Two reports recently released tell us what many of us already know: the number of low-paying jobs is increasing, as are good paying jobs. The effect is a widening pay gap.

LAANE
http://www.laane.org/docs/research/Poverty_Jobs_and_the_Los_Angeles_Economy.pdf

California Budget Project
http://www.cbp.org/pdfs/2007/0708_swc.pdf

Problem: Shortage of technical service workers is causing a long-term rise in wages in the upper fifth.

Solution: Free college educations, and additional educational options for adults or dropouts, but only for these jobs that are in-demand.

Problem: Lack of growth of good paying manufacturing jobs.

Solution: None, but pushing for tariffs would be a start.

Problem: Large number of poor people lack affordable housing, heath insurance, and time.

Solution: Shift people out of service into supporting building of duplexes and houses. Create statewide health insurance. Implement mandatory overtime across jobs, so hiring a moonlighter is expensive.

Good ideas and all, but how will they be paid for? Free college? Free health care? Maybe free at the point of service but not free in the big picture. People are going to have to dig very deep into their pockets to afford these services. Taxes on businesses will have to go up and you'll have to be prepared to accept an increase in unemployment. If it was as easy as saying "voila, everyone now has free health care and higher education" it would have been done already.

The economy is allegedly growing. The money is *somewhere* in the system. There's growth in the number of upper-end jobs, so, presumably, there's more tax revenues there.

The reason for free education is simple: to lower the cost of highly skilled labor, and to reduce the number of people squeezed downward into poverty, where they will pay less taxes and consume more public services. Back in the 1960s, going to the University of California was free, so it's been done before.

Likewise, the dramatic decline in health care coverage is has already reached a tipping point where (allegedly) market-based price competition isn't happening, and people have fallen out of the private system and into the public safety net. The public safety net is alternately unravelling, or figuring out tricks to squeeze money out of the general budget.

We're paying more per-person for medical services than people in other countries. It's time for a market-correction, be it through state force, or by the insurance companies reorganizing to adapt to the public will. If this isn't done, the system will continue to diverge from what's being done in other countries.

The most important revenue source to hit is the top 1% of taxpayers, who have seen tax cuts for most of the past decade. They cut the estate tax, the cap gains tax, income taxes, prop 13, all while spending on this war, and now, stoking the fires of inflation by putting more cash into the economy to avert a mortgage crash.

Nobody really likes a tax hike, but at this time, there's a lot of support for raising taxes and spending it in wise ways.