You really think taxes are going to decrease with the way the deficit has been increasing the last two years?
This is only true in terms of dollars, not hours.
Supply and demand determines your trades hours to dollars ratio. Comparing in dollars means nothing.
Does a pop star labor 100 times more hours than the guy that owns your local major car dealership?
Doubt it, but they may well have 100 times more money.
People further up the scale produce more dollars than they consume, not hours.
Ever known a poor person who had hundreds of people who work for them?
No, only rich people.
It’s kind of the basic formula for being rich.
If a minimum wage worker can only get goods and services from another minimum wage worker or above then there’s no way they can afford everything that makes up a modern lifestyle. No matter how much the rich give some of the money back to all of them.
You just can’t make something from nothing.
If I work minimum wage I can only afford to buy what I need because it’s made by people who make $2 an hour.
If I’m a doctor and want to buy a jaguar and a 3000sf house on a well maintained golf course I can only afford to do that because the people providing it make $15 an hour to my $150.
All those forms of redistribution don’t do anything but close the gap a little. They make those with more money have a little less and those with less money have a little more.
We’re not creating more product by handing some of the money back down.
What’s with the obsession with hours? If someone can do something in an hour that provides them a great deal of wealth (Taylor Swift peforming at a concert, HRC giving a speech to investment bankers, Tom Brady playing a football game, etc), kudos to them.
The people buying an iPhone are benefitting by some time from someone who stamps them out in a Chinese factory for $2/hour, but also the engineer that designed it and the programmer that wrote the OS updates, and the supply chain management that made sure the appropriate parts arrived at the factory in the appropriate times and quantities, and the marketer that came up with the ad campaign to sell them, etc.
Probably not, but I can hope, can’t I?
Trying to understand how , they would apparently not be any less affordable if they were manufactured in the US.
Since international trade and cheap labor
I guess doesn’t subsidize our lifestyles.
It wasn’t the landlord who forced me out, very much the landlord wanted me to stay. In exchange for the low rent I was essentially the building manager doing maintenance and light repairs. Everyone else in the place was paying at least twice the rent I was. Unfortunately, no one is living there now and due to the ongoing problems generated by the county the landlord can’t rent it out again, either. In a nutshell, road construction f***ed the utilities for everyone on that side of the street. Can’t live in a place with no power, no heat, and no water. Lawsuits have been filed but they take time.
The landlord has refunded me the rent from September from the point we lost utilities. He’s also letting me use my old apartment for free storage until I can finish going through/liquidating the 30 years of stuff accumulated from when my late husband and me were together as well as what’s left of the tools and stuff from his prior business. Because I don’t have to do that in a rush I’m getting more money for it (yay, rebuilding savings!) and less stress for me. I should be done by May or June if not sooner.
Anyhow, I knew I’d never get a deal like that again which is why I stayed in that building despite some problems with the neighborhood. Financial solvency allows one to cope with a lot of other problems better.
I’m still solvent, but saving or rebuilding savings after an emergency is going to be MUCH harder than it was. My savings are down slightly after four such this year (had to have a tow and vehicle repair memorial day, medical treatment for a hand injury, death in the family, and an unexpected move) but I still have, as I said, six-eight months of cash banked and was able to put $750 back into savings at the end of December (thanks to overtime, largely, working retail during the holiday season and selling off my comic book collection. I had been collecting since the 1970’s).
But, again, not everyone could do this, in part because aside from one very expensive hobby I’m no longer indulging I have never had extravagant desires. I spend very little money on anything other the the basics. The fact I now live a mere block and half from a library branch means that I am no longer spending gas money on a major source of entertainment (books and DVD’s). I have halved the commuting distance between me and where I work which adds up over a year. I don’t have the latest electronic gadgets - I’m still using a flipphone/stupidphone - I don’t buy make-up, my biggest clothing expense is new work uniforms and replacement socks for those that wear out, I have a friend trim my hair instead of paying a stylist… And I’m not miserable or feeling the lack. Psychologically, this is not causing me a problem. It would be a problem for a lot of other people who would feel deprived or miserable.
It would be impossible if I was raising a kid.
I make enough money to support one person in a very, very modest lifestyle. No more than that.
Certainly, in my state that is true.
Uh, yeah, good luck with that unless you have a retired parent around…
This is why some of my coworkers are homeless. Despite full time jobs. Some of them are earning less an hour than I am.
Back to the topic, whats worse than working paycheck to paycheck is when your income isnt fixed and fluctuates. for example your a salesman on commission. Or maybe you own your own business and business goes up and down.
Even worse was back on the farm where you get maybe a couple of checks a year like when you sell your crops and have to make that big payday last a year.
Not to be snarky, but I would study some basic economics. It is literally the science of how societies collectively work to provide stuff for everyone.
Depends on how you define “worse”. Someone living paycheck to paycheck on a stable income can at least budget based on that income.
A commissioned salesman or business owner might have ups and downs, but they (theoretically) have a much higher upside. Presumably, after doing it for a few years they get good enough to reasonably predict their income.
A farmer is also in possession of a revenue producing asset (i.e. the farm).
What’s worse IMHO is the modern concept of corporate “freelancers” and contractors. Certainly some people like that type of work and it can pay well. But personally, I think there are advantages to working long term for a large, successful company.
Along these lines, there’s “just in time” worker scheduling. You find out the night before or even that morning whether you’re scheduled or not. Or you might get sent home if things are slow. If you have significant transit costs, that can result in a net zero or even negative wage for the day.
Even at low wage, one can pull in quite a bit if working, say, 70 hours per week. But if job #1 caps you at 34.9 and won’t give you a set schedule, you can’t even get job #2.
Because, fundamentally, “hours worked” is a fungible commodity. At least for now, we need people who are able and willing to work 8 hours a day doing things like flipping burgers, manning cash registers, and folding clothes. That’s simply something our society needs to function. At the same time, these positions are grossly denigrated. We act like people shouldn’t expect to be paid enough to survive doing those jobs, and at the same time, we act like it’s perfectly normal for people who aren’t working a whole lot harder to be paid hundreds of times more. That’s… kinda bullshit, on a couple of levels.
Firstly, you cannot demand a service, then denigrate anyone who would perform that service - that’s absurd. The fact that the service is something anyone can do does not reduce the fact that someone is spending literally half their waking hours providing it to you, and that their options are often split between “do that” and “starve/become homeless/freeze in the streets”.
Secondly, being rich in a situation where those around you are in crushing poverty is just downright sociopathic, regardless of how you earned that money. As the marginal value of each dollar you own falls, the grotesquery grows. You could take 99.99% of Jeff Bezos’s money from him and he’d still be able to live like a king for the rest of his life without working a goddamn day; meanwhile, those billions of dollars taken from him would be enough to ensure that nobody on the planet went hungry for years. There is so much good you could do with 123 billion dollars. You could maybe even get away with not horribly abusing and underpaying your workers! What does Bezos have to say about that? “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it.” And some people wonder where the guillotine memes are coming from. :rolleyes:
It feels like there are a lot of assumptions baked in here that don’t make a whole lot of sense. Like that you can objectively measure “production” by what the market offers in dollars. Given the structure of capitalism, that assumption seems batfuck insane. Any given minimum wage burger-flipper is being a hell of a lot more productive (in terms of overall utility provided to humanity) than some middle-manager in a bullshit job, and yet probably makes only a fraction of the money. Something may be wrong with the model here.
Most poor people do, in fact, work. And while higher-paid people tend to work more, it’s more by a matter of degree, not magnitude, and it’s usually fairly detached from the actual work put in. Someone working two full-time minimum wage jobs is already working as many hours as Bill Gates put in, and yet will never, ever, ever get rich from their labor. You typically only get rich when you have other people working to make you rich - people you pay less than they produce for you.
That last bit should be fairly uncontroversial - it’s literally how a company works. If you paid people the full value they produced for you, there would be no way to turn a profit. And that’s where this theory falls apart. Without line cooks, cashiers, and all those other minimum wage jobs, McDonalds could not function. Do they get paid what they deserve? Probably not - flipping burgers is a famously low-wage enterprise. Meanwhile, McDonalds could easily double the wages of its workers and still turn a profit (without raising prices!) - in your model, would their productivity have suddenly doubled? It sounds like it, but that makes zero sense - they’d still be doing exactly what they were before.
How much do you suppose your smartphone would cost if the countries it was sourced from had a similar standard of living and labor laws to the US? Maybe double or triple what it costs now? Even leaving aside cases like Coca-Cola hiring death squads to break up attempts at unionization in columbia or the borderline slave labor at FoxConn plants in China, or the literal slave labor that’s used to mine Coltan, where some party is using coercive tactics to enforce slave-like conditions, the fact of the matter is that if the people working in sweatshops demanded a standard of living akin to ours, our products would be far more expensive. That’s why manufacturing has moved to places like China, India, and Thailand - you can still pay people a dollar a day there, and any attempts at unionization tend to get stomped on a lot harder than is legal here. We are absolutely subsidized by cheap labor (at times slave labor) from the third world.
Not so.
Cite.
Almost no one in the work force holds two full-time jobs, MW or otherwise.
Cite.
Yes, it’s correct that people are paid less than the full amount they generate for the company, but I don’t see how that makes the theory fall apart. People run businesses in order to turn a profit. If the company doesn’t turn a profit, either because they pay their workers more than they have to or for some other reason, then no jobs at that company.
No, their productivity would not change at all. McDonald’s would be making less profit, that’s all.
You are making the common mistake of confusing what people’s labor is worth on the open market with what they deserve. The first can be discovered - the second doesn’t exist.
Regards,
Shodan
I mean, if we’re defining poor by the poverty line, then that’s fair? I wasn’t aware that was our standard, but this is apparently just sloppy terminology on my part. Mea culpa, thank you for fighting my ignorance. I think the larger point still mostly stands, though - that’s still an awful lot of working people who still end up below the poverty line.
Yeah, no kidding - because it’s basically hell to do so. 80-hour work weeks fucking suck. Imagine having basically zero time to do anything other than work, eat, and travel between work and home. But some portion of people do manage that. And those people will never get rich as a result of their labor - they may end up middle class if they also live frugally, but they’ll never end up rich from it.
This is confusing my critique of Corry El’s model with what I actually believe. I agree - if McDonalds paid their workers more, their productivity wouldn’t change. But here’s what Corry said:
This only makes sense if “production” is defined in terms of dollars made. I think that’s untenable, precisely because of what you’re saying.
I wouldn’t say it was an awful lot, at least as defined by full time work -
10.4% doesn’t seem like a lot. Especially when it includes people who did not end up below the poverty line so much as start out -
That’s probably why hardly anyone does, including poor people.
Then I guess I don’t understand your point. Littleman alleged that poor people produce more than they consume, and Correy El pointed out that this is not true - they consume a lot more than they produce, because they get all kinds of transfer payments from those who do produce more than they consume. Consumption and productivity are both being measured in the same way - in dollars. Their productivity doesn’t change because they receive transfer payments, nor would it if they had their wages (for the minority who are working) increased by fiat.
Production and consumption are both measured in money, because money is a medium of exchange. But ISTM that you are getting it the wrong way round - productivity increases income, overall, but that is an effect, not a cause. Transfer payments increase income too, independently of productivity.
People don’t collect welfare because they are producing anything. They collect it because we as a society have decided that everybody should get some kind of income whether they are producing or not. Indeed, the only reason we can have a welfare state is because we have enough people who produce more than they consume, overall, and therefore the government can transfer money from the upper and middle classes to the poor.
Consumption doesn’t track to productivity in a welfare state in the same way it does in a free market. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing - very few people want poor people to starve if they can’t work, accusations against conservatives nothwithstanding - but it is a thing.
Regards,
Shodan
You don’t really believe this, do you?
I’m assuming that expensive hobby you had to give up was flying planes.
Whats scary is I remember years ago when you were in a much better place financially, and it’s been a struggle for years for you now since then.
I have a coworker who was laid off from a good job in 2010, and she never recovered. She never found another job with benefits than paid the same, and she sometimes has trouble just finding a stable job.
It seems like some people, after they lose their middle class job they bounce back, but some people never do. It’s scary. I’m glad I never had children.
Exactly- I never thought of “flash” as unusual. Just a word in common usage- thanks Lisiate.
What’s it mean? What’s a “flash meal?”
Makes perfect sense to me. “Here is a great harm you could easily prevent without even touching your standard of living.” “Nah, I’d rather build a 50-foot-tall golden statue. Maybe I’ll donate a pittance to certain vanity projects (that nobody has any say in) - more likely, I’ll spend money to lobby so that I can get even richer at everyone else’s expense.” That’s pretty much just evil no matter how you slice it. Nobody needs a third fucking yacht or a fourth McMansion.