So you are saying I have to find a country that is exactly like the US but has some other economic system to make a valid comparison? My, that is setting the bar very high. Perhaps you are trying to say that the energy wealth of Finland is what creates the entrepreneurial culture? That makes no sense of course. There are plenty of other countries that are net exporters of oil that are miserable Third World hellholes run by wealthy dictators and a small oligarchy consisting of their family and friends, with everyone else poor as hell. Instead Finland invests in its people, who return that investment with a vibrant entrepreneurial economy. Taxes are high, but the risk of failure is small. Life is good. America could stand to emulate that.
This is really not what “Keynes would tell you”. In general Keynesians are pretty skeptical about wage reductions as a way of reducing unemployment during a recession. For one thing there isn’t a lot of evidence that 15$/hour workers consume a lot more than 30$/hour workers. Perhaps a bit more but probably not that much. Secondly your example assumes that the demand for labour is fairly elastic, halving the wage rate doubles the demand. This is pretty unrealistic in the short run. If the demand is somewhat inelastic, total wages would go down reducing demand. This would be much closer to a typical Keynesian argument that what you are saying.
This is pretty much the opposite of what I have heard from the likes of [David Brooks](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/opinion/04brooks.html?ref=davidbrooks):
So Obama is doing exactly what you say he isn’t: taking on powerful unions to reform education in failing schools.
Do you have a source for this? Frankly it sounds like a BS right-wing talking point.
So what? This may not help the poor much but I don’t see how it hurts them.
It just means that the Democrats comprise a broad range of constituencies coming from both the poor and the middle class and have to balance their different demands. Over the decades the Democrats have done a lot to help the poor as well: Medicaid, Head Start, EITC expansion etc.
So, you have no real plan? Just a reinforcement of the “social safety net” system that is already a failure, in terms of creating and maintaining economic and educational growth.
Re: mandating a 30-hour work week - what business is it of yours how much people want to work? Unless, of course, you want to further drag everyone into a dull lower-middle class, where no one is allowed to work harder than their peers. I guess that counts as “fair” :rolleyes:
And a newsflash for you - most people who are poor have not the skills or the drive to open a new business. Based on your attitude, I would assume as much - your refusal to recognize how hard and risky it is to open and maintain a business is obvious by your snide dismissal of “businesses.”
It was wrong in the sense of not corresponding with reality. You claimed
As it turns out, “those at the bottom” typically do not work 12 hour days. Almost three quarters of them, in fact.
Your claim, in other words, that those at the bottom have to work 12 hour days was wrong. Incorrect. Not true. Other than valid. At variance with the established facts. Complete horseshit.
Not sure I can make it any clearer than that.
Regards,
Shodan
I know this wasn’t quoted at me, but if this is type of vigilance that you advocate, then you will surely run a disastrous economy far faster and with far more upheaval then the way things are currently going.
Every “liberal” idea of improving the economy always starts with hamstringing productivity and ends with stifling innovation. You should add another bureaucracy for the trifecta.
Unless you’re taking the Glenn Beck position – contemporary progressivism is identical with the early 20th century flavor – you’re mixing apples and oranges. Certainly society as a whole was racist in the early 20th century, and certainly the strains of progressivism in various eras has done good things as well as bad; that doesn’t alter the fact that early 20th century progressivism was indeed supportive of eugenics.
Here’s a suggestion: it’s a lot easier to understand the world when you stop feeling obligated to defend everything a perceived “us” has done, and impugning everything from a perceived “them.”
It doesn’t.
I don’t think many would disagree.
Call me crazy, but I have a feeling there were a lot of changes that affected society over the last few hundred years. I’m not going to get into a historical argument, but suffice it to say I think your rendering a bit simplistic.
And this is where you are completely at odds with the facts.
And this, frankly, reveals a hell of lot.
Your attempt to avoid the issue with your usual diversionary tactics is noted. The success of the stimulus package in holding down unemployment is at this point pretty well established.
The reason I brought up Walker is that he is using exactly the same tactic you are - cutting revenues with the tax cut diode and then trying to pit the various groups who are hurt against each other. The tactic is dishonest and despicable. And counting Republicans as protectors of the poor and weak would be insane even for Glen Beck. They did really well under a Republican Congress and Administration, didn’t they?
What diversionary tactics would those be? You’re the one who tried to change the subject to Walker in Minnesota, when I was talking about general trends. And because I don’t shift with you, I’m the one using diversionary tactics?
No, it’s really not. You guys keep trumpeting the CBO’s continual updates as proof, despite being shown that all the CBO can do is re-run the models given to them that they used for the original estimates. Since it’s the models themselves that are in question, the CBO’s estimates are useless for this debate.
In fact, we have a situation where the original estimates for unemployment with and without the stimulus turned out to be grossly wrong. The pro-stimulus folks immediately blamed it on initial conditions that were worse than anticipated, rather than on a failure of the stimulus itself. In other words, the stimulus worked and unemployment would have been much worse without it. But in fact, there have been a number of papers from good economists in the past two years examining the assumptions behind the stimulus and finding them wanting. There are a number of papers that have found multiplier effects lower than the estimates baked into the models.
It’s true that conditions appear to have been somewhat worse than anticipated, but it’s not clear at all whether they make up the sum total of the difference between the stimulus estimate and reality. You don’t get to claim that this is a closed issue. Economists will be debating the value of the stimulus for years.
Oh, I see. So you don’t believe that there’s a limited pool of funds available for government operations without raising taxes or cutting benefits on the middle class? Is ‘the rich’ such a bottomless well of potential government funding that 53 billion in high speed rail won’t crowd out any other government funding? Or that Wisconsin can close a multi-billion dollar biennial deficit without cutting any services, just by taxing the rich more?
If you agree that you can’t close the gap with taxes on the rich, then it’s a zero-sum game to an extent - any dollar that goes to the benefit package of a public employee is a dollar that won’t be spent on other government programs.
So tell me - which other programs in Wisconsin would you cut so that the public unions could have their benefits? Or do you agree with the benefit cuts?
Isn’t that because they believe wages are sticky and hard to reduce, and not that reductions wouldn’t be useful?
But we’re not talking about wage reductions here. We’re talking about new jobs. What’s more stimulative - hiring two people at $15 each, or hiring one at $30 and leaving the other unemployed? And since the unemployed person is probably collecting government unemployment benefits anyway, wouldn’t it be more cost effective to put that person to work?
I said no such thing. Maybe offering jobs to non-union workers at half the rate would have resulted in a 10% increase in the labor pool. I don’t know. Either way, it would have been more stimulative.
But wait - if total wages went down, then you’d have more money left over in your stimulus that you could spend elsewhere. The same amount of money is going to be spent in either case - but in the non-union case, more unemployed people get put to work. Keeping people in the workforce is a big deal, since the longer someone stays unemployed, the harder it is to re-enter the workforce. So this would be a social good and would help speed the recovery once more jobs become available. Plus, money given to a person who is unemployed will see a greater proportion spent than money given to a worker who already makes an above-median salary.
But there’s another fairly large factor that comes into play when you demand that ‘prevailing wages’ be paid - it slows down implementation, because the government has to do time-consuming prevailing wage analysis in each region where it wants to do a project before it can budget the project.
For example, the Weatherization Assistance Program had $5 billion in stimulus funds attached to it. Under the Bush Administration the WAP was exempted from Davis-Bacon requirements, but that requirement was added in the stimulus bill. As a result, states had to delay implementation because contractors could not figure out how much they’d have to pay employees until the state completed prevailing wage analysis.
This is what the GAO said about this in its interim report on the stimulus at the end of 2009:
Here’s an article from Politifact showing how this program has been tied up because of the unions:
The article goes on to identify the reasons why this program failed as a stimulus. Among them:
It’s pretty clear that the unions managed to pull this waiver, and in doing so they delayed by a number of months the implementation of a stimulus plan that was supposed to employ 87,000 workers. And that’s just one program. Many other infrastructure projects would have been delayed for the same reason.
Furthermore, plenty of people made the argument that this would happen before it was signed into law. It was quite obvious that prevailing wage requirements would damage the effectiveness of the stimulus. The Democrats put it in anyway, because they answer to the unions.
I already gave Obama credit as an honest reformer - The problem is that the Democrats in Congress are decidedly not reformers. The only way he could get any reform at all was to wave a 4 billion dollar carrot in front of the teachers. True meaningful reform in the basic way schools are operated and in allowing for private charter schools is pretty much stonewalled.
I give lots of credit to Obama for his efforts on school reform, and I’ve posted on that in the past. But all he can do at this point is offer rhetoric, because meaningful reform can’t get through congress or the bureaucrats at the Dept. of Education.
The demand for charter schools is so high that openings in the current ones are given out by lottery, and there are always many applicants for each open position. These schools are having the most effect in the inner cities where the public schools are godawful. This should be a priority of the government, and Republicans are in lockstep in favor of this kind of reform. It’s Democrats who are blocking the move to more charter schools.
Stimulus Funds net Wayland Teachers $1250 lump sum
Two Americas - Public Sector gains in recession
Manhattan Moment: Obama puts public sector employees ahead of private sector
The stimulus act was written to encourage this - it specifically allowed stimulus funds to be used to ‘retain’ jobs, which gave Democrats and union leaders in various states wiggle room to give out wage increases and claim that they had to do that to prevent teachers from quitting or leaving the state.
In addition, the stimulus act accounting allowed for a wage increase to be treated as a percentage of a job. So if you give 100,000 people a 10% raise, you ‘created’ 10,000 jobs by the logic of the stimulus. This also gave state governments the cover they needed to get away with using stimulus money to increase pay of public workers:
MSNBC Stimulus Watch: Pay raise counted as saved job
Really? How do you save a ‘portion of a job’ by giving someone a raise? Again, it’s very interesting that the language of the stimulus allowed government to funnel pay raises to public union employees, then cover their tracks by counting the raises as ‘jobs saved’.
And yet, Democrats stick by the claim that the stimulus did exactly what they predicted it to do, despite reams of evidence that it was badly managed, inefficient, that a lot of it went to pay increases for people already making above the national median income, and that many of the programs that were supposed to directly create jobs were delayed or mismanaged and never created anything like the number of jobs they were supposed to. Couple that with accounting chicanery, and it’s a mess.
It hurts them because of opportunity cost. 53 billion dollars is not chump change, and that’s just the federal government’s contribution. The state governments are also supposed to kick in a bunch of money. The states are all in debt and struggling to find ways to balance the budget now. Programs for the poor are being cut.
Saying this has nothing to do with the poor is like saying that Republicans pushing for a tax cut on the rich has nothing to do with the poor. In an era where government is swimming in debt and revenue sources are drying up, you need to treat the budget as a zero-sum game. 53 billion ‘invested’ in high speed rail is 53 billion that won’t be spent on other government programs or applied to the debt.
I suppose if you believe that all of this can be funded and the deficit fixed and the debt paid down if only the rich are made to pay their ‘fair share’, then you can claim that HSR doesn’t hurt the poor. But that would be a foolish claim.
[QUOTE=sleestak]
Yet again we come to the basis of your philosophy ‘Do it my way or else…’ even when it hurts the poor.
[/QUOTE]
How the heck is stating that if you disagree with the law that the proper course to advocate changing it considered “Do it my way or else…” Are you even familiar with democratic governance?
And the difference between civil disobedience and criminality is that former breaks the law to highlight its injustice and campaigns to abolish the law, so their acts are no longer illegal. The latter seeks to break the law only for their personal benefit and could care less if their actions become legal or not.
And I have stated what the basis of my philosophy is several times, but you can continue to chase ghosts that only exist in your own mind.
[QUOTE=sleestak]
Serious question. Do you think that the fact a cab medallion goes for $600,000 is a reasonable price to run a cab? If so, how do you reconcile that with ‘we need to give them to people at the bottom to allow them to earn non-wage income and not rely on the labor market.’?
[/QUOTE]
Serious question. Do you honestly think the $600,000 is the average price for a cab medallion, especially in the jurisdictions where the gypsy driver was operating? As to whether $600,000 is a fair price for a New York medallion, well, that price is determined by future cash flows and all the other standard business valuation techniques. For all I know, that could be cheap compared to the future earnings it would enable.
[QUOTE=sleestak]
Second, how do you know that the cab driver was not working towards changing the law?
[/QUOTE]
No evidence was presented in that short blurb. If there is evidence that he was, then it was a total journalistic fail on the part of Reason, which does not help their credibility either.
[QUOTE=Shodan]
As it turns out, “those at the bottom” typically do not work 12 hour days. Almost three quarters of them, in fact.
Your claim, in other words, that those at the bottom have to work 12 hour days was wrong. Incorrect. Not true. Other than valid. At variance with the established facts. Complete horseshit.
[/QUOTE]
Yet you accept without evidence the claim that three quarters or more of those at the top work 12 hour days, ignore the substantial claim that those who do work 12 hour days at the bottom work harder than those at the top who supposedly work the equivalent hours, and ignore the inference that no matter how many hours worked, labor done by the poor takes more of a toll on them than the labor done by those at the top over equivalent hours. The claim was never that all the poor work 12 hour days, or that they must work 12 days, but those that do have to work 12 days, or 8 hours or 2 hours, generally work harder than those at the top. I’ve spent time on both sides of the spectrum. I know which side made me collapse in bed as soon as I got home, and it was not the side where I spent the majority of my time at a desk or in meetings. And I know which side that if I got hurt or injured, that I hoped it happened on the job since at least worker’s comp was available. Health benefits certainly weren’t.
So I do smell horseshit, but it ain’t coming from me.
[QUOTE=furt]
Unless you’re taking the Glenn Beck position – contemporary progressivism is identical with the early 20th century flavor – you’re mixing apples and oranges.
[/QUOTE]
Which is exactly what the author in the video did, and is what I challenged. And while progressives have discarded social Darwinism, the same is not true of conservatives. Hell, that is the major foundation of their platform. Only those fit to earn a living are entitled to receive one.
And I am sure that the world gets easier to understand when one stops challenging the misinformation and outright lies by one’s opponents, lies such as those by that author. Sadly, the understanding will have little to no correlation to reality.
Good thing I did not go back over the last few hundred years, but just the last few decades. And since this is a message board, and not a research conference, simplistic is generally the best we get. And libertarians should be careful who they call simplistic.
Budget and staffing levels have increased, barely in pace with GDP or population growth, but not enough to ensure effective enforcement of the regulations they monitor. Several agencies barely have the resources to do that monitoring. And the size of the police force doesn’t matter if all they do is sit at their desk and eat donuts, or conversely is the crime rate increases even faster that the number of officers. And similar effects have occurred over the the last decades. And the problem is only exacerbated at the state and local levels. Staffing levels are one the major complaints of most regulators, along with the size of their enforcement budget.
[QUOTE=Sateryn76]
And a newsflash for you - most people who are poor have not the skills or the drive to open a new business. Based on your attitude, I would assume as much - your refusal to recognize how hard and risky it is to open and maintain a business is obvious by your snide dismissal of “businesses.”
[/QUOTE]
Newflash - a lot more poor people do have the skills and drive to open a new business then you appear to give them credit for.
Measuring the informal economy is always difficult, since one of the main purposes is avoid reporting requirements and it operates primarily on a cash or barter basis, but estimates show it ranges from 10% to as high as 25% of GDP, and about an equal percentage of the population working in that sector. PDF.
A large number of successful small businesses were also started by immigrants with few skills. A major reason why is that those immigrant communities are great in helping newcomers get established. Teaching those skills and developing that drive are not that difficult, as several micro-business development programs have shown. What is lacking is the access to start up funds and operating capital until they are established, and the willingness to scale up those programs to make them available to the majority of the population and offer them a viable alternative to becoming a wage laborer.
And even established firms are having difficulty to expand their businesses since the banks are hoarding their cash and are less willing to loan funds.Cite.
Promoting policies that capture even half of the informal economy would spur major job growth and increase tax revenue. A majority of those earners do not pay FICA and other payroll taxes on those incomes, even though many do work in legitimate jobs and work long enough to qualify for benefits.
Benefits that will be lower since they are short-changing themselves now since that supplemental income is needed to make ends meet now. Plus I doubt they have high expectations of living to retirement and being able to quit working. Ain’t no point in saving for a rainy day, when every day is a downpour.
Again, the goal is not to shift the entire poor, working or not, into become self-earners, but enable those who are capable or willing to do so, and thus help relive unemployment for those that want to remain wage earners by increasing the number of legitimate employers and decreasing the total number of job seekers.
And it is worth removing distortions that prevent that shift, but it is also worth promoting incentives to encourage it.
No, I mean to replace/shore up a social safety net that is a failure at keeping people healthy and sheltered. Food is not a failure, overall, in most places, but it’s slowly heading that way. The idea of the social safety net is not to create and maintain economic growth, it’s to keep people alive and healthy while unemployed, so they can participate in economic growth in boom times, not being dead or seriously ill.
Somehow I doubt people will be clamoring for more work at the same wage. Call me a cynic! I suppose I should have specified, the wages would be the same for the 30-hour week as for the old 40-hour week. We’ve asked employees to work more productively, and in many cases, longer hours for the same pay, now it’s time to ask employers to take a little hit. I know, awfullest thing in the world to make management instead of labor to take a hit, would you like me to take out my itty-bitty violin to serenade you as you grieve?
And if you’d read my post more carefully, you’d see that people who want more out of their lives could use their free time to educate themselves more, start new businesses, etc. Hell even the people who have no real ambition could spend more time with their families … a great thing for society now that both spouses in a family work for a living, typically. The benefits here could be awesome!
But many have the skills and the drive to study, especially if they can do so cheaply at a community college.
And I do recognize how hard and risky it is to open and maintain a business, I want it to be considerably LESS difficult and LESS risky so more people can participate in this capitalism thing I hear so much about on the Dope from conservatives.
I am sure there were people who said the same thing when the work week was reduced from 60 hours to 40 hours back in the day. Doom and gloom, sky is falling, peasants are revolting! Yawn.
This assumes that money saved by paying lower wages is immediately spent on new projects. Given the shortage of shovel ready projects this may not happen and the money may not be spent for a while. The choice may be between creating 10 jobs at $15 today and perhaps more spending later and 8 jobs at $30 today. You can make a case for either and the idea that Keynesian arguments necessarily dictate the first isn’t really true
Your other point about Davis-Bacon delaying implementation may be true for some programs but I wonder how widespread it is. From the same GAO report that you quote
Still I would agree that Davis-Bacon could have been suspended for at least a few programs like the WAP.
This is just not true. First of all I would dispute that Race to the Top is some kind of giveaway. As Brooks says it offers money only in return for real reform. Secondly Arne Duncan is also a reformist and he runs the Department of Education and has certainly done more than offer rhetoric. For example:
I think what this education reform shows is that Democratic administrations are willing to take on core Democratic interest groups in the interests of good economic policy. Obviously they don’t do this all the time otherwise those interest groups wouldn’t remain part of the Democratic party and you have to balance good policy with good politics to get anything done. However this has happened before as well. Clinton defied unions to get NAFTA passed. He decided on the advice of his economists to focus early in his administration to focus on deficit reduction at the expense of greater government spending something that would surely have pleased his party more. I would struggle to find comparable examples of the recent Bush administration defying a key corporate lobby on a major issue. The last comparable example I can think of is HW Bush agreeing to raises taxes as part of a deficit reduction bill and of course this is widely viewed as heresy by today’s GOP even though it laid the foundations for the good economy of the 90’s.
I really don’t understand this argument. Are you saying that any program which doesn’t directly help the poor hurts the poor? So hypothetically a proposal to spend 50 billion on the poor and 50 billion on the middle class hurts the poor because it doesn’t all go to them? That is just not the way US politics works or should work. The Democratic party has never claimed to represent only the poor and obviously no viable political party could do that. Like I said they represent a wide range of groups from both the poor and the middle class and pursue programs to help both. Over the years they have expended a fair amount of political capital creating and defending programs to help the poor. And they have also pursued other initiatives like high-speed rail to help the environment and improve infrastructure. There is no contradiction between the two.
There you go again. Please show where I - or anyone else - has demanded that the gap be closed exclusively by taxing the rich. The problem - in Wisconsin, in California, and elsewhere - is that Republicans refuse to consider any tax increases at all. In California they refuse to even let the people vote for a potential tax extension (not even an increase.)
Your false dichotomy is that either the entire gap gets closed by taxing the rich or the entire gap gets closed by cutting pay for state workers and/or benefits to the people. In fact the usual Democratic proposal - in California at least - is a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. Please explain to me why this is unacceptable to Republicans, and why you refuse to even consider it as an option.
So - do you support a tax increase on the rich (at least) to help close the gap, with the understanding that other measures will no doubt be necessary also?
Yes, anyone who takes tax increases off the table is not serious about deficits. Moderate spending cuts are much more feasible than massive spending cuts and therefore a combination of tax increases and moderate spending cuts is much more feasible than a combination of constant taxes and massive spending cuts. Secondly as a matter of history, the US has actually achieved massive deficit reduction successfully as recently as the 90’s and it was achieved by a combination of tax increases and spending restraint. The logical and pragmatic step would be to replicate that success and it can’t be done without tax increases.
I agree that regulation is part of the problem, but its because they are applied to the detriment of the little people, and dissolved when it is to the benefit of the big players at the top. Example - Glass Steagal dissolved.
Your hair braiding example fits this perfectly, where the little guy can’t compete with those that already have an established market with political connections.
There should be more regulations that empower the little people, and less regulations that give more power to the big players.
Companies like Monsanto for example already have a greater advantage via political connections, lawyers and lobbyists than any little seed start up company could ever have.
Any regulations would be a pittance for Monsanto to pay while it would kill off any competition at the bottom that cannot afford those costs.
I would absolutely support tax increases, but I cannot do so without a proposal that also seriously slashes spending. This has to be a two-sided solution.
And addresses the coming explosion in entitlement spending. And telling the public unions (among others) who go into meltdown mode when they are asked to pay for more of their own health care to go pound sand.
Regards,
Shodan
Agree. Unfortunately Republicans don’t. As I mentioned, in California both parties agree that spending cuts are required, but the Republicans don’t even want the state to vote on keeping the taxes we have now.
Uh, not exactly. They went into meltdown mode when, after they agreed to this, Pig Walker took away their right to bargain. Let’s try to be a little accurate, can we?