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The median student debt in the US is about $13,000. 25% of students graduate with little to no debt.

Not bad for an $800,000 payback premium over a high school education.

So it will happen, but we just shouldn't worry about it.

It's not guaranteed to happen; it's unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. That is: it's as likely to happen tomorrow as it was yesterday; it's as likely to happen in 500 years as it is today. The transition requires entirely-new technology of a form largely different from what we have today, and technology is not something that happens by brute force; it's a constant gamble with results mediated largely by luck.

Give some research that backs up your claims.

It's generally complex, but shows a trend of minimum wage increase causing job loss. The studies to determine if it does are statistical, and have problems with confounding. The analysis I use is mathematical based on supply of income, which is only representative of the trade of working hours.

How do we summarize this evidence? Many studies over the years find that higher minimum wages reduce employment of teens and low-skilled workers more generally. Recent exceptions that find no employment effects typically use a particular version of estimation methods with close geographic controls that may obscure job losses. Recent research using a wider variety of methods to address the problem of comparison states tends to confirm earlier findings of job loss. Coupled with critiques of the methods that generate little evidence of job loss, the overall body of recent evidence suggests that the most credible conclusion is a higher minimum wage results in some job loss for the least-skilled workers—with possibly larger adverse effects than earlier research suggested.

Basically nearly all studies detect a loss of jobs; and narrow geographical studies show little to no localized impact. San Francisco may not suffer unemployment by raising minimum wage to $15/hr, while somewhere else in the country jobs are lost because that total flow of income has to come from someone's labor hours purchasing fewer things.

I never said how much I would increase the minimum wage.

Any increase has the same general effect; it's a matter of magnitude.

Since Bernie's done the research, let's start with $15/hr and set increases based on inflation.

Bernie likes to start sentences with, "You don't need to have a Ph.D. in economics to know..." and then say something that's totally fucking bonkers and doesn't align with objective reality. He doesn't know a god damned thing about economics and is approximately the political equivalent of Dr. Oz or Dr. Mercola.

Bernie and Trump have the same position on trade and economics in general.

Inflation is actually slower than wealth growth, by the way.

Say you have 10 workers working $10/hr making 10 chairs per hour. That's $10 per chair. Now you find a way for them to produce 20 chairs per hour, that's $5/chair. You have deflation!

The first observation you should make: the old way meant one worker worked 1 hour (1h) to purchase 1 chair. The new way meant one worker worked 0.5 hours (0.5h) to purchase 1 chair. That chair costs half as much.

So we want to keep a 2% inflation rate. Assume the above occurs over 10 years, the $10 chair should cost $12.19. Well, that chair costs 0.5h because 10 workers make 20 per hour. For those wages to adjust to this inflation, the workers must make $12.19/hr; but to have chairs cost $12.19/hr, we must pay workers $24.38/hr. It's impossible for wages to not exceed inflation in general.

Something like a Universal Social Security automatically adjusts for this because it just takes a percentage of the per-capita income and levels it. No human intervention required. This also has the bonus effect of moving the income outside the wage structure, which

Well excepting the fact that there are such studies

http://www.frbsf.org/economic-...

You don't have to be Milton Friedman to figure this stuff out.

I saw the BLS stats, but i don't think you're right. The median tenure of the workforce is increasing. The length of tenure is highly related to age, and the workforce is aging.

What you really need to see is if the tenure time is actually increasing across age bands and not just for the overall workforce. Here's a somewhat dated analysis (compare figure 1 and figure 2): http://www.frbsf.org/economic-...

You can see the overall tenure is increasing, but the tenure of each age subgroups are actually declining. It's just the change of the population in the subgroups has dominated the results. This is called Simpson's Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

So the truth is that for any given age, job tenure was higher in the past. As they say, "lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Yes, indeed: depending on who you believe you could believe in a bias in either direction. :P

Politician A should win, but politician B will.

Its funny you say that because politician A isn't especially honest either. National defense is a constitutional responsibility of the federal government in the US, but social welfare isn't. And yet social welfare spending is about twice what national defense spending is, and social welfare spending is going to be increasing significantly over the coming years. National defense spending has been on a long decline since WW2 when it was nearly 40% of GDP whereas now it mainly bounces between 4-5%. Increasing taxes doesn't help if you don't control spending. And taxes are a drag on the economy which are slowing the recovery.

Fiscal Headwinds: Is the Other Shoe About to Drop?

Surprisingly, despite all the attention federal spending cuts and sequestration have received, our calculations suggest they are not the main contributors to this projected drag. The excess fiscal drag on the horizon comes almost entirely from rising taxes. Specifically, we calculate that nine-tenths of that projected 1 percentage point excess fiscal drag comes from tax revenue rising faster than normal as a share of the economy.

And no, the "sheep" aren't willing to "give up anything". What has been revealed so far is far from that. It constitutes no rights or freedoms lost, and a what constitutes at most a limited intrusion on privacy as the program operates under the oversight of the FISA court.

In a real sense you aren't suggesting a bargain any different that you complain about: fear the government instead of fear the terrorists. Your preferred fiscal solution leads to serious financial problems even faster than what you decry.

It may not come easy to hear this for Americans, but fact is, China's owned the world for quite some time; the far far vast majority of everything you own and will use and own etc, comes from China. Everything depends on them. They're the ones with the power, not the US with their supposed big guns. Attacking China will just destroy everything about US, or just about any other first world nation.-

How doe the fact that only 2.7%

Because Glenn Beck said so in one of his monologues on Fox New?

How doe the fact that only 2.7% of US consumer spending is spent on Chinese goods fit into your little narrative?

The average US consumer can't buy a "Made in China" home, nor a "Made in China" car, nor "Made in China" food, nor "Made in China" gas. As it turns out, housing, transportation, and food makes up the majority of a consumer's spending.

And if we lived in a system where tax money was literally handed to people, you'd have a point, but that's not what tax money is used for on all but the smallest scales. Economics has shown time and time again that the impacts on quality of life from spending money on social infrastructre are disproportionately large.

It is true that there are ways governments could spend the money in a way that each citizen would gain more than $61.61 in wealth. But most studies I have been able to find in a 10 minute Google search show the effect to be closer to $1 of infrastructure spending boosting economic output by $2. Here is one example I found on my search.

So even if taking all of Bill Gate's money would give $123.22 to each Indian, that would still not have some huge impact.

The US only imports about 2.7% of its gross spending in terms of goods from China.

http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2011/el2011-25.html.

Not only that but these are not energy intensive goods. Cheap trinkets don't take a lot of energy to make.

This article is unmitigated hooey.

The sorts of things the US imports from China are not particularly energy intensive, and the total is only a small fraction of the total US GDP.

http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2011/el2011-25.html

Ultimately the US is not exporting a significant fraction of it's energy use to China. The facts just don't support the idea.

This is the specific criteria: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act_of_1977#Sec._804. Note that the Federal Government is the one decided whether or not the bank is meeting the needs of low-income customers. This is not the case in practice, however. Enforcement of the CRA is done by community advocacy groups. One of the criteria that is used to determine whether the bank is CRA-compliant is the comparative number of loans made to high- versus low-income clients. If you don't make enough loans to low-income clients, then you are not CRA-compliant. Source: http://www.frbsf.org/community/craresources/advocacy.pdf If a bank has a bad CRA record, then the bank will be prohibited from expanding or merging. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

Japanese are printing Yen like crazy, it should be much stronger than it is today and prices in Japan must be much lower than they are today and there should be restructuring.

Looking at relative values between currencies ALL of which are being debased is useless.

Here is an example of their printing plan: 4 year printing plan that started in 2001

Here is part of their plan description from 2010

Here is the result of the third time BoJ 'eased' in August 2011

Here is some more in October 2011

2012, April, the headline is: "BoJ will print as much as it takes."

May, 2012

They are constantly running 'Quantitative Easing' programs, you can even refer to wiki - fourth paragraph in that chapter.

Recall any great economists? Psychologists? Biologists? Philosophers?

Because those fields are run by incompetent hacks.

????

You're a lunatic.

Lang didn't deny AIDS...or so according to Wikipedia anyway...

...Lang's most controversial political stance was as an AIDS denialist...

Way to go!

So it isn't easy, in fact it may even be illegal to formally co-opt a CU in the way the GP described, but sometimes they do end up being managed by execs with a bankster mindset.

When has "illegal" been a sure stop? If the executives, under whatever influence, decide to appoint a consultant to put forth a conversion proposal, and the members are persuaded to go with the conversion (which is in the consulants' interest), within the rules of the CU's charter, conversion can happen legally, ultimately at a loss to members, and profit to the acquirer.

And yes, Credit unions can convert to bank charters, although it has been rare in the past , see CU Financial Services.

See... FRBSF Economic Letter, Credit Unions, Conversions, and Capital , Credit Union Conversions to Banks: Facts, Incentives, Issues, and Reforms.

A mass exodus to credit unions could change matters greatly, as the members who have the most $$$ tied up, could begin to see opportunities from the mass importation of financially unsavvy members joining, to provide the CU as a whole great opportunity for exploitations.

And the loss of $$$ to banks would give then a great incentive to want to join / become a "partner" in a credit union.

Meanwhile as the CU struggles with growing pains due the importation of members and requires more scalability and more resources to provide service, for-profit models become more enticing, as they provide more capital towards that end.... P.S. and more capital to pay executive bonuses

However, most people usually just run it as credit - and there's a good reason for that. If someone steals your card info for a debit card - you're pretty much screwed. Any money they pull out before you notice is _gone_ unless you report it pretty much immediately - and even then, that's no guarantee you'll get it back. I think they have a maximum amount they'll refund, and they'll only refund that if you notify them within 30 days.

Just to let you know, debit cards do have slightly more risk to the consumer, but not in the way you described. According to the Electronic Fund Transfer Act which is codified in Federal Reserve Board Regulation E, liability to consumers that had a fraudulent debit card transaction is limited to $50 unless the consumer does not notify their bank within 2 days of learning of the fraud or loss of debit card. The $50 limit is not normally enforced, because banks don't want to loose your deposits. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Fransisco has a good summary of the differences in liability between Debit and Credit cards. Further, a bank must return any funds transferred by error or fraud within ten days {see paragraph (c)(1&2)}, unless the bank can prove no error or fraud took place.

One might say that 2 days is not enough time, but my bank (ING) sends me an email for every transaction in my accounts. If one is not familiar, I can easily check the detail.

With Visa - they'll refund everything. And I don't recall there being any significant time limit on it.

The law imposes a strict $50 limit on liability for credit cards, but credit card issuers rarely enforce this in order to retain you as a customer.

The depression of wages is pretty damn obvious if you look at it

And yet, people who have actually looked find out that immigration does not depress wages or harm the employment chances of citizens.

For example the bousing bubble collapse (which put us in this present poor state) was caused by a 1997 regulation that required banks give loans to people, even if they were unable to pay it back.

Absolutely false. Typical of your single-track, shallow bullshit though.
First of all the CRA - Community Reinvestment Act was a 1977 regulation, not 1997. There weren't even any changes, regulatory or legislative, to the CRA in 1997.

Second the part about not being able to pay it back - the people who qualified for CRA loans were much better vetted than the people getting the subprime loans that were securitized and sold with misleading AAA ratings because CRA doesn't apply to those kinds of banks, only depository instutions, not wall-street banks. For example, most of the CRA loans were not the high-priced kinds indicative of poor credit risks. Furthermore, CRA loans only made up a small part of the market for loans during the bubble years -- more than 50% of subprime loans were granted by non-CRA institutions, another 25% were only partially CRA regulated, which means essentially no CRA loans, while only the remaining ~25% were from banks that were fully regulated by CRA - which means only some fraction their loans were CRA, i.e. only the ones from branches in poorer neighborhoods.

That's a failure CAUSED by regulation, rather than prevented

Totally false, as I have already spelled out, the high-risk loans were the ones subject to the least amount of regulation. CRA did not permit those No-Income, No-Job or Assets (NINJA) loans that have had nearly a 100% default rate, nor any of those other low-doc loans that have also had extremely high default rates.

I suggest you try blaming teh gays instead. There is less evidence to refute that.

I'm sure none of this will sink in and you will continue to repeat the bullshit that matches your preconceived bias. But at least anyone else reading along will understand just what a fucking looney you really are.

To be fair, the US didn't actually have paper currency until around the time of the Civil War.

I don't see the relevance of paper versus coinage, the fact remains that the United States did not use "In God We Trust" until the time of the Civil War and it was not official until 1956.

The coinage act of 1792 resulted in the creation of United States currency with no "In God We Trust".

The First Bank of The United States was chartered in 1792 and from what I understand had the approval to create official bank notes for the United States but I don't know that they actually did create any notes.

The Second Bank of The United States was chartered in 1816 with similar approval to create bank notes and did proceed to create notes with no inscription "In God We Trust".

The fact is "In God We Trust" didn't even show up on paper currency in any significant numbers until the 1950s. So the motto on the currency is still a relatively new religious inclusion in light of over 200 years of history.

The parent is correct, but a bit terse. I thought I'd elaborate a bit:

"Federal Reserve Board data shows that:

* More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
* Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
* Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics."

- http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html

The stats don't back up the idea that any public institution or law bears the brunt of the responsibility for problematic lending.

It also doesn't make much sense. Take the fingers pointed at the CRA. It didn't force banks to make risky loans. They could deny an application based on income, credit rating, or any other relevant factors. What it *did* force them to avoid was "red-lining": denying loans based on the current living location (used as a proxy for the applicant's race). A person's race and living location might have some correlation with risk of defaulting, but as we all know here on slashdot, correlation is not causation, and a responsible financial institution would deal with the more directly relevant information: an individual's income/asset information and their credit history.

Here's some other links:

http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html
http://www.ccc.unc.edu/news/news.021809.php
http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/Commentary/2000/1100.htm
http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/ls564.htm

Wikipedia also has a summary.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html
http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html

Finally, there's a summary at Wikipedia.

Someone needs to write a bot to post a response every time someone blames the financial crisis on the CRA or in some other way largely on the GSE's.

"Federal Reserve Board data shows that:

* More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
* Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
* Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics."

- http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html

Here's a few other links:

http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html

There is also a summary at Wikipedia.

"Federal Reserve Board data show that:

*More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
*Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
*Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics."

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html

It doesn't take much poking around to see some serious holes poked in the idea that the CRA caused this mess:

http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html

But, let's not get those pesky facts get in the way, shall we?

Democrats have been running the show for 2 years now

Did you read my post?

How exactly do you justify the idea the Democrats have been "running the show" for 2 years?

. Look up Community Reinvestment Act when you get a chance if you're interested in the truth.

You sound as if you'd be surprised to discover that I'm already quite familiar with it -- and its popular usage as a tool of misdirection from failures and malfeasance in the private sector:

http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html

Re-read the article. It says that you cannot discriminate against low-income neighborhoods when giving out loans. In all actuality the bank doesn't care where you are from, they just want to see income. This change essentially created a quota for banks to lend to certain areas. Well guess what? Lending to low-income people is a really dumb idea.

Let's see your numbers. The numbers I've seen indicate that the portfolios of institutions subject to those sorts of regulations did not underperform, and their portfolios contained significantly less sub-prime paper than those of "non-bank" entities that weren't regulated like that. Basically, unless there's some serious data behind it, I'm going to have to take Janet Yellen's word over yours.

To an extent, it's true: the financial problems are due in part to the Community Reinvestment Act [wikipedia.org], which they claim was modified during the Clinton administration in such a way that it forced banks to make riskier loans.

If that was the actual cause, you'd expect loans made under the CRA to have a high default rate, yes? What would happen to that argument if the data showed that CRA loans don't default at a higher rate than other loans?

Yeah.. because..you know.. when the seeds for this were sown in 1977 the Congress was Democrat controlled and it was signed by a Democrat president. In 1995 President Clinton made regulatory changes (no need for the consent of the Republican Congress) that put the program on steroids, paving the way straight to our current crisis.

So, you're suggesting that a law that:

1) was passed 31 years ago
2) applies only to federally-insured banks and thrifts and not to the non-bank mortgage companies that made the majority of the sub-prime loans
3) George Bush weakened in 2004 with no apparent decrease in subprime activity
4) does not appear to lead to unprofitable lending

caused the sharp upward trend in unprofitable loans that did not coincide with either 1977 or 1995? Oh, and of course, the banks making these bad loans (knowing full well that they were bad--they were under duress, you know), decided to borrow huge sums of money to make huge numbers of them in order to massively leverage their losses (which they expected to be losses--you know, the CRA made them make those loans against their will). Well done indeed.

It was after this that FM/FM started taking on the risky loans to comply with the heightened standards.

I'm not going to claim that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enacted wise regulations during the run-up, but for God's sake, they lost significant market share to asset-backed securities issuers starting in about 1999. You're suggesting that organizations that don't originate mortgages and have been declining in significances (especially in the sub-prime market) are responsible for a huge up-tick in sub-prime mortgages? I salute you.
Notably absent from this discussion is the fact that the types of derivatives that made these securities as attractive as they were happened to become deregulated at just about the same time the asset backed securities market started to eat away at Fannie and Freddie's mortgage holdings.

Bottom line: Let's see your numbers. From what I can see, this is an example of a spectacular lack of oversight in a new and "innovative" market that got out of control. The economic theory bears it out well, the time line works, and the numbers seem to favor that explanation. There's no reason to appeal to things like the CRA or FM/FM to explain the sudden run-up in available credit to low-quality borrowers. I'm willing to hear a detailed explanation, if it makes economic sense and has some data behind it, though.

Bush tried to fix this in 2003, but the Democrats killed it.

Of course, I'm sure that Mr. Responsible governance and regulation tried everything he could to get a tighter grip around those guys, but it was 2003, and his party only controlled both houses of the legislature. Sure, he got whatever he wanted in those days, but woe to those who cross Barney Frank, especially when he's in a minority party that couldn't seem to do shit when it came to pushing its agenda.

Frankly, any argument that's being pushed by Kevin "Dow 36000" Hasset needs a little bit of hard data backing it up before I buy into it, especially when it appears to run counter to the facts and expert opinion. Basically, I'm thinking, Kevin Hasset vs Janet Yellen. Who gets the benefit of the doubt on data-driven matters of economic policy?

Interestingly enough, if you track the market and label the time axis based on who is power at that time, the market has historically done slightly better with a democrat at the helm. Not sure if that is *really* a measure of "prosperity", as it doesn't measure any quality-of-life indicators, just market growth. Capital growth is at least somewhat related to prosperity, though. "The humorist Will Rogers reportedly suggested that, in order to find the place where the Republican Party was formed, one should find out where the first business was formed." This seems more humorous than true, however.

LOL. Great theory except for the mythical "discount of Y" and "lowering of prices once meals were eliminated". There was no lowering of prices, the meals were eliminated in an attempt to raise profits. Just like there won't be a discount of Y.

I'm not sure that's an entirely fair statement. Airline costs have also been increasing quite a bit due to the cost of oil, and I suspect that measures like the one you describe are a big part of the reason that costs haven't been higher.

I can't find a more recent plot, but this one which goes until 2000 shows a steady decrease in U.S. domestic airfare prices:

http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2002/el2002-01b.gif

inflation adjusted housing price indices graphed for the last hundred years.

you have it wrong.. most middle class americans are seeing their wages fail to adjust upward to meet inflation due to h1b's and offshoring, and are being forced to run up their home equity like credit cards to maintain their current standard of living.

Dude, this line of reasoning comes straight from militia freaks in Oregon who want to steal your money. I had a friend in Hawaii who was scammed by these guys. I tried to tell him that it was all bullshit, even showing him books about the Fed that contradicted what these asshole scammers said, but of course that was all just propaganda. Poor guy lost thousands to the scammers and thousands more to the IRS.

If you want to believe this crap, go ahead, I won't try to talk you out of it. But here's some links so you can find out more for yourself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_reserve_bank
http://www.frbsf.org/publications/federalreserve/f edinbrief/index.html
http://money.howstuffworks.com/fed.htm

And to provide some balance, here's more from the scammers themselves (please take with a HUGE grain of salt):
http://www.fdrs.org/banking_history.html

From an article at Federal Reserve Bank: "The performance of productivity in the U.S. economy has delivered some big surprises over the last several years. One surprise was in the latter half of the 1990s, when productivity growth surged to average an annual rate of over 3%, more than twice as fast as the rate in the previous two decades. A bigger surprise has been the further ratcheting up...productivity growth averaged around 3.8% for the 2001 through 2004 period."

From TCS: "Annual economic growth in the eurozone has averaged less than 2 percent since 2000. The unemployment rate has averaged 9 percent thus far in 2005, compared to 5.1 percent in the U.S. Half of Germany's unemployed are classified as "long-term" compared to just 12 percent in the U.S."

so, in order to stop someone who you perceive as wealthy getting more wealth, you are going to prevent me from increasing my wealth?

if the interest on my personal account outpaces the interest on the borrowed money, then i will take the difference. if the current lending rate from the feds is 1.75% i lock that in on the borrowed money, invest and get 5-10% conservatively in the market. that does equal or better than social security now, plus i own the money and can pass it on.

alternativley the feds could learn restraint, set priorities and figure out a way to make the budget actually work - much like i have to at home.

currently, the lowest 20% of wage earners earn 4-5% on social security:http://www.frbsf.org/econrsrch/wklyltr/wk lyltr99/el99-34.html#subhead1

Banks used to settle accounts with real money. At least that was what I was told when I was researching the history of American currency. For an example, see the $100,000 Bank Transfer Note.

Umm, you said we are the first generation with a lower standard of living, not that we WILL be the first generation with a lower standard of living. I'll bet your current lifestyle is better than what your parents had at the equivalent point in their life.

I didn't say standard of living, I said worse off... that meant economically. My parents are from a time where both parents didn't have to work to make ends meet. They also come from a time where the disparity between the have's and have not's wasn't so wide. The middle class is shrinking and another article. Unless you squeak into the wealthiest 5% of U.S. citizens, then you're either considered impoverished or a dying breed.

I agree with your old fogie rant. My first salary out of college was $18k, when most of my friends expected to hit the work force running at $30k'ish. THey all thought they should have nice new cars (while I drove an old beat up pickup truck to work), wear expensive suits to work (I shopped at the discount stores), and live uptown. They were all living check to check and barely getting by, because they thought they deserved nice things like their parents had. Fast forward 12 years later, and I have a nice savings account, a nice 401(k), have maxed out on social security (not that I'll ever see any of it), and have extra investments to boot. Mainly because I lived within my means. Which, by the way, were lower means (if you compare using CPI) to how my parents lived when they started out.

I'd hate to give up my chance for a share of a higher standard of living in order to preserve your current standard of living. Sadly, this comment is the case for many people... at least those who work for mid to large companies. I now write HR software, and am privy to the extra monies the senior execs rape from companies, including this one which hasn't seen a profitable year in the last three. There have been paycuts, cuts in the bonuses, and cuts in benefits. Meanwhile, the senior execs have seen increases in their bonuses. So the effect of this is exactly what you said... my standard of living is suffering because theirs is increasing... drastically. This is not the only company I've seen this happen at. Hell, just watch the news... we saw this with Enron, Dynegy, El Paso Oil, WorldCom......
You, however, shouldn't have to worry about my standard of living affecting yours... and only I should worry about my standard of living. But I would love to see examples of "every other change in history has resulted in a higher average standard of living." How about the new bill that expands the definition of exempt employees? Millions of Americans will not be able to bill overtime (such as police officers). Their standard if living will decrease... all in the name of corporate greed.

I don't have to show you the numbers. It's absolutely logical.

Arguments can be internally consistent and still be completely wrong. Falling back on "It's absolutely logical." isn't the least bit convincing unless you prove the base assumptions are correct (which you haven't, no data of any kind)

And your references to a questionable report written by liberal economists for the liberal EPI think-tank is hardly "proof" of your position.

I'll concede half a point on this one. I looked into it and the founding members of EPI are all Democrats. I'll withold half a point though as they are a long way from fringe liberal quacks. Every one has a list of accomplishments as long as your arm and each has served at one time or another as advisors to presidents or legislators in Congress. And unless you're saying that all Democrats are by definition quacks, you'll have to give me the 1/2 point.

So why won't it work? $100k per year is a rediculous mininum wage? What about $50k? What about $30k? At what point does it stop being rediculous? At what point will companies either go bankrupt because they can't pay the minimum wage, or will have to let people go so that they CAN pay the minimum wage to those who are left?

The average minimum wage increment over the last 40 years has been 26 cents.

.26 * 40 hours/week = $10.40

If a company goes bankrupt by paying workers an additional $10.40/worker/week, their profit margin is so razor-thin thay they aren't really viable anyway.

Despite liberals' attempts to try to reject simple economic principles, if we can admit that with a 5 cent minimum wage virtually everyone would be employed while with a $100k minimum wage the system would collapse, then you have just agreed with me--and rejected the conclusions of "Bernstein and Schmitt (1998)."

Re boldface: Not at all. While I admittedly haven't read "Bernstein and Schmitt (1998)", I would wager that the increments they are advocating are primarilary to preserve the buying power of the minimum wage and to offset devaluation caused by inflation. This devaluation requires that the wage hike be keyed to current buying power rather than some nice arbitrary amount like 5 cents.

It's hard to argue with some liberals that produce "studies" written by liberal "pr

Produce a study written by conservatives. Liberals don't have a monopoly on PR

In the spirit of bipartainship check out the following link paying particular attention to the last paragraph. The article presents a very balanced view of this whole issue (pro and con) and at the very least proves that the effect of raising of the minimum wage is not nearly so cut and dried as you have been arguing.

"Minimum wage article"

Thanks for a most enjoyable argument:)

If your interested in seeing what the money of the past looks like, found a good url. http://www.frbsf.org/currency/bills.html
A 1776 1 3rd dollar. 33.3333333 cents. lol