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On September 27 2011 07:59 Bibdy wrote:
No, we're trying to solve the problem of everyone facing debt as a result of the burst by offering a combination of
A) continued low taxes for the wealthy, to incentivize creating jobs here and
that doesn't do any good if the employment cost is too high. It's not like the rich dont' have money... they actually do have money (still,) the problem is that american labor isn't worth the return on the investment. increasing or lowering the taxes doesn't really make a huge deal of a difference.
B) low interest rates for investors to borrow the money they need to open the businesses they want to open
why would you want to open businesses when the population already has a huge debt? how is that a smart idea, when no one has any money why would they buy your product.
the low interest rates in attempt to create business are self-defeating, because you want to create business so people could get jobs to get out of debt, but the only way a business can survive is by having people purchase its products which plunges the people further into debt... how is this supposed to work?
the only way it can work if it replaces some of the existing consumption which will obviously puts others out of jobs... it just reshuffles jobs while obviously some of the money gets lost in the bureaucracy.
C) low interest rates for 'common folk' to reduce the burden of their existing bills by lowering their costs each payment, and to borrow what they need to keep going
and also reducing their incentives to start saving.
All of this is predicated on the assumption that the country isn't going to go spiraling out of control and sink into the depths of R'lyeh any time soon.
It's ONLY a bad time to invest if you're sure the country is going to go into a second recession. The mere MENTION of a double-dip recession has been enough to spook these people out of investing and, as previously mentioned, it's now become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
how can it not go into a recession. The moment that the low rates get lifted it WILL go into a recession, and my entire point is that it HAS TO go into a recession, so that the mis-allocation of resources that caused this problem gets worked out of the system, and all the debts are paid off.
all the low interest rates are doing are guaranteeing that there will be a continued mis-allocation of resources, and if the rates stay up forever we will hit very sharp inflation, especially if our importers decide to let their currency appreciate, or just refuse to sell us stuff for so cheap since they're getting nothing in return (which in essence is the same thing.)
This is what I mean; the ENTIRE system operates on faith. And the only things that can control the herd-like decisions of the wealthy, is other wealthy people and government incentive. When a few of them catch wind that maybe, JUST MAYBE, the US could go through a second recession, everyone turtles up and awaits the coming storm until its safe to come out - a storm caused by the turtling up.
The only reason that it has to operate on faith is because the fundamentals aren't sound, and the economy never recovered from the initial market crashes in the first place...
How is this difficult to understand? If it's operating on faith there's already something inherintly wrong which causes it to operate on faith... A real economy operates on profit... if the economy was trully a profitable place right now then the investors would be all over it, because they would see the profits that businesses make when they're invested in... but what we've seen in the last 10 years as the result of investment is only growth of market bubbles.
What in the nine hells did Clinton, or his administration, have to do with banking institutions picking up, repackaging and trading bad loans and mortgages? It was a completely new and unprecedented piece of financial magic. Not even the next 8 years of the next administration saw it coming when they foolishly kept low taxes rates through the boom of 2002-2007 (they should have been risen to pay back some of the existing national debt we used to SPUR that boom in the first place - the other half of Keynesian economics that gets routinely ignored by administrations on both sides).
The GSE's forced banks to make risky loans... They provided a guarantee to rebuy mortgages at certain rates a bit below the current market value... This hedged the banks' risks on loans, and made it profitable for them to give out more loans at worse standards... the GSE's were in fact regulating the market, so don't tell me that it was a result of unregulated banking... it was result of shitty government policy, and then when the system started to collapse on itself, because the product ultimately wasn't worth the price, everyone turned to Freddy and Fannie to bail them out, and they defaulted because it was too much.
You can't blame any administration for that. If anything, the one lesson to learn, that should be abundantly clear, is that completely unregulated business practices like that are HORRIFICALLY dangerous for everyone. The less regulated the market gets, the more volatile it gets. I don't know how that couldn't be more obvious following that financial crisis. I'm just as confused as to why someone would continue to think that the free market is infallible following that.
GSE's aren't a natural part of free market... they hedge risks for the few ( so whoever gets there first makes the profit,) but then fail when large volumes arrive (resulting in the burst of the bubble, and the destruction of fake equity, resulting in tons of debt which still hasn't either been paid off, or defaulted on.)
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Thanks guys for your responses. I get that it helps the unemployed, but he said remove not lower. I can understand lowering it, given that it follows the data, but you can't argue 'because lower is better we need to remove it'. There are a lot more people close to minimum wage than there are unemployed ( not counting the natural rate of unemployment). Since corporations and laborers compete over pay, it seems that this will have a far greater negative. Just a quick example if a pizza boy doesn't make minimum wage in tips, then the employer makes up for the difference. This shatters the delicate balance that these people already walk. Now if he said lowering it....
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On September 27 2011 08:37 jbee wrote:
Thanks guys for your responses. I get that it helps the unemployed, but he said remove not lower. I can understand lowering it, given that it follows the data, but you can't argue 'because lower is better we need to remove it'. There are a lot more people close to minimum wage than there are unemployed ( not counting the natural rate of unemployment). Since corporations and laborers compete over pay, it seems that this will have a far greater negative. Just a quick example if a pizza boy doesn't make minimum wage in tips, then the employer makes up for the difference. This shatters the delicate balance that these people already walk. Now if he said lowering it....
It's not like wages would go to $1/hr. People won't work for certain wages. If all of a sudden it was abolished and say Albertsons (grocery store) decided to only offer $1/hr, they wouldn't be able to hire anyone. Quite simply no one is going to work 8hr/day for that wage. As more and more jobs flood back into the American economy, less labor becomes available, driving wages back up (although nowhere near where minimum wage is now, of course).
Concerning your pizza boy example, Ron Paul, like many people, think it's best if the government isn't involved and it's up to the pizza boy to decide whether or not he wants to work that job, as long as he's fully aware he's dependent upon tips. It's your choice to work for a company or not. You're only valuable if you're profitable to the company, so you better do your best to make yourself profitable. If you're replaceable, why should they be paying such a premium to employ you in the first place when someone else is willing to work harder than your for less?
Also I think Ron Paul not only follows that mentality, but he's also against it for the simple reason that more regulation --> bad with his philosophy, and he claims it's not Constitutional (I think? I'm not sure on his stances with the Federal government and taxation...).
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he is against income tax i'm pretty sure... but not becasue it's unconstitutional.
I think that he wants more contract protection. In a way minimum wage brings the government to negotiate contract between people like "ok you get minimum wage... but you have to give him benefits... etc etc."
from what i understand about his position is that he believes that the government shouldn't do this, and the contract terms should simply be negotiated between employee and employer, or union and employer if there's a lot of workers.
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Yeah I get it. But I was trying to describe an inherent advantage to corporations over laborers. Say u made 8 dollars and then minimum wage was abolished. You probably wouldn't leave if it lowered to 7.50 an hour simply because of the cost of finding a new job. Add this to the times when your employee tries to trim here and there and its a huge problem for someone living under the poverty level. Unions are even less of a options for those making less than minimum wage.
One person doesn't have much leverage relative to corporations and minimum wage was their only bargaining power.
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On September 27 2011 08:53 jbee wrote:
Yeah I get it. But I was trying to describe an inherent advantage to corporations over laborers. Say u made 8 dollars and then minimum wage was abolished. You probably wouldn't leave if it lowered to 7.50 an hour simply because of the cost of finding a new job. Add this to the times when your employee tries to trim here and there and its a huge problem for someone living under the poverty level. Unions are even less of a options for those making less than minimum wage.
One person doesn't have much leverage relative to corporations and minimum wage was their only bargaining power.
1 person has quite a bit of leverage relative to a pizza parlor though... and that's hte example you were using.
if they don't have a delivery guy for just 1 day they lose quite a bit of income
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On September 27 2011 08:53 jbee wrote:
Yeah I get it. But I was trying to describe an inherent advantage to corporations over laborers. Say u made 8 dollars and then minimum wage was abolished. You probably wouldn't leave if it lowered to 7.50 an hour simply because of the cost of finding a new job. Add this to the times when your employee tries to trim here and there and its a huge problem for someone living under the poverty level. Unions are even less of a options for those making less than minimum wage.
One person doesn't have much leverage relative to corporations and minimum wage was their only bargaining power.
And should they? I don't think they should. You have a choice if you want to work somewhere or if you don't. And I'm confused, if the minimum wage was lowered a meager 0.50, isn't that just "lowering" it as you said you could understand earlier?
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United States7483 Posts
On September 27 2011 08:16 FabledIntegral wrote:Show nested quote +On September 27 2011 07:44 jbee wrote:
I hate politics, but isn't Ron Paul the guy that wants to remove ( not lower but remove) minimum wage? Usually I suspend layman's judgement, but how the hell does that benefit the poor? Economically speaking it heavily benefits the poor... overall. By reducing unemployment. Many companies can't afford to employ very many people in the U.S. due to minimum wage, and thus will move jobs abroad. An abolished minimum wage would almost assuredly create a TON of jobs in the U.S., significantly helping those who are unemployed, while simultaneously hurting those who already have jobs. The net result is always that the overall social welfare is larger, but it's more complicated than that. I'm not a supporter of the abolishment of minimum wage anyways, but I think it is a little on the high side at the moment. And as I said before, I don't think you should be able to raise a family on minimum wage. If you think you should be able to raise children as well as provide for yourself while affording food, housing, transportation, clothing, etc. for your children on a single job wages by doing something that requires almost no critical thinking and can easily be replaced doing, I think you're crazy. Show nested quote +On September 27 2011 07:59 Bibdy wrote:
No, we're trying to solve the problem of everyone facing debt as a result of the burst by offering a combination of
A) continued low taxes for the wealthy, to incentivize creating jobs here and
B) low interest rates for investors to borrow the money they need to open the businesses they want to open
C) low interest rates for 'common folk' to reduce the burden of their existing bills by lowering their costs each payment, and to borrow what they need to keep going
All of this is predicated on the assumption that the country isn't going to go spiraling out of control and sink into the depths of R'lyeh any time soon.
It's ONLY a bad time to invest if you're sure the country is going to go into a second recession. The mere MENTION of a double-dip recession has been enough to spook these people out of investing and, as previously mentioned, it's now become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is what I mean; the ENTIRE system operates on faith. And the only things that can control the herd-like decisions of the wealthy, is other wealthy people and government incentive. When a few of them catch wind that maybe, JUST MAYBE, the US could go through a second recession, everyone turtles up and awaits the coming storm until its safe to come out - a storm caused by the turtling up.
What in the nine hells did Clinton, or his administration, have to do with banking institutions picking up, repackaging and trading bad loans and mortgages? It was a completely new and unprecedented piece of financial magic. Not even the next 8 years of the next administration saw it coming when they foolishly kept low taxes rates through the boom of 2002-2007 (they should have been risen to pay back some of the existing national debt we used to SPUR that boom in the first place - the other half of Keynesian economics that gets routinely ignored by administrations on both sides).
You can't blame any administration for that. If anything, the one lesson to learn, that should be abundantly clear, is that completely unregulated business practices like that are HORRIFICALLY dangerous for everyone. The less regulated the market gets, the more volatile it gets. I don't know how that couldn't be more obvious following that financial crisis. I'm just as confused as to why someone would continue to think that the free market is infallible following that. I really dislike how people say "low taxes for the wealthy." I mean, they aren't low taxes for the wealthy, they're actually substantially (imo) higher than that of the rest. You can speak relatively, but once again I think it's a terrible argument to point to other countries in comparison. Rather, you should be saying a) Keeping tax rates only marginally (as I'd presume you'd put it) higher than the poor for your first point. I know you said "low" and not "lower" but it's very much so implied by a lot of people that rich people pay less, whether it be an absolute value or percentage, when it's clearly not the case.
They most certainly are low taxes for the wealthy. While the exact precise amount they pay is a good deal higher than the poor, the relative amount they pay is quite a bit lower, especially considering the absurd amounts of wealth they have. They can easily afford to pay a much MUCH bigger share than they currently do without even having a noticeable impact on their lifestyle, but that fact seems to escape people. They'd still be extremely wealthy, I'm not advocating communism here. To be precise, I'm advocating increasing the marginal tax rate for the super wealthy (top 2%) to 60-70%.
Hell, even Reagan had taxes raised more than 10 times while he was in office.
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@kiarip The pizza boy is gambling his job/career while the pizza parlor is gambling lost revenue (which could be entirely made-up by having somebody else cover for him). If you don't see the imbalance in that then I have nothing more to say.
@fabled I don't think they should or shouldn't, as I am morally nihilistic. People want different things out of the government which means it is like arguing about taste ( hence why I hate politics). I only asked about this because I couldn't think of any reason somebody would support this, unless they owned a business. What i said was as example of if it was removed. If it was removed, pay wouldn't go to a dollar an hour, but it gives the ability for your employer to undercut you. This ability decreases the stability in the Poors' income which is why I can't see it as good for the poor either.
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On September 27 2011 09:06 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +On September 27 2011 08:16 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 07:44 jbee wrote:
I hate politics, but isn't Ron Paul the guy that wants to remove ( not lower but remove) minimum wage? Usually I suspend layman's judgement, but how the hell does that benefit the poor? Economically speaking it heavily benefits the poor... overall. By reducing unemployment. Many companies can't afford to employ very many people in the U.S. due to minimum wage, and thus will move jobs abroad. An abolished minimum wage would almost assuredly create a TON of jobs in the U.S., significantly helping those who are unemployed, while simultaneously hurting those who already have jobs. The net result is always that the overall social welfare is larger, but it's more complicated than that. I'm not a supporter of the abolishment of minimum wage anyways, but I think it is a little on the high side at the moment. And as I said before, I don't think you should be able to raise a family on minimum wage. If you think you should be able to raise children as well as provide for yourself while affording food, housing, transportation, clothing, etc. for your children on a single job wages by doing something that requires almost no critical thinking and can easily be replaced doing, I think you're crazy. On September 27 2011 07:59 Bibdy wrote:
No, we're trying to solve the problem of everyone facing debt as a result of the burst by offering a combination of
A) continued low taxes for the wealthy, to incentivize creating jobs here and
B) low interest rates for investors to borrow the money they need to open the businesses they want to open
C) low interest rates for 'common folk' to reduce the burden of their existing bills by lowering their costs each payment, and to borrow what they need to keep going
All of this is predicated on the assumption that the country isn't going to go spiraling out of control and sink into the depths of R'lyeh any time soon.
It's ONLY a bad time to invest if you're sure the country is going to go into a second recession. The mere MENTION of a double-dip recession has been enough to spook these people out of investing and, as previously mentioned, it's now become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is what I mean; the ENTIRE system operates on faith. And the only things that can control the herd-like decisions of the wealthy, is other wealthy people and government incentive. When a few of them catch wind that maybe, JUST MAYBE, the US could go through a second recession, everyone turtles up and awaits the coming storm until its safe to come out - a storm caused by the turtling up.
What in the nine hells did Clinton, or his administration, have to do with banking institutions picking up, repackaging and trading bad loans and mortgages? It was a completely new and unprecedented piece of financial magic. Not even the next 8 years of the next administration saw it coming when they foolishly kept low taxes rates through the boom of 2002-2007 (they should have been risen to pay back some of the existing national debt we used to SPUR that boom in the first place - the other half of Keynesian economics that gets routinely ignored by administrations on both sides).
You can't blame any administration for that. If anything, the one lesson to learn, that should be abundantly clear, is that completely unregulated business practices like that are HORRIFICALLY dangerous for everyone. The less regulated the market gets, the more volatile it gets. I don't know how that couldn't be more obvious following that financial crisis. I'm just as confused as to why someone would continue to think that the free market is infallible following that. I really dislike how people say "low taxes for the wealthy." I mean, they aren't low taxes for the wealthy, they're actually substantially (imo) higher than that of the rest. You can speak relatively, but once again I think it's a terrible argument to point to other countries in comparison. Rather, you should be saying a) Keeping tax rates only marginally (as I'd presume you'd put it) higher than the poor for your first point. I know you said "low" and not "lower" but it's very much so implied by a lot of people that rich people pay less, whether it be an absolute value or percentage, when it's clearly not the case. They most certainly are low taxes for the wealthy. While the exact precise amount they pay is a good deal higher than the poor, the relative amount they pay is quite a bit lower, especially considering the absurd amounts of wealth they have. They can easily afford to pay a much MUCH bigger share than they currently do without even having a noticeable impact on their lifestyle, but that fact seems to escape people. They'd still be extremely wealthy, I'm not advocating communism here.
Should wealth one already possesses be related to their income tax, though? If someone has 1billion dollars, and made $50,000 in income last year, they should be paying in that tax bracket, irrelevant of their 1 billion. I don't see how they pay a relatively lower amount, whatsoever. They pay a relatively higher amount of their income for income taxes? I'm not sure where you define "absurdly wealthy" either. Someone making say $400,000 per year, while definitely now falling into upper class, having a stayhome wife and say four kids, is still going to have a mortgage, and most likely won't be able to afford driving a Ferrari or some shit. Sure, those that are EXTREMELY wealthy, like those making say $3 million+ per year, might not take as much of a hit, but then they're also paying in over a million dollars in taxes of that three million (well, at least in CA, accounting for state income taxes). I don't know how you don't think that's a huge amount, when it's a third of their income. It's not like they didn't earn that income.
I'd say almost everyone making a $100,000 salary is working significantly harder than those making minimum wage. At that point, your decisions matter, jobs are in your hands, profits of the company are highly relevant to your personal choices (exception of huge corps), significantly more stress involved in terms of decision making, far higher prerequisites and investment to obtain said job in the first place, etc.
On September 27 2011 09:10 jbee wrote:
@kiarip The pizza boy is gambling his job/career while the pizza parlor is gambling lost revenue (which could be entirely made-up by having somebody else cover for him). If you don't see the imbalance in that then I have nothing more to say.
@fabled I don't think they should or shouldn't, as I am morally nihilistic. People want different things out of the government which means it is like arguing about taste ( hence why I hate politics). I only asked about this because I couldn't think of any reason somebody would support this, unless they owned a business. What i said was as example of if it was removed. If it was removed, pay wouldn't go to a dollar an hour, but it gives the ability for your employer to undercut you. This ability decreases the stability in the Poors' income which is why I can't see it as good for the poor either.
Without government protection you're also far more likely to be a more productive worker for fear of losing your job. If you're valuable to the company, said company will be far less likely to attempt to undercut you because they value your labor. Of course, generalizing sweeps across the board may effect you if you're a small person in a massive company, but isn't it that company's choice on how it wants to run itself? That's the theory at least, I personally agree with you that job stability is decently more important, as even amazing work ethic won't always save you from individually getting screwed.
Also, if the pizza boy is "gambling his career" he made some pretty bad choices for that to be his career. I'm not sure how you have nothing more to say because business owners generally incur significantly more risk than employees. If there wasn't this risk then far more people would open businesses. So unless you're talking about it being heavily imbalanced for the business owner, which I know you're not, I'm not sure why you ended that with "I have nothing more to say."
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On September 27 2011 09:10 jbee wrote:
@kiarip The pizza boy is gambling his job/career while the pizza parlor is gambling lost revenue (which could be entirely made-up by having somebody else cover for him). If you don't see the imbalance in that then I have nothing more to say.
actually business especially small ones are taking way huger gambles, because a lot of them may still be paying off debt, and etc.
if you're a pizza boy it's not like getting fired/quitting abruptly will create this huge problem when you apply for antoher similar resume, but defaulting on your business loans will when you go to apply for another loan if you want to start another business.
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United States7483 Posts
On September 27 2011 09:17 FabledIntegral wrote:Show nested quote +On September 27 2011 09:06 Whitewing wrote:On September 27 2011 08:16 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 07:44 jbee wrote:
I hate politics, but isn't Ron Paul the guy that wants to remove ( not lower but remove) minimum wage? Usually I suspend layman's judgement, but how the hell does that benefit the poor? Economically speaking it heavily benefits the poor... overall. By reducing unemployment. Many companies can't afford to employ very many people in the U.S. due to minimum wage, and thus will move jobs abroad. An abolished minimum wage would almost assuredly create a TON of jobs in the U.S., significantly helping those who are unemployed, while simultaneously hurting those who already have jobs. The net result is always that the overall social welfare is larger, but it's more complicated than that. I'm not a supporter of the abolishment of minimum wage anyways, but I think it is a little on the high side at the moment. And as I said before, I don't think you should be able to raise a family on minimum wage. If you think you should be able to raise children as well as provide for yourself while affording food, housing, transportation, clothing, etc. for your children on a single job wages by doing something that requires almost no critical thinking and can easily be replaced doing, I think you're crazy. On September 27 2011 07:59 Bibdy wrote:
No, we're trying to solve the problem of everyone facing debt as a result of the burst by offering a combination of
A) continued low taxes for the wealthy, to incentivize creating jobs here and
B) low interest rates for investors to borrow the money they need to open the businesses they want to open
C) low interest rates for 'common folk' to reduce the burden of their existing bills by lowering their costs each payment, and to borrow what they need to keep going
All of this is predicated on the assumption that the country isn't going to go spiraling out of control and sink into the depths of R'lyeh any time soon.
It's ONLY a bad time to invest if you're sure the country is going to go into a second recession. The mere MENTION of a double-dip recession has been enough to spook these people out of investing and, as previously mentioned, it's now become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is what I mean; the ENTIRE system operates on faith. And the only things that can control the herd-like decisions of the wealthy, is other wealthy people and government incentive. When a few of them catch wind that maybe, JUST MAYBE, the US could go through a second recession, everyone turtles up and awaits the coming storm until its safe to come out - a storm caused by the turtling up.
What in the nine hells did Clinton, or his administration, have to do with banking institutions picking up, repackaging and trading bad loans and mortgages? It was a completely new and unprecedented piece of financial magic. Not even the next 8 years of the next administration saw it coming when they foolishly kept low taxes rates through the boom of 2002-2007 (they should have been risen to pay back some of the existing national debt we used to SPUR that boom in the first place - the other half of Keynesian economics that gets routinely ignored by administrations on both sides).
You can't blame any administration for that. If anything, the one lesson to learn, that should be abundantly clear, is that completely unregulated business practices like that are HORRIFICALLY dangerous for everyone. The less regulated the market gets, the more volatile it gets. I don't know how that couldn't be more obvious following that financial crisis. I'm just as confused as to why someone would continue to think that the free market is infallible following that. I really dislike how people say "low taxes for the wealthy." I mean, they aren't low taxes for the wealthy, they're actually substantially (imo) higher than that of the rest. You can speak relatively, but once again I think it's a terrible argument to point to other countries in comparison. Rather, you should be saying a) Keeping tax rates only marginally (as I'd presume you'd put it) higher than the poor for your first point. I know you said "low" and not "lower" but it's very much so implied by a lot of people that rich people pay less, whether it be an absolute value or percentage, when it's clearly not the case. They most certainly are low taxes for the wealthy. While the exact precise amount they pay is a good deal higher than the poor, the relative amount they pay is quite a bit lower, especially considering the absurd amounts of wealth they have. They can easily afford to pay a much MUCH bigger share than they currently do without even having a noticeable impact on their lifestyle, but that fact seems to escape people. They'd still be extremely wealthy, I'm not advocating communism here. Should wealth one already possesses be related to their income tax, though? If someone has 1billion dollars, and made $50,000 in income last year, they should be paying in that tax bracket, irrelevant of their 1 billion. I don't see how they pay a relatively lower amount, whatsoever. They pay a relatively higher amount of their income for income taxes? I'm not sure where you define "absurdly wealthy" either. Someone making say $400,000 per year, while definitely now falling into upper class, having a stayhome wife and say four kids, is still going to have a mortgage, and most likely won't be able to afford driving a Ferrari or some shit. Sure, those that are EXTREMELY wealthy, like those making say $3 million+ per year, might not take as much of a hit, but then they're also paying in over a million dollars in taxes of that three million (well, at least in CA, accounting for state income taxes). I don't know how you don't think that's a huge amount, when it's a third of their income. It's not like they didn't earn that income. I'd say almost everyone making a $100,000 salary is working significantly harder than those making minimum wage. At that point, your decisions matter, jobs are in your hands, profits of the company are highly relevant to your personal choices (exception of huge corps), significantly more stress involved in terms of decision making, far higher prerequisites and investment to obtain said job in the first place, etc. Show nested quote +On September 27 2011 09:10 jbee wrote:
@kiarip The pizza boy is gambling his job/career while the pizza parlor is gambling lost revenue (which could be entirely made-up by having somebody else cover for him). If you don't see the imbalance in that then I have nothing more to say.
@fabled I don't think they should or shouldn't, as I am morally nihilistic. People want different things out of the government which means it is like arguing about taste ( hence why I hate politics). I only asked about this because I couldn't think of any reason somebody would support this, unless they owned a business. What i said was as example of if it was removed. If it was removed, pay wouldn't go to a dollar an hour, but it gives the ability for your employer to undercut you. This ability decreases the stability in the Poors' income which is why I can't see it as good for the poor either. Without government protection you're also far more likely to be a more productive worker for fear of losing your job. If you're valuable to the company, said company will be far less likely to attempt to undercut you because they value your labor. Of course, generalizing sweeps across the board may effect you if you're a small person in a massive company, but isn't it that company's choice on how it wants to run itself? That's the theory at least, I personally agree with you that job stability is decently more important, as even amazing work ethic won't always save you from individually getting screwed.
I was careful to mention that I meant the top 2% of the wealth bracket qualifies as 'super rich'. I also think something needs to be done about the tax system in general, I don't believe income taxes in and of them themselves are sufficient, simply by design. Long term capital gains, for example, are taxed too low. The current system has the wealth accumulated all at the top: almost all of it, and more of it keeps going up there, rather than being spread out. The distribution of wealth is INCREDIBLY uneven. While I'm not suggesting we attempt to make it perfectly distributed so that everyone has a fair share of wealth relative to their actual income, the system should not have half of the entire country with a net total of one fiftieth of the total wealth.
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United States7483 Posts
On September 27 2011 09:23 Kiarip wrote:Show nested quote +On September 27 2011 09:10 jbee wrote:
@kiarip The pizza boy is gambling his job/career while the pizza parlor is gambling lost revenue (which could be entirely made-up by having somebody else cover for him). If you don't see the imbalance in that then I have nothing more to say.
actually business especially small ones are taking way huger gambles, because a lot of them may still be paying off debt, and etc. if you're a pizza boy it's not like getting fired/quitting abruptly will create this huge problem when you apply for antoher similar resume, but defaulting on your business loans will when you go to apply for another loan if you want to start another business.
You're ignoring the cost of unemployment. Cost of unemployment can be extremely high, and in general, companies like having a high unemployment rate in general. It makes cost of unemployment higher, which means that they can make unreasonable demands of their employees, since fear of being fired is huge. When cost of unemployment is high, it is a big deal to lose your job. There are a lot of people out there who can't find work at all, and would accept an $8 an hour job despite it not being enough to support themselves with, simply because it's better than nothing. We don't have enough jobs that pay well, and we don't have enough minimum wage jobs either.
Current unemployment rates have less to do with cost of employment than it does with demand for production btw. People aren't hiring because there isn't enough demand for their products, so there's no reason to hire to increase production.
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On September 27 2011 09:28 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +On September 27 2011 09:17 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 09:06 Whitewing wrote:On September 27 2011 08:16 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 07:44 jbee wrote:
I hate politics, but isn't Ron Paul the guy that wants to remove ( not lower but remove) minimum wage? Usually I suspend layman's judgement, but how the hell does that benefit the poor? Economically speaking it heavily benefits the poor... overall. By reducing unemployment. Many companies can't afford to employ very many people in the U.S. due to minimum wage, and thus will move jobs abroad. An abolished minimum wage would almost assuredly create a TON of jobs in the U.S., significantly helping those who are unemployed, while simultaneously hurting those who already have jobs. The net result is always that the overall social welfare is larger, but it's more complicated than that. I'm not a supporter of the abolishment of minimum wage anyways, but I think it is a little on the high side at the moment. And as I said before, I don't think you should be able to raise a family on minimum wage. If you think you should be able to raise children as well as provide for yourself while affording food, housing, transportation, clothing, etc. for your children on a single job wages by doing something that requires almost no critical thinking and can easily be replaced doing, I think you're crazy. On September 27 2011 07:59 Bibdy wrote:
No, we're trying to solve the problem of everyone facing debt as a result of the burst by offering a combination of
A) continued low taxes for the wealthy, to incentivize creating jobs here and
B) low interest rates for investors to borrow the money they need to open the businesses they want to open
C) low interest rates for 'common folk' to reduce the burden of their existing bills by lowering their costs each payment, and to borrow what they need to keep going
All of this is predicated on the assumption that the country isn't going to go spiraling out of control and sink into the depths of R'lyeh any time soon.
It's ONLY a bad time to invest if you're sure the country is going to go into a second recession. The mere MENTION of a double-dip recession has been enough to spook these people out of investing and, as previously mentioned, it's now become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is what I mean; the ENTIRE system operates on faith. And the only things that can control the herd-like decisions of the wealthy, is other wealthy people and government incentive. When a few of them catch wind that maybe, JUST MAYBE, the US could go through a second recession, everyone turtles up and awaits the coming storm until its safe to come out - a storm caused by the turtling up.
What in the nine hells did Clinton, or his administration, have to do with banking institutions picking up, repackaging and trading bad loans and mortgages? It was a completely new and unprecedented piece of financial magic. Not even the next 8 years of the next administration saw it coming when they foolishly kept low taxes rates through the boom of 2002-2007 (they should have been risen to pay back some of the existing national debt we used to SPUR that boom in the first place - the other half of Keynesian economics that gets routinely ignored by administrations on both sides).
You can't blame any administration for that. If anything, the one lesson to learn, that should be abundantly clear, is that completely unregulated business practices like that are HORRIFICALLY dangerous for everyone. The less regulated the market gets, the more volatile it gets. I don't know how that couldn't be more obvious following that financial crisis. I'm just as confused as to why someone would continue to think that the free market is infallible following that. I really dislike how people say "low taxes for the wealthy." I mean, they aren't low taxes for the wealthy, they're actually substantially (imo) higher than that of the rest. You can speak relatively, but once again I think it's a terrible argument to point to other countries in comparison. Rather, you should be saying a) Keeping tax rates only marginally (as I'd presume you'd put it) higher than the poor for your first point. I know you said "low" and not "lower" but it's very much so implied by a lot of people that rich people pay less, whether it be an absolute value or percentage, when it's clearly not the case. They most certainly are low taxes for the wealthy. While the exact precise amount they pay is a good deal higher than the poor, the relative amount they pay is quite a bit lower, especially considering the absurd amounts of wealth they have. They can easily afford to pay a much MUCH bigger share than they currently do without even having a noticeable impact on their lifestyle, but that fact seems to escape people. They'd still be extremely wealthy, I'm not advocating communism here. Should wealth one already possesses be related to their income tax, though? If someone has 1billion dollars, and made $50,000 in income last year, they should be paying in that tax bracket, irrelevant of their 1 billion. I don't see how they pay a relatively lower amount, whatsoever. They pay a relatively higher amount of their income for income taxes? I'm not sure where you define "absurdly wealthy" either. Someone making say $400,000 per year, while definitely now falling into upper class, having a stayhome wife and say four kids, is still going to have a mortgage, and most likely won't be able to afford driving a Ferrari or some shit. Sure, those that are EXTREMELY wealthy, like those making say $3 million+ per year, might not take as much of a hit, but then they're also paying in over a million dollars in taxes of that three million (well, at least in CA, accounting for state income taxes). I don't know how you don't think that's a huge amount, when it's a third of their income. It's not like they didn't earn that income. I'd say almost everyone making a $100,000 salary is working significantly harder than those making minimum wage. At that point, your decisions matter, jobs are in your hands, profits of the company are highly relevant to your personal choices (exception of huge corps), significantly more stress involved in terms of decision making, far higher prerequisites and investment to obtain said job in the first place, etc. On September 27 2011 09:10 jbee wrote:
@kiarip The pizza boy is gambling his job/career while the pizza parlor is gambling lost revenue (which could be entirely made-up by having somebody else cover for him). If you don't see the imbalance in that then I have nothing more to say.
@fabled I don't think they should or shouldn't, as I am morally nihilistic. People want different things out of the government which means it is like arguing about taste ( hence why I hate politics). I only asked about this because I couldn't think of any reason somebody would support this, unless they owned a business. What i said was as example of if it was removed. If it was removed, pay wouldn't go to a dollar an hour, but it gives the ability for your employer to undercut you. This ability decreases the stability in the Poors' income which is why I can't see it as good for the poor either. Without government protection you're also far more likely to be a more productive worker for fear of losing your job. If you're valuable to the company, said company will be far less likely to attempt to undercut you because they value your labor. Of course, generalizing sweeps across the board may effect you if you're a small person in a massive company, but isn't it that company's choice on how it wants to run itself? That's the theory at least, I personally agree with you that job stability is decently more important, as even amazing work ethic won't always save you from individually getting screwed. I was careful to mention that I meant the top 2% of the wealth bracket qualifies as 'super rich'. I also think something needs to be done about the tax system in general, I don't believe income taxes in and of them themselves are sufficient, simply by design. Long term capital gains, for example, are taxed too low. The current system has the wealth accumulated all at the top: almost all of it, and more of it keeps going up there, rather than being spread out. The distribution of wealth is INCREDIBLY uneven. While I'm not suggesting we attempt to make it perfectly distributed so that everyone has a fair share of wealth relative to their actual income, the system should not have half of the entire country with a net total of one fiftieth of the total wealth.
Oops, I must have missed your 2% quotation, I didn't go back and read your posts, but I've only been glancing over things at this point so I'm sure you're right. Regardless, even if you say taxes on the rich are low, they are still higher in both absolute and relative numbers to the poor. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal
Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2%." Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That's about 7% of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 -- paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.
Note that federal income taxes are already "progressive" with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He'd also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won't come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need.
I don't understand the sentiment whatsoever that "the rich aren't paying their fair share." They're paying almost the entire share, and relying on them soley isn't feasible anyways. As the article continues
But let's not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let's go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable "dime" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.
And these numbers don't even mention the fact that a ton of that money paid in by the rich is being directly given back to the poor as handouts. I think the answer comes with needing to cut spending, heavily. Preferably starting with the military.
On September 27 2011 09:28 Whitewing wrote:
Current unemployment rates have less to do with cost of employment than it does with demand for production btw. People aren't hiring because there isn't enough demand for their products, so there's no reason to hire to increase production.
Make employment cheaper --> product comes out cheaper --> demand increases because people can now afford product with their lower amount of money in their possession. Not to mention jobs relocating to the U.S. means money is staying here, etc.
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On September 27 2011 09:32 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +On September 27 2011 09:23 Kiarip wrote:On September 27 2011 09:10 jbee wrote:
@kiarip The pizza boy is gambling his job/career while the pizza parlor is gambling lost revenue (which could be entirely made-up by having somebody else cover for him). If you don't see the imbalance in that then I have nothing more to say.
actually business especially small ones are taking way huger gambles, because a lot of them may still be paying off debt, and etc. if you're a pizza boy it's not like getting fired/quitting abruptly will create this huge problem when you apply for antoher similar resume, but defaulting on your business loans will when you go to apply for another loan if you want to start another business. You're ignoring the cost of unemployment. Cost of unemployment can be extremely high, and in general, companies like having a high unemployment rate in general. It makes cost of unemployment higher, which means that they can make unreasonable demands of their employees, since fear of being fired is huge. When cost of unemployment is high, it is a big deal to lose your job. There are a lot of people out there who can't find work at all, and would accept an $8 an hour job despite it not being enough to support themselves with, simply because it's better than nothing. We don't have enough jobs that pay well, and we don't have enough minimum wage jobs either. Current unemployment rates have less to do with cost of employment than it does with demand for production btw. People aren't hiring because there isn't enough demand for their products, so there's no reason to hire to increase production.
well if the minimum wage was removed then there'd be less unemployment in the first place. in the end i don't think you can make an argument that less money would be paid to all the employees in total then it is now... on average it will obviously drop, but i think in total it will rise and it will increase the productivity of businesses taht hire at minimum wage now which will possibly allow for further increases, and employees will get some bargaining power back with the decreased unemployment rates.
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United States7483 Posts
On September 27 2011 09:37 FabledIntegral wrote:Show nested quote +On September 27 2011 09:28 Whitewing wrote:On September 27 2011 09:17 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 09:06 Whitewing wrote:On September 27 2011 08:16 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 07:44 jbee wrote:
I hate politics, but isn't Ron Paul the guy that wants to remove ( not lower but remove) minimum wage? Usually I suspend layman's judgement, but how the hell does that benefit the poor? Economically speaking it heavily benefits the poor... overall. By reducing unemployment. Many companies can't afford to employ very many people in the U.S. due to minimum wage, and thus will move jobs abroad. An abolished minimum wage would almost assuredly create a TON of jobs in the U.S., significantly helping those who are unemployed, while simultaneously hurting those who already have jobs. The net result is always that the overall social welfare is larger, but it's more complicated than that. I'm not a supporter of the abolishment of minimum wage anyways, but I think it is a little on the high side at the moment. And as I said before, I don't think you should be able to raise a family on minimum wage. If you think you should be able to raise children as well as provide for yourself while affording food, housing, transportation, clothing, etc. for your children on a single job wages by doing something that requires almost no critical thinking and can easily be replaced doing, I think you're crazy. On September 27 2011 07:59 Bibdy wrote:
No, we're trying to solve the problem of everyone facing debt as a result of the burst by offering a combination of
A) continued low taxes for the wealthy, to incentivize creating jobs here and
B) low interest rates for investors to borrow the money they need to open the businesses they want to open
C) low interest rates for 'common folk' to reduce the burden of their existing bills by lowering their costs each payment, and to borrow what they need to keep going
All of this is predicated on the assumption that the country isn't going to go spiraling out of control and sink into the depths of R'lyeh any time soon.
It's ONLY a bad time to invest if you're sure the country is going to go into a second recession. The mere MENTION of a double-dip recession has been enough to spook these people out of investing and, as previously mentioned, it's now become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is what I mean; the ENTIRE system operates on faith. And the only things that can control the herd-like decisions of the wealthy, is other wealthy people and government incentive. When a few of them catch wind that maybe, JUST MAYBE, the US could go through a second recession, everyone turtles up and awaits the coming storm until its safe to come out - a storm caused by the turtling up.
What in the nine hells did Clinton, or his administration, have to do with banking institutions picking up, repackaging and trading bad loans and mortgages? It was a completely new and unprecedented piece of financial magic. Not even the next 8 years of the next administration saw it coming when they foolishly kept low taxes rates through the boom of 2002-2007 (they should have been risen to pay back some of the existing national debt we used to SPUR that boom in the first place - the other half of Keynesian economics that gets routinely ignored by administrations on both sides).
You can't blame any administration for that. If anything, the one lesson to learn, that should be abundantly clear, is that completely unregulated business practices like that are HORRIFICALLY dangerous for everyone. The less regulated the market gets, the more volatile it gets. I don't know how that couldn't be more obvious following that financial crisis. I'm just as confused as to why someone would continue to think that the free market is infallible following that. I really dislike how people say "low taxes for the wealthy." I mean, they aren't low taxes for the wealthy, they're actually substantially (imo) higher than that of the rest. You can speak relatively, but once again I think it's a terrible argument to point to other countries in comparison. Rather, you should be saying a) Keeping tax rates only marginally (as I'd presume you'd put it) higher than the poor for your first point. I know you said "low" and not "lower" but it's very much so implied by a lot of people that rich people pay less, whether it be an absolute value or percentage, when it's clearly not the case. They most certainly are low taxes for the wealthy. While the exact precise amount they pay is a good deal higher than the poor, the relative amount they pay is quite a bit lower, especially considering the absurd amounts of wealth they have. They can easily afford to pay a much MUCH bigger share than they currently do without even having a noticeable impact on their lifestyle, but that fact seems to escape people. They'd still be extremely wealthy, I'm not advocating communism here. Should wealth one already possesses be related to their income tax, though? If someone has 1billion dollars, and made $50,000 in income last year, they should be paying in that tax bracket, irrelevant of their 1 billion. I don't see how they pay a relatively lower amount, whatsoever. They pay a relatively higher amount of their income for income taxes? I'm not sure where you define "absurdly wealthy" either. Someone making say $400,000 per year, while definitely now falling into upper class, having a stayhome wife and say four kids, is still going to have a mortgage, and most likely won't be able to afford driving a Ferrari or some shit. Sure, those that are EXTREMELY wealthy, like those making say $3 million+ per year, might not take as much of a hit, but then they're also paying in over a million dollars in taxes of that three million (well, at least in CA, accounting for state income taxes). I don't know how you don't think that's a huge amount, when it's a third of their income. It's not like they didn't earn that income. I'd say almost everyone making a $100,000 salary is working significantly harder than those making minimum wage. At that point, your decisions matter, jobs are in your hands, profits of the company are highly relevant to your personal choices (exception of huge corps), significantly more stress involved in terms of decision making, far higher prerequisites and investment to obtain said job in the first place, etc. On September 27 2011 09:10 jbee wrote:
@kiarip The pizza boy is gambling his job/career while the pizza parlor is gambling lost revenue (which could be entirely made-up by having somebody else cover for him). If you don't see the imbalance in that then I have nothing more to say.
@fabled I don't think they should or shouldn't, as I am morally nihilistic. People want different things out of the government which means it is like arguing about taste ( hence why I hate politics). I only asked about this because I couldn't think of any reason somebody would support this, unless they owned a business. What i said was as example of if it was removed. If it was removed, pay wouldn't go to a dollar an hour, but it gives the ability for your employer to undercut you. This ability decreases the stability in the Poors' income which is why I can't see it as good for the poor either. Without government protection you're also far more likely to be a more productive worker for fear of losing your job. If you're valuable to the company, said company will be far less likely to attempt to undercut you because they value your labor. Of course, generalizing sweeps across the board may effect you if you're a small person in a massive company, but isn't it that company's choice on how it wants to run itself? That's the theory at least, I personally agree with you that job stability is decently more important, as even amazing work ethic won't always save you from individually getting screwed. I was careful to mention that I meant the top 2% of the wealth bracket qualifies as 'super rich'. I also think something needs to be done about the tax system in general, I don't believe income taxes in and of them themselves are sufficient, simply by design. Long term capital gains, for example, are taxed too low. The current system has the wealth accumulated all at the top: almost all of it, and more of it keeps going up there, rather than being spread out. The distribution of wealth is INCREDIBLY uneven. While I'm not suggesting we attempt to make it perfectly distributed so that everyone has a fair share of wealth relative to their actual income, the system should not have half of the entire country with a net total of one fiftieth of the total wealth. Oops, I must have missed your 2% quotation, I didn't go back and read your posts, but I've only been glancing over things at this point so I'm sure you're right. Regardless, even if you say taxes on the rich are low, they are still higher in both absolute and relative numbers to the poor. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal Show nested quote +Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2%." Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That's about 7% of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 -- paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.
Note that federal income taxes are already "progressive" with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He'd also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won't come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need. I don't understand the sentiment whatsoever that "the rich aren't paying their fair share." They're paying almost the entire share, and relying on them soley isn't feasible anyways. As the article continues Show nested quote +But let's not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let's go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable "dime" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion. And these numbers don't even mention the fact that a ton of that money paid in by the rich is being directly given back to the poor as handouts. I think the answer comes with needing to cut spending, heavily. Preferably starting with the military. Show nested quote +On September 27 2011 09:28 Whitewing wrote:
Current unemployment rates have less to do with cost of employment than it does with demand for production btw. People aren't hiring because there isn't enough demand for their products, so there's no reason to hire to increase production. Make employment cheaper --> product comes out cheaper --> demand increases because people can now afford product with their lower amount of money in their possession. Not to mention jobs relocating to the U.S. means money is staying here, etc.
Making employment cheaper by lowering wages means people don't have money to buy even cheaper products. If you can lower the cost of employment in some way other than lowering wages, then by all means.
If I have $100 to pay my employees, and they each get paid $10, I can hire 10 employees. If I reduce their pay to $5, then I can hire $20 employees, but I'm still only paying a net of $100. Production may go up, a bit, although labor saturation is an issue. But an increase in production is irrelevant if the consumers don't have the money to purchase the products, thus giving me no incentive to hire additional workers. Instead, I'll just lower their wages and keep $50 for myself, increasing my profits the easy way.
well if the minimum wage was removed then there'd be less unemployment in the first place. in the end i don't think you can make an argument that less money would be paid to all the employees in total then it is now... on average it will obviously drop, but i think in total it will rise and it will increase the productivity of businesses taht hire at minimum wage now which will possibly allow for further increases, and employees will get some bargaining power back with the decreased unemployment rates.
Yes, there would be less unemployment, but I'm not sure how much less. By removing minimum wage, you provide the ability to lower wages, but without an incentive to actually hire (demand for production), hiring won't occur. The additional jobs that would be created would be very low paying jobs, and the net amount of money being paid out would not increase, so the result is that people who do have jobs get paid less, and some people who didn't have jobs get some very low paying jobs. I don't think that fixes anything. I should also point out that most employers don't usually give significant raises out to the low earners. If anything, they might get a raise of 50 cents after a year.
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On September 27 2011 09:56 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +On September 27 2011 09:37 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 09:28 Whitewing wrote:On September 27 2011 09:17 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 09:06 Whitewing wrote:On September 27 2011 08:16 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 07:44 jbee wrote:
I hate politics, but isn't Ron Paul the guy that wants to remove ( not lower but remove) minimum wage? Usually I suspend layman's judgement, but how the hell does that benefit the poor? Economically speaking it heavily benefits the poor... overall. By reducing unemployment. Many companies can't afford to employ very many people in the U.S. due to minimum wage, and thus will move jobs abroad. An abolished minimum wage would almost assuredly create a TON of jobs in the U.S., significantly helping those who are unemployed, while simultaneously hurting those who already have jobs. The net result is always that the overall social welfare is larger, but it's more complicated than that. I'm not a supporter of the abolishment of minimum wage anyways, but I think it is a little on the high side at the moment. And as I said before, I don't think you should be able to raise a family on minimum wage. If you think you should be able to raise children as well as provide for yourself while affording food, housing, transportation, clothing, etc. for your children on a single job wages by doing something that requires almost no critical thinking and can easily be replaced doing, I think you're crazy. On September 27 2011 07:59 Bibdy wrote:
No, we're trying to solve the problem of everyone facing debt as a result of the burst by offering a combination of
A) continued low taxes for the wealthy, to incentivize creating jobs here and
B) low interest rates for investors to borrow the money they need to open the businesses they want to open
C) low interest rates for 'common folk' to reduce the burden of their existing bills by lowering their costs each payment, and to borrow what they need to keep going
All of this is predicated on the assumption that the country isn't going to go spiraling out of control and sink into the depths of R'lyeh any time soon.
It's ONLY a bad time to invest if you're sure the country is going to go into a second recession. The mere MENTION of a double-dip recession has been enough to spook these people out of investing and, as previously mentioned, it's now become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is what I mean; the ENTIRE system operates on faith. And the only things that can control the herd-like decisions of the wealthy, is other wealthy people and government incentive. When a few of them catch wind that maybe, JUST MAYBE, the US could go through a second recession, everyone turtles up and awaits the coming storm until its safe to come out - a storm caused by the turtling up.
What in the nine hells did Clinton, or his administration, have to do with banking institutions picking up, repackaging and trading bad loans and mortgages? It was a completely new and unprecedented piece of financial magic. Not even the next 8 years of the next administration saw it coming when they foolishly kept low taxes rates through the boom of 2002-2007 (they should have been risen to pay back some of the existing national debt we used to SPUR that boom in the first place - the other half of Keynesian economics that gets routinely ignored by administrations on both sides).
You can't blame any administration for that. If anything, the one lesson to learn, that should be abundantly clear, is that completely unregulated business practices like that are HORRIFICALLY dangerous for everyone. The less regulated the market gets, the more volatile it gets. I don't know how that couldn't be more obvious following that financial crisis. I'm just as confused as to why someone would continue to think that the free market is infallible following that. I really dislike how people say "low taxes for the wealthy." I mean, they aren't low taxes for the wealthy, they're actually substantially (imo) higher than that of the rest. You can speak relatively, but once again I think it's a terrible argument to point to other countries in comparison. Rather, you should be saying a) Keeping tax rates only marginally (as I'd presume you'd put it) higher than the poor for your first point. I know you said "low" and not "lower" but it's very much so implied by a lot of people that rich people pay less, whether it be an absolute value or percentage, when it's clearly not the case. They most certainly are low taxes for the wealthy. While the exact precise amount they pay is a good deal higher than the poor, the relative amount they pay is quite a bit lower, especially considering the absurd amounts of wealth they have. They can easily afford to pay a much MUCH bigger share than they currently do without even having a noticeable impact on their lifestyle, but that fact seems to escape people. They'd still be extremely wealthy, I'm not advocating communism here. Should wealth one already possesses be related to their income tax, though? If someone has 1billion dollars, and made $50,000 in income last year, they should be paying in that tax bracket, irrelevant of their 1 billion. I don't see how they pay a relatively lower amount, whatsoever. They pay a relatively higher amount of their income for income taxes? I'm not sure where you define "absurdly wealthy" either. Someone making say $400,000 per year, while definitely now falling into upper class, having a stayhome wife and say four kids, is still going to have a mortgage, and most likely won't be able to afford driving a Ferrari or some shit. Sure, those that are EXTREMELY wealthy, like those making say $3 million+ per year, might not take as much of a hit, but then they're also paying in over a million dollars in taxes of that three million (well, at least in CA, accounting for state income taxes). I don't know how you don't think that's a huge amount, when it's a third of their income. It's not like they didn't earn that income. I'd say almost everyone making a $100,000 salary is working significantly harder than those making minimum wage. At that point, your decisions matter, jobs are in your hands, profits of the company are highly relevant to your personal choices (exception of huge corps), significantly more stress involved in terms of decision making, far higher prerequisites and investment to obtain said job in the first place, etc. On September 27 2011 09:10 jbee wrote:
@kiarip The pizza boy is gambling his job/career while the pizza parlor is gambling lost revenue (which could be entirely made-up by having somebody else cover for him). If you don't see the imbalance in that then I have nothing more to say.
@fabled I don't think they should or shouldn't, as I am morally nihilistic. People want different things out of the government which means it is like arguing about taste ( hence why I hate politics). I only asked about this because I couldn't think of any reason somebody would support this, unless they owned a business. What i said was as example of if it was removed. If it was removed, pay wouldn't go to a dollar an hour, but it gives the ability for your employer to undercut you. This ability decreases the stability in the Poors' income which is why I can't see it as good for the poor either. Without government protection you're also far more likely to be a more productive worker for fear of losing your job. If you're valuable to the company, said company will be far less likely to attempt to undercut you because they value your labor. Of course, generalizing sweeps across the board may effect you if you're a small person in a massive company, but isn't it that company's choice on how it wants to run itself? That's the theory at least, I personally agree with you that job stability is decently more important, as even amazing work ethic won't always save you from individually getting screwed. I was careful to mention that I meant the top 2% of the wealth bracket qualifies as 'super rich'. I also think something needs to be done about the tax system in general, I don't believe income taxes in and of them themselves are sufficient, simply by design. Long term capital gains, for example, are taxed too low. The current system has the wealth accumulated all at the top: almost all of it, and more of it keeps going up there, rather than being spread out. The distribution of wealth is INCREDIBLY uneven. While I'm not suggesting we attempt to make it perfectly distributed so that everyone has a fair share of wealth relative to their actual income, the system should not have half of the entire country with a net total of one fiftieth of the total wealth. Oops, I must have missed your 2% quotation, I didn't go back and read your posts, but I've only been glancing over things at this point so I'm sure you're right. Regardless, even if you say taxes on the rich are low, they are still higher in both absolute and relative numbers to the poor. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2%." Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That's about 7% of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 -- paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.
Note that federal income taxes are already "progressive" with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He'd also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won't come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need. I don't understand the sentiment whatsoever that "the rich aren't paying their fair share." They're paying almost the entire share, and relying on them soley isn't feasible anyways. As the article continues But let's not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let's go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable "dime" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion. And these numbers don't even mention the fact that a ton of that money paid in by the rich is being directly given back to the poor as handouts. I think the answer comes with needing to cut spending, heavily. Preferably starting with the military. On September 27 2011 09:28 Whitewing wrote:
Current unemployment rates have less to do with cost of employment than it does with demand for production btw. People aren't hiring because there isn't enough demand for their products, so there's no reason to hire to increase production. Make employment cheaper --> product comes out cheaper --> demand increases because people can now afford product with their lower amount of money in their possession. Not to mention jobs relocating to the U.S. means money is staying here, etc. Making employment cheaper by lowering wages means people don't have money to buy even cheaper products. If you can lower the cost of employment in some way other than lowering wages, then by all means.
yes... you can lower the liability...
but also, more money will get paid out some more products will get bought... yes, they will be more essential type of products, but in general the total income of hte population will rise, because businesses will hire more, and the increased productivity will only lead to more growth.
Yes, there would be less unemployment, but I'm not sure how much less. By removing minimum wage, you provide the ability to lower wages, but without an incentive to actually hire (demand for production), hiring won't occur. The additional jobs that would be created would be very low paying jobs, and the net amount of money being paid out would not increase, so the result is that people who do have jobs get paid less, and some people who didn't have jobs get some very low paying jobs. I don't think that fixes anything. I should also point out that most employers don't usually give significant raises out to the low earners. If anything, they might get a raise of 50 cents after a year
there will be hiring, because if you're paying the workers less, but hire more workers you're more productive, and you can sell more goods while still making same or bigger profit by lowerin cost, then if you make more profit, you can hire even more workers, and be even more productive, driving the prices even lower, and thus making the goods available to even more people...
if the goods are essential, then you will constantly have an increasing demand as you lower the cost, because like you said there's so many people that are already unemployed/employed at very low wages, that their consumption would probably definitely increase if given the chance by lower prices.
edit:
it's kind of like the idea behind the stimulus, except the difference here being that there will be incentive to decrease prices of products (because of increased productivity,) as opposed to keep the prices of products the same or even inflate them higher, because people magically got a little more money.
edit 2:
here's another idea that can make you think about it.
think about all the people that are unemployed. let's say they can all use more food.
if you distribute those people to work on farms (wheat) -> (mills) -> ( bakeries) they could definitely make enough food for all of them to eat, and more (which will drive down the prices of food,) however right now you can't do that because the minimum wages don't let you.
there's all these people that could technically be fed given a certain amount of agriculture-friendly land (obviously there's an assumption here that this land is somewhere available,) but they won't work for free (obviously, because they'd still want money with which to buy the food,) and their work isn't going to be worth minimum wages at market-place value... but if you could pay them less, then they could create a hell of a lot of food.
it's like 15% of our total workforce we're talking about... if it was possible to employ simply in agriculture they would be able to feed themselves, and a huge portion of the country.
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On September 27 2011 09:56 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +On September 27 2011 09:37 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 09:28 Whitewing wrote:On September 27 2011 09:17 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 09:06 Whitewing wrote:On September 27 2011 08:16 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 07:44 jbee wrote:
I hate politics, but isn't Ron Paul the guy that wants to remove ( not lower but remove) minimum wage? Usually I suspend layman's judgement, but how the hell does that benefit the poor? Economically speaking it heavily benefits the poor... overall. By reducing unemployment. Many companies can't afford to employ very many people in the U.S. due to minimum wage, and thus will move jobs abroad. An abolished minimum wage would almost assuredly create a TON of jobs in the U.S., significantly helping those who are unemployed, while simultaneously hurting those who already have jobs. The net result is always that the overall social welfare is larger, but it's more complicated than that. I'm not a supporter of the abolishment of minimum wage anyways, but I think it is a little on the high side at the moment. And as I said before, I don't think you should be able to raise a family on minimum wage. If you think you should be able to raise children as well as provide for yourself while affording food, housing, transportation, clothing, etc. for your children on a single job wages by doing something that requires almost no critical thinking and can easily be replaced doing, I think you're crazy. On September 27 2011 07:59 Bibdy wrote:
No, we're trying to solve the problem of everyone facing debt as a result of the burst by offering a combination of
A) continued low taxes for the wealthy, to incentivize creating jobs here and
B) low interest rates for investors to borrow the money they need to open the businesses they want to open
C) low interest rates for 'common folk' to reduce the burden of their existing bills by lowering their costs each payment, and to borrow what they need to keep going
All of this is predicated on the assumption that the country isn't going to go spiraling out of control and sink into the depths of R'lyeh any time soon.
It's ONLY a bad time to invest if you're sure the country is going to go into a second recession. The mere MENTION of a double-dip recession has been enough to spook these people out of investing and, as previously mentioned, it's now become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is what I mean; the ENTIRE system operates on faith. And the only things that can control the herd-like decisions of the wealthy, is other wealthy people and government incentive. When a few of them catch wind that maybe, JUST MAYBE, the US could go through a second recession, everyone turtles up and awaits the coming storm until its safe to come out - a storm caused by the turtling up.
What in the nine hells did Clinton, or his administration, have to do with banking institutions picking up, repackaging and trading bad loans and mortgages? It was a completely new and unprecedented piece of financial magic. Not even the next 8 years of the next administration saw it coming when they foolishly kept low taxes rates through the boom of 2002-2007 (they should have been risen to pay back some of the existing national debt we used to SPUR that boom in the first place - the other half of Keynesian economics that gets routinely ignored by administrations on both sides).
You can't blame any administration for that. If anything, the one lesson to learn, that should be abundantly clear, is that completely unregulated business practices like that are HORRIFICALLY dangerous for everyone. The less regulated the market gets, the more volatile it gets. I don't know how that couldn't be more obvious following that financial crisis. I'm just as confused as to why someone would continue to think that the free market is infallible following that. I really dislike how people say "low taxes for the wealthy." I mean, they aren't low taxes for the wealthy, they're actually substantially (imo) higher than that of the rest. You can speak relatively, but once again I think it's a terrible argument to point to other countries in comparison. Rather, you should be saying a) Keeping tax rates only marginally (as I'd presume you'd put it) higher than the poor for your first point. I know you said "low" and not "lower" but it's very much so implied by a lot of people that rich people pay less, whether it be an absolute value or percentage, when it's clearly not the case. They most certainly are low taxes for the wealthy. While the exact precise amount they pay is a good deal higher than the poor, the relative amount they pay is quite a bit lower, especially considering the absurd amounts of wealth they have. They can easily afford to pay a much MUCH bigger share than they currently do without even having a noticeable impact on their lifestyle, but that fact seems to escape people. They'd still be extremely wealthy, I'm not advocating communism here. Should wealth one already possesses be related to their income tax, though? If someone has 1billion dollars, and made $50,000 in income last year, they should be paying in that tax bracket, irrelevant of their 1 billion. I don't see how they pay a relatively lower amount, whatsoever. They pay a relatively higher amount of their income for income taxes? I'm not sure where you define "absurdly wealthy" either. Someone making say $400,000 per year, while definitely now falling into upper class, having a stayhome wife and say four kids, is still going to have a mortgage, and most likely won't be able to afford driving a Ferrari or some shit. Sure, those that are EXTREMELY wealthy, like those making say $3 million+ per year, might not take as much of a hit, but then they're also paying in over a million dollars in taxes of that three million (well, at least in CA, accounting for state income taxes). I don't know how you don't think that's a huge amount, when it's a third of their income. It's not like they didn't earn that income. I'd say almost everyone making a $100,000 salary is working significantly harder than those making minimum wage. At that point, your decisions matter, jobs are in your hands, profits of the company are highly relevant to your personal choices (exception of huge corps), significantly more stress involved in terms of decision making, far higher prerequisites and investment to obtain said job in the first place, etc. On September 27 2011 09:10 jbee wrote:
@kiarip The pizza boy is gambling his job/career while the pizza parlor is gambling lost revenue (which could be entirely made-up by having somebody else cover for him). If you don't see the imbalance in that then I have nothing more to say.
@fabled I don't think they should or shouldn't, as I am morally nihilistic. People want different things out of the government which means it is like arguing about taste ( hence why I hate politics). I only asked about this because I couldn't think of any reason somebody would support this, unless they owned a business. What i said was as example of if it was removed. If it was removed, pay wouldn't go to a dollar an hour, but it gives the ability for your employer to undercut you. This ability decreases the stability in the Poors' income which is why I can't see it as good for the poor either. Without government protection you're also far more likely to be a more productive worker for fear of losing your job. If you're valuable to the company, said company will be far less likely to attempt to undercut you because they value your labor. Of course, generalizing sweeps across the board may effect you if you're a small person in a massive company, but isn't it that company's choice on how it wants to run itself? That's the theory at least, I personally agree with you that job stability is decently more important, as even amazing work ethic won't always save you from individually getting screwed. I was careful to mention that I meant the top 2% of the wealth bracket qualifies as 'super rich'. I also think something needs to be done about the tax system in general, I don't believe income taxes in and of them themselves are sufficient, simply by design. Long term capital gains, for example, are taxed too low. The current system has the wealth accumulated all at the top: almost all of it, and more of it keeps going up there, rather than being spread out. The distribution of wealth is INCREDIBLY uneven. While I'm not suggesting we attempt to make it perfectly distributed so that everyone has a fair share of wealth relative to their actual income, the system should not have half of the entire country with a net total of one fiftieth of the total wealth. Oops, I must have missed your 2% quotation, I didn't go back and read your posts, but I've only been glancing over things at this point so I'm sure you're right. Regardless, even if you say taxes on the rich are low, they are still higher in both absolute and relative numbers to the poor. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2%." Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That's about 7% of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 -- paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.
Note that federal income taxes are already "progressive" with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He'd also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won't come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need. I don't understand the sentiment whatsoever that "the rich aren't paying their fair share." They're paying almost the entire share, and relying on them soley isn't feasible anyways. As the article continues But let's not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let's go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable "dime" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion. And these numbers don't even mention the fact that a ton of that money paid in by the rich is being directly given back to the poor as handouts. I think the answer comes with needing to cut spending, heavily. Preferably starting with the military. On September 27 2011 09:28 Whitewing wrote:
Current unemployment rates have less to do with cost of employment than it does with demand for production btw. People aren't hiring because there isn't enough demand for their products, so there's no reason to hire to increase production. Make employment cheaper --> product comes out cheaper --> demand increases because people can now afford product with their lower amount of money in their possession. Not to mention jobs relocating to the U.S. means money is staying here, etc. Making employment cheaper by lowering wages means people don't have money to buy even cheaper products. If you can lower the cost of employment in some way other than lowering wages, then by all means. If I have $100 to pay my employees, and they each get paid $10, I can hire 10 employees. If I reduce their pay to $5, then I can hire $20 employees, but I'm still only paying a net of $100. Production may go up, a bit, although labor saturation is an issue. But an increase in production is irrelevant if the consumers don't have the money to purchase the products, thus giving me no incentive to hire additional workers. Instead, I'll just lower their wages and keep $50 for myself, increasing my profits the easy way.
But that's not how it works at all in economics. First of all, it's going to be more beneficial for 20 people to have $5 than 10 people to have $10. I'm not arguing that having a good distribution of wealth is bad, it's definitely good, it's just the means to achieve it is questionable. In this scenario, it happens through private contracts between people = good. However, the more likely scenario is your second scenario, where you keep the 10 people and pay them half as much (or maybe you hire 1-2 more people, but for simplicity sake we'll keep it even). You can't simply lower wages and keep $50 for yourself, everything about the free market screams that won't happen. Because what will happen is that your competitor will lower his prices due to decreasing costs while you keep yours similar, meaning you'll lose out completely to your competitor in terms of business. So you HAVE to lower your prices, it's utterly ridiculous to assume you could profit off that $50 difference.
And as prices have now dropped, it benefits every other consumer that ISN'T an employee by dropping their costs, which is an easy net positive for society.
Not to mention that the scenario is more likely that the company had 10 employees in the U.S., and 50 abroad, and due to the changes in employment it now fires 20 people in Thailand and hires 20 people here, thus employing 30 people in the U.S. that are all making $5 an hour, meaning there's now $150 in the hands of consumers rather than $100, another positive gain.
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United States7483 Posts
On September 27 2011 10:03 Kiarip wrote:Show nested quote +On September 27 2011 09:56 Whitewing wrote:On September 27 2011 09:37 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 09:28 Whitewing wrote:On September 27 2011 09:17 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 09:06 Whitewing wrote:On September 27 2011 08:16 FabledIntegral wrote:On September 27 2011 07:44 jbee wrote:
I hate politics, but isn't Ron Paul the guy that wants to remove ( not lower but remove) minimum wage? Usually I suspend layman's judgement, but how the hell does that benefit the poor? Economically speaking it heavily benefits the poor... overall. By reducing unemployment. Many companies can't afford to employ very many people in the U.S. due to minimum wage, and thus will move jobs abroad. An abolished minimum wage would almost assuredly create a TON of jobs in the U.S., significantly helping those who are unemployed, while simultaneously hurting those who already have jobs. The net result is always that the overall social welfare is larger, but it's more complicated than that. I'm not a supporter of the abolishment of minimum wage anyways, but I think it is a little on the high side at the moment. And as I said before, I don't think you should be able to raise a family on minimum wage. If you think you should be able to raise children as well as provide for yourself while affording food, housing, transportation, clothing, etc. for your children on a single job wages by doing something that requires almost no critical thinking and can easily be replaced doing, I think you're crazy. On September 27 2011 07:59 Bibdy wrote:
No, we're trying to solve the problem of everyone facing debt as a result of the burst by offering a combination of
A) continued low taxes for the wealthy, to incentivize creating jobs here and
B) low interest rates for investors to borrow the money they need to open the businesses they want to open
C) low interest rates for 'common folk' to reduce the burden of their existing bills by lowering their costs each payment, and to borrow what they need to keep going
All of this is predicated on the assumption that the country isn't going to go spiraling out of control and sink into the depths of R'lyeh any time soon.
It's ONLY a bad time to invest if you're sure the country is going to go into a second recession. The mere MENTION of a double-dip recession has been enough to spook these people out of investing and, as previously mentioned, it's now become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is what I mean; the ENTIRE system operates on faith. And the only things that can control the herd-like decisions of the wealthy, is other wealthy people and government incentive. When a few of them catch wind that maybe, JUST MAYBE, the US could go through a second recession, everyone turtles up and awaits the coming storm until its safe to come out - a storm caused by the turtling up.
What in the nine hells did Clinton, or his administration, have to do with banking institutions picking up, repackaging and trading bad loans and mortgages? It was a completely new and unprecedented piece of financial magic. Not even the next 8 years of the next administration saw it coming when they foolishly kept low taxes rates through the boom of 2002-2007 (they should have been risen to pay back some of the existing national debt we used to SPUR that boom in the first place - the other half of Keynesian economics that gets routinely ignored by administrations on both sides).
You can't blame any administration for that. If anything, the one lesson to learn, that should be abundantly clear, is that completely unregulated business practices like that are HORRIFICALLY dangerous for everyone. The less regulated the market gets, the more volatile it gets. I don't know how that couldn't be more obvious following that financial crisis. I'm just as confused as to why someone would continue to think that the free market is infallible following that. I really dislike how people say "low taxes for the wealthy." I mean, they aren't low taxes for the wealthy, they're actually substantially (imo) higher than that of the rest. You can speak relatively, but once again I think it's a terrible argument to point to other countries in comparison. Rather, you should be saying a) Keeping tax rates only marginally (as I'd presume you'd put it) higher than the poor for your first point. I know you said "low" and not "lower" but it's very much so implied by a lot of people that rich people pay less, whether it be an absolute value or percentage, when it's clearly not the case. They most certainly are low taxes for the wealthy. While the exact precise amount they pay is a good deal higher than the poor, the relative amount they pay is quite a bit lower, especially considering the absurd amounts of wealth they have. They can easily afford to pay a much MUCH bigger share than they currently do without even having a noticeable impact on their lifestyle, but that fact seems to escape people. They'd still be extremely wealthy, I'm not advocating communism here. Should wealth one already possesses be related to their income tax, though? If someone has 1billion dollars, and made $50,000 in income last year, they should be paying in that tax bracket, irrelevant of their 1 billion. I don't see how they pay a relatively lower amount, whatsoever. They pay a relatively higher amount of their income for income taxes? I'm not sure where you define "absurdly wealthy" either. Someone making say $400,000 per year, while definitely now falling into upper class, having a stayhome wife and say four kids, is still going to have a mortgage, and most likely won't be able to afford driving a Ferrari or some shit. Sure, those that are EXTREMELY wealthy, like those making say $3 million+ per year, might not take as much of a hit, but then they're also paying in over a million dollars in taxes of that three million (well, at least in CA, accounting for state income taxes). I don't know how you don't think that's a huge amount, when it's a third of their income. It's not like they didn't earn that income. I'd say almost everyone making a $100,000 salary is working significantly harder than those making minimum wage. At that point, your decisions matter, jobs are in your hands, profits of the company are highly relevant to your personal choices (exception of huge corps), significantly more stress involved in terms of decision making, far higher prerequisites and investment to obtain said job in the first place, etc. On September 27 2011 09:10 jbee wrote:
@kiarip The pizza boy is gambling his job/career while the pizza parlor is gambling lost revenue (which could be entirely made-up by having somebody else cover for him). If you don't see the imbalance in that then I have nothing more to say.
@fabled I don't think they should or shouldn't, as I am morally nihilistic. People want different things out of the government which means it is like arguing about taste ( hence why I hate politics). I only asked about this because I couldn't think of any reason somebody would support this, unless they owned a business. What i said was as example of if it was removed. If it was removed, pay wouldn't go to a dollar an hour, but it gives the ability for your employer to undercut you. This ability decreases the stability in the Poors' income which is why I can't see it as good for the poor either. Without government protection you're also far more likely to be a more productive worker for fear of losing your job. If you're valuable to the company, said company will be far less likely to attempt to undercut you because they value your labor. Of course, generalizing sweeps across the board may effect you if you're a small person in a massive company, but isn't it that company's choice on how it wants to run itself? That's the theory at least, I personally agree with you that job stability is decently more important, as even amazing work ethic won't always save you from individually getting screwed. I was careful to mention that I meant the top 2% of the wealth bracket qualifies as 'super rich'. I also think something needs to be done about the tax system in general, I don't believe income taxes in and of them themselves are sufficient, simply by design. Long term capital gains, for example, are taxed too low. The current system has the wealth accumulated all at the top: almost all of it, and more of it keeps going up there, rather than being spread out. The distribution of wealth is INCREDIBLY uneven. While I'm not suggesting we attempt to make it perfectly distributed so that everyone has a fair share of wealth relative to their actual income, the system should not have half of the entire country with a net total of one fiftieth of the total wealth. Oops, I must have missed your 2% quotation, I didn't go back and read your posts, but I've only been glancing over things at this point so I'm sure you're right. Regardless, even if you say taxes on the rich are low, they are still higher in both absolute and relative numbers to the poor. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2%." Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That's about 7% of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 -- paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.
Note that federal income taxes are already "progressive" with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He'd also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won't come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need. I don't understand the sentiment whatsoever that "the rich aren't paying their fair share." They're paying almost the entire share, and relying on them soley isn't feasible anyways. As the article continues But let's not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let's go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable "dime" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion. And these numbers don't even mention the fact that a ton of that money paid in by the rich is being directly given back to the poor as handouts. I think the answer comes with needing to cut spending, heavily. Preferably starting with the military. On September 27 2011 09:28 Whitewing wrote:
Current unemployment rates have less to do with cost of employment than it does with demand for production btw. People aren't hiring because there isn't enough demand for their products, so there's no reason to hire to increase production. Make employment cheaper --> product comes out cheaper --> demand increases because people can now afford product with their lower amount of money in their possession. Not to mention jobs relocating to the U.S. means money is staying here, etc. Making employment cheaper by lowering wages means people don't have money to buy even cheaper products. If you can lower the cost of employment in some way other than lowering wages, then by all means. yes... you can lower the liability... but also, more money will get paid out some more products will get bought... yes, they will be more essential type of products, but in general the total income of hte population will rise, because businesses will hire more, and the increased productivity will only lead to more growth. Show nested quote +
Yes, there would be less unemployment, but I'm not sure how much less. By removing minimum wage, you provide the ability to lower wages, but without an incentive to actually hire (demand for production), hiring won't occur. The additional jobs that would be created would be very low paying jobs, and the net amount of money being paid out would not increase, so the result is that people who do have jobs get paid less, and some people who didn't have jobs get some very low paying jobs. I don't think that fixes anything. I should also point out that most employers don't usually give significant raises out to the low earners. If anything, they might get a raise of 50 cents after a year
there will be hiring, because if you're paying the workers less, but hire more workers you're more productive, and you can sell more goods while still making same or bigger profit by lowerin cost, then if you make more profit, you can hire even more workers, and be even more productive, driving the prices even lower, and thus making the goods available to even more people... if the goods are essential, then you will constantly have an increasing demand as you lower the cost, because like you said there's so many people that are already unemployed/employed at very low wages, that their consumption would probably definitely increase if given the chance by lower prices.
You're ignoring demand again. Simply having the ability to produce additional goods is insufficient, demand has to be higher for there to be any reason to produce more. Lower costs are great and all, but that doesn't mean they'll hire more. Essential goods being cheaper would increase demand, assuming perfect competition (which is a major question in and of itself, good luck preventing collusion or monopoly here). But if your income goes down, you don't really buy more goods if the cost of goods goes down by an approximate amount. If anything, this would have the net result of less luxury goods being sold, since they are non-essential, there's no way their prices would go down from this.
I'm fairly certain that lowering minimum wages would not have any net positive effect, and would probably screw a lot of people over who are already just barely eeking by. Plus, it causes more net problems: if I am willing to work for $5 an hour, but not less, they can just fire me and hire someone who will accept $4 an hour. I have no real negotiating powers without unions, which once again become extremely necessary.
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