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Post 14 Oct 2017, 9:22 am

freeman3
Democrats have to do a better job of winning the war ideologically if we want more progressive policies which will surely benefit more Americans. You can't just say tax the rich or raise the minimum wage or promote unions. You have to show this is a fair way to set up a society. You need a lot of hard thinking to show why that is so and then able be to present it in a convincing fashion. Republicans have been winning on the argument that is fair for everyone to go out and compete, the winners get as much money as they can make, it is unfair for government to take too much of that, the government shouldn't regulate business too much, unions are bad, the unemployed are lazy, etc. I think there are convincing answers to these Neo-liberal economic policies and we need to start trying to win the ideological battle there if we want a more progressive agenda


If the political system is not responsive ... then you can win the argument and nothing changes.
Most Americans want sane gun control laws. But you can't get them.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/02/politics/ ... index.html
A majority of Americans say it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage. But its not there yet and you just took a big step back.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/20 ... democrats/
In a Pew Research Center survey conducted last year, about three-quarters of U.S. adults (74%) said “the country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment,” compared with 23% who said “the country has gone too far in its efforts to protect the environment.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/20 ... al-issues/
But now the EPA has been defanged because of the ideology of Trump.

If the political system is so lacking in its ability to respond to voters...and instead responds to industry, then winning the war ideologically isn't enough. You have to crush it... And that's nigh impossible.
If the media environment is so poisoned that a third of the country is informed only by Fox and Breitbart and worse... then you never even get a chance to address those people.
If the political system entrenches political parties abilities to gerrymander, and depress voting ....then even winning the ideological battle isn't enough.
Then you've got the system of litigating every law for 10 years..meaning that even when a legislative battle is won .... the effects of the win are delayed and diminished...

rayjay
Look at the Keystone pipeline. Look at restrictions on off shore drilling or coal mining. (it may be the right policy from a climate change perspective, but you are killing the livelihoods of the people you claim to care about in the process.)

The Keystone pipelines primary purpose is to take Canadian oil to the gulf for export.
Off shore drilling, without the stringent regulation that is largely absent in the US, results in disasters like Deep Water Horizon. The economic and health impacts from such Deep water were huge. Estimates of lost tourism dollars were projected to cost the Gulf coastal economy up to 22.7 billion through 2013.
Coal Mining jobs were primarily lost to automation. Autonomous drills and trucks are the latest innovations that eliminate human requirements... The rest are market forces. Cheap clean gas....has largely driven the coal industry down.

. Your entire response was written from the individual stakeholders viewpoint and not from the general welfare of society.
Yet, most Americans believe that their environment needs protection. And the benefits to society as whole include decreased health care costs
And the problem that the US has, is that individual stakeholders hold far more sway, and have far more levers to pull in the American system then is deserved.
They can lobby at the legislative level. Both committees and in the general assemblies. Here politics becomes money. So, the money required to run... and political contributions go a long way. Legislation is almost always affected by this focused lobbying.
Then, the laws passed are litigated.... for years.
Then regulation is watered down by continuous lobbying of regulators. Till you end up with situations like the "self reporting and inspection" that precipitated the Deep Water Horizon accident.
And sometimes, the actual enforcement and regulation is beaten down by ideological stances or by industry lobbying.Example: Flint water crisis the first. Immigration enforcement at employers the second.

The system is sclerotic. And resistance to change. And the oligarchs like it that way.
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Post 14 Oct 2017, 10:04 am

“Rickyp, what do you think of Trump’s tax plan?”

1. Gun control
2. Healthcare.
3. Environment.


“Oh, okay. But, what about the tax plan?”
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Post 14 Oct 2017, 11:20 am

bbauska wrote:A friend of mine owns/manages a fast food restaurant in town here. The minimum wage increase caused him to terminate an employee to keep the restaurant profitable.

That is what I think of minimum wage. Another person lost a job.
How much was the state providing to his staff to support his low wages?
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Post 14 Oct 2017, 1:09 pm

danivon wrote:
bbauska wrote:A friend of mine owns/manages a fast food restaurant in town here. The minimum wage increase caused him to terminate an employee to keep the restaurant profitable.

That is what I think of minimum wage. Another person lost a job.
How much was the state providing to his staff to support his low wages?


I don't know. I would guess that is not an employer's need to know.
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Post 15 Oct 2017, 4:37 am

danivon wrote:
bbauska wrote:A friend of mine owns/manages a fast food restaurant in town here. The minimum wage increase caused him to terminate an employee to keep the restaurant profitable.

That is what I think of minimum wage. Another person lost a job.
How much was the state providing to his staff to support his low wages?


How much would they have to provide if he had no job at all?
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Post 15 Oct 2017, 9:54 am

Ray Jay wrote:
danivon wrote:
bbauska wrote:A friend of mine owns/manages a fast food restaurant in town here. The minimum wage increase caused him to terminate an employee to keep the restaurant profitable.

That is what I think of minimum wage. Another person lost a job.
How much was the state providing to his staff to support his low wages?


How much would they have to provide if he had no job at all?


Probably more, but that's not the only option available or even desirable. If you are making a profit on labor subsidized by the public, any good businessperson is going to say, "I want more of that!!" Fix it. Either expect workers to be more productive and pay them more, or, the business person makes less profit and the worker is paid more, but either way the public should be paying NOTHING.

Likely some workers would likely lose their jobs as others are asked to be more productive. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, as increasing productivity improves everyone's standard of living.
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Post 15 Oct 2017, 10:39 am

bbauska wrote:
danivon wrote:
bbauska wrote:A friend of mine owns/manages a fast food restaurant in town here. The minimum wage increase caused him to terminate an employee to keep the restaurant profitable.

That is what I think of minimum wage. Another person lost a job.
How much was the state providing to his staff to support his low wages?


I don't know. I would guess that is not an employer's need to know.

Maybe not. But it is something taxpayers and competitors might want to know.
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Post 15 Oct 2017, 10:41 am

Ray Jay wrote:
danivon wrote:
bbauska wrote:A friend of mine owns/manages a fast food restaurant in town here. The minimum wage increase caused him to terminate an employee to keep the restaurant profitable.

That is what I think of minimum wage. Another person lost a job.
How much was the state providing to his staff to support his low wages?


How much would they have to provide if he had no job at all?
How much less if people were employed at a decent wage and so had more disposable income to spend in the local area?

Minimum wage policies, when applied well, do not lead to more unemployment. Indeed, they can lead to less.
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Post 16 Oct 2017, 6:09 am

danivon wrote:
Ray Jay wrote:
danivon wrote:
bbauska wrote:A friend of mine owns/manages a fast food restaurant in town here. The minimum wage increase caused him to terminate an employee to keep the restaurant profitable.

That is what I think of minimum wage. Another person lost a job.
How much was the state providing to his staff to support his low wages?


How much would they have to provide if he had no job at all?
How much less if people were employed at a decent wage and so had more disposable income to spend in the local area?

Minimum wage policies, when applied well, do not lead to more unemployment. Indeed, they can lead to less.


Often they are not applied well. What then?

I appreciate your empathy for minimum wage earners -- the irony here is that the other 3 members of my family are minimum wage earners -- but I don't think you are empathizing enough with employers. What I see is people who are struggling to meet payroll, struggling to pay suppliers, owners going without pay for a year, dealing with endless regulation from the Feds and states, working 60 + hours to survive, etc.

The business owners are responsible to following the law, including worker safety and environment, and engaging in voluntary transactions with customers, employees, and suppliers, They stay in business which is a noble fight. You / Democrats see them as responsible for ensuring that their employees can live a lifestyle that the state deems appropriate, paying for health insurance (but curiously not car insurance or home insurance :) ) etc. The state is demanding too much of private sector employers because it can. In addition to my not buying that philosophically, I think it also has disastrous effects for our economy, although maybe not the agents of the state.
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Post 16 Oct 2017, 6:18 am

Geo:
but either way the public should be paying NOTHING.


The employer isn't mandating that the public pay additional amounts to its minimum wage employee (who in Mass., if he is working full time is making $22,000 per year. (50 X 40 X $11). 40 hours per week is not Dickensian.

Geo:
Likely some workers would likely lose their jobs as others are asked to be more productive. That's not necessarily a bad thing,


It depends on the numbers. How many people will lose their jobs and why don't you care about them? Even before the storm the unemployment rate in Puerto Rico was very high.
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Post 16 Oct 2017, 9:24 am

Why is it that you think what is paid a minimum wage worker is fair? We have a Federal Reserve which basically interferes in the economy on the side of employers. How so? By pursuing anti inflationary policies it ensures that there is at least 10% true unemployment. So employers have a built-in advantage in bargaining with workers in minimum wage jobs.

And of course large employers like Wal-Mart and McDonalds have even more bargaining power. A person going in to do what our society has decided is a minimum wage job has almost no bargaining power. There are no unions in those jobs. He simply has to take the job. If he tries to bargain...there are millions of other people that will take that job.

Yes...but they dont have any skills, you say. What is skilled vs unskilled labor. Do you know what the big invention the McDonalds brothers came up with? They "deskilled" the process. Instead of having short order cooks who were "skilled" they broke up what the short order cook did into separate parts that a person who did not know much about cooking could do. (The McDonald brothers hated paying short order cooks so much money.) Nowadays instead of having a butcher making $40,000 a year....you just teach someone how to make a few cuts on an assembly line and pay those workers the minimum wage.

Henry Ford started the assembly line for the same reason--deskilling labor and cutting down labor costs. For whatever reason he decided to pay workers decent wages and the unionization in the industry ensured many millions of Americans had a middle-class lifestyle. But it could have been different--those jobs on the auto assembly line where you do the same thing over and over could have been deemed deskilled. And why is it that we don't think of auto industry jobs as being deskilled? Pretty arbitrary classification isn't it? Do you really think our country would be better off if the auto industry had paid minimum wage? Somehow I think if the business friendly ideology we have right now prevailed back then ...the auto industry would have been a low wage industry.

It's pretty rich to deskill sectors of the economy and then call workers that do those jobs deskilled.

The idea that the market decides a fair wage for an employee is absurd. How much wealth does a worker at McDonalds create? I got not idea. You got no idea. McDonalds doesn't care--they just pay workers as little as they can. Clearly, their wage is not tied in any sense to the wealth they create. And large corporations with disproportionate bargaining power lead the way in paying low wages. One could just imagine that if there were just small businesses they would pay higher wages, but now they can just follow the lead of Walmart and McDonalds.

And the deunionizatiom of the economy makes it impossible for workers in minimum wage jobs to bargain with those large employers to get fair wages. And we certainly do not make it easy to unionize and corporations use various means to discourage it.

So since low-wage workers are getting taken advantage of in our economy...the minimum wage is the one way we can limit how much they are taken advantage of. And setting the minimum wage at a living wage should be the limit of how much they are taken advantage of. And it may be that some businesses that are surviving on low wage labor on bad business models without enough customers will go under. Others with better business models will take their place.
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Post 16 Oct 2017, 10:12 am

And by intentionally deskilling labor by breaking a skilled job into its component parts in order to pay lower wages employers also turn a job that a worker finds rewarding with new and interesting challenges that they could apply their skills to, providing him/her with a sense of pride/dignity...into rote, dehumanizing jobs. There is that too...

I think akin to George that by forcing employers to pay higher wages employers will find ways to make employees more productive, invest more in them...and make jobs more rewarding.
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Post 16 Oct 2017, 11:15 am

Do you know what the big invention the McDonalds brothers came up with?


Having a standardized product so that whether you were buying a big mac in California or in Kalamazoo it would be exactly the same. There was buzz, and a national advertising campaign, and it tasted good, and was cheap (which a lot of people who make minimum wage appreciate).

Freeman:
Instead of having short order cooks who were "skilled" they broke up what the short order cook did into separate parts that a person who did not know much about cooking could do. (The McDonald brothers hated paying short order cooks so much money


Don't short order cooks basically make minimum wage now?

In any case, we are very far apart and will only get further apart.
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Post 16 Oct 2017, 11:17 am

freeman3 wrote:Why is it that you think what is paid a minimum wage worker is fair? We have a Federal Reserve which basically interferes in the economy on the side of employers. How so? By pursuing anti inflationary policies it ensures that there is at least 10% true unemployment. So employers have a built-in advantage in bargaining with workers in minimum wage jobs.


So the supply of labor has an effect on wages?

That's kind of you to admit. One has to wonder why liberals believe illegal immigrants have no such impact. If supply and demand is a law of economics, it seems to me that it's a LAW.

And of course large employers like Wal-Mart and McDonalds have even more bargaining power. A person going in to do what our society has decided is a minimum wage job has almost no bargaining power. There are no unions in those jobs. He simply has to take the job. If he tries to bargain...there are millions of other people that will take that job.


Again, supply and demand is a thing.

Yes...but they dont have any skills, you say. What is skilled vs unskilled labor. Do you know what the big invention the McDonalds brothers came up with? They "deskilled" the process. Instead of having short order cooks who were "skilled" they broke up what the short order cook did into separate parts that a person who did not know much about cooking could do. (The McDonald brothers hated paying short order cooks so much money.) Nowadays instead of having a butcher making $40,000 a year....you just teach someone how to make a few cuts on an assembly line and pay those workers the minimum wage.


Yes, yes, efficiency that drives down prices is a terrible thing . . . said no one ever.

Henry Ford started the assembly line for the same reason--deskilling labor and cutting down labor costs. But the unionization in the industry ensured many millions of Americans had a middle-class lifestyle. But it could have been different--those jobs where you do the same thing over and over could have been deskilled. And why is it that we don't think of auto industry jobs as being deskilled? Pretty arbitrary classification isn't it? Do you really think our country would be better off if the auto industry had paid minimum wage?


Don't blame Henry Ford. He raised the wages of his workers so they would stop quitting. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstal ... 4edaf4766d

The idea that the market decides a fair wage for an employee is absurd. How much wealth does a worker at McDonalds create? I got not idea. You got no idea. McDonalds doesn't care--they just pay workers as little as they can.


So, who should set wages? The government? When more workers are swept into the "minimum wage" category (because it keeps rising), the government will have more and more control. Is that what you want? Should the government set your salary? Mine? What's the limit? Why?

Clearly, their wage is not tied in any sense to the wealth they create. And large corporations with disproportionate bargaining power lead the way in paying low wages. One could just imagine that if were just small businesses they would pay higher wages, but now they can just follow the lead of Walmart and McDonalds.

And the deunionizatiom of the economy makes it impossible for workers in minimum wage jobs to bargain with those large employers to get fair wages. And we certainly do not make it easy to unionize and corporations use various means to discourage it.


Why do you hate workers so much?

The very first full-time job I had was 20 cents above minimum wage. The Teamsters ran the warehouse, meaning I was paying $25 union dues a month on $420 take home. The temperature in that warehouse could reach 135 degrees in some areas. There was little/no safety. I cannot tell you what benefit the union afforded us other than medical insurance, which was not the bonanza then that it is now.
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Post 16 Oct 2017, 11:19 am

freeman3 wrote:And by intentionally deskilling labor by breaking a skilled job into its component parts in order to pay lower wages employers also turn a job that a worker finds rewarding with new and interesting challenges that they could apply their skills to, providing him/her with a sense of pride/dignity...into rote, dehumanizing jobs. There is that too...
.


It's a shame that these workers in dehumanizing jobs are prevented by law from creating their own businesses or furthering their education or figuring out a skill that an employer is willing to pay more for. These are bleak times indeed.

Oh, and what Fate said.