I'm sorry, but you display profound ignorance and delusion on multiple levels. Most of your post is simply unworthy of a response. Instead, I'll respond to some of the more contradictory elements.
The US doesn't compete in the global labour market. The idea that it could is absurd. The US is an advanced economy that competes on the global product and service market. It's not trying to make a cheaper mousetrap, it's trying to make a better mousetrap.
Later you write:
Restore the bargaining power of labour.
Raise minimum wage. Reduce access to cheap labour through immigration. Apply tariffs to equalise costs of foreign-manufactured goods. Employ idle labour in useful work (eg: building/maintaining public infrastructure).
The US doesn't compete in the global labor market, yet you feel the need to reduce access to cheap labor through immigration, apply tariffs to equalize costs of foreign-manufactured goods, and employ idle labor in useful work. But the US doesn't compete in the global labor market and hence, doesn't have a reason for these measures which are all purely protectionist measures for a global labor market.
Credit doesn't consume in itself, it just makes it a bit easier.
Yes it does. That's where speculation and bubbles come from.
Point to the house that has credit as a buyer. Every act of consumption has physical parties involved not some vague economics concept. Whatever you will say to this will just boil down to credit made it easier for the physical party to consume, but credit didn't in itself do the consumption.
My view is that you got what you wanted.
Your view is wrong. I would have been - if I were alive - getting what I wanted for the first couple of decades after WW2. Since then the world has been run by supply-siders, only ever looking at one side of the equation, forever trying to reduce costs through lowering wages, and - giving the benefit of the doubt as I tend to do - simply not understanding that the world is demand-driven.
And here you are again, only ever looking at one side of the equation. The obvious rebuttal is that employers always have attempted to reduce costs through lowering wages. The reason they've failed to reach zero is because employers have to compete to get the labor they need to profit. The more employers looking for employees, the better the deal for workers. That's the supply-demand dynamic that you keep ignoring.
The obvious question here is what changed between the first two decades after the Second World War and the subsequent period leading up to modern times. The obvious answer is that the US didn't have significant labor competition from Europe or Japan prior to 1970. The moment they did, such as when the Japanese automakers made huge end roads into the US auto market after the oil crises of the 1970s, we started seeing pressure on US labor. That happened well before supply side policies were adopted.
The only person in this discussion who thinks "full employment" is somehow at odds with "everyone does useful stuff" is you. Indeed, the whole point of full employment as a policy is to try and ensure "everyone does useful stuff".
Do you ever think about this stuff? I would be just as fully employed digging a ditch with a spoon as I would be building state of the art computers or saving billions of lives with novel advances in medicine. Usefulness of the job is completely unrelated to whether you are employed or not.
I have no idea what maths you're using. But the correct way to look at it is that if worker and CEO wages had both increased at the same rate as productivity - like they did for the first few decades after WW2 - then the relative incomes of workers would not have collapsed and their living standards would have increased at the same rate.
How is it that I am only considering "certain demand" ? How is it that "employers are excluded" ?
[...]
I have no idea what point you're trying to make here. Employers will not produce any more than is demanded of them by consumers. Employers do not employ people out of the goodness of their hearts, as you seem to believe, they employ them to meet a need. If you want to increase employees, or employers - employment - you need to create more consumer demand. Reducing the cost of employees does not improve unemployment in the face of a lack of demand.
Your point is invalid because you used the "from an XXX perspective". This is the latest scourge of market/executive-speak that is sweeping American business.
You do realize that point of view is just as old as humanity. It isn't a recent fad to attempt to consider other peoples' viewpoints. And you should welcome any market/executive-speak that actually acknowledges that there are other viewpoints out there rather than foolishly treat usage of it as some deeply flawed litmus test for a imaginary validity.
Or every action has a consequence according to Universal Law. Everything is connected yes?
I'm also connected to asteroids in the Andromeda Galaxy. Maybe we should be firing off our corpses to there at nine tenths the speed of light because of that connection.
You're assuming (a) that the principles of the economy are immutable
You're assuming you have a way to change those principles.
(b) that the government needs to stay out of managing the economy even if it hurts hundreds of millions of people
I haven't seen evidence yet that developed world governments are doing positive things for their people via most of their labor and public benefits policies.
and (c) the people won't revolt at some time.
The same goes for any other policies with net negative effect. Revolts are a thing to worry about.
We have had prosperity with a lot less income inequality and higher taxes in the upper brackets, and the prosperity helped most people.
And we had a lot less labor competition from the developing world. Why are things supposed to stay the same in the face of massive change?
As far as the revolt goes, look at the popularity Sanders has picked up. If we elect him President, and vote in a sympathetic Congress, things are going to change, and a lot of people with lots of money will not like it.
A lot of people without money probably aren't going to like the results either, but that's not going to stop them from voting for Sanders. After all, they voted for Obama too and that worked out well.
I'm not saying his policies will be best for the country, but that no other Presidential candidate is as clearly on the side of the people as he is.
I've never been a fan of voting for someone just because they allegedly have good intentions. Those go wrong so easily.
Developed countries are more democratic. The biggest threat to the rulers in a democratic country is the Average Joe - labor. They're a huge voting bloc, and they could organize. But in a democratic country you can't just use guns to keep them down. You need to be more subtle. Like, say, hurt their wallet so even if they organize they can't buy a big enough microphone.
They don't have to be subtle or even have intent. There's plenty of harm you can do just by advocating policies that appear to favor workers like minimum wage, public pensions, inflating demand (and prices) for goods and services that people need, some of the more aggressive pro-labor union policies, hard to fire policies, etc, but which don't create jobs.
Ultimately, lowering demand for labor is what takes away labor's power. A lot of labor policies do just that.
No. Employers are demand too and there's not enough of them either. You only consider certain demand not all demand. The demand model of an economy is inherently flawed because it deliberately excludes employers, a huge category of demand.
How's that ?
By definition and ideological bias.
The product wasn't real estate. It was credit.
Credit doesn't consume in itself, it just makes it a bit easier. And it's worth noting that a lot of people were just find with that credit being used to build a lot of houses and other things. That physical activity generates a lot of economic activity while pure credit would not.
Yes. Because they're broke. They're broke because they've suffered decades of policies aimed at suppressing their incomes and are additionally suffering from the debt load taken on to maintain the increase in living standards they had grown to expect from the previous thirty years of progress.
I agree. I just think it is policies you favor which do that. It's supply and demand for labor. You cripple the demand and then the price of labor, namely, wages and other benefits goes down. Another effect is that if you force employers and employees to vastly overpay for low value benefits (like weak return pensions or greatly overpriced health care), then you shrink the actual benefit that workers get from working.
The number one economic fallacy is that we compare our world to some unattainable goal rather than the alternative choices we could have made. No choice of the past fifty years would allow the US to maintain its relative standard of living and compete on the global labor market at the wage differentials that existed in 1965.
That's because a vast amount of new demand for labor has been created throughout the world. And that gives the lie to the claim that "unimaginably wealthy" people are sucking up the wealth.
It's not a claim, and it's certainly not a lie. It's a fact. The evidence of upwards wealth transfer across the entire world over the last few decades is clear.
And whenever this falsehood rears its head, I point out this graph (see figure 1). It shows the wealthiest indeed increasing their wealth over the recent period 1988-2008. But it also shows two thirds of humanity getting substantial increases in their wealth as well. Just because your policies help the wealthy in your country more than they help you, doesn't mean that others in the world aren't becoming better off through no fault of you.
O.o You cannot be serious.
The US is the poster child for this in the developed world, with most worker's wages there having gone nowhere in real terms for the better part of forty years, the labour share of GDP dropping and the capital share of GDP going through the roof. However, it is a trend that is common across the entire developed world to varying degrees (since they're all basically marching to the same drum).
Name another good or service, for which people pay money, which you can increase the supply by a factor of five to ten without having the price fall through the floor and stay there. Despite your vigorous and reality-free assertion, wages didn't collapse in the US or the rest of the developed world (except for some particularly dysfunctional countries like Greece). That implies that there was a huge amount of demand creation.
I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but in the '50s a typical CEO earned something like 25x the typical worker's wages. Now it is more like 300x. In what world does that not represent a dramatic collapse in those workers' wages !?
Of course not. Just because someone else is paid more doesn't imply even in the least that you are paid less.
They are saying the power is reserved to the States OR THE PEOPLE- meaning that powers not specifically granted the Federal government then go to the States, and if not addressed by the States, the power is not government at all but left freely to people so they can decide what they want to do.
You do realize that is not a convention in the English language? Just because I list a number of parties, doesn't imply that there is an ordering on that list.
Er, yes ? That's kind of the point I've been making over and over again ? The economy is driven by demand and we don't have enough of it because the middle- and lower-classes are being systemically and deliberately impoverished. No demand, no need for production. No need for production, no jobs. No jobs, no money, no demand. Return to step 1 and continue to circle the drain.
No. Employers are demand too and there's not enough of them either. You only consider certain demand not all demand. The demand model of an economy is inherently flawed because it deliberately excludes employers, a huge category of demand. And the subsequent impairment of society, which you term "circle the drain" is a consequence.
Here's how I see it. In the US, a few years back our overheated real estate market created a massive recession for the entire world. Here was an attempt to create massive consumer demand for US real estate and it failed badly. My view is that we have considerable evidence that consumers just can't consume much more than they are right now. Focusing on consumer demand is a terrible strategy because it does nothing to improve the earning power of those consumers. There's only so much a consumer can consume, even when borrowing everything they can borrow.
Similarly, attempts to increase the standard of living of workers while making their labor less valuable to employers are an ongoing disaster. The contradiction inherently insures it will not work.
The reality is that the west is in an economic malaise because it has chosen to systemically and deliberately undermine its middle- and lower-classes for no reason other than to facilitate a handful of already unimaginably wealthy people sucking up even more wealth. Until wealth and disposable income are returned to them, nothing will improve. Because it literally, cannot.
Then stop enabling that. Your policies are the cause here. Rich people can get wealthier anywhere in the world. Middle and lower-class people can only get wealthier where they live. And the primary means by which those people get wealthier is by labor.
Employment is trade. You have to have something to offer in order to get wages in exchange. The employer is the important part of the economy, not a consumer. The demand of employers is so much more open ended than the demand of people who are capped by their limited earning power.
For example, back in 1950, the effective global economy consisted of North America (excluding Mexico), western Europe, and a little bit of other parts of the world. There was maybe half a billion or so people. Now, that number is something like three to five billion people that are reasonable well connected to the global economy.
There has been a huge increase in labor available to business. Yet we haven't seen a dramatic collapse in developed world wages. That's because a vast amount of new demand for labor has been created throughout the world. And that gives the lie to the claim that "unimaginably wealthy" people are sucking up the wealth. There's a vast amount of improvement in peoples' lives globally. It's just not happening as fast as you would like in the developed world.
So when you propose, once again, screwing over employers because rich people, you are harming the most important part of your economy. Wealth and disposable income "can be returned" to workers. Wealth and disposable income can't be returned to the unemployable unemployed.
Yes they do: buy precious metals. Or spend overseas or on real-estate instead of things that actually turn the economic gears. quote>
And the money always comes back because the above process makes things that turn gears more attractive and with higher return than it would otherwise have. It also provides a reward for those who correctly anticipate recessions and expansions.
Some speculate our current slow recovery is caused by making real-estate too lucrative compared to real investments in industries.
Maybe so. I think though that we need to keep in mind the combination of uncertainty from inconsistent economic policy (a key problem with Keynesian spending is that it stops. No one can plan on it for long term.) and manipulation of future interest rates which hides the actual risks of making long term choices (quantitative easing in particular).
Keynesian economics would work great if we as a country save more during the good times. But politicians haven't shown the discipline: they are not judged on the future, but the here-and-now in elections.
This is how "austerity" happens. Enough of this uncontrolled spending and creditors will step in and decide economic policy in their favor. Obviously, I'm even less in favor of this path than I am of proper Keynesian strategy (which at least limits the damage to a more controllable degree).
If there was any sort of "we're all in this together" feeling, it would help, but there isn't.
There isn't such a feeling because we aren't all in this together.
Why does US labor have to take a haircut while the 1% get lots more money?
Because you're competing with several billion people who will work for a lot less while the capital of those rich people does not. There's no reason to expect this to be fair. But at the same time, it's not unfair to expect you to adapt to the situation rather than make it worse.
For example, let's say you're the only plumber in a town. You are a paragon of virtue and don't abuse your effective monopoly position and offer prices comparable to neighboring towns which do have more than one plumber.
Then one day, five new plumbers move in and immediately start offering lower and lower prices. It's not fair to you. Nobody else in town has this sort of competition going on. You are losing wealth relative to everyone else who isn't a plumber through no fault of your own. Income inequality increases as a result with six poor plumbers.
At this point, you have a number of choices, all of them bad to some degree. For example, you can attempt to tough it out to be one of the last ones standing, knowing that you'll still have a greatly reduced market share and profit as a result. You can move to a new town and be a plumber there. Or you can abandon plumbing as a career altogether. Maybe you'll try to take a chance and create a new plumbing service that the other plumbers can't match (maybe it'll pay off, maybe it won't)..
There are all ways you could attempt to better your situation. But you could also choose to make the situation worse such as developing a drinking habit.
I believe this is going on at a vast scale in the developed world. There's all this entitled talk about how the rich people owe us a good salary and such. Well, they owe the Indians and the Chinese good salaries too. And good salaries there are much less than good salaries in the developed world.
Bottom line is that developed world labor has to be able to offer something that developing world labor can't offer (and it can be as simple as access to a nice market, though the developing world has nice markets too) or it won't get the work for the pay that is desired. Developed world labor just doesn't have pricing power and won't get it until there is near parity with the developing world (which is improving at a good rate) or until some remarkable advantage is created (I'm not seeing the remarkable advantages in the long run).
You want what rich people have, but you don't have leverage to get it. You're not going to make your situation any better by making it harder for rich people to give you what you want.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Here, you forgot a very important party, the people. I think walking to school is exercise of a people power not a state-granted privilege. Personally, I don't think the federal government has a place in education, K-12 or higher education, except as a sponsor and propagator of educational standards (which I think is a legitimate role of the Commerce Clause). But they do have a role as a protector of the people which I think this law imperfectly attempts.
In the US, real wages have been flat, as has social mobility. US social mobility is well below the mobility in some European countries. It's all well and good that developing countries are getting better standards of living, but the fact that all US productivity gains have gone to the wealthy is still a problem, and the US is seeing a smaller and less secure middle class.
So what? I don't see this as having an easy or low pain solution. US labor has to take a haircut (which it is a significant part of the way through BTW) because the world isn't perfect. That's the way it is.
And another after that and another after that. There's a reason I'm not concerned about it. The more nuclear accidents there are, the less fear there will be.
It's just like plane crashes. They happen, but they aren't treated with the same drama they used to be. Further, with each plane accident, we've come to understand the risks of flying and how to minimize those risks to the point that flying is one of the safer modes of transportation by passenger-mile.
The thing you don't get is that employment is a trade. Both sides have to bring something to the table. You aren't entitled to a job. Let's give an example. You wrote elsewhere:
Yes, yes, but then what ? Did they just sit in their warehouse full of goods cackling ?
Of course not. They sold it, at which point they were given money (or if you want to go back four-odd thousand years before money existed, other goods) in exchange, which they then used to fund more production.
Without the consumption - the demand - the whole thing falls apart, because without consumption, production is just a waste of time (and resources).
Well, guess what? Jobs are just like warehouses of goods. If the demand for those jobs isn't there, the jobs aren't there. I find it telling how the parties talking about how economies are about the consumers conveniently forget that employers are consumers of labor. This is a transparent ideological excuse to screw over someone you don't like. Well, my take is different: eat your own dogfood or STFU.
Let's look at some other errors in your current post:
Here's what's missing: leisure time and spending, risk taking, insurance, research and development, and business expansion.
Here's what's missing. Any evidence - heck, even some vaguely coherent reasoning - for that claim.
Where do you think money for those things comes from? Trees? It comes from profits. When you have razor thin profit margins, that's the sort of things which gets lost.
But I'm sure that government will continue to take and squander much more than that razor thin profit margin as is their due.
You are blindly arguing ideology.
Walmart had a profit margin of a bit over 3% of revenue in the recent past. California has a sales tax of 7.5% which would apply to almost all Walmart revenue in that state. That's more than double the profits of Walmart right there. And California is notorious for squandering the money it gets. If you look at the map at the bottom of this article you see a lot of states with combined state and local sales tax over 6% (including all ten of the most populous states in the US). And many of those states have a similar reputation for screwing the pooch whenever they get their hands on money.
Well, nothing really. It's just part of the ongoing half century of economic shift to the developing world and growing wage parity between developed and developing worlds.
Which is policy choice. It's unclear why you think the American people should be supporting it. Their Government's responsibility is to them, not the rest of the world.
I think this is like saying its unclear whether the American people should be supporting gravity. The American people don't have a choice. They can't choose for those billions of people to vanish. They can't choose for those billions of people to magically have the same wealth and standard of living as US citizens currently enjoy. This disparity of wealth and cost of labor exists whether you support it or not. It's not policy choice, it's reality.
I notice in a few places you have this delusion that's it just a matter of positive thinking. After all, the very first whine is about how I'm holding us back with my mental failwaves. And it goes all the way to the end with another piteous whine that US citizens can choose via policy to unmake those billions of people who are willing to work for less.
It's time for you to pull your head out of your ass. If your ideas can fail merely because I disagree, then they weren't worth having in the first place. If your ideas can fail merely because reality isn't as you would like, well that's another reason that they aren't worth having.
The Father of Capitalism, Adam Smith, pointed out that the interests of the capitalists are never the same and often opposite of the rest of society. He also pointed out that the capitalists will use every means at their disposal to convince everyone else that their interests are the same as everyone else. And, finally, he pointed out that profits are lowest in rich countries, higher in poor countries, and highest of all in countries racing toward ruin.
So what? Everyone else does that too. Conflict of interest is not a capitalism thing. It is a sentient being thing. It's ridiculous when a basic nature thing gets recast as an imaginary flaw peculiar to capitalism. One might as a result get the impression that you don't have a clue what you are speaking of.
The problem is that the capitalist model is based on the fact that it is most advantageous to invest first in the country in which you live because the rate of return is higher that foreign trade or the carrying trade. However, this model is broken today as money travels instantaneously and modern transportation is very fast compared to the times when it took a long time to transport items and gold and silver had to be transported by sailing ship to pay for things.
Capitalism is not based on that assumption. It is based on private ownership of capital with the trade infrastructure and legal protections that implies.
The real problem the rich today don't realize is that income inequality is the basis of most revolutions and eventually they will lose everything. Che once noted that the reason Americans weren't ripe for revolution was that the rich shared enough of the wealth with the other classes that they were satisfied. However, that is no longer the case as they take more and more of the wealth.
The rich don't "realize" something that isn't true? What a shocker. Every society has income inequality because everyone is not equally competent and skilled, doing the exact same job, and having the exact same luck.
And a Che quote? At least under the Batista regime, they didn't have a massive fraction of their citizens trying to flee the island. It's also worth noting that Che became the new elite once the Communists took over. The Communists might have destroyed the notions of income and wealth in Cuba, but they didn't destroy inequality.
Finally, I can't help but notice that you speak of income inequality not poverty. I think that's telling because poverty is a real problem, income inequality is not. Further, this talk ignores that globally, income and wealth inequality have improved over the past few decades, due in considerable part to widespread adoption of capitalism, such as in China. That's a bit contrary to the narrative, don't you think?
And, if anyone recalls any history at all, how did we manage our way out of the Depression? (Hint: It wasn't by sticking our remaining money in a locked vault.)
The US didn't manage its way out of the Depression, it muddled its way out. My view is Keynesian spending during recessions is like beating drums during solar eclipses to scare away the giant space snake that's eating the Sun. Since the recession ended, the Keynesian spending is claimed to have always worked. The problem is that the recession would have ended anyway. People don't keep their money in a vault forever.
Hell, let's give infrastructure a boost back up to 3% of the federal budget, from the 2.5% where it's currently at, but not at the expense of shutting NASA down. Pushing NASA back up from 0.5% to 1% of the budget, and education up from 6% to 8%, and energy and environmental up from 3% to 4%, while reducing military spending from 54% to 50% would seem to be a good way to make this country stronger, long term.
What of that spending is going to help the US long term? They could already fix pot holes on 2.5%, it just gets more votes to spend it on creating new infrastructure rather than fixing existing infrastructure. NASA could do vastly more on what it currently spends than it is. Doubling that spending would be throwing good money after bad. Education and environmental spending make things worse. Educational spending is in large part responsible for education being as expensive as it is. And environmental spending chased off a lot of US industry over the past 40 years. Spending more on it will chase off even more.
Finally, military spending is a huge low lying fruit for getting the US into a healthy fiscal position. I'd look at cutting it to 20-25%, maybe less. I notice also you ignore Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, focusing only on discretionary spending. Those programs do absolutely nothing for the US economy even from a Keynesian point of view and are terrible for the purposes they are meant for. And since they're also of the same size roughly as military spending, we can get a lot of benefit out of greatly curbing or eliminating these programs.
OK. So once we follow your idea and successfully drive wages - ie: costs - down to slightly-more-than zero, who is going to buy the stuff business produces ?
Why would that happen? Is regulation the magic sauce for making sure you don't starve because you forget to ask for a paycheck? This sentiment reminds me of The Incoherence of the Philosophers, a work which among other things proposes that reality itself goes on as it does only because Allah wills it so. So do we have an economy and people getting paid for their work only because the regulators will it so? I'm not feeling it.
You need to consider that there's a revenues side of the ledger as well as an expenses one.
Somewhat lower wages is still better than no wages when it comes to generating revenue, wouldn't you think?
The thing that is missed here is that reducing profits also reduces living standards.
No it doesn't. An economy running on a razor-thin profit but still producing excess of everything it needed would have high living standards.
Here's what's missing: leisure time and spending, risk taking, insurance, research and development, and business expansion. But I'm sure that government will continue to take and squander much more than that razor thin profit margin as is their due.
Er, no. Living standards are declining because all the regulations that protected normal people's incomes have been systemically destroyed. That's why real incomes for almost everyone in the US have gone nowhere for thirty-odd years.
It's a nice story except that it isn't true. The labor regulations haven't changed much; benefits and unemployment regulations haven't changed much; minimum wage is still around; and health care has actually been expanded. What has changed? Well, nothing really. It's just part of the ongoing half century of economic shift to the developing world and growing wage parity between developed and developing worlds.
Everyone knows what works. Post-WW2 USA (until the neoliberals took over in the '70s, brought in the morally bankrupt NAIRU, deregulated everything, started selling off public assets and disassembling the public services - again, a common problem throughout the western world, though some countries had their Reagans and Thatchers much later - here in Australia, for example, we didn't go full retard until the mid-90s) was the quickest and most widespread increase in wealth and living standards in human history. It was a time of increasing real wages, a large and financially secure middle class, relatively high social mobility, large-scale public investment and full employment as a policy goal rather than a bete noir.
In other words, those darn Reagans and Thatchers didn't ban the billions of people who are eating your lunch, labor competition-wise.
And the great incongruity of your post is that the actual quickest and most widespread increase in wealth and living standards in human history happened after the period of time you mention. It is happening now, not in the 1950s. Now is the time of increasing real wages, creation of a global large and financially secure middle, relatively high social mobility, etc. What happened in the developed world then is now happening everywhere. But I guess all those people are kind of hard to see from whatever podunk country you're from.
Businesses are not "impaired" from employing US workers. They *choose* not to so as to achieve greater profits.
You ought to think about what you just said. Reducing profits is the chief form of impairment that a business can experience. And if you reduce profits to the red, then you've destroyed the case for the business.
(Note that this is common issue across the western world as most barriers in place to protect living standards have been torn down in the name of greater profits.)
I'm not saying that all such barriers should be torn down, but severely reducing profits is a very good reason to consider tearing these barriers down.
The thing that is missed here is that reducing profits also reduces living standards. And we can see that living standards are declining despite all the regulation to the contrary. I think it's time to look at what's working and what isn't. My view is that a lot of that regulation is actually very counterproductive, making the situation worse.
While I think that the current alleged consensus on catastrophic global warming and other climate change is grossly exaggerated,
What do you mean?
For example, the media routinely exaggerates any research that even hints at climate change being involved. The IPCC which alleges to be a neutral party routinely exaggerates the extent, impact, and certainty of global warming as can be seen in the variation between the summaries for policy makers versus the actual research described in their multiyear assessment reports.
I don't see fossil fuels being used as they currently are forever.
How will they be used?
Like most resources, as they become more scarce and more costly to extract, fossil fuels will be continue to be used for higher value purposes. For example, pesticides, plastics, and fertilizer (nitrogen fixing).
There will come a time when we'll switch to other things.
Like what?
I already mentioned some in my previous post:
Sure, biofuels, nuclear power, renewable electric power, that sort of thing.
They were talking about reactors sucking up river sediment because the rivers are so low. Are you saying you would reduce the generating capacity to match the amount of water available?
They're talking about a need for redesigning water intakes to handle lower river levels. I've also heard that they're having problems with thermal pollution of the rivers in question. That indicates to me that plant should have one or more lakes that it draws water from and dumps heat to rather than drawing from the river directly.
It's not a problem of water availability as I see it, but rather a problem of poor ability to draw water at low river levels combined with dumping heat directly to the river.
Since the plants currently aren't engineered to handle these conditions (and may be unable to improve due to land restrictions), then yes, they should operate at reduced capacity when low river levels occur until the problem is fixed.
Which is, to me, an argument that such information has to be made available for certain employers.
They would have to demonstrate that the mental illness in question were relevant. For example, for a job I work, I'm required to be able to lift 50 pounds (20-25 kg). There's no requirement that I not have particular back injuries. If I can do the task with the injury, then I'm good. (Incidentally, if I become unable to meet that particular requirement, they have the option to move me to another job where I don't have to lift 50 pounds or to restructure my current job).
A blanket proscription against mental illness (of the sort implied by the GP) is no different than a blanket proscription against injury. It's an overly broad category that includes a variety of problems which wouldn't be relevant for the job aspect in question.
"Co-Pilot in Germanwings Crash Hid Mental Illness From Employer"
Here, it does appear quite relevant since the mental illness of the copilot (who was at the controls when the plane crashed) in question was apparently quite debilitating. He collected several doctor's notes stating he was too sick to work, including one for the day he actually flew.
Also the language of the employer (as it appears in the linked story above) is more focused.
Lufthansa company policy requires notification of conditions that could affect flying or a pilotâ(TM)s license.
This policy doesn't require notification of mental illness that wouldn't affect flying.
Slashdot Mirror
The US doesn't compete in the global labour market. The idea that it could is absurd. The US is an advanced economy that competes on the global product and service market. It's not trying to make a cheaper mousetrap, it's trying to make a better mousetrap.
Later you write:
Restore the bargaining power of labour. Raise minimum wage. Reduce access to cheap labour through immigration. Apply tariffs to equalise costs of foreign-manufactured goods. Employ idle labour in useful work (eg: building/maintaining public infrastructure).
The US doesn't compete in the global labor market, yet you feel the need to reduce access to cheap labor through immigration, apply tariffs to equalize costs of foreign-manufactured goods, and employ idle labor in useful work. But the US doesn't compete in the global labor market and hence, doesn't have a reason for these measures which are all purely protectionist measures for a global labor market.
Credit doesn't consume in itself, it just makes it a bit easier.
Yes it does. That's where speculation and bubbles come from.
Point to the house that has credit as a buyer. Every act of consumption has physical parties involved not some vague economics concept. Whatever you will say to this will just boil down to credit made it easier for the physical party to consume, but credit didn't in itself do the consumption.
My view is that you got what you wanted.
Your view is wrong. I would have been - if I were alive - getting what I wanted for the first couple of decades after WW2. Since then the world has been run by supply-siders, only ever looking at one side of the equation, forever trying to reduce costs through lowering wages, and - giving the benefit of the doubt as I tend to do - simply not understanding that the world is demand-driven.
And here you are again, only ever looking at one side of the equation. The obvious rebuttal is that employers always have attempted to reduce costs through lowering wages. The reason they've failed to reach zero is because employers have to compete to get the labor they need to profit. The more employers looking for employees, the better the deal for workers. That's the supply-demand dynamic that you keep ignoring.
The obvious question here is what changed between the first two decades after the Second World War and the subsequent period leading up to modern times. The obvious answer is that the US didn't have significant labor competition from Europe or Japan prior to 1970. The moment they did, such as when the Japanese automakers made huge end roads into the US auto market after the oil crises of the 1970s, we started seeing pressure on US labor. That happened well before supply side policies were adopted.
The only person in this discussion who thinks "full employment" is somehow at odds with "everyone does useful stuff" is you. Indeed, the whole point of full employment as a policy is to try and ensure "everyone does useful stuff".
Do you ever think about this stuff? I would be just as fully employed digging a ditch with a spoon as I would be building state of the art computers or saving billions of lives with novel advances in medicine. Usefulness of the job is completely unrelated to whether you are employed or not.
I have no idea what maths you're using. But the correct way to look at it is that if worker and CEO wages had both increased at the same rate as productivity - like they did for the first few decades after WW2 - then the relative incomes of workers would not have collapsed and their living standards would have increased at the same rate.
This is dis
How is it that I am only considering "certain demand" ? How is it that "employers are excluded" ?
[...]
I have no idea what point you're trying to make here. Employers will not produce any more than is demanded of them by consumers. Employers do not employ people out of the goodness of their hearts, as you seem to believe, they employ them to meet a need. If you want to increase employees, or employers - employment - you need to create more consumer demand. Reducing the cost of employees does not improve unemployment in the face of a lack of demand.
There's the answer to your question.
Your point is invalid because you used the "from an XXX perspective". This is the latest scourge of market/executive-speak that is sweeping American business.
You do realize that point of view is just as old as humanity. It isn't a recent fad to attempt to consider other peoples' viewpoints. And you should welcome any market/executive-speak that actually acknowledges that there are other viewpoints out there rather than foolishly treat usage of it as some deeply flawed litmus test for a imaginary validity.
Or every action has a consequence according to Universal Law. Everything is connected yes?
I'm also connected to asteroids in the Andromeda Galaxy. Maybe we should be firing off our corpses to there at nine tenths the speed of light because of that connection.
You're assuming (a) that the principles of the economy are immutable
You're assuming you have a way to change those principles.
(b) that the government needs to stay out of managing the economy even if it hurts hundreds of millions of people
I haven't seen evidence yet that developed world governments are doing positive things for their people via most of their labor and public benefits policies.
and (c) the people won't revolt at some time.
The same goes for any other policies with net negative effect. Revolts are a thing to worry about.
We have had prosperity with a lot less income inequality and higher taxes in the upper brackets, and the prosperity helped most people.
And we had a lot less labor competition from the developing world. Why are things supposed to stay the same in the face of massive change?
As far as the revolt goes, look at the popularity Sanders has picked up. If we elect him President, and vote in a sympathetic Congress, things are going to change, and a lot of people with lots of money will not like it.
A lot of people without money probably aren't going to like the results either, but that's not going to stop them from voting for Sanders. After all, they voted for Obama too and that worked out well.
I'm not saying his policies will be best for the country, but that no other Presidential candidate is as clearly on the side of the people as he is.
I've never been a fan of voting for someone just because they allegedly have good intentions. Those go wrong so easily.
Developed countries are more democratic. The biggest threat to the rulers in a democratic country is the Average Joe - labor. They're a huge voting bloc, and they could organize. But in a democratic country you can't just use guns to keep them down. You need to be more subtle. Like, say, hurt their wallet so even if they organize they can't buy a big enough microphone.
They don't have to be subtle or even have intent. There's plenty of harm you can do just by advocating policies that appear to favor workers like minimum wage, public pensions, inflating demand (and prices) for goods and services that people need, some of the more aggressive pro-labor union policies, hard to fire policies, etc, but which don't create jobs.
Ultimately, lowering demand for labor is what takes away labor's power. A lot of labor policies do just that.
No. Employers are demand too and there's not enough of them either. You only consider certain demand not all demand. The demand model of an economy is inherently flawed because it deliberately excludes employers, a huge category of demand.
How's that ?
By definition and ideological bias.
The product wasn't real estate. It was credit.
Credit doesn't consume in itself, it just makes it a bit easier. And it's worth noting that a lot of people were just find with that credit being used to build a lot of houses and other things. That physical activity generates a lot of economic activity while pure credit would not.
Yes. Because they're broke. They're broke because they've suffered decades of policies aimed at suppressing their incomes and are additionally suffering from the debt load taken on to maintain the increase in living standards they had grown to expect from the previous thirty years of progress.
I agree. I just think it is policies you favor which do that. It's supply and demand for labor. You cripple the demand and then the price of labor, namely, wages and other benefits goes down. Another effect is that if you force employers and employees to vastly overpay for low value benefits (like weak return pensions or greatly overpriced health care), then you shrink the actual benefit that workers get from working.
The number one economic fallacy is that we compare our world to some unattainable goal rather than the alternative choices we could have made. No choice of the past fifty years would allow the US to maintain its relative standard of living and compete on the global labor market at the wage differentials that existed in 1965.
That's because a vast amount of new demand for labor has been created throughout the world. And that gives the lie to the claim that "unimaginably wealthy" people are sucking up the wealth.
It's not a claim, and it's certainly not a lie. It's a fact. The evidence of upwards wealth transfer across the entire world over the last few decades is clear.
And whenever this falsehood rears its head, I point out this graph (see figure 1). It shows the wealthiest indeed increasing their wealth over the recent period 1988-2008. But it also shows two thirds of humanity getting substantial increases in their wealth as well. Just because your policies help the wealthy in your country more than they help you, doesn't mean that others in the world aren't becoming better off through no fault of you.
O.o You cannot be serious.
The US is the poster child for this in the developed world, with most worker's wages there having gone nowhere in real terms for the better part of forty years, the labour share of GDP dropping and the capital share of GDP going through the roof. However, it is a trend that is common across the entire developed world to varying degrees (since they're all basically marching to the same drum).
Name another good or service, for which people pay money, which you can increase the supply by a factor of five to ten without having the price fall through the floor and stay there. Despite your vigorous and reality-free assertion, wages didn't collapse in the US or the rest of the developed world (except for some particularly dysfunctional countries like Greece). That implies that there was a huge amount of demand creation.
I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but in the '50s a typical CEO earned something like 25x the typical worker's wages. Now it is more like 300x. In what world does that not represent a dramatic collapse in those workers' wages !?
Of course not. Just because someone else is paid more doesn't imply even in the least that you are paid less.
Another way to look at the colossal
They are saying the power is reserved to the States OR THE PEOPLE- meaning that powers not specifically granted the Federal government then go to the States, and if not addressed by the States, the power is not government at all but left freely to people so they can decide what they want to do.
You do realize that is not a convention in the English language? Just because I list a number of parties, doesn't imply that there is an ordering on that list.
Er, yes ? That's kind of the point I've been making over and over again ? The economy is driven by demand and we don't have enough of it because the middle- and lower-classes are being systemically and deliberately impoverished. No demand, no need for production. No need for production, no jobs. No jobs, no money, no demand. Return to step 1 and continue to circle the drain.
No. Employers are demand too and there's not enough of them either. You only consider certain demand not all demand. The demand model of an economy is inherently flawed because it deliberately excludes employers, a huge category of demand. And the subsequent impairment of society, which you term "circle the drain" is a consequence.
Here's how I see it. In the US, a few years back our overheated real estate market created a massive recession for the entire world. Here was an attempt to create massive consumer demand for US real estate and it failed badly. My view is that we have considerable evidence that consumers just can't consume much more than they are right now. Focusing on consumer demand is a terrible strategy because it does nothing to improve the earning power of those consumers. There's only so much a consumer can consume, even when borrowing everything they can borrow.
Similarly, attempts to increase the standard of living of workers while making their labor less valuable to employers are an ongoing disaster. The contradiction inherently insures it will not work.
The reality is that the west is in an economic malaise because it has chosen to systemically and deliberately undermine its middle- and lower-classes for no reason other than to facilitate a handful of already unimaginably wealthy people sucking up even more wealth. Until wealth and disposable income are returned to them, nothing will improve. Because it literally, cannot.
Then stop enabling that. Your policies are the cause here. Rich people can get wealthier anywhere in the world. Middle and lower-class people can only get wealthier where they live. And the primary means by which those people get wealthier is by labor.
Employment is trade. You have to have something to offer in order to get wages in exchange. The employer is the important part of the economy, not a consumer. The demand of employers is so much more open ended than the demand of people who are capped by their limited earning power.
For example, back in 1950, the effective global economy consisted of North America (excluding Mexico), western Europe, and a little bit of other parts of the world. There was maybe half a billion or so people. Now, that number is something like three to five billion people that are reasonable well connected to the global economy.
There has been a huge increase in labor available to business. Yet we haven't seen a dramatic collapse in developed world wages. That's because a vast amount of new demand for labor has been created throughout the world. And that gives the lie to the claim that "unimaginably wealthy" people are sucking up the wealth. There's a vast amount of improvement in peoples' lives globally. It's just not happening as fast as you would like in the developed world.
So when you propose, once again, screwing over employers because rich people, you are harming the most important part of your economy. Wealth and disposable income "can be returned" to workers. Wealth and disposable income can't be returned to the unemployable unemployed.
Yet, he (she?) chose the third option: to be a dick.
What makes you say that? He didn't force the police to arrest the mother. He didn't force bureaucrats to swarm over the situation.
And maybe, just maybe, read online about the shit that's happening about him. It's called being an informed, responsible citizen, for crying out loud.
Because we should all be fully informed about every issue you care about.
Yes they do: buy precious metals. Or spend overseas or on real-estate instead of things that actually turn the economic gears. quote> And the money always comes back because the above process makes things that turn gears more attractive and with higher return than it would otherwise have. It also provides a reward for those who correctly anticipate recessions and expansions.
Some speculate our current slow recovery is caused by making real-estate too lucrative compared to real investments in industries.
Maybe so. I think though that we need to keep in mind the combination of uncertainty from inconsistent economic policy (a key problem with Keynesian spending is that it stops. No one can plan on it for long term.) and manipulation of future interest rates which hides the actual risks of making long term choices (quantitative easing in particular).
Keynesian economics would work great if we as a country save more during the good times. But politicians haven't shown the discipline: they are not judged on the future, but the here-and-now in elections.
This is how "austerity" happens. Enough of this uncontrolled spending and creditors will step in and decide economic policy in their favor. Obviously, I'm even less in favor of this path than I am of proper Keynesian strategy (which at least limits the damage to a more controllable degree).
If there was any sort of "we're all in this together" feeling, it would help, but there isn't.
There isn't such a feeling because we aren't all in this together.
Why does US labor have to take a haircut while the 1% get lots more money?
Because you're competing with several billion people who will work for a lot less while the capital of those rich people does not. There's no reason to expect this to be fair. But at the same time, it's not unfair to expect you to adapt to the situation rather than make it worse.
For example, let's say you're the only plumber in a town. You are a paragon of virtue and don't abuse your effective monopoly position and offer prices comparable to neighboring towns which do have more than one plumber.
Then one day, five new plumbers move in and immediately start offering lower and lower prices. It's not fair to you. Nobody else in town has this sort of competition going on. You are losing wealth relative to everyone else who isn't a plumber through no fault of your own. Income inequality increases as a result with six poor plumbers.
At this point, you have a number of choices, all of them bad to some degree. For example, you can attempt to tough it out to be one of the last ones standing, knowing that you'll still have a greatly reduced market share and profit as a result. You can move to a new town and be a plumber there. Or you can abandon plumbing as a career altogether. Maybe you'll try to take a chance and create a new plumbing service that the other plumbers can't match (maybe it'll pay off, maybe it won't)..
There are all ways you could attempt to better your situation. But you could also choose to make the situation worse such as developing a drinking habit.
I believe this is going on at a vast scale in the developed world. There's all this entitled talk about how the rich people owe us a good salary and such. Well, they owe the Indians and the Chinese good salaries too. And good salaries there are much less than good salaries in the developed world.
Bottom line is that developed world labor has to be able to offer something that developing world labor can't offer (and it can be as simple as access to a nice market, though the developing world has nice markets too) or it won't get the work for the pay that is desired. Developed world labor just doesn't have pricing power and won't get it until there is near parity with the developing world (which is improving at a good rate) or until some remarkable advantage is created (I'm not seeing the remarkable advantages in the long run).
You want what rich people have, but you don't have leverage to get it. You're not going to make your situation any better by making it harder for rich people to give you what you want.
those powers ARE RESERVED BY THE STATES.
Let's look at the actual Tenth Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Here, you forgot a very important party, the people. I think walking to school is exercise of a people power not a state-granted privilege. Personally, I don't think the federal government has a place in education, K-12 or higher education, except as a sponsor and propagator of educational standards (which I think is a legitimate role of the Commerce Clause). But they do have a role as a protector of the people which I think this law imperfectly attempts.
In the US, real wages have been flat, as has social mobility. US social mobility is well below the mobility in some European countries. It's all well and good that developing countries are getting better standards of living, but the fact that all US productivity gains have gone to the wealthy is still a problem, and the US is seeing a smaller and less secure middle class.
So what? I don't see this as having an easy or low pain solution. US labor has to take a haircut (which it is a significant part of the way through BTW) because the world isn't perfect. That's the way it is.
When you're willing to think, I'll be around. There's plenty wrong with nuclear power. Safety isn't one of those things.
And another after that and another after that. There's a reason I'm not concerned about it. The more nuclear accidents there are, the less fear there will be.
It's just like plane crashes. They happen, but they aren't treated with the same drama they used to be. Further, with each plane accident, we've come to understand the risks of flying and how to minimize those risks to the point that flying is one of the safer modes of transportation by passenger-mile.
Why would that happen?
Because of people like you.
The thing you don't get is that employment is a trade. Both sides have to bring something to the table. You aren't entitled to a job. Let's give an example. You wrote elsewhere:
Yes, yes, but then what ? Did they just sit in their warehouse full of goods cackling ?
Of course not. They sold it, at which point they were given money (or if you want to go back four-odd thousand years before money existed, other goods) in exchange, which they then used to fund more production.
Without the consumption - the demand - the whole thing falls apart, because without consumption, production is just a waste of time (and resources).
Well, guess what? Jobs are just like warehouses of goods. If the demand for those jobs isn't there, the jobs aren't there. I find it telling how the parties talking about how economies are about the consumers conveniently forget that employers are consumers of labor. This is a transparent ideological excuse to screw over someone you don't like. Well, my take is different: eat your own dogfood or STFU.
Let's look at some other errors in your current post:
Here's what's missing: leisure time and spending, risk taking, insurance, research and development, and business expansion.
Here's what's missing. Any evidence - heck, even some vaguely coherent reasoning - for that claim.
Where do you think money for those things comes from? Trees? It comes from profits. When you have razor thin profit margins, that's the sort of things which gets lost.
But I'm sure that government will continue to take and squander much more than that razor thin profit margin as is their due. You are blindly arguing ideology.
Walmart had a profit margin of a bit over 3% of revenue in the recent past. California has a sales tax of 7.5% which would apply to almost all Walmart revenue in that state. That's more than double the profits of Walmart right there. And California is notorious for squandering the money it gets. If you look at the map at the bottom of this article you see a lot of states with combined state and local sales tax over 6% (including all ten of the most populous states in the US). And many of those states have a similar reputation for screwing the pooch whenever they get their hands on money.
Well, nothing really. It's just part of the ongoing half century of economic shift to the developing world and growing wage parity between developed and developing worlds.
Which is policy choice. It's unclear why you think the American people should be supporting it. Their Government's responsibility is to them, not the rest of the world.
I think this is like saying its unclear whether the American people should be supporting gravity. The American people don't have a choice. They can't choose for those billions of people to vanish. They can't choose for those billions of people to magically have the same wealth and standard of living as US citizens currently enjoy. This disparity of wealth and cost of labor exists whether you support it or not. It's not policy choice, it's reality.
I notice in a few places you have this delusion that's it just a matter of positive thinking. After all, the very first whine is about how I'm holding us back with my mental failwaves. And it goes all the way to the end with another piteous whine that US citizens can choose via policy to unmake those billions of people who are willing to work for less.
It's time for you to pull your head out of your ass. If your ideas can fail merely because I disagree, then they weren't worth having in the first place. If your ideas can fail merely because reality isn't as you would like, well that's another reason that they aren't worth having.
The Father of Capitalism, Adam Smith, pointed out that the interests of the capitalists are never the same and often opposite of the rest of society. He also pointed out that the capitalists will use every means at their disposal to convince everyone else that their interests are the same as everyone else. And, finally, he pointed out that profits are lowest in rich countries, higher in poor countries, and highest of all in countries racing toward ruin.
So what? Everyone else does that too. Conflict of interest is not a capitalism thing. It is a sentient being thing. It's ridiculous when a basic nature thing gets recast as an imaginary flaw peculiar to capitalism. One might as a result get the impression that you don't have a clue what you are speaking of.
The problem is that the capitalist model is based on the fact that it is most advantageous to invest first in the country in which you live because the rate of return is higher that foreign trade or the carrying trade. However, this model is broken today as money travels instantaneously and modern transportation is very fast compared to the times when it took a long time to transport items and gold and silver had to be transported by sailing ship to pay for things.
Capitalism is not based on that assumption. It is based on private ownership of capital with the trade infrastructure and legal protections that implies.
The real problem the rich today don't realize is that income inequality is the basis of most revolutions and eventually they will lose everything. Che once noted that the reason Americans weren't ripe for revolution was that the rich shared enough of the wealth with the other classes that they were satisfied. However, that is no longer the case as they take more and more of the wealth.
The rich don't "realize" something that isn't true? What a shocker. Every society has income inequality because everyone is not equally competent and skilled, doing the exact same job, and having the exact same luck.
And a Che quote? At least under the Batista regime, they didn't have a massive fraction of their citizens trying to flee the island. It's also worth noting that Che became the new elite once the Communists took over. The Communists might have destroyed the notions of income and wealth in Cuba, but they didn't destroy inequality.
Finally, I can't help but notice that you speak of income inequality not poverty. I think that's telling because poverty is a real problem, income inequality is not. Further, this talk ignores that globally, income and wealth inequality have improved over the past few decades, due in considerable part to widespread adoption of capitalism, such as in China. That's a bit contrary to the narrative, don't you think?
And, if anyone recalls any history at all, how did we manage our way out of the Depression? (Hint: It wasn't by sticking our remaining money in a locked vault.)
The US didn't manage its way out of the Depression, it muddled its way out. My view is Keynesian spending during recessions is like beating drums during solar eclipses to scare away the giant space snake that's eating the Sun. Since the recession ended, the Keynesian spending is claimed to have always worked. The problem is that the recession would have ended anyway. People don't keep their money in a vault forever.
Hell, let's give infrastructure a boost back up to 3% of the federal budget, from the 2.5% where it's currently at, but not at the expense of shutting NASA down. Pushing NASA back up from 0.5% to 1% of the budget, and education up from 6% to 8%, and energy and environmental up from 3% to 4%, while reducing military spending from 54% to 50% would seem to be a good way to make this country stronger, long term.
What of that spending is going to help the US long term? They could already fix pot holes on 2.5%, it just gets more votes to spend it on creating new infrastructure rather than fixing existing infrastructure. NASA could do vastly more on what it currently spends than it is. Doubling that spending would be throwing good money after bad. Education and environmental spending make things worse. Educational spending is in large part responsible for education being as expensive as it is. And environmental spending chased off a lot of US industry over the past 40 years. Spending more on it will chase off even more.
Finally, military spending is a huge low lying fruit for getting the US into a healthy fiscal position. I'd look at cutting it to 20-25%, maybe less. I notice also you ignore Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, focusing only on discretionary spending. Those programs do absolutely nothing for the US economy even from a Keynesian point of view and are terrible for the purposes they are meant for. And since they're also of the same size roughly as military spending, we can get a lot of benefit out of greatly curbing or eliminating these programs.
That a lot of re-engineering you are talking about, you can't exactly move the reactor. Do you propose a solution?
Well, case by case. If the future value of the reactor justifies the re-engineering costs, then do it. Generic, but straightforward.
OK. So once we follow your idea and successfully drive wages - ie: costs - down to slightly-more-than zero, who is going to buy the stuff business produces ?
Why would that happen? Is regulation the magic sauce for making sure you don't starve because you forget to ask for a paycheck? This sentiment reminds me of The Incoherence of the Philosophers, a work which among other things proposes that reality itself goes on as it does only because Allah wills it so. So do we have an economy and people getting paid for their work only because the regulators will it so? I'm not feeling it.
You need to consider that there's a revenues side of the ledger as well as an expenses one.
Somewhat lower wages is still better than no wages when it comes to generating revenue, wouldn't you think?
The thing that is missed here is that reducing profits also reduces living standards.
No it doesn't. An economy running on a razor-thin profit but still producing excess of everything it needed would have high living standards.
Here's what's missing: leisure time and spending, risk taking, insurance, research and development, and business expansion. But I'm sure that government will continue to take and squander much more than that razor thin profit margin as is their due.
Er, no. Living standards are declining because all the regulations that protected normal people's incomes have been systemically destroyed. That's why real incomes for almost everyone in the US have gone nowhere for thirty-odd years.
It's a nice story except that it isn't true. The labor regulations haven't changed much; benefits and unemployment regulations haven't changed much; minimum wage is still around; and health care has actually been expanded. What has changed? Well, nothing really. It's just part of the ongoing half century of economic shift to the developing world and growing wage parity between developed and developing worlds.
Everyone knows what works. Post-WW2 USA (until the neoliberals took over in the '70s, brought in the morally bankrupt NAIRU, deregulated everything, started selling off public assets and disassembling the public services - again, a common problem throughout the western world, though some countries had their Reagans and Thatchers much later - here in Australia, for example, we didn't go full retard until the mid-90s) was the quickest and most widespread increase in wealth and living standards in human history. It was a time of increasing real wages, a large and financially secure middle class, relatively high social mobility, large-scale public investment and full employment as a policy goal rather than a bete noir.
In other words, those darn Reagans and Thatchers didn't ban the billions of people who are eating your lunch, labor competition-wise.
And the great incongruity of your post is that the actual quickest and most widespread increase in wealth and living standards in human history happened after the period of time you mention. It is happening now, not in the 1950s. Now is the time of increasing real wages, creation of a global large and financially secure middle, relatively high social mobility, etc. What happened in the developed world then is now happening everywhere. But I guess all those people are kind of hard to see from whatever podunk country you're from.
Businesses are not "impaired" from employing US workers. They *choose* not to so as to achieve greater profits.
You ought to think about what you just said. Reducing profits is the chief form of impairment that a business can experience. And if you reduce profits to the red, then you've destroyed the case for the business.
(Note that this is common issue across the western world as most barriers in place to protect living standards have been torn down in the name of greater profits.)
I'm not saying that all such barriers should be torn down, but severely reducing profits is a very good reason to consider tearing these barriers down.
The thing that is missed here is that reducing profits also reduces living standards. And we can see that living standards are declining despite all the regulation to the contrary. I think it's time to look at what's working and what isn't. My view is that a lot of that regulation is actually very counterproductive, making the situation worse.
While I think that the current alleged consensus on catastrophic global warming and other climate change is grossly exaggerated,
What do you mean?
For example, the media routinely exaggerates any research that even hints at climate change being involved. The IPCC which alleges to be a neutral party routinely exaggerates the extent, impact, and certainty of global warming as can be seen in the variation between the summaries for policy makers versus the actual research described in their multiyear assessment reports.
I don't see fossil fuels being used as they currently are forever.
How will they be used?
Like most resources, as they become more scarce and more costly to extract, fossil fuels will be continue to be used for higher value purposes. For example, pesticides, plastics, and fertilizer (nitrogen fixing).
There will come a time when we'll switch to other things.
Like what?
I already mentioned some in my previous post:
Sure, biofuels, nuclear power, renewable electric power, that sort of thing.
They were talking about reactors sucking up river sediment because the rivers are so low. Are you saying you would reduce the generating capacity to match the amount of water available?
They're talking about a need for redesigning water intakes to handle lower river levels. I've also heard that they're having problems with thermal pollution of the rivers in question. That indicates to me that plant should have one or more lakes that it draws water from and dumps heat to rather than drawing from the river directly.
It's not a problem of water availability as I see it, but rather a problem of poor ability to draw water at low river levels combined with dumping heat directly to the river.
Since the plants currently aren't engineered to handle these conditions (and may be unable to improve due to land restrictions), then yes, they should operate at reduced capacity when low river levels occur until the problem is fixed.
Which is, to me, an argument that such information has to be made available for certain employers.
They would have to demonstrate that the mental illness in question were relevant. For example, for a job I work, I'm required to be able to lift 50 pounds (20-25 kg). There's no requirement that I not have particular back injuries. If I can do the task with the injury, then I'm good. (Incidentally, if I become unable to meet that particular requirement, they have the option to move me to another job where I don't have to lift 50 pounds or to restructure my current job).
A blanket proscription against mental illness (of the sort implied by the GP) is no different than a blanket proscription against injury. It's an overly broad category that includes a variety of problems which wouldn't be relevant for the job aspect in question.
"Co-Pilot in Germanwings Crash Hid Mental Illness From Employer"
Here, it does appear quite relevant since the mental illness of the copilot (who was at the controls when the plane crashed) in question was apparently quite debilitating. He collected several doctor's notes stating he was too sick to work, including one for the day he actually flew.
Also the language of the employer (as it appears in the linked story above) is more focused.
Lufthansa company policy requires notification of conditions that could affect flying or a pilotâ(TM)s license.
This policy doesn't require notification of mental illness that wouldn't affect flying.