Don’t know about other countries but the US is in debt because we gave everything to the rich, they spent it and charged up more, and then told the middle class it was lazy poor immigrants fault for both “stealing jobs” and “being too entitled and lazy to work.” Sound like bullshit? Yeah, it is.
Sorry, link.
Sure is! 
I think the point here is that you’re not somehow losing something of great worth because of Wal-Mart. You’re calling a good thing a bad thing with a handwave: Wal-Mart vastly increases economic efficiencies, freeing up labor for more productive pursuits.
It’s exactly the same thing as happened about ten bajillion times before, and every. single. time. there’ve been countless peope complaining about it.
Like unemployment and welfare?
Do you really think some dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest strategy is going to make all the survivors doctors, lawyers, politicians, sports stars and multi-million dollar lotto winners who all live in economic equilibrium?
No. Who said that it would?
What wonders is our labor being freed up for?
It’s a global market, whether you choose to participate in it or not. Unfortunately, labor doesn’t have to be freed up for anything. The fact is, there is labor out there that will do your job as good for less cost. Now, what are you going to do about that? If you want to whine, that’s fine. But whining doesn’t pay the rent.
Oh, my answer is easy. Make the rich pay their fair share.
The US is not in the practice of negotiating citizens’ wages down to that of Chinese rice paddy subsistence farmers. Globalization doesn’t mean bringing the human standard of living down to all time lows. It’s about bringing it up. Corporations can start paying their fair share.
There’s always prostitution. They haven’t figured a way to outsource that yet.
“Take off the feathers, dear illustrator: they’re orcs, not auks” - Tolkien
Yeah that’s what I was thinking but didn’t want to say. When you talk about entitlements in this country people immediately assume the poor.
Which isn’t happening, and which no one is arguing for. So that’s just a strawman.
Yes and no. It creates new opportunities, but it eliminates some, too, and people have to adapt to the changing reality. It’s very similar to automation. Automation has eliminated orders of magnitude of more jobs than globalization has. We went from a country where 50% of the populace worked on farms to one where 2% of the populace does.
And since we all agree on what is meant by ‘fair share’, this is a piece of cake. Actually, it’s not. It’s the whole problem.
Again, there’s that attitude **Condescending Robot ** mentioned. If people aren’t working as doctors, lawyers and marketing consultants making six figures, the work is “demeaning” and isn’t worth doing.
I’m not really sure what you think should happen. You can’t force companies to hire people they can’t (or won’t) afford just as you can’t force customers to purchase products they don’t want or need. Should society just keep paying people to do a job, even if there isn’t a need for it?
A fringe one.
Let me point out a few thiings:
(1) “Rich” is a judgement call. It means radically different things to different people, and even one flat, utterly-obvious-and-inarguable number can mean radically different things in different sectors of the country. The differences in state tax codes also complicate matters.
(2) “Fair” is a weasel word. It means whatever you want it to mean. And let’s note that somehow these supposedly fair tax increases never seem to actually impact the really rich… who seem to vote Democrat an awful lot.
(3) “Easy”. Words cannot describe how inaccurate this is. Even leaving aside all the raw economic issues that a significant tax increase could cause - and they’re massive - the social issues may be impossible to overcome. And even if you did institute a massive tax increase, there’s no guarrantee you’d get much out of it. Taxes all have a maximum efficacy - and we’re probably close to maxing that out. We’re likely a little below, but that’s not actually a bad thing
No, but it might lead to the most prosperous economy history has ever known.
I skipped to the end, but where do people get the idea that Wal-Mart only sells “cheap crap”? I can buy, for example, Budweiser beer at Wal-Mart and it’s the same Budweiser that I can buy at a mom and pop mini-mart, but Wal-Mart has it cheaper.
People who dislike Wal-Mart seem to imply that only knock off substandard products are sold there.
Yeah, but you’re putting in an extra level of retail that someone like Wal-Mart and Home Depot don’t have, along with all the wholesale markup and extra costs involved with that, and doing some hand-waving and saying that it’ll be cheaper for the Mom & Pops than for Wal-Mart to do the same thing.
It doesn’t work that way- Wal-Mart and most of the big-box stores buy directly from the manufacturers- to the point where in many cases, they have exclusive products or their own variants of some common product. They then have a warehouse and distribution network that’s finely tuned to very cheaply and rapidly get goods from the manufacturers to the consumer.
That’s where Wal-Mart makes their money, BTW. Yes, they’re a low-cost, high volume model retailer, but the margin that they make on their items is predominantly gained through supply chain efficiency and control- by pushing prices lower at the front end and getting it to the consumer for the least possible amount of money, it lets them charge lower prices for the same amount of profit.
That right there is why a Mom and Pop isn’t going to compete on an equal footing with Wal-Mart, without getting out of the lowest-cost/high volume game.
It better be prosperous because it’s going to have a lot of mouths to feed.
Not everyone can be one of the winners. The whole system requires losers. Lots of losers. It doesn’t matter how much you tell people to go back to school and learn something marketable and then have them go back and learn something else marketable and then go and…
Really, most humans are blue collar and they can’t go claim a piece of land and hunt and fish and farm for a nice simple living. So what are people supposed to do? Go back to school yet again? People can’t spend unlimited amounts of time racking up student loans going to school only to graduate and find out they aren’t winner material. 10 people get jobs, 50 don’t.
What are the 50 supposed to do? Wait for business to create them some jobs? Business isn’t into that anymore. Make their own jobs? Doing what? They’re poor. Oh they’ll find something to do though. It probably won’t be legal.
The military and government sector is mostly make work. It will simply have to expand until unemployment goes down to a healthy level.
Business continues to rake in trillions in record setting profits. I have no patience for “it’s too expensive!” We spent what, three trillion now on Iraq? For what?
Of course we can afford to put people to work. What else are we planning?
All suffering is life—Sam Walton