Let's Raise The Minimum Wage to $115,000 per Year And Reduce Week To 20 Hours (independent, federal)

[Kenneth-Kaunda]

Originally Posted by shiftymh

Why would someone make 1 million when they can make much, much more somewhere else or if someone chooses to stay in the US, where is the motivation to produce a single dime after they make a million dollars that year?

easy, just ban all passports except for those with special status.

if you've earned 1 million already, you must continue working otherwise you will forfeit the money.

[Vinsanity]

Originally Posted by Kenneth-Kaunda

easy, just ban all passports except for those with special status.

if you've earned 1 million already, you must continue working otherwise you will forfeit the money.

LMAO. I think I'll take my chances stuffing my suitcase full of cash and making an escape to Mexico.

[FairnessIsGlorious]

Originally Posted by skeeter31

I have another question...if 100% of the income of a company is being paid to the workers, how would said company afford up keep of their buildings and facilities, or afford to purchase new inventory to see or make? How would they pay their taxes, fees, lawyers, permits, etc?

Buying inventory is paying income to workers since that money is being used to pay workers to produce that inventory. That is not what is meant by paying 100% of our income to workers.

We pay two types of income in our economy. Roughly half goes to people for working and producing every single good and service in our economy. That is called earned income because they got that income by working.

The other half of our income is paid to people who do not work and do not contribute to producing anything in our economy. This is called unearned income because they got that income without working.

An example of unearned income is interest. If you had $10 million, you can deposit that money in a bank and collect $300,000 per year in interest income without working at all. You can sit home all day watching tv, and you will get paid all that money every year.

Since these people do not work, they are contributing absolutely nothing to the economy. So it is a complete waste to pay them. And since this is $300k less that we can now pay to workers, the people doing the actual work, it is not fair to workers. That $300k should be getting paid to workers.

Half our income is paid out as unearned income. So workers are only getting paid half the income they produce.

Of course, we need money to invest and lend. However, what this post explains is that we don't need to borrow some person's savings in order to lend and invest in our economy.

Paying people unearned income like interest or profit in order to make investment money available is just as useful and necessary to a market economy as needing to pay people to print their own money in order to make money available.

A central bank can provide investment money to the market more efficiently than private investors can just like it can deliver enough money to the market more efficiently than private individuals printing their own money can.

The central bank will just provide investment banks with enough investment funds, taken from whatever the natural savings rate is, to meet whatever their demand for investment funds is.

The central bank's mandate will be to provide enough investment money to launch or expand enough businesses to fully employ everyone who wants to work. If the natural savings rate is not enough, they would levy a tax on gross sales in order to make up the difference.

This is a trivially simple task to accomplish for a central bank, especially in today's digital banking system. Just like the central bank can manage the money supply, they can manage the investment supply.

Keep in mind that this does not mean government does the investing, or runs the banks, or runs the businesses. This is still a free market economic system. Investing will still be done by individually run banks, the people at those banks in charge of investing will still be paid based on how well their investments perform, those investors will still invest in entrepreneurs who launch individually run companies, and those entrepreneurs will still be paid based on how well the companies they launch perform.

It just means the funds they use will be public funds. And requiring companies to use public investment funds is no different than requiring everyone today to use public money.

But most importantly, using public funds will enable us to stop paying unearned income. It will enable us to pay workers twice the amount of income they are getting paid today. And it will enable us to always maintain full employment. You wouldn't ever have today's situation where 18% of workers cannot get a full-time job while tens of trillions of dollars sit idle.

For a little more information on investing, read this.

[Marc Allen 242]

Originally Posted by Kenneth-Kaunda

easy, just ban all passports except for those with special status.

if you've earned 1 million already, you must continue working otherwise you will forfeit the money.

That trips the light fantastic, staggering between mind numbing stupidity and totalitarianism...it's really no wonder your namesake's country is in such disarray...

[Vinsanity]

LMAO @ central banks having to levy a tax to meet demand for capital. So much for being an "efficient" source of money.

[FairnessIsGlorious]

Originally Posted by Loveshiscountry

I wonder how many jobs would move overseas? I wonder how many people would stay in America when they can live so much cheaper elsewhere? Canada here we come.

If you think you will get a better deal as a worker moving to Canada than in a system where the minimum wage is $115k or $230k depending on what job you do, you are wrong.

And if you think re-allocating existing income causes inflation, you are also wrong.

As explained in the post, all we are doing is re-allocating EXISTING income. We are not increasing the total amount of income that is getting paid out. So it does not cause inflation.

If all we did was increase the minimum wage to $115k, and kept everyone else's income the same, that would cause inflation. But that is not what we are doing. We are also lowering the top pay from hundreds of millions and billions of dollars to just $460k. The amount we are reducing the top pay is exactly equal to the amount we are increasing the minimum pay. The net result is no increase in price on average. This is math 101.

If you have a $14.5 trillion economy and you only pay out $14.5 trillion in income, it is mathematically impossible to have inflation. How is the economy going to inflate beyond the $14.5 trillion if only $14.5 trillion is being spent? It can't. It is impossible.

You can see the calculation in paying out those incomes here:

http://www.city-data.com/forum/25524742-post28.html

[FairnessIsGlorious]

Originally Posted by UNC4Me

Let's say (just for laughs) that I agree with your premise that everything anyone has ever achieved was accomplished by theft. In your words via the slaughter of a whole population and the privatization of the planet.

That is not my premise. That is not what I said. I said all privatization of the planet came by way of theft. I never said everything anyone has ever achieved was accomplished by theft.

Since all the land in the US was stolen, we need to return the land to the rightful owners. OK, then let's do that. Let's reduce everything that's been built in the last 600 years to rubble. No roads, buildings, homes, businesses, power plants or Starbucks. We're gonna bulldoze the whole kit and kaboodle and give the land back to the indigenous people. Oh, wait, that won't work because you don't want to return what was taken, you want to take what was created. Never mind......

Why would destroying everything return the planet to its rightful owners? And why are some indigenous people the rightful owner?

Since Mother Nature does not have a store where you can purchase the planet, nobody can legitimately claim to be the rightful, private owner. The planet and its rich resources rightfully belongs to everyone which gives everyone a natural right to be able to participate in converting the planet's resources into useful goods and services and a natural right to get paid fairly for that work.

As equal owners of the planet, you have a natural right to a job and a fair income. And a fair income is paying 100% of the total income to workers and allocating that income based on how hard they work.

[FairnessIsGlorious]

Originally Posted by skeeter31

I love it!! You're presented with an economic term yet you don't understand what it means and return to your babble. PRICELESS!!

I understand economics and economic terms. I did not understand his incoherent sentence.

[FairnessIsGlorious]

Originally Posted by UNC4Me

It becomes more and more clear that you just copied and pasted from the OWS site. If you were the author of the original post, you'd have something more to add to the discussion than just reposting the same stuff over and over. "Knowing" the owner of the website and author of the original post is not the same as understanding or being able to defend the concept.

Fairness is Fantasy.

I am the author of that OWS post. I am only posting here because somebody at that OWS forum asked me to. That person who asked me made that known in one of the comments in this thread.

If you want more information than I respond with here in my comments, just point that out and I will give more detailed information.

[FairnessIsGlorious]

Originally Posted by Mathguy

I mentioned inflation caused by quadrupling the median wage in the US and you referred me back to post #3.

Increasing the median wage means you are decreasing the inequality. It does not mean you are paying out more total income. So an increase in the median wage does not mean there will be inflation.

Your math there is wrong. You are assuming that the total US production is void of input costs

Total production means total production, including input costs. Since input costs are a part of what we produce, it is obviously included.

If you do not understand what GDP is and how it is computed, this may help.

Your other huge gaping error is the silent assumption that the 20 hour workweek isn't going to impact the US GDP that you are using to support your "wage math".

The incomes of $115k to $460k are based on what we produced in 2010. But whether we need to work 40 hours for that income or 20 hours depends on whether we automate half the jobs we do. I claim that half our jobs can be automated with existing technology. If we automated them all, we would be able to reduce the work week to 20 hours as explained here.