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Old 02-24-2014, 04:10 PM
 
10,464 posts, read 5,549,199 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mysticaltyger View Post
We may disagree on the details, but you seem to understand the larger point....You realized $11 an hour wasn't going to get you the life you wanted so you did something about it besides complain.
And that right there is the key to this whole discussion.
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Old 02-24-2014, 04:19 PM
 
Location: Maui County, HI
4,131 posts, read 7,419,631 times
Reputation: 3391
Quote:
Originally Posted by mysticaltyger View Post
We may disagree on the details, but you seem to understand the larger point....You realized $11 an hour wasn't going to get you the life you wanted so you did something about it besides complain.
If everybody gets an engineering degree, do you think we'll all get jobs as engineers, and no one will have to work those low paying jobs?

That's something a lot of people with a small-picture view don't get. You can't use an example of a single person improving his job prospects to negate the societal effects of all these jobs that don't pay a living wage.
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Old 02-24-2014, 04:19 PM
 
3,570 posts, read 2,507,056 times
Reputation: 2290
Quote:
Originally Posted by TaxPhd View Post
I believe that we need a significantly reduced scope of government, with a correspondingly reduced amount of revenue to fund that government, and a better system to provide those funds.

Pretty much.

I believe that we need a safety net. But what we have now is a complete perversion of that concept. We have an ever growing segment of the population that uses the force of government as a means to plunder the wealth of the productive class. Able-bodied men and women should not be paid to produce children that they can't care for. If one is physically capable of working, they should work.

In Atlanta, it is very common to see someone pull into a gas station/mini-mart in a new or nearly new vehicle, pay cash for a tank of gas, and then use an EBT card to buy Red Bull's and snacks. Is that really the kind of government social spending that you are advocating?

I can't come up with ANY justifiable reason why money that I earned should be taken from me by force, and given to someone that didn't earn it, so that they can buy energy drinks and snacks. Can you?
The devil is in the details, so to say. What do you want to cut? SS & Medicare? Health & Education? Defense & Intelligence?

I think that the "market efficiency" arguments for deregulating the labor market tend to ignore that technology enhances productivity, populations are rising dramatically, and labor's equilibrium price is headed to the floor, especially if your deregulated labor market is fully deregulated in the sense that there are no barriers to entry for foreign workers. I would expect the result of this approach to be even greater inequality than we see today. An unregulated labor market gave us child labor and unsafe working conditions in the late 19th century. I consider enhanced worker safety and increased wages and benefits the result of government intervention in our labor markets.

You've used some telling and biased terms here: "plunder the wealth" and "productive class." Unemployment in the United States is ~6.6%. Are you referring to the 93.4% as the productive class? Even the U-6 is down to 12.7%, which includes people who do some work. Do you include people who inherited wealth as members of the productive class?

How exactly do you believe that people are paid to produce children they can't care for? The child tax credit? S-Chip? Those programs do not replace salaries.

The overwhelming majority of people do work. Some people earn so little that they are eligible for benefits like EBT, Medicaid, etc.

Your anecdote about buying red bull and snacks is also interesting. Do you suppose that we should exert more control over how someone uses their money? Do you realize that junk food often provides cheaper calories than healthy food?

More to the point, why do you believe that you are entitled not to pay taxes? If they are so oppressive, you could go off the grid and live by your own ability to hunt, gather, and farm on unclaimed territory. National and subnational governments are intimately involved in making policy and influencing markets. If you don't like it, you live in a representative democracy and you have political options.

If you don't want your money "being taken by force," you can renounce your citizenship and seek residence in Brunei, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or the British Virgin Islands.

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Old 02-24-2014, 04:34 PM
 
Location: Michigan
2,198 posts, read 2,723,110 times
Reputation: 2105
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheCityTheBridge View Post
Government taxes, it does not confiscate. It also provides benefits. Do you think that Social Security and Medicare should be eliminated? I think you would be alone in that bucket.
Gee, how nice of the government to deduct social security taxes from my paycheck, give that money to other people, and then (maybe) pay me a fraction of what I paid in by the time I get to that age instead of letting me invest that money for my own retirement with a massively higher return. Pretty strange to refer to that as a "benefit."

Quote:
Originally Posted by TheCityTheBridge View Post
Do you think it is a good thing for people who work full time to only earn enough money to afford necessities? At the federal minimum wage, before any taxes, an individual earns $15,080 annually working 40 hours a week without any time off. After state and federal taxes, that is not going to stretch terribly far in most places. At San Francisco's minimum wage, the highest in the nation, an individual working 40 hours a week without any time off earns $21,299.20 annually before any taxes. That would not stretch very far most places, much less in coastal California.
People don't want to hear this but people who cannot earn enough to live in San Francisco should not be living in San Francisco, whether they're minimum wage earners or middle class. No one has a right to live in a high cost of living area. How many millions of middle class workers or retirees have left California in the last decade because the cost of living is too high? I'm sure a lot of middle class people would love to live in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Grosse Point, or Manhattan but they don't because they can't afford it. Tough luck.

If the minimum wage people moved to lower cost of living areas then the supply of labor for those jobs would decrease and the businesses and Twitter millionaires would be forced to pay up. That's why people in parts of North Dakota are starting out at $15-20 an hour working at McDonald's.
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Old 02-24-2014, 04:41 PM
 
Location: Michigan
2,198 posts, read 2,723,110 times
Reputation: 2105
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheCityTheBridge View Post
Do you realize that junk food often provides cheaper calories than healthy food?
No it doesn't, junk food is expensive.

Example: A 9.5-ounce bag of Lay's potato chips costs the same amount as a 10-lb. bag of potatoes.
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Old 02-24-2014, 04:42 PM
 
30,873 posts, read 36,818,996 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Submariner View Post
That could be.

Right now things are changing a lot.

Our local newspaper has no website, no email, no web presence at all.

However it is changing. I think most of the change is being driven by the chain stores.

Nationwide chains seem to be at the front of this movement. While most local businesses are not online yet.

I think I recently saw that around 40% of the population have computers now and are getting online.

Some places that I do business with are online already, though most are not, yet.
I think that 40% number seems awfully low.

I don't know where you live but we must live in different worlds in the same country!
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Old 02-24-2014, 04:43 PM
 
3,570 posts, read 2,507,056 times
Reputation: 2290
Quote:
Originally Posted by EugeneOnegin View Post
Gee, how nice of the government to deduct social security taxes from my paycheck, give that money to other people, and then (maybe) pay me a fraction of what I paid in by the time I get to that age instead of letting me invest that money for my own retirement with a massively higher return. Pretty strange to refer to that as a "benefit."



People don't want to hear this but people who cannot earn enough to live in San Francisco should not be living in San Francisco, whether they're minimum wage earners or middle class. No one has a right to live in a high cost of living area. How many millions of middle class workers or retirees have left California in the last decade because the cost of living is too high? I'm sure a lot of middle class people would love to live in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Grosse Point, or Manhattan but they don't because they can't afford it. Tough luck.

If the minimum wage people moved to lower cost of living areas then the supply of labor for those jobs would decrease and the businesses and Twitter millionaires would be forced to pay up if they still want those services. That's why people in parts of North Dakota are starting out at $15-20 an hour working at McDonald's.
If you don't like the taxes and benefits, elect new representation in local, state, and federal government. If you don't like any government at all, I hear there's a whole lot of unclaimed land in the Antarctic.

Elected representatives have put in place programs to help low income people afford housing and food. Elected officials acknowledge and work on middle class cost of living problems in California. The idea that low income and middle class people should not live in the Bay Area or New York is silly. Our cost of living crunch is a policy problem, and it needs policy solutions.
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Old 02-24-2014, 04:46 PM
 
30,873 posts, read 36,818,996 times
Reputation: 34457
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hemlock140 View Post
True, if you cannot apply online you cannot apply at our company and most others around here. At the local Jr. High School every student is issued a laptop.

In our small city of 50,000 they recently built a new, much larger library to accommodate the number of patrons, despite the old one only being 10 years old. They have about a dozen computers but very few are used since most people are online at home or on mobile devices.

The computers where I work get used a lot by low income folks who don't have them or by other folks who don't happen to have their laptops/mobile devices with them.
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Old 02-24-2014, 04:48 PM
 
30,873 posts, read 36,818,996 times
Reputation: 34457
Quote:
Originally Posted by EugeneOnegin View Post
No it doesn't, junk food is expensive.

Example: A 9.5-ounce bag of Lay's potato chips costs the same amount as a 10-lb. bag of potatoes.
Thank you This nonsense about eating healthy being expensive is just that. It's mostly about ignorance and laziness....those two traits seem to go together.

Take a look at how much beans cost. They are cheap! And very nutritious. Before processed food, poor people knew how to eat cheaply and nutritiously until processed foods made everyone lazy and fat and destroyed that knowledge.
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Old 02-24-2014, 04:50 PM
 
30,873 posts, read 36,818,996 times
Reputation: 34457
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheCityTheBridge View Post
Elected representatives have put in place programs to help low income people afford housing and food. Elected officials acknowledge and work on middle class cost of living problems in California. The idea that low income and middle class people should not live in the Bay Area or New York is silly. Our cost of living crunch is a policy problem, and it needs policy solutions.
The biggest policy solution NYC or the Bay Area could implement would be to build more housing....but they refuse to do it.
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