Presumably, they are going to listen to polls and feedback from focus groups. Otherwise, it'd take more than sweet words to make them support policies opposed by 2/3 of the country. The study in question didn't find that that the rich have a somewhat disproportionate influence in politics. It found that if you aren't in the top 10%, your opinion has NO correlation with public policy.
Plus, you are assuming competence on the part of both lobbyists and politicians.
Your argument about single payer working elsewhere is ridiculous. There's no rational reason for US citizens to subsidize private profits from legal monopolies with severe regulatory capture, just for the sake of medical research of the rest of the world. Other countries with similar resources should be pulling their own weight, and it's a horribly inefficient way to fund research.
Basically all of the useful research is taxpayer funded while still being under unchecked, for-profit monopolies, with only a nominal amount going back to the researchers and universities that engage in said research. Take the NIH grants and university spending, tack on money from 10% of our military budget, release them to the public in a generics process that consists of making untainted chemical equivalents, and we'll get at least twice as many useful drugs at a fraction of the cost.
Yes, it was passed by the Democrats, but that kind of plan was historically backed by Nixon, the Heritage Foundation, and Romney.
They didn't oppose it because they hated the plan, they opposed it because they had to be anti-Obama, and they were left without a plan of their because Obama stole their plan.
I would argue that the ACA was a net negative, though, and possibly worse than doing nothing in the long term because of the backlash. ACA was the Republican plan, and it sucked in a lot of ways. This got in the way of the single-payer system that we actually need, which would actually work.
The last thing we need is an agency who decides what can be on network TV (remember Janet Jackson?) to be anywhere NEAR this issue.
You seem to misunderstand the problem with the FCC. The FCC shouldn't be involved in content, and you've provided a clear example of that. However, it does not follow that because the FCC is involved in things it shouldn't be, that the FCC shouldn't be involved in anything.
The FCC does a pretty decent job of boring technical issues like making sure radio signals don't interfere with each other. Net Neutrality is exactly that kind of issue, and in both cases, it largely boils down to enforcing a policy of "don't be an obnoxious jackass."
A historical example or two are far more convincing than any actual evidence of contemporary wrongdoing!
Yeah, because it's not as if those kinds of policies haven't persisted and continued. It's not like there is a long list of governments the US has tried to overthrow. And of course, parallel construction, which was using surveillance data in an illegal way, and covering it up by creating a different way to find the info, was cited post-Snowden, on top of all of the programs like PRISM that he leaked info on.
The FBI was abusive back when J. Edgar was sucking up dirt like another kind of Hoover. Not even counting things like almost destroying the goddamn world during the Cuvan Missile Crisis, we've even got the recent LoveInt within the NSA. We've also got parallel construction for the abuse by law enforcement.
Jesus, how fucking stupid do you have to be to not realize that power is inherently corrupting, and anybody that can wave their hands at any criticism by saying "national security" is going to be overwhelmingly corrupt.
Trump isn't smart enough to collude with himself, and Russian intel wouldn't want an operative like him, because it jeopardize the operation.
Russian interference in the election, for which evidence is limited to a modest budget of shit-tier memes, generally trends more anti-Clinton than pro-Trump, but overall, it's just low-level trolling. Thus, people who keep repeating "Trump is a traitor" ad nauseum are the real useful idiots.
And for the record, my stance is that the greatest insult to American democracy was the lack of an option on the ballot to send both Clinton and Trump on a rocket headed towards the sun.
No, you are the corporate tool. Mega-corps control our government, and real wages haven't gone up since that really became the case. If higher wages were good for mega-corps, we would have them.
It's quite hilarious that you think that one is a corporate tool for taking the stance of unions/pre-Reaganomics American policy.
You're a broken record. "Start a business" is not an argument, you dipshit.
I'd rather be at the poverty line and working than unemployed because people like you decided the job shouldn't exist.
You are ignoring all the jobs freed up by people not having to have multiple jobs, and family members working part-time or not at all. You are also ignoring all the waste and overhead of our welfare system subsidizing these wages. Cheap pieces of shit need to go out of business, because they cost us all so much.
To pay every person that works enough to support a family of 4 is a great way to devalue our money and just move people in the middle class to poor.
No, it's how the American middle class was built in the first place, and if workers were paid proportionate to their historical productivity, we'd have more than enough to support that lifestyle.
I know plenty of families of 4, and even some larger. In fact, 2.1 births per woman is the line for population replacement. What the fuck is wrong with your brain to even ask that kind of question?
If a husband and a wife get a job at Walmart, Walmart has to pay for a family of 8?
The point is that a single full-time income should be able to keep a normal-sized family out of poverty. If a modern job can't do that, then that job shouldn't exist, because that's a very low hurdle.
Start your own fucking company
That's always the answer to any critique of bad business practices, and ignores basically any reality about how businesses actually work or are founded, and assumes that the only people that can comment are entrepreneurs, or more realistically, PHBs.
and stop spending other people's money you cheapasss fucking douche.
Wal-mart and other businesses that don't pay a living wage are the cheapasses, and they are the ones stealing other people's money.
Nope. Clinton was popular within important groups in the Dem party, but hated outside of them. Similar to Trump and GOP. That's why they both polled so negatively.
Your reasoning, though, is very much in line with out-of-touch beltway politics. Clinton is more "moderate," so she should appeal more to the voters that are on the right. The problem is that she compromises for the elites on the right, not the masses. Same with most corporatist Dems, not grasping that in order to be popular outside of donors, they need to adopt populist policies, not just pick half of each party's platform and pretend everyone is going to like it.
I agree with you on the problem. And the very concepts of left and right economics totally breaks down when power starts to be concentrated. I think the authoritarian-anarchist spectrum tends to be the most important.
Now, you are correct that they had a lot of policies that were for the masses. However, that's something that predates socialism, and even applies to criminal organizations, businesses, and other power structures. Bread and circuses, church mandated holidays, and all of that. The only reason what the Nazis did seems noteworthy is because we're looking at this through the lends of "normal" being Reaganomics on steroids.
Bernie is far and away the most popular politician in the country. Clinton, by contrast, is basically the only person that could have managed to lose a general election to Trump.
Also, the demographics of the general election and the Dem primaries are very different. Plus, Clinton cheated.
One definition of a living wage is enough to keep a family of four at or above the poverty line. When comparing such a wage to productivity, there's no need to carve out a bunch of hypothetical exceptions, just stop being a cheapass piece of shit.
People with at least a rudimentary understanding of concepts like game theory. So long as there are hungry and desperate people, we have the risk of a wage floor that could lead to many more people being hungry and desperate. Now, if we had a UBI, we could possibly get rid of minimum wage, because the potential for exploitation would not be there, or at least not nearly as much.
In order for someone to reasonably progress, they need a wage that puts them ABOVE the poverty line. Yes, we can't all start at CEO pay, but if someone is going to progress to a better job, they need to actually be making progress. If minimum wage had kept pace with productivity, we wouldn't need to have this conversation.
A living wage is a wage where full time employment can have a family of four at or above the poverty line. A fair wage is a wage where pay is roughly equivalent to productivity. If a fair wage for a job is not a living wage, that job should not exist, as the process is too inefficient to waste valuable human time and effort.
Advocates for low wages are enabling crappy businesses and crappy jobs, instead of having them eviscerated for their failure. As for people advocating for fair wages "having no idea," go fuck yourself. Productivity is higher today than at any other point in human history. The wages to the people who actually do useful work, outside of a few exceptions, have not seen an effective raise in decades, despite constant growth in productivity.
So, there is no reason that a competently run business would be unable to pay living wages to a job that should continue to exist, outside of a prisoner's dilemma-type race to the bottom. However, that case is handled by raising the minimum wage, as the minimum wage is the limit of that kind of race.
Your reasoning is circular. Wages are more reflective of bargaining power than meeting needs, especially since so many Walmart employees are on government assistance. Because Walmart holds almost all of the power here, they underpay their workers.
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably, they are going to listen to polls and feedback from focus groups. Otherwise, it'd take more than sweet words to make them support policies opposed by 2/3 of the country. The study in question didn't find that that the rich have a somewhat disproportionate influence in politics. It found that if you aren't in the top 10%, your opinion has NO correlation with public policy.
Plus, you are assuming competence on the part of both lobbyists and politicians.
Yeah, if you agree with Adam Smith on the danger of monopolies, you are a "libtard."
Something attributed to Nixon and the Heritage Foundation can, though. It's a right-wing alternative to single payer/
Your argument about single payer working elsewhere is ridiculous. There's no rational reason for US citizens to subsidize private profits from legal monopolies with severe regulatory capture, just for the sake of medical research of the rest of the world. Other countries with similar resources should be pulling their own weight, and it's a horribly inefficient way to fund research.
Basically all of the useful research is taxpayer funded while still being under unchecked, for-profit monopolies, with only a nominal amount going back to the researchers and universities that engage in said research. Take the NIH grants and university spending, tack on money from 10% of our military budget, release them to the public in a generics process that consists of making untainted chemical equivalents, and we'll get at least twice as many useful drugs at a fraction of the cost.
Yes, it was passed by the Democrats, but that kind of plan was historically backed by Nixon, the Heritage Foundation, and Romney.
They didn't oppose it because they hated the plan, they opposed it because they had to be anti-Obama, and they were left without a plan of their because Obama stole their plan.
I would argue that the ACA was a net negative, though, and possibly worse than doing nothing in the long term because of the backlash. ACA was the Republican plan, and it sucked in a lot of ways. This got in the way of the single-payer system that we actually need, which would actually work.
You seem to misunderstand the problem with the FCC. The FCC shouldn't be involved in content, and you've provided a clear example of that. However, it does not follow that because the FCC is involved in things it shouldn't be, that the FCC shouldn't be involved in anything.
The FCC does a pretty decent job of boring technical issues like making sure radio signals don't interfere with each other. Net Neutrality is exactly that kind of issue, and in both cases, it largely boils down to enforcing a policy of "don't be an obnoxious jackass."
Because the flying tube can have a greater integrity with less weight if you don't have a bunch of unnecessary holes in it.
Yeah, because it's not as if those kinds of policies haven't persisted and continued. It's not like there is a long list of governments the US has tried to overthrow. And of course, parallel construction, which was using surveillance data in an illegal way, and covering it up by creating a different way to find the info, was cited post-Snowden, on top of all of the programs like PRISM that he leaked info on.
The FBI was abusive back when J. Edgar was sucking up dirt like another kind of Hoover. Not even counting things like almost destroying the goddamn world during the Cuvan Missile Crisis, we've even got the recent LoveInt within the NSA. We've also got parallel construction for the abuse by law enforcement.
Jesus, how fucking stupid do you have to be to not realize that power is inherently corrupting, and anybody that can wave their hands at any criticism by saying "national security" is going to be overwhelmingly corrupt.
Yes.
Yes.
To an endemic extent, where the best thing we can do for national security would be to destroy the headquarters of the major intel TLAs.
Not being illegal doesn't make something okay.
Trump isn't smart enough to collude with himself, and Russian intel wouldn't want an operative like him, because it jeopardize the operation.
Russian interference in the election, for which evidence is limited to a modest budget of shit-tier memes, generally trends more anti-Clinton than pro-Trump, but overall, it's just low-level trolling. Thus, people who keep repeating "Trump is a traitor" ad nauseum are the real useful idiots.
And for the record, my stance is that the greatest insult to American democracy was the lack of an option on the ballot to send both Clinton and Trump on a rocket headed towards the sun.
I would go with eMerde-data as the mnemonic. Shitty digital data.
No, you are the corporate tool. Mega-corps control our government, and real wages haven't gone up since that really became the case. If higher wages were good for mega-corps, we would have them.
It's quite hilarious that you think that one is a corporate tool for taking the stance of unions/pre-Reaganomics American policy.
You're a broken record. "Start a business" is not an argument, you dipshit.
You are ignoring all the jobs freed up by people not having to have multiple jobs, and family members working part-time or not at all. You are also ignoring all the waste and overhead of our welfare system subsidizing these wages. Cheap pieces of shit need to go out of business, because they cost us all so much.
No, it's how the American middle class was built in the first place, and if workers were paid proportionate to their historical productivity, we'd have more than enough to support that lifestyle.
I know plenty of families of 4, and even some larger. In fact, 2.1 births per woman is the line for population replacement. What the fuck is wrong with your brain to even ask that kind of question?
The point is that a single full-time income should be able to keep a normal-sized family out of poverty. If a modern job can't do that, then that job shouldn't exist, because that's a very low hurdle.
Wal-mart and other businesses that don't pay a living wage are the cheapasses, and they are the ones stealing other people's money.
Nope. Clinton was popular within important groups in the Dem party, but hated outside of them. Similar to Trump and GOP. That's why they both polled so negatively.
Your reasoning, though, is very much in line with out-of-touch beltway politics. Clinton is more "moderate," so she should appeal more to the voters that are on the right. The problem is that she compromises for the elites on the right, not the masses. Same with most corporatist Dems, not grasping that in order to be popular outside of donors, they need to adopt populist policies, not just pick half of each party's platform and pretend everyone is going to like it.
I agree with you on the problem. And the very concepts of left and right economics totally breaks down when power starts to be concentrated. I think the authoritarian-anarchist spectrum tends to be the most important.
Now, you are correct that they had a lot of policies that were for the masses. However, that's something that predates socialism, and even applies to criminal organizations, businesses, and other power structures. Bread and circuses, church mandated holidays, and all of that. The only reason what the Nazis did seems noteworthy is because we're looking at this through the lends of "normal" being Reaganomics on steroids.
Bernie is far and away the most popular politician in the country. Clinton, by contrast, is basically the only person that could have managed to lose a general election to Trump.
Also, the demographics of the general election and the Dem primaries are very different. Plus, Clinton cheated.
Is North Korea a Democratic Republic, or does the name someone adopts not always indicate what they are?
One definition of a living wage is enough to keep a family of four at or above the poverty line. When comparing such a wage to productivity, there's no need to carve out a bunch of hypothetical exceptions, just stop being a cheapass piece of shit.
People with at least a rudimentary understanding of concepts like game theory. So long as there are hungry and desperate people, we have the risk of a wage floor that could lead to many more people being hungry and desperate. Now, if we had a UBI, we could possibly get rid of minimum wage, because the potential for exploitation would not be there, or at least not nearly as much.
In order for someone to reasonably progress, they need a wage that puts them ABOVE the poverty line. Yes, we can't all start at CEO pay, but if someone is going to progress to a better job, they need to actually be making progress. If minimum wage had kept pace with productivity, we wouldn't need to have this conversation.
A living wage is a wage where full time employment can have a family of four at or above the poverty line. A fair wage is a wage where pay is roughly equivalent to productivity. If a fair wage for a job is not a living wage, that job should not exist, as the process is too inefficient to waste valuable human time and effort.
Advocates for low wages are enabling crappy businesses and crappy jobs, instead of having them eviscerated for their failure. As for people advocating for fair wages "having no idea," go fuck yourself. Productivity is higher today than at any other point in human history. The wages to the people who actually do useful work, outside of a few exceptions, have not seen an effective raise in decades, despite constant growth in productivity.
So, there is no reason that a competently run business would be unable to pay living wages to a job that should continue to exist, outside of a prisoner's dilemma-type race to the bottom. However, that case is handled by raising the minimum wage, as the minimum wage is the limit of that kind of race.
Your reasoning is circular. Wages are more reflective of bargaining power than meeting needs, especially since so many Walmart employees are on government assistance. Because Walmart holds almost all of the power here, they underpay their workers.