The main problem of America is that you're seeing people working all over this country two jobs, they're working three jobs, and they're getting nowhere in a hurry. They're working hard. They can't afford to send their kids to college in many instances. They can't afford child care for their little babies. They're worried to death about retirement.
Certainly, workers in many industries do not have the privilege of being able to balance parenting at the workplace, and we must fight especially hard to support working parents in low-wage jobs.
The youth of Taiwan not only have to face the harsh reality of low wages and high commodity and housing prices, but due to the lack of employment opportunities, many young people are forced to leave their home towns to search for jobs in the cities.
Economies are risky. Some industries rise, and others implode, like housing. Some places get richer, and others drop, like Atlantic City. Some people get new jobs that pay better, many lose their jobs or their wages.
For instance, we have to listen to the concerns that working people, our forgotten working people, have over the record pace of immigration and it's impact on their jobs, wages, housing, schools, tax bills and general living conditions.
The real story in housing will be a recovery in the economy that will drive a recovery in housing, When people are working, when there are more jobs, more households forming and people go back to buying cars, they're going to want their apartments and homes. And that's when you'll start to see a recovery in home prices.
The rapid growth in many of our suburbs has spawned a booming construction industry eager to hire low wage immigrants who gladly fill these jobs, many of them happy to be paid in cash, free of federal and state taxes.
When you feel house poor, you don't buy anything. Housing immediately impacts the job numbers because there are so many housing-related jobs within the industry, and in adjacent industries.
Many people in my constituency come to see me absolutely distraught at the prospect of losing their private rented flat because of the imposition of a housing benefit cut. Social cleansing is going on in all of central London because of the benefit cap. That is a disgraceful situation.
Some good employers provide people benefits. Many do not. The ones that do not tend to be the low end of the pay scale. This program will give those employers a way to support their employees. The employees will get this benefit, making it more likely that their employee will come back to them - that's a benefit for the employer over the long term and a benefit for the employee and all the while supporting families in their time of need.
Instead of building housing in a wealthy neighborhood and saying, here you go, here's some under the market which will, by the way, drop the market for everyone's housing. Go into the lower income neighborhoods and say, here's a business incentives, so that people can get jobs.
Tax credits do not help people get better jobs; in fact, they can create poverty traps that actually disincentivise people from working more hours or finding a better paid job.
The government has brought on the housing problem, partly by these very low interest rates, which encouraged many people to go way out on a limb. They've brought it on by highly restrictive building policies, which have caused housing prices to skyrocket artificially. And they've brought it on by the Community Reinvestment Act, which presumes that politicians are better able to tell investors where to put their money than the investors themselves are. When you put all that together, you get something like what you have.
If you have an economic system in which there must be a lower class, there must be unemployed. There must be a large pool of people working at the worst jobs and the lowest paid jobs. Once you have a system like that, then the most likely people to be victims of that are people of color.
While it's absolutely important that we build housing for our low-income residents, when we are talking about opening up hundreds of sites for housing, we should be trying to build affordable housing for all of our residents struggling to pay rent. That means housing for teachers, for nurses, for janitors.
It's - the working class of San Francisco and the Bay Area is being pushed out of its old neighborhoods because of the skyrocketing cost of housing, and there's no real working class left because these are jobs for engineers and managers and designers - very smart people.