It can’t just apply to government jobs… the government is in the market looking for workers, and anyone else that employs people with similar skills will thus be forced to compete with that standard.
autz - well, at best, IMO, a living wage solution is a reform that alleviates some problems but not all problems. I really haven’t thought much about that kind of thing, honestly because such a solution ought to be the product of actual demands by people rather than a pre-thought out blueprint.
if the intent is to help people economically, why not make accounting mandatory in highschool. that shouldn’t cost taxpayers or business anything. just trash a year of english literature and replace it with accounting.
the banks sending credit cards to college freshman might not like it tho.
Shrug. Regional differences, I guess. Around here, it’s very difficult to find such apartments. There is subsidized housing, but there’s a huge waiting list to get into those places. I also live in the mountains, where ice can make it extremely difficult to get around a bike. And in terms of health care, there are plenty of people who make too much to afford Medicaid and too little to afford private insurance. “Don’t get sick” is not terribly helpful advice. I realize I’m not going to change your mind about any of this, but I am starting to think from your description that Sacramento must be a great place to be a poor person in.
Actually, I hadn’t looked at your particular chart until just now. I’ve seen the figures before, and I’m well familiar with economic trends over the past 25 years or so. So no, I wasn’t referring to a particular chart, just going off existing knowledge. But your charts didn’t contain anything I didn’t already know.
Also, when you say that those figures are in 1998 dollars without considering inflation, you’re contradicting yourself. “1998 dollars” means “taking into account inflation, how much these values would be equivalent to in 1998”.
That being said, I see nothing that the poor should be upset about with regards to those numbers, unless they’re just being jealous. Basically, it shows that the poor didn’t lose anything, and in fact made gains, just not nearly as much as the wealthy. Note that this doesn’t mean individual poor people have not gained much - as someone pointed out, many poor people become non-poor all the time. But as a class, the poor have gained only slightly.
As I stated before, if my income goes from $100k to $150k, and yours goes from $20k to $25k, the gap between us has widened, but you are still making more - class envy aside, how is this bad for you? Phrased another way, which would you rather choose: My income goes from $100k to $150k and yours goes from $20k to $25k, or mine goes from $100k to $101k and yours goes from $20k to $23k? In the latter case, the gap between us shrank… that must make it the better of the two, right?
I’m sure this is obvious to you all, but I certainly don’t support such a federally mandated “living wage”. And if I did support a “living wage”, it would be what is necessary for one person working full-time to support himself and only himself.
Jeff
But you see, there’s no such thing as a perfectly free market. There’s always a political aspect to the distribution of wealth, and wealth tends to flow to those who have the political clout to get it, often even when they’ve contributed little or nothing to the actual production of goods and services. This tends to be a matter of social and economic class. The pirates at Enron who looted the pension funds of lower level employees were able to do so because the laws allowed them to do so, and the laws allowed them to do so because the upper classes had manipulated the government to write the laws to suit themselves. Similarly the working people of nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and America lived in misery until they’d acquired the political clout to force the upper classes to share the wealth. The problem with the disparity of wealth and power between the upper and lower classes is that the upper classes will be able to use their wealth and power to direct even more wealth and power to themselves at the expense of the lower classes. The idea that we only have to get the government out of the way and let the miraculous free market work its wonders is tremendously naive.
You can’t separate wealth and political power.
( I don’t mean to suggest that it’s all politics, and we can simply ignore market forces whenever we find them inconvenient. No one here, and certainly not me, is advocating a Soviet style command economy.)
But you see, there’s no such thing as a perfectly free market. There’s always a political aspect to the distribution of wealth, and wealth tends to flow to those who have the political clout to get it, often even when they’ve contributed little or nothing to the actual production of goods and services. This tends to be a matter of social and economic class. The pirates at Enron who looted the pension funds of lower level employees were able to do so because the laws allowed them to do so, and the laws allowed them to do so because the upper classes had manipulated the government to write the laws to suit themselves. Similarly the working people of nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and America lived in misery until they’d acquired the political clout to force the upper classes to share the wealth. The problem with the disparity of wealth and power between the upper and lower classes is that the upper classes will be able to use their wealth and power to direct even more wealth and power to themselves at the expense of the lower classes. The idea that we only have to get the government out of the way and let the miraculous free market work its wonders is tremendously naive.
You can’t separate wealth and political power.
( I don’t mean to suggest that it’s all politics, and we can simply ignore market forces whenever we find them inconvenient. No one here, and certainly not me, is advocating a Soviet style command economy.)
There is such a thing as a perfectly free market. The fact that we don’t have one doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The fact that there is a certainly a “political aspect” to the distribution of wealth stems from the fact that there is so much regulation. To take an extreme view, pretend that we had system of perfect laissaze faire (probably spelled wrong) capitalism, with not a single regulation in sight. How would a company benefit from political clout? It couldn’t, because the government would be completely removed from the market, and thus unable to affect it. As soon as you create a regulation, you create an opportunity to exploit that regulation. The more regulations, the more opportunities to exploit. How many people do you think would cheat on your taxes if there was simply a flat tax rate, with no deductions? Far fewer than do now. The increased number of laws and regulations with regards to how you pay your taxes create a huge number of loopholes to exploit. The market is the same way. You want people with money to stop exploiting the system? Eliminate the laws they use to exploit it. Keep the laws that address blatant ethical infringements - fraud, deceit, etc. Axe the rest.
This whole paragraph is pretty much entirely wrong. The laws didn’t allow those at Enron to do any of the shady things they did. That’s why there are criminal investigations running. If what Enron did was against the law, then why are the execs being investigated and indicted?
This being the case, I see no reason to create new laws. We may need to do a better job of enforcing the old ones, but I don’t see a reason for new laws, with the possible exception of some sort of conflict-of-interest law designed to keep accounting and consulting more separate - and I’m not 100% convinced even that is necessary. The market decline you’re seeing right now is the best incentive to keep executives honest. The companies that had shady accounting records are dropping like flies. Investors are telling firms “Keep it clean, or screw off.” This is going to do more for corporate ethics than any number of regulations could. What’s a better incentive, “Be honest, or you’ll go to prison for a few years”, or “Be honest, or your company will collapse and you’ll go bankrupt”?
Sure you can - by limiting government intereference with the free market.
Jeff
Food has to be grown somewhere. Since the land food is grown on is private property, so is the food.
And while people do not have to work to make air and water exist (air is everywhere and water falls from the sky), people do have to work to make food (planting crops, harvesting crops, raising animals, etc.). In cases where water is not free (meaning low rainfall and/or no local wells or rivers), the people do have to pay for water (most of us have water bills everyone month).
True, not as spoiled as many Europeans, but spoiled nonetheless.
Organized labor is great as long as there are no laws involved. I fully support the right of people to strike. I also the support the right of the business to fire all of those striking workers and replace them with people that want a job. It is only when there is no one to replace the striking workers that strikes should be effective.
They die. Let me show you how to design a low-budget life. You acquire a set of clothes warm enough to allow you to sleep outside and you purchase a bucket of lard for sustenance. Done. That is all. Sound cruel? I didn’t think so when I lived like that. When I got my first job I didn’t have enough for rent and food even with a roommate. I calculated that it was cheaper to purchase a bucket of lard and a bottle of multi-vitamins than it was to purchase real food (this is especially true since most multi-vitamins give you more per pill than you need to survive so I took 1/5 of a pill per day). It involved some health problems, but I survived. I eventually got enough for a better diet by adding another roommate.
I didn’t want to share my tail of woe, but these people that say that they cannot live on minimum wage are not even trying (I did not even mention the more disgusting ways I conserved money). When I got sick (and did I ever) I just waited to get better. I was frequently sick for months at a time. I didn’t take Welfare or Medicaid because those things are stealing. The money does not come from the government, it comes from our neighbors. And if I wanted to steal from my neighbors, I would steal directly. It was one thing when someone chose to give me a little food or when a private charity gave me a nicer set of clothes, but I have to assume that anything that comes from the government was stolen from an unwilling tax-payer. If the government had not taken so much money from each tax-payer, there might have been some left over for them to give to the poorer people.
I have nothing against compassion. I like compassion. But when the government gives you something that they pried from the hands of he who worked for it, that is not compassion.
As my above example shows, you really can. The odds of living to 80 (or even 60) are much smaller under such circumstances, but living to be old is a luxury.
The vast majority of people that claim they cannot make ends meet have fewer people living in their home than they can afford (e.g. they only have 1 roommate when they should have 2 or 3). There are indeed laws that prevent us from cramming too many people into a small area, but when you are poor there is little you can do but ignore those biased laws.
I cannot deny that many of our government’s regulations (such as minimum wage) have made my life easier, but I cannot say that that makes them right.
Lets just stick to the business world for now. I take it that you feel employers shouldn’t pay minimum wage (or less) because it isn’t “nice”. I am simply telling you that the market does not care about “niceness”. Labor wages are affected by the same market forces as tosters, bananas or widgets. If you make it too expensive for businesses to operate, they will simply pack up and move their operations out of the country. That’s one of the main reasons most manufacturing has moved overseas. Between unions and government regulations, it just became too expensive to pay someone to stitch Nike logos onto sneakers.
Yes, it is cruel. Nobody should have to live like that in a world where humanity is capable of producing enough food to adequately feed the world’s population three times over. If property rights are being used as an excuse to cause human suffering, then property rights must go. Human dignity must come ahead of profit.
El Jeffe, I think if you do some research into Enron you’ll discover that there’s a very strong case to made for deregulation of various kinds having played a large hand in the current scandals. In fact it is not proving easy in the least to indict executives. Anderson was gotten for shredding documents that obstructed the government’s investigation, not for fraudulent accounting. As you are a new poster you might want to check into one of the many Enron threads that took place over this issue a few months back.
Your last couple of posts are so riddled with debatable assertions–entirely unsupported by credible evidence–that I would have to hijack this thread to Cuba to respond to more than one of them.
I’ll limit myself to this one.
In your last statement you assert that it’s possible to “separate wealth and political power” by “limiting government interference with the free market.”
I confess, I’m not entirely sure what you mean there. Government “interference” is the vaguest of concepts: it can describe anything from enforcing speed limits on the nation’s highways to full-scale fascism.
Let me offer a counter-assertion and see if you’re willing to accept it. I maintain that the right kind of government interference–judicious regulation of business, in this instance–can indeed limit the political power of wealth in the interests of preserving democracy. (It is also absolutely necessary to the functioning of capitalism over the long run; but that is yet another potential hijack.) I assume that you know what a plutocracy is, and recognize that it poses a legitimate threat to democracy in a society rife with socio-economic inequality. Perhaps you can say how you think that the so-called free market can operate on its own to curb plutocratic tendencies. Or perhaps you’d rather acknowledge that your statement was exaggerated in the first place and stick to more defensable positions.
Yer livin’ in a dream world, bub.
It’s not only cruel, it’s insane. You are quite mad if you think people should just accept such living conditions because the “market” dictates it.
Quite right Polecat. Not to mention the fact that the health of the economy, in the US and throughout the globe, depends on consumer demand. Economies do best when everyone has purchasing power beyond the bare means of subsistence. The most cursory knowledge of the history of capitalism teaches that. Hence, the “market” dictactes no such thing.
I’ve just read over Procacious’ most recent contributions to this thread and I’m simply floored. I cannot even begin to hope to fathom how it is possible to think as s/he does. There is nothing there worth replying to, IMO. Yinzall can carry on with him/her there if you want, but there are other far more palatable fish to fry in this discussion.
ElJeffe: Neither scenario is acceptable to me. Primarily because of my stance on capitalism as a class society and therefore a producer and sustainer of social, economic, and political inequality, but more specifically because the increase in income for the bottom two quintiles in either situation often proves to be insufficient to match the increase in the cost of living. Add to that the fact that most people in that category are devoting more of their income to paying off credit debt, and it becomes quite clear how woefully insufficient such increases are. It’s not the gap I’m worried about, it’s the actual effects on people’s lives that concern me.
msmith: Note, though, that the companies who move their factories overseas don’t just pick up and move anywhere. They move to countries that already possess a developed infrastructure, like Singapore or Indonesia, so they don’t have to spend money on new factories and roads and suchlike in order to support their productive capacity. You don’t see Nike factories in places like Nepal or the poorest countries of Africa, do you?
Overall, though, I have about as much sympathy for the industrialists as some of you apparently do for the poor. Those studies I’ve looked at show how much of the national wealth is being disproportionately raked in by the richest 40% of the country, and demanding that they return a larger portion of that for increased wages and social spending programs is not only fair but necessary.
Finally, the one common thread that seems to run through the arguments of those on the other side of this debate is the view of the market as something standing outside and above society, as inviolable as the laws of nature and of physics. It’s not. The market is a social creation, the product of a society organized upon the principle of the means of production being held privately. Society governs the market, not the other way around, and the elimination of the market and the system that supports it does not spell the end of society. The market can and must be questioned, and when it comes down to the question of increased profits for the industrialists or better wages and social support for those who work for them, I unhesitatingly side with the latter. (As if you didn’t know. ;))
Bucket? You had a bucket? Why when I was a lad we didn’t have such luxury! We had to carry around our lumps of lard in our bare hands.
Just wondering, have you ever eaten on an expense account? Have you ever seen someone use a company car to pick the kids up from school?
Now, have you ever seen a hardworking man who was layed off be humiliated by using foodstamps because he can’t make a living wage?
As far as claiming that people shouldn’t have children they can’t support, I suppose that in the world you live in nobody has ever been laid off. I’ll tell you the truth, I think this world would be a lot better off if the fat cats who live off of the work of others were the ones that “shouldn’t reproduce”.
Grendel, you apparently didn’t read what I said very closely.
Waste and abuse happens all the time. No doubt about it. But WHY? Because the company doesn’t care? Because the management is lax and just needs the right incentive to ‘shape up’? No. By and large, companies do the best they can to control expense accounts and such, but at some point you just can’t do any more. What are you going to do, send spies out to make sure your employees aren’t expensing things they shouldn’t? If so, is your ‘spy’ budget costing more than the losses its preventing?
So you try to scale back expense accounts, but now your salesmen are unhappy because they are losing sales. Maybe more auditing? More accounting? These are very expensive things to do.
Waste and fraud exists. Companies are trying to control it as best they can, because it’s THEIR money that is being lost. Passing a minimum wage law will not allow you to wave a magic wand and somehow turn fraud and waste into a revenue stream to pay workers. It just doesn’t work that way.
You are correct Sam, I overreacted and replied before I’d really read the thread or your response.
What bothers me (and this was from a different poster and I’m not accusing you of saying this) about the arguments against paying a living wage is the judgmentalism that creeps into comments like “they shouldn’t have children if they can’t afford them”. To my ears that argument sounds like this: “those plebians shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce, we shall have to send Biff and Buffy to private school so they needn’t mingle with the spawn of workers.”
Doubling the minimum wage would be a disaster, but those who have to make ends meet on that cash are not bad people. There but for the grace of god go I.