…for 80+ years, stating that every social program–Social Security, minimum wage, workplace safety laws, overtime pay, the 40-hour work week, Medicare, etc. would bring about the total destruction of American business and obliterate American Life as We Know It, despite the fact that that hasn’t happened, and that we’re still pretty well off, thank you, even with supporting all those lazy welfare bums and keeping people from dying on the job any more than necessary (really, the cheek of doing that!).
The spurious this-will-be-the-death-of-American-business argument is being dragged out yet again in opposition to Obamacare. I find it stupid and offensive, for both its fallaciousness AND its sheer meanness. I wish poverty, illness, and lifelong, persistent misery on every Republican, without, of course, any government assistance to relieve their plights, since accepting any such assistance would violate their principles.
I support this pitting. They think government’s so bad? Then let them try to get along without its help
Because we’re still a society with many poor people, we need to ensure that our public service programs can capture the poorest of the poor. If rich millionaires and billionaires need to make less money to do so, then that’s a terrific side effect.
That may be where yours and my opinions diverge, in that I don’t think making rich people less rich is an intrinsic good. I don’t think that rich people don’t deserve to be rich, or that the vast majority of them didn’t get that way through hard work and/or smarts. It’s just that the marginal utility of a dollar diminishes as you acquire more and more of them. $10,000 would be a trivial sum to Bill Gates, but it could keep a poor family alive for a year. Therefore, I support programs that would transfer some reasonable portion of such wealth. What the Republimorons miss is that even Bill Gates would benefit from such a transfer; he would live in a more peaceful, stable society. They only focus on the actual dollar amounts “taken” from the rich.
I do. I don’t think the vast majority of rich people came to be rich through working significantly harder or being significantly smarter than many poor and middle class people do and are. Indeed, our society is so arranged that most of the people who do the hardest, most unpleasant, work are amongst the poorest. Many, perhaps most, rich people inherited their wealth, or at any rate, inherited a large enough nest egg to make growing what they have through investment relatively easy and free of real risk. (Even if all their stocks tank, they are not going to wind up homeless.) Others rich people may have started small and worked for what they have (or rather, wheeled and dealed - no-one gets very rich just by doing lots of ordinary productive work), and they probably had to be smart about it, but what distinguishes them from the hordes of smart, hard working poor and middle class people is not exceptional levels of hard work and smarts, but the fact that they got the breaks.
The requirements for getting rich, if you weren’t born rich, are hard work, intelligence, chutzpa, and lots and lots of luck.
Well, I do get the impression–accurate or not–that your opinions are formed to bolster a basic dislike of the rich, in the sense that we’re all jealous of the privileges their wealth affords them. The liberal arguments that arise from that feeling are largely based on a way to justify that jealousy: we can more easily, and with a clearer conscience, take their wealth away if we convince ourselves that they didn’t earn it and thus, don’t deserve it anyway.
This attitude and the politics that it spawns is very understandable, but progressives have to realize that it weakens their agenda and provides conservatives with ammo to fight back against social progress. We must approach income redistribution from the standpoint of improving society rather than taking some kind of revenge on the rich. After all, we ARE taking money from people by force, or threat of it.
(By the way, my father got rich (before the IRS raped him, anyway) on pretty much the combination of elements you describe, but not in the proportion you imply: he was lucky, yes, but he also worked his ass off.)
You know what? Fuck that impression. The conservatives/GOP/Republicans/Teabags have managed, over the years, to brand any sort of reaction to wealth equality as “jealousy”. That’s a freakin’ lazy argument. We’re not jealous- we’re just willing to admit that the game favors those that have money, and the more money you have, the more it favors you… and that those with money are increasingly able to *change *the rules such that they favor the wealthy even more.
Especially the latter. That is why so few people who make tons of money with their first start up make any money with their second. They got lucky and they thought it was brains. Not that brains and hard work aren’t good, but plenty of people who are just as smart and hard working as those who made it don’t.
As for the OP, it goes further back than that. There was fear about the death of business when they put in the 40 hour week and outlawed child labor. However, back then it wasn’t necessarily Republicans who were having fits.
Four years ago I decided that I really “needed” an expensive as hell espresso maker. Since my husband balked at shelling out the $1200 market price on the machine, I decided to take a weekend job at the coffee chain. As an employee, I’d save 40% and could put my wages and tips towards the purchase. I got a Saturday/Sunday 5 hour evening shift. Figured it couldn’t be that difficult slinging lattes for the drive-thru crowd. The wage, less than a quarter of my “real” salary, didn’t bother me either. Figured it was commiserate with not requiring any “marketable” skills.
I lasted for two months and ended up settling for a far less high-end gadget. Turns out, it was freaking HARD work that taxed me both physically and emotionally. For the princely sum of $8/hr I was expected to stand on my feet for 5 hours, multi-task quickly and efficiently as part of an assembly line, learn to make a huge bevy of complicated drinks with endless customer-specified deviations, smile politely at rude and condescending blowhards (exercise those diplomacy skills), shill the company lingo ("can I get your name with that order? Would you like to try one of our delicious scones? How about a half price pound of our specialty roast today? Would you like to donate to our troops today by purchasing… and on, and on, all of the “not about my order and you are annoying the piss out of me” questions that I curtly fielded as a consumer). All while having a micro-managing assistant store manager breathing down my neck, monitoring performance on the upsells and the amount of required tasks that should have taken 8 hours and must be squeezed into 5. I washed dishes, mopped and swept and cleaned and mucked out toilets (and yes, people do routinely make enormous messes and several times I was snapping on gloves to fish used condoms from the floor behind the bowl; one enterprising young man found a way to shit and placed the intact item inside the regrettably unlocked paper towel dispenser).
I found that the menial, low wage job required that I utilize just about every skill I exercised at my 40 hour desk job, and I am not exaggerating. And my coworkers – mostly high school and college kids but quite a few older people who relied on the job for health insurance and to keep food on the table – worked their asses off too. Between the mandatory “rah rah” corporate meetings, the politicking of managers who held the golden keys of scheduling times, the mean ass customers, the never-ending you must be busy EVERY SECOND even if that sometimes means sweeping the clean floors again because you are ON THE CLOCK and you’d better learn to make 20 different beverages for a line of 12 cars and 10 impatient people inside the store and nobody better wait for more than 2 minutes and “Traci you forgot to ask for her NAME again, you didn’t ask if she’d like a slice of cinammmon coffee cake. I went with that, it was supposed to be 10 pumps of Vanilla not 5” … it was HARD work
Actually, I was more concerned with a specific flawed argument they make, which, strictly speaking, isn’t confined to Republicans.
I do think we should have a moratorium on bitching about threads bitching about Republicans, or for that matter, on bitching about threads that someone who doesn’t like the subject isn’t forced to read.
You’re not factoring in that “wealth equality,” as you term it, is a LOT more attractive to those who will receive money from it than to those from whom money will be taken as a result. Therefore, we absolutely must ensure that redistributional programs aren’t motivated by the fact that taking money from that rich guy over there and giving it to me seems like a swell idea.
And I don’t disagree with you that the game favors those with money–but so what? That doesn’t constitute an argument for taking money away from the winners of the game, any more than shooting any running back who crosses the goal line makes everyone else a better athlete. I think that, in fact, rich people would be more than “willing to admit” that the game favors them. They would argue that no one would play the game at all if that didn’t happen. And I wouldn’t like to see a society where no one played the game at all, except the government (that’s been tried).
What you might be missing is that ascribing success and wealth to nothing more than luck (and/or malfeasance) is hyperbolic at best and obscures the much more powerful arguments that exist for income redistribution. The proper approach is “You’re allowed to make money–congratulations, you’ve succeeded. Now it’s your civic duty to help those who, for whatever reason, haven’t been as successful.” This works better than, “You undeservedly fortunate scum, hand over that money that you only earned because you’re a lucky asshole or a crook.” If we were a Marxist/totalitarian state, we could use the latter argument because if anyone talked back, we’d shoot them. However, we don’t have that luxury–rich people vote, and (gasp!) have rights, too.
Meant to complete by saying, society dictates worth of a job. That brief barista stint gave me a glimpse into life of working poor I would not have otherwise had. It was not about my entitled ass getting a Verisimo. It was about my surprise at seeing just how HARD everyone worked. If I had that job full time, I would not have had the energy to seek secondary education opportunities.
I always thought, I work hard, I deserve what I have.
But no, working hard does not equate to a livable wage. 40% of public assistance recipients in MN are employed at or nearly full time. That statistic should not exist in a society that prides itself on bootstrap ethics.
Let me see if I can figure out why you posted this.
To illustrate that the poor/poorly paid work just as hard as the rich/well paid, if not harder. We knew that already. The compensation you receive from your work has very little to do with how hard that work is, but rather, its market value. If it’s something a lot of other people could do, it will be poorly paid. That doesn’t mean that the rich don’t work hard–it means that they work hard at something for which they are well compensated (either in an employment or entreprenurial context).
To illustrate that the same individual can earn x or 4x dollars, respectively, for the same amount but a different kind of work.
To keep us from buying espresso machines and therefore keep on shelling out for Starbucks (you bought some stock in that company didn’t you, you devil you!).
Are we supposed to conclude–since it was you doing both jobs–that you were underpaid at the coffee place or that you are overpaid at your regular job, since, it would seem, you work less hard at your regular job?
Or should we conclude that your pay in each case is/was appropriate (certainly, as far as the market is concerned, they were/are)?
Sorry. I wasn’t referring to your thread specifically. It just happened to be the one at the top of the Pit when I realized there were 2,200 of them going simultaneously.
But doesn’t the fact that said recipients are on public assistance, and that said assistance exists at all, indicate that we acknowledge that many fulltime workers do not earn a living wage? Given that that condition exists, do we fix it by a) forcing employers to pay a minimum wage or b) providing compensation to those whose earnings are inadequate? It seems that we do both, and neither of the measures we take would be sufficient in and of themselves. But a person earning minimum wage, together with the earned income credit and public assistance, can indeed get by.
Imagine if we did mutate to a society where “that statistic did not exist.” That would mean that everyone who worked full time earned a living wage that was equivalent to the current total of prevailing wage+income tax credits+public assistance. As a result, the price of virtually everything would be higher, and taxes would be lower. The result would be a massive shift of income from the poor to the rich.
It was a roundabout way of objecting to the notion that the rich work extra hard or do something spectacularly worthy to get rich.
I’m not wealthy by society standards, but comparitavely, to a full-time Wal-Mart associate (many earning full time wages low enough to qualify for SNAP, child care assistance, and state or federally funded medical assistance) I’m living large. I don’t see that I’ve done much different, aside from toking my way through college and obtaining a degree in the early 90’s, when that extra piece of paper actually meant something.