Discussion for article #227805
Low wage employers should start paying a surcharge to the government because they refuse to pay people a living wage that would keep them off the social safety net. It’s high time Americans stopped subsidizing highly profitable businesses. Make 'em pay the surcharge, or pay their employees. It’s up to them.
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Clearly, we just haven’t cut taxes on Job Creators enough. If only they didn’t have to pay any taxes on capital gains at all, they would shower the rest of us with some of their prosperity.
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Oh sure, and I’m the queen of England. 
Or England and Scotland. We’ll know later today.
Seriously, let’s face up to the real problem: when you tell the average “persuadable” white voter in this country what it’s going to take to fix their problems, they either hear “SOSHULISM!!! Women not shaving body hair and inflation and crumbling depressing buildings!” or they hear “blah blah take your money and give it to the lazy, unemployed, crack dealing blah people” and go running to the R’s. Or both.
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The problem, Steve, is that I am not convinced that there IS a way to “fix” this. There are some things, like raising the minimum wage, that will make a difference for those at the very bottom, and I favor that. However, that probably won’t do much for middle-income folks, say those making $40-50k. Even if they got a small bump in wages, prices for many goods (like a happy meal) are held down by low wages and would likely rise some, so they would end up about the same. Again, I favor it, but let’s not pretend it will fix the larger problem.
And to be clear, no the conservative “solutions” won’t fix anything at all. They would only make it worse. But the problem is a global one. Almost every country, no matter what policies they have followed, has seen rising inequality http://inequalitywatch.eu/spip.php?article58
So why is that? My 2 cents is that the “New Economy” has sucked up a ton of capital and may have produced some good things, but it can’t produce a ton of jobs, because of the business model it operates under. GM at its peak had more than 1,000,000 workers world-wide. Google, the GM of today, has 52,000.
I don’t see policies that can really fix that, but then maybe I’m not smart enough…
Let’s have some more wars. Wars are a good distraction.
It’s pretty amazing though, that in a time when only massive use of antipoverty programs is keeping tens of millions of people afloat the answer being advanced by one side is to cut antipoverty programs.
You’d think that secretly they want people to come for them with pitchforks.
I believe the premise of this article is missing the money shot - this isn’t an accident.
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Don’t need to. The people who should be sharpening their pitch forks are convinced that it’s the person of a different color down the street that’s the cause of their problem.
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You say prices are held down by low wages. Not true. Wages have been stagnant since the economic meltdown but price inflation has been about 10-20% a year–despite what the government claims.
I buy pet food in Walmart, leader of low-paid workers. Yesterday I noticed that Twizzlers that used to be $1.88 are now $2.24 (a 20% jump). Earlier, half and half there went up by 10%. Most prices are going up or the packaging is shrinking.
Unless something is a necessity, people aren’t buying. Why else do you think retail is dying? And nothing will get solved as long as those in charge are divorced from reality.
Inflation isn’t actually that high, it’s just very spottily distributed. And in ways that (natch) tend to make things more expensive for poor people. So the cost of computers may be coming down, and the cost of cars, and even the cost of many generic food items. But if you’re stuck shopping in a place that doesn’t sell generics, or you really can’t substitute some other random candy for your Twizzlers fix (or skim milk for half and half) then you’re getting socked.
Also if you’re not in a position to buy everything on sale and stock up. The base price of name-brand soft drinks at our local supermarket has roughly doubled in the past five years, so we only get it when it’s on sale. But we have a basement.
Sure there’s a solution. The problem is that forty years of right wing propaganda has taken us to a point where even many self-described liberals view the solution as unbelievable from an economic standpoint and all of us see it as nearly impossible politically.
Take inheritance taxes back to where they were about 1980 and clamp down hard on the dodges, tax capital gains as ordinary income, eliminate the carried interest deduction, add a new top bracket of about 60% on income over ten million, drop the 10% bracket to 1% and the 25 to 20%, and then drop about half a trillion a year of net new money into infrastructure and the kind of things like research and space exploration and green energy initiatives that most of them consider “wasteful boondoggles.”
I’m SWAGing the numbers, but that’s the scale of change its going to take to start putting things to rights. The solution, in short, is the kind of deliberate governmental intervention in the economy through taxing and spending policy with the express purpose of redistributing wealth downward–to people who’ll spend it rather than hoard it up in savings vehicles or put it into rent-seeking psuedo-investments–while maintaining a market based economy we had up until 1980.
There would certainly be unintended adverse consequences, but, for at least two or three decades, they’d be vastly preferable to the adverse consequences of what we’ve got now. But the elites have spent the last three decades convincing people that an economic order that was the norm, with broad bi-partisan buy-in, before 1980 is laughably, shockingly, almost obscenely, inconceivable now.
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Steve, I’m not against those things. But even countries that have such policies have seen growing inequality (I showed the data above). Yes, they have less than the US, because they started more equal (particularly after World War II, when they were almost totally destroyed and no one had anything) but their trends are towards greater inequality too. You didn’t address that at all, nor provide any data.
Globalization is real and creates bigger winners. Someone with a product or idea that catches on can sell billions around the world, which was much harder to do 50 years ago. Therefore, the ability for the first mover to make a killing is much greater than it was. Government policies can mitigate those effects but not nullify them.
And unfortunately, I don’t have time to engage on the fact side of that. What I will say is that at least philosophically, I don’t have a problem with people getting rich actually selling something people like and want. It’s the misallocation of capital to increasingly, well, insane rent-seeking projects like, say, building a straight-line fiber route between New York and Chicago so high speed traders can capitalize on a seven millisecond advantage placing orders or PE firms that buy up existing businesses, suck money out of them, and then put them back out on the street loaded up with debt and patent hoarding that’s killing us.
After Boehner’s remarks of last week, calling the unemployed “lazy”, I sent his office a quick email. Since he likely would never see it, I felt free to be as candid as possible.
Dear Speak Boehner,
My wife is one of those unemployed who you imagine are all lazy. She’s been looking for a full time job ever since being laid off years ago. This recovery is doing nothing for middle class people looking for work. When you call the unemployed lazy, you are speaking about my wife. That is unacceptable. Kindly shut your whore mouth.
Butbutbut, the Job Creators have never done better! Look at all the wealth they have taken off the hands of people who don’t really deserve it.
Those low-wage service jobs will be giving everybody the Dignity of Work real soon now! Just stand below the seat and watch the prosperity fall our way.