If discussions like these could be productive, democracy would be a functional form of government. Edit: Rather, I should say, it would be the best form of government. That goes to benevolent dictatorship.
A much higher minimum wage is working pretty well in Australia. You know, that little country that was the only western nation to not get affected by the GFC and has a very strong healthcare system and newly implimented disability scheme. The government even gave tax payers just under $1000 each to spend on whatever they liked to make sure money kept circulating. I believe in capitalism but it has it's limits like any system. England pre-union was a miserable place for most people to live and work. Profits are not the only benefit from industrialisation, especially profits that don't get used. Community is more important than corporation, and money only has any real value if it's in circulation. Otherwise it might aswell be a beer can collection. So yes, paying people more will inevitably lead to better business and better standards of living all round, but then you can't pay too much or you'll get hyper-inflation. Edit: The Aussie minimum wage is $16.37 an hour (more than double that of the US), and our dollar was recently at parity with the US. Our economy isn't exactly struggling because of this so called 'burden'.
In principle, I'd agree with you. The issue is, human beings that are corrupt and screw everything up regularly are in charge of something that they have no first hand experience with. It's the only reason I fall closer to Libertarian - human incompetence and corruptibility. The examples of any level of socialism working are few and far between. I trust a politician as far as I can throw the moon. Noah Webster said it best. "There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." When you put it from that perspective, you would be surprised how many of us small government types would otherwise agree with you.
Maybe the US Congress knows what Somali warlords know: that keeping a group of people in desperate poverty is the best recruitment tool for your well-paid military. I mean, all the nations that sit well above the US in the various 'best standard of living' polls struggle with military recruitment.
The US military is primarily made up of the middle class and has a higher high school and college graduation rate than the rest of the population. But nice try.
Lol. Really? You'd best go look at where your military recruits. Or are you just thinking about the officer corps.
So you're saying kids who grow up in the middle-classes with a college degree that can't get them a job because the economy changed while they were studying won't take a well paid military job rather than risk jumping down to minimum wages which are too low because you probably assume all middle-class people are guaranteed middle-class jobs. Of coarse your stats would include people FROM middle classes, trying to stay OUT of the lower classes. Sheesh. This stuff is pretty simple.
You're projecting. What, I don't know. But, Americans tend to join the military at a younger age, generally fresh out of high school, and go to college after or during. Compare to Canada where the average soldier gets a few years of schooling first, then joins the military.
This sort of thing happens a lot in my country too, that being 'of the left' means you are a Marxist, or something like that. Even people on the left make this blunder.
Maybe it depends on how one defines middle class. I did a quick search with conflicting results, both looking at data from about the same time period. The Heritage Foundation has an article claiming recruits are from middle class families, yadda yadda. Who Are the Recruits? The Demographic Characteristics of U.S. Military Enlistment, 2003-2005 Then there is this one from the WA Post, Youths in Rural U.S. Are Drawn To Military. Since both reports are based on zip codes, it is curious how they say such different things. If you want results that say the poor are disproportionately represented, you use the median income to define lower income. If you are the Heritage Foundation, and you don't want it to look like the poor are fighting America's wars, you look only at the very poor and call the people who are barely scraping by, 'middle income'. If you are the Heritage Foundation you say things like: So there is a smaller proportion of poor people in the military than not in the military. One has to wonder if they included prison and mentally disabled populations in their > poor people % not in the military. If you are the Post you say things like: So if one is honest, the military has substantially more recruits from the lower class economies than middle class and above. As for education, I don't think you can say that because the military requires a high school diploma for recruits that means a whole lot. By the same token it's not that meaningful to say there aren't many college grads in the military given the age at which the bulk of soldiers enlist.
There's no magic bullet that's going to cure everything. But a number of different things would help. One of the biggest would be our tax structure. Businesses should be taxed, not rewarded, for sending manufacturing jobs overseas. It needs to be made economically beneficial to keep those jobs here in the U.S. There ARE costs to moving these jobs abroad -- its just that the companies don't pay them. When you move to countries to manufacture because it's cheaper, part of the reason it's cheaper is that there are no environmental or safety laws. Pour whatever toxins you want into the river -- it may not hurt the company directly immediately, but we all live on earth, and we shouldn't be destroying it just to save a few dollars. Have a bunch of hard working people die in a fire because there was no way out? Sure, it doesn't harm the CEO of the company, but I hate to see people not care that families were destroyed and people died just so the CEO could have a toilet made of solid gold. Tax these imports and eliminate any tax breaks for sending these jobs overseas. Similarly, these disparities in environmental and safety regulations need to be highlighted much more than they are. People need to demand products that are not grown and made by killing the workers. This would also lessen the cost disparity between jobs here and jobs abroad -- it wouldn't entirely eliminate it, due to differing costs of living, but it would lessen it. And the rest should be equalized by taxes on these re-imported devices. I read that making the iPhones here would add $100 to the cost. Well, they already run $500. I think anyone willing to shell out that money would also be willing to shell out another $100. Especially if it meant that our own economy was doing better, more people could afford that extra cost. And if that $100 cost differential is a deal-breaker, maybe you shouldn't be spending that money on the phone in the first place. Another way our tax system would work better is in higher tax rates for these ridiculous bonuses that the highest levels of management receive. The lower workers should be taxed less and those who make millions, even hundreds of millions should be taxed more. Those people are not going to stop working. Our economy wouldn't grind to a halt. There are other perks and elements of prestige that come from being the CEO of a major global corporation. It's not purely based on the money. Can you really not live well on $300 million dollars a year? Is it necessary to have $600 million? I wonder what these people possibly spend it all on. And I'm talking purely executive compensation, especially bonus compensation. If someone invents an advanced widget, and it is a smashing success, and he sells billions of units a year, he totally deserves that. But increasing his taxes, from, say 14% to 28%, which is what most people pay, isn't going to punish his success. Executive compensation and bonuses could be taxed more than that. Our economy was booming in the 50s and 60s, and marginal tax rates were in excess of 90%. If you long for those good old days, you want higher tax rates. And I'm not even suggesting a marginal tax rate that high. But it does need to be restructured. Similarly, there need to be disincentives for putting all your money in places like the Cayman Islands. Those fixes would go a long way toward solving some of these problems. Other things that would help are not tying healthcare to jobs, which "Obamacare" is slightly addressing, but is going to help. Also, we need to provide government regulated and subsidized high quality child care. Childcare is insanely expensive. I look back on how much money I made when I was first married. Had I had a baby then, I seriously do not know what I would have done. Childcare would have taken up most of my monthly net pay. Childcare plus repayment on my student loans would have been MORE than my net take home pay. There are many parts of the country that have no good childcare options, and many childcare providers don't even need a license from the state. There was recently a case of a woman in rural Virginia whose child died while in the care of an unlicensed provider. The thing is, she had no other choice. There were no other child care options available, and she couldn't afford to pay very much. She desperately wanted to stay home to care for the child, but she and her husband could not come up with a way to make it feasible. When she talked to her state legislator about the issue, his response was simply, "I wouldn't leave my child with someone I didn't know." That was it. No offer of help. No talk of solutions. Not even an expression of sympathy. Nice that he would be in a position to do that, but this poor woman had no choice. That just shouldn't happen here. So those things would be a start.
hmmm. how can I say this without insulting people? Not sure I can... Oh how it must be so great to live in ivory towers, looking down on those that work so-called menial jobs, the service industry, those in McHats, those uneducated oaths, how dare they even pound the same paths in their dirty worn out shoes. Those not as fortunate, those that didn't have the same fortune or opportunities as some here. Please Sir, can I have some more? More son? More? The peasants are revolting!
This is not a matter of love or hate. Human society has outgrown the primitive system of monetary reward and payment for services. This is why the system is collapsing. There's no more 'big money' to be made, without robbing a lot of people of their basic human rights, and that is barbarism and savagery. Everything has been bought and sold countless times, including dignity and lives, and most people's lives revolve around what they can and can not financially afford. It's as if the human race became slaves to money. It's a sign that we need to transcend the impulse of greed and develop into a society that no longer functions on those principles. Alternatives have been explored, and most of them involve most of us actually living better and having access to more than we do now, The price is that those very, very few can't hog perverse amounts of wealth for themselves. Seems perfectly reasonable solution to me. But the massive shift in consciousness hasn't happened yet. Ordinary people aren't prepared to give up any of their luxuries or indulgences for any reasonable period of time ( for transition to occur) even if that meant end to world hunger, world peace, massively improved quality of life not just for them but their offspring too. People fear that someone will abuse a better system, whilst they are fully aware of extreme abuses of the current system and are still doing very little about it. But until we are all prepared to give up this desperate rat race and place a higher value on human life than our ability to indulge greed, I don't think there'll be any lasting improvements..
I'm interested in where high-paying unfilled jobs are these days. You know, the ones that unemployed or underemployed people are supposed to be out trying for, and the ones schools are supposed to be training students to get. However you shake down blame, the fact is there are lots more people out there looking for work, than there are jobs, and that's at any level of pay. Ask any employer. They'll tell you they routinely get hundreds of applications for a single job these days. Think about that next time you are tempted to go through an automated checkout at a supermarket, order something online rather than go to a shop, pay bills by direct debit instead of at a counter, or by cheque with a postage stamp. Automation and the technological revolution has massively tipped the scales towards unemployment, and the so-called 'service' industry. Every time something gets 'computerised' folk lose jobs. And no, they are NOT all replaced by IT. Very few of them are. That's why companies turn to IT. It really lowers their wage bill! Every time I hear of some new digital revolution which is supposed to make things 'better' for customers and more profitable and 'efficient' for the company in question, I cringe. It inevitably means good jobs are lost, along with the services these workers used to provide. If the jobs are replaced, they are replaced by 'bad' jobs, and a loss of overall quality of care. The difference between the money you made working directly for a company, and what you earn working at the call centre the company now uses for its 'customer service' just doesn't add up in your favour, if you are the worker.
And yet, they force junior doctors to work 100 hour weeks, not to mention super long shifts for factory workers, or 4 hours a day travel to and from work that eats up your entire life etc. There's nothing stopping the employers from reducing the working week to 36 hours or less ( while maintaining people's income, there is plenty of money around, it just has to be more equally shared) or from opening new jobs. However, the prerogative of almost every industry, including public services, is how much money they can save for the investors. People who actually work and run this world, are expendable resource and are often run into the ground with sub-human working conditions, and employers don't bat an eyelid. They just replace them, often by someone much less competent, as long as they are cheaper. When an employer deliberately continues exploiting one worker, making him do a job of 2 or 3 people, so the company can ever increase the profits for the shareholders (because it can't stay the same, it must always be increased, that's the dogma) then it looks like there isn't enough work. But it's not true at all.
It has been proven that no matter what the marginal tax rate is, it doesn't affect the amount of money the government receives in taxes. Whether the marginal tax rate is 90% or 20%, the amount of money the government receives as a percentage of GDP, remains the same.
The horror! I see Lowe's, Costco and Walmart compactors simply crushing all those corrugated cardboard houses! Do they not realize junkies need a place to live?! Seriously...Never walk into a grocery store without being thankful. Although we live in a land of plenty, the number of people in our country living hand-to-mouth is growing. No different from the dark days of the depression. Frontline on PBS had a story of the homeless. The POV was that of the children and amazing how strong many of them are. But without education or jobs with higher pay, they're shit outa luck.
This is an interesting take on economics I've not heard before and don't quite understand. What would replace "monetary reward and payment for services"? You'll likely be waiting more than a lifetime for this hope. I don't think this utopia is consistent with what we know about evolution and the human species.
It's not a study as much as it is public ally available information of tax revenues compared to GDP. Here's a link with most of the information.
Oh if only economics were so simple. If revenues stay the same despite marginal tax rates going down, it suggests the rich just find more loop holes (seem like a solvable problem). But it also suggests the poor pay more to make up the difference. Remember, it's a % of GDP that stays the same, not the total amount collected which would be more along the lines of a Laffer Curve argument. Care to explain? I'm sure I'm missing something.
Of course, and while companies are desperately putting all their effort into finding tax shelters and loopholes, they aren't spending money on things like hiring people and improving their infrastructure.
