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Interesting perspective, except that your figures are wrong. Sales tax is high in Europe, but 25% is the maximum, not the common amount.

Gas is expensive indeed, but because of that Europeans have been driving more fuel efficient cars for years. Our densely populated continent is better of this way to keep the air cleaner, but also because we can keep parking lots smaller. And again, you picked the maximum (8USD/gallon)

10-19% unemployment? The average is 10.1 in Europe. And although there are some extremes like Spain at 19.7, a country with fairly high taxes (the Netherlands) is currently at 4.3. So maybe you can say 4.3-19 %. But I would rely on the official average of 10.1 And in the USA it was 9.7 in May.

And 75-99 % unemployment rate among teenagers? I have no idea where you got that from, but in Europe most teenagers are still in school/college. And the only figures I could find are that in most countries the youth unemployment is roughly twice the average, no where near 75%

If you yourself are educated the way you advocate, you in my view are a perfect example why we should encourage youth to go to college! They do teach you to do some research and how to interpret the figures. Don't think I ever saw an episode on that on Discovery.

When government fucks with free markets, the customer loses, always.

No. They don't. I like my strawberry tart without so much rat in it.

Considering Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", President Theodore Roosevelt considered Sinclair a "crackpot" and wrote to William Allen White, "I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth." Roosevelt however did sent two investigators to appease public outcry. Labor Commissioner Charles P. Neill and Social Worker James Bronson Reynolds.

From: http://www.bls.gov/opub/blsfirsthundredyears/100_years_of_bls.pdf
Page: 48 & 49

Packinghouse conditions

For over a decade, reformers had been demanding Federal legislation to require the accurate labeling of preserved foods, beverages, and drugs. Germany and other European countries had roundly condemned American preserved meat and packinghouse products. Veterans of the Spanish-American War remembered none too fondly the "embalmed beef" of the quartermaster. Such legislation had passed the House only to die in the Senate, and Roosevelt urged its adoption in his message to Congress in December 1905.

Early in 1906, Upton Sinclair published "The Jungle", which exposed the unsanitary practices of the Chicago packers and stirred public indignation. Roosevelt called for action. The Bureau of Animal Industry of the Department of Agriculture, which maintained a staff of inspectors at the stockyards, immediately launched an investigation. The President directed Neill to make an independent inquiry: "I want to get at the bottom of this matter and be absolutely certain of our facts when the investigation is through." Neill, along with James Bronson Reynolds, a reformer from New York City, spent 2 and 1/2 weeks gathering information and then submitted a report to Roosevelt, who praised him for his work. In addition, not satisfied with the report of the Animal Industry Bureau, Roosevelt asked Neill to revise it.

Based on these reports, Roosevelt ordered the Department of Agriculture to prepare a bill establishing more stringent meat inspection procedures. Senator Albert J. Beveridge introduced the proposal in May. The so-called Beveridge Amendment quickly passed the Senate, where the packers made no fight. The press reported that the packers "were willing to agree to almost any kind of legislation" to Prevent publication of the Neill-Reynolds report.

However, Representative James W. Wadsworth of New York, Chairman of the Committee on Agriculture, mounted a vigorous opposition in the House. Thereupon, Roosevelt released both reports. As he transmitted the Neill-Reynolds report, he declared, "The conditions shown by even this short inspection to exist in the Chicago stockyards are revolting. It is imperatively necessary in the interest of health and decency that they should be radically changed. Under the existing law it is wholly impossible to secure satisfactory results." The Neill-Reynolds report had described the poor lighting and ventilation facilities; the "indifference to matters of cleanliness and sanitation" demonstrated by the privies provided for men and women; and the uncleanliness in handling products.

The packers retorted in congressional hearings that their procedures were sanitary and wholesome but that they would favor more efficient and expanded inspection. Nevertheless, their defenders in the House treated Neill harshly when he came to testify, prompting him to complain, "I feel like a witness under cross-examination whose testimony is trying to be broken down."

In the meantime, the press reported vigorous activities at the packinghouses where "carpenters and plumbers and kalsominers ( note added: whitewasher / painter ) by the score are at work on alterations." Nevertheless, a great outcry continued in both American and foreign newspapers. On June 19, Congress agreed to a meat inspection bill, and the President signed it on June 30, the same day he signed the Pure Food Law.

They are able to get as much done in a standard 7 hour day/35 hour week as most Americans do in 8 hour day/40 hour week.

No.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_ove_pro_ppp-economy-overall-productivity-ppp

And http://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod4.nr0.htm

And ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ForeignLabor/flsgdp.txt

And http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20572828/

They are able to get as much done in a standard 7 hour day/35 hour week as most Americans do in 8 hour day/40 hour week.

No.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_ove_pro_ppp-economy-overall-productivity-ppp

And http://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod4.nr0.htm

And ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ForeignLabor/flsgdp.txt

And http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20572828/

"Employed persons worked an average of 7.5 hours on the days they worked. More hours were worked, on average, on week-days than on week-end days -- 7.9 hours compared with 5.0 hours. On the days that they worked, employed men worked 56 minutes more than employed women. This difference partly reflects women's greater likelihood of working part time. However, even among full-time workers (those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked longer than women -- 8.3 hours compared with 7.5 hours.

Many more people worked on week-days than on week-end days; that is, they spent some time doing tasks required for a job, regardless of whether it was part of their usual work schedule or arrangement. 83% of employed persons worked on an average week day, compared with 35% on an average week-end day. On the days that they worked, 24% of employed persons did some or all of their work at home, and 84% did some or all of their work at their work-place. Men and women were about equally likely to do some or all of their work at home.

[People with more than one job] were almost twice as likely to work on an average week-end day as were [those with one job] -- 59% compared with 32%. [People with more than one job] also were more likely to work at home than were [those with one job] -- 32% compared with 22%.

Self-employed workers were 3 times more likely than wage and salary workers to have done some work at home on days worked -- 60% compared with 20%. On the days that they worked, 40% of employed people age 25 and over with a bachelor's degree or higher did some work at home, compared with only 10% of those with less than a high school diploma...

On an average day, nearly everyone age 15 and over (96%) engaged in some sort of leisure activity, such as watching TV, socializing, or exercising. Of those who engaged in leisure activities, men spent more time in these activities (5.8 hours) than did women (5.1 hours)...

Students averaged 5.08 hours per day in class, and 2.66 hours on week-days and 3.36 hours on holidays and week-ends on home-work and research."
Time Use Survey

"Employed persons worked an average of 7.5 hours on the days they worked. More hours were worked, on average, on week-days than on week-end days -- 7.9 hours compared with 5.0 hours. On the days that they worked, employed men worked 56 minutes more than employed women. This difference partly reflects women's greater likelihood of working part time. However, even among full-time workers (those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked longer than women -- 8.3 hours compared with 7.5 hours.

Many more people worked on week-days than on week-end days; that is, they spent some time doing tasks required for a job, regardless of whether it was part of their usual work schedule or arrangement. 83% of employed persons worked on an average week day, compared with 35% on an average week-end day. On the days that they worked, 24% of employed persons did some or all of their work at home, and 84% did some or all of their work at their work-place. Men and women were about equally likely to do some or all of their work at home.

[People with more than one job] were almost twice as likely to work on an average week-end day as were [those with one job] -- 59% compared with 32%. [People with more than one job] also were more likely to work at home than were [those with one job] -- 32% compared with 22%.

Self-employed workers were 3 times more likely than wage and salary workers to have done some work at home on days worked -- 60% compared with 20%. On the days that they worked, 40% of employed people age 25 and over with a bachelor's degree or higher did some work at home, compared with only 10% of those with less than a high school diploma...

On an average day, nearly everyone age 15 and over (96%) engaged in some sort of leisure activity, such as watching TV, socializing, or exercising. Of those who engaged in leisure activities, men spent more time in these activities (5.8 hours) than did women (5.1 hours)...

Students averaged 5.08 hours per day in class, and 2.66 hours on week-days and 3.36 hours on holidays and week-ends on home-work and research."
Time Use Survey

Benton Harbor has 70% unemployment? I have family and friends there. Granted, the economy is no great shakes there, but I don't think it's quite as bad as you're portraying, and the BLS agrees with me it seems: http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.mi_niles_msa.htm

This is of course a very good point, and deserves a citation so it's not an unsupported assertion: http://www.bls.gov/fls/chartbook/section3.htm#chart3.6 However, that represents the current situation, not the future situation. The concern is the trends, which are pretty uniformly negative as far as the US is concerned. Broad changes on this scale take decades, but the trend seems to be to send jobs OUT of the US, rather than bringing them in.

Remember how economic investment potential is measured by investors - growth potential is king. It's a bit of a problem for large, mature companies since they have to find ways to keep growing to keep stockholders and investors happy - if the US as a whole is showing a downward trend that is FAR more alarming than the current relative numbers. Economic investment looks ahead at what is coming, not at the here-and-now - the future doesn't look so good when the US isn't competitive.

Also, I would probe a little further into the derivation of those numbers and what they mean - does a "percentage of world manufacturing output" come from some sort of $$ based calculation using a uniform price for all goods everywhere? Does that number reflect not just gross output but actual profits? Is it "n widgets produced, where a plane = 1000*n and a car = 1*n?" I wonder how they do that math - it's actually quite a complex question.

I'm posting supporting stats before /. archives the story, to prove how culturally independent from company commitment the US is. I just wish I had stats for Japan, which is supposed to have a high loyalty rate and very personal tie between work life and personal life, where your kissing up to the boss after hour is expected. Anyway, age apparently drives people to be loyal; it's either a generational gap, or the likely fear of older people putting family mouths in danger by moving around or switching careers.

From the lion's mouth (US Bureau of labor statistics) is an interesting document on tenure for employees
Only 27% of US workers 16 or older were at their employer for more than 10 years. For people over 55, more than 50% have 10 year of tenure. "The median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.1 years in January 2008." You can imagine the curve joining these two endpoints, or just read the first couple pages of the report above, which is all I've done.

Decisions in this most influential country on earth are made without much expectation of being there to account for them. For anyone with a little time, poke around the historic values for 2006 and 2004.

PS: Some later searching shows that recent stats are paywalled by academic sites. There is the short pdf (tables around [scanned] page 726) with data from 1979, showing japan had a mean of 8 years (4 for the US) and 25% tenure for 10+ years, compared to 15% in the US. Google books shows that Japanese workers were the highest tenured in 1990, followed closely by Germany, France and Spain. The US was last in a list of around 10. I also found a forum comment citing that the Phillipines have the 2nd highest turnover rate in Asia-Pacific, which is bone-chilling seeing how we think Indian callcenters suck, and how Americans are switching away from India to cheap pinoy labor. I could not confirm if India has the highest rate or not, but it still gives me a chill.

As a bonus, since I'll refer to this in the future, here's a short general article on employee retention and company culture.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were some sort of index that would measure that and let us know?

(FWIW, last month taken as a whole, price changes favored the consumer by 0.2%)

Oh, now I see where you're at -- education doesn't promote mobility or job creation, replace public schools with vouchers, eliminate Social Security, cut back government spending.

I started reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page years ago, because they were conservatives who actually had respect for the facts, even when the facts went against them. Now unfortunately, along with the rest of the conservative movement, they've been completely taken over by anti-government ideology and have abandoned facts. The traditional fact-based conservative movement actually has a name for this, "epistemic closure."

So I'm familiar with your fact-free arguments. When someone dismisses the facts in peer-reviewed journals like Science, I know that facts and logic will never convince them.

I rest my case.

BTW, for the record (in the unlikely case that anybody else is following this) you have a complete misunderstanding of what nurses do, and what their educational requirements are. http://stats.bls.gov/oco/ocos083.htm (more facts) and a complete misunderstanding of what the legal requirements are for decision-making in hospitals. This is a good example of the intellectual methods of conservatives today: just make things up.

I admit that if you buy health care on the free market, you probably won't need Social Security.

How is it hard to know that in advance, exaclty:

http://www.bls.gov/emp/

The flaw with your argument is that there is a much smaller pool of road construction workers to draw from than from the general population, which all of your other statistics represent. I don't know how many road construction workers there are, but I can guarantee it's significantly smaller than 300 million. If we make the assumption that there are 1 million road construction workers, which seems overly generous, the likelyhood of being struck by a car and dying while doing road construction work is roughly equivalent to the likelyhood of being murdered.

A quick look at the bureau of labor statistics here suggests that in 2008, in the US, there were approximately 83,000 road, bridge, and highway construction workers. Extrapolated to a risk for the general US population, you would expect to lose about 220,000 people to being struck by a car in a workzone, about 5.5 times as likely as dying in a car accident in general, and an order of magnitude more likely than being murdered.

Seriously? You can't do five minutes of your own research? I simply copied and pasted your above statement into Google, and this link, http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/highwayworkzones/ , was fourth from the top. It includes a lot of documents that are relevant, including this useful summary:

During the 1995 to 2002 period, 844 workers were killed while working at a road construction site. During this same period there were 9325 deaths in the construction industry. The 844 worker deaths in road construction represent 9% of all deaths in construction. More than half of these fatalities were attributable to a worker being struck by a vehicle or mobile equipment. Workplace fatalities that occur at a road construction site typically account for 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent of all workplace fatalities annually.

of this document: Source: Fatal occupational injuries at road construction sites

Road construction fatality rates are disproportionately higher than most other occupations. As to whether or not Arizona is more or less prone to road construction fatalities, the document only ranks the top and bottom five, and Arizona was in neither. But even if their work zones were among the safest in the nation, that's not saying much. It's still a very hazardous occupation.

Further summarizing the document's contents, of the 693 fatalities between 1995 and 2002, 509 were due to a worker being struck by a vehicle. The rest were "construction" types of accidents, including falls, struck by objects, contact with electricity, etc. Of the 509 deaths caused by vehicles, 363 occurred in the roadway, and 119 occurred off to the side of the road.

So don't delude yourself for a moment into thinking that work zones aren't dangerous places for workers, or that traffic isn't the primary cause of death for the workers. It is.

Oh, stumbled onto 2008 data. Cabbies are down to 10th position. Don't know if it mean it's now safer to be a cabbie or if other jobs are now more dangerous. :/

Okay, I asked Peter. The discrepancy is because (a) he used a 1997 study, actually from the same journal you cited the 2000 study; (b) the 1997 paper studied job fatalities in general, while the later one was exclusively about job homicides.

Thus while police had the second-highest homicide rate, overall they didn't make the top ten most dangerous occupations for getting killed (while cabbies did).

You know what is a far more dangerous job than being a cop? Being a pizza delivery guy.

Pizza delivery guys put themselves into situations that you or I hopefully NEVER have to be in. Every delivery is a potential bullet to the face (which while rare, DOES happen (more often than it happens to cops)). Pizza delivery guys are not above the law, but they deserve special protections due to the situations they are forced to be in. You can deliberately miss the point and argue semantics but the point of this statute is clear--to protect pizza delivery guys from people who are potentially dangerous and acting in unpredictable fashions.

FTFY.

Clearly pizza delivery guys should have the right to beat the shit out of anyone who "stands too close to them".

We already have laws against threatening police officers, laws against "standing too close to police officers" are stupid. And why only police officers? Surely if some crazy dude "stands too close" to a regular citizen, they should deserve protection as well.

To quote Peter himself, "... taxicab drivers suffer three times the homicide rate of any law enforcement category, that being a cabbie is the fifth-most-dangerous job in the US while Law Enforcement doesn't even make the Top 10. If the risks associated with border patrol can be invoked to excuse the kind of violence I experienced, should we not extend the same immunity to cabbies?"

Your post intrigued me enough to go and look up the statistics myself. You're playing a little fast and loose with the statistics yourself. Cab drivers suffer a much higher homicide rate than law enforcement officers (about 4x higher per 100,000 in 1998). But law enforcement has the second highest homicide rate. If you correct for the fraction of time actually spent out in the field (most officers only spend part of their time doing patrols out of a 40 hours work week, while cab drivers work about 60 hours a week), I imagine the homicide rate per hour interacting with the public may actually be higher for law enforcement than for cabbies.

That's not to say any of this is relevant in this case. I'm not even familiar with the facts of the case as this slashdot article was the first I've heard of it.

  Interesting, I'd never really looked it up. A quick look at fatal injuries per occupation yields this chart from the BLS. In the homicides category the highest numbers by a ways are in retail sales, food preparation and sales supervisors ;-?! Protective service occupations are actually a fair ways down the list.

  I assume there are different ways of looking at it, but as someone who has worked a lot of retail sales, it does make a morbid kind of sense...

  (It would be nice if they would put their statistics tables in some sort of sortable format... it's not hard...)

  I would appreciate a better link if anyone has one.

SB

No, the video game industry is not bigger than the film industry.

Film Industry in the US employs 361,000

http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs038.htm

All software publishing in the US employs 263,700

http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs051.htm

Globally video games are worth 40 billion

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Extra/VideoGameSalesOvertakingMusic.aspx

US film revenue is 42 billion, total box office gross is 10-11 billion, but that's only a piece of the US film industry.

http://www.allbusiness.com/media-telecommunications/movies-sound-recording/10512814-1.html

No, the video game industry is not bigger than the film industry.

Film Industry in the US employs 361,000

http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs038.htm

All software publishing in the US employs 263,700

http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs051.htm

Globally video games are worth 40 billion

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Extra/VideoGameSalesOvertakingMusic.aspx

US film revenue is 42 billion, total box office gross is 10-11 billion, but that's only a piece of the US film industry.

http://www.allbusiness.com/media-telecommunications/movies-sound-recording/10512814-1.html

Borrowed time perhaps, but then with old technology the number of interested people goes way down over time too.

The best objective indicator of scarcity is market price. Is there an obsolete technology that is worth more today than it cost originally, in inflation-adjusted dollars? Obviously some cars and comic books are "collectible" in this way. Any technology examples? What would somebody pay for a mint condition Apple ][, or an original arcade game console (Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, etc.)?

A case example would be the Curta mechanical calculator, which has become a hot collectors item due to its uniqueness and interesting history. They sold for $600 fifty years ago, and meanwhile inflation over this period has been around 7.5x. I don't believe these are worth $4,500 today, even in very good condition. Could there ever be a collectible technology, or does demand always fall off faster than the supply of working parts?

At least according to this site. Now how about some comparisons of the Courier versus the iPad!

The USA's "U6" measure is about 17% at the moment (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm).
It's what you get if you include part-time workers who say they'd prefer to be full-timers. All the other measures are about 10%. So hesiod's point still stands, sorry :)

Read before you write. Especially when it's obvious that you haven't read anything. You apparently don't know who Upton Sinclair was, or why he wrote, or the fact that people have mixed fact with fictional plot lines in order to get certain points across. I swear to God this is like arguing with someone who's illiterate.

Many of the book's assertions were confirmed in the Neill-Reynolds report, commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle

The rending of human flesh wasn't confirmed in the report, but the meat packing companies had been cleaning up for three weeks before the on site inspection began. Here's a newspaper article from 1906 in case your dimly lit bulb is still lost at sea:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1913&dat=19060529&id=UdAgAAAAIBAJ&sjid=vWoFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1292,1463035

Your single vote cannot hope to change government policy.

Funny. Popular movements stopped slavery, got women and non-whites the right to vote, stopped the Vietnam War, got us the right to freedom of speech, a 40 hour workweek, overtime pay, and ended child labor. But you'd have to have the most basic understanding of labor history to understand these facts. Here's a good place to start.

Plus, you still are required to pay taxes.

Oh, fuck. News to me! I guess it's time to privatize every piece of infrastructure we have, and when all of those basic services triple in cost, we can gloat about how we don't pay any taxes. Hooray! We're winners!

With a corporation, you can refrain from buying their products, depriving them of profit.

You may literally be too dumb to argue with. Exactly how are you going to deprive your insurance company of profit when they deny your claim to life-saving procedures on technicalities? How are you going to battle Microsoft if they take you to court with a team of lawyers making $10,000 an hour? How are you going to sue the coal mine for poisoning your well if there are no environmental regulations?

Your sense of economics can only comprehend widgets and customers and buyers. What are you going to do next? Model the real estate market with a game of Monopoly?

Thus, corporations are far more responsive to their customers than anyone working for the government. Compare the service you get at McDonalds with the service you get at the DMV or the post office.

I'd rather deal with my local DMV than Comcast or AT&T or dozens of other companies. Why don't you compare the service you get from the US Military to the kind you receive from Blackwater? Alright, ten times the cost, none of the accountability! Way to go.

Likewise, go smoke some more Chomsky.

Really? Kind of a downer. I figure you would have copied a t-shirt witticism, and pretended it was your own. I guess all the kids on American Idol are just wearing graphic tees these days.

The CPI has been gamed and tricked out so much that you can't believe it.

For example they have this idea about cheaper substitutes. Basically as the price of something nice goes up, you'll use a cheaper substitute, so they change their baseline to include the cheaper substitute instead.

The classic example here is "hamburgers for steak". Which the BLS has responded to:

http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpiqa.htm#Question_3

Their rebuttal, if you read it carefully, actually admits that they do substitute less desirable goods within categories, just not technically hamburger and steak because those are in different categories. But they will substitute cheaper cuts of steak for nicer ones if it suits their tinkering.

There are groups who assemble the more realistic numbers, and they really aren't pretty.

Actually, BLS releases this data too:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

"U-6 Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force"

18% in January.

Let's see. There is employment of about 3.2 million in Information Services. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm There are about 20,000 active patent attorneys in all fields, and about 6,000 patent examiners in all fields. Even if they all worked in IT, nothing would change. Even if you double those numbers to include support staff. It is arguable that Slashdot wastes more IT productivity in a day than the patent system could ever hope to. And examiners are much more useful in the chemical arts because the investment behind a patent is much greater than in high-tech. Especially in pharmaceuticals (say $300 million a drug).

And here is a problem with circumventing those yearly caps. Last I heard with the immigration debate was that there is something like 12 million illegals in the USA according to some and closer to 20 million according to others. Remeber, if they pop a baby out while over here, their baby is a natural citizen so kids who didn't cross the border do not count as illegals.

Right now, unemployment in the US is around 10.4 percent according to Google's search answer and 9.4 percent according to the government BLS. With that in mind, and the last population estimates coming in around 303 million people in the US, then unemployment can be dropped by anywhere from 3.9 percent to 6.6 percent just by removing all the illegals.

In other words, between almost 4% to almost 7% of the unemployment is caused by people entering the country by circumventing the normal mechanisms. Actually, it will most likely be less then that because not all illegals will be employed but you should be able to get the drift. Now I'm not sure if this is the case in other nations, but in the US at least, businesses that hire illegals like to do so because they can pay them less. Sometimes this pay is even less then the minimum wage which displaces employment for others. The travesty of this is that the illegals do not have an effective remedy against this because reporting the violations of labor laws would also disclose their status. They are held basically in bondage by fear of deportation or imprisonment and exploited because of their unique situations. If you ask me, this is far more harmful to the illegals then waiting in line for a visa or whatever to come up. And for every illegal employed, it displaces at least one legal employee from a job so even though someone might make the claim that they add to the system by paying sales taxes and such, they are taking more away because of the unemployment benefits and welfare created for others. Another problem is that this also inflates the work pool and causes wages to stay down which in turn causes legal employees to earn less and sometimes take two or more jobs just to get a decent standard of living for their families.

IF they want to come in, they need to get in line and wait just like every other legal immigrant does. There is a limit for a reason or several reasons and if all the illegals were not in the country right now, more legal immigrants would be allowed in. All they are doing by jumping the lines and coming in illegally is making it harder for others to come in and causing government resources to be diverted making taxes go up even more while wages go down.

I'm a liar for expressing my personal concerns? Wow... The progressive groupthink virus has struck here.

You convinced me with your cogent argument. I turned off FN and now I believe all government activity is benevolent and good. Thanks!

Proof please of the very little paperwork statement? You have no idea about what I might do or how I might do it. Before you shoot off your mouth about things you know nothing about and state it as fact you might want to do a little research. Do you know what is required to sell food? Give legal or financial advice? Handle chemicals involved in manufacturing? Produce hazardous waste? Provide any service that touch people from a hair salon to a hospital? Oh, and if I want to do it in multiple states, it doubles or triples.

If I started a business your type would be the kind demanding that I give you the job because it was your right and then you would complain about the lack of free, dolphin-safe, green, holistic massages in the ADA compliant chanting room.

If I wanted to start a business and have an employee, it would cost me on average $27.42 per hour.
The legally required compensation items average 8.2 percent of total compensation. Most companies have a lower profit margin than that pre-tax.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm

Let's assume my goal is to make $100,000/year. At a 5% profit margin I would need $2,000,000/yr of revenue. How much of my personal capital should I put up? How much should I borrow? What new regulations will come next year? Should I have US employees (at $27.42/hour * 2080 hours a year is $57,033) or buy from China and India and let them deal with the toxic waste from the manufacturing site while my IP is stolen? I plan to do something a little more complex than a porn site in mom's basement... Your business acumen and advice is welcome!

I also think it is interesting that the most vicious attacks here in this response thread were posted by ACs... It is always ad hominem attacks that generalize and mis-characterize. Civil discourse and rational discussion is dying, the end of true freedom is not far behind that and it is sad.

Like with absolutely any job, it depends not just on what the work requirements are, but also on what the pay is. Difficulty is compensate by money.

Would Americans pick lettuce for $5/hour? Hell no. Federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour? Probably not, when you can do less physically demanding work for more pay. $10? That's close to the median hourly wage for janitors. (lots of neat wage facts at http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes_nat.htm#b00-0000 ). The same site gives $8-$12 for agricultural labor in general. So these are the jobs Americans are already doing, at the wages they're already doing them for. If we assume a few decades of illegal labor has depressed wages in that sector, but only by two dollars an hour, then we should be asking "will enough Americans do this for $10-$14/hour to meet demand?".

I'd say yes. That compares favorably to a lot of other industries. (Check the wage for sales clerk - $10. Food preparation - $8-$11). It's physically demanding, but requires less skill than anything else, and at $10-$14 would be paying equal or MORE than a lot of things that actually require a fair amount of skill (like, say, a cook, or an electrician's assistant, or a college student interning somewhere over the summer). You'd get a lot of people doing seasonal retail work in the fall/winter and seasonal harvesting work in the summer/fall, and actually making more money in the fields than in the stores. Last harvest, there were news stories about the huge crowds that showed up to scavenge fields just for the food; obviously those same people would be willing to do the exact same thing for more than the price of the food in wages, right?

"I am pretty sure, the answer is a resounding 'Yes'."

Only if you aren't concerned with democracy. Democracy requires that a government rule by the consent of the governed. We cannot consent to what we do not know.

We may elect government officials, but how meaningful is that really if their activities in office are secret from us? If we are choosing whether or not to re-elect an incumbent candidate, or selecting among candidates who have held previous government office, how can our approval or disapproval of their past performance be meaningful if we don't know what they have been doing?

You may say that the threats to our society from outside it are greater than the threats from government abuse of power. You may say that government officials' priorities are to protect us from those threats. You may say that government officials require secrecy to effectively protect us.

I think the greatest threats to my health and safety come from sources from which government officials have no interest in protecting me (see Toyota product safety, Wall Street sub-prime mortgage derivatives and credit default swaps, etc). How many people have died as a result of terrorism in the US in the past 20 years? How many from on-the-job injuries?

If the largest and most powerful military in the world cannot effectively occupy a devastated, impoverished country a fraction of it's size, how am I supposed to believe that any outside force of Islamic radicals could occupy the US with it's 300 million (often armed) citizens and impose sharia law? I think the greatest threats to my freedom come from the US Government (USA PATRIOT spying, sneak-and-peek break-ins, wiretapping, COINTELPRO disruption of peaceful movements for social change).

In the main, I don't think that the Government is keeping secrets from me to protect me. Rather I believe that the Government keeps secrets from me to protect those in office from being held accountable by me and my fellow citizens.

I want to live in an effective democracy. That desire is greater than my fear of outside threats, threats that I don't believe government secrecy helps to combat anyway

.

Hint: There exists state jobs, which are massively in excess at the moment - compared to lossage in every other field.

Basically, the "stimulus" has been used to shore up failing state budgets to avoid public employee layoffs. Then these jobs are listed as "saved or created", and Obama takes a bow. Meanwhile, productive jobs in the private sector are experiencing 10% unemployment - that's people looking for work, the official Unemployment Rate. Alternative measures reaches as high as 18% in the month of January 2010.

http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab15.htm
Select U-6.

Public sector jobs experience "only" a 4% unemployment rate.

http://mercatus.org/publication/public-vs-private-unemployment

Shouldn't the least productive, public tax fed jobs be pruned first?

Oh but wait, those jobs are unionized - primarily - and the system allows the union to get their representatives on both sides of the negotiation table.

If we look at the youth crime rates in the US, they dropped of precipitously when the PS1 came out and have stayed low compared to previous decades ever since.

The Playstation was released on December 3, 1994.

The US price was $300.

$580, adjusted for inflation. CPI Inflation Calculator That makes the market middle class and, stereotypically, suburban.

Windows 95 was released in August 1995. In 1996 AOL went to flat-rate monthly billing. IE4 arrives in 1997. The [middle class] kid in the mid-nineties was getting his first real taste of the interactive, on-line, world.

Your numbers are for "Computer Scientists" - generally with a Ph.D. The numbers from the BLS for "Computer Software Engineers and Computer Programmers" are lower:

"In May 2008, median annual wages of wage-and-salary computer applications software engineers were $85,430. The middle 50 percent earned between $67,790 and $104,870. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $53,720, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $128,870"

"Median annual wages of wage-and-salary computer programmers were $69,620 in May 2008. The middle 50 percent earned between $52,640 and $89,720 a year. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $40,080, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $111,450."

See http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm

...there's a difference.

The median income of a software enginner is $85,430 as of May 2008. Programmers make less, with $69,620 as the median as of May 2008.

Software engineers have design and architectural skills that programmers may lack. This is why they are paid more.

Source: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm

The Bureau of Labor Satistics would disagree with you...

Median annual wages of computer and information scientists were $97,970 in May 2008. The middle 50 percent earned between $75,340 and $124,370. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $57,480, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $151,250. Median annual wages of computer and information scientists employed in computer systems design and related services in May 2008 were $99,900.

http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos304.htm

Mind you, Programming == Computer Scientist as much as Machinist == Mechanical Engineer.

If you happen to read the BLS 2010-2011 Occupational Outlook Handbook for programmers, you'll see they are making a great distinction between simple programmers and software engineers. In fact, the good outlook is only for the software engineers (+32% until 2018) leaving the programmers at -3%. Please read the report where they give the explanation for the difference between these two kinds of developers, which might be technical, but really important to understand the powers of the market.

Programmers, unfortunately, can be easily outsourced, leaving much competition and perhaps lower salaries. Really well-prepared software engineers, on the other hand, will almost always thrive because they need to be physically near the places of R&D and new paradigms, talking face-to-face with customers, and experience the IT evolution first-hand. You can't always do that from Bangalore.

Similar definitions and hints you can find at the German BERUFENET about Computer Scientists and their various branches. Simple coders (programmers) are always the peons.

You can find lots of U.S. survey data on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, by occupation here: http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes_nat.htm#b15-0000 and by region here: http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm
I can't find starting salaries though.

You can find lots of U.S. survey data on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, by occupation here: http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes_nat.htm#b15-0000 and by region here: http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm
I can't find starting salaries though.

OP is correct, people will likely go with whatever is suggested by the government, even given the chance to review and modify it. Dan Ariely points out this effect in the context of organ donor percentages across multiple nations in his TED talk. I also think that Intuit is, though admittedly biased, correct (at least insofar as the company was quoted correctly in the summary).

But what I want to know is, by what metric do you determine the average case? 95% of the time the government's calculations are accurate? 99%? 99.9%? The census.gov Population Clock estimates that there are 308 million people in the United States, and the Bureau of Labor and Statistics currently claims that the employment-population ratio is 58 percent, which I assume translates to about 179 million people who'll be paying income taxes.

If the error rate is 1%, just short of 2 million people will have to correct mistakes in their government-provided taxation proposals. If the error rate is 0.1%, it'll be just shy of 200,000 people.

I agree in principal that taxes could be streamlined, but I would want to see some hard numbers after a trial run before deciding that the government was doing a good job (and I would want to see a comparison with the current error rate, as well as hard numbers on the Intuit-assisted error rate).

I agree, but no need to guess, Its not uncommon to do things without financial motivation:

Bureau of Labour Statistics
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/volun.nr0.htm
"Among employed persons, 28.9 percent volunteered during the year ending in September 2008."

There's an old expression, "Don't complain about not having shoes, when there are people who don't have feet."

I'm unemployed and would love a job. So would those included in this January 8, 2010 report by the US Dept of Labor.

Unemployment rates for the major worker groups--adult men (10.2 percent),
adult women (8.2 percent), teenagers (27.1 percent), whites (9.0 percent),
blacks (16.2 percent), and Hispanics (12.9 percent)--showed little change in
December. The unemployment rate for Asians was 8.4 percent, not seasonally
adjusted.

Among the unemployed, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27
weeks and over) continued to trend up, reaching 6.1 million. In December, 4 in
10 unemployed workers were jobless for 27 weeks or longer.

If you don't like the job for whatever reason, quit. This isn't indentured servitude.

Get a job in the public sector, or academia.

They can go through their entire lives in a system that has at is philosophy 'as long as you feel like you're doing good... that is all that counts... and you deserve lots of money for it too'.

Emphasis mine and the embolded part is completely wrong, at least for the rake and file in any part of the Executive Branch of the US Federal Government. I've spent some time working with a Federal Agency a few years ago as an engineer, for professional jobs (GS 7 or higher) you tend to get paid as little as 2/3rds the average pay in the private sector, for an equivalent position with similar experience. The health and retirement benefits do raise the total compensation costs per employee, but not by that much! Now the equivalent to most senior management and executive positions in the Federal Government are either on the SES or some other pay scale and doesn't necessarily follow the same trend, but they are still often less than what you would find in any medium to large corporation.

Now, I suppose some posters here are against almost any government job beyond law enforcement and the military (if that), so any amount would be too much for them. However, for most white-collar workers you will most likely take an appreciable pay cut moving from the private sector to the Federal Government. For a concrete example, the national mean annual salary for an engineering manager is $120,580. However, such a job in the Federal Government would normally be at GS 11 or 12, and with the highest locality pay increase to the base rate (an additional 2.42%) the last step of GS 12 is only $97,333!

Continue to believe the government when they say there is no inflation - there's even DEFLATION (hah! Then why do prices keep going up? How much is gold this morning? $1147/troy oz?).

You sound like a conspiracy theorist. Why would gold, an industrial commodity, be in the inflation basket? How much gold did you have for breakfast today?

Yeah, believe that. Or you can see the real numbers, calculated in the traditional way.

The shadowstats people are in the business of selling newsletters, not in the business of truth. Here is a debunking of their misleading sensationalist claims by BLS economists John Greenlees and Robert McClelland.

The old quarter paid the entire arcade AND the development. Staff, location, lighting etc etc.

MS has far fewer costs, yet charges more... amazing.

But then, people swallowed that with iTunes.

Costs savings to be passed on to the customer, wasn't that the whole point behind the free market? Elmer Fud told me so ages ago in a cartoon, so it must be true.

According to the ol' inflation calculator a quarter in 1980 Dollars is worth about $0.66 in 2009 Dollars. Working backward, the 50 cents for the demo play is worth about 16 cents in 1980 Dollars. Actually a fair bit cheaper!

It's sickening that a family man who works a forty hour week at minimum wage is eligible for food stamps.

Maybe he shouldn't have had children at 16. There is a reason it is called the minimum wage; it is the lowest wage you can legally get paid. When would it not be sickening in your eyes to receive food stamps? I guess, only when you are unemployed. Those 2% above the age of 25 who are still making minimum wage are unfortunate and lucky for them if they have kids, they have a safety net.

I fear the socialistic bastards who are trying to destroy the basic principles and freedoms of our country more than I fear all of the other bastards and nutballs.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 565,700 out of approximately 145 million jobs in the United States last year were for computer support. That's one of every 256 jobs. However, a large portion of workers don't use computers for their jobs. I couldn't find statistics for that, but whatever the real ratio is, it's lower than 256:1. It's safe to say your 300:1 ratio is well above average.

These are raw $, not adjusted for inflation from a site i looked up a few weeks a go that summarized prices for milk, bread, cars, housing, salaries, and a basket of other things.

The numbers you need to look at are the CPI tables which is the most common benchmark for inflation. (there are others but the CPI is used the most, despite some weaknesses) On average the cost of a basket of goods rises about 2-3% in a typical year in the US. Sometimes more, sometimes less but usually inflation is somewhere near 2-3%.

What they showed was that from 1940-1980's, every 10 years, everything doubled (wages AND cars AND bread).

Sounds about right but that's normal inflation and wages have mostly kept pace during that period. Some stagnation in places.

Starting in 1990, prices continued to double, but wages only rose 50% per 10 years.

So you are comparing data from the 1940-80s with data from the 1990s onward. I think you need to be very careful about what data you are using and what you are comparing. If costs actually outstripped wage increases by double (which is less than you originally claimed) for the last 20 years we would be in FAR worse shape than we actually are. I've seen a LOT of data on the US macroeconomic picture and nothing I've seen supports what you are saying. Citations please - and it needs to be from someplace like the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, not some political blog.

If someone wants to be a programmer, the difference in salary between that and an engineer is negligible. Here is some statistical data that may help your son...

(from Occupational Outlook Handbook, bls.gov)
Median annual wages of computer and information scientists: $97,970
Median annual wage of computer programmer: $85,430
Average median of all engineer professions you mentioned: $79,090

(all engineering professions)
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos027.htm#earnings

I'd also like to point out that Econometrics, Biochemistry, Statistics, Actuarial Science, and Operations Management pair nicely with CSCI if earnings is important.