Crime rates Are Up

Crime rates have been going up lately. And why wouldn’t they? Take a look at what our economic system is based upon. If you want to eat and have a place to live you’ve got to be able to earn a living and how is that done in today’s society? For the most part, it’s done by big business taking advantage of other people. The inequality is unfair.
Big business, worth trillions of dollars, takes advantage of people who need jobs by paying them as low a wage as possible. And that’s minimum wage for millions of people. And everybody knows that’s not enough to make a decent living or rent a decent apartment and certainly not enough to buy a home. Far from it.
The top few dozen people in the US have more money than the bottom 150 million people. That, in itself, is enough to cause a revolution if not enough for a rise in crime.
And the cost of going to college these days is outrageous. More people owe more money to college loans now days than they do to credit cards and we’re talking trillions of dollars. How did that happen? Republicans have been cutting taxes for the rich for years and giving tax subsidies to big business.
And who is really paying for that? Everybody else is paying for it and that angers people who feel like they should be able to get what they need in the USA.
So, more people do what they think they have to do to get what they want. If it’s dealing drugs or burglarizing or robbing people or worse, evidently they’re willing to do it.
Just like today’s candidates running for president are saying, “the system is rigged.” It’s rigged for the rich who now basically control Congress by making “Campaign contributions” that we know are basically brides to get the policies passed that they want passed. And, naturally that’s giving them more power and putting more billions of dollars in their pockets.
People know that’s what’s happening and they feel powerless to stop it and some people evidently are willing to do what they believe they can get away with to get what they want and if it’s committing crime, they’re willing to do that and hope they don’t get caught. And some of them don’t get caught.
And speaking of getting caught, with less taxes paid by the rich, who are not paying their fair share (They pay much less percentage wise than you and I pay) and the cost of housing criminals in prison today, many criminals are being let out of prison for crimes they commit and what do they do then? A lot of them commit more crimes. So it’s a vicious cycle and until we do something about it, I’m afraid it’s going to continue.
And I’m not even talking about the cost of health care and medications. When one guy can have a monopoly on a necessary medication and raise the price 750 percent which happened recently. The health care system is due for a massive overhaul as is our inherently unfair economic system.
And what can we do about it? I believe a good start is having the rich pay their fair share of taxes so we can fix our infrastructure and make college affordable again (like it was not that long ago when the rich were paying their fair share of taxes before Ronald Reagan) and hire more teachers at a decent living wage and put more police officers on the street and put money into solar and wind and other sources of renewable energy so we’re actually protecting our planet that sustains us rather than poisoning our air and our water and our food.
Then people won’t feel as ripped off and might care more about other people than they have been doing lately. And they just may commit less crime.