Why we love Trump....

[bendog]

Most billionaires do not have "earned taxable income" subject to US income tax. Their wealth does generate income but it's usually in the form of investment income which is simply rolled back into more investment and not realized as income earned. They will pay a tax on it when it is received as income but they could elect to take small disbursements subject to minimal taxation.

Again.... The top marginal income tax rate is applied to earned income, not wealth. I could literally be $10 million in debt and have income exceeding $1 million for the year.... I'm not wealthy, I'm $10 million in debt. My wealth has nothing to do with my income.

What you are falling for is class warfare rhetoric from Socialists. They need for you to believe that people with wealth are evil and deserve to have their wealth taken away by the power of the state. They need you to believe the system unfairly gives them advantages you don't get. They depend on you being jealous and envious of what you don't have that someone else does. And mostly, they want you to believe that punishing those evil wealthy bastards somehow benefits you in the long run. None of this is true.

Boss I completely understand what you say about income I'm far from jealous or envious of others being quite wealthy myself.....but when folks are starving even while working a couple of jobs something is wrong with the system Can you at least agree the wealth of those million and billionaires have increased greatly while the rest of the "suckers" stay in the same place?

ME making money on wise investments has zip zero fucking zilch to do with jack and jill dropping out of HS and working min wage jobs to support their kids on...

That is the difference between /wise decisions/ vs /stupid decisions/ nothing more:

The /wise/ decision is to wait to have a kid until you can pay for it's diapers and food.

The /stupid/ decision is to be impatient and get saddled with massive rent, a car payment (or two), a big cell phone bill (or two), and then toss in a kid or two while you're working min wage jobs.

Simple shit, but ya'll conflate this logic with "feels" - problem is that feels ain't so bright, in fact that's typically how you end up with kids when you can't afford them...

Good thing daddy gave trump a few million to start off ,,,Born on 3rd base and thought he hit a triple

That's called envy dear. Envy will /never/ gain /you/ anything. If /you/ want to gain, then /you/ have to put in the effort and make wise decisions. Crying about someone else's financial "gifts"/inheritance, or how much their parents have does no good at all.

That is not envy....it is a reality

It's about equating Trump to a JFK or HW ... if not a Gates or Jobs. I don't really care about Trump or his money. Or W's for that matter. But the policies he pursues do not help people who aspire and work gain rewards.

 

[EverCurious]

Most billionaires do not have "earned taxable income" subject to US income tax. Their wealth does generate income but it's usually in the form of investment income which is simply rolled back into more investment and not realized as income earned. They will pay a tax on it when it is received as income but they could elect to take small disbursements subject to minimal taxation.

Again.... The top marginal income tax rate is applied to earned income, not wealth. I could literally be $10 million in debt and have income exceeding $1 million for the year.... I'm not wealthy, I'm $10 million in debt. My wealth has nothing to do with my income.

What you are falling for is class warfare rhetoric from Socialists. They need for you to believe that people with wealth are evil and deserve to have their wealth taken away by the power of the state. They need you to believe the system unfairly gives them advantages you don't get. They depend on you being jealous and envious of what you don't have that someone else does. And mostly, they want you to believe that punishing those evil wealthy bastards somehow benefits you in the long run. None of this is true.

Boss I completely understand what you say about income I'm far from jealous or envious of others being quite wealthy myself.....but when folks are starving even while working a couple of jobs something is wrong with the system Can you at least agree the wealth of those million and billionaires have increased greatly while the rest of the "suckers" stay in the same place?

ME making money on wise investments has zip zero fucking zilch to do with jack and jill dropping out of HS and working min wage jobs to support their kids on...

That is the difference between /wise decisions/ vs /stupid decisions/ nothing more:

The /wise/ decision is to wait to have a kid until you can pay for it's diapers and food.

The /stupid/ decision is to be impatient and get saddled with massive rent, a car payment (or two), a big cell phone bill (or two), and then toss in a kid or two while you're working min wage jobs.

Simple shit, but ya'll conflate this logic with "feels" - problem is that feels ain't so bright, in fact that's typically how you end up with kids when you can't afford them...

In a capitalistic economy there are always workers with the fewest skills, and there are jobs that require few skills. And there is no way one can define "good" choices without there also being "bad" choices. But if people are willing to work and try to support their families, America has stood for making sure jobs pay enough for families to believe children can have better lives.

it seems to me the question is whether Trump represents something new in terms of "expectations."

No. America has always stood for 'opportunity' - that is not the same as just handing people a "good life."

Look, I agree to a point; I didn't want "better" for my kids, but I wanted them to have a "good life" - so I taught them to stay in school, to wait to have children, to pursue "wealth" not specifically "money" itself but a "comfortable" financial standing [stuff like budgeting, when to buy a house or car, investing, financial independence, retirement, etc.] I instilled within them a "drive" for "betterment" in their finances/their 'status' (apartment to house, being able to get cars, snow machines, boats, saving for their kids expenses and college, etc.)

I also told them about reality; that /they/ were responsible for achieving /all/ of that stuff for themselves and their wives and kids because it wasn't anyone else's responsibility. And the second part of that "reality" is that if you /do/ let (or expect) others to 'provide' for you, then you'll /never/ achieve shit; you'll have the bare minimum for survival (if you're lucky) because there are more hands looking for freebies then there will ever be money given out - hard facts of life. My kids, unlike the recent socialist crops out there, know damn well that if they want a "good life" they have to work for it, they know it's not going to just land in their lap, they know it's probably going to take some time and effort, they understand /patience/ - turtle and the hare kind of shit. My eldest sons, in their early 20s, are all well on their way to being wealthy, or at a minimum very comfortably happy, already. Not one of them has kids, not even the 30 year old daughter, they're /all/ waiting until they've got their own shit straight before they drag kids into it.

It has /nothing/ to do with how much /I/ (the wealthy) make, it has to do with the individual's drive to succeed, where they are putting their efforts - if you're more concerned about social media/partying/showing up your friends (new car, phone, whatever)/or even playing at political activism, than you are about advancing your own life (through your career and financial status) then your priorities are not going to give you a "good life" - they'll give you the bare minimum (if you're lucky) - because that's what level of /effort/ you're putting into your financial standing and your own future. Again, wise decisions vs stupid decisions.

That's the rub you bleeding heart SJW's need to understand; you cannot /make/ someone put in effort to better their own lives, only they can do that. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a "user" they are not going to magically turn into an "achiever" until /they/ decide to. All you do by handing out "free" money (welfare) is prolong the time these types can "use" instead of "achieving" for themselves.

When you raise the min wage, businesses will /not/ eat the cost, never will, they pass those costs onto consumers period. Businesses have "rules" too, like not living pay check to pay check - they cannot ever do that, ever - which is why they have built in "profit margins" that they will /always/ meet, because not doing so means they go bankrupt - seriously. So, if you raise the minimum wage, so the cost of their employees goes up, they have exactly two choices. 1) they lay employees off, stop hiring, etc. or 2) they increase prices to cover that cost. Typically you'll see 2, and especially at the end of a recession like we've been in, because businesses have already streamlined their employee numbers as much as they can. So they raise the prices, which means, the cost of living goes up and wipes out the min wage increase. It's a cycle and there is /nothing/ you can do about it. Whining about being "fair" isn't going to change the hard reality that businesses MUST have a certain profit margin or they go under, it is not going to change the fact that businesses are going to "reallocate" the new "expenses" of employee wage increases.

No matter how much sympathy you want to have for "poor folk" who "need help" a business is /not/ there to help, they are there to make money, period. You cannot change that, the best you can do is harness that known reality - unleash the dogs and let them grow so they hire more people; more jobs, more upward mobility for the employees, the more upward mobility for the employees there is, the more folks are getting financially "comfortable" That is the best you can hope for from businesses when it comes down to it.

I'm no more a SJW than you are a loser. But historically speaking, you're simply wrong. Jefferson and Jackson were both at heart about forcing the rich to give lesser earners a better shot at making more. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well. The New Deal dominated our policies from 32-80. And Reagan was all about a reinvigorated capitalism that had stagnated into not rewarding effort.

Nothing I posted could be perceived as advocating for handouts. Liveable wages are not handouts. Perhaps you have a specific gripe about min wages. I didn't bring it up. Min wages may require franchises like McDonalds to raise wages. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. But it's simply not a matter of dispute that corp profits are at a all time high, and out tax policy is about to put debt on workers so profits can be higher, and at that the same time repeal govt support for workers healthcare with "no a fcking thing." And simultaneously reducing federal support for higher education.

So while Trump ran on improving how society rewards effort, he's governing in a manner exactly the opposite. (which doesn't make Hillary more likeable, btw)

To me, the bleating about the minimum wage = income inequality aka "the rich have more than me" is an SJW cause. Somewhat irrelevant.

Ugh saying "living wage" is even worse than bleating about minimum wage... "Livable" wages are a pipe dream, that's kind of what I said without using the term, like the more you force businesses to pay for employees, the more they charge customers (aka their employees) for the products they need to "live." And not to mention living wages where? In China vs America? Hell, even Anchorage Alaska vs San Francisco California? For a single teen living with mom and dad vs an single mom with four kids? ALL of them have different "living" wages, so the idea that you can put a "wage" out there as "livable" is just bologna, ya know? It's like my husband, son, and I live /very/ comfortably on... $36-40k ish that's like $20/h in total which is only a little higher than the 2016 fed min wage ($8.5/h x2 adults $35k) and on par with the 2017 min wage ($9.25/h x 2 adults $38k) - The single mother of two who's getting no child support from dead beat dad can't live in San Francisco on min wage $9.25/h (and again that's /wise/ decisions vs /stupid/ decisions stuff) but probably could in say Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe they could if they had parents who could help out and watch the kids so they didn't have to pay for daycare, or maybe dad does pay child support so she could make it work, or maybe she does or doesn't have a car payment, on and on and on with different scenarios of can or cannot live off fed minimum wage - it just shows that there is no such thing as a "livable" wage; it's a made up term with zero meaning.


Corp profits are at an all time high because they have access to the entire planet now vs from the 1930s to the 80s/90s. This is not rocket science dear, when you go from say 200-300M customers to 6B customers, no shit you make more money... When you go from a pool of 200-300M potential employees to a pool of 6B potential employees, no shit the cost of labor goes down. [Yes I know not all 200-300M in the country, nor 6B on the planet are capable working adults; the idea stands however.) You just gotta look at the /entire/ puzzle, instead of individual select pieces, ya know? Either way though, the profits of businesses isn't really tied to labor costs, I mean they sell the product for as much as they can and they pay the labor costs they have to pay based on the cost of labor... More on this a bit later though.

I mean uf dah, the new deal... you're trying to boil down global economic changes over a period of like 87 years into single American policy... it just doesn't work that way. Yes, after WWII we were a power house - we were the only nation not bombed into oblivion, of course, we shit gold and other nations had no choice but to buy it. Other nations (Europe mostly) caught up to us and started to shit their own gold, aka America had a slowing economy. Another point that effects the price of labor (aka employee wages) in the 70s we doubled the American work force (ah hell we practically doubled the global workforce because everyone wanted to be Americanized back then.) Women went to work. When you flood the market with employees the cost of labor goes down; supply and demand. Then the 80s and 90s hit, that's when communication between nations became the "norm," so damn easy, and the /true/ (or perhaps I should say "pure") globalization of businesses happened - that's when "American economy" became just a footnote in the full economic picture - where it all became an entangled rats nest. In the 80s-90s Asia started to catch up to us and Europe, massively changing the scope of the global economy and driving wages and income "inequality" by a sudden massive influx of workers (penny workers at that.) You cannot take out just "America's economy" from the global economy and try to talk about it like it's an "independent" thing ya know what I'm saying?

Nor can we /force/ companies to abide by American social [economic] wishes [aka income inequality "adjustments".] Multinational businesses, which is most of them these days (especially the min wage paying ones, box stores and shit) will pay the cost of labor - regardless of if they're in America proper or elsewhere in the world, they're going to find the most "economic" labor force. If they're making computers and labor in China's cheaper they'll go there and import to American's, etc. You know the story, or can figure it out, I'm sure. AND people, American's will buy the cheap shit - that drives lower wages too so there it is. It's a circle, it's all tied together.

When you talk about "income inequality" and shit you're looking at the polar extremes - poor people in America vs global companies entire profit off the planet. Like oil companies who have a product that /everyone/ wants. They are making money off sales across entire planet so of course they're going to have more "equity" than a minimum wage worker who only works (aka sells) their own labor for themselves. No kidding a company that can sell to 6M can make more than an individual who is say a server at a restaurant that serves maybe 300 people a day (that's 150k a year customers) - percentage wise, right, I mean the individual min wage worker has 0.000025% of the customer base to make profit off of - (ya follow?) One has to understand that multinational corps are like... octopuses, each arm has its own brain (seriously.) Take K-mart right, each individual store has to be financially solvent. The parent company will suck up individual stores losses for a little bit, but at some point they cut that "arm" lose and close the store (they did that up here in Alaska, our K-marts were some of the first to go under - labor up here is expensive and they couldn't remain solvent financially.) Each store has to maintain a profit margin in order to be "solvent" or they're a risk of bankruptcy, which effects the entire corp (stock values and shit) Lets say a store has a profit margin of say 3%/y; that means they are /spending/ 97%/y of their profits just to operate [many businesses have /monthly/ profit margins but you get the point.] That means if there's a down turn in profits they go in the hole, they can't even maintain the store for a month. So I mean to say okay fed min wage needs to be $25/h across the nation is seriously shitty because the Home Depot in bumfuck Texas population 200k isn't making enough to cover that labor cost increase.

... I could go on and on about hows and whys, but I'll stop cause peoples eyes tend to glaze over.

 

[rightwinger]

Boss I completely understand what you say about income I'm far from jealous or envious of others being quite wealthy myself.....but when folks are starving even while working a couple of jobs something is wrong with the system Can you at least agree the wealth of those million and billionaires have increased greatly while the rest of the "suckers" stay in the same place?

ME making money on wise investments has zip zero fucking zilch to do with jack and jill dropping out of HS and working min wage jobs to support their kids on...

That is the difference between /wise decisions/ vs /stupid decisions/ nothing more:

The /wise/ decision is to wait to have a kid until you can pay for it's diapers and food.

The /stupid/ decision is to be impatient and get saddled with massive rent, a car payment (or two), a big cell phone bill (or two), and then toss in a kid or two while you're working min wage jobs.

Simple shit, but ya'll conflate this logic with "feels" - problem is that feels ain't so bright, in fact that's typically how you end up with kids when you can't afford them...

Good thing daddy gave trump a few million to start off ,,,Born on 3rd base and thought he hit a triple

That's called envy dear. Envy will /never/ gain /you/ anything. If /you/ want to gain, then /you/ have to put in the effort and make wise decisions. Crying about someone else's financial "gifts"/inheritance, or how much their parents have does no good at all.

That is not envy....it is a reality

It's about equating Trump to a JFK or HW ... if not a Gates or Jobs. I don't really care about Trump or his money. Or W's for that matter. But the policies he pursues do not help people who aspire and work gain rewards.

We have had wealthy Presidents before.....Washington, Teddy and FDR, JFK

None bragged about how wealthy they were and were somewhat reluctant to bring it up
They were also willing to stick their necks out to help the less fortunate

Trump's biggest goal is to slash inheritance and income taxes

 

[rightwinger]

Boss I completely understand what you say about income I'm far from jealous or envious of others being quite wealthy myself.....but when folks are starving even while working a couple of jobs something is wrong with the system Can you at least agree the wealth of those million and billionaires have increased greatly while the rest of the "suckers" stay in the same place?

ME making money on wise investments has zip zero fucking zilch to do with jack and jill dropping out of HS and working min wage jobs to support their kids on...

That is the difference between /wise decisions/ vs /stupid decisions/ nothing more:

The /wise/ decision is to wait to have a kid until you can pay for it's diapers and food.

The /stupid/ decision is to be impatient and get saddled with massive rent, a car payment (or two), a big cell phone bill (or two), and then toss in a kid or two while you're working min wage jobs.

Simple shit, but ya'll conflate this logic with "feels" - problem is that feels ain't so bright, in fact that's typically how you end up with kids when you can't afford them...

In a capitalistic economy there are always workers with the fewest skills, and there are jobs that require few skills. And there is no way one can define "good" choices without there also being "bad" choices. But if people are willing to work and try to support their families, America has stood for making sure jobs pay enough for families to believe children can have better lives.

it seems to me the question is whether Trump represents something new in terms of "expectations."

No. America has always stood for 'opportunity' - that is not the same as just handing people a "good life."

Look, I agree to a point; I didn't want "better" for my kids, but I wanted them to have a "good life" - so I taught them to stay in school, to wait to have children, to pursue "wealth" not specifically "money" itself but a "comfortable" financial standing [stuff like budgeting, when to buy a house or car, investing, financial independence, retirement, etc.] I instilled within them a "drive" for "betterment" in their finances/their 'status' (apartment to house, being able to get cars, snow machines, boats, saving for their kids expenses and college, etc.)

I also told them about reality; that /they/ were responsible for achieving /all/ of that stuff for themselves and their wives and kids because it wasn't anyone else's responsibility. And the second part of that "reality" is that if you /do/ let (or expect) others to 'provide' for you, then you'll /never/ achieve shit; you'll have the bare minimum for survival (if you're lucky) because there are more hands looking for freebies then there will ever be money given out - hard facts of life. My kids, unlike the recent socialist crops out there, know damn well that if they want a "good life" they have to work for it, they know it's not going to just land in their lap, they know it's probably going to take some time and effort, they understand /patience/ - turtle and the hare kind of shit. My eldest sons, in their early 20s, are all well on their way to being wealthy, or at a minimum very comfortably happy, already. Not one of them has kids, not even the 30 year old daughter, they're /all/ waiting until they've got their own shit straight before they drag kids into it.

It has /nothing/ to do with how much /I/ (the wealthy) make, it has to do with the individual's drive to succeed, where they are putting their efforts - if you're more concerned about social media/partying/showing up your friends (new car, phone, whatever)/or even playing at political activism, than you are about advancing your own life (through your career and financial status) then your priorities are not going to give you a "good life" - they'll give you the bare minimum (if you're lucky) - because that's what level of /effort/ you're putting into your financial standing and your own future. Again, wise decisions vs stupid decisions.

That's the rub you bleeding heart SJW's need to understand; you cannot /make/ someone put in effort to better their own lives, only they can do that. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a "user" they are not going to magically turn into an "achiever" until /they/ decide to. All you do by handing out "free" money (welfare) is prolong the time these types can "use" instead of "achieving" for themselves.

When you raise the min wage, businesses will /not/ eat the cost, never will, they pass those costs onto consumers period. Businesses have "rules" too, like not living pay check to pay check - they cannot ever do that, ever - which is why they have built in "profit margins" that they will /always/ meet, because not doing so means they go bankrupt - seriously. So, if you raise the minimum wage, so the cost of their employees goes up, they have exactly two choices. 1) they lay employees off, stop hiring, etc. or 2) they increase prices to cover that cost. Typically you'll see 2, and especially at the end of a recession like we've been in, because businesses have already streamlined their employee numbers as much as they can. So they raise the prices, which means, the cost of living goes up and wipes out the min wage increase. It's a cycle and there is /nothing/ you can do about it. Whining about being "fair" isn't going to change the hard reality that businesses MUST have a certain profit margin or they go under, it is not going to change the fact that businesses are going to "reallocate" the new "expenses" of employee wage increases.

No matter how much sympathy you want to have for "poor folk" who "need help" a business is /not/ there to help, they are there to make money, period. You cannot change that, the best you can do is harness that known reality - unleash the dogs and let them grow so they hire more people; more jobs, more upward mobility for the employees, the more upward mobility for the employees there is, the more folks are getting financially "comfortable" That is the best you can hope for from businesses when it comes down to it.

I'm no more a SJW than you are a loser. But historically speaking, you're simply wrong. Jefferson and Jackson were both at heart about forcing the rich to give lesser earners a better shot at making more. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well. The New Deal dominated our policies from 32-80. And Reagan was all about a reinvigorated capitalism that had stagnated into not rewarding effort.

Nothing I posted could be perceived as advocating for handouts. Liveable wages are not handouts. Perhaps you have a specific gripe about min wages. I didn't bring it up. Min wages may require franchises like McDonalds to raise wages. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. But it's simply not a matter of dispute that corp profits are at a all time high, and out tax policy is about to put debt on workers so profits can be higher, and at that the same time repeal govt support for workers healthcare with "no a fcking thing." And simultaneously reducing federal support for higher education.

So while Trump ran on improving how society rewards effort, he's governing in a manner exactly the opposite. (which doesn't make Hillary more likeable, btw)

To me, the bleating about the minimum wage = income inequality aka "the rich have more than me" is an SJW cause. Somewhat irrelevant.

Ugh saying "living wage" is even worse than bleating about minimum wage... "Livable" wages are a pipe dream, that's kind of what I said without using the term, like the more you force businesses to pay for employees, the more they charge customers (aka their employees) for the products they need to "live." And not to mention living wages where? In China vs America? Hell, even Anchorage Alaska vs San Francisco California? For a single teen living with mom and dad vs an single mom with four kids? ALL of them have different "living" wages, so the idea that you can put a "wage" out there as "livable" is just bologna, ya know? It's like my husband, son, and I live /very/ comfortably on... $36-40k ish that's like $20/h in total which is only a little higher than the 2016 fed min wage ($8.5/h x2 adults $35k) and on par with the 2017 min wage ($9.25/h x 2 adults $38k) - The single mother of two who's getting no child support from dead beat dad can't live in San Francisco on min wage $9.25/h (and again that's /wise/ decisions vs /stupid/ decisions stuff) but probably could in say Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe they could if they had parents who could help out and watch the kids so they didn't have to pay for daycare, or maybe dad does pay child support so she could make it work, or maybe she does or doesn't have a car payment, on and on and on with different scenarios of can or cannot live off fed minimum wage - it just shows that there is no such thing as a "livable" wage; it's a made up term with zero meaning.


Corp profits are at an all time high because they have access to the entire planet now vs from the 1930s to the 80s/90s. This is not rocket science dear, when you go from say 200-300M customers to 6B customers, no shit you make more money... When you go from a pool of 200-300M potential employees to a pool of 6B potential employees, no shit the cost of labor goes down. [Yes I know not all 200-300M in the country, nor 6B on the planet are capable working adults; the idea stands however.) You just gotta look at the /entire/ puzzle, instead of individual select pieces, ya know? Either way though, the profits of businesses isn't really tied to labor costs, I mean they sell the product for as much as they can and they pay the labor costs they have to pay based on the cost of labor... More on this a bit later though.

I mean uf dah, the new deal... you're trying to boil down global economic changes over a period of like 87 years into single American policy... it just doesn't work that way. Yes, after WWII we were a power house - we were the only nation not bombed into oblivion, of course, we shit gold and other nations had no choice but to buy it. Other nations (Europe mostly) caught up to us and started to shit their own gold, aka America had a slowing economy. Another point that effects the price of labor (aka employee wages) in the 70s we doubled the American work force (ah hell we practically doubled the global workforce because everyone wanted to be Americanized back then.) Women went to work. When you flood the market with employees the cost of labor goes down; supply and demand. Then the 80s and 90s hit, that's when communication between nations became the "norm," so damn easy, and the /true/ (or perhaps I should say "pure") globalization of businesses happened - that's when "American economy" became just a footnote in the full economic picture - where it all became an entangled rats nest. In the 80s-90s Asia started to catch up to us and Europe, massively changing the scope of the global economy and driving wages and income "inequality" by a sudden massive influx of workers (penny workers at that.) You cannot take out just "America's economy" from the global economy and try to talk about it like it's an "independent" thing ya know what I'm saying?

Nor can we /force/ companies to abide by American social [economic] wishes [aka income inequality "adjustments".] Multinational businesses, which is most of them these days (especially the min wage paying ones, box stores and shit) will pay the cost of labor - regardless of if they're in America proper or elsewhere in the world, they're going to find the most "economic" labor force. If they're making computers and labor in China's cheaper they'll go there and import to American's, etc. You know the story, or can figure it out, I'm sure. AND people, American's will buy the cheap shit - that drives lower wages too so there it is. It's a circle, it's all tied together.

When you talk about "income inequality" and shit you're looking at the polar extremes - poor people in America vs global companies entire profit off the planet. Like oil companies who have a product that /everyone/ wants. They are making money off sales across entire planet so of course they're going to have more "equity" than a minimum wage worker who only works (aka sells) their own labor for themselves. No kidding a company that can sell to 6M can make more than an individual who is say a server at a restaurant that serves maybe 300 people a day (that's 150k a year customers) - percentage wise, right, I mean the individual min wage worker has 0.000025% of the customer base to make profit off of - (ya follow?) One has to understand that multinational corps are like... octopuses, each arm has its own brain (seriously.) Take K-mart right, each individual store has to be financially solvent. The parent company will suck up individual stores losses for a little bit, but at some point they cut that "arm" lose and close the store (they did that up here in Alaska, our K-marts were some of the first to go under - labor up here is expensive and they couldn't remain solvent financially.) Each store has to maintain a profit margin in order to be "solvent" or they're a risk of bankruptcy, which effects the entire corp (stock values and shit) Lets say a store has a profit margin of say 3%/y; that means they are /spending/ 97%/y of their profits just to operate [many businesses have /monthly/ profit margins but you get the point.] That means if there's a down turn in profits they go in the hole, they can't even maintain the store for a month. So I mean to say okay fed min wage needs to be $25/h across the nation is seriously shitty because the Home Depot in bumfuck Texas population 200k isn't making enough to cover that labor cost increase.

... I could go on and on about hows and whys, but I'll stop cause peoples eyes tend to glaze over.

We used to have living wages

Low skilled workers could earn enough to support themselves and their families. Todays low skilled worker needs government help to get by. A tax subsidy for their employers to make a profit

 

[bendog]

ME making money on wise investments has zip zero fucking zilch to do with jack and jill dropping out of HS and working min wage jobs to support their kids on...

That is the difference between /wise decisions/ vs /stupid decisions/ nothing more:

The /wise/ decision is to wait to have a kid until you can pay for it's diapers and food.

The /stupid/ decision is to be impatient and get saddled with massive rent, a car payment (or two), a big cell phone bill (or two), and then toss in a kid or two while you're working min wage jobs.

Simple shit, but ya'll conflate this logic with "feels" - problem is that feels ain't so bright, in fact that's typically how you end up with kids when you can't afford them...

In a capitalistic economy there are always workers with the fewest skills, and there are jobs that require few skills. And there is no way one can define "good" choices without there also being "bad" choices. But if people are willing to work and try to support their families, America has stood for making sure jobs pay enough for families to believe children can have better lives.

it seems to me the question is whether Trump represents something new in terms of "expectations."

No. America has always stood for 'opportunity' - that is not the same as just handing people a "good life."

Look, I agree to a point; I didn't want "better" for my kids, but I wanted them to have a "good life" - so I taught them to stay in school, to wait to have children, to pursue "wealth" not specifically "money" itself but a "comfortable" financial standing [stuff like budgeting, when to buy a house or car, investing, financial independence, retirement, etc.] I instilled within them a "drive" for "betterment" in their finances/their 'status' (apartment to house, being able to get cars, snow machines, boats, saving for their kids expenses and college, etc.)

I also told them about reality; that /they/ were responsible for achieving /all/ of that stuff for themselves and their wives and kids because it wasn't anyone else's responsibility. And the second part of that "reality" is that if you /do/ let (or expect) others to 'provide' for you, then you'll /never/ achieve shit; you'll have the bare minimum for survival (if you're lucky) because there are more hands looking for freebies then there will ever be money given out - hard facts of life. My kids, unlike the recent socialist crops out there, know damn well that if they want a "good life" they have to work for it, they know it's not going to just land in their lap, they know it's probably going to take some time and effort, they understand /patience/ - turtle and the hare kind of shit. My eldest sons, in their early 20s, are all well on their way to being wealthy, or at a minimum very comfortably happy, already. Not one of them has kids, not even the 30 year old daughter, they're /all/ waiting until they've got their own shit straight before they drag kids into it.

It has /nothing/ to do with how much /I/ (the wealthy) make, it has to do with the individual's drive to succeed, where they are putting their efforts - if you're more concerned about social media/partying/showing up your friends (new car, phone, whatever)/or even playing at political activism, than you are about advancing your own life (through your career and financial status) then your priorities are not going to give you a "good life" - they'll give you the bare minimum (if you're lucky) - because that's what level of /effort/ you're putting into your financial standing and your own future. Again, wise decisions vs stupid decisions.

That's the rub you bleeding heart SJW's need to understand; you cannot /make/ someone put in effort to better their own lives, only they can do that. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a "user" they are not going to magically turn into an "achiever" until /they/ decide to. All you do by handing out "free" money (welfare) is prolong the time these types can "use" instead of "achieving" for themselves.

When you raise the min wage, businesses will /not/ eat the cost, never will, they pass those costs onto consumers period. Businesses have "rules" too, like not living pay check to pay check - they cannot ever do that, ever - which is why they have built in "profit margins" that they will /always/ meet, because not doing so means they go bankrupt - seriously. So, if you raise the minimum wage, so the cost of their employees goes up, they have exactly two choices. 1) they lay employees off, stop hiring, etc. or 2) they increase prices to cover that cost. Typically you'll see 2, and especially at the end of a recession like we've been in, because businesses have already streamlined their employee numbers as much as they can. So they raise the prices, which means, the cost of living goes up and wipes out the min wage increase. It's a cycle and there is /nothing/ you can do about it. Whining about being "fair" isn't going to change the hard reality that businesses MUST have a certain profit margin or they go under, it is not going to change the fact that businesses are going to "reallocate" the new "expenses" of employee wage increases.

No matter how much sympathy you want to have for "poor folk" who "need help" a business is /not/ there to help, they are there to make money, period. You cannot change that, the best you can do is harness that known reality - unleash the dogs and let them grow so they hire more people; more jobs, more upward mobility for the employees, the more upward mobility for the employees there is, the more folks are getting financially "comfortable" That is the best you can hope for from businesses when it comes down to it.

I'm no more a SJW than you are a loser. But historically speaking, you're simply wrong. Jefferson and Jackson were both at heart about forcing the rich to give lesser earners a better shot at making more. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well. The New Deal dominated our policies from 32-80. And Reagan was all about a reinvigorated capitalism that had stagnated into not rewarding effort.

Nothing I posted could be perceived as advocating for handouts. Liveable wages are not handouts. Perhaps you have a specific gripe about min wages. I didn't bring it up. Min wages may require franchises like McDonalds to raise wages. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. But it's simply not a matter of dispute that corp profits are at a all time high, and out tax policy is about to put debt on workers so profits can be higher, and at that the same time repeal govt support for workers healthcare with "no a fcking thing." And simultaneously reducing federal support for higher education.

So while Trump ran on improving how society rewards effort, he's governing in a manner exactly the opposite. (which doesn't make Hillary more likeable, btw)

To me, the bleating about the minimum wage = income inequality aka "the rich have more than me" is an SJW cause. Somewhat irrelevant.

Ugh saying "living wage" is even worse than bleating about minimum wage... "Livable" wages are a pipe dream, that's kind of what I said without using the term, like the more you force businesses to pay for employees, the more they charge customers (aka their employees) for the products they need to "live." And not to mention living wages where? In China vs America? Hell, even Anchorage Alaska vs San Francisco California? For a single teen living with mom and dad vs an single mom with four kids? ALL of them have different "living" wages, so the idea that you can put a "wage" out there as "livable" is just bologna, ya know? It's like my husband, son, and I live /very/ comfortably on... $36-40k ish that's like $20/h in total which is only a little higher than the 2016 fed min wage ($8.5/h x2 adults $35k) and on par with the 2017 min wage ($9.25/h x 2 adults $38k) - The single mother of two who's getting no child support from dead beat dad can't live in San Francisco on min wage $9.25/h (and again that's /wise/ decisions vs /stupid/ decisions stuff) but probably could in say Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe they could if they had parents who could help out and watch the kids so they didn't have to pay for daycare, or maybe dad does pay child support so she could make it work, or maybe she does or doesn't have a car payment, on and on and on with different scenarios of can or cannot live off fed minimum wage - it just shows that there is no such thing as a "livable" wage; it's a made up term with zero meaning.


Corp profits are at an all time high because they have access to the entire planet now vs from the 1930s to the 80s/90s. This is not rocket science dear, when you go from say 200-300M customers to 6B customers, no shit you make more money... When you go from a pool of 200-300M potential employees to a pool of 6B potential employees, no shit the cost of labor goes down. [Yes I know not all 200-300M in the country, nor 6B on the planet are capable working adults; the idea stands however.) You just gotta look at the /entire/ puzzle, instead of individual select pieces, ya know? Either way though, the profits of businesses isn't really tied to labor costs, I mean they sell the product for as much as they can and they pay the labor costs they have to pay based on the cost of labor... More on this a bit later though.

I mean uf dah, the new deal... you're trying to boil down global economic changes over a period of like 87 years into single American policy... it just doesn't work that way. Yes, after WWII we were a power house - we were the only nation not bombed into oblivion, of course, we shit gold and other nations had no choice but to buy it. Other nations (Europe mostly) caught up to us and started to shit their own gold, aka America had a slowing economy. Another point that effects the price of labor (aka employee wages) in the 70s we doubled the American work force (ah hell we practically doubled the global workforce because everyone wanted to be Americanized back then.) Women went to work. When you flood the market with employees the cost of labor goes down; supply and demand. Then the 80s and 90s hit, that's when communication between nations became the "norm," so damn easy, and the /true/ (or perhaps I should say "pure") globalization of businesses happened - that's when "American economy" became just a footnote in the full economic picture - where it all became an entangled rats nest. In the 80s-90s Asia started to catch up to us and Europe, massively changing the scope of the global economy and driving wages and income "inequality" by a sudden massive influx of workers (penny workers at that.) You cannot take out just "America's economy" from the global economy and try to talk about it like it's an "independent" thing ya know what I'm saying?

Nor can we /force/ companies to abide by American social [economic] wishes [aka income inequality "adjustments".] Multinational businesses, which is most of them these days (especially the min wage paying ones, box stores and shit) will pay the cost of labor - regardless of if they're in America proper or elsewhere in the world, they're going to find the most "economic" labor force. If they're making computers and labor in China's cheaper they'll go there and import to American's, etc. You know the story, or can figure it out, I'm sure. AND people, American's will buy the cheap shit - that drives lower wages too so there it is. It's a circle, it's all tied together.

When you talk about "income inequality" and shit you're looking at the polar extremes - poor people in America vs global companies entire profit off the planet. Like oil companies who have a product that /everyone/ wants. They are making money off sales across entire planet so of course they're going to have more "equity" than a minimum wage worker who only works (aka sells) their own labor for themselves. No kidding a company that can sell to 6M can make more than an individual who is say a server at a restaurant that serves maybe 300 people a day (that's 150k a year customers) - percentage wise, right, I mean the individual min wage worker has 0.000025% of the customer base to make profit off of - (ya follow?) One has to understand that multinational corps are like... octopuses, each arm has its own brain (seriously.) Take K-mart right, each individual store has to be financially solvent. The parent company will suck up individual stores losses for a little bit, but at some point they cut that "arm" lose and close the store (they did that up here in Alaska, our K-marts were some of the first to go under - labor up here is expensive and they couldn't remain solvent financially.) Each store has to maintain a profit margin in order to be "solvent" or they're a risk of bankruptcy, which effects the entire corp (stock values and shit) Lets say a store has a profit margin of say 3%/y; that means they are /spending/ 97%/y of their profits just to operate [many businesses have /monthly/ profit margins but you get the point.] That means if there's a down turn in profits they go in the hole, they can't even maintain the store for a month. So I mean to say okay fed min wage needs to be $25/h across the nation is seriously shitty because the Home Depot in bumfuck Texas population 200k isn't making enough to cover that labor cost increase.

... I could go on and on about hows and whys, but I'll stop cause peoples eyes tend to glaze over.

We used to have living wages

Low skilled workers could earn enough to support themselves and their families. Todays low skilled worker needs government help to get by. A tax subsidy for their employers to make a profit

With increasing technology, there may not be jobs. The rich may have to pay us to buy their shit. LOL

 

[EverCurious]

ME making money on wise investments has zip zero fucking zilch to do with jack and jill dropping out of HS and working min wage jobs to support their kids on...

That is the difference between /wise decisions/ vs /stupid decisions/ nothing more:

The /wise/ decision is to wait to have a kid until you can pay for it's diapers and food.

The /stupid/ decision is to be impatient and get saddled with massive rent, a car payment (or two), a big cell phone bill (or two), and then toss in a kid or two while you're working min wage jobs.

Simple shit, but ya'll conflate this logic with "feels" - problem is that feels ain't so bright, in fact that's typically how you end up with kids when you can't afford them...

Good thing daddy gave trump a few million to start off ,,,Born on 3rd base and thought he hit a triple

That's called envy dear. Envy will /never/ gain /you/ anything. If /you/ want to gain, then /you/ have to put in the effort and make wise decisions. Crying about someone else's financial "gifts"/inheritance, or how much their parents have does no good at all.

That is not envy....it is a reality

It's about equating Trump to a JFK or HW ... if not a Gates or Jobs. I don't really care about Trump or his money. Or W's for that matter. But the policies he pursues do not help people who aspire and work gain rewards.

We have had wealthy Presidents before.....Washington, Teddy and FDR, JFK

None bragged about how wealthy they were and were somewhat reluctant to bring it up
They were also willing to stick their necks out to help the less fortunate

Trump's biggest goal is to slash inheritance and income taxes

Nothing new son, he's been bragging about his fame and wealth since the 80s. Most of us don't give a shit.

No Trump's biggest goal is probably something along the lines of going down in history as the best president America has ever had, that's what narcissists do. His attempts to do so are resonating quite well with me thus far. I do wish he was a bit more fiscally right leaning, but I knew he was a bit of a pac-man (aka centrist/middle road) from the get go so I'm not complaining. If only the rest of the shitheads in DC would stop playing around and get half as much done...

 

[EverCurious]

In a capitalistic economy there are always workers with the fewest skills, and there are jobs that require few skills. And there is no way one can define "good" choices without there also being "bad" choices. But if people are willing to work and try to support their families, America has stood for making sure jobs pay enough for families to believe children can have better lives.

it seems to me the question is whether Trump represents something new in terms of "expectations."

No. America has always stood for 'opportunity' - that is not the same as just handing people a "good life."

Look, I agree to a point; I didn't want "better" for my kids, but I wanted them to have a "good life" - so I taught them to stay in school, to wait to have children, to pursue "wealth" not specifically "money" itself but a "comfortable" financial standing [stuff like budgeting, when to buy a house or car, investing, financial independence, retirement, etc.] I instilled within them a "drive" for "betterment" in their finances/their 'status' (apartment to house, being able to get cars, snow machines, boats, saving for their kids expenses and college, etc.)

I also told them about reality; that /they/ were responsible for achieving /all/ of that stuff for themselves and their wives and kids because it wasn't anyone else's responsibility. And the second part of that "reality" is that if you /do/ let (or expect) others to 'provide' for you, then you'll /never/ achieve shit; you'll have the bare minimum for survival (if you're lucky) because there are more hands looking for freebies then there will ever be money given out - hard facts of life. My kids, unlike the recent socialist crops out there, know damn well that if they want a "good life" they have to work for it, they know it's not going to just land in their lap, they know it's probably going to take some time and effort, they understand /patience/ - turtle and the hare kind of shit. My eldest sons, in their early 20s, are all well on their way to being wealthy, or at a minimum very comfortably happy, already. Not one of them has kids, not even the 30 year old daughter, they're /all/ waiting until they've got their own shit straight before they drag kids into it.

It has /nothing/ to do with how much /I/ (the wealthy) make, it has to do with the individual's drive to succeed, where they are putting their efforts - if you're more concerned about social media/partying/showing up your friends (new car, phone, whatever)/or even playing at political activism, than you are about advancing your own life (through your career and financial status) then your priorities are not going to give you a "good life" - they'll give you the bare minimum (if you're lucky) - because that's what level of /effort/ you're putting into your financial standing and your own future. Again, wise decisions vs stupid decisions.

That's the rub you bleeding heart SJW's need to understand; you cannot /make/ someone put in effort to better their own lives, only they can do that. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a "user" they are not going to magically turn into an "achiever" until /they/ decide to. All you do by handing out "free" money (welfare) is prolong the time these types can "use" instead of "achieving" for themselves.

When you raise the min wage, businesses will /not/ eat the cost, never will, they pass those costs onto consumers period. Businesses have "rules" too, like not living pay check to pay check - they cannot ever do that, ever - which is why they have built in "profit margins" that they will /always/ meet, because not doing so means they go bankrupt - seriously. So, if you raise the minimum wage, so the cost of their employees goes up, they have exactly two choices. 1) they lay employees off, stop hiring, etc. or 2) they increase prices to cover that cost. Typically you'll see 2, and especially at the end of a recession like we've been in, because businesses have already streamlined their employee numbers as much as they can. So they raise the prices, which means, the cost of living goes up and wipes out the min wage increase. It's a cycle and there is /nothing/ you can do about it. Whining about being "fair" isn't going to change the hard reality that businesses MUST have a certain profit margin or they go under, it is not going to change the fact that businesses are going to "reallocate" the new "expenses" of employee wage increases.

No matter how much sympathy you want to have for "poor folk" who "need help" a business is /not/ there to help, they are there to make money, period. You cannot change that, the best you can do is harness that known reality - unleash the dogs and let them grow so they hire more people; more jobs, more upward mobility for the employees, the more upward mobility for the employees there is, the more folks are getting financially "comfortable" That is the best you can hope for from businesses when it comes down to it.

I'm no more a SJW than you are a loser. But historically speaking, you're simply wrong. Jefferson and Jackson were both at heart about forcing the rich to give lesser earners a better shot at making more. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well. The New Deal dominated our policies from 32-80. And Reagan was all about a reinvigorated capitalism that had stagnated into not rewarding effort.

Nothing I posted could be perceived as advocating for handouts. Liveable wages are not handouts. Perhaps you have a specific gripe about min wages. I didn't bring it up. Min wages may require franchises like McDonalds to raise wages. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. But it's simply not a matter of dispute that corp profits are at a all time high, and out tax policy is about to put debt on workers so profits can be higher, and at that the same time repeal govt support for workers healthcare with "no a fcking thing." And simultaneously reducing federal support for higher education.

So while Trump ran on improving how society rewards effort, he's governing in a manner exactly the opposite. (which doesn't make Hillary more likeable, btw)

To me, the bleating about the minimum wage = income inequality aka "the rich have more than me" is an SJW cause. Somewhat irrelevant.

Ugh saying "living wage" is even worse than bleating about minimum wage... "Livable" wages are a pipe dream, that's kind of what I said without using the term, like the more you force businesses to pay for employees, the more they charge customers (aka their employees) for the products they need to "live." And not to mention living wages where? In China vs America? Hell, even Anchorage Alaska vs San Francisco California? For a single teen living with mom and dad vs an single mom with four kids? ALL of them have different "living" wages, so the idea that you can put a "wage" out there as "livable" is just bologna, ya know? It's like my husband, son, and I live /very/ comfortably on... $36-40k ish that's like $20/h in total which is only a little higher than the 2016 fed min wage ($8.5/h x2 adults $35k) and on par with the 2017 min wage ($9.25/h x 2 adults $38k) - The single mother of two who's getting no child support from dead beat dad can't live in San Francisco on min wage $9.25/h (and again that's /wise/ decisions vs /stupid/ decisions stuff) but probably could in say Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe they could if they had parents who could help out and watch the kids so they didn't have to pay for daycare, or maybe dad does pay child support so she could make it work, or maybe she does or doesn't have a car payment, on and on and on with different scenarios of can or cannot live off fed minimum wage - it just shows that there is no such thing as a "livable" wage; it's a made up term with zero meaning.


Corp profits are at an all time high because they have access to the entire planet now vs from the 1930s to the 80s/90s. This is not rocket science dear, when you go from say 200-300M customers to 6B customers, no shit you make more money... When you go from a pool of 200-300M potential employees to a pool of 6B potential employees, no shit the cost of labor goes down. [Yes I know not all 200-300M in the country, nor 6B on the planet are capable working adults; the idea stands however.) You just gotta look at the /entire/ puzzle, instead of individual select pieces, ya know? Either way though, the profits of businesses isn't really tied to labor costs, I mean they sell the product for as much as they can and they pay the labor costs they have to pay based on the cost of labor... More on this a bit later though.

I mean uf dah, the new deal... you're trying to boil down global economic changes over a period of like 87 years into single American policy... it just doesn't work that way. Yes, after WWII we were a power house - we were the only nation not bombed into oblivion, of course, we shit gold and other nations had no choice but to buy it. Other nations (Europe mostly) caught up to us and started to shit their own gold, aka America had a slowing economy. Another point that effects the price of labor (aka employee wages) in the 70s we doubled the American work force (ah hell we practically doubled the global workforce because everyone wanted to be Americanized back then.) Women went to work. When you flood the market with employees the cost of labor goes down; supply and demand. Then the 80s and 90s hit, that's when communication between nations became the "norm," so damn easy, and the /true/ (or perhaps I should say "pure") globalization of businesses happened - that's when "American economy" became just a footnote in the full economic picture - where it all became an entangled rats nest. In the 80s-90s Asia started to catch up to us and Europe, massively changing the scope of the global economy and driving wages and income "inequality" by a sudden massive influx of workers (penny workers at that.) You cannot take out just "America's economy" from the global economy and try to talk about it like it's an "independent" thing ya know what I'm saying?

Nor can we /force/ companies to abide by American social [economic] wishes [aka income inequality "adjustments".] Multinational businesses, which is most of them these days (especially the min wage paying ones, box stores and shit) will pay the cost of labor - regardless of if they're in America proper or elsewhere in the world, they're going to find the most "economic" labor force. If they're making computers and labor in China's cheaper they'll go there and import to American's, etc. You know the story, or can figure it out, I'm sure. AND people, American's will buy the cheap shit - that drives lower wages too so there it is. It's a circle, it's all tied together.

When you talk about "income inequality" and shit you're looking at the polar extremes - poor people in America vs global companies entire profit off the planet. Like oil companies who have a product that /everyone/ wants. They are making money off sales across entire planet so of course they're going to have more "equity" than a minimum wage worker who only works (aka sells) their own labor for themselves. No kidding a company that can sell to 6M can make more than an individual who is say a server at a restaurant that serves maybe 300 people a day (that's 150k a year customers) - percentage wise, right, I mean the individual min wage worker has 0.000025% of the customer base to make profit off of - (ya follow?) One has to understand that multinational corps are like... octopuses, each arm has its own brain (seriously.) Take K-mart right, each individual store has to be financially solvent. The parent company will suck up individual stores losses for a little bit, but at some point they cut that "arm" lose and close the store (they did that up here in Alaska, our K-marts were some of the first to go under - labor up here is expensive and they couldn't remain solvent financially.) Each store has to maintain a profit margin in order to be "solvent" or they're a risk of bankruptcy, which effects the entire corp (stock values and shit) Lets say a store has a profit margin of say 3%/y; that means they are /spending/ 97%/y of their profits just to operate [many businesses have /monthly/ profit margins but you get the point.] That means if there's a down turn in profits they go in the hole, they can't even maintain the store for a month. So I mean to say okay fed min wage needs to be $25/h across the nation is seriously shitty because the Home Depot in bumfuck Texas population 200k isn't making enough to cover that labor cost increase.

... I could go on and on about hows and whys, but I'll stop cause peoples eyes tend to glaze over.

We used to have living wages

Low skilled workers could earn enough to support themselves and their families. Todays low skilled worker needs government help to get by. A tax subsidy for their employers to make a profit

With increasing technology, there may not be jobs. The rich may have to pay us to buy their shit. LOL

No, the rich just wouldn't make that shit. It's the same reason no one makes typewriters anymore - supply and demand.

On the plus side, computers and technology will never replace all jobs, though I do imagine it'll cut down on how many jobs their are. There's always going to be winners and losers, all everyone has to do is decide which side of that equation they are going to be on.

 

[eddiew37]

No. America has always stood for 'opportunity' - that is not the same as just handing people a "good life."

Look, I agree to a point; I didn't want "better" for my kids, but I wanted them to have a "good life" - so I taught them to stay in school, to wait to have children, to pursue "wealth" not specifically "money" itself but a "comfortable" financial standing [stuff like budgeting, when to buy a house or car, investing, financial independence, retirement, etc.] I instilled within them a "drive" for "betterment" in their finances/their 'status' (apartment to house, being able to get cars, snow machines, boats, saving for their kids expenses and college, etc.)

I also told them about reality; that /they/ were responsible for achieving /all/ of that stuff for themselves and their wives and kids because it wasn't anyone else's responsibility. And the second part of that "reality" is that if you /do/ let (or expect) others to 'provide' for you, then you'll /never/ achieve shit; you'll have the bare minimum for survival (if you're lucky) because there are more hands looking for freebies then there will ever be money given out - hard facts of life. My kids, unlike the recent socialist crops out there, know damn well that if they want a "good life" they have to work for it, they know it's not going to just land in their lap, they know it's probably going to take some time and effort, they understand /patience/ - turtle and the hare kind of shit. My eldest sons, in their early 20s, are all well on their way to being wealthy, or at a minimum very comfortably happy, already. Not one of them has kids, not even the 30 year old daughter, they're /all/ waiting until they've got their own shit straight before they drag kids into it.

It has /nothing/ to do with how much /I/ (the wealthy) make, it has to do with the individual's drive to succeed, where they are putting their efforts - if you're more concerned about social media/partying/showing up your friends (new car, phone, whatever)/or even playing at political activism, than you are about advancing your own life (through your career and financial status) then your priorities are not going to give you a "good life" - they'll give you the bare minimum (if you're lucky) - because that's what level of /effort/ you're putting into your financial standing and your own future. Again, wise decisions vs stupid decisions.

That's the rub you bleeding heart SJW's need to understand; you cannot /make/ someone put in effort to better their own lives, only they can do that. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a "user" they are not going to magically turn into an "achiever" until /they/ decide to. All you do by handing out "free" money (welfare) is prolong the time these types can "use" instead of "achieving" for themselves.

When you raise the min wage, businesses will /not/ eat the cost, never will, they pass those costs onto consumers period. Businesses have "rules" too, like not living pay check to pay check - they cannot ever do that, ever - which is why they have built in "profit margins" that they will /always/ meet, because not doing so means they go bankrupt - seriously. So, if you raise the minimum wage, so the cost of their employees goes up, they have exactly two choices. 1) they lay employees off, stop hiring, etc. or 2) they increase prices to cover that cost. Typically you'll see 2, and especially at the end of a recession like we've been in, because businesses have already streamlined their employee numbers as much as they can. So they raise the prices, which means, the cost of living goes up and wipes out the min wage increase. It's a cycle and there is /nothing/ you can do about it. Whining about being "fair" isn't going to change the hard reality that businesses MUST have a certain profit margin or they go under, it is not going to change the fact that businesses are going to "reallocate" the new "expenses" of employee wage increases.

No matter how much sympathy you want to have for "poor folk" who "need help" a business is /not/ there to help, they are there to make money, period. You cannot change that, the best you can do is harness that known reality - unleash the dogs and let them grow so they hire more people; more jobs, more upward mobility for the employees, the more upward mobility for the employees there is, the more folks are getting financially "comfortable" That is the best you can hope for from businesses when it comes down to it.

I'm no more a SJW than you are a loser. But historically speaking, you're simply wrong. Jefferson and Jackson were both at heart about forcing the rich to give lesser earners a better shot at making more. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well. The New Deal dominated our policies from 32-80. And Reagan was all about a reinvigorated capitalism that had stagnated into not rewarding effort.

Nothing I posted could be perceived as advocating for handouts. Liveable wages are not handouts. Perhaps you have a specific gripe about min wages. I didn't bring it up. Min wages may require franchises like McDonalds to raise wages. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. But it's simply not a matter of dispute that corp profits are at a all time high, and out tax policy is about to put debt on workers so profits can be higher, and at that the same time repeal govt support for workers healthcare with "no a fcking thing." And simultaneously reducing federal support for higher education.

So while Trump ran on improving how society rewards effort, he's governing in a manner exactly the opposite. (which doesn't make Hillary more likeable, btw)

To me, the bleating about the minimum wage = income inequality aka "the rich have more than me" is an SJW cause. Somewhat irrelevant.

Ugh saying "living wage" is even worse than bleating about minimum wage... "Livable" wages are a pipe dream, that's kind of what I said without using the term, like the more you force businesses to pay for employees, the more they charge customers (aka their employees) for the products they need to "live." And not to mention living wages where? In China vs America? Hell, even Anchorage Alaska vs San Francisco California? For a single teen living with mom and dad vs an single mom with four kids? ALL of them have different "living" wages, so the idea that you can put a "wage" out there as "livable" is just bologna, ya know? It's like my husband, son, and I live /very/ comfortably on... $36-40k ish that's like $20/h in total which is only a little higher than the 2016 fed min wage ($8.5/h x2 adults $35k) and on par with the 2017 min wage ($9.25/h x 2 adults $38k) - The single mother of two who's getting no child support from dead beat dad can't live in San Francisco on min wage $9.25/h (and again that's /wise/ decisions vs /stupid/ decisions stuff) but probably could in say Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe they could if they had parents who could help out and watch the kids so they didn't have to pay for daycare, or maybe dad does pay child support so she could make it work, or maybe she does or doesn't have a car payment, on and on and on with different scenarios of can or cannot live off fed minimum wage - it just shows that there is no such thing as a "livable" wage; it's a made up term with zero meaning.


Corp profits are at an all time high because they have access to the entire planet now vs from the 1930s to the 80s/90s. This is not rocket science dear, when you go from say 200-300M customers to 6B customers, no shit you make more money... When you go from a pool of 200-300M potential employees to a pool of 6B potential employees, no shit the cost of labor goes down. [Yes I know not all 200-300M in the country, nor 6B on the planet are capable working adults; the idea stands however.) You just gotta look at the /entire/ puzzle, instead of individual select pieces, ya know? Either way though, the profits of businesses isn't really tied to labor costs, I mean they sell the product for as much as they can and they pay the labor costs they have to pay based on the cost of labor... More on this a bit later though.

I mean uf dah, the new deal... you're trying to boil down global economic changes over a period of like 87 years into single American policy... it just doesn't work that way. Yes, after WWII we were a power house - we were the only nation not bombed into oblivion, of course, we shit gold and other nations had no choice but to buy it. Other nations (Europe mostly) caught up to us and started to shit their own gold, aka America had a slowing economy. Another point that effects the price of labor (aka employee wages) in the 70s we doubled the American work force (ah hell we practically doubled the global workforce because everyone wanted to be Americanized back then.) Women went to work. When you flood the market with employees the cost of labor goes down; supply and demand. Then the 80s and 90s hit, that's when communication between nations became the "norm," so damn easy, and the /true/ (or perhaps I should say "pure") globalization of businesses happened - that's when "American economy" became just a footnote in the full economic picture - where it all became an entangled rats nest. In the 80s-90s Asia started to catch up to us and Europe, massively changing the scope of the global economy and driving wages and income "inequality" by a sudden massive influx of workers (penny workers at that.) You cannot take out just "America's economy" from the global economy and try to talk about it like it's an "independent" thing ya know what I'm saying?

Nor can we /force/ companies to abide by American social [economic] wishes [aka income inequality "adjustments".] Multinational businesses, which is most of them these days (especially the min wage paying ones, box stores and shit) will pay the cost of labor - regardless of if they're in America proper or elsewhere in the world, they're going to find the most "economic" labor force. If they're making computers and labor in China's cheaper they'll go there and import to American's, etc. You know the story, or can figure it out, I'm sure. AND people, American's will buy the cheap shit - that drives lower wages too so there it is. It's a circle, it's all tied together.

When you talk about "income inequality" and shit you're looking at the polar extremes - poor people in America vs global companies entire profit off the planet. Like oil companies who have a product that /everyone/ wants. They are making money off sales across entire planet so of course they're going to have more "equity" than a minimum wage worker who only works (aka sells) their own labor for themselves. No kidding a company that can sell to 6M can make more than an individual who is say a server at a restaurant that serves maybe 300 people a day (that's 150k a year customers) - percentage wise, right, I mean the individual min wage worker has 0.000025% of the customer base to make profit off of - (ya follow?) One has to understand that multinational corps are like... octopuses, each arm has its own brain (seriously.) Take K-mart right, each individual store has to be financially solvent. The parent company will suck up individual stores losses for a little bit, but at some point they cut that "arm" lose and close the store (they did that up here in Alaska, our K-marts were some of the first to go under - labor up here is expensive and they couldn't remain solvent financially.) Each store has to maintain a profit margin in order to be "solvent" or they're a risk of bankruptcy, which effects the entire corp (stock values and shit) Lets say a store has a profit margin of say 3%/y; that means they are /spending/ 97%/y of their profits just to operate [many businesses have /monthly/ profit margins but you get the point.] That means if there's a down turn in profits they go in the hole, they can't even maintain the store for a month. So I mean to say okay fed min wage needs to be $25/h across the nation is seriously shitty because the Home Depot in bumfuck Texas population 200k isn't making enough to cover that labor cost increase.

... I could go on and on about hows and whys, but I'll stop cause peoples eyes tend to glaze over.

We used to have living wages

Low skilled workers could earn enough to support themselves and their families. Todays low skilled worker needs government help to get by. A tax subsidy for their employers to make a profit

With increasing technology, there may not be jobs. The rich may have to pay us to buy their shit. LOL

No, the rich just wouldn't make that shit. It's the same reason no one makes typewriters anymore - supply and demand.

On the plus side, computers and technology will never replace all jobs, though I do imagine it'll cut down on how many jobs their are. There's always going to be winners and losers, all everyone has to do is decide which side of that equation they are going to be on.

Robots are taking over

 

[EverCurious]

ME making money on wise investments has zip zero fucking zilch to do with jack and jill dropping out of HS and working min wage jobs to support their kids on...

That is the difference between /wise decisions/ vs /stupid decisions/ nothing more:

The /wise/ decision is to wait to have a kid until you can pay for it's diapers and food.

The /stupid/ decision is to be impatient and get saddled with massive rent, a car payment (or two), a big cell phone bill (or two), and then toss in a kid or two while you're working min wage jobs.

Simple shit, but ya'll conflate this logic with "feels" - problem is that feels ain't so bright, in fact that's typically how you end up with kids when you can't afford them...

In a capitalistic economy there are always workers with the fewest skills, and there are jobs that require few skills. And there is no way one can define "good" choices without there also being "bad" choices. But if people are willing to work and try to support their families, America has stood for making sure jobs pay enough for families to believe children can have better lives.

it seems to me the question is whether Trump represents something new in terms of "expectations."

No. America has always stood for 'opportunity' - that is not the same as just handing people a "good life."

Look, I agree to a point; I didn't want "better" for my kids, but I wanted them to have a "good life" - so I taught them to stay in school, to wait to have children, to pursue "wealth" not specifically "money" itself but a "comfortable" financial standing [stuff like budgeting, when to buy a house or car, investing, financial independence, retirement, etc.] I instilled within them a "drive" for "betterment" in their finances/their 'status' (apartment to house, being able to get cars, snow machines, boats, saving for their kids expenses and college, etc.)

I also told them about reality; that /they/ were responsible for achieving /all/ of that stuff for themselves and their wives and kids because it wasn't anyone else's responsibility. And the second part of that "reality" is that if you /do/ let (or expect) others to 'provide' for you, then you'll /never/ achieve shit; you'll have the bare minimum for survival (if you're lucky) because there are more hands looking for freebies then there will ever be money given out - hard facts of life. My kids, unlike the recent socialist crops out there, know damn well that if they want a "good life" they have to work for it, they know it's not going to just land in their lap, they know it's probably going to take some time and effort, they understand /patience/ - turtle and the hare kind of shit. My eldest sons, in their early 20s, are all well on their way to being wealthy, or at a minimum very comfortably happy, already. Not one of them has kids, not even the 30 year old daughter, they're /all/ waiting until they've got their own shit straight before they drag kids into it.

It has /nothing/ to do with how much /I/ (the wealthy) make, it has to do with the individual's drive to succeed, where they are putting their efforts - if you're more concerned about social media/partying/showing up your friends (new car, phone, whatever)/or even playing at political activism, than you are about advancing your own life (through your career and financial status) then your priorities are not going to give you a "good life" - they'll give you the bare minimum (if you're lucky) - because that's what level of /effort/ you're putting into your financial standing and your own future. Again, wise decisions vs stupid decisions.

That's the rub you bleeding heart SJW's need to understand; you cannot /make/ someone put in effort to better their own lives, only they can do that. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a "user" they are not going to magically turn into an "achiever" until /they/ decide to. All you do by handing out "free" money (welfare) is prolong the time these types can "use" instead of "achieving" for themselves.

When you raise the min wage, businesses will /not/ eat the cost, never will, they pass those costs onto consumers period. Businesses have "rules" too, like not living pay check to pay check - they cannot ever do that, ever - which is why they have built in "profit margins" that they will /always/ meet, because not doing so means they go bankrupt - seriously. So, if you raise the minimum wage, so the cost of their employees goes up, they have exactly two choices. 1) they lay employees off, stop hiring, etc. or 2) they increase prices to cover that cost. Typically you'll see 2, and especially at the end of a recession like we've been in, because businesses have already streamlined their employee numbers as much as they can. So they raise the prices, which means, the cost of living goes up and wipes out the min wage increase. It's a cycle and there is /nothing/ you can do about it. Whining about being "fair" isn't going to change the hard reality that businesses MUST have a certain profit margin or they go under, it is not going to change the fact that businesses are going to "reallocate" the new "expenses" of employee wage increases.

No matter how much sympathy you want to have for "poor folk" who "need help" a business is /not/ there to help, they are there to make money, period. You cannot change that, the best you can do is harness that known reality - unleash the dogs and let them grow so they hire more people; more jobs, more upward mobility for the employees, the more upward mobility for the employees there is, the more folks are getting financially "comfortable" That is the best you can hope for from businesses when it comes down to it.

I'm no more a SJW than you are a loser. But historically speaking, you're simply wrong. Jefferson and Jackson were both at heart about forcing the rich to give lesser earners a better shot at making more. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well. The New Deal dominated our policies from 32-80. And Reagan was all about a reinvigorated capitalism that had stagnated into not rewarding effort.

Nothing I posted could be perceived as advocating for handouts. Liveable wages are not handouts. Perhaps you have a specific gripe about min wages. I didn't bring it up. Min wages may require franchises like McDonalds to raise wages. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. But it's simply not a matter of dispute that corp profits are at a all time high, and out tax policy is about to put debt on workers so profits can be higher, and at that the same time repeal govt support for workers healthcare with "no a fcking thing." And simultaneously reducing federal support for higher education.

So while Trump ran on improving how society rewards effort, he's governing in a manner exactly the opposite. (which doesn't make Hillary more likeable, btw)

To me, the bleating about the minimum wage = income inequality aka "the rich have more than me" is an SJW cause. Somewhat irrelevant.

Ugh saying "living wage" is even worse than bleating about minimum wage... "Livable" wages are a pipe dream, that's kind of what I said without using the term, like the more you force businesses to pay for employees, the more they charge customers (aka their employees) for the products they need to "live." And not to mention living wages where? In China vs America? Hell, even Anchorage Alaska vs San Francisco California? For a single teen living with mom and dad vs an single mom with four kids? ALL of them have different "living" wages, so the idea that you can put a "wage" out there as "livable" is just bologna, ya know? It's like my husband, son, and I live /very/ comfortably on... $36-40k ish that's like $20/h in total which is only a little higher than the 2016 fed min wage ($8.5/h x2 adults $35k) and on par with the 2017 min wage ($9.25/h x 2 adults $38k) - The single mother of two who's getting no child support from dead beat dad can't live in San Francisco on min wage $9.25/h (and again that's /wise/ decisions vs /stupid/ decisions stuff) but probably could in say Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe they could if they had parents who could help out and watch the kids so they didn't have to pay for daycare, or maybe dad does pay child support so she could make it work, or maybe she does or doesn't have a car payment, on and on and on with different scenarios of can or cannot live off fed minimum wage - it just shows that there is no such thing as a "livable" wage; it's a made up term with zero meaning.


Corp profits are at an all time high because they have access to the entire planet now vs from the 1930s to the 80s/90s. This is not rocket science dear, when you go from say 200-300M customers to 6B customers, no shit you make more money... When you go from a pool of 200-300M potential employees to a pool of 6B potential employees, no shit the cost of labor goes down. [Yes I know not all 200-300M in the country, nor 6B on the planet are capable working adults; the idea stands however.) You just gotta look at the /entire/ puzzle, instead of individual select pieces, ya know? Either way though, the profits of businesses isn't really tied to labor costs, I mean they sell the product for as much as they can and they pay the labor costs they have to pay based on the cost of labor... More on this a bit later though.

I mean uf dah, the new deal... you're trying to boil down global economic changes over a period of like 87 years into single American policy... it just doesn't work that way. Yes, after WWII we were a power house - we were the only nation not bombed into oblivion, of course, we shit gold and other nations had no choice but to buy it. Other nations (Europe mostly) caught up to us and started to shit their own gold, aka America had a slowing economy. Another point that effects the price of labor (aka employee wages) in the 70s we doubled the American work force (ah hell we practically doubled the global workforce because everyone wanted to be Americanized back then.) Women went to work. When you flood the market with employees the cost of labor goes down; supply and demand. Then the 80s and 90s hit, that's when communication between nations became the "norm," so damn easy, and the /true/ (or perhaps I should say "pure") globalization of businesses happened - that's when "American economy" became just a footnote in the full economic picture - where it all became an entangled rats nest. In the 80s-90s Asia started to catch up to us and Europe, massively changing the scope of the global economy and driving wages and income "inequality" by a sudden massive influx of workers (penny workers at that.) You cannot take out just "America's economy" from the global economy and try to talk about it like it's an "independent" thing ya know what I'm saying?

Nor can we /force/ companies to abide by American social [economic] wishes [aka income inequality "adjustments".] Multinational businesses, which is most of them these days (especially the min wage paying ones, box stores and shit) will pay the cost of labor - regardless of if they're in America proper or elsewhere in the world, they're going to find the most "economic" labor force. If they're making computers and labor in China's cheaper they'll go there and import to American's, etc. You know the story, or can figure it out, I'm sure. AND people, American's will buy the cheap shit - that drives lower wages too so there it is. It's a circle, it's all tied together.

When you talk about "income inequality" and shit you're looking at the polar extremes - poor people in America vs global companies entire profit off the planet. Like oil companies who have a product that /everyone/ wants. They are making money off sales across entire planet so of course they're going to have more "equity" than a minimum wage worker who only works (aka sells) their own labor for themselves. No kidding a company that can sell to 6M can make more than an individual who is say a server at a restaurant that serves maybe 300 people a day (that's 150k a year customers) - percentage wise, right, I mean the individual min wage worker has 0.000025% of the customer base to make profit off of - (ya follow?) One has to understand that multinational corps are like... octopuses, each arm has its own brain (seriously.) Take K-mart right, each individual store has to be financially solvent. The parent company will suck up individual stores losses for a little bit, but at some point they cut that "arm" lose and close the store (they did that up here in Alaska, our K-marts were some of the first to go under - labor up here is expensive and they couldn't remain solvent financially.) Each store has to maintain a profit margin in order to be "solvent" or they're a risk of bankruptcy, which effects the entire corp (stock values and shit) Lets say a store has a profit margin of say 3%/y; that means they are /spending/ 97%/y of their profits just to operate [many businesses have /monthly/ profit margins but you get the point.] That means if there's a down turn in profits they go in the hole, they can't even maintain the store for a month. So I mean to say okay fed min wage needs to be $25/h across the nation is seriously shitty because the Home Depot in bumfuck Texas population 200k isn't making enough to cover that labor cost increase.

... I could go on and on about hows and whys, but I'll stop cause peoples eyes tend to glaze over.

We used to have living wages

Low skilled workers could earn enough to support themselves and their families. Todays low skilled worker needs government help to get by. A tax subsidy for their employers to make a profit

Sure, when America pioneered industrialization, when we were the "last nation standing," before we flooded the labor market with women, before the internet opened the flood gates to a global labor market.

Yes. When America was in it's own little bubble we were able to compete with third world wages. Ya'll wanna go back to those days? I suppose we could bomb the fucking shit out of the planet and take over again...

 

[bendog]

No. America has always stood for 'opportunity' - that is not the same as just handing people a "good life."

Look, I agree to a point; I didn't want "better" for my kids, but I wanted them to have a "good life" - so I taught them to stay in school, to wait to have children, to pursue "wealth" not specifically "money" itself but a "comfortable" financial standing [stuff like budgeting, when to buy a house or car, investing, financial independence, retirement, etc.] I instilled within them a "drive" for "betterment" in their finances/their 'status' (apartment to house, being able to get cars, snow machines, boats, saving for their kids expenses and college, etc.)

I also told them about reality; that /they/ were responsible for achieving /all/ of that stuff for themselves and their wives and kids because it wasn't anyone else's responsibility. And the second part of that "reality" is that if you /do/ let (or expect) others to 'provide' for you, then you'll /never/ achieve shit; you'll have the bare minimum for survival (if you're lucky) because there are more hands looking for freebies then there will ever be money given out - hard facts of life. My kids, unlike the recent socialist crops out there, know damn well that if they want a "good life" they have to work for it, they know it's not going to just land in their lap, they know it's probably going to take some time and effort, they understand /patience/ - turtle and the hare kind of shit. My eldest sons, in their early 20s, are all well on their way to being wealthy, or at a minimum very comfortably happy, already. Not one of them has kids, not even the 30 year old daughter, they're /all/ waiting until they've got their own shit straight before they drag kids into it.

It has /nothing/ to do with how much /I/ (the wealthy) make, it has to do with the individual's drive to succeed, where they are putting their efforts - if you're more concerned about social media/partying/showing up your friends (new car, phone, whatever)/or even playing at political activism, than you are about advancing your own life (through your career and financial status) then your priorities are not going to give you a "good life" - they'll give you the bare minimum (if you're lucky) - because that's what level of /effort/ you're putting into your financial standing and your own future. Again, wise decisions vs stupid decisions.

That's the rub you bleeding heart SJW's need to understand; you cannot /make/ someone put in effort to better their own lives, only they can do that. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a "user" they are not going to magically turn into an "achiever" until /they/ decide to. All you do by handing out "free" money (welfare) is prolong the time these types can "use" instead of "achieving" for themselves.

When you raise the min wage, businesses will /not/ eat the cost, never will, they pass those costs onto consumers period. Businesses have "rules" too, like not living pay check to pay check - they cannot ever do that, ever - which is why they have built in "profit margins" that they will /always/ meet, because not doing so means they go bankrupt - seriously. So, if you raise the minimum wage, so the cost of their employees goes up, they have exactly two choices. 1) they lay employees off, stop hiring, etc. or 2) they increase prices to cover that cost. Typically you'll see 2, and especially at the end of a recession like we've been in, because businesses have already streamlined their employee numbers as much as they can. So they raise the prices, which means, the cost of living goes up and wipes out the min wage increase. It's a cycle and there is /nothing/ you can do about it. Whining about being "fair" isn't going to change the hard reality that businesses MUST have a certain profit margin or they go under, it is not going to change the fact that businesses are going to "reallocate" the new "expenses" of employee wage increases.

No matter how much sympathy you want to have for "poor folk" who "need help" a business is /not/ there to help, they are there to make money, period. You cannot change that, the best you can do is harness that known reality - unleash the dogs and let them grow so they hire more people; more jobs, more upward mobility for the employees, the more upward mobility for the employees there is, the more folks are getting financially "comfortable" That is the best you can hope for from businesses when it comes down to it.

I'm no more a SJW than you are a loser. But historically speaking, you're simply wrong. Jefferson and Jackson were both at heart about forcing the rich to give lesser earners a better shot at making more. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well. The New Deal dominated our policies from 32-80. And Reagan was all about a reinvigorated capitalism that had stagnated into not rewarding effort.

Nothing I posted could be perceived as advocating for handouts. Liveable wages are not handouts. Perhaps you have a specific gripe about min wages. I didn't bring it up. Min wages may require franchises like McDonalds to raise wages. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. But it's simply not a matter of dispute that corp profits are at a all time high, and out tax policy is about to put debt on workers so profits can be higher, and at that the same time repeal govt support for workers healthcare with "no a fcking thing." And simultaneously reducing federal support for higher education.

So while Trump ran on improving how society rewards effort, he's governing in a manner exactly the opposite. (which doesn't make Hillary more likeable, btw)

To me, the bleating about the minimum wage = income inequality aka "the rich have more than me" is an SJW cause. Somewhat irrelevant.

Ugh saying "living wage" is even worse than bleating about minimum wage... "Livable" wages are a pipe dream, that's kind of what I said without using the term, like the more you force businesses to pay for employees, the more they charge customers (aka their employees) for the products they need to "live." And not to mention living wages where? In China vs America? Hell, even Anchorage Alaska vs San Francisco California? For a single teen living with mom and dad vs an single mom with four kids? ALL of them have different "living" wages, so the idea that you can put a "wage" out there as "livable" is just bologna, ya know? It's like my husband, son, and I live /very/ comfortably on... $36-40k ish that's like $20/h in total which is only a little higher than the 2016 fed min wage ($8.5/h x2 adults $35k) and on par with the 2017 min wage ($9.25/h x 2 adults $38k) - The single mother of two who's getting no child support from dead beat dad can't live in San Francisco on min wage $9.25/h (and again that's /wise/ decisions vs /stupid/ decisions stuff) but probably could in say Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe they could if they had parents who could help out and watch the kids so they didn't have to pay for daycare, or maybe dad does pay child support so she could make it work, or maybe she does or doesn't have a car payment, on and on and on with different scenarios of can or cannot live off fed minimum wage - it just shows that there is no such thing as a "livable" wage; it's a made up term with zero meaning.


Corp profits are at an all time high because they have access to the entire planet now vs from the 1930s to the 80s/90s. This is not rocket science dear, when you go from say 200-300M customers to 6B customers, no shit you make more money... When you go from a pool of 200-300M potential employees to a pool of 6B potential employees, no shit the cost of labor goes down. [Yes I know not all 200-300M in the country, nor 6B on the planet are capable working adults; the idea stands however.) You just gotta look at the /entire/ puzzle, instead of individual select pieces, ya know? Either way though, the profits of businesses isn't really tied to labor costs, I mean they sell the product for as much as they can and they pay the labor costs they have to pay based on the cost of labor... More on this a bit later though.

I mean uf dah, the new deal... you're trying to boil down global economic changes over a period of like 87 years into single American policy... it just doesn't work that way. Yes, after WWII we were a power house - we were the only nation not bombed into oblivion, of course, we shit gold and other nations had no choice but to buy it. Other nations (Europe mostly) caught up to us and started to shit their own gold, aka America had a slowing economy. Another point that effects the price of labor (aka employee wages) in the 70s we doubled the American work force (ah hell we practically doubled the global workforce because everyone wanted to be Americanized back then.) Women went to work. When you flood the market with employees the cost of labor goes down; supply and demand. Then the 80s and 90s hit, that's when communication between nations became the "norm," so damn easy, and the /true/ (or perhaps I should say "pure") globalization of businesses happened - that's when "American economy" became just a footnote in the full economic picture - where it all became an entangled rats nest. In the 80s-90s Asia started to catch up to us and Europe, massively changing the scope of the global economy and driving wages and income "inequality" by a sudden massive influx of workers (penny workers at that.) You cannot take out just "America's economy" from the global economy and try to talk about it like it's an "independent" thing ya know what I'm saying?

Nor can we /force/ companies to abide by American social [economic] wishes [aka income inequality "adjustments".] Multinational businesses, which is most of them these days (especially the min wage paying ones, box stores and shit) will pay the cost of labor - regardless of if they're in America proper or elsewhere in the world, they're going to find the most "economic" labor force. If they're making computers and labor in China's cheaper they'll go there and import to American's, etc. You know the story, or can figure it out, I'm sure. AND people, American's will buy the cheap shit - that drives lower wages too so there it is. It's a circle, it's all tied together.

When you talk about "income inequality" and shit you're looking at the polar extremes - poor people in America vs global companies entire profit off the planet. Like oil companies who have a product that /everyone/ wants. They are making money off sales across entire planet so of course they're going to have more "equity" than a minimum wage worker who only works (aka sells) their own labor for themselves. No kidding a company that can sell to 6M can make more than an individual who is say a server at a restaurant that serves maybe 300 people a day (that's 150k a year customers) - percentage wise, right, I mean the individual min wage worker has 0.000025% of the customer base to make profit off of - (ya follow?) One has to understand that multinational corps are like... octopuses, each arm has its own brain (seriously.) Take K-mart right, each individual store has to be financially solvent. The parent company will suck up individual stores losses for a little bit, but at some point they cut that "arm" lose and close the store (they did that up here in Alaska, our K-marts were some of the first to go under - labor up here is expensive and they couldn't remain solvent financially.) Each store has to maintain a profit margin in order to be "solvent" or they're a risk of bankruptcy, which effects the entire corp (stock values and shit) Lets say a store has a profit margin of say 3%/y; that means they are /spending/ 97%/y of their profits just to operate [many businesses have /monthly/ profit margins but you get the point.] That means if there's a down turn in profits they go in the hole, they can't even maintain the store for a month. So I mean to say okay fed min wage needs to be $25/h across the nation is seriously shitty because the Home Depot in bumfuck Texas population 200k isn't making enough to cover that labor cost increase.

... I could go on and on about hows and whys, but I'll stop cause peoples eyes tend to glaze over.

We used to have living wages

Low skilled workers could earn enough to support themselves and their families. Todays low skilled worker needs government help to get by. A tax subsidy for their employers to make a profit

With increasing technology, there may not be jobs. The rich may have to pay us to buy their shit. LOL

No, the rich just wouldn't make that shit. It's the same reason no one makes typewriters anymore - supply and demand.

On the plus side, computers and technology will never replace all jobs, though I do imagine it'll cut down on how many jobs their are. There's always going to be winners and losers, all everyone has to do is decide which side of that equation they are going to be on.

Yes the rich can just buy all their own shit.

 

[EverCurious]

I'm no more a SJW than you are a loser. But historically speaking, you're simply wrong. Jefferson and Jackson were both at heart about forcing the rich to give lesser earners a better shot at making more. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well. The New Deal dominated our policies from 32-80. And Reagan was all about a reinvigorated capitalism that had stagnated into not rewarding effort.

Nothing I posted could be perceived as advocating for handouts. Liveable wages are not handouts. Perhaps you have a specific gripe about min wages. I didn't bring it up. Min wages may require franchises like McDonalds to raise wages. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. But it's simply not a matter of dispute that corp profits are at a all time high, and out tax policy is about to put debt on workers so profits can be higher, and at that the same time repeal govt support for workers healthcare with "no a fcking thing." And simultaneously reducing federal support for higher education.

So while Trump ran on improving how society rewards effort, he's governing in a manner exactly the opposite. (which doesn't make Hillary more likeable, btw)

To me, the bleating about the minimum wage = income inequality aka "the rich have more than me" is an SJW cause. Somewhat irrelevant.

Ugh saying "living wage" is even worse than bleating about minimum wage... "Livable" wages are a pipe dream, that's kind of what I said without using the term, like the more you force businesses to pay for employees, the more they charge customers (aka their employees) for the products they need to "live." And not to mention living wages where? In China vs America? Hell, even Anchorage Alaska vs San Francisco California? For a single teen living with mom and dad vs an single mom with four kids? ALL of them have different "living" wages, so the idea that you can put a "wage" out there as "livable" is just bologna, ya know? It's like my husband, son, and I live /very/ comfortably on... $36-40k ish that's like $20/h in total which is only a little higher than the 2016 fed min wage ($8.5/h x2 adults $35k) and on par with the 2017 min wage ($9.25/h x 2 adults $38k) - The single mother of two who's getting no child support from dead beat dad can't live in San Francisco on min wage $9.25/h (and again that's /wise/ decisions vs /stupid/ decisions stuff) but probably could in say Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe they could if they had parents who could help out and watch the kids so they didn't have to pay for daycare, or maybe dad does pay child support so she could make it work, or maybe she does or doesn't have a car payment, on and on and on with different scenarios of can or cannot live off fed minimum wage - it just shows that there is no such thing as a "livable" wage; it's a made up term with zero meaning.


Corp profits are at an all time high because they have access to the entire planet now vs from the 1930s to the 80s/90s. This is not rocket science dear, when you go from say 200-300M customers to 6B customers, no shit you make more money... When you go from a pool of 200-300M potential employees to a pool of 6B potential employees, no shit the cost of labor goes down. [Yes I know not all 200-300M in the country, nor 6B on the planet are capable working adults; the idea stands however.) You just gotta look at the /entire/ puzzle, instead of individual select pieces, ya know? Either way though, the profits of businesses isn't really tied to labor costs, I mean they sell the product for as much as they can and they pay the labor costs they have to pay based on the cost of labor... More on this a bit later though.

I mean uf dah, the new deal... you're trying to boil down global economic changes over a period of like 87 years into single American policy... it just doesn't work that way. Yes, after WWII we were a power house - we were the only nation not bombed into oblivion, of course, we shit gold and other nations had no choice but to buy it. Other nations (Europe mostly) caught up to us and started to shit their own gold, aka America had a slowing economy. Another point that effects the price of labor (aka employee wages) in the 70s we doubled the American work force (ah hell we practically doubled the global workforce because everyone wanted to be Americanized back then.) Women went to work. When you flood the market with employees the cost of labor goes down; supply and demand. Then the 80s and 90s hit, that's when communication between nations became the "norm," so damn easy, and the /true/ (or perhaps I should say "pure") globalization of businesses happened - that's when "American economy" became just a footnote in the full economic picture - where it all became an entangled rats nest. In the 80s-90s Asia started to catch up to us and Europe, massively changing the scope of the global economy and driving wages and income "inequality" by a sudden massive influx of workers (penny workers at that.) You cannot take out just "America's economy" from the global economy and try to talk about it like it's an "independent" thing ya know what I'm saying?

Nor can we /force/ companies to abide by American social [economic] wishes [aka income inequality "adjustments".] Multinational businesses, which is most of them these days (especially the min wage paying ones, box stores and shit) will pay the cost of labor - regardless of if they're in America proper or elsewhere in the world, they're going to find the most "economic" labor force. If they're making computers and labor in China's cheaper they'll go there and import to American's, etc. You know the story, or can figure it out, I'm sure. AND people, American's will buy the cheap shit - that drives lower wages too so there it is. It's a circle, it's all tied together.

When you talk about "income inequality" and shit you're looking at the polar extremes - poor people in America vs global companies entire profit off the planet. Like oil companies who have a product that /everyone/ wants. They are making money off sales across entire planet so of course they're going to have more "equity" than a minimum wage worker who only works (aka sells) their own labor for themselves. No kidding a company that can sell to 6M can make more than an individual who is say a server at a restaurant that serves maybe 300 people a day (that's 150k a year customers) - percentage wise, right, I mean the individual min wage worker has 0.000025% of the customer base to make profit off of - (ya follow?) One has to understand that multinational corps are like... octopuses, each arm has its own brain (seriously.) Take K-mart right, each individual store has to be financially solvent. The parent company will suck up individual stores losses for a little bit, but at some point they cut that "arm" lose and close the store (they did that up here in Alaska, our K-marts were some of the first to go under - labor up here is expensive and they couldn't remain solvent financially.) Each store has to maintain a profit margin in order to be "solvent" or they're a risk of bankruptcy, which effects the entire corp (stock values and shit) Lets say a store has a profit margin of say 3%/y; that means they are /spending/ 97%/y of their profits just to operate [many businesses have /monthly/ profit margins but you get the point.] That means if there's a down turn in profits they go in the hole, they can't even maintain the store for a month. So I mean to say okay fed min wage needs to be $25/h across the nation is seriously shitty because the Home Depot in bumfuck Texas population 200k isn't making enough to cover that labor cost increase.

... I could go on and on about hows and whys, but I'll stop cause peoples eyes tend to glaze over.

We used to have living wages

Low skilled workers could earn enough to support themselves and their families. Todays low skilled worker needs government help to get by. A tax subsidy for their employers to make a profit

With increasing technology, there may not be jobs. The rich may have to pay us to buy their shit. LOL

No, the rich just wouldn't make that shit. It's the same reason no one makes typewriters anymore - supply and demand.

On the plus side, computers and technology will never replace all jobs, though I do imagine it'll cut down on how many jobs their are. There's always going to be winners and losers, all everyone has to do is decide which side of that equation they are going to be on.

Robots are taking over

Naw, it's mostly the shitty jobs that even a monkey could do. It's not going to endanger any of my kidos career choices so I'm okay with it. Plus I'm quite sure that a computer can get my burger order right vs the low pay moron at McDonalds who may or may not spit on my burger because their assholes...

 

[bendog]

In a capitalistic economy there are always workers with the fewest skills, and there are jobs that require few skills. And there is no way one can define "good" choices without there also being "bad" choices. But if people are willing to work and try to support their families, America has stood for making sure jobs pay enough for families to believe children can have better lives.

it seems to me the question is whether Trump represents something new in terms of "expectations."

No. America has always stood for 'opportunity' - that is not the same as just handing people a "good life."

Look, I agree to a point; I didn't want "better" for my kids, but I wanted them to have a "good life" - so I taught them to stay in school, to wait to have children, to pursue "wealth" not specifically "money" itself but a "comfortable" financial standing [stuff like budgeting, when to buy a house or car, investing, financial independence, retirement, etc.] I instilled within them a "drive" for "betterment" in their finances/their 'status' (apartment to house, being able to get cars, snow machines, boats, saving for their kids expenses and college, etc.)

I also told them about reality; that /they/ were responsible for achieving /all/ of that stuff for themselves and their wives and kids because it wasn't anyone else's responsibility. And the second part of that "reality" is that if you /do/ let (or expect) others to 'provide' for you, then you'll /never/ achieve shit; you'll have the bare minimum for survival (if you're lucky) because there are more hands looking for freebies then there will ever be money given out - hard facts of life. My kids, unlike the recent socialist crops out there, know damn well that if they want a "good life" they have to work for it, they know it's not going to just land in their lap, they know it's probably going to take some time and effort, they understand /patience/ - turtle and the hare kind of shit. My eldest sons, in their early 20s, are all well on their way to being wealthy, or at a minimum very comfortably happy, already. Not one of them has kids, not even the 30 year old daughter, they're /all/ waiting until they've got their own shit straight before they drag kids into it.

It has /nothing/ to do with how much /I/ (the wealthy) make, it has to do with the individual's drive to succeed, where they are putting their efforts - if you're more concerned about social media/partying/showing up your friends (new car, phone, whatever)/or even playing at political activism, than you are about advancing your own life (through your career and financial status) then your priorities are not going to give you a "good life" - they'll give you the bare minimum (if you're lucky) - because that's what level of /effort/ you're putting into your financial standing and your own future. Again, wise decisions vs stupid decisions.

That's the rub you bleeding heart SJW's need to understand; you cannot /make/ someone put in effort to better their own lives, only they can do that. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a "user" they are not going to magically turn into an "achiever" until /they/ decide to. All you do by handing out "free" money (welfare) is prolong the time these types can "use" instead of "achieving" for themselves.

When you raise the min wage, businesses will /not/ eat the cost, never will, they pass those costs onto consumers period. Businesses have "rules" too, like not living pay check to pay check - they cannot ever do that, ever - which is why they have built in "profit margins" that they will /always/ meet, because not doing so means they go bankrupt - seriously. So, if you raise the minimum wage, so the cost of their employees goes up, they have exactly two choices. 1) they lay employees off, stop hiring, etc. or 2) they increase prices to cover that cost. Typically you'll see 2, and especially at the end of a recession like we've been in, because businesses have already streamlined their employee numbers as much as they can. So they raise the prices, which means, the cost of living goes up and wipes out the min wage increase. It's a cycle and there is /nothing/ you can do about it. Whining about being "fair" isn't going to change the hard reality that businesses MUST have a certain profit margin or they go under, it is not going to change the fact that businesses are going to "reallocate" the new "expenses" of employee wage increases.

No matter how much sympathy you want to have for "poor folk" who "need help" a business is /not/ there to help, they are there to make money, period. You cannot change that, the best you can do is harness that known reality - unleash the dogs and let them grow so they hire more people; more jobs, more upward mobility for the employees, the more upward mobility for the employees there is, the more folks are getting financially "comfortable" That is the best you can hope for from businesses when it comes down to it.

I'm no more a SJW than you are a loser. But historically speaking, you're simply wrong. Jefferson and Jackson were both at heart about forcing the rich to give lesser earners a better shot at making more. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well. The New Deal dominated our policies from 32-80. And Reagan was all about a reinvigorated capitalism that had stagnated into not rewarding effort.

Nothing I posted could be perceived as advocating for handouts. Liveable wages are not handouts. Perhaps you have a specific gripe about min wages. I didn't bring it up. Min wages may require franchises like McDonalds to raise wages. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. But it's simply not a matter of dispute that corp profits are at a all time high, and out tax policy is about to put debt on workers so profits can be higher, and at that the same time repeal govt support for workers healthcare with "no a fcking thing." And simultaneously reducing federal support for higher education.

So while Trump ran on improving how society rewards effort, he's governing in a manner exactly the opposite. (which doesn't make Hillary more likeable, btw)

To me, the bleating about the minimum wage = income inequality aka "the rich have more than me" is an SJW cause. Somewhat irrelevant.

Ugh saying "living wage" is even worse than bleating about minimum wage... "Livable" wages are a pipe dream, that's kind of what I said without using the term, like the more you force businesses to pay for employees, the more they charge customers (aka their employees) for the products they need to "live." And not to mention living wages where? In China vs America? Hell, even Anchorage Alaska vs San Francisco California? For a single teen living with mom and dad vs an single mom with four kids? ALL of them have different "living" wages, so the idea that you can put a "wage" out there as "livable" is just bologna, ya know? It's like my husband, son, and I live /very/ comfortably on... $36-40k ish that's like $20/h in total which is only a little higher than the 2016 fed min wage ($8.5/h x2 adults $35k) and on par with the 2017 min wage ($9.25/h x 2 adults $38k) - The single mother of two who's getting no child support from dead beat dad can't live in San Francisco on min wage $9.25/h (and again that's /wise/ decisions vs /stupid/ decisions stuff) but probably could in say Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe they could if they had parents who could help out and watch the kids so they didn't have to pay for daycare, or maybe dad does pay child support so she could make it work, or maybe she does or doesn't have a car payment, on and on and on with different scenarios of can or cannot live off fed minimum wage - it just shows that there is no such thing as a "livable" wage; it's a made up term with zero meaning.


Corp profits are at an all time high because they have access to the entire planet now vs from the 1930s to the 80s/90s. This is not rocket science dear, when you go from say 200-300M customers to 6B customers, no shit you make more money... When you go from a pool of 200-300M potential employees to a pool of 6B potential employees, no shit the cost of labor goes down. [Yes I know not all 200-300M in the country, nor 6B on the planet are capable working adults; the idea stands however.) You just gotta look at the /entire/ puzzle, instead of individual select pieces, ya know? Either way though, the profits of businesses isn't really tied to labor costs, I mean they sell the product for as much as they can and they pay the labor costs they have to pay based on the cost of labor... More on this a bit later though.

I mean uf dah, the new deal... you're trying to boil down global economic changes over a period of like 87 years into single American policy... it just doesn't work that way. Yes, after WWII we were a power house - we were the only nation not bombed into oblivion, of course, we shit gold and other nations had no choice but to buy it. Other nations (Europe mostly) caught up to us and started to shit their own gold, aka America had a slowing economy. Another point that effects the price of labor (aka employee wages) in the 70s we doubled the American work force (ah hell we practically doubled the global workforce because everyone wanted to be Americanized back then.) Women went to work. When you flood the market with employees the cost of labor goes down; supply and demand. Then the 80s and 90s hit, that's when communication between nations became the "norm," so damn easy, and the /true/ (or perhaps I should say "pure") globalization of businesses happened - that's when "American economy" became just a footnote in the full economic picture - where it all became an entangled rats nest. In the 80s-90s Asia started to catch up to us and Europe, massively changing the scope of the global economy and driving wages and income "inequality" by a sudden massive influx of workers (penny workers at that.) You cannot take out just "America's economy" from the global economy and try to talk about it like it's an "independent" thing ya know what I'm saying?

Nor can we /force/ companies to abide by American social [economic] wishes [aka income inequality "adjustments".] Multinational businesses, which is most of them these days (especially the min wage paying ones, box stores and shit) will pay the cost of labor - regardless of if they're in America proper or elsewhere in the world, they're going to find the most "economic" labor force. If they're making computers and labor in China's cheaper they'll go there and import to American's, etc. You know the story, or can figure it out, I'm sure. AND people, American's will buy the cheap shit - that drives lower wages too so there it is. It's a circle, it's all tied together.

When you talk about "income inequality" and shit you're looking at the polar extremes - poor people in America vs global companies entire profit off the planet. Like oil companies who have a product that /everyone/ wants. They are making money off sales across entire planet so of course they're going to have more "equity" than a minimum wage worker who only works (aka sells) their own labor for themselves. No kidding a company that can sell to 6M can make more than an individual who is say a server at a restaurant that serves maybe 300 people a day (that's 150k a year customers) - percentage wise, right, I mean the individual min wage worker has 0.000025% of the customer base to make profit off of - (ya follow?) One has to understand that multinational corps are like... octopuses, each arm has its own brain (seriously.) Take K-mart right, each individual store has to be financially solvent. The parent company will suck up individual stores losses for a little bit, but at some point they cut that "arm" lose and close the store (they did that up here in Alaska, our K-marts were some of the first to go under - labor up here is expensive and they couldn't remain solvent financially.) Each store has to maintain a profit margin in order to be "solvent" or they're a risk of bankruptcy, which effects the entire corp (stock values and shit) Lets say a store has a profit margin of say 3%/y; that means they are /spending/ 97%/y of their profits just to operate [many businesses have /monthly/ profit margins but you get the point.] That means if there's a down turn in profits they go in the hole, they can't even maintain the store for a month. So I mean to say okay fed min wage needs to be $25/h across the nation is seriously shitty because the Home Depot in bumfuck Texas population 200k isn't making enough to cover that labor cost increase.

... I could go on and on about hows and whys, but I'll stop cause peoples eyes tend to glaze over.

We used to have living wages

Low skilled workers could earn enough to support themselves and their families. Todays low skilled worker needs government help to get by. A tax subsidy for their employers to make a profit

Sure, when America pioneered industrialization, when we were the "last nation standing," before we flooded the labor market with women, before the internet opened the flood gates to a global labor market.

Yes. When America was in it's own little bubble we were able to compete with third world wages. Ya'll wanna go back to those days? I suppose we could bomb the fucking shit out of the planet and take over again...

In a capitalistic economy there are always workers with the fewest skills, and there are jobs that require few skills. And there is no way one can define "good" choices without there also being "bad" choices. But if people are willing to work and try to support their families, America has stood for making sure jobs pay enough for families to believe children can have better lives.

it seems to me the question is whether Trump represents something new in terms of "expectations."

No. America has always stood for 'opportunity' - that is not the same as just handing people a "good life."

Look, I agree to a point; I didn't want "better" for my kids, but I wanted them to have a "good life" - so I taught them to stay in school, to wait to have children, to pursue "wealth" not specifically "money" itself but a "comfortable" financial standing [stuff like budgeting, when to buy a house or car, investing, financial independence, retirement, etc.] I instilled within them a "drive" for "betterment" in their finances/their 'status' (apartment to house, being able to get cars, snow machines, boats, saving for their kids expenses and college, etc.)

I also told them about reality; that /they/ were responsible for achieving /all/ of that stuff for themselves and their wives and kids because it wasn't anyone else's responsibility. And the second part of that "reality" is that if you /do/ let (or expect) others to 'provide' for you, then you'll /never/ achieve shit; you'll have the bare minimum for survival (if you're lucky) because there are more hands looking for freebies then there will ever be money given out - hard facts of life. My kids, unlike the recent socialist crops out there, know damn well that if they want a "good life" they have to work for it, they know it's not going to just land in their lap, they know it's probably going to take some time and effort, they understand /patience/ - turtle and the hare kind of shit. My eldest sons, in their early 20s, are all well on their way to being wealthy, or at a minimum very comfortably happy, already. Not one of them has kids, not even the 30 year old daughter, they're /all/ waiting until they've got their own shit straight before they drag kids into it.

It has /nothing/ to do with how much /I/ (the wealthy) make, it has to do with the individual's drive to succeed, where they are putting their efforts - if you're more concerned about social media/partying/showing up your friends (new car, phone, whatever)/or even playing at political activism, than you are about advancing your own life (through your career and financial status) then your priorities are not going to give you a "good life" - they'll give you the bare minimum (if you're lucky) - because that's what level of /effort/ you're putting into your financial standing and your own future. Again, wise decisions vs stupid decisions.

That's the rub you bleeding heart SJW's need to understand; you cannot /make/ someone put in effort to better their own lives, only they can do that. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a "user" they are not going to magically turn into an "achiever" until /they/ decide to. All you do by handing out "free" money (welfare) is prolong the time these types can "use" instead of "achieving" for themselves.

When you raise the min wage, businesses will /not/ eat the cost, never will, they pass those costs onto consumers period. Businesses have "rules" too, like not living pay check to pay check - they cannot ever do that, ever - which is why they have built in "profit margins" that they will /always/ meet, because not doing so means they go bankrupt - seriously. So, if you raise the minimum wage, so the cost of their employees goes up, they have exactly two choices. 1) they lay employees off, stop hiring, etc. or 2) they increase prices to cover that cost. Typically you'll see 2, and especially at the end of a recession like we've been in, because businesses have already streamlined their employee numbers as much as they can. So they raise the prices, which means, the cost of living goes up and wipes out the min wage increase. It's a cycle and there is /nothing/ you can do about it. Whining about being "fair" isn't going to change the hard reality that businesses MUST have a certain profit margin or they go under, it is not going to change the fact that businesses are going to "reallocate" the new "expenses" of employee wage increases.

No matter how much sympathy you want to have for "poor folk" who "need help" a business is /not/ there to help, they are there to make money, period. You cannot change that, the best you can do is harness that known reality - unleash the dogs and let them grow so they hire more people; more jobs, more upward mobility for the employees, the more upward mobility for the employees there is, the more folks are getting financially "comfortable" That is the best you can hope for from businesses when it comes down to it.

I'm no more a SJW than you are a loser. But historically speaking, you're simply wrong. Jefferson and Jackson were both at heart about forcing the rich to give lesser earners a better shot at making more. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well. The New Deal dominated our policies from 32-80. And Reagan was all about a reinvigorated capitalism that had stagnated into not rewarding effort.

Nothing I posted could be perceived as advocating for handouts. Liveable wages are not handouts. Perhaps you have a specific gripe about min wages. I didn't bring it up. Min wages may require franchises like McDonalds to raise wages. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. But it's simply not a matter of dispute that corp profits are at a all time high, and out tax policy is about to put debt on workers so profits can be higher, and at that the same time repeal govt support for workers healthcare with "no a fcking thing." And simultaneously reducing federal support for higher education.

So while Trump ran on improving how society rewards effort, he's governing in a manner exactly the opposite. (which doesn't make Hillary more likeable, btw)

To me, the bleating about the minimum wage = income inequality aka "the rich have more than me" is an SJW cause. Somewhat irrelevant.

Ugh saying "living wage" is even worse than bleating about minimum wage... "Livable" wages are a pipe dream, that's kind of what I said without using the term, like the more you force businesses to pay for employees, the more they charge customers (aka their employees) for the products they need to "live." And not to mention living wages where? In China vs America? Hell, even Anchorage Alaska vs San Francisco California? For a single teen living with mom and dad vs an single mom with four kids? ALL of them have different "living" wages, so the idea that you can put a "wage" out there as "livable" is just bologna, ya know? It's like my husband, son, and I live /very/ comfortably on... $36-40k ish that's like $20/h in total which is only a little higher than the 2016 fed min wage ($8.5/h x2 adults $35k) and on par with the 2017 min wage ($9.25/h x 2 adults $38k) - The single mother of two who's getting no child support from dead beat dad can't live in San Francisco on min wage $9.25/h (and again that's /wise/ decisions vs /stupid/ decisions stuff) but probably could in say Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe they could if they had parents who could help out and watch the kids so they didn't have to pay for daycare, or maybe dad does pay child support so she could make it work, or maybe she does or doesn't have a car payment, on and on and on with different scenarios of can or cannot live off fed minimum wage - it just shows that there is no such thing as a "livable" wage; it's a made up term with zero meaning.


Corp profits are at an all time high because they have access to the entire planet now vs from the 1930s to the 80s/90s. This is not rocket science dear, when you go from say 200-300M customers to 6B customers, no shit you make more money... When you go from a pool of 200-300M potential employees to a pool of 6B potential employees, no shit the cost of labor goes down. [Yes I know not all 200-300M in the country, nor 6B on the planet are capable working adults; the idea stands however.) You just gotta look at the /entire/ puzzle, instead of individual select pieces, ya know? Either way though, the profits of businesses isn't really tied to labor costs, I mean they sell the product for as much as they can and they pay the labor costs they have to pay based on the cost of labor... More on this a bit later though.

I mean uf dah, the new deal... you're trying to boil down global economic changes over a period of like 87 years into single American policy... it just doesn't work that way. Yes, after WWII we were a power house - we were the only nation not bombed into oblivion, of course, we shit gold and other nations had no choice but to buy it. Other nations (Europe mostly) caught up to us and started to shit their own gold, aka America had a slowing economy. Another point that effects the price of labor (aka employee wages) in the 70s we doubled the American work force (ah hell we practically doubled the global workforce because everyone wanted to be Americanized back then.) Women went to work. When you flood the market with employees the cost of labor goes down; supply and demand. Then the 80s and 90s hit, that's when communication between nations became the "norm," so damn easy, and the /true/ (or perhaps I should say "pure") globalization of businesses happened - that's when "American economy" became just a footnote in the full economic picture - where it all became an entangled rats nest. In the 80s-90s Asia started to catch up to us and Europe, massively changing the scope of the global economy and driving wages and income "inequality" by a sudden massive influx of workers (penny workers at that.) You cannot take out just "America's economy" from the global economy and try to talk about it like it's an "independent" thing ya know what I'm saying?

Nor can we /force/ companies to abide by American social [economic] wishes [aka income inequality "adjustments".] Multinational businesses, which is most of them these days (especially the min wage paying ones, box stores and shit) will pay the cost of labor - regardless of if they're in America proper or elsewhere in the world, they're going to find the most "economic" labor force. If they're making computers and labor in China's cheaper they'll go there and import to American's, etc. You know the story, or can figure it out, I'm sure. AND people, American's will buy the cheap shit - that drives lower wages too so there it is. It's a circle, it's all tied together.

When you talk about "income inequality" and shit you're looking at the polar extremes - poor people in America vs global companies entire profit off the planet. Like oil companies who have a product that /everyone/ wants. They are making money off sales across entire planet so of course they're going to have more "equity" than a minimum wage worker who only works (aka sells) their own labor for themselves. No kidding a company that can sell to 6M can make more than an individual who is say a server at a restaurant that serves maybe 300 people a day (that's 150k a year customers) - percentage wise, right, I mean the individual min wage worker has 0.000025% of the customer base to make profit off of - (ya follow?) One has to understand that multinational corps are like... octopuses, each arm has its own brain (seriously.) Take K-mart right, each individual store has to be financially solvent. The parent company will suck up individual stores losses for a little bit, but at some point they cut that "arm" lose and close the store (they did that up here in Alaska, our K-marts were some of the first to go under - labor up here is expensive and they couldn't remain solvent financially.) Each store has to maintain a profit margin in order to be "solvent" or they're a risk of bankruptcy, which effects the entire corp (stock values and shit) Lets say a store has a profit margin of say 3%/y; that means they are /spending/ 97%/y of their profits just to operate [many businesses have /monthly/ profit margins but you get the point.] That means if there's a down turn in profits they go in the hole, they can't even maintain the store for a month. So I mean to say okay fed min wage needs to be $25/h across the nation is seriously shitty because the Home Depot in bumfuck Texas population 200k isn't making enough to cover that labor cost increase.

... I could go on and on about hows and whys, but I'll stop cause peoples eyes tend to glaze over.

We used to have living wages

Low skilled workers could earn enough to support themselves and their families. Todays low skilled worker needs government help to get by. A tax subsidy for their employers to make a profit

Sure, when America pioneered industrialization, when we were the "last nation standing," before we flooded the labor market with women, before the internet opened the flood gates to a global labor market.

Yes. When America was in it's own little bubble we were able to compete with third world wages. Ya'll wanna go back to those days? I suppose we could bomb the fucking shit out of the planet and take over again...

"our own little bubble?" Did you somehow miss the history of US manufacturing in the 20th century?

 

[EverCurious]

I'm no more a SJW than you are a loser. But historically speaking, you're simply wrong. Jefferson and Jackson were both at heart about forcing the rich to give lesser earners a better shot at making more. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well. The New Deal dominated our policies from 32-80. And Reagan was all about a reinvigorated capitalism that had stagnated into not rewarding effort.

Nothing I posted could be perceived as advocating for handouts. Liveable wages are not handouts. Perhaps you have a specific gripe about min wages. I didn't bring it up. Min wages may require franchises like McDonalds to raise wages. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. But it's simply not a matter of dispute that corp profits are at a all time high, and out tax policy is about to put debt on workers so profits can be higher, and at that the same time repeal govt support for workers healthcare with "no a fcking thing." And simultaneously reducing federal support for higher education.

So while Trump ran on improving how society rewards effort, he's governing in a manner exactly the opposite. (which doesn't make Hillary more likeable, btw)

To me, the bleating about the minimum wage = income inequality aka "the rich have more than me" is an SJW cause. Somewhat irrelevant.

Ugh saying "living wage" is even worse than bleating about minimum wage... "Livable" wages are a pipe dream, that's kind of what I said without using the term, like the more you force businesses to pay for employees, the more they charge customers (aka their employees) for the products they need to "live." And not to mention living wages where? In China vs America? Hell, even Anchorage Alaska vs San Francisco California? For a single teen living with mom and dad vs an single mom with four kids? ALL of them have different "living" wages, so the idea that you can put a "wage" out there as "livable" is just bologna, ya know? It's like my husband, son, and I live /very/ comfortably on... $36-40k ish that's like $20/h in total which is only a little higher than the 2016 fed min wage ($8.5/h x2 adults $35k) and on par with the 2017 min wage ($9.25/h x 2 adults $38k) - The single mother of two who's getting no child support from dead beat dad can't live in San Francisco on min wage $9.25/h (and again that's /wise/ decisions vs /stupid/ decisions stuff) but probably could in say Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe they could if they had parents who could help out and watch the kids so they didn't have to pay for daycare, or maybe dad does pay child support so she could make it work, or maybe she does or doesn't have a car payment, on and on and on with different scenarios of can or cannot live off fed minimum wage - it just shows that there is no such thing as a "livable" wage; it's a made up term with zero meaning.


Corp profits are at an all time high because they have access to the entire planet now vs from the 1930s to the 80s/90s. This is not rocket science dear, when you go from say 200-300M customers to 6B customers, no shit you make more money... When you go from a pool of 200-300M potential employees to a pool of 6B potential employees, no shit the cost of labor goes down. [Yes I know not all 200-300M in the country, nor 6B on the planet are capable working adults; the idea stands however.) You just gotta look at the /entire/ puzzle, instead of individual select pieces, ya know? Either way though, the profits of businesses isn't really tied to labor costs, I mean they sell the product for as much as they can and they pay the labor costs they have to pay based on the cost of labor... More on this a bit later though.

I mean uf dah, the new deal... you're trying to boil down global economic changes over a period of like 87 years into single American policy... it just doesn't work that way. Yes, after WWII we were a power house - we were the only nation not bombed into oblivion, of course, we shit gold and other nations had no choice but to buy it. Other nations (Europe mostly) caught up to us and started to shit their own gold, aka America had a slowing economy. Another point that effects the price of labor (aka employee wages) in the 70s we doubled the American work force (ah hell we practically doubled the global workforce because everyone wanted to be Americanized back then.) Women went to work. When you flood the market with employees the cost of labor goes down; supply and demand. Then the 80s and 90s hit, that's when communication between nations became the "norm," so damn easy, and the /true/ (or perhaps I should say "pure") globalization of businesses happened - that's when "American economy" became just a footnote in the full economic picture - where it all became an entangled rats nest. In the 80s-90s Asia started to catch up to us and Europe, massively changing the scope of the global economy and driving wages and income "inequality" by a sudden massive influx of workers (penny workers at that.) You cannot take out just "America's economy" from the global economy and try to talk about it like it's an "independent" thing ya know what I'm saying?

Nor can we /force/ companies to abide by American social [economic] wishes [aka income inequality "adjustments".] Multinational businesses, which is most of them these days (especially the min wage paying ones, box stores and shit) will pay the cost of labor - regardless of if they're in America proper or elsewhere in the world, they're going to find the most "economic" labor force. If they're making computers and labor in China's cheaper they'll go there and import to American's, etc. You know the story, or can figure it out, I'm sure. AND people, American's will buy the cheap shit - that drives lower wages too so there it is. It's a circle, it's all tied together.

When you talk about "income inequality" and shit you're looking at the polar extremes - poor people in America vs global companies entire profit off the planet. Like oil companies who have a product that /everyone/ wants. They are making money off sales across entire planet so of course they're going to have more "equity" than a minimum wage worker who only works (aka sells) their own labor for themselves. No kidding a company that can sell to 6M can make more than an individual who is say a server at a restaurant that serves maybe 300 people a day (that's 150k a year customers) - percentage wise, right, I mean the individual min wage worker has 0.000025% of the customer base to make profit off of - (ya follow?) One has to understand that multinational corps are like... octopuses, each arm has its own brain (seriously.) Take K-mart right, each individual store has to be financially solvent. The parent company will suck up individual stores losses for a little bit, but at some point they cut that "arm" lose and close the store (they did that up here in Alaska, our K-marts were some of the first to go under - labor up here is expensive and they couldn't remain solvent financially.) Each store has to maintain a profit margin in order to be "solvent" or they're a risk of bankruptcy, which effects the entire corp (stock values and shit) Lets say a store has a profit margin of say 3%/y; that means they are /spending/ 97%/y of their profits just to operate [many businesses have /monthly/ profit margins but you get the point.] That means if there's a down turn in profits they go in the hole, they can't even maintain the store for a month. So I mean to say okay fed min wage needs to be $25/h across the nation is seriously shitty because the Home Depot in bumfuck Texas population 200k isn't making enough to cover that labor cost increase.

... I could go on and on about hows and whys, but I'll stop cause peoples eyes tend to glaze over.

We used to have living wages

Low skilled workers could earn enough to support themselves and their families. Todays low skilled worker needs government help to get by. A tax subsidy for their employers to make a profit

With increasing technology, there may not be jobs. The rich may have to pay us to buy their shit. LOL

No, the rich just wouldn't make that shit. It's the same reason no one makes typewriters anymore - supply and demand.

On the plus side, computers and technology will never replace all jobs, though I do imagine it'll cut down on how many jobs their are. There's always going to be winners and losers, all everyone has to do is decide which side of that equation they are going to be on.

Yes the rich can just buy all their own shit.

hmmm true to a point, ya know cell phones are a product of the rich buying other rich peoples shit. We're like the test bed for products before it gets economized and improved for the masses; without the rich ya'll would likely never see any of the cool shit become affordable. Perhaps a double edged sword because patience is not a virtue in the "lower brackets" - they want it all now and currently they expect us to pay for it.

 

[Boss]

Boss I completely understand what you say about income I'm far from jealous or envious of others being quite wealthy myself.....but when folks are starving even while working a couple of jobs something is wrong with the system Can you at least agree the wealth of those million and billionaires have increased greatly while the rest of the "suckers" stay in the same place?

No, I don't agree with that. Every year, people move from middle income to upper income... from upper to middle... from poor to middle... from middle to poor. It's an ever-changing dynamic. Since 1967, the percentage of upper income families has increased while middle and lower income families have decreased.

Ironically, the Socialists actually exploit a byproduct of a free enterprise system to condemn a free enterprise system with their "wage gap" or "income disparity" memes. The notion that the rich are getting richer while the poor remain poor is simply a matter of routine circumstance in a free economic system such as ours. Of course the rich are getting richer, this is something they know how to do better which is why they are rich.

I have an analogy I like to use for this. Imagine wealth acquisition is a marathon race. You have different types of competitors in the marathon. You have the seasoned veteran marathon runner who trains year round, you have the amateur who runs for the joy of running and you have the couch potatoes who'd just as soon not even compete... and if someone would kindly wheel their couch down the street while they eat potato chips, that would be great. Now this marathon last several days, representing a typical lifetime earning wealth. After the first day, who do you think will be leading? Of course, the pros! At the end of the second day, will the pros be leading by an even greater margin? Of course! And as long as the marathon continues, the pros will extend their lead over the rest because they are seasoned veterans who know how to do this better. It's not because the marathon is unfair and the results are simply the manifestation of normal circumstances... not some "problem" that requires a "solution" to fix. IF you wish to somehow mitigate the growing lead the pros have in the race, the answer wouldn't be to hobble the pros, it would be to motivate the couch potatoes and amateurs.

The only "problems" I see with out system are that we've moved away from free market capitalism. On the left, we have regulated and taxed... on the right, we have set up loopholes and caveats for corporatists.

 

[EverCurious]

No. America has always stood for 'opportunity' - that is not the same as just handing people a "good life."

Look, I agree to a point; I didn't want "better" for my kids, but I wanted them to have a "good life" - so I taught them to stay in school, to wait to have children, to pursue "wealth" not specifically "money" itself but a "comfortable" financial standing [stuff like budgeting, when to buy a house or car, investing, financial independence, retirement, etc.] I instilled within them a "drive" for "betterment" in their finances/their 'status' (apartment to house, being able to get cars, snow machines, boats, saving for their kids expenses and college, etc.)

I also told them about reality; that /they/ were responsible for achieving /all/ of that stuff for themselves and their wives and kids because it wasn't anyone else's responsibility. And the second part of that "reality" is that if you /do/ let (or expect) others to 'provide' for you, then you'll /never/ achieve shit; you'll have the bare minimum for survival (if you're lucky) because there are more hands looking for freebies then there will ever be money given out - hard facts of life. My kids, unlike the recent socialist crops out there, know damn well that if they want a "good life" they have to work for it, they know it's not going to just land in their lap, they know it's probably going to take some time and effort, they understand /patience/ - turtle and the hare kind of shit. My eldest sons, in their early 20s, are all well on their way to being wealthy, or at a minimum very comfortably happy, already. Not one of them has kids, not even the 30 year old daughter, they're /all/ waiting until they've got their own shit straight before they drag kids into it.

It has /nothing/ to do with how much /I/ (the wealthy) make, it has to do with the individual's drive to succeed, where they are putting their efforts - if you're more concerned about social media/partying/showing up your friends (new car, phone, whatever)/or even playing at political activism, than you are about advancing your own life (through your career and financial status) then your priorities are not going to give you a "good life" - they'll give you the bare minimum (if you're lucky) - because that's what level of /effort/ you're putting into your financial standing and your own future. Again, wise decisions vs stupid decisions.

That's the rub you bleeding heart SJW's need to understand; you cannot /make/ someone put in effort to better their own lives, only they can do that. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a "user" they are not going to magically turn into an "achiever" until /they/ decide to. All you do by handing out "free" money (welfare) is prolong the time these types can "use" instead of "achieving" for themselves.

When you raise the min wage, businesses will /not/ eat the cost, never will, they pass those costs onto consumers period. Businesses have "rules" too, like not living pay check to pay check - they cannot ever do that, ever - which is why they have built in "profit margins" that they will /always/ meet, because not doing so means they go bankrupt - seriously. So, if you raise the minimum wage, so the cost of their employees goes up, they have exactly two choices. 1) they lay employees off, stop hiring, etc. or 2) they increase prices to cover that cost. Typically you'll see 2, and especially at the end of a recession like we've been in, because businesses have already streamlined their employee numbers as much as they can. So they raise the prices, which means, the cost of living goes up and wipes out the min wage increase. It's a cycle and there is /nothing/ you can do about it. Whining about being "fair" isn't going to change the hard reality that businesses MUST have a certain profit margin or they go under, it is not going to change the fact that businesses are going to "reallocate" the new "expenses" of employee wage increases.

No matter how much sympathy you want to have for "poor folk" who "need help" a business is /not/ there to help, they are there to make money, period. You cannot change that, the best you can do is harness that known reality - unleash the dogs and let them grow so they hire more people; more jobs, more upward mobility for the employees, the more upward mobility for the employees there is, the more folks are getting financially "comfortable" That is the best you can hope for from businesses when it comes down to it.

I'm no more a SJW than you are a loser. But historically speaking, you're simply wrong. Jefferson and Jackson were both at heart about forcing the rich to give lesser earners a better shot at making more. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well. The New Deal dominated our policies from 32-80. And Reagan was all about a reinvigorated capitalism that had stagnated into not rewarding effort.

Nothing I posted could be perceived as advocating for handouts. Liveable wages are not handouts. Perhaps you have a specific gripe about min wages. I didn't bring it up. Min wages may require franchises like McDonalds to raise wages. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. But it's simply not a matter of dispute that corp profits are at a all time high, and out tax policy is about to put debt on workers so profits can be higher, and at that the same time repeal govt support for workers healthcare with "no a fcking thing." And simultaneously reducing federal support for higher education.

So while Trump ran on improving how society rewards effort, he's governing in a manner exactly the opposite. (which doesn't make Hillary more likeable, btw)

To me, the bleating about the minimum wage = income inequality aka "the rich have more than me" is an SJW cause. Somewhat irrelevant.

Ugh saying "living wage" is even worse than bleating about minimum wage... "Livable" wages are a pipe dream, that's kind of what I said without using the term, like the more you force businesses to pay for employees, the more they charge customers (aka their employees) for the products they need to "live." And not to mention living wages where? In China vs America? Hell, even Anchorage Alaska vs San Francisco California? For a single teen living with mom and dad vs an single mom with four kids? ALL of them have different "living" wages, so the idea that you can put a "wage" out there as "livable" is just bologna, ya know? It's like my husband, son, and I live /very/ comfortably on... $36-40k ish that's like $20/h in total which is only a little higher than the 2016 fed min wage ($8.5/h x2 adults $35k) and on par with the 2017 min wage ($9.25/h x 2 adults $38k) - The single mother of two who's getting no child support from dead beat dad can't live in San Francisco on min wage $9.25/h (and again that's /wise/ decisions vs /stupid/ decisions stuff) but probably could in say Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe they could if they had parents who could help out and watch the kids so they didn't have to pay for daycare, or maybe dad does pay child support so she could make it work, or maybe she does or doesn't have a car payment, on and on and on with different scenarios of can or cannot live off fed minimum wage - it just shows that there is no such thing as a "livable" wage; it's a made up term with zero meaning.


Corp profits are at an all time high because they have access to the entire planet now vs from the 1930s to the 80s/90s. This is not rocket science dear, when you go from say 200-300M customers to 6B customers, no shit you make more money... When you go from a pool of 200-300M potential employees to a pool of 6B potential employees, no shit the cost of labor goes down. [Yes I know not all 200-300M in the country, nor 6B on the planet are capable working adults; the idea stands however.) You just gotta look at the /entire/ puzzle, instead of individual select pieces, ya know? Either way though, the profits of businesses isn't really tied to labor costs, I mean they sell the product for as much as they can and they pay the labor costs they have to pay based on the cost of labor... More on this a bit later though.

I mean uf dah, the new deal... you're trying to boil down global economic changes over a period of like 87 years into single American policy... it just doesn't work that way. Yes, after WWII we were a power house - we were the only nation not bombed into oblivion, of course, we shit gold and other nations had no choice but to buy it. Other nations (Europe mostly) caught up to us and started to shit their own gold, aka America had a slowing economy. Another point that effects the price of labor (aka employee wages) in the 70s we doubled the American work force (ah hell we practically doubled the global workforce because everyone wanted to be Americanized back then.) Women went to work. When you flood the market with employees the cost of labor goes down; supply and demand. Then the 80s and 90s hit, that's when communication between nations became the "norm," so damn easy, and the /true/ (or perhaps I should say "pure") globalization of businesses happened - that's when "American economy" became just a footnote in the full economic picture - where it all became an entangled rats nest. In the 80s-90s Asia started to catch up to us and Europe, massively changing the scope of the global economy and driving wages and income "inequality" by a sudden massive influx of workers (penny workers at that.) You cannot take out just "America's economy" from the global economy and try to talk about it like it's an "independent" thing ya know what I'm saying?

Nor can we /force/ companies to abide by American social [economic] wishes [aka income inequality "adjustments".] Multinational businesses, which is most of them these days (especially the min wage paying ones, box stores and shit) will pay the cost of labor - regardless of if they're in America proper or elsewhere in the world, they're going to find the most "economic" labor force. If they're making computers and labor in China's cheaper they'll go there and import to American's, etc. You know the story, or can figure it out, I'm sure. AND people, American's will buy the cheap shit - that drives lower wages too so there it is. It's a circle, it's all tied together.

When you talk about "income inequality" and shit you're looking at the polar extremes - poor people in America vs global companies entire profit off the planet. Like oil companies who have a product that /everyone/ wants. They are making money off sales across entire planet so of course they're going to have more "equity" than a minimum wage worker who only works (aka sells) their own labor for themselves. No kidding a company that can sell to 6M can make more than an individual who is say a server at a restaurant that serves maybe 300 people a day (that's 150k a year customers) - percentage wise, right, I mean the individual min wage worker has 0.000025% of the customer base to make profit off of - (ya follow?) One has to understand that multinational corps are like... octopuses, each arm has its own brain (seriously.) Take K-mart right, each individual store has to be financially solvent. The parent company will suck up individual stores losses for a little bit, but at some point they cut that "arm" lose and close the store (they did that up here in Alaska, our K-marts were some of the first to go under - labor up here is expensive and they couldn't remain solvent financially.) Each store has to maintain a profit margin in order to be "solvent" or they're a risk of bankruptcy, which effects the entire corp (stock values and shit) Lets say a store has a profit margin of say 3%/y; that means they are /spending/ 97%/y of their profits just to operate [many businesses have /monthly/ profit margins but you get the point.] That means if there's a down turn in profits they go in the hole, they can't even maintain the store for a month. So I mean to say okay fed min wage needs to be $25/h across the nation is seriously shitty because the Home Depot in bumfuck Texas population 200k isn't making enough to cover that labor cost increase.

... I could go on and on about hows and whys, but I'll stop cause peoples eyes tend to glaze over.

We used to have living wages

Low skilled workers could earn enough to support themselves and their families. Todays low skilled worker needs government help to get by. A tax subsidy for their employers to make a profit

Sure, when America pioneered industrialization, when we were the "last nation standing," before we flooded the labor market with women, before the internet opened the flood gates to a global labor market.

Yes. When America was in it's own little bubble we were able to compete with third world wages. Ya'll wanna go back to those days? I suppose we could bomb the fucking shit out of the planet and take over again...

No. America has always stood for 'opportunity' - that is not the same as just handing people a "good life."

Look, I agree to a point; I didn't want "better" for my kids, but I wanted them to have a "good life" - so I taught them to stay in school, to wait to have children, to pursue "wealth" not specifically "money" itself but a "comfortable" financial standing [stuff like budgeting, when to buy a house or car, investing, financial independence, retirement, etc.] I instilled within them a "drive" for "betterment" in their finances/their 'status' (apartment to house, being able to get cars, snow machines, boats, saving for their kids expenses and college, etc.)

I also told them about reality; that /they/ were responsible for achieving /all/ of that stuff for themselves and their wives and kids because it wasn't anyone else's responsibility. And the second part of that "reality" is that if you /do/ let (or expect) others to 'provide' for you, then you'll /never/ achieve shit; you'll have the bare minimum for survival (if you're lucky) because there are more hands looking for freebies then there will ever be money given out - hard facts of life. My kids, unlike the recent socialist crops out there, know damn well that if they want a "good life" they have to work for it, they know it's not going to just land in their lap, they know it's probably going to take some time and effort, they understand /patience/ - turtle and the hare kind of shit. My eldest sons, in their early 20s, are all well on their way to being wealthy, or at a minimum very comfortably happy, already. Not one of them has kids, not even the 30 year old daughter, they're /all/ waiting until they've got their own shit straight before they drag kids into it.

It has /nothing/ to do with how much /I/ (the wealthy) make, it has to do with the individual's drive to succeed, where they are putting their efforts - if you're more concerned about social media/partying/showing up your friends (new car, phone, whatever)/or even playing at political activism, than you are about advancing your own life (through your career and financial status) then your priorities are not going to give you a "good life" - they'll give you the bare minimum (if you're lucky) - because that's what level of /effort/ you're putting into your financial standing and your own future. Again, wise decisions vs stupid decisions.

That's the rub you bleeding heart SJW's need to understand; you cannot /make/ someone put in effort to better their own lives, only they can do that. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a "user" they are not going to magically turn into an "achiever" until /they/ decide to. All you do by handing out "free" money (welfare) is prolong the time these types can "use" instead of "achieving" for themselves.

When you raise the min wage, businesses will /not/ eat the cost, never will, they pass those costs onto consumers period. Businesses have "rules" too, like not living pay check to pay check - they cannot ever do that, ever - which is why they have built in "profit margins" that they will /always/ meet, because not doing so means they go bankrupt - seriously. So, if you raise the minimum wage, so the cost of their employees goes up, they have exactly two choices. 1) they lay employees off, stop hiring, etc. or 2) they increase prices to cover that cost. Typically you'll see 2, and especially at the end of a recession like we've been in, because businesses have already streamlined their employee numbers as much as they can. So they raise the prices, which means, the cost of living goes up and wipes out the min wage increase. It's a cycle and there is /nothing/ you can do about it. Whining about being "fair" isn't going to change the hard reality that businesses MUST have a certain profit margin or they go under, it is not going to change the fact that businesses are going to "reallocate" the new "expenses" of employee wage increases.

No matter how much sympathy you want to have for "poor folk" who "need help" a business is /not/ there to help, they are there to make money, period. You cannot change that, the best you can do is harness that known reality - unleash the dogs and let them grow so they hire more people; more jobs, more upward mobility for the employees, the more upward mobility for the employees there is, the more folks are getting financially "comfortable" That is the best you can hope for from businesses when it comes down to it.

I'm no more a SJW than you are a loser. But historically speaking, you're simply wrong. Jefferson and Jackson were both at heart about forcing the rich to give lesser earners a better shot at making more. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well. The New Deal dominated our policies from 32-80. And Reagan was all about a reinvigorated capitalism that had stagnated into not rewarding effort.

Nothing I posted could be perceived as advocating for handouts. Liveable wages are not handouts. Perhaps you have a specific gripe about min wages. I didn't bring it up. Min wages may require franchises like McDonalds to raise wages. I don't know, and frankly don't much care. But it's simply not a matter of dispute that corp profits are at a all time high, and out tax policy is about to put debt on workers so profits can be higher, and at that the same time repeal govt support for workers healthcare with "no a fcking thing." And simultaneously reducing federal support for higher education.

So while Trump ran on improving how society rewards effort, he's governing in a manner exactly the opposite. (which doesn't make Hillary more likeable, btw)

To me, the bleating about the minimum wage = income inequality aka "the rich have more than me" is an SJW cause. Somewhat irrelevant.

Ugh saying "living wage" is even worse than bleating about minimum wage... "Livable" wages are a pipe dream, that's kind of what I said without using the term, like the more you force businesses to pay for employees, the more they charge customers (aka their employees) for the products they need to "live." And not to mention living wages where? In China vs America? Hell, even Anchorage Alaska vs San Francisco California? For a single teen living with mom and dad vs an single mom with four kids? ALL of them have different "living" wages, so the idea that you can put a "wage" out there as "livable" is just bologna, ya know? It's like my husband, son, and I live /very/ comfortably on... $36-40k ish that's like $20/h in total which is only a little higher than the 2016 fed min wage ($8.5/h x2 adults $35k) and on par with the 2017 min wage ($9.25/h x 2 adults $38k) - The single mother of two who's getting no child support from dead beat dad can't live in San Francisco on min wage $9.25/h (and again that's /wise/ decisions vs /stupid/ decisions stuff) but probably could in say Fargo, North Dakota, or maybe they could if they had parents who could help out and watch the kids so they didn't have to pay for daycare, or maybe dad does pay child support so she could make it work, or maybe she does or doesn't have a car payment, on and on and on with different scenarios of can or cannot live off fed minimum wage - it just shows that there is no such thing as a "livable" wage; it's a made up term with zero meaning.


Corp profits are at an all time high because they have access to the entire planet now vs from the 1930s to the 80s/90s. This is not rocket science dear, when you go from say 200-300M customers to 6B customers, no shit you make more money... When you go from a pool of 200-300M potential employees to a pool of 6B potential employees, no shit the cost of labor goes down. [Yes I know not all 200-300M in the country, nor 6B on the planet are capable working adults; the idea stands however.) You just gotta look at the /entire/ puzzle, instead of individual select pieces, ya know? Either way though, the profits of businesses isn't really tied to labor costs, I mean they sell the product for as much as they can and they pay the labor costs they have to pay based on the cost of labor... More on this a bit later though.

I mean uf dah, the new deal... you're trying to boil down global economic changes over a period of like 87 years into single American policy... it just doesn't work that way. Yes, after WWII we were a power house - we were the only nation not bombed into oblivion, of course, we shit gold and other nations had no choice but to buy it. Other nations (Europe mostly) caught up to us and started to shit their own gold, aka America had a slowing economy. Another point that effects the price of labor (aka employee wages) in the 70s we doubled the American work force (ah hell we practically doubled the global workforce because everyone wanted to be Americanized back then.) Women went to work. When you flood the market with employees the cost of labor goes down; supply and demand. Then the 80s and 90s hit, that's when communication between nations became the "norm," so damn easy, and the /true/ (or perhaps I should say "pure") globalization of businesses happened - that's when "American economy" became just a footnote in the full economic picture - where it all became an entangled rats nest. In the 80s-90s Asia started to catch up to us and Europe, massively changing the scope of the global economy and driving wages and income "inequality" by a sudden massive influx of workers (penny workers at that.) You cannot take out just "America's economy" from the global economy and try to talk about it like it's an "independent" thing ya know what I'm saying?

Nor can we /force/ companies to abide by American social [economic] wishes [aka income inequality "adjustments".] Multinational businesses, which is most of them these days (especially the min wage paying ones, box stores and shit) will pay the cost of labor - regardless of if they're in America proper or elsewhere in the world, they're going to find the most "economic" labor force. If they're making computers and labor in China's cheaper they'll go there and import to American's, etc. You know the story, or can figure it out, I'm sure. AND people, American's will buy the cheap shit - that drives lower wages too so there it is. It's a circle, it's all tied together.

When you talk about "income inequality" and shit you're looking at the polar extremes - poor people in America vs global companies entire profit off the planet. Like oil companies who have a product that /everyone/ wants. They are making money off sales across entire planet so of course they're going to have more "equity" than a minimum wage worker who only works (aka sells) their own labor for themselves. No kidding a company that can sell to 6M can make more than an individual who is say a server at a restaurant that serves maybe 300 people a day (that's 150k a year customers) - percentage wise, right, I mean the individual min wage worker has 0.000025% of the customer base to make profit off of - (ya follow?) One has to understand that multinational corps are like... octopuses, each arm has its own brain (seriously.) Take K-mart right, each individual store has to be financially solvent. The parent company will suck up individual stores losses for a little bit, but at some point they cut that "arm" lose and close the store (they did that up here in Alaska, our K-marts were some of the first to go under - labor up here is expensive and they couldn't remain solvent financially.) Each store has to maintain a profit margin in order to be "solvent" or they're a risk of bankruptcy, which effects the entire corp (stock values and shit) Lets say a store has a profit margin of say 3%/y; that means they are /spending/ 97%/y of their profits just to operate [many businesses have /monthly/ profit margins but you get the point.] That means if there's a down turn in profits they go in the hole, they can't even maintain the store for a month. So I mean to say okay fed min wage needs to be $25/h across the nation is seriously shitty because the Home Depot in bumfuck Texas population 200k isn't making enough to cover that labor cost increase.

... I could go on and on about hows and whys, but I'll stop cause peoples eyes tend to glaze over.

We used to have living wages

Low skilled workers could earn enough to support themselves and their families. Todays low skilled worker needs government help to get by. A tax subsidy for their employers to make a profit

Sure, when America pioneered industrialization, when we were the "last nation standing," before we flooded the labor market with women, before the internet opened the flood gates to a global labor market.

Yes. When America was in it's own little bubble we were able to compete with third world wages. Ya'll wanna go back to those days? I suppose we could bomb the fucking shit out of the planet and take over again...

"our own little bubble?" Did you somehow miss the history of US manufacturing in the 20th century?

RWer is the one who is talking about the "bubble" that only includes America. Are you not following the conversation?

I allude (and even out right mention) US manufacturing "rise" and "decline" via post WWII, the rebuild of Europe, the rise of Asia, AND "true" globalization of businesses.

 

[eddiew37]

Boss I completely understand what you say about income I'm far from jealous or envious of others being quite wealthy myself.....but when folks are starving even while working a couple of jobs something is wrong with the system Can you at least agree the wealth of those million and billionaires have increased greatly while the rest of the "suckers" stay in the same place?

No, I don't agree with that. Every year, people move from middle income to upper income... from upper to middle... from poor to middle... from middle to poor. It's an ever-changing dynamic. Since 1967, the percentage of upper income families has increased while middle and lower income families have decreased.

Ironically, the Socialists actually exploit a byproduct of a free enterprise system to condemn a free enterprise system with their "wage gap" or "income disparity" memes. The notion that the rich are getting richer while the poor remain poor is simply a matter of routine circumstance in a free economic system such as ours. Of course the rich are getting richer, this is something they know how to do better which is why they are rich.

I have an analogy I like to use for this. Imagine wealth acquisition is a marathon race. You have different types of competitors in the marathon. You have the seasoned veteran marathon runner who trains year round, you have the amateur who runs for the joy of running and you have the couch potatoes who'd just as soon not even compete... and if someone would kindly wheel their couch down the street while they eat potato chips, that would be great. Now this marathon last several days, representing a typical lifetime earning wealth. After the first day, who do you think will be leading? Of course, the pros! At the end of the second day, will the pros be leading by an even greater margin? Of course! And as long as the marathon continues, the pros will extend their lead over the rest because they are seasoned veterans who know how to do this better. It's not because the marathon is unfair and the results are simply the manifestation of normal circumstances... not some "problem" that requires a "solution" to fix. IF you wish to somehow mitigate the growing lead the pros have in the race, the answer wouldn't be to hobble the pros, it would be to motivate the couch potatoes and amateurs.

The only "problems" I see with out system are that we've moved away from free market capitalism. On the left, we have regulated and taxed... on the right, we have set up loopholes and caveats for corporatists.

You crack me up ""they know how to do it better"" Need to give that some time to sink in So these folks getting wealthier have no need of tax cuts or loopholes? Meanwhile OT You're a pretty smart guy

 

[Boss]

You crack me up ""they know how to do it better"" Need to give that some time to sink in So these folks getting wealthier have no need of tax cuts or loopholes? Meanwhile OT You're a pretty smart guy

Again, wealth has nothing to do with income taxation. We don't tax wealth. We tax income. And yes... generally speaking, wealthier people know better how to create wealth than the average person.... that's how they became wealthy.

 

[eddiew37]

You crack me up ""they know how to do it better"" Need to give that some time to sink in So these folks getting wealthier have no need of tax cuts or loopholes? Meanwhile OT You're a pretty smart guy

Again, wealth has nothing to do with income taxation. We don't tax wealth. We tax income. And yes... generally speaking, wealthier people know better how to create wealth than the average person.... that's how they became wealthy.

Can you at least say Trump had a greater start in life that most people don't have?

 

[Boss]

Can you at least say Trump had a greater start in life that most people don't have?

He did, but you have to also remember he lost everything he had and rebuilt his fortune.

Look... I happen to know some very wealthy people. One of my best lifelong friends who I went to high school with, was recently listed in the Forbes 500. He is one of the richest people in America and he came from the same middle class background as I did. I know from growing up with him, there is something inherently different in the way their minds work. I experienced this first hand. Even back when he was in high school, he was constantly thinking of ways to generate wealth. He was a major tight wad... pinch a penny 'til it squealed. He never had a car that ran, always drove some piece of shit that would break down and leave us stranded. He STILL hates to spend money. But he can make money out of virtually NOTHING... I've seen him in action! Last year, he turned a property valued at $20k (he had nothing invested in it) into $25 million. It required some hustle on his part and he had some connections, but that was pretty fucking impressive.

People like him just have something different between their ears. He didn't screw anyone or cheat anyone, it was all legal and legitimate... he just knew how to do it. He says 90% of it is believing you CAN do it.

 

[eddiew37]

Can you at least say Trump had a greater start in life that most people don't have?

He did, but you have to also remember he lost everything he had and rebuilt his fortune.

Look... I happen to know some very wealthy people. One of my best lifelong friends who I went to high school with, was recently listed in the Forbes 500. He is one of the richest people in America and he came from the same middle class background as I did. I know from growing up with him, there is something inherently different in the way their minds work. I experienced this first hand. Even back when he was in high school, he was constantly thinking of ways to generate wealth. He was a major tight wad... pinch a penny 'til it squealed. He never had a car that ran, always drove some piece of shit that would break down and leave us stranded. He STILL hates to spend money. But he can make money out of virtually NOTHING... I've seen him in action! Last year, he turned a property valued at $20k (he had nothing invested in it) into $25 million. It required some hustle on his part and he had some connections, but that was pretty fucking impressive.

People like him just have something different between their ears. He didn't screw anyone or cheat anyone, it was all legal and legitimate... he just knew how to do it. He says 90% of it is believing you CAN do it.

I'm not quite as good as your pal

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