But that's maybe two low paying jobs per garbage truck my city doesn't have anymore.
Depending where you live, I can almost guarantee that those guys got full health benefits. Probably even after retirement, which probably they qualify for after 25 or 30 years and get half-salary forever. So then you are paying the health care, benefits, and half salary of 2 or perhaps 3 generations of garbage men at any one time.
And no, I am not trolling, this is a question that really needs to be thought about regardless of how you think it's answered.
I agree with you. As low-skilled manufacturing goes away as an option, the only things left are professions, the arts, the sciences, services, construction, and machine operators/technicians that replace factory jobs. Professions, arts, sciences, and engineering all require lots of training and/or practice. There is probably a slightly lower bar for operators/technicians, but it will still be higher than traditional assembly line work. Construction has a fine tradition of employing some dumbasses, but I don't see that industry growing at anywhere near the rate needed to replace factory work.
On the other hand, we had approximately 17 million factory jobs in 1970, and we had the same number in 2000. This despite output going up tremendously and population growth from 180 million to 300 million. So that shows that factory jobs can be cut by roughly 40% without too much ill effect on unemployment if the time period is long enough. The problem is that the time window is shorter now - we've probably lost about 25% of our manufacturing jobs since 2000 (ignoring the sudden drop-off from the recession)... that's a LOT of jobs in a little window of time.
Why does a banker who sits in an office 35 hours a week earn 100 more than someone who works in a construction site 50 hours a week?
Probably a combination of factors. He probably had parents who were more well-off, and he probably had an education. He's probably naturally pretty smart and more than a little politically savvy. The construction worker's parents were probably blue collar and either couldn't spend time with him or didn't want to. He probably went to public high school - may or may not have graduated. He probably isn't all the way up the hill on the IQ curve. And most of all, he probably "tells it how it is" and whistles at women as they go by.
But most of all, the banker has someone willing to pay him more money. Any able-bodied dumbass can shoot a 2x4 with a nail gun. It takes a real expensive dumbass to sink Too Large To Fail Bank.
The good news is that Mr. Banker pays for most of Mr. Construction Worker's public services - probably including the public works project that Mr. Construction worker uses to feed his family when the recession hits.
I tend to agree that we need to do something to help the middle class, and that wealth distribution is going the wrong way. But this class warfare talk is getting ridiculous. There will always be people living better than you - learn not to be so envious, and realize that you need them as much as they need you.
I have not proposing anything in this discussion at all, I am explaining why your original remark about mythical "people with cash" being the only ones hurt by inflation is wrong.
Okay, but I made that statement in a certain context - one where we were discussing it as a downside of fractional reserve banking. In this context, it should be clear that I am talking about long-term, planned, predictable inflation. The only alternative I know is practically no long-term inflation, but wild swings in short-term inflation and deflation.
Given that context, I contend that the long-term, planned, predictable inflation is preferable to everyone except those sitting on big piles of cash. In the old days, that meant sitting on gold. Today, it means having a big pile of cash in reserves - or to a layman, in a bank account or in a mattress.
In the old days, not only were salaries up and down all the time, but prices were too. Having wages and prices rise in a less volatile fashion is good for the working poor.
The greatest problem of recent bailout... money were produced at a rate as if the system is working
We're getting a bit off topic, but money wasn't "produced" for TARP - it was borrowed. Not only that, little additional leverage was used because the government got equity stakes in the borrowers. TARP didn't really do anything to cause inflation. Quantitative easing, on the other hand, is just another way of saying "printing money". Of course, I'm not naive, and I realize that the government likely never paid back the treasuries used to fund TARP - so as a practical matter TARP could very well drive some inflation.
As to your contention that inflation makes salaries decrease over time, I dispute that. I think the diminishing need for manufacturing workers in the US is what has decreased salaries for lower-middle-class and poor workers. I have no idea what the solution to this is, but I will say that free trade and free capital is odd to have in the absence of free labor - and that is probably responsible for part of the decline, though it is hard to imagine how wages would hold up with an almost infinite supply of low-income workers in the developing world.
it's un-invested money
Dude, most of us call that cash! If you want to use a different definition, fine - then just amend my statement to say that long-term, predictable inflation really only hurts those with cash or reserves. I don't want to run around arguing about semantics if we can help it:)
unless banks are greedy enough to keep interest below inflation
They can't very well pay out more than they can earn on the money. Interest rates are only very loosely correlated to inflation, and mostly because inflation tends to increase in a good economy when money starts to get more scarce. But banks paid out interest even before the fractional reserve system was in place, so inflation still hurts cash investors compared to the older systems.
Their life is their "exposure".
I meant their financial exposure. You don't have to convince me that the working poor have a tough life.
If they noticed, they would not participate in nonsense about taxes and other ultra-conservative crap that has absolutely nothing to do with their lives.
Membership in the working class not come with a test in economic theory or history. They are acting out, even if not in their best interest. The talk show hosts and news commentators and politicians have them quite riled up.
Except, of course, it accomplishes absolutely nothing.
It's a bit early to tell - there is definitely a populist influence in congress that wasn't there before. With a little luck they will at least succeed in reforming some of the distressed entitlement programs that the poor rely on and set up the federal government to inc
Trading millions of dollars back and forth in a few milliseconds has exactly nothing to do with markets "being efficient".
I don' t think that's true. The only way that someone can make money with a strategy like that is if they find an inefficiency in the market an exploit it. It's like micro-arbitrage. At the very least, they are making the markets a lot more liquid, which helps anyone trying to buy or sell.
But you are probably right, and there are probably limits to the needed efficiency. I'm not sure we need to intervene in any way, though. Are they doing any harm? There are already "circuit breakers" in place to protect against run-away electronic trading. And they seem to be pushing the state-of-the-art in IT... some of the server setups these exchanges are using are unbelievable.
Also shut up about gold standard. It has absolutely nothing to do with this.
Can we please keep this civil? Do you expect to be taken seriously or not?
If you are not talking about a gold standard, what system are you proposing?
Bank doesn't store cash and magically conjure interest on it
I know the bank isn't invested in cash, but the depositor certainly is. Similarly, you mention the bank being required to hold reserves - ultimately these are just a cash balance with the Federal Reserve. That is about as much a "cash investment" as you can possibly have.
This protects "people with cash" that you were boo-hoo-hooing about
I'm not "boo-hooing". I'm pointing out that the only people hurt by constant, predictable inflation are those with cash investments - and you rightly point out that they are compensated by interest. I'm the one arguing that constant, predictable inflation is not a big problem.
Working poor, on the other hand, lack any of those protections because they don't have anything in the bank.
They also lack any exposure, since they have nothing in the bank. If they do have money in the bank, it probably bears little or no interest (like in a checking account).
however salaries do not because employer is happy to keep it that way as long as employees don't notice
I'm sure they are. But if you think that the working poor don't notice, I don't think you are listening very hard. Half of the incoherent tea party stuff is rooted in very real and legitimate grievances that working people have. They blame the wrong things (like inflation, over-regulation, immigration, and - sorry, for this but I've heard it a lot from the Ron Paul crowd - leaving the gold standard), but they are at least going after some of the right people (politicians and Wall Street). Organized disgusted middle class is a good thing for the country.
Such a mechanism would be too expensive to implement, and it will be extremely unpopular.
What on earth are you talking about? Getting a pay cut is too expensive to implement? The poor took pay cuts all the time prior to the abolition of the gold standard. Hell, they are getting pay cuts now, even with constant rates of planned inflation.
Inflation only applies to prices.
Sure - but those prices are also someone's assets.
there is no such thing as "cash investment"
??? A bank account is a cash investment. A loan is a cash investment. Taking your money and putting it in a safe is a cash investment. Bank accounts, loans, and a safe full of money all lose value with inflation.
I would take price swings over constant and continuous slide into poverty that society does not recognize until it's too late.
This slide does not occur because of inflation. It occurs because the American middle class factory worker is not willing or able to compete with a factory worker from a much poorer country - often times even when you include shipping, training, bribes, and all of the other fun when doing business in a far-away developing nation. Often they even have competition domestically in the form of robots. Inflation has very little interaction with wages, other than that people have come to expect "cost of living increases"
And then of course, there is the issue of WHAT is becoming more expensive. Oil/fuel, food, education, and healthcare are all increasing in cost at a far greater rate than can be blamed on centralized banking. And those are the very things that the middle class cares about. Going to a gold standard won't fix that.
And how would you solve hoarding? Gold is being hoarded right now. If we used a gold standard, people would be hoarding our only currency and there wouldn't be enough of it for normal economic activity. What is worse, the rich would own most of the gold and their best course of action would be to sit on it and wait as it increases in value. So working people who rely on a fair price for commodities would get less and less for their labors as deflation hit, and the rich would grow wealthier and wealthier as their gold pile grew in value. Then of course, the gold would top out and the rich would need to find other places to stick their money. As they unloaded their gold, the previously cash-starved economy would again be flush with cash and prices would skyrocket ahead of salaries. There would be runs on the bank as people desperately tried to get their money before it became worthless and to trade it in for goods that will soon be unaffordable . Farmers start holding back stockpiles of grain so that they can wait for the price to go up. Eventually the price peaks and everyone starts unloading their stockpiled commodities - gold shoots back up in value. Rinse. Repeat.
Our history is so full of panics like I just described. I have to assume that people who advocate the gold standard weren't paying attention in eighth grade history. We didn't create the Fed out of thin air - monetary policy has been an issue for hundreds of years. The middle class is not well served by huge economic swings - mostly because on the upswing their salary (if they still have a job) lags the higher costs. Steady, predictable inflation allows unions to bargain for small but steady salary increases over the long term. It discourages the rich from sitting on cash (hoarding). It's obviously not a perfect situation, but it is a hell of a lot better than the old days under the gold standard.
Don't believe me? Look it up. The biggest owner of US debt is the US government.
That's mostly Social Security Trust Fund money and the recent quantitative easing. Social Security has been dipping into the fund recently and quantitative easing ended months ago, yet the US debt is still yielding almost nothing.
Working poor who actually support themselves, don't get raises
In a gold economy, or in some other model with zero inflation, those working poor would be getting pay cuts. Inflation does not factor into your salary, only your cash investments and debts.
The problem is, that there are large groups of people whose living standard is constantly declining. This spreads poverty and crime, damaging the whole society in the process.
Agreed, but the root cause is not inflation.
it's merely a part of a mechanism that you ignorantly claimed to be only damaging for "people with cash".
Inflation has nothing to do with people sliding into poverty with stagnant wages.
True, the working poor are affected by "inflation" - but in the absence of inflation they would be getting hammered by declining salaries instead. Same thing. The only people hurt by small rates of planned inflation are people who hold cash investments.
In ye olde days of the gold standard, there were still wild price swings - periods of inflation and deflation - and the poor were hurt just as badly in the short term as they are today.
Please explain the new-found strengths in the Swiss Franc and the Japanese Yen for me if the US is in such great shape?
If you are going to cherry-pick economic data, then I can just turn this around on you and ask, "Please explain the historically-low yields of American government bonds if the US is in such bad shape?"
Migrant workers pay no income tax, legal or no. Their incomes are too low.
True if they are working for cash they pay no payroll taxes and other poor people do, but those are for Social Security and Medicare and unemployment insurance - things that they will not be eligible to collect much from, anyway. And I know at least a great deal of them are working with fake SS numbers, so money is still being put into the system - they just get no credit for it.
But again, what is your point? My comment was about population and the economy. Are you arguing that because they aren't legal, they don't contribute to the growth of the economy? Does the money that passes through their hands become unavailable for use somehow? Do the goods they produce become less valuable?
What does that even mean? Even the minimum wage goes up.
And yes, there are people with stagnant or declining wages - low-skill manufacturing, for instance. But if you think that "inflation" is the reason, then you need to turn that "moron" name calling on yourself. The problem for unskilled manufacturing workers is that there are people all over the world willing to work for less, and the majority of people in the developed world are more concerned with the lower prices than they are in having a manufacturing welfare system.
In other words, even with a gold standard or some other such nonsense, the same people you are claiming are getting "hurt" by inflation would have salary decreases as the value of their work declines. Same thing.
suggest that stock transactions be taxed based on speed
That sounds like a good way to make the markets less efficient to me, and I doubt he'd be suggesting it if it didn't sound like a good way to raise taxes without pissing off the masses.
I'd look into the solution Japan employs instead: all trades must occur at discrete points in time - kind of like an interrupt cycle for the nerdy among us. This makes the speed race irrelevant, since your system only needs to be able to make a decision within the interrupt cycle - and that's the best anyone can do.
The only growing economies are NOT the US and Europe.
How can you lump the US in with Europe? Yes, the US are approaching that level of indebtedness and we the US is a developed country, but unlike Western Europe (and even Japan or China for that matter) it has population growth, and the long-term GDP chart definitely points up, even factoring in inflation.
You are trying to make a negative point about stock value in the context of assets for the everyman, and you pick Google??? Have you seen the chart? Pick the old GM or some other big corporation that tanked - not a stock that is up around 600% since it's IPO.
The stock value has nothing to do with profits, it has to do with the rate of change of perceived net worth with respect to actual net worth.
How does that change the parent's point? Don't improved profits increase the perceived value of the company? Unless you are a very short-term investor, being off by a few cents either way on earnings won't change your investment performance very much.
Maybe he thinks they will have a monopoly, but since no one can predict the future, he wouldn't advocate breaking up Apple before they actually violate the law in some way.
Humans have a grand tradition of ignoring trademarks in colloquial speech.
iPad is a concise way to say "non-stylus based tablet computer". Just like saying Xerox was a nice concise way to differentiate a "new" photo copier.
In Atlanta you buy a "Coke", no matter what kind of soda it is. One of the other posters already mentioned Kleenex. People "photoshop" a picture. You "google" someone. We went "rollerblading".
I think MS only was successful with "good enough" because they were able to pair it with aggressive business practices that ultimately resulted in a monopoly. Without the ultimate monopoly, the state of the art would have probably moved forward.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, I thought you were completely bonkers until I googled that... we never had that show state-side.
The robots will go away once it becomes cheaper to hire humans than it is to make and power robots. It's really that simple.
Why, do human require no energy?
But that's maybe two low paying jobs per garbage truck my city doesn't have anymore.
Depending where you live, I can almost guarantee that those guys got full health benefits. Probably even after retirement, which probably they qualify for after 25 or 30 years and get half-salary forever. So then you are paying the health care, benefits, and half salary of 2 or perhaps 3 generations of garbage men at any one time.
That robotic arm is worth it :)
And no, I am not trolling, this is a question that really needs to be thought about regardless of how you think it's answered.
I agree with you. As low-skilled manufacturing goes away as an option, the only things left are professions, the arts, the sciences, services, construction, and machine operators/technicians that replace factory jobs. Professions, arts, sciences, and engineering all require lots of training and/or practice. There is probably a slightly lower bar for operators/technicians, but it will still be higher than traditional assembly line work. Construction has a fine tradition of employing some dumbasses, but I don't see that industry growing at anywhere near the rate needed to replace factory work.
On the other hand, we had approximately 17 million factory jobs in 1970, and we had the same number in 2000. This despite output going up tremendously and population growth from 180 million to 300 million. So that shows that factory jobs can be cut by roughly 40% without too much ill effect on unemployment if the time period is long enough. The problem is that the time window is shorter now - we've probably lost about 25% of our manufacturing jobs since 2000 (ignoring the sudden drop-off from the recession)... that's a LOT of jobs in a little window of time.
Why does a banker who sits in an office 35 hours a week earn 100 more than someone who works in a construction site 50 hours a week?
Probably a combination of factors. He probably had parents who were more well-off, and he probably had an education. He's probably naturally pretty smart and more than a little politically savvy. The construction worker's parents were probably blue collar and either couldn't spend time with him or didn't want to. He probably went to public high school - may or may not have graduated. He probably isn't all the way up the hill on the IQ curve. And most of all, he probably "tells it how it is" and whistles at women as they go by.
But most of all, the banker has someone willing to pay him more money. Any able-bodied dumbass can shoot a 2x4 with a nail gun. It takes a real expensive dumbass to sink Too Large To Fail Bank.
The good news is that Mr. Banker pays for most of Mr. Construction Worker's public services - probably including the public works project that Mr. Construction worker uses to feed his family when the recession hits.
I tend to agree that we need to do something to help the middle class, and that wealth distribution is going the wrong way. But this class warfare talk is getting ridiculous. There will always be people living better than you - learn not to be so envious, and realize that you need them as much as they need you.
I'll admit that my Trekkie knowledge is thin, but I'm pretty sure that they knew about sapphires in the 1980s.
I have not proposing anything in this discussion at all, I am explaining why your original remark about mythical "people with cash" being the only ones hurt by inflation is wrong.
Okay, but I made that statement in a certain context - one where we were discussing it as a downside of fractional reserve banking. In this context, it should be clear that I am talking about long-term, planned, predictable inflation. The only alternative I know is practically no long-term inflation, but wild swings in short-term inflation and deflation.
Given that context, I contend that the long-term, planned, predictable inflation is preferable to everyone except those sitting on big piles of cash. In the old days, that meant sitting on gold. Today, it means having a big pile of cash in reserves - or to a layman, in a bank account or in a mattress.
In the old days, not only were salaries up and down all the time, but prices were too. Having wages and prices rise in a less volatile fashion is good for the working poor.
The greatest problem of recent bailout... money were produced at a rate as if the system is working
We're getting a bit off topic, but money wasn't "produced" for TARP - it was borrowed. Not only that, little additional leverage was used because the government got equity stakes in the borrowers. TARP didn't really do anything to cause inflation. Quantitative easing, on the other hand, is just another way of saying "printing money". Of course, I'm not naive, and I realize that the government likely never paid back the treasuries used to fund TARP - so as a practical matter TARP could very well drive some inflation.
As to your contention that inflation makes salaries decrease over time, I dispute that. I think the diminishing need for manufacturing workers in the US is what has decreased salaries for lower-middle-class and poor workers. I have no idea what the solution to this is, but I will say that free trade and free capital is odd to have in the absence of free labor - and that is probably responsible for part of the decline, though it is hard to imagine how wages would hold up with an almost infinite supply of low-income workers in the developing world.
it's un-invested money
Dude, most of us call that cash! If you want to use a different definition, fine - then just amend my statement to say that long-term, predictable inflation really only hurts those with cash or reserves. I don't want to run around arguing about semantics if we can help it :)
unless banks are greedy enough to keep interest below inflation
They can't very well pay out more than they can earn on the money. Interest rates are only very loosely correlated to inflation, and mostly because inflation tends to increase in a good economy when money starts to get more scarce. But banks paid out interest even before the fractional reserve system was in place, so inflation still hurts cash investors compared to the older systems.
Their life is their "exposure".
I meant their financial exposure. You don't have to convince me that the working poor have a tough life.
If they noticed, they would not participate in nonsense about taxes and other ultra-conservative crap that has absolutely nothing to do with their lives.
Membership in the working class not come with a test in economic theory or history. They are acting out, even if not in their best interest. The talk show hosts and news commentators and politicians have them quite riled up.
Except, of course, it accomplishes absolutely nothing.
It's a bit early to tell - there is definitely a populist influence in congress that wasn't there before. With a little luck they will at least succeed in reforming some of the distressed entitlement programs that the poor rely on and set up the federal government to inc
Trading millions of dollars back and forth in a few milliseconds has exactly nothing to do with markets "being efficient".
I don' t think that's true. The only way that someone can make money with a strategy like that is if they find an inefficiency in the market an exploit it. It's like micro-arbitrage. At the very least, they are making the markets a lot more liquid, which helps anyone trying to buy or sell.
But you are probably right, and there are probably limits to the needed efficiency. I'm not sure we need to intervene in any way, though. Are they doing any harm? There are already "circuit breakers" in place to protect against run-away electronic trading. And they seem to be pushing the state-of-the-art in IT... some of the server setups these exchanges are using are unbelievable.
Also shut up about gold standard. It has absolutely nothing to do with this.
Can we please keep this civil? Do you expect to be taken seriously or not?
If you are not talking about a gold standard, what system are you proposing?
Bank doesn't store cash and magically conjure interest on it
I know the bank isn't invested in cash, but the depositor certainly is. Similarly, you mention the bank being required to hold reserves - ultimately these are just a cash balance with the Federal Reserve. That is about as much a "cash investment" as you can possibly have.
This protects "people with cash" that you were boo-hoo-hooing about
I'm not "boo-hooing". I'm pointing out that the only people hurt by constant, predictable inflation are those with cash investments - and you rightly point out that they are compensated by interest. I'm the one arguing that constant, predictable inflation is not a big problem.
Working poor, on the other hand, lack any of those protections because they don't have anything in the bank.
They also lack any exposure, since they have nothing in the bank. If they do have money in the bank, it probably bears little or no interest (like in a checking account).
however salaries do not because employer is happy to keep it that way as long as employees don't notice
I'm sure they are. But if you think that the working poor don't notice, I don't think you are listening very hard. Half of the incoherent tea party stuff is rooted in very real and legitimate grievances that working people have. They blame the wrong things (like inflation, over-regulation, immigration, and - sorry, for this but I've heard it a lot from the Ron Paul crowd - leaving the gold standard), but they are at least going after some of the right people (politicians and Wall Street). Organized disgusted middle class is a good thing for the country.
Such a mechanism would be too expensive to implement, and it will be extremely unpopular.
What on earth are you talking about? Getting a pay cut is too expensive to implement? The poor took pay cuts all the time prior to the abolition of the gold standard. Hell, they are getting pay cuts now, even with constant rates of planned inflation.
Inflation only applies to prices.
Sure - but those prices are also someone's assets.
there is no such thing as "cash investment"
??? A bank account is a cash investment. A loan is a cash investment. Taking your money and putting it in a safe is a cash investment. Bank accounts, loans, and a safe full of money all lose value with inflation.
I would take price swings over constant and continuous slide into poverty that society does not recognize until it's too late.
This slide does not occur because of inflation. It occurs because the American middle class factory worker is not willing or able to compete with a factory worker from a much poorer country - often times even when you include shipping, training, bribes, and all of the other fun when doing business in a far-away developing nation. Often they even have competition domestically in the form of robots. Inflation has very little interaction with wages, other than that people have come to expect "cost of living increases"
And then of course, there is the issue of WHAT is becoming more expensive. Oil/fuel, food, education, and healthcare are all increasing in cost at a far greater rate than can be blamed on centralized banking. And those are the very things that the middle class cares about. Going to a gold standard won't fix that.
And how would you solve hoarding? Gold is being hoarded right now. If we used a gold standard, people would be hoarding our only currency and there wouldn't be enough of it for normal economic activity. What is worse, the rich would own most of the gold and their best course of action would be to sit on it and wait as it increases in value. So working people who rely on a fair price for commodities would get less and less for their labors as deflation hit, and the rich would grow wealthier and wealthier as their gold pile grew in value. Then of course, the gold would top out and the rich would need to find other places to stick their money. As they unloaded their gold, the previously cash-starved economy would again be flush with cash and prices would skyrocket ahead of salaries. There would be runs on the bank as people desperately tried to get their money before it became worthless and to trade it in for goods that will soon be unaffordable . Farmers start holding back stockpiles of grain so that they can wait for the price to go up. Eventually the price peaks and everyone starts unloading their stockpiled commodities - gold shoots back up in value. Rinse. Repeat.
Our history is so full of panics like I just described. I have to assume that people who advocate the gold standard weren't paying attention in eighth grade history. We didn't create the Fed out of thin air - monetary policy has been an issue for hundreds of years. The middle class is not well served by huge economic swings - mostly because on the upswing their salary (if they still have a job) lags the higher costs. Steady, predictable inflation allows unions to bargain for small but steady salary increases over the long term. It discourages the rich from sitting on cash (hoarding). It's obviously not a perfect situation, but it is a hell of a lot better than the old days under the gold standard.
Don't believe me? Look it up. The biggest owner of US debt is the US government.
That's mostly Social Security Trust Fund money and the recent quantitative easing. Social Security has been dipping into the fund recently and quantitative easing ended months ago, yet the US debt is still yielding almost nothing.
Working poor who actually support themselves, don't get raises
In a gold economy, or in some other model with zero inflation, those working poor would be getting pay cuts. Inflation does not factor into your salary, only your cash investments and debts.
The problem is, that there are large groups of people whose living standard is constantly declining. This spreads poverty and crime, damaging the whole society in the process.
Agreed, but the root cause is not inflation.
it's merely a part of a mechanism that you ignorantly claimed to be only damaging for "people with cash".
Inflation has nothing to do with people sliding into poverty with stagnant wages.
True, the working poor are affected by "inflation" - but in the absence of inflation they would be getting hammered by declining salaries instead. Same thing. The only people hurt by small rates of planned inflation are people who hold cash investments.
In ye olde days of the gold standard, there were still wild price swings - periods of inflation and deflation - and the poor were hurt just as badly in the short term as they are today.
Please explain the new-found strengths in the Swiss Franc and the Japanese Yen for me if the US is in such great shape?
If you are going to cherry-pick economic data, then I can just turn this around on you and ask, "Please explain the historically-low yields of American government bonds if the US is in such bad shape?"
Migrant workers pay no income tax, legal or no. Their incomes are too low.
True if they are working for cash they pay no payroll taxes and other poor people do, but those are for Social Security and Medicare and unemployment insurance - things that they will not be eligible to collect much from, anyway. And I know at least a great deal of them are working with fake SS numbers, so money is still being put into the system - they just get no credit for it.
But again, what is your point? My comment was about population and the economy. Are you arguing that because they aren't legal, they don't contribute to the growth of the economy? Does the money that passes through their hands become unavailable for use somehow? Do the goods they produce become less valuable?
It's a problem for people on fixed salary
What does that even mean? Even the minimum wage goes up.
And yes, there are people with stagnant or declining wages - low-skill manufacturing, for instance. But if you think that "inflation" is the reason, then you need to turn that "moron" name calling on yourself. The problem for unskilled manufacturing workers is that there are people all over the world willing to work for less, and the majority of people in the developed world are more concerned with the lower prices than they are in having a manufacturing welfare system.
In other words, even with a gold standard or some other such nonsense, the same people you are claiming are getting "hurt" by inflation would have salary decreases as the value of their work declines. Same thing.
suggest that stock transactions be taxed based on speed
That sounds like a good way to make the markets less efficient to me, and I doubt he'd be suggesting it if it didn't sound like a good way to raise taxes without pissing off the masses.
I'd look into the solution Japan employs instead: all trades must occur at discrete points in time - kind of like an interrupt cycle for the nerdy among us. This makes the speed race irrelevant, since your system only needs to be able to make a decision within the interrupt cycle - and that's the best anyone can do.
Only if you count your illegal immigrants, hombre.
Your point being?
"we the US"
I sure is the literate lol.
The only growing economies are NOT the US and Europe.
How can you lump the US in with Europe? Yes, the US are approaching that level of indebtedness and we the US is a developed country, but unlike Western Europe (and even Japan or China for that matter) it has population growth, and the long-term GDP chart definitely points up, even factoring in inflation.
Yep, it creates money and debases it in the process.
Correct. Who is this a problem for? People with cash.
but it creates real poverty in the long term for those who have a little money.
Who are these mysterious impoverished people with cash?
You are trying to make a negative point about stock value in the context of assets for the everyman, and you pick Google??? Have you seen the chart? Pick the old GM or some other big corporation that tanked - not a stock that is up around 600% since it's IPO.
The stock value has nothing to do with profits, it has to do with the rate of change of perceived net worth with respect to actual net worth.
How does that change the parent's point? Don't improved profits increase the perceived value of the company? Unless you are a very short-term investor, being off by a few cents either way on earnings won't change your investment performance very much.
Maybe he thinks they will have a monopoly, but since no one can predict the future, he wouldn't advocate breaking up Apple before they actually violate the law in some way.
Humans have a grand tradition of ignoring trademarks in colloquial speech.
iPad is a concise way to say "non-stylus based tablet computer". Just like saying Xerox was a nice concise way to differentiate a "new" photo copier.
In Atlanta you buy a "Coke", no matter what kind of soda it is. One of the other posters already mentioned Kleenex. People "photoshop" a picture. You "google" someone. We went "rollerblading".
Sorry, I fail at reading comprehension :)
I think MS only was successful with "good enough" because they were able to pair it with aggressive business practices that ultimately resulted in a monopoly. Without the ultimate monopoly, the state of the art would have probably moved forward.
LOL, but then they'll immediately download the next version, right?