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I'd agree with that too, but people are willing to pay to watch some clown drag a ball in one direction while someone else tries to take it away and drag it in the other direction. If people are willing to pay to watch that, they are at liberty to do that. They just won't get any of my money. If you don't like it either, don't pay to go to those games, don't watch them on cable tv, don't buy their endorsed products.
By increasing minimum wage, the poor will get hurt twice:
1)Current holders of minimum wages will loose their jobs (will be eliminated due to increased cost of doing business).
2)Increased minimum wage will add to the cost of products (which will also hurt the same low wage earners).
Yes, I was going to mention this later on, you beat me to it. It has happened to me when I was a teen, in the middle of 1986 when the minimum wage went up and my hours were cut back. Not only did the employer get less work done, but I didn't make any more money, either. But advocates for minimum wage laws refuse to see this. The same people think that taxing someone at a higher rate because "they can afford it" is going to help poor people, but I cannot see how. Washing money through Washington to eventually trickle down to the poor in the form of programs has proven woefully inefficient, and encourages dependence rather than independence. Id rather let people raise themselves up in life as I have, and as many others have. One should aspire to be "rich", not sit and demand to force down the "rich".
But, that will trickle down and everything, don't you know, leading to better job creation and all of that BS.
I am 54 and am finally making again the same wage I made when I was laid off from my manufacturing plant job - in 1991 at age 30. Granted, that was a union job, but I sure was putting my wages back into the economy then at a much faster clip, and at higher interest rates, than I am doing now. The home I purchased on that job in 1990 was at an interest rate of about 10%, but it was do-able because medical insurance wasn't eating us alive, and Certificates of Deposit were paying good dividends and good savers were being rewarded handsomely. Different world today. I'm also now looking at a retirement age of about 70, if I live that long - how fun.
I know. I honestly think the mild success of the 80s with that trickle down nonsense did a massive disservice to the American people. 1983-85 and 1987-88 were good, but the rest was a mess. And people to this day believe in this "voodoo" economics.
I think reagan stunted the 80s. They could have been more grand.
People think wealth occurs overnight. People stay poor because their decision didn't work out and they have failed to adapt. They are more focus on instant-gratification.
I don't know, nor have ever met, anyone who believes wealth occurs overnight. Most rich people I have met in my life are heirs. They didn't earn their prosperity, they inherited it. How much longer before we just give these people titles?
Now tell us with a straight face that the average pro sports thug - or say OJ - has 50 times more worth to the rest of society than the Teacher of the Year.
The entertainment industry will you stare you dead cold in the face and show you so.
Damn if I didn't read this as giving people these *******. Upon a second glance your point makes more sense.
I don't understand what you are saying in your first sentence. Perhaps because there is a blurred out word..... And I honestly don't know what you were saying there.
Over 80 years of socialism/communism experience has proven around the world that the "equality" mantra is doomed to failure.
Both the communists and the capitalists have good intentions. Both succeed for a moment, and then flow into corruption, eventually flowing into each other. Capitalism flows into Communalism; Communalism flows into Capitalism.
Business has fought every form of social equality throughout history. Business supported slavery; business supported war for expansion of its products; business fought laws to limit children's working hours and fought labor laws that gave workers a living way, decent work environments, days off, health care; business has fought every attempt to humanize the work place, because it cares only about personal profit. I don't think personal profit is the ONLY motive of a humane society. I think we've reached the abyss of the world motivated by private gain.
I personaly don't see the government as the destroyers of private gain, but as the balancers of rights and responsibilities of both the rich (the minority) and the poor (the majority). Government does not always act is the Great Balancer. Today the Government is in bed with Big Business; and together they are soaking the public, the consumer, for every last dime. Both Big Government and Big Business are the problem today. In fact, Wall Street is the white-collar mafia, which controlls the government to make laws that work for them (often against the public). We need to rest. We need to demolish the hierarchy, and start over. Don't tell me that Big Business will save America. And I won't tell you that Big Government will save America. America needs to go back down into the melting pot. When you lose your identity, as a person or as a nation, you need to experience defeat, die, become small, and return to the soil, to nature, the melting pot, the alchemical furnace, so your old weak corrupt metal can be refired into a new youthful form. We do this naturally when we sink into depression (deflation) which is the alchemical melting pot. This time, driven by FED monetary policy, we are attempting to avoid this necessary dark stage that leads to rebirth -- this necessary evaporation of the hierarchy of rich and poor. We need new leaders; new leaders rise up out of chaos. Old leaders, holding on to their power, create chaos.
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Taking from the rich and giving to the poor is a sure economic disaster by killing any incentive for the smart and able.
28173, what normally happens during the Inflation Cycle is that the gap between the rich and the poor gets stretched. That is natural. When the Inflation Cycle ends, and interest rates are raised, that gap gets lessened again. The Class Gap gets drawn back toward a relatively classless Rest Period. But FED actions in this latest Rest Season has been to effect the opposite; they are prolonging the CLASS GAP by keeping interest rates artificially low, making it worse, fearful that deflation and lowering prices on assets will steal money which the Inflation Cycle worked so hard to institute.
Fear of loss. There is gain and there is loss. Two sides. The Fed is wrecking this perfect system. We need to start destroying our debt and the rich need to pay for deflation season. This is how our system is supposed to work. The Lord gives and the Lords takes away.
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one cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity
I might argue that the greed of the rich is what's bringing this country down. I might argue that the superdebt machine is what's bringing this country down. I might argue that costs of the empire is what is brining this country down. Maybe the petrified nature of a government bought out by Wall Street and by special (unspecial) interests. We worship the wrong God: MONEY. That is what is bringing this country down. We've lost our humanity; and we worship machinery instead of our own best natures. I could argue that.
But I'd never think that the poor majority is what is destroying America, the working poor -- and that a raise in wages of America's poorest and most abused workers is destroying America.
I could argue that the greed of legal drug companies is killing America; housing bubbles orchestrated from the top of the food chain; but working people asking for higher salaries so they don't have to use food stamps or have two family members both have two jobs? I never would have guessed that.
We need to stop worshipping the rich and see them what they really are -- the best thieves and exploiters of the system. Sympathy for the Rich? What have they done except exemplify the shadow side of the argument that the dog-eat-dog world-view is that it creates a world of mad dogs?
How did Walmart, for example, come to power in America? Through ruthless bloodletting and stingy exploitation of underskilled workers? And you want more of that? Where is the soul of civilization?
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