Job Security

It seems that, with your plan, the poor would still be poor, they'd just be less poor than they were before. I guess that's better than nothing, but shouldn't we be trying to elevate them beyond poverty? While we're at it, shouldn't we also be trying to keep more people from sliding into poverty? One of the unintended consequences might be that the government wouldn't have to hire as many people to administer the various welfare programs, which would add to the unemployment rate. As you said, however, they could just raise the poverty threshold, but then we're right back where we started from. It seems that a lot of people have a vested interest in this thing.

You mentioned something about the bottom 20%. I have read and heard a little about that over the years. As I understand it, they divide the population into five groups which are called "quintiles". The bottom quintile is considered to be poor, the top quintile is considered to be rich, and the other three quintiles are somewhere in the middle. When they talk about the gap between rich and poor, they are talking about the differences between the average incomes of each quintile. What they don't tell you is that everybody doesn't stay in the same quintile all their lives. The bottom quintile is largely composed of children and recently arrived immigrants. After awhile, many of these guys move up into the next quintile, displacing people who have moved up into the next quintile, and so on. If you look at it from that perspective, a larger income gap between quintiles can be a good thing. When somebody moves up, he is moving higher up than he would have if the gap were narrower. Of course people can move down a quintile too, which isn't such a good thing, unless they're retired like us. A retired person doesn't need as much money to live on because his kids are grown, his mortgage has been paid off, and he doesn't need to wine and dine his girlfriends anymore. If you just count income and not assets, which I think is what they do with this quintile thing, you can have a low income and still be well off. If you have enough money in the bank, or other investments, you don't really need an income anymore. It's probably more complicated than I think, most things are, but that's all I remember about those quintiles.

When I first came to Berlin, we didn't have to do any KP duty, they had German civilians hired to do that. I think they were paid by the German government as a way to pay back some money they had borrowed from Uncle Sam after the war. Shortly after I arrived, though, the debt must have been  paid off, because the German KPs were gradually phased out and replaced by GIs. I think they let them work until they retired, because the last one in our mess hall was an old guy who we called "Konrad". (We used "Konrad" as a generic name for all Germans, much like all GIs were called "Joe" during the war. Nevertheless. I think this guy's name really was Konrad.)

We had some Germans pulling guard duty with us too. They wore uniforms, but not the same uniforms that we or the German military wore. They all seemed to be pretty young, so maybe it was kind of a junior military apprenticeship program. At first the just had them on the main gates, mostly to serve as translators or deal with people that didn't speak English. Towards the end of my hitch, though, they started putting them in as replacements for our guys on more and more guard posts because we were way understaffed due to the escalation of the Vietnam War.

Guard duty in peacetime is actually pretty boring. Other than the gate posts, most of the time you are guarding a motor pool (parking lot) or an ammo dump, which is mostly underground with steel doors that are designed to be explosive proof. It is unlikely the anybody is going to try to break in because they know it's well guarded, although we did have one incident where a German teenager was shot on one of our guard posts. After a thorough investigation, it was determined that the kid walked in through a big hole in the fence that had been there for as long as anybody could remember. They talked about fixing the hole, but I don't know if they ever did. I don't know how they could contract guard duty out to civilians in wartime, but apparently they do it nowadays.