You first. Is Australias minimum wage much higher than the United States, or is it not? Why yes, it is. Does Australia have a problem with inflation? No, it does not. Replying that Australia hasn't eliminated poverty is a dipshit attempt to move the goalposts.
Not even close. Just because your capitalist indoctrination was interrupted by facts, doesn't mean there was any fallacy. Is Flint's water still poisoned years after the fact, or is it not? Did the USSR provide free-to-use housing, food, medical care and education, or did it not?
The only thing socialized by Venezuela was their oil industry. Not the rest of the economy, and none of the market sectors showing shortages pointed to by useful idiots to say "derp Venezuela socialism derp". Those are still capitalist. The only thing that has changed is America ramping up it's imperialist regime change efforts against another country that has never done a thing to the United States.
Ultimately there is no more economic activity than there was before
How do you figure. Let's say Amazon has a warehouse in Baltimore that employs 3,000 people. That's not a huge number in a metro area of over 2 million people. But. That's still 3,000 fewer people that might be applying for assistance like food stamps with the wage raise. It also means more demand for retail and food near said warehouse, as more workers will now be able to eat out or shop on their way to or from work. And some more tickets will be sold for Ravens or Oriels games.
An increase in wages doesn't have to be universal for it to be worth doing, or have an impact, or spurn the creation of other jobs.
You then also have to spend more on social care looking after those who now have no job at all.
That's just repeating the (false) trope that rising wages lead to fewer jobs. Companies have long tried to hire part time workers instead of full time in order to avoid paying benefits. Amazon's wage increase does nothing to change that trend. If the company can dodge paying for health insurance or vacation by scheduling a worker for 28 hours instead of 40, they aren't going to suddenly replace that 28 hour worker with two 14 hour workers. More employees mean more overhead, recruitment and hiring costs.
The United States has been deliberately trying to sabotage Venezuela's economy, so useful idiots like yourself can say "blah blah Venezuela blah blah socialism doesn't work blah blah"
Reality has a well-known anticapitalist bias. How long has Flint had poisoned water? How many tens of thousands of Americans die every year from lack of basic medical care? All in the richest country in the history of the world.
The USSR freed people from wage slavery and provided all its peoples with basic necessities. It was an infinitely superior system than anything the United States has ever had. Facts.
You guys keep saying that like it's supposed to mean something. This is probably going to trigger your wingnut lizard brain, but Gore was prescient on both the internet and climate change. Whereas Bush was always dumb as sack of hammers, taking his private and public sector positions and running their respective organizations into the ground. Positions he was handed, solely based on his last name.
It's the faucet-like availability of government-backed loans and too-easy education money that is directly responsible for driving tuition prices through the roof in the first place.
The problem with that old saw, is that if it was just about easy loan dollars, more schools (public and private) would compete for those dollars, forcing prices back down. So you can toss that in the garbage bin of failed winger talking points, like DDT bans causing malaria or increases in the minimum wage leading to job losses/inflation.
Holding up Amazon (an internet-only business for most of its existence) as an example is disingenuous at best.
Who owns Whole Foods again? That and the fact that businesses have been waging price wars to try and put their rivals out of business as long as businesses have been around. Willfully obtuse, at best.
When you compare apples to oranges, it's stupid to be amazed that they're not identical.
Larger business undercuts smaller business to drive them out of the market - after which bring on the monopoly pricing, baby. You'd have to be stupid to say they have to be identical situations.
Stop wasting everyone's time trying to say otherwise because the facts disagree with your fact-free opinions.
Take the butthurt and the projection to the nearest mirror, where it belongs. Bezos would happily run every last Whole Foods at a loss for years (remember he already did this at Amazon) if it would drive Trader Joes and other competitors out of the market he wants to compete in. This is basic econ that you would learn from any 5th grade textbook.
No, you didn't. Otherwise you would have noticed that Blahous responded to people pointing his own research paper shows $2 trillion in saves by....trashing his own research paper:
Blahous used the text of Sandersâ(TM) bill to guide assumptions. For example, he said, the bill says health care providers will be reimbursed for patients at Medicare payment rates. Blahous said Medicare payment rates are projected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to be roughly 40 percent lower than those paid by private insurers, so he built those assumed savings into his estimate.
But in the report, Blahous cautions that the assumption is suspect.
More to the point, why are wingnuts still trying to argue it when pretty much every other industrialized country spends half what the United States does, while covering 100% of their populations.
Those who fight for raising the minimum wage are consistently ignoring the "what happens then" aspect of their idea.
Those who fight increasing the minimum wage are constantly ignoring that other countries are constantly proving how full of shit you are. By having double the minimum wage that America does, without having high inflation and while paying comparable prices for consumer goods.
If your economy is dependent on having a large amount of people trapped in wage slavery and generation property - fuck your economy.
Venezuela's economy is overwhelmingly capitalist, dipshit. Don't take my word for it, just ask Fox News. Yes, diper-shits, this link is from 2010. The only thing that's changed have been sanctions applied to Venezuela to destroy their economy, so tools like yourself can look at Venezuela and whine about how socialism fails.
Great Depression: Read the timeline; you'll see that things starting to recover. Then FDR implemented program after program, with the result of the recovery stalling and things going back in the tank.
Completely backwards. Things were improving until FDR listened to deficit peacocks and rolled back the New Deal. World War II proved that the only problem with the New Deal is that it wasn't big enough. Massive government spending and near-universal employment ended the Great Depression - which could have been done without entering a war.
You say that like it's a bad thing. But "big government" has an infinitely better track record than unrestrained capitalism. Which saw companies trade humans for profit for centuries, sell lead paint/asbestos/cigarettes for decades after their suppliers knew them to be toxic.
Central planning succeeded spectacularly under every Soviet-era communist government
FTFY. Under the Soviets, no one wanted for food, medical care, housing or education. Whereas over here in the Evil Empire, you had poor people eating out of dumpsters, dying from lack of basic medicine, and going to secondary school was a luxury.
When you increase the minimum wage, you drive companies to invest in automation.
You could cut the minimum wage in half and companies would still be looking to automate as much as possible. Automation is a shit excuse for paying poverty wages. When Amazon can replace all their workers with robots, all their workers are getting fired, whether they make $25 or 25 cents an hour.
and those that have tried emulating it more recently (see Venezuela)
The only thing Venezuela nationalized was their oil production, you ignorant boob. Their economy is still overwhelmingly capitalist, including all the sectors facing shortages used by tools like yourself to say "derp Venezuela socialism doesn't work derp".
Let's say your story is true, and not just an elitist pile of BS you just made up. Your real problem is with the management of that store, as they are the ones responsible for...wait for it...managing the employees. If all you have is pot smokers who show up late for work, then either management isn't doing their jobs, or you're getting what you pay for and need better wages if you want better workers
Minimum wages and unionized wages/benefits are really stopgap measures to try to ensure a living wage and appropriate compensation. UBI would negate the need for both
Actors and athletes would disagree. Pro football players make a few hundred thousand on average, far from being destitute - but they also risk life-long injuries and having 80 year old brains before they are 25, thanks to brain injuries. As for actors (and writers)....Disney will keep making money from movies they released in the 1930's for another century, if they keep getting their copyright extensions. That's why it's a good thing that unions fought for and won the right to residuals, so they're getting a chunk of those continued profits.
Unions act as a check against corporate greed. That greed affects workers on any end of the pay scale.
Fixed. Alaska has a (small) UBI program in the form of state residents getting a check for oil revenue. Nationwide UBI would just be a larger version of that. And as the richest country in the history of the world, you can't say the money isn't there. You just don't want to go get it from the people who have taken it.
Completely wrong. It sets a floor for the minimal legal price you can sell your labor. The reality is that people end up with no job, because their labor isnâ(TM)t that valuable. Most people increase the value of their labor by improving their skills while working.
Randian whackjobbery. Companies hire to create the maximum profits for the minimum labor costs. What the minimum wage is set to is pretty much irrelevant to that equation. Unless your business can't exist while paying people a living wage - in which case your business doesn't deserve to exist.
That's not how business works. Individual stores must be profitable to stay open.
No they don't. Amazon did nothing but lose money the first ten years of its existence. Uber loses billions of dollars every year. You don't have to make a profit when your goal is to drive out the competition, and/or you are floated with venture capital in the process of establishing a presence in the market.
The end result may not actually affect a companies bottom line much but it will mean that those less capable workers are going to find it harder and harder to find jobs as they are squeezed out by automation and higher job expectations.
It doesn't "cut both ways" because poor people having more money to spend means more economic activity. Local economic activity. Give a rich person a tax cut and he'll just invest it in another overseas tech stock. Give a poor person money and they'll spend it at Target or Home Depot.
More economic activity means more jobs, because there is more demand for goods and services. It also boosts wages for workers currently making more than minimum wage. No reason to keep working at that high stress call center job for $15, if stocking shelves at Walmart now pays the same. So now the call center has to pay $20 an hour. If a salaried manager at a company makes $20 an hour, why keep working 60 hours a week if he can make that much at the call center. And so on.
and by raising prices of course. Workers are thrilled to see that minimum wage go from say $13 to $15/hr, right up until they take home their new paycheck and discover the cost of dinner out just went from $13 to $15. Imagine that. And that's how inflation works.
No - that's how dipshit talking points work. Other countries have double the minimum wage that the United States has, with none of that inflation and they pay comparable prices for consumer products. None of the states or cities that have increased the minimum wage have seen inflation.
This is just wingnut apologia for subjecting other people to generational poverty. Never to yourselves, of course.
Socialism is fine until you run out of other people's money.
As is always the case, when fascists try and attack socialism, they're describing the the flaws of capitalism. It is capitalism that rewards laziness, corruption and graft. It is capitalism that is dependent on a never-ending stream of cash and assets to sustain itself.
Slashdot Mirror
You first. Is Australias minimum wage much higher than the United States, or is it not? Why yes, it is. Does Australia have a problem with inflation? No, it does not. Replying that Australia hasn't eliminated poverty is a dipshit attempt to move the goalposts.
Not even close. Just because your capitalist indoctrination was interrupted by facts, doesn't mean there was any fallacy. Is Flint's water still poisoned years after the fact, or is it not? Did the USSR provide free-to-use housing, food, medical care and education, or did it not?
The only thing socialized by Venezuela was their oil industry. Not the rest of the economy, and none of the market sectors showing shortages pointed to by useful idiots to say "derp Venezuela socialism derp". Those are still capitalist. The only thing that has changed is America ramping up it's imperialist regime change efforts against another country that has never done a thing to the United States.
How do you figure. Let's say Amazon has a warehouse in Baltimore that employs 3,000 people. That's not a huge number in a metro area of over 2 million people. But. That's still 3,000 fewer people that might be applying for assistance like food stamps with the wage raise. It also means more demand for retail and food near said warehouse, as more workers will now be able to eat out or shop on their way to or from work. And some more tickets will be sold for Ravens or Oriels games.
An increase in wages doesn't have to be universal for it to be worth doing, or have an impact, or spurn the creation of other jobs.
That's just repeating the (false) trope that rising wages lead to fewer jobs. Companies have long tried to hire part time workers instead of full time in order to avoid paying benefits. Amazon's wage increase does nothing to change that trend. If the company can dodge paying for health insurance or vacation by scheduling a worker for 28 hours instead of 40, they aren't going to suddenly replace that 28 hour worker with two 14 hour workers. More employees mean more overhead, recruitment and hiring costs.
Why would we, when Venezuela is overwhelmingly capitalist? A fact highlighted by right wing media when oil prices were still high:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/...
The United States has been deliberately trying to sabotage Venezuela's economy, so useful idiots like yourself can say "blah blah Venezuela blah blah socialism doesn't work blah blah"
[remedial knowledge of the subject].
Australia in particular has a minimum wage of $18.93 AUD, which is also indexed to inflation. Speaking of inflation, Australia's rate is less than 2%.
The old saw that more wages for poor workers leading directly to high rates of inflation was never anything but a pile of elitist bullshit.
Reality has a well-known anticapitalist bias. How long has Flint had poisoned water? How many tens of thousands of Americans die every year from lack of basic medical care? All in the richest country in the history of the world.
The USSR freed people from wage slavery and provided all its peoples with basic necessities. It was an infinitely superior system than anything the United States has ever had. Facts.
You guys keep saying that like it's supposed to mean something. This is probably going to trigger your wingnut lizard brain, but Gore was prescient on both the internet and climate change. Whereas Bush was always dumb as sack of hammers, taking his private and public sector positions and running their respective organizations into the ground. Positions he was handed, solely based on his last name.
The problem with that old saw, is that if it was just about easy loan dollars, more schools (public and private) would compete for those dollars, forcing prices back down. So you can toss that in the garbage bin of failed winger talking points, like DDT bans causing malaria or increases in the minimum wage leading to job losses/inflation.
Who owns Whole Foods again? That and the fact that businesses have been waging price wars to try and put their rivals out of business as long as businesses have been around. Willfully obtuse, at best.
Larger business undercuts smaller business to drive them out of the market - after which bring on the monopoly pricing, baby. You'd have to be stupid to say they have to be identical situations.
Take the butthurt and the projection to the nearest mirror, where it belongs. Bezos would happily run every last Whole Foods at a loss for years (remember he already did this at Amazon) if it would drive Trader Joes and other competitors out of the market he wants to compete in. This is basic econ that you would learn from any 5th grade textbook.
Maybe you should buy one, might learn something.
No, you didn't. Otherwise you would have noticed that Blahous responded to people pointing his own research paper shows $2 trillion in saves by....trashing his own research paper:
More to the point, why are wingnuts still trying to argue it when pretty much every other industrialized country spends half what the United States does, while covering 100% of their populations.
Those who fight increasing the minimum wage are constantly ignoring that other countries are constantly proving how full of shit you are. By having double the minimum wage that America does, without having high inflation and while paying comparable prices for consumer goods.
If your economy is dependent on having a large amount of people trapped in wage slavery and generation property - fuck your economy.
Venezuela's economy is overwhelmingly capitalist, dipshit. Don't take my word for it, just ask Fox News. Yes, diper-shits, this link is from 2010. The only thing that's changed have been sanctions applied to Venezuela to destroy their economy, so tools like yourself can look at Venezuela and whine about how socialism fails.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/...
Completely backwards. Things were improving until FDR listened to deficit peacocks and rolled back the New Deal. World War II proved that the only problem with the New Deal is that it wasn't big enough. Massive government spending and near-universal employment ended the Great Depression - which could have been done without entering a war.
You say that like it's a bad thing. But "big government" has an infinitely better track record than unrestrained capitalism. Which saw companies trade humans for profit for centuries, sell lead paint/asbestos/cigarettes for decades after their suppliers knew them to be toxic.
FTFY. Under the Soviets, no one wanted for food, medical care, housing or education. Whereas over here in the Evil Empire, you had poor people eating out of dumpsters, dying from lack of basic medicine, and going to secondary school was a luxury.
You could cut the minimum wage in half and companies would still be looking to automate as much as possible. Automation is a shit excuse for paying poverty wages. When Amazon can replace all their workers with robots, all their workers are getting fired, whether they make $25 or 25 cents an hour.
The only thing Venezuela nationalized was their oil production, you ignorant boob. Their economy is still overwhelmingly capitalist, including all the sectors facing shortages used by tools like yourself to say "derp Venezuela socialism doesn't work derp".
Let's say your story is true, and not just an elitist pile of BS you just made up. Your real problem is with the management of that store, as they are the ones responsible for...wait for it...managing the employees. If all you have is pot smokers who show up late for work, then either management isn't doing their jobs, or you're getting what you pay for and need better wages if you want better workers
Actors and athletes would disagree. Pro football players make a few hundred thousand on average, far from being destitute - but they also risk life-long injuries and having 80 year old brains before they are 25, thanks to brain injuries. As for actors (and writers)....Disney will keep making money from movies they released in the 1930's for another century, if they keep getting their copyright extensions. That's why it's a good thing that unions fought for and won the right to residuals, so they're getting a chunk of those continued profits.
Unions act as a check against corporate greed. That greed affects workers on any end of the pay scale.
Your premise seems to be invalid.
Fixed. Alaska has a (small) UBI program in the form of state residents getting a check for oil revenue. Nationwide UBI would just be a larger version of that. And as the richest country in the history of the world, you can't say the money isn't there. You just don't want to go get it from the people who have taken it.
Randian whackjobbery. Companies hire to create the maximum profits for the minimum labor costs. What the minimum wage is set to is pretty much irrelevant to that equation. Unless your business can't exist while paying people a living wage - in which case your business doesn't deserve to exist.
They were always right wing. That's why National Pentagon Radio is sometimes referred to as Nice Polite Republicans.
No they don't. Amazon did nothing but lose money the first ten years of its existence. Uber loses billions of dollars every year. You don't have to make a profit when your goal is to drive out the competition, and/or you are floated with venture capital in the process of establishing a presence in the market.
It doesn't "cut both ways" because poor people having more money to spend means more economic activity. Local economic activity. Give a rich person a tax cut and he'll just invest it in another overseas tech stock. Give a poor person money and they'll spend it at Target or Home Depot.
More economic activity means more jobs, because there is more demand for goods and services. It also boosts wages for workers currently making more than minimum wage. No reason to keep working at that high stress call center job for $15, if stocking shelves at Walmart now pays the same. So now the call center has to pay $20 an hour. If a salaried manager at a company makes $20 an hour, why keep working 60 hours a week if he can make that much at the call center. And so on.
No - that's how dipshit talking points work. Other countries have double the minimum wage that the United States has, with none of that inflation and they pay comparable prices for consumer products. None of the states or cities that have increased the minimum wage have seen inflation.
This is just wingnut apologia for subjecting other people to generational poverty. Never to yourselves, of course.
As is always the case, when fascists try and attack socialism, they're describing the the flaws of capitalism. It is capitalism that rewards laziness, corruption and graft. It is capitalism that is dependent on a never-ending stream of cash and assets to sustain itself.