I don't see the actual harm that microbeads are supposed to cause. If they are inert, they are effectively no different from sand. If they are not inert, they just harmlessly biodegrade into carbon dioxide and water.
Java is great on microbenchmarks, and it's a great demonstration that languages could provide high performance and still be safe at the same time. Unfortunately, writing larger systems that perform well in Java is quite hard: you can write fast inner loops, but if you try to use abstractions anywhere, usually things get really slow. Java's garbage collector is also quite good, but unfortunately, the standard libraries force interfaces on you that result in the generation of vast amounts of garbage, so that effect is negated as well.
Although superficially pretty similar,.NET actually fixes many of those problems. And with LLVM, more languages like that are appearing.
There are certain things that Java is very good at
I can't think of anything that Java is "very good at". Most of its popularity derived from the anything-but-Microsoft attitude of the 1990s and Sun's lies about making it an open standard, not from any technical or performance features.
As a language, Java is at best mediocre. And Java failed biggest at what was one of its primary selling points: security. One of the reasons Java is now limited to the server is because they simply couldn't get the sandboxing working for applets, something Flash and JavaScript managed just fine.
I wouldn't expect it to "wipe storage", nor would I want it to. Flash storage has a limited number of write cycles, and people do factory resets much more frequently during the lifetime of a product than wiping the device in order to recycle it. If you want to erase storage, use the "erase storage" function.
"Should" is irrelevant. If someone could control the water supply they could charge $1000/gallon and there is no economic requirement not to.
I agree it's irrelevant, but it's the argument you are making.
In fact, you do it immediately in the next sentence: the price is determined by the cost of the inputs plus the value the restaurant adds"
No, I don't do it at all. "Value" is like "speed" in physics: relative to a reference frame (buyer). Furthermore, when people talk about "the value" in economics, it is "the average value", understanding that it actually represents an average over a wide spread, as opposed to a single value for all customers. It is perfectly reasonable to continue using the term "the value" as long as one remembers that there is always a reference frame involved and that it is an average representing what actually is a wide distribution.
What I was getting at with that sentence isn't about an absolute "value" of the product, but the fact that even as a relative quantity, you're looking at the wrong "value". A buyer assigns a value to the entire end product (restaurant dish). But that value to the buyer is composed of the required inputs (ingredients, etc.) plus a small difference that the restaurant actually adds and that the business owner gets paid for. What I'm pointing out to you is that dish washing is an input, and as such what businesses pay for it is a cost. If an input becomes more expensive, the restaurant has to raise prices because there is no other place for the money to come from. There is no gigantic magical pot of profits that can be used to pay these workers higher wages; if there were, everybody would be investing in fast food restaurants.
If one of the inputs (e.g., clean dishes) becomes more expensive, then the customer will just pay for it.
This presumes that the customer is willing to pay more. The value to the customer of the end product hasn't changed so why would this be true?
Demand is elastic, so if the vendor is forced to raise prices in order to pay for higher wages, fewer people will find the product to be worth buying. Those who still buy at the higher prices will be paying for the higher wages (profits will also decrease slightly, but that only pays for a small fraction of the increases). For the people who choose not to buy at the higher prices, a corresponding number of businesses will cease to operate.
(Regarding substitution: I assume that most restaurants already have industrial dishwashers, but those dishwashers don't load themselves.)
You gave the example of (manual) dish washers, not me. I agree it's a stupid example, but since it's your example, I illustrated how substitution works with it. There are plenty of ways to substitute for loading dish washers too.
And one easy way of replacing low skill labor is to replace it with high skill labor doing the same job; I might hire a high school dropout to load dishes at $8/h, but at $15/h, I might as well require a high school diploma. The people intended to be helped by the law still weren't helped.
But even if the employees don't change, some businesses just become unprofitable at the higher wage rates and go out of business; that may even show up as a positive effect, as it is likely followed by an exodus of low skill residents, who now have trouble finding jobs or affording the higher prices. Or employers simply may tacitly agree to ignore the law altogether, find loopholes, or move into a neighboring community.
And because there is such a variety of consequences, all of which occur simultaneously, any attempts to quantify the negative effects of higher minimum wages fail: the effects are distributed across many different coping strategies.
Because the price (wage of the job) is based on market equilibrium, not the actual value of the end product.
Ah, so because water is necessary for survival, we should price it at $1000 / gallon, instead of at $0.02 / gallon? I don't think so. Goods and services do not have an intrinsic value; their value is determined by scarcity and demand. If dish washers are not scarce, their wages are low and they should be low. The idea that labor or products have some intrinsic, absolute value independent of scarcity or demand is common in fascist and Marxist economics, and it simply doesn't work in practice.
The supply of labor is so high that it is a minimum wage job even though the value to the restaurant of having clean dishes is very high.
The restaurant only transforms various inputs into an output that customers buy; the price is determined by the cost of the inputs plus the value the restaurant adds. If one of the inputs (e.g., clean dishes) becomes more expensive, then the customer will just pay for it. The restaurant doesn't really care per se how much the dish washing costs, except that if they raise prices, they may sell less because customers find substitutes for their products. To forestall that, the restaurant can substitute too: if manual dish washing becomes to expensive, they buy a big commercial dishwasher or start using disposable dishes.
There is a massive literature on minimum wage effects which you're welcome to pick holes in. You can't just ignore it, though.
Yes, and that massive literature has found negative effects. There are also many papers that have failed to find negative effects, but for each of those, there are simple explanations for why they failed to find negative effects.
In fact, a basic problem with many studies is that they don't even look at the identity of the workers, only at categories. Employment may stay the same within a category of workers, but the workers that made $8/h are simply replaced by different, more skilled workers when the minimum wage rises to $15/h. In fact, that's the most rational and likely outcome.
You're basically saying that anything you don't agree with [what] can't be be studied, which is self-evidently bullshit.
No, I'm saying that if you advocate intervening in the economy in a big way by raising the minimum wage, you need to demonstrate conclusively that, at a minimum, doing so doesn't cause more harm than good (that's only necessary, not sufficient). Negative effects on employment are actually the least of those problems, they are simply the most poignant ones because they illustrate that the policy may actually hurt the people it purports to help. But even if you could dismiss those, there is a long list of other things you need to show.
As for stickiness, your argument seems to be that residual stickiness is worse than the harm inflicted by widespread low pay, which seems to be overdoing it somewhat.
I'm not making an argument there, I'm pointing out a basic inconsistency in the arguments about wage stickiness. The fundamental argument is that downward stickiness leads to unemployment, yet a minimum wage law is nothing other than downward stickiness. Furthermore, since unemployment is high right now, you can't even say that minimum wage is addressing temporary upward stickiness.
(Of course, given the high turnover rates in low wage jobs, it's doubtful that there is a lot of stickiness in either direction anyway. Wages not going up because there is a surplus of low skill workers for those jobs isn't "stickiness".)
but the evidence is simple: almost everywhere the minimum wages are imposed or increased, the predicted negative consequences invariably fail to materialise
Negative consequences of minimum wage can manifest in a huge number of ways, from decreased labor participation rates in narrow demographics to increased college enrollment and time to graduation. And governments that impose minimum wages screw up the economy and employment in lots of other ways too, drowning out the effect. Studies that fail to find effects therefore really don't show anything.
There are good arguments that wages, especially at the lower bound, are sticky and don't reflect a "true" market rate.
Sure, plenty of people believe that and argue that it's a source of unemployment and contributed to the Great Depression. Trouble is that a minimum wage increases exactly the kind of stickiness that they believe is harmful. Therefore, if you believe in wage stickiness, you should oppose, not support, minimum wage laws.
Cherry-picking quotations over the last 100 years of labor relations by black conservative Thomas Sowell in the New York Post is not "well documented".
I'm not "cherry picking quotations from Sowell", this is a clear statement he has made over and over again, and he has documented it very well. Read his publications to find a lot of support.
One of the main reasons for the black middle class is union wages.
Really? Unlike Sowell's well-documented charge of racism, I have seen no evidence for that at all. Why don't you provide some citations to academic sources? In fact, economically, since unions represent such a small percentage of the workforce, that statement is implausible.
If your business requires paying wages that are so low that your workers can't make a living and to survive are still welfare and foodstamps (that my tax dollars pay for) despite working full time then your business plan is broken.
Business plans don't "require" that. The alternative business plan is to invest more in automation and technology and then fire most of the low-skill workers since they aren't needed anymore. And if, for some reason, a business can't do that, they simply close and do something different.
hat's why the Walton family has more wealth blah blah blah
The Walton family has tons of wealth because their stores are convenient, cheap, and well stocked. And even if you guillotined the entire Walton family, as you seem itching to do, it wouldn't change the economics of the minimum wage one iota.
Work is fungible. Perhaps you had said worker hammering roofing nails manually and after the wage increase you decide to buy a nail gun to increase their productivity.
Quite true. And once a business invests in that productivity-increasing device, they lay off most of their minimum wage workers because they don't need them anymore.
In fact historically union shops have lead the way in increases in productivity for exactly this reason. This is well documented.
Historically, unions have lead the way on minimum wages because white unionized workers wanted to keep cheaper minority workers from competing with them. This is well documented.
Even assuming you're correct, there's still a big difference: in US, those coalitions are largely static
There are no "coalitions" in US politics, and representatives work together on a case-by-case basis.
and historical trends now show that each such "coalition" is more and more tightly knit and more separated from the other one
Given the influx of European-style progressivism and European-style Christian conservatism into US politics, yeah, it's gotten more polarized. That's not a problem with our political system, it's a problem with those ideologies.
In Europe, OTOH, coalitions are dynamic,
Yes, dynamic coalitions between a small number of ideologically rigidly fixed partners, usually constrained by rigid party discipline; coalitions that often result in utterly disproportionate amounts of power for minority viewpoints. That's great if you're a socialist, an environmentalist, or a fascist, but it's not so good for democracy as a whole.
So in fact, the European system is more flexible. Sure, it may be hard to organize a new party, but there's already plenty of parties covering many more distinct viewpoints
I actually grew up in Europe and lived there for a long time, and you're full of it. European parliaments are largely an ideological monoculture, with lots of political theater for the people, and little disagreement on substantial issues, like which big corporations or special interest groups to funnel money to. Occasionally, fringe parties rising to exceptional power because of weird coalition arrangements.
In light of European history, the idea that this is a good way of running a democracy is ludicrous.
If you consume $1000 in goods, you have just blown $1000. If you invest $1000 and get 5% of return per year on it, there is $1000 in assets somewhere, and those assets generate another $50/year in value to society. How do we know that's value to society? Because someone in society is willing to actually pay $50 for that extra value.
where it does nothing to stimulate the economy. Consumption, on the other hand, drives the economy.
What drives the economy is scarcity. Consumption is the alleviation of scarcity. A well functioning economy has a lot of consumption because it is good at alleviating scarcity. However, the opposite is not true: consumption for its own sake does nothing for the economy or people, it is simply wasteful of resources.
Citation for what? I asked you to explain what would ever motivate a business to hire a worker who doesn't at least produce as much value as he is paid.
This is particularly the case today when most money is seating idle in bank accounts and treasury bonds.
Money that is in bank accounts isn't "idle"; rather, it is invested in stock, which means that instead of paying for consumption, it pays for job-creating investments. And money in treasury securities doesn't "sit idly" either, it pays for much of the government programs you people want. If people stopped buying treasury securities, the US government would fall apart.
Lastly you need to read about money multipliers and it being possibly larger than 1 in some instances such as this.
I have read about multipliers, extensively: multipliers larger than 1 are a fiction.
You misunderstood him. He says "there's an optimum level of any given factor"; that means that below that optimum, you improve things by increasing the minimum wage, and above it, you make things worse.
So circulating money in the economy is worse than keeping it in the bank or tied up in illiquid assets?
What do you think money that is "kept in the bank" does? Do you think it sits in some vault somewhere? Of course not. It gets invested in businesses. And, yes, investing $1000 in a business is clearly better for the economy than consuming $1000 in goods.
As for "illiquid assets", money is never "tied up in illiquid assets" from the point of the economy. You yourself may be sitting on an "illiquid asset" and run into problems because of it, but someone else has the very liquid money you paid to buy that asset.
The correct answer is "basic income". But that would mean lower costs to business, but higher taxes, so we can't have that.
It wouldn't mean higher taxes at all if it replaced our current welfare system.
The reason "we can't have that" is because it would put a lot of bureaucrats and non-profits out of work and would deprive politicians of a major tool for vote buying and crony capitalism.
Lets look at this for a second.... Who are a businesses customers? Hint: It's the people who get paid a wage. These people get more money, more businesses get more customers. More customers mean more sales. More sales means more profits.
The part you're missing there is that the money you give to the employee needs to come from somewhere, and it usually comes from people who would have done something more useful with it than the employee spending it on consumption.
Of course, you're also missing an even more fundamental point, which is that you simply price a lot of labor out of the market with minimum wages.
Well, so you're saying that there is an upper limit beyond which a minimum wage becomes harmful. So there must be a mechanism that kicks in that imposes that limit. So, explain what it is.
(While you're at it, also explain why businesses would pay $15/h for a worker who doesn't increase revenue by significantly more than $15 for each hour he works.)
The US has something much better than multiple parties: we have a Congress instead of a parliament. In particular, our representatives aren't bound by party discipline.
Similarly, in Europe, I'd argue that it was easier to make the German Green Party or the Pirate Party an electoral success, at least enough to get its points heard in parliament and the press
And what does that accomplish? In the end, things need to boil down to one decision. Small parliamentary parties in Europe usually have either no influence, or they hold too much influence (when they cast the deciding votes in a coalition). The first means that they have even less power than in the US, the second has been a frequent cause of failures of governments in Europe. It is precisely because of this problem that countries like Germany set minimum requirements for parties to even enter parliament.
Think of the votes one of those big tent American parties would lose nationwide if they actually adopted a (for now) minority viewpoint.
European parties have enormous influence over how their representatives vote, which is why they have fairly little diversity internally. American parties don't work that way. Democrats have anything from socialist representatives to business-friendly economists and war hawks. Republicans have anything from fundamentalist Christians to libertarian free market guys. The national party platform and leadership are of little relevance.
at least enough to get its points heard in parliament and the press, than to turn the Democrats or Republicans into a Green Party or a Pirate Party
They shouldn't "turn into" these parties because these parties represent fringe views. What happens in the US is that representatives holding these views get elected to Congress, so there is a diversity of views represented. And unlike Europe, where "party discipline" is often enforced in voting, in the US, people frequently vote against their party and against their party's president.
Even assuming that the methodology itself is valid, NOMINATE scales people based on their choices relative to contemporaries; you can't meaningfully apply that to compare politicians across decades.
It boggles my mind, the extent to which U.S. culture only sees two different possibilities.
That's only your myopia. Unlike European multi-party systems, where each party represents a political group, in the US, the two parties each represent a dynamic coalition of a wide variety of political groups. The equivalent of a "US party" is a European coalition government, not a European party. And Europe is just as binary that way: there is the coalition that's in power, and there is its opposition.
I think the US system is a lot more flexible than the European system, since it's a lot harder to create and organize a new party in Europe than to shift the direction of one of the US parties. The latter can be done one politician at a time.
ABET does not consider "Financial Engineering" to be an engineering field
Of course it's not. It's also irrelevant to your investments. What I'm saying is that the basics of markets and economics should be pretty easy for an engineer to understand.
And whatever it is that HFET people do
Again, it's irrelevant to you our your investments.
It stinks, and I resent having not many other viable options for what to do with my 401k savings, but what else can we do with them?
You have tons of viable options for your 401k.
Sure an iPhone is worth more than the sum of its parts, but Apple is special
There is nothing special about that; any company that wants to stay in business needs to add value to its inputs.
That makes it sound overvalued to me.
Well, that's nice for you, but it simply means you're not a customer. What counts is that enough people are willing to pay for it; their reasons and whether you approve of them really don't matter.
On one hand, it seems to be a good idea to turn stock market investments into useful "stuff" just before it crashes. On the other hand, even useful stuff that no one can afford to buy from you because their savings and investments were wiped out by a stock market crash isn't going to help you make ends meet:-/
Stock market crashes simply average out in the long term. That's why you invest slowly and withdraw slowly. Trying to time the market is pointless for most people.
If you need money in the short term, gradually move some of your stocks into assets with guaranteed (if lower) returns.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no actual evidence of harm anywhere, or even of increased uptake of pollutants by humans.
I don't see the actual harm that microbeads are supposed to cause. If they are inert, they are effectively no different from sand. If they are not inert, they just harmlessly biodegrade into carbon dioxide and water.
Java is great on microbenchmarks, and it's a great demonstration that languages could provide high performance and still be safe at the same time. Unfortunately, writing larger systems that perform well in Java is quite hard: you can write fast inner loops, but if you try to use abstractions anywhere, usually things get really slow. Java's garbage collector is also quite good, but unfortunately, the standard libraries force interfaces on you that result in the generation of vast amounts of garbage, so that effect is negated as well.
Although superficially pretty similar, .NET actually fixes many of those problems. And with LLVM, more languages like that are appearing.
I can't think of anything that Java is "very good at". Most of its popularity derived from the anything-but-Microsoft attitude of the 1990s and Sun's lies about making it an open standard, not from any technical or performance features.
As a language, Java is at best mediocre. And Java failed biggest at what was one of its primary selling points: security. One of the reasons Java is now limited to the server is because they simply couldn't get the sandboxing working for applets, something Flash and JavaScript managed just fine.
I wouldn't expect it to "wipe storage", nor would I want it to. Flash storage has a limited number of write cycles, and people do factory resets much more frequently during the lifetime of a product than wiping the device in order to recycle it. If you want to erase storage, use the "erase storage" function.
I agree it's irrelevant, but it's the argument you are making.
No, I don't do it at all. "Value" is like "speed" in physics: relative to a reference frame (buyer). Furthermore, when people talk about "the value" in economics, it is "the average value", understanding that it actually represents an average over a wide spread, as opposed to a single value for all customers. It is perfectly reasonable to continue using the term "the value" as long as one remembers that there is always a reference frame involved and that it is an average representing what actually is a wide distribution.
What I was getting at with that sentence isn't about an absolute "value" of the product, but the fact that even as a relative quantity, you're looking at the wrong "value". A buyer assigns a value to the entire end product (restaurant dish). But that value to the buyer is composed of the required inputs (ingredients, etc.) plus a small difference that the restaurant actually adds and that the business owner gets paid for. What I'm pointing out to you is that dish washing is an input, and as such what businesses pay for it is a cost. If an input becomes more expensive, the restaurant has to raise prices because there is no other place for the money to come from. There is no gigantic magical pot of profits that can be used to pay these workers higher wages; if there were, everybody would be investing in fast food restaurants.
Demand is elastic, so if the vendor is forced to raise prices in order to pay for higher wages, fewer people will find the product to be worth buying. Those who still buy at the higher prices will be paying for the higher wages (profits will also decrease slightly, but that only pays for a small fraction of the increases). For the people who choose not to buy at the higher prices, a corresponding number of businesses will cease to operate.
You gave the example of (manual) dish washers, not me. I agree it's a stupid example, but since it's your example, I illustrated how substitution works with it. There are plenty of ways to substitute for loading dish washers too.
And one easy way of replacing low skill labor is to replace it with high skill labor doing the same job; I might hire a high school dropout to load dishes at $8/h, but at $15/h, I might as well require a high school diploma. The people intended to be helped by the law still weren't helped.
But even if the employees don't change, some businesses just become unprofitable at the higher wage rates and go out of business; that may even show up as a positive effect, as it is likely followed by an exodus of low skill residents, who now have trouble finding jobs or affording the higher prices. Or employers simply may tacitly agree to ignore the law altogether, find loopholes, or move into a neighboring community.
And because there is such a variety of consequences, all of which occur simultaneously, any attempts to quantify the negative effects of higher minimum wages fail: the effects are distributed across many different coping strategies.
Ah, so because water is necessary for survival, we should price it at $1000 / gallon, instead of at $0.02 / gallon? I don't think so. Goods and services do not have an intrinsic value; their value is determined by scarcity and demand. If dish washers are not scarce, their wages are low and they should be low. The idea that labor or products have some intrinsic, absolute value independent of scarcity or demand is common in fascist and Marxist economics, and it simply doesn't work in practice.
The restaurant only transforms various inputs into an output that customers buy; the price is determined by the cost of the inputs plus the value the restaurant adds. If one of the inputs (e.g., clean dishes) becomes more expensive, then the customer will just pay for it. The restaurant doesn't really care per se how much the dish washing costs, except that if they raise prices, they may sell less because customers find substitutes for their products. To forestall that, the restaurant can substitute too: if manual dish washing becomes to expensive, they buy a big commercial dishwasher or start using disposable dishes.
Yes, and that massive literature has found negative effects. There are also many papers that have failed to find negative effects, but for each of those, there are simple explanations for why they failed to find negative effects.
In fact, a basic problem with many studies is that they don't even look at the identity of the workers, only at categories. Employment may stay the same within a category of workers, but the workers that made $8/h are simply replaced by different, more skilled workers when the minimum wage rises to $15/h. In fact, that's the most rational and likely outcome.
No, I'm saying that if you advocate intervening in the economy in a big way by raising the minimum wage, you need to demonstrate conclusively that, at a minimum, doing so doesn't cause more harm than good (that's only necessary, not sufficient). Negative effects on employment are actually the least of those problems, they are simply the most poignant ones because they illustrate that the policy may actually hurt the people it purports to help. But even if you could dismiss those, there is a long list of other things you need to show.
I'm not making an argument there, I'm pointing out a basic inconsistency in the arguments about wage stickiness. The fundamental argument is that downward stickiness leads to unemployment, yet a minimum wage law is nothing other than downward stickiness. Furthermore, since unemployment is high right now, you can't even say that minimum wage is addressing temporary upward stickiness.
(Of course, given the high turnover rates in low wage jobs, it's doubtful that there is a lot of stickiness in either direction anyway. Wages not going up because there is a surplus of low skill workers for those jobs isn't "stickiness".)
Negative consequences of minimum wage can manifest in a huge number of ways, from decreased labor participation rates in narrow demographics to increased college enrollment and time to graduation. And governments that impose minimum wages screw up the economy and employment in lots of other ways too, drowning out the effect. Studies that fail to find effects therefore really don't show anything.
Sure, plenty of people believe that and argue that it's a source of unemployment and contributed to the Great Depression. Trouble is that a minimum wage increases exactly the kind of stickiness that they believe is harmful. Therefore, if you believe in wage stickiness, you should oppose, not support, minimum wage laws.
I'm not "cherry picking quotations from Sowell", this is a clear statement he has made over and over again, and he has documented it very well. Read his publications to find a lot of support.
Really? Unlike Sowell's well-documented charge of racism, I have seen no evidence for that at all. Why don't you provide some citations to academic sources? In fact, economically, since unions represent such a small percentage of the workforce, that statement is implausible.
Business plans don't "require" that. The alternative business plan is to invest more in automation and technology and then fire most of the low-skill workers since they aren't needed anymore. And if, for some reason, a business can't do that, they simply close and do something different.
The Walton family has tons of wealth because their stores are convenient, cheap, and well stocked. And even if you guillotined the entire Walton family, as you seem itching to do, it wouldn't change the economics of the minimum wage one iota.
Quite true. And once a business invests in that productivity-increasing device, they lay off most of their minimum wage workers because they don't need them anymore.
Historically, unions have lead the way on minimum wages because white unionized workers wanted to keep cheaper minority workers from competing with them. This is well documented.
http://nypost.com/2013/09/17/w...
There are no "coalitions" in US politics, and representatives work together on a case-by-case basis.
Given the influx of European-style progressivism and European-style Christian conservatism into US politics, yeah, it's gotten more polarized. That's not a problem with our political system, it's a problem with those ideologies.
Yes, dynamic coalitions between a small number of ideologically rigidly fixed partners, usually constrained by rigid party discipline; coalitions that often result in utterly disproportionate amounts of power for minority viewpoints. That's great if you're a socialist, an environmentalist, or a fascist, but it's not so good for democracy as a whole.
I actually grew up in Europe and lived there for a long time, and you're full of it. European parliaments are largely an ideological monoculture, with lots of political theater for the people, and little disagreement on substantial issues, like which big corporations or special interest groups to funnel money to. Occasionally, fringe parties rising to exceptional power because of weird coalition arrangements.
In light of European history, the idea that this is a good way of running a democracy is ludicrous.
If you consume $1000 in goods, you have just blown $1000. If you invest $1000 and get 5% of return per year on it, there is $1000 in assets somewhere, and those assets generate another $50/year in value to society. How do we know that's value to society? Because someone in society is willing to actually pay $50 for that extra value.
What drives the economy is scarcity. Consumption is the alleviation of scarcity. A well functioning economy has a lot of consumption because it is good at alleviating scarcity. However, the opposite is not true: consumption for its own sake does nothing for the economy or people, it is simply wasteful of resources.
Citation for what? I asked you to explain what would ever motivate a business to hire a worker who doesn't at least produce as much value as he is paid.
Money that is in bank accounts isn't "idle"; rather, it is invested in stock, which means that instead of paying for consumption, it pays for job-creating investments. And money in treasury securities doesn't "sit idly" either, it pays for much of the government programs you people want. If people stopped buying treasury securities, the US government would fall apart.
I have read about multipliers, extensively: multipliers larger than 1 are a fiction.
You misunderstood him. He says "there's an optimum level of any given factor"; that means that below that optimum, you improve things by increasing the minimum wage, and above it, you make things worse.
What do you think money that is "kept in the bank" does? Do you think it sits in some vault somewhere? Of course not. It gets invested in businesses. And, yes, investing $1000 in a business is clearly better for the economy than consuming $1000 in goods.
As for "illiquid assets", money is never "tied up in illiquid assets" from the point of the economy. You yourself may be sitting on an "illiquid asset" and run into problems because of it, but someone else has the very liquid money you paid to buy that asset.
It wouldn't mean higher taxes at all if it replaced our current welfare system.
The reason "we can't have that" is because it would put a lot of bureaucrats and non-profits out of work and would deprive politicians of a major tool for vote buying and crony capitalism.
The part you're missing there is that the money you give to the employee needs to come from somewhere, and it usually comes from people who would have done something more useful with it than the employee spending it on consumption.
Of course, you're also missing an even more fundamental point, which is that you simply price a lot of labor out of the market with minimum wages.
Well, so you're saying that there is an upper limit beyond which a minimum wage becomes harmful. So there must be a mechanism that kicks in that imposes that limit. So, explain what it is.
(While you're at it, also explain why businesses would pay $15/h for a worker who doesn't increase revenue by significantly more than $15 for each hour he works.)
The US has something much better than multiple parties: we have a Congress instead of a parliament. In particular, our representatives aren't bound by party discipline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
(Ah, Dave, the European flag waver, showing his political illiteracy again...)
And what does that accomplish? In the end, things need to boil down to one decision. Small parliamentary parties in Europe usually have either no influence, or they hold too much influence (when they cast the deciding votes in a coalition). The first means that they have even less power than in the US, the second has been a frequent cause of failures of governments in Europe. It is precisely because of this problem that countries like Germany set minimum requirements for parties to even enter parliament.
European parties have enormous influence over how their representatives vote, which is why they have fairly little diversity internally. American parties don't work that way. Democrats have anything from socialist representatives to business-friendly economists and war hawks. Republicans have anything from fundamentalist Christians to libertarian free market guys. The national party platform and leadership are of little relevance.
They shouldn't "turn into" these parties because these parties represent fringe views. What happens in the US is that representatives holding these views get elected to Congress, so there is a diversity of views represented. And unlike Europe, where "party discipline" is often enforced in voting, in the US, people frequently vote against their party and against their party's president.
Even assuming that the methodology itself is valid, NOMINATE scales people based on their choices relative to contemporaries; you can't meaningfully apply that to compare politicians across decades.
That's only your myopia. Unlike European multi-party systems, where each party represents a political group, in the US, the two parties each represent a dynamic coalition of a wide variety of political groups. The equivalent of a "US party" is a European coalition government, not a European party. And Europe is just as binary that way: there is the coalition that's in power, and there is its opposition.
I think the US system is a lot more flexible than the European system, since it's a lot harder to create and organize a new party in Europe than to shift the direction of one of the US parties. The latter can be done one politician at a time.
Of course it's not. It's also irrelevant to your investments. What I'm saying is that the basics of markets and economics should be pretty easy for an engineer to understand.
Again, it's irrelevant to you our your investments.
You have tons of viable options for your 401k.
There is nothing special about that; any company that wants to stay in business needs to add value to its inputs.
Well, that's nice for you, but it simply means you're not a customer. What counts is that enough people are willing to pay for it; their reasons and whether you approve of them really don't matter.
Stock market crashes simply average out in the long term. That's why you invest slowly and withdraw slowly. Trying to time the market is pointless for most people.
If you need money in the short term, gradually move some of your stocks into assets with guaranteed (if lower) returns.