Well, ain’t this a crab bucket.
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I’m going to turn this argument on its head…
On average, the wealthiest 0.1% of the population are job destroyers.
They do not add jobs to our economy, they remove them.
New jobs are created, as you’ve said, by small and (to a lesser extent) mid-sized businesses. But we’d have even more employment and thus more money flowing to products and services if the wealthiest class weren’t actively diminishing the number of available jobs wherever they can.
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I think people are going to take you more seriously if you have case examples of this scenario playing out under the conditions you describe. Not being sarcastic, I just think it’d be productive.
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fche, I understand that entrepreneurs create jobs. Every job I’ve every had was the result of someone who started a successful business.
However, given that the job creation is an accidental by-product of their attempt create a successful business, and not a goal in and of itself, I’m unwilling to give some award some sort of moral superiority for doing so.
(Nor am I willing to say that it is the moral responsibility of an entrepreneur to hire someone - to do so would, by implication, mean that I am morally guilty for saving money by buying a lawn mower rather than hiring someone to do it for me. I’m not hypocritical enough to chastise someone for doing what I feel I should be able to do without moral qualm.)
Destroy global number of jobs, or is this a matter of “foreigners don’t count”?
Besides, we’re all “job destroyers” in that most of us pretty much try to spend as little as possible on paying other people if we can get an equivalent job done for less.
Either way, it seems, as per my original point, to award kudos or brickbats for “job creation” when it’s not intended seems silly. Should I be praising myself as ecologically valuable because I produce organic waste?
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Very few of my jobs had anything to do with business, incidentally.
Supreme Court clerk, brain injury rehab counsellor, charity collector, university admin, research scientist, teacher…
It’s almost as if profit is not the only valid human motivation. Unthinkable, I know.
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The title of the thread makes it clear that we’re talking specifically about the U.S. economy, and the poster I was responding to was using the usual Fox News talking points.
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Absolutely, and let me withdraw one remark - I suspect the the US is pretty close to the maximum income vs. inequality (conceivably over it, but not by a lot). When I was talking about going beyond and down the other side, yes, I think of many Latin American countries.
Once you figure purchasing power, I’m not certain that holds true. Norway is appallingly expensive. Cheap labour does mean a lot of cheaper things. Also, oil + gas. I think a fairer comparison is probably Finland, for which I harbour a great deal of fondness (speeding fines proportional to income!) PPP is 1.13 for Finland, 1.34 for Norway.
That said, this Wikipedia article based on self-reported Gallup polling reports PPP adjusted income as 51K for Norway, 43K for USA, and 34K for Finland, which about matches my priors on the US and Finland, but makes Norwegians much wealthier than the Norwegians I talk to claim - maybe they’re just being modest…)
And that would be my point - it’s really hard to claw back increased income even when it is the result of cultural trade-offs that have many severe negatives. Also, to be fair to the USA, I suspect that there is a strong racial component to many of the US’ low scores that would not disappear in the event of Norwegian levels of inequality.
Racism has a long and bitter history that transcends income.
[quote=“anon67050589, post:216, topic:80888”]The title of the thread makes it clear that we’re talking specifically about the U.S. economy, and the poster I was responding to was using the usual Fox News talking points.
[/quote]
Fair enough - sorry for being snarky.
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I understand that entrepreneurs create jobs.
Cool. As trivial and obvious as that sounds, people like Robert Reich and his fellow travellers can’t seem to accept it. It’s as though there is an envy about the role, or a desire to diminish it by claiming everyone’s a job creator, or the government is, or whatever such nonsense.
I’m unwilling to give some award some sort of moral superiority for doing so.
Fine, no one asked for your appraisal of moral superiority. Heck, you as an employee don’t really need to thank the businessperson for the job, after all it is to your and their mutual benefit. Isn’t capitalism grand.
If the government doesn’t create jobs what do you call people who work for the government?
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Hey, @fche: perhaps you should read the most important work of macroeconomics of our time, and get back to us - http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2
In which, Piketty’s mountain of research illustrates beyond any shadow of doubt the dynamic whereby the rich repeatedly bleed everyone else dry every chance they get, parasitically destroying the economy until a depression occurs, at which point folks realise that maybe it’s a bad idea to let these scumbags have everything their own way and governments take steps to redistribute wealth. After a while, everything’s peachy, until after a generation or two, people forget the rich are the enemy of everyone (including, ultimately, themselves), and get convinced by shysters that deregulation is a good thing.
You know that golden age for the US, the 50s? That was a direct result of FDR’s response to the 30s. Tax the fuck out of the rich (who’ll still be rich anyway, because of the obscene degree to which they like to get rich if they can help it), spend it on wealth redistribution via the creation of infrastructure and the provision of services, and society flourishes. Let the scum convince you they deserve to lord it over everyone, and hey presto, shitty medieval feudalism.
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Found a typo.
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Eh? I’m missing your point…
Here in the States, the cycle of collective amnesia is somewhat shorter.
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I neglected to factor in the scum’s vast investment in propaganda via concentrated media ownership and think tanks.
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Bingo!
Collective amnesia might have been a mostly passive process 120 years ago. Today it has so many active forces (centralized exactly as you’ve described) that we’re now seeing it on the scale of months.
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i think there are people who feel 68k is a lot, but these days - especially depending on where you live, it’s really not.
at any rate, if taxation focused on the top 10% - i think that’s 300k - and if we raised capital gains, got rid of outdated deductions, and threw in a financial transaction tax… we’d have a lot of money to make 12k, 35k, 65k go further.
money for public transportation, money for education, money for healthcare.
unfortunately, lots of people don’t seem to see the logic of pooling our funds via taxes to do the things we can’t do individually. instead, many - who aren’t even the target of tax increases - think don’t take any more, i don’t have any left to give.
it’s like some horrible game theory psychology experiment played out in real time.
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Likewise. And – significantly – many of the “private sector” jobs I’ve had would not have existed absent a large, robust, well-funded public sector. I’d never have had that toxicology lab job if it weren’t for their contracts with coroners’ offices in half the parishes in south Louisiana. It was a “private” lab, but we relied on taxpayers’ money for the bulk of our income, both for the forensic work and for the testing contracts with regional hospitals. Taxpayers’ dollars all the way.
I spent years after that working in what was supposedly one of the most “private” sub-sectors of the economy – mining. However, if it were not for the millions of acres of BLM and Forest Service land in the intermontane West we would not have a mining industry in the U.S. The cost of leasing land from a myriad of private owners is prohibitively high. Eastern states with viable mining (coal) industries have massive, decades old land/rights ownership by the predecessors of the coal companies to thank for the continued existence of mining. And vast amounts of state-level regulatory capture.
I have never has a job that wasn’t partly reliant on government for it’s existence. I believe that is common. Far more common than is admitted by ‘private sector’ cultists. They are bullshitters. Purely bullshitters.
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Yes, and government regulates the legal entities, loans, investments and insurance necessary for the “job creators” too.
The “free” market depends on working voters continuing to vote for supply side tax breaks, charters for commercial lenders, access to bankruptcy remedies and Taft-Hartley.
The term “job creators” is just a general sales term for a rent collector or someone who works for one.
Or, put another way, voters are the job creators’ job creator.
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My current job (bush regenerator, AKA wilderness weedpuller) is one of the few “business” industries that I’ve been involved in. It’s an industry that was invented by unpaid volunteers, and only went semi-pro about two decades ago.
Almost all of our contracts are with local councils or the National Parks Service. The handful of non-government contracts are based on helping businesses fulfil their state-required environmental obligations (remediating old mining sites etc).
The company makes just enough money to pay for our staff (casual, minimum wage), a couple of vehicles, worker’s comp insurance, rent on the toolshed and a partial income for the owner. He uses that income in order to help fund his further environmental management studies.
The work is skilled, physically demanding and dangerous (our insurance rates are higher than what the skydiving schools pay). Ain’t nobody getting rich from it.
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