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Carly Is Out
MouseTheLuckyDog writes: I don't like stories that are not nerd oriented, but given Carly Fiorina's disastrous time as HP's CEO, the second only to Stephen Elop's tenure at Nokia, I think it is appropriate to announce that as of now Carly Fiorina is out of the Presidential race.
Yes, but only while running companies into the ground.
That doesn't necessarily make Rand Paul a socialist. Like his father he has Libertarian leanings, which means he'll agree with socialists on some stuff, and with conservatives on other stuff. (In other words, both parties get to hate him.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Perhaps he is in favour of personal liberty and small government? Republicans (and Democrats) have consistently favored large government and trampling over the rights of the citizens while making whatever promises will get them elected.
So far the only successful libertarian movements have been socialist, which makes sense as socialism is in favour of the rights of the people while the various right wing movements are in favour of the rights of big business and/or the rich. In America both parties main differences are which big businesses they back with the Democrats throwing the odd bone to the people to attract those with leftist leanings and Republicans likewise throwing the odd bone to Conservatives to attract their votes.
The main problem with America is how successful the propaganda machine has been, including the idea that socialism equals big government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
But no one has ever adequately explained to me how, if society values a certain form of labor at $x, but we legislate to be $x*1.2, prices won't eventually inflate by x1.2; leaving the minimum wage earner with a larger bank account, but the same buying power; and society still paying equivalently the same in buying power for the labor that it had before.
Allow me to help you out. For goods and services that are provided through minimum wage labor, the actual labor cost is a fairly small component (not insignificant, but dominated by other costs). Raising the minimum wage form the current $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour is calculated to raise the cost of fast food for example by 4.3%, but more than doubling the salary of the employee. Obviously the cost of service provided by minimum wage labor cannot be 100% labor which is the only situation where your hypothetical could hold. Minimum wage workers are left much, much better off.
Certainly, I do recall from my youth, when minimum wages increased a few months later prices would also increase at places like McDonalds, Subway, and such... the places where minimum wage earners go.
Your youth must have been in the 1970s, I gather. An anomalous period of high inflation when the prices of everything was going up.
Granted, it's not like my degree is in economics, and I know there IS data that shows that minimum wage increases do boost the economy. But it just feels like voodoo.
Good that you are interested in actual facts (many here are not, their mind is made up and have no need for stinkin' facts). Yes, minimum wage increases do boost the economy. There are many natural experiments here, where one area raises minimum wages, while another does not. It is not voodoo at all. It is just very, very basic economics. Businesses make money selling things. To sell things people must have money to buy things, and be willing to spend it. Low wage people spend almost all their money buying things that many businesses sell, they aren't putting it into overseas bank accounts or buying yachts. In a consumer driven economy like ours, a higher share of the GDP going to labor leads to a higher growth rate, since there is more economic activity. That share has been declining for decades, and so has the economic growth rate.
Plus, when I was growing up, minimum wage jobs were for high-schoolers learning how to have a job, college kids earning beer money, and retirees who just wanted to get out of the house. No one expected to make a career out of it.
And now many people do depend on minimum wages to make a living. It is impossible in truth, so the difference is made up by public assistance - the government subsidizing low wage businesses. Walmart instructs its workers how to apply for public assistance, since otherwise they could not work at Walmart.
But a key point about minimum wage that so many here seem not to notice, but my Republican uncle who runs a business, and supports minimum wages, does - it levels the wage playing field. Without a minimum wage competitive pressure prevents him from offering higher wages to his workers, since the guy down the street will undercut him on prices by not doing that. When a decent minimum wage floor is in place, that disappears. There is no competitive disadvantage.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
it causes unemployment increases
No, actually it doesn't.
You also ignore that without a minimum wage it quickly becomes a race to the bottom.
government wealth redistribution
This alone makes you socialist/communist.
There are specific definitions of those words, even if you choose to ignore them.
You have apparently never been unemployed. I have. I was out of work for just over a year. If unemployment ended at 3 months I would have been forced into homelessness and poverty-induced crime. As a male, there's no shelters for me to go to like there are for women. Move to a cheaper apartment? No, apartments require you to have a source of income before they'll let you in and breaking your current lease early can cost $$$. I would now be in jail consuming lots of your taxes instead of earning 85K and paying lots of taxes. My unemployment benefits were mostly (completely?) covered by my employee. They paid the state which then paid me since I wasn't fired with cause. It cost you basically nothing in taxes and saved you from getting robbed.
When you are on unemployment, you're required to apply for jobs. There are random audits to make sure you're not lying. When you're out of work for over a year, you have to prove you submitted X number of applications per month (X is somewhere between 20-40, I forget). You provide when, where, and who you applied to and they follow up with some percentage of those companies. Lazy people can't do that and go off unemployment or are eventually uncovered, fined, then tossed in jail.
It doesn't matter if there are tons of jobs available or not. You have to actually be hired by the company. You have no control over that. On job related Slashdot articles there are always people saying they've had positions open for years and yet can't find anyone and you have people saying they've been out of work for years and can't find a job. You can retrain yourself (assuming you have time from the unemployment benefits which keep you from having to whore yourself out to multiple minimum wage jobs to keep that once affordable apartment that's more expensive to move out than stay). However you don't know how long you'll be out of a job so you can't train yourself for a specific position. You can learn a new skill, but jobs REQUIRE experience and you can't get years of that, especially if all your income and benefits cut out after 3 months. Recruiters do their best to stay away from people who don't already have jobs so that's another huge hurtle you need to slip around.
You could move, but you don't have the money, don't know where to move, and there's little reason to think you'd have better chances in the new area. If you have a medical issues and require CORBA (else you go without medical insurance), you definitely don't have any money what so ever. CORBA is $$$$$. (I don't know how this changed with Obamacare, I was unemployed before all that.)
If you force people into busy work, then they'll have no time to improve their skills to find real work. They'll become trapped. Finding a job is can be a full time job. You've got to make perfect resumes and cover letters for every application. You've got to find the actual open positions (there are tons of job ads that are just 'feelers'). You've got to create almost the exact same personal profile on almost every corporate website to apply to them and these sites are complete shit that barely work.
Sure, there is some fraud in unemployment just like there is in everything else. But you'd be much more effective if you went after large sources of fraud, like corporate taxes, rather than trying to kick random people when they're just above bottom. Please stop with the poor deserve to be poor bullshit. You might not realize it, but that's what you're pushing.
Minimum wage is a requirement. Without it the race to the bottom would be so fast the middle class would be gone in a year and we'd have civil unrest within two. Business owners and boards are too greedy. It can work in other societies, but not here in USA.
I have one question for you. How has voting 90% helped blacks get out of places like Chicago and Detroit?
My point, if it is too subtle for you is that voting DNC in lockstep hasn't helped the very people the DNC claims as its untouchables. Though they keep trying to blame Republicans for everything done in the name of socialism and social justice.
MY view is doing "nothing" as you say, would have been better than keeping them enslaved to the DNC party has. And having a Black President hasn't helped them in the slightest either.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
That's just not true. People are uniformly better off today than they were 35 years ago. What has happened is that tax burdens have shifted somewhat. And if you look at government taxation and spending, you'll find that the only income group that pays substantially more than they receive in government benefits is the top 20%.
We do have a massive problem with crony capitalism in the US, where companies that are in bed with the government and politicians benefit massively. But that's a separate issue from inequality and income distribution.
The actual sociopaths are the kind of politicians you support. And, no, I don't "feel sorry for you": your stupidity and ignorance harms everybody.
Wage stagnation for the lower 2 quintiles, while a massive increase for the already wealthy. While some people like to use the "economy isn't a zero sum game," it actually is. There is X amount of money in the economy, and it goes somewhere. When laws are passed, and tax cuts made, that overwhelmingly favor the already rich... everyone else is simply some form of fucked over. Productivity has gone up, with all that new generation of wealth going straight up. That is a redistribution of wealth from the people that actually produce, to those that sit on their ass and invest.... who are then taxes less because it's capital gains.
And yes, the tax burden has shifted. Back in the 80's, Reagan was all about the tax cuts (at first). The wealthy sure loved him, but it increased the deficit and debt, so he decided to raise taxes. It wasn't the wealthy he raised taxes on, though.... it was the poor and middle class. Government redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to, yes you guessed it, the already wealthy.
http://acivilamericandebate.co...
Along with some other good information, half way down the page is an interesting chart showing the difference Reagan's tax cuts had. The entire premise of trickle down economics is bullshit, and is the basis for the economic inequity we're suffering right now... along with all the ill effects that has on society. It has, because of the government sticking to the absurdity of it, redistributed wealth upwards.
People are uniformly better off today than they were 35 years ago...... And if you look at government taxation and spending, you'll find that the only income group that pays substantially more than they receive in government benefits is the top 20%
And neither of those things have anything to do with the fact that the government, in the pockets of the wealthy, has been redistributing wealth from the poor and middle class for the last 35+ years, and certainly neither of them refute what is obvious to pretty much anyone who's been alive since before the 80's (and is actually old enough to remember them). My mea culpa is, i actually voted for Reagan... at least it didn't take me more than a couple years to see how truly fucked up his voodoo economics was, and foresee the devastation it would bring on this country if it wasn't changed.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's