No. Just because someone suports issue A doesn’t mean that issue A is high on that person’s priority list. Although I don’t know this, I suspect that raising the MW is not that important an issue, otherwise more politicians would support it. But I’m open to being educated. Can you show me a poll that indicates raising the MW is anywhere near the top of the prioority list? I don’t subscribe to the idea that a poltician should simply be the collectve wishes of his constituents. Legislators are elected based on what they stand for, and the people entrust them to make the hard decisions.
It was a political decision to have the movement of goods halfway around the world take a fraction of a week, and the movement of information halfway around the world take a fraction of a second?
News to me.
I agree with you to an extent. If its a borderline issue and polls are showing 55/45 or 60/40 support, stick with what got you elected. But when something comes up on the floor for a vote (negating the whole priority issue), and an overwhelming majority (80%) support it, it’s your duty to make sure their voices are heard. I could almost understand the priority issue if it didn’t already come up for a vote, or if bridges to 2 people in Alaska hadn’t come up for a vote, or if somehow one of the other various issues the rep held conflicted with raising minimum wage - but none of that is the case.
I call it “irrelevant to the claims I was responding to.”
Because America is very far to the right; even moderately left wing solutions are unthinkable.
I hadn’t noticed the left hiding, or doing much of anything. The left is politically the next thing to dead in this country.
And not by coincidence, it’s the income ( and estate ) taxes that are demonized and constantly lowered, while the common people are slowly buried by government fees for formerly free services, and otherwise squeezed to make up for the decreased taxes paid by the rich.
Because the rich are in charge, and they don’t want to pay their employees at all, much less raise wages.
Frankly, I can’t get all that worked up about the federal MW. As I posted earlier, most people are covered by higher MW laws in the states they live in. And that’s where I think the decision should be in the first place.
Go ahead and raise the MW to $6.50 and I bet that wouldn’t make any difference to the numbers the OP is based on. Only 2% of workers over age 25 make the federal MW, and 25% of all MW workers are teenagers.
I’ve only know one truly righ person in my life, and quite a characeter he was, too. He worked his butt off making his money and was happy to give generously to charity. The greatest thing about him was that he didn’t define himself by his money. Most people would never guess how much money he had based on the way he lived. He accomplished so much in his life, but what I realy appreciate is that he taugh me a valuable lesson.
Which means that 75% are not teenagers.
Not to mention that doesn’t really mean much. When analyzing MW you should be takng into account everyone making below what the new min wage will be. And also, the whole teenage thing is why I suggested a tiered system that’s based on age and education 
but I guess again that’s another discussion.
Touching story, John. Dick, the Plucky Newsboy? But I’m afraid your point evades me, unless it was just a reflexive excercise in counterpoint.
Is it his hard work that is the virtue that we should respect? But surely you know people who work hard and get pretty much squat? And what about the guy who works hard motivated by nothing but sheer greed? Am I bound to respect that more than Jesus would?
Actually it is right on the point. This thread is about the rich plundering, not about outsourcing. If an employee was in collusion with a manager, or group of managers, for his salary to be increased beyond what was reasonable for his performance, we could quite reasonably call it stealing from the company. But when CEOs do this, it is business as usual. Backdating options, among other things, leads to a reduced tax liability, which is stealing from the government., and thus all of us.
There is a lot of concern that workers don’t “deserve” a higher MW, because they don’t “deserve” it. Yet I hear very little complaint from this quarter about CEOs not deserving a ten million dollar bonus when the stockholders didn’t do well. Maybe that money wouldn’t fund pay raises, but it might be invested in the company to improve productivity, which would.
No John, the topic is the rich plundering the middle class. Getting gobs of money from friendly compensation committees without regard to performance is plundering in my book.
You mentioned admins. When I started work, there was an admin for every two groups, maybe 20 people. These admins would do typing, correct grammar and spelling, and do a lot of paperwork. There were higher level admins for VPs and the like also, very well paid.
Today in big companies the VP level admins are all that are left. Yeah they’re well paid - the lower level ones got canned. They support over 100 people - loosely speaking, because engineers do most of the work themselves these days. That is a productivity improvement - except when I spent a day getting a paper someone in my group up to a level of English where it would be publishable.
Yeah, some companies employ idiot checkers. Some companies, like the Safeway I go to, consider checkers as a customer contact point, and actually pay them decently. These checkers are faster than the idiots at Albertsons, solve problems more quickly, and keep me coming back. It is not always a good idea to pay the absolutely least you can get by with.
That’s one of the inherent contradictions of a capitalist system. What is competetively good for a single company is not good for the society as a whole, especially a consumer based economy that depends on workers buying the product.
It requires a fundamental, even radical, shift in values. If a company can defer the competitive advantages of pressing for lower wages with the assurance that his competitors will do the same, everybody wins. Profit without greed. Capitalism without conscience is savagery in a three piece suit.
The impact will be not just on MW workers, but on those more senior who get raises above the MW. At least from the experience of my daughter’s friends, the pay scale is no more compressed in California with a higher MW than I suppose it is in states with a lower one.
As far as I can tell, there are the skilled workers being screwed by outsourcing because they are too expensive, and the unskilled workers who don’t have to worry about outsourcing (like checkers) who are screwed by a low MW because they are unskilled. Now there are some skilled and exceptional people like you and me who can command big salaries, but we’re the exception. (And I’m so cheap that if the economy depended on me spending money its in big trouble.)
If you don’t buy an SUV, the terrorists win.
Are you trying to understand that data or spin it? The salient fact is that 98% of the those making the federal MW are either teenagers, or young adults just getting started in their careers. If that’s supposed to generate some kind of outrage, pardon me if I yawn instead.
Voyager: As I said, go ahead and raise the federal MW. But can you do the math and tell me how much it would change the numbers behind the issue here? I suspect we’re talking mice nuts. The real problem is that a lot of people don’t have valuable skills. So, how do we change that? I’d hope that there is a more create answer than “legislate a higher wage”. If that’s our only option, then maybe it is time for hysteria.
elucidator: I didn’t understand what your anecdote had to do with the topic at hand. I was trying to subtly tell you that maybe you should expand your social circle. Sorry if I was being too vague about that.
No. It was more the gist of your derision in your first and last posts of the first page that led me to infer that point of view, combined with the “hard work is the key to success” theme I thought I saw in your other posts. I see now where I might have been wrong about the latter. I’m not sure how to reinterpret the derision, though.
“Relevance, Mr. Spock?” “None that I am aware of, Captain.” Who said that the wealthy plunder the middle or working or poor classes by buying only the influence of politicians on the right? However, what I was referring to was not the Social Security system itself, but the 1983 revamping of the system as recommended by Alan Greenspan and signed into law by Ronald Reagan. Yes, the House was controlled by Democrats at the time, so the modification must have had support of the Reagan Democrats at least. To be honest, I don’t know which Democrats supported it. Nevertheless, it vastly accelerated the accumulation of a surplus by increasing the payroll tax, as I’m sure you know. The idea was that the boomers would need to make use of the surplus, so the working class was taxed at a higher rate. Has the surplus been used for that purpose? To a degree, perhaps, but it has been plundered for other purposes, and Bush has used language that make some fear he or others might not feel compelled to honor the t-bills that now make up the surplus.
Okay, how do you plan to educate yourself?
Well, if you can handwave away everything else, then you can get down to the nitty gritty.
See, this is part of the problem. You can pretend like the wealthy don’t use their influence to help ensure that they can keep about $70 billion out of the hands of the government through manipulation of the IRS and politicians through tax laws. And you can pretend like the billions of dollars that went missing from the CPA in Iraq didn’t actually end up in the hands of the already wealthy, along with the money that “legitimately” went to the Halliburtons et al., but that is money right out of the hands of “we the people” spent with little oversight and no other good outcome.
But of course, with one’s fingers in one’s ears, the real problem is where we set the minimum wage.
But here’s the thing. The OP claims that the middle class is stagnating while the rich are getting richer. You’re saying: OK, let’s stop the rich from getting richer. But how does that help the middle class? Do you think the rich are going to generate the same amount of money in order to give it away to someone else? I have no problem with closing loopholes and tightening up accounting rules. But that’s not what is keeping wages stagnant-- what’s doing that is a fast changing global economy that people are having trouble keeping up with.
“Hi, there, rich guy! John Mace sent me here? Expand my social circle?”
“Release the hounds.”
I’m not pretending anything. You’re pretending that those topics have some relavence to the OP. They don’t. Are you saying that we can fix the problem by just having the government redistribute income more fairly? How exactly does that work? Let me say it one more time: The folks who are stuggling are struggling because their skills aren’t keeping up with the demands of the global economy-- often thru no fault of their own. I don’t pretend to know how to fix that. I’m not even sure there is a fix. Is there some law of nature that says that American middle class incomes must always rise? Maybe we need to look at some economic model where instead of a MW, we have a Minimum Profit Sharing plan. But that’s going to put workers income at risk if there isn’t any profit.
No, I don’t approve of all the Iraq war money Halliburton got. Hell, I don’t approve of the Iraq war. But I thought we were debating stagnant middle class incomes, not whether Bush is a poopypants.
Normally I don’t debate with someone as insulting as you’ve been here, but I’m going to give you one more chance. For the record, I’m not the person who brought up raising the MW, and I already said raise it if you want. And I’ve said multiple times that that is not the solution. I’m happy to debate this issue with you honestly, but if you continue to distort my position, I’ll invite you to find someone else to insult.