US out of Venezuela!

From CNBC:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/13/workers ... wages.html

T2M

thinkstoomuch wrote:From CNBC:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/13/workers ... wages.html

T2M

Great. Not nearly enough to repair the damage done over the past 30 years, of course, but you gotta start somewhere I suppose.

If you do not know what I am referring to, from 1946 to 1980, average income across almost all wage groups doubled, with the exception of the already super-rich (who still saw an increase, just not a straight 100% one). From 1980 to 2014, incomes for the bottom 50% remained at their previous levels or shrunk slightly, while the earnings of the 95th percentile and above doubled, tripled or sextupled(!) in extreme cases. (Source); So please excuse my lack of enthusiasm for a small increase in a single year when there are 3 decades of imbalance left to correct.

Imaginos1892 wrote:And your proposed means of accomplishing that end is to have the government control everybody's lives. If everybody is provided with a comfortable lifestyle that is not 'contingent on whether or not they are employed', why would any of them work?

To have fun? To feel like you contributed something to society? To fulfill a personal desire?
There are many positive reasons to do something not just for pleasure. "I have to work because if I don't, I'll die cold and alone" is not one of them, and that seems to be the only one you recognize as valid.
And, well. I would like to point you towards the studies of universal basic income concepts and how they increased productivity, but I am fairly certain you didn't read them the last time I did, so I'm not going to bother now.

You'd wind up like the inner-city areas of Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore where four generations of welfare has enabled a 'lifestyle' of indolence, drug addiction and senseless violence.

Hmmm, could this possibly be because you americans have an instinctive aversion to anything that you can label "socialist" or "communist", without understanding those terms? That you consistently elect minarchists and oligarchs with a vested interest in making government as inefficient and bad as possible?

Nooo, impossible! It must be because government is always bad and socialism cannot work ever!

Not undesirable, but if low-value jobs are paid more than what they contribute to the economy, that money has to be taken from other people.

What does Jeff Bezos contribute to society that justifies his income?

It reflects the fact that most people know better than to believe that bullshit by the time they've lived 40 years in the real world.

Provably wrong. The core policy proposals of the american DSA are widely popular.

So, who gets to decide what is 'excessive'? You? The leftist elitists running the government, all of which have 'excessive concentrations of wealth' by any standard? The people that haven't bothered to learn enough to get better than an unskilled job?

Get off your high horse, man. To give you a concrete example of excessive, let's assume an income of ten times the minimum wage (which in the US would be around 150k USD annually) to be the upper limit of what should be acceptable for a single person. At that level of income, it is safe to assume that you can live very comfortably without any unfulfillable material desires and have enough left over after taking care of necessary expenses to build a comfortable heritage for your children to inherit.
If that isn't enough, you should be asking pointed questions as to why it isn't.

My proposal is to eliminate individual income taxes for the bottom 80% of all taxpayers. If you were paid less than $100,000.00 — you don’t pay any tax, no tax is withheld, you don’t even have to LOOK at a tax form. The top 20% already pay almost 90% of the income tax, so set 120 million people FREE! Cutting the IRS down to about a quarter of its current size would make up most of the difference.

That you don't see the fact that most of the tax income comes from a small number of people as something wrong is telling. In an equitable society, the tax base should be broad and spread out, lest the people in your statistic there think that since they're paying for everything, they should run everything too.
(Then again, a true capitalist like yourself is conditioned to think of this state of affairs as good...)

You seem to believe that everybody should be able to buy a house, raise a family, and settle into a comfortable retirement without ever taking the trouble to learn anything more valuable than flipping burgers and salting fries. That does not make economic sense. There is not enough value in unskilled labor to support a career, and a middle-class family.

No, there isn't. However, being unskilled means that, under current conditions, you are likely to stay unskilled, as the simple business of surviving will eat all energy that you might otherwise have to learn more skills. Having a fulltime job should never be a poverty trap in disguise, and yet, that is the reality a lot of people are living in.

Minimum wage is a STARTING POINT, not an ultimate goal. It’s the bottom rung of the career ladder. Jacking it up too high places it out of reach of those who need it most. If companies are forced to pay $20.00 an hour, they’re not going to hire somebody they don’t believe will be able to produce $20.00 of value. The kid just out of high school, or the one with a degree in Renaissance Poetry, is going to be shit-out-of-luck. Unless they really NEED an expert in Renaissance Poetry.

Please investigate the term "precariat", then come back to this discussion.

As someone said, being poor is proportionally the most financially expensive situation you can be in since all income goes to surviving and not bettering your situation.

It's no wonder there is a strong correlation between poverty and crime, since some people will find it much easier to survive by committing crimes.

And the question to ask then, is it financially better for society to make sure everyone has a living wage versus the cost of crime due to poverty?

I'm sure it's a made up story, but real enough.

"Why are you poor, simply save $5.00 a week."
"If I had $5.00 a werk to save I wouldn't be so poor"


Lets put this a different way.

Chris, myself, and 5 teenage kids still at home.
Our budget for our main evening meal is A$15.00 or so on average. Total.

How many of you spend that each on your main meal?
And there are plenty far worse off than us.

It can be very difficult to escape a poverty trap. When first married I was essentially penniless, having just left university and married a lady with two preteen kids. No point quoting wages as inflation makes that pointless, but as a working scientist my pay was less than a meat factory worker's. We bought 8 acres of bushland, and shifted a second hand old wooden house onto it. My new wife did take on said meat factory worker's job. Meanwhile we juggled raising kids, made our shack habitable (roof first, then power, then water then toilet and bath) while living in it.
We worked in other part time jobs as well, plus saved money by using a woodstove that heated our water, as well as other stuff.
Slowly we pulled ahead. Originally when the occasional mortgage month had three of two weeks pay in it, we would get enough for take away, or a weekend away in a tent.
As time went on I moved into administration, did many night courses to get more qualifications, while my wife eventually moved into more skilled work as well.
Many years later, now I'm 70, retired at 58 as I could, and we travel world wide. People look at us and say gee you've been lucky, and wonder why they get a brisk response.
That's why I become annoyed when some on here imply that those on minimum wages are somehow responsible for their situation. Not boasting but both my wife and I have above average intelligence, ambition and drive, and many times we wondered if the 70 hour weeks were worth it. There are many really good people who don't have those advantages.

Daryl wrote:It can be very difficult to escape a poverty trap. When first married I was essentially penniless, having just left university and married a lady with two preteen kids. No point quoting wages as inflation makes that pointless, but as a working scientist my pay was less than a meat factory worker's. We bought 8 acres of bushland, and shifted a second hand old wooden house onto it. My new wife did take on said meat factory worker's job. Meanwhile we juggled raising kids, made our shack habitable (roof first, then power, then water then toilet and bath) while living in it.
We worked in other part time jobs as well, plus saved money by using a woodstove that heated our water, as well as other stuff.
Slowly we pulled ahead. Originally when the occasional mortgage month had three of two weeks pay in it, we would get enough for take away, or a weekend away in a tent.
As time went on I moved into administration, did many night courses to get more qualifications, while my wife eventually moved into more skilled work as well.
Many years later, now I'm 70, retired at 58 as I could, and we travel world wide. People look at us and say gee you've been lucky, and wonder why they get a brisk response.
That's why I become annoyed when some on here imply that those on minimum wages are somehow responsible for their situation. Not boasting but both my wife and I have above average intelligence, ambition and drive, and many times we wondered if the 70 hour weeks were worth it. There are many really good people who don't have those advantages.

If all things where equal and everyone has the same opportunities and they somehow still end up in poverty then it is on them. But what some fail to see (as Daryl highlighted above) is that many people don't have equal opportunities to start with and may be in a even worse situation that Daryl's.

Saying that paying a living wage for unskilled labor is too expensive and costs society too much is the same as saying that you don't mind people living in poverty because they aren't worth the effort and you don't mind the cost of crime as a result of it.

The E wrote:Hmmm, could this possibly be because you americans have an instinctive aversion to anything that you can label "socialist" or "communist", without understanding those terms?

Or could it be because they’ve been taught that the world owes them a living, and they don’t have to do anything to earn it? That they don't have to be responsible for themselves because The Gub'mint will take care of them no matter what they do? That nothing they do matters anyway, because 'The Man' won't let them get ahead? So most of them never try. Those cities have been ruled by big-government leftists for decades. They established and controlled the policies that made those cities what they are. If those policies had any validity, they wouldn’t have turned into third-world hellholes.

The E wrote:What does Jeff Bezos contribute to society that justifies his income?

Jeff Bezos is living proof that capitalism is open to everybody. He doesn't have to justify anything to you.

The E wrote:Get off your high horse, man.

Oh, now that’s a compelling argument.

The E wrote:To give you a concrete example of excessive, let's assume an income of ten times the minimum wage (which in the US would be around 150k USD annually) to be the upper limit of what should be acceptable for a single person.

Acceptable to you. And you make that pronouncement, based on what qualifications, exactly? What do you believe gives you the right to decide what other people are worth?

Jeff Bezos was not born rich. His parents were not important, or connected. He was just an ordinary guy who studied, learned, improved himself, and then had an idea. He busted his ass for years to make that idea a reality, and now, after 25 years, he’s built Amazon into a huge company that provides valuable services to hundreds of millions of people, and jobs to over half a million. Just the tiny fraction of that money he managed to keep made him extremely rich.

Rather than be inspired by his phenomenal success through hard work, dedication and perseverance, you can feel only resentment, envy and greed because he has ‘too much money’ and you can conceive of no higher purpose than taking his money from him by force. Why? Because he has it, and you don’t.

Never mind that he earned that money, and you didn’t. Never mind that he put in those long years of hard work, and you didn’t. Never mind that a hundred million other people had the exact same opportunities, and they didn’t create Amazon. He has ‘too much money’ and you find that ‘unacceptable’.

What does he do with that money? You seem to believe he piles it up and rolls around in it like Scrooge McDuck. In reality, he invests that money in various risky ventures that have the potential to create enormous value for everybody. Of course, if those ventures succeed he expects to get a small fraction of that value back as profit. Why shouldn't he?

The E wrote:That you don't see the fact that most of the tax income comes from a small number of people as something wrong is telling.

How are the unskilled workers better off if we Raise The Minimum Wage! to $15.00 and then take $7.50 tax out of it, than if they are just paid the $7.50 and allowed to keep it?

The E wrote:No, there isn't. However, being unskilled means that, under current conditions, you are likely to stay unskilled, as the simple business of surviving will eat all energy that you might otherwise have to learn more skills. Having a fulltime job should never be a poverty trap in disguise, and yet, that is the reality a lot of people are living in.

I started out in a low-paying job and went to vocational school at night. After about a year, I got a better job. After two more years I finished night school and got a much better job. I didn’t see that low-paying job as a ‘poverty trap’ but as a first step. The first step should be a small one, to prepare you to take bigger steps.

The E wrote:Please investigate the term "precariat", then come back to this discussion.

Isn’t that one of those words the communists made up because there weren't any real words that supported their totalitarian fantasies?
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Get the government involved in health care and you wind up with doctors filling out paperwork while paper-pushers play doctor.

Imaginos1892 wrote:

The E wrote:What does Jeff Bezos contribute to society that justifies his income?

Jeff Bezos is living proof that capitalism is open to everybody. He doesn't have to justify anything to you.

Of course the little hidden catch here is the difference between "everybody" and "anybody". And what you should ave said here was "anybody".

As in... "not everybody can win the lottery, but anybody could win".

Which, while true, is not an argument for lotteries being a relied upon means of gaining wealth and power and stability and security in your life now is it? Or recommends it as a very good system for a society to rely on for distributing its wealth in a manner which results in a stable and prosperous population.

The same applies to your statement about Bezos.

How stupid do you have to be to not understand the difference between earning money and gambling?

Imaginos1892 wrote:Jeff Bezos is living proof that capitalism is open to everybody. He doesn't have to justify anything to you.

No, he doesn't. I'm still curious why it is important for him to earn more money than anyone can ever spend while the workers that enable him to make that money are making minimum wage only. He could literally double the salary of every single warehouse worker under his employ, and still have unimaginable amounts of money.

Acceptable to you.

You asked me what I meant by excessive, and now you berate me for giving you an answer?

And you make that pronouncement, based on what qualifications, exactly? What do you believe gives you the right to decide what other people are worth?

If the minimum wage represents the minimum amount of money a full-time employee can make and still be expected to have a decent living (meaning, a place to live, food, at least some basic amenities) and have enough time left over to educate themselves in the hopes of advancement towards a better position down the line, then ten times that amount should be plenty for a single person. It's a simple calculation.

Jeff Bezos was not born rich. His parents were not important, or connected. He was just an ordinary guy who studied, learned, improved himself, and then had an idea. He busted his ass for years to make that idea a reality, and now, after 25 years, he’s built Amazon into a huge company that provides valuable services to hundreds of millions of people, and jobs to over half a million. Just the tiny fraction of that money he managed to keep made him extremely rich.

We get it, you like Bezos. You don't need to suck his cock in public.

The basic question is still: What the fuck does he do for the company that he makes in 11.5 seconds what one of his warehouse workers makes in a year?

Rather than be inspired by his phenomenal success through hard work, dedication and perseverance, you can feel only resentment, envy and greed because he has ‘too much money’ and you can conceive of no higher purpose than taking his money from him by force. Why? Because he has it, and you don’t.

You fundamentally misunderstand me here. I do not feel any resentment towards Bezos personally. He managed to win the lottery of being at the right place, at the right time, with the right idea and with enough skill and fortitude to be successful.

What I feel negatively about is this lottery existing in the first place, and that it can deliver such highly variable outcomes. My points of criticism are mostly systemic and based around the pretty well-proven point that modern liberal capitalism is a system antithetical to human society.

Never mind that he earned that money, and you didn’t. Never mind that he put in those long years of hard work, and you didn’t. Never mind that a hundred million other people had the exact same opportunities, and they didn’t create Amazon. He has ‘too much money’ and you find that ‘unacceptable’.

It is unacceptable. Capitalism leads to oligarchy. It's almost inevitable; unless democratic institutions can retain their primacy over corporations and their owners, the concentration of wealth they represent will warp society to their benefit and their benefit only.

What does he do with that money? You seem to believe he piles it up and rolls around in it like Scrooge McDuck. In reality, he invests that money in various risky ventures that have the potential to create enormous value for everybody. Of course, if those ventures succeed he expects to get a small fraction of that value back as profit. Why shouldn't he?

Yes, the super rich do invest their money. But that investment largely ends up in the hands of other super-rich people. Once money enters the circles of the 1%, it is hesitant to leave; It might change hands, yes, but it will only seldomly trickle down to benefit normal humans.

How are the unskilled workers better off if we Raise The Minimum Wage! to $15.00 and then take $7.50 tax out of it, than if they are just paid the $7.50 and allowed to keep it?

*sigh*

Reread the section you are responding to and respond to the actual argument I made, not the one that got you ranting, please.

I started out in a low-paying job and went to vocational school at night. After about a year, I got a better job. After two more years I finished night school and got a much better job. I didn’t see that low-paying job as a ‘poverty trap’ but as a first step. The first step should be a small one, to prepare you to take bigger steps.

Congratulations on everything working out for you.
Now be a good little capitalist and rant some more about how the poor need to exist.

The E wrote:Please investigate the term "precariat", then come back to this discussion.

Isn’t that one of those words the communists made up because there weren't any real words that supported their totalitarian fantasies?

So you're ignorant and proud of it. What a good little capitalist drone you are.