A friend of mine came to this country from China back in the eighties. China had little opportunity for people like him he tells me, especially after Chairman Mao had destroyed the country. To get anywhere you had to know people and pay them off. Everything, he adds, was corrupt and there was no freedom. America looked better and so he emigrated, married and raised a family here.
Today he works for a city agency as an air conditioning technician making a good salary with an excellent benefits package (including a health insurance plan and a government pension). And he gets lots of opportunity for overtime that supplements his already substantial regular income and contributes to the baseline against which his pension will eventually be calculated. He’s also active in the stock market and is a fairly successful investor.
Still he’s soured on this country of late. Americans live beyond their means, he complains. They spend more than they can afford and finance the difference by borrowing from countries like his former homeland. But why should China keep lending to us, he asks. The Chinese have to be crazy to do it because we’ll never be able to pay them back. Americans are living off the largess of the rest of the world and someday we’ll have to pay the piper, he points out.
In fact, he’s so frustrated over the recent turn of events that he has found himself wondering whether he made the right decision in coming here. When he did, America looked like the future to him but now it seems China is where the economic growth is. America is too full of financial inequities, too, he argues. A confirmed Democrat, he despised George Bush and the last Republican administration. Bush, he insists, spent too much. That’s why we’re in the hole we’re in.
And Barack Obama? In fact he’s a fan of the current president, especially his health care initiative. We need national health care, my friend tells me. When I protest that most people in the country are already covered, one way or the other, he responds by pointing out that there are still some who aren’t.
When I remind him of the good coverage he has for himself and his family under the current system, he reminds me of those who don’t.
What’s wrong with America, my friend goes on, is the big gap between the wealthiest and those who have less. On a personal level, it bothers him that while he is as competent as, or more competent than, the electricians and stationary engineers in his department, they get paid much more than he does while not having to work as hard. That’s a discrepancy that really galls him.
It’s due, of course, to the clout of the unions that represent these workers and the contracts they’ve extracted from the city. Although my friend is a one-of-a-kind tradesman in his agency – the sole staffer on board equipped to maintain and repair sophisticated refrigeration equipment in-house, an essential to that organization because of its heavy reliance on lab equipment, computers and major air conditioning systems – he has no powerful union to represent him as these other workers do and so watches with envy as people he believes less qualified work fewer hours while out-earning him.
Weren’t there inequities in China, I ask? Sure, he says, but in China such gaps are not so obvious. In this country, he says, you have all these Wall Street bankers and insurance industry executives making way more than the rest of us. That, he points out, simply isn’t fair. Are they really worth hundreds of millions of dollars while he is barely worth $80,000 a year before overtime and all the extra work his job requires of him?
And this is to say nothing of those electricians and stationary engineers, the latter of whom basically sit and monitor electronic signals on various pieces of equipment all day while he is running from site to site, getting his hands dirty. Why should others make more than he does if he’s just as smart and qualified?
Americans need to level the playing field, he says, and they need national health care like they have in other countries, including China, so everyone can have equal access to the same level of medical services.