15 dollars an hour = rise of the machines John Conner

[ABikerSailor]

Interesting.................you want to dry up the labor markets (i.e. making it harder for illegals to get jobs), but yet you want to keep the wages the same.

Sorry..........but if you want a decent workforce, you've got to pay a decent wage.

I'm thinking that 10.10/hour is a decent wage, because, if it kept up with inflation, that is roughly what it would be.

Actually, if it kept up with inflation and the way things are getting more expensive, it would actually be around 10.50/hour.

But..................I guess we don't care, as long as the stockholders keep making money on the backs of the workers.

 

[Freemason9]

Question for the right wing droolers on this thread:

[MENTION=38998]Freemason9[/MENTION] Right wing drooler reporting for duty sir and my drool bucket is freshly emptied too, so I'm ready to go!

(1) As technology supplants humans in the labor force, who will be spending money in the economy as workers are displaced and income approaches zero?

That is a problem. Look at where most opposition to illegal immigration comes from - the right. Even on legal immigration the dissenters are found on the right. This anti-immigration faction has long been arguing that we need to do two things - increase labor scarcity, thereby increasing wages for workers (with the side-effect of lowering income inequality) and pushing labor up the value chain by roboticizing low value labor. We lost that debate. Democrats freaking love to import a new people to bring their multicultural vision to fruition and they love to import a new dependent class who will vote for Democrats and give nice, liberal white ladies jobs as social workers and administrators of non-profits and government programs focused on helping this dependent class.

So I'm not really seeing why Republicans should be held to account for outcomes which many Republicans are against. Can you explain why I need to answer for the policies liberals favor? Ok, let's disallow the favorite liberal go-to tactic of not accepting blame and blaming President Bush instead. You guys want more immigrants, you guys want more poor immigrants, you guys want more multicultural immigrants, you guys say it's mean to deport 20 million people who have only an 8th grade education or less from Central American schools.

You want a solution? Deport people. Stop cold all immigration. Dry up labor markets so that employers have to start paying people more. This will accelerate the move to capital equipment replacing low value labor. We don't need 20 to 50 million peasants in one of the world's highest cost of living and most technologically sophisticated societies. Why do we need lettuce pickers here? The only reason a lettuce farm is economical is because society indirectly subsidizes the labor on that farm. Import the lettuce from abroad and simultaneously do away with all the subsidies to the lettuce pickers. Alternatively mechanize that farm to replace the peon labor. This creates downstream employment for robot manufacturers and technicians. Keep pushing the labor up the value ladder.

But you guys don't want to deport 20 million people, you guys are opening the border to 20 million more poor peasants from Latin America. This is insane, or that's how it seems to us inbred mouth-breathing droolers in Right Wing America. But I'm sure that your plan for all these peasants makes terrific liberal sense that we're just not intelligent enough to understand.

(2) Why in the world do you believe "leftyloon progressives" are less productive than the right wing droolers? In my travels--and I travel extensively--the wealthiest, most productive, and busiest places are in blue liberal states. The laziest, most run-down places are "conservative" red states.

And most of those red states are saddled with hugely dysfunctional black populations. There is a huge carrying cost to paying for social dysfunction and low human capital. Look, I can give credit where it is due, liberal cities like San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Portland have done a remarkable subrosa job of ethnic cleansing their cities of blacks. Black population is falling in each city and this delivers benefits from reduced carrying costs. Your zoning innovations, your high cost of living tactics all work wonders at achieving that unmentioned goal. Bravo.

Your second innovation is to concentrate value transference industries in the big cities. We see this best play out in fields like finance and marketing, where a broker or investment banker or a product manager or marketing executive earn vastly more than the operations research engineer heading the factory or the civil engineer building a dam or a road or the structural engineer building a bridge or the computer engineer writing code for an innovative product. You see there is value creation and their is value capture and they're not proportional. The value created by a public relations executive is grossly over-counted in terms of salary paid compared to the value of the product engineer.

Then there's the third tactic that Blue States are very good at - exploiting government in order to enrich themselves via rent-seeking arrangements. This is DC as a company town. All those lobbyists actually produce no value at all but they are well rewarded for corrupting government so that value can be extracted from one region or one industry or one consumer sector and be directed to those who pay for the lobbying. I shudder to think what Blue megapolises would look like if we stripped revenue from rent-seeking arrangements out of the picture.

And the last point here is that these Blue paradises have the highest income inequality in the land. Those productive people in the heartland are mainly found in the suburbs, not the inner cities and not in the black communities (blacks are vastly over-represented in the government employee ranks). With the value transference industries heavily concentrated in the Blue States, a high cost of living making middle class jobs difficult to sustain, the expected outcome is exactly what we see - vast income inequality - and this divorced from actual value production.

Hey, my drool bucket is close to overflowing and my buck-toothed sister/wife hates it when my drool hits the floor, so I gotta go and empty that bucket. See ya.

Beautiful response, and I actually agree with much of what you say. I would point out that it is both parties that have avoided the immigration issue; Democrats like liberal immigration policies to increase voting stock, and Republicans like liberal immigration policies to provide a continual stream of cheap labor and to suppress wages.

I should have stuck with my initial point, which is the inevitability of economic disaster if a good portion of labor is displaced by technology. (No income left to spend, IOW.)

Thanks.

 

[Rikurzhen]

Question for the right wing droolers on this thread:

[MENTION=38998]Freemason9[/MENTION] Right wing drooler reporting for duty sir and my drool bucket is freshly emptied too, so I'm ready to go!



That is a problem. Look at where most opposition to illegal immigration comes from - the right. Even on legal immigration the dissenters are found on the right. This anti-immigration faction has long been arguing that we need to do two things - increase labor scarcity, thereby increasing wages for workers (with the side-effect of lowering income inequality) and pushing labor up the value chain by roboticizing low value labor. We lost that debate. Democrats freaking love to import a new people to bring their multicultural vision to fruition and they love to import a new dependent class who will vote for Democrats and give nice, liberal white ladies jobs as social workers and administrators of non-profits and government programs focused on helping this dependent class.

So I'm not really seeing why Republicans should be held to account for outcomes which many Republicans are against. Can you explain why I need to answer for the policies liberals favor? Ok, let's disallow the favorite liberal go-to tactic of not accepting blame and blaming President Bush instead. You guys want more immigrants, you guys want more poor immigrants, you guys want more multicultural immigrants, you guys say it's mean to deport 20 million people who have only an 8th grade education or less from Central American schools.

You want a solution? Deport people. Stop cold all immigration. Dry up labor markets so that employers have to start paying people more. This will accelerate the move to capital equipment replacing low value labor. We don't need 20 to 50 million peasants in one of the world's highest cost of living and most technologically sophisticated societies. Why do we need lettuce pickers here? The only reason a lettuce farm is economical is because society indirectly subsidizes the labor on that farm. Import the lettuce from abroad and simultaneously do away with all the subsidies to the lettuce pickers. Alternatively mechanize that farm to replace the peon labor. This creates downstream employment for robot manufacturers and technicians. Keep pushing the labor up the value ladder.

But you guys don't want to deport 20 million people, you guys are opening the border to 20 million more poor peasants from Latin America. This is insane, or that's how it seems to us inbred mouth-breathing droolers in Right Wing America. But I'm sure that your plan for all these peasants makes terrific liberal sense that we're just not intelligent enough to understand.

(2) Why in the world do you believe "leftyloon progressives" are less productive than the right wing droolers? In my travels--and I travel extensively--the wealthiest, most productive, and busiest places are in blue liberal states. The laziest, most run-down places are "conservative" red states.

And most of those red states are saddled with hugely dysfunctional black populations. There is a huge carrying cost to paying for social dysfunction and low human capital. Look, I can give credit where it is due, liberal cities like San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Portland have done a remarkable subrosa job of ethnic cleansing their cities of blacks. Black population is falling in each city and this delivers benefits from reduced carrying costs. Your zoning innovations, your high cost of living tactics all work wonders at achieving that unmentioned goal. Bravo.

Your second innovation is to concentrate value transference industries in the big cities. We see this best play out in fields like finance and marketing, where a broker or investment banker or a product manager or marketing executive earn vastly more than the operations research engineer heading the factory or the civil engineer building a dam or a road or the structural engineer building a bridge or the computer engineer writing code for an innovative product. You see there is value creation and their is value capture and they're not proportional. The value created by a public relations executive is grossly over-counted in terms of salary paid compared to the value of the product engineer.

Then there's the third tactic that Blue States are very good at - exploiting government in order to enrich themselves via rent-seeking arrangements. This is DC as a company town. All those lobbyists actually produce no value at all but they are well rewarded for corrupting government so that value can be extracted from one region or one industry or one consumer sector and be directed to those who pay for the lobbying. I shudder to think what Blue megapolises would look like if we stripped revenue from rent-seeking arrangements out of the picture.

And the last point here is that these Blue paradises have the highest income inequality in the land. Those productive people in the heartland are mainly found in the suburbs, not the inner cities and not in the black communities (blacks are vastly over-represented in the government employee ranks). With the value transference industries heavily concentrated in the Blue States, a high cost of living making middle class jobs difficult to sustain, the expected outcome is exactly what we see - vast income inequality - and this divorced from actual value production.

Hey, my drool bucket is close to overflowing and my buck-toothed sister/wife hates it when my drool hits the floor, so I gotta go and empty that bucket. See ya.

Beautiful response, and I actually agree with much of what you say. I would point out that it is both parties that have avoided the immigration issue; Democrats like liberal immigration policies to increase voting stock, and Republicans like liberal immigration policies to provide a continual stream of cheap labor and to suppress wages.

I should have stuck with my initial point, which is the inevitability of economic disaster if a good portion of labor is displaced by technology. (No income left to spend, IOW.)

Thanks.

[MENTION=38998]Freemason9[/MENTION]

It's not really both parties. There are some in the Republican Party, Chamber of Commerce types, who want to import cheap labor, but most everyone else is opposed. Look at the national debate - I'm not hearing any constituency who votes Democrat expressing opposition, even labor unions have gone insane and support more illegal and legal immigration. The faction of nativists who want all immigration, legal and illegal, stopped is found only on the Right.

As for economic disaster, no, I don't think that that's going to happen. We have two factors to weigh - national unity and personal well-being. Are you willing to be turned out of your house because the taxes on your income are so high because they're needed to support all those jobless people? At some point the workers resist, they resist and they shuck off the government grab, which means that the country fractures. All those low income people are cast loose. What follows are migrations, deportations, incentives to emigrate, perhaps even partitions and secessions, and all of this AFTER we've gone the plutocracy route with gated communities and zones of prosperity which income really divides people into groups, meaning that your neighbors will not be the jobless, those jobless will be 100 miles away, in the hinterlands and out of sight, because they can't afford to live in the cities.

One last point. That blue-state vs. red-state income/poverty disparity you raised. The Census Bureau has devised a new metric on poverty which accounts for state differences in cost of living and housing costs. All of those high salaries in the blue states sometimes don't buy a better style of living compared to the red states, so are blue state people actually richer? Here are the new metrics.

Here is a map, where the darker the color the greater the proportion of people living in poverty. You'll notice that Moynihan's Rule about life improving the closer you get to Canada still applies.