Lon: The majority of your posts on this thread have amounted to the economic equivalent of victim blaming. “Don’t like it, do something about it” & “all you have to do is work hard and the American Dream can be yours too” are some of the biggest lies the poor have ever been sold.
The “success” of a company should be measured not by its success at wealth redistribution (remember, poor -> rich = ‘Merika!, rich -> poor = pinko commie!) but instead measured by the number of employees it can sustain on a living wage.
I’ll leave you with a conversation I once overheard (paraphrasing) as food for thought as I do actually have to get back to work: “I hate these lefties always saying I’m only rich because my parents are rich. I work hard, I got good grades and I haven’t taken a penny from them since I graduated Harvard!”
Feel free to pick/choose for your rebuttal, I won’t be reading it.
I believe you’re off by an order of magnitude. 4800/15=320. In “olden days”, like pre Reagan and Voodoo economics, CEO’s typically made 40x workers, and still do in Europe. A pretty good wage for AN EMPLOYEE!! Most large corporate CEO’s are not visionaries who built a business from scratch, they’re hired guns.
Like many who share your rather transparent agenda, you’ve focussed all of your attention on Federal taxes, which is only part of the picture, and (conveniently) the part that supports your argument.
Try putting these words into a search engine: total tax burden by income.
I’ll save you a little work and give you a link to the very first hit that came up when I searched.
Lon, your presumptions about how low the tax burden is upon low income people is pure mythology.
One of the reasons poor people eat so much fast food is that the cost is kept artificially low. So you end up with poor people eating unhealthy food which contributes to health problems they can’t afford to treat. It’s a big nasty cycle.
Seems to me there are a lot of exceptions, but it would depend on how we define “skill set”-- a professor of advanced mathematics does something most people can’t even fathom, and a concert violinist has mastered an instrument most other musicians can’t even dabble in, and they both get paid far less than any CEO. Neurosurgeon (any surgeon, really), classical or jazz musician, pilot, mechanic, acrobat, computer programmer, even basket weaver-- these are all skilled trades, something you have to master with lots of study and effort. I’ve never understood what exactly is “skilled” about what CEOs do-- they make decisions based on market research and profit margins, you don’t even really need a business degree to do that. While I don’t disagree with you about the larger issue of economics and inflation, if pay is based on skill then CEOs are still way overpaid, particularly since even when companies go belly-up these guys walk away with a huge bonus or can just bow out and retire to their beach house.
As for learning a skill to get out of fast-food hell, even paying for tuition at your local community college is a real burden when you are also paying rent and insurance and perhaps childcare. Telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is kind of condescending when they have neither boots nor straps.
[edit: the phrase “in the marketplace” seems to be the sticker here-- true, “the marketplace” perhaps has no great demand for a mathematician or violinist, so they don’t get paid very much, but I would suggest that CEOs still command far more in compensation than they actually deserve. Shareholders are OK with that as long as they get dividends themselves, which seems like a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” situation.]
Never spending another dime in that place. Sure, he’s got every right to run his biz the way he sees fit, but geeze this stinks. I’ll go to the local mom and pop place for donuts. They may also be paying their workers minimum wage, but at least the owners are also barely scraping by. I’ll feel better if my money goes to them.
.actual slaves were more of a business investment than the employee is
This is a really important point when it comes to universal health care: If a slave owners property died, they were out their investment, so they were arguably more concerned with their worker’s well being, than (say) wal mart, who can dump an ailing worker and hire a new one with almost zero loss on investment.
An old sock to Dobby for noting the core Republican ideology. It wouldn’t matter if the 1% believed they were morally superior and deserved all that extra money if this stupid belief was not also held by a sufficient number of people to continue to elect Republicans to office. This type of blind faith is hard to dislodge; I thought a war we were lied into, flat wages for a few decades and the Great Recession would have been wake up calls, but apparently not. I’m not sure what it will take.
I can’t say I agree with you on very much, but I agree with you on this. Cities and rural areas are very different economically. $15/hour might make sense in NYC or a similarly high cost-of-living area, but near Utica or Syracuse it doesn’t, and definitely not out in the sticks.
I like the idea of setting minimum wage at the municipal level. The feedback cycles for the effects would be shorter and easier to study and manage, and it would create a whole bunch of natural experiments for economists to study for the next few decades of debate about minimum wage.
By the way, signaling your disagreement by yelling “learn some economics!” at everybody is an insufferable internet libertarian thing to do, and if you want to be taken seriously you should probably stop. I understand you take the western world’s dominant religious ideology very seriously, but for many people it is not the end-all-be-all of human existence – sometimes what’s best for the economy may not be best for humans. I think you should take such sentiments seriously and make serious arguments against them instead of heaping scorn on people with whom you disagree.
I had noticed the same thing about @Lon 's rhetorical style, and was trying to figure out how to work it into my next reply to him without just giving him a taste of his own medicine.
You’ve spared me that trouble with your well-phrased and polite recommendation
that’s a really good point. the money from raising minimum wage isn’t going to go get parked offshore, it’s going to get spent on real goods and services.
i still think there’s some danger in rents eating up the gains ( in my city at any rate )… i wish the rent issue was as easily fixed as minimum wage.
it certainly could, but my hypothesis is: rising minimum wage won’t increase rent as much as it will decrease roommates. it may put slightly more pressure on the $20-$25 an hour worker, since the number of people looking for housing will increase (due to less roommates) but it will have zero effect on single family housing.
basically if we divide it into these strata: min wage, low middle class, middle class, high middle class, and rich, raising the minimum wage will improve the min wage, squeeze the low, and do nothing to anyone above that. low middle class will either precipitate to min wage, or raise to middle class.
