answer:
Number one: haven't you heard the united states is in a recession right now and americans are more worried about their jobs, wondering if their jobs will be there for them when they wake up in the morning or their job will be downsized. People are afraid of losing their homes due to the mortgage crisis. Companies (large and small) are having financial problems.
Number two: in addition there are two wars the united states is fighting: iraq and afganistan. Us citizens are more worried if their loved ones will come home the way they left or even if they will come home at all.
Number three: your information is all wrong. People no matter where they live do not care how much money someone else has. What they care about is getting food on their plate, their rent paid, etc.
Number four: and what someone else said - people can be poor one day and rich and powerful the next.
This is what the person said: I figured out what the real problem with america is, what do you think? It all comes down to the foolish pride of the american working class. For example, in britian, our commoners accept their place in society and do not feel as if they deserve the same luxeries that the nobility has earned. Granted, they may wish they were nobility but they recognize that they do not deserve it. However, in america, the commoners have rejected the term "commoner" and have replaced it with "working class." they are basically trying to imply that they are of greater importance than what they are. Also, have you noticed that americans tend to look upon their royalty (celebrities) with jealousy whereas british commoners look upon our royalty with respect.this also applies to religion. The american working class tends to be much more religious than the british. I believe this is because religions tend to express the importance of the individual (eternal life, a god that loves you, etc.) and makes these people feel much more important than they actually are. I believe the only solution to the problems in america is for the working class to submit themsleves and recognize that they are not quite as smart as they think they are and be willing for people of higher intelligence to guide them in the right direction
This person is an idiot.
Celebrities are not royalty. They're massive, rich idiots for everyone else to gossip about.
Secondly, as a rich child of a rich person, I may not be in the place to say this, but we live in a generally middle-class neighborhood because my father (who is a brilliant man, if nothing else) didn't want us to lose touch. The working class, being "commoners," are the most common type of people, thus making them the most important people in the entire country. We need to keep a middle class because poor people do not consume and by not consuming, they contribute nothing to the economy.
The working class, or "Middle Class" as it truly is, consists of our country's consumers. They are not jealous of and they are not demanding mansions and 90,000 dollar sport cars. The majority of them just want to comfortably own a house and a car. They want health insurance so that they can take care of their children when they're sick. They want enough to survive.
Lately, we've been seeing less and less unions. We've also been seeing countless more people unemployed and an absolutely unbelievable amount of people who are working just as hard as the next person and are not making enough money to survive.
I know a man who works a full day and only earns 25,000 dollars a year. He works in manufacturing. Every day, he comes home exhausted. Every day, he puts his limbs on the line to manufacture little parts that you hardly ever think about. On 25k a year, he can't even afford to have a house without a lot of help. He can't afford to buy, no less to maintain a car. He can't afford to heat his house, so he's constantly terrified that his pipes are going to freeze and burst, flooding out the few things that he does actually own.
This is insane. This is not the American Dream. What we wanted and in fact, what we had, back before everything became imported, was a comfortable lifestyle. If you worked for General Motors, Zenith or Schwinn, you were not filthy rich. You weren't buying mansions and Luxury cars. What you had was enough money to afford the basics and a good number of Americans don't get that, anymore.
The problem with America is that people have completely lost faith in it. Our system worked well enough when the Unions were strong and when people proudly supported American made products. That is no longer the case.
People don't want hand outs, they want jobs.
I can promise you that if everyone in this country starts supporting it, again, we will recover from this recession faster than you knew was possible.
Lets start with the auto industry.
We lost our consumer electronics industry when those jobs were all shipped overseas. We don't have an American Option, anymore.
We lost most of our Appliance industry (American made are hard to find) so we can't start, there.
We still have three perfectly good auto companies that are not being supported enough by our people because they'd rather be self-loathing and support other countries, instead.
I have a child and thus, the future of my country is of a huge concern to me. I'm house hunting. My love and I are looking at American Made furniture to furnish it. I bought a car a few months ago. Its a Chevy Cobalt SS (fastest car for under 20k). My love bought a Chevy Malibu (voted best Family Sedan by Kelley Bluebook and gets better gas mileage than Accord or Camry). If it is not providing a job for me or someone else in my country, it isn't good.
The government also benefits from a gainfully employed population. The Union worker who makes 50k a year is able to pay more in taxes than the non-union one who makes 25k. That means more money for schools, roads, police and generally national security.
Union wages and a thriving working class benefits everyone.
The only other option is socialism and being one of those "rich" people, who's going through a lot of schooling in order to make more money, I really don't want socialism. Socialism would mean that I'd have to share my money with people like my mother who thrive off of welfare and never worked a day in their lives.
We will always have our social classes and yet, the working class is such a broad category that it truly does matter. That is the category in which we see the majority of our country.
Check this out for me. It will tell you how much of an impact the auto industry alone has on our economy. You can only imagine how much impact we see in furniture and how much we lost when all of these other industries left.
http://levelfieldinstitute.org/
To summarize, the problem with America is that no one in the country wants to support it.
In Japan 95% of the vehicles purchased are Japanese. In Korea, 96% of the vehicles purchased are Korean. In America, only 45% of the vehicles purchased are American.
We need to wake up.
If we want job security, we need to keep supporting American jobs. (That's American, not Japanese not Korean and certainly not Chinese.)
This person who said what he said to me was NOT even living in the United States. He was visting for the first time for two days. He is from England. What he is saying is that all we care about is our place in society. I told him that the citizens in the United States have the recession to be worried about, the wars we are in right now, etc.
Your answer is ok but it didn't really cover everything that the other person said. I mean if you wanted to retort to every point and defend another point of view it wasn't a hundred percent successful. For example, I don't see what people being worried about a recession has to do with what the person was implying. Better luck next time!
