Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojkt1975 – British rock band Queen begins to record lead singer Freddie Mercury’s song Bohemian Rhapsody at Rockfield Studios in Wales. The song takes over three weeks to fully record, with sessions going 10 hours a day. EMI, Queen’s record company, was reluctant to release the song as a single, but eventually relented after the band secreted a copy of the song to a Capitol Radio DJ who played the song 14 times over the course of a weekend, to much praise. The song stayed on the UK charts for 9 weeks, reaching number one in 1976, and then climbing back into the top spot in 1991 following the death of Mercury. In the US, the song peaks at number 9 in 1976, but reached all the way to number 2 in 1992 after it was featured in the comedy Wayne’s World.
1812 – British forces defeat the American militia at Bladensburg, Maryland and march unopposed into Washington D.C. The British proceed to set fire to the White House, the House of Representatives, the Library of Congress and the unfinished Capitol building, as well as many private homes. The British retreat from the city 2 days later, leaving it in charred ruins.
79 – Mount Vesuvius in southern Italy erupts for the first time in centuries, destroying the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The eruption is reported to have lasted 18 hours, burying Pompeii under some 15 feet of volcanic ash and pumice, while Herculaneum is buried under 60 feet of mud and volcanic rock. During the 18th century a farmer found traces of Pompeii on his vineyard, prompting an excavation project that continues to this very day. The ash under which the city was buried preserved many artifacts, including the outlines of the bodies of the poor souls who were buried under it, in a kind of plaster mold, providing great insight into the daily life of the time prior to the eruption.
Filed under: This Day in History |
All Things in Moderation 
The dirty Royalists did not burn the Marine Barracks in DC.
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Nauseating Oberlin Hoax update. Kinda like the Bush TANG letters, “fake but real.”
http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/08/oberlin-issues-statement-these-actions-were-real/
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The Pompeii ruins are gorgeous but the remains are creepy:
All my Pompeii photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yellojkt/sets/72157617147539484/with/3464233998/
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If the date on that volcanic eruption is correct it means those remains are almost 2000 years old…………..amazing to see them in that form as opposed to skeletal. Definitely creepy looking though.
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Oh, and I loved Freddie Mercury.
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Alex Pareene at Salon calls for the NYT to fire MoDo. I sort of think MoDo and the NYT are a perfect match, actually.
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Apparently not everyone shares my appreciation of Winston Churchill.
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The Guardian talks about Christie as the potential 2016 nominee.
Still, Christie is not that conservative on the whole. Yes, Christie is pro-life, anti-gay marriage, and just vetoed gun control legislation. Abortion, however, is something most Americans are split on. Christie also signed a law banning gay conversion therapy, and he signed 10 different gun control laws recently. In other words, Christie is a kind of ideological hodgepodge. This can best be seen by looking at ideological ranking systems. This takes the subjectivity out of trying to parse out where exactly a candidate stands.
As Nate Silver did originally, you can average scores across different systems to get a good idea of where a candidate stands. In the case of Christie, he’d be the most moderate Republican candidate in the past 50 years.
Christie’s scoring on the two rankings we have available place him more toward the center than any other candidate to win a Republican nomination since 1964. Some of you might say that Christie is more conservative than these scores indicate. But it seems to me that for every issue where Christie takes a conservative stand, he takes a moderate stance. So that while he’s conservative on taxes, he’s for campaign finance reform and green energy.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/25/some-republicans-are-nuts-but-the-party-leaders-are-not/
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Here’s a little push back on the latest CATO Institute study on poverty and the amount of assistance the poor receive in the US.
Running the numbers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Tanner and Hughes claim that “the current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work” and urge lawmakers to “consider ways to shrink the gap between the value of welfare and work by reducing current benefit levels and tightening eligibility requirements.”
[snip]
Tanner and Hughes make much of the fact that in 13 states, the maximum benefits exceed $15 per hour, but according to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, their hypothetical single parent needs to make at least $20.14 per hour just to cover his or her family’s basic necessities. That’s in the cheapest state – South Dakota. The nationwide average is $24.09 per hour. The federal minimum wage, had it kept up with American workers’ productivity, would fall somewhere between $16.50 and $22.00 per hour instead of $7.25.
But the paper shouldn’t be taken at face value because the authors’ abundant caveats show that their study measures neither the reality of poverty in America, nor that of the public programs designed to fight it.
Tanner and Hughes acknowledge that “surveys of welfare recipients consistently show their desire for a job.” They acknowledge that a significant share of those receiving public benefits are working – Walmart employees, for example, famously rely on public assistance to get by, meaning that taxpayers effectively subsidize the Walton family’s vast fortunes. And they note that programs like TANF are time-limited – to a maximum of 60 months except in most cases.
They also acknowledge the central flaw in their conclusion: in real life the “typical” family in their study doesn’t come close to receiving the maximum benefit from every single program for which they’re eligible. But here the authors’ caveat doesn’t go far enough. Due largely to the fact that eligibility requirements have already become harder to overcome, these programs are helping fewer poor families get by. In 2009, around three out of four poor families with kids weren’t getting any TANF benefits. At the height of the economic crash, about 25 percent of those eligible for food stamps weren’t receiving them; during better times, that number hovers around 40 percent. And as the CATO study concedes, six out of seven poor families aren’t getting housing assistance.
So a study that claims to tell us about the “typical” poor family is really describing a rarity — the equivalent of a four-leaf clover. But the purpose of these studies isn’t to inform good policymaking. They feed a narrative that the poor are lazy and undeserving, and provide wonky cover for further weakening our social safety net.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/22/cato-institute-report-says-poor-americans-have-it-too-good/
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lms (from the article):
Walmart employees, for example, famously rely on public assistance to get by, meaning that taxpayers effectively subsidize the Walton family’s vast fortunes.
No, that is not what it means, and when someone says such an absurd thing it makes everything else they say immediately suspect.
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Here’s another one on low wages. The solutions will go over like a lead balloon though.
However, a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows just how much Americans across the economic spectrum have in common when it comes to stagnating wages.
“The bottom 99 percent may be a bit of an exaggeration but it’s not much,” said EPI president Lawrence Mishel, who co-authored A Decade of Flat Wages with economist Heidi Shierholz. “In an era when the only people moving ahead are those with an advanced degree — and that’s just 12 percent of the workforce — we shouldn’t partition off people at the low end as if they are totally distinct.”
The report demonstrates that during the recession and its aftermath, from 2007 to 2012, wages fell for the entire bottom 70 percent of workers despite productivity growth of 7.7 percent. But Mishel emphasizes that the cause of stagnating wages isn’t the recession.
“We need to be clear that these trends are really evident from 2002 to 2007, after the momentum of the strong wage growth of the late 1990s ended,” he said.
From 2000 to 2007, productivity increased by a robust 16 percent but a worker at the 50th percentile saw a wage growth of just 2.6 percent, a worker at the 20th percentile saw a wage increase of 1 percent and the 80th percentile saw a wage growth of 4.6 percent. Indeed, over the past ten years, wages were stagnant or declined for the bottom 70 percent.
“And even the wages of the worker at the 80th percentile rose only 1.7 percent over the past 10 years — that’s less than 0.2 percent annually, which in economic terms is zero, ” said Mishel. “Basically, somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of workers in the last decade aren’t getting bupkis, as my grandmother used to say.”
http://billmoyers.com/2013/08/23/90-percent-of-workers-aren%E2%80%99t-getting-bupkis/
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One thing rarely discussed w/regards to wage growth is the impact on our open borders. High immigration equals low rising / stagnant wages.
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I am about to posit a hypothesis. It has no moral foundation; I am not suggesting a “should”.
Here it is. It seems to me that in a competitive economy at theoretical equilibrium the lowest paid full time job would pay enough for the frugal employee to cover survival: food, clothing, shelter, transportation and health care. It seems to me that jobs that cannot pay that well in a competitive economy at equilibrium should be replaced by machinery, or the labor costs and the price of the goods and services must increase.
I know that model is not fully reflected in the actual market. But if I am correct about what I recollect about equilibria [am I?], the question is why does the actual market not fully reflect that?
Global competition is certainly a factor. The weakness of unions may be a factor. concentration of oligopoly power may be a factor. Immigration may be a factor.
I would like to know why we are not at an equilibrium point before I recommended a government intervention.
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Even the Walton empire knows the perception of their employment practices leave them open to criticism. It’s their choice though to have employees that can’t support their families and need food stamps and medicaid to survive.
I do realize this is one of those situations Democrats will exploit for political advantage though. Meanwhile, the piece made short work of taking apart the CATO report.
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lms:
Even the Walton empire knows the perception…
Perception is not necessarily reality. We’ve been round and round on the whole Walmart business, so probably not much use going through it again, but that particular criticism of Walmart rests on an outrageously false premise, namely that welfare payments are part of the natural order of the world, not a choice made by government.
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probably not much use going through it again
Okay, but “an outrageously false premise” is an opinion, not a fact. Medicaid/food stamps have been around for a lot longer than the demise of the middle class as we knew it.
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lms:
but “an outrageously false premise” is an opinion, not a fact.
Welfare payments are not a part of the natural order of the world. That is a fact, not opinion.
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“Natural order?” What are you talking about? Social Darwinism?
Scott, if I am right, that theoretical equilibrium in a competitive market would not produce jobs that pay less than a frugal person could live on, is it possible that assistance payments to employees affects that equilibrium in a way that amounts to subsidization of WalMart and of its pricing system?
That seems to me to be a fair question.
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Mark,
You are barking up the wrong tree. In libertarian theory, if a person’s skills are too meager to justify a living wage in a free labor market their only option is to rely on voluntary charity or to die. Government forced transfers of wealth such as food stamps or the earned income credit are theft from the labor of more skilled workerss. Also, minimum wage laws infringe on the liberty of employers to freely enter into contracts with their employees.
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yello:
In libertarian theory, if a person’s skills are too meager to justify a living wage in a free labor market their only option is to rely on voluntary charity or to die.
That is not libertarian theory. That is the nature of reality.
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mark:
“Natural order?” What are you talking about?
The payment of welfare to any given person is not a naturally occurring event. It does not come as an automatic and inevitable consequence of Walmart paying its employees X rather than Y. Paying welfare is a choice made by the government. If the government doesn’t want to pay welfare to people who get paid what Walmart pays its employees, then it can choose not to pay them.
Scott, if I am right, that theoretical equilibrium in a competitive market would not produce jobs that pay less than a frugal person could live on…
I don’t think you are right. Your mistake is assuming that no person would ever take a job that pay less than a frugal person could live on. There are in fact lots of reasons a person might take (and in fact have throughout history taken) a job that pays less than a frugal person could live in.
…is it possible that assistance payments to employees affects that equilibrium in a way that amounts to subsidization of WalMart and of its pricing system?
There is no doubt that government interference in the market for labor will affect the natural “equilibrium” of that market, and it is certainly possible that by subsidizing potential employees with government assistance, the government enables/encourages some of them to take jobs they otherwise would not take, thus increasing demand for those jobs and hence naturally putting downward pressure on the cost of filling those jobs. But even if so it remains the case that it is the employee himself that is being subsidized with a direct payment from the government, not anyone else. To characterize such a situation as a taxpayer “subisidy” of either the employer whose pool of potential employees has been increased or consumers whose cost of goods may be effected is nothing more than an ideologically driven abuse of language.
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No sense talking about it anymore……………I was using a different premise. I wonder why WalMart employees need assistance in the first place. I think you defined the premise after the fact to fit your narrative. No matter……………I’m out for awhile anyway.
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lms:
I think you defined the premise after the fact to fit your narrative.
I haven’t presented a narrative. I am pointing out the problem with the narrative advanced by your link, namely that taxpayers are subsidizing the Walmart family fortune.
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Lms, is your thinking that if WalMart did not employ these people, they would have employment elsewhere and would no longer require welfare? If so, why do you think that?
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Yello, do you believe that Scott or I are Anarchists?
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do you believe that Scott or I are Anarchists?
I believe that you would abolish the minimum wage if given the opportunity. I have yet to understand what libertarians would do for people unable to support themselves if the labor market placed wages below a subsistence level.
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yello:
I have yet to understand what libertarians would do for people unable to support themselves if the labor market placed wages below a subsistence level.
What do you do for such people?
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What do you do for such people?
I advocate for an increase in the minimum wage and I proudly pay my taxes.
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yello:
I advocate for an increase in the minimum wage
In other words, you advocate for someone else to do something about it. What a generous guy!
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I tithe.
And agitate to eliminate the minimum wage so more people can work, earn income and help unshackled the economy.
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McWing, my thinking is that WalMart preys on people who are desperate for work by paying them wages that are so far below a subsistence existence for themselves and their children that they know the government (us) will pick up the rest of the tab. As a business model I think it could use some improvement, that’s what I think. They’re not the only employer doing it but they’re one of the biggest.
The new global economy and free trade, recession, trickle down that doesn’t do what it promised, astronomical differences between worker’s wages and owner’s equity, loss of labor negotiations, etc, etc have turned many hard working Americans into paupers and I don’t think it’s fair to blame the programs that are keeping food on the table and allowing their kids to see a doctor.
It’s just another way to blame liberals for programs that were created out of a need that wouldn’t be met in a dog eat dog world.
But I guess it’s the premise that’s really important and apparently the premise is that the government should never interfere with the “natural order” of the free market. It doesn’t happen to be a premise that I agree with. I guess that’s about all there is to say at this point………..stalemate.
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The Washington Post had a long article today on how undocumented workers affect the labor market. Some excerpts:
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lms:
McWing, my thinking is that WalMart preys on people who are desperate for work by paying them wages that are so far below a subsistence existence for themselves and their children that they know the government (us) will pick up the rest of the tab.
Perhaps Walmart should institute a policy of refusing to hire anyone on welfare. Somehow, though, I don’t think such a policy would assuage the anti-Walmart crowd. In fact I suspect it would just infuriate them even more.
…and I don’t think it’s fair to blame the programs that are keeping food on the table and allowing their kids to see a doctor.
But what if those programs do in fact have unintended consequences, as they surely do? It is one thing to argue that the consequences are outweighed by other values and are therefore acceptable, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to deny that the consequences exist.
and apparently the premise is that the government should never interfere with the “natural order” of the free market.
That has not been my premise. I have not been arguing that the government shouldn’t pay people welfare because it interferes with the natural order of the labor market. I have been arguing that it makes no sense to blame Walmart for the consequences of that interference.
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Progressive thinking in action:
In order to alleviate the suffering and uncertainty felt by people who are, for various reasons, unable to support themselves, let’s get government to transfer some resources from those who can and do support themselves to those who can’t and don’t, thus providing them with a minimally acceptable lifestyle. This in turn creates a new circumstance…those at the margins who can support themselves but only barely, ie to the minimum level that the government would provide anyway, now have a disincentive to work to support themselves.
In order to offset this disincentive to support oneself, let’s get government to continue to provide support even to people who can and do support themselves in some measure, so that it is always more economically advantageous to take some job, even one that doesn’t pay more than what the government will pay, than to not work at all. This in turn results in the circumstance of some people collecting government support checks despite the fact that they are gainfully employed.
In order to advance some of our other policy preferences, like a higher minimum wage, let’s blame this new circumstance, which is exactly the circumstance our welfare policy was designed to create, on the “greed” of private businesses, and try to convince voters that taxpayers are “subsidizing” private businesses by handing out welfare payments to people who work.
A foreigner completely unfamiliar with American politics could easily be forgiven for thinking that progressivism gets its name from the fact that it progressively advocates for more and more government solutions to the problems that their previous “solutions” have created.
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Scott
In fact I suspect it would just infuriate them even more.
WalMart can do what they want within the legal limits of running a business. The only avenue we have left as tax payers and even citizens really is to apply pressure as consumers. It’s the same with freedom of speech, say what you want but don’t expect to be free of criticism for it.
what if those programs do in fact have unintended consequences
Every action has consequences, some intended some not, but WalMart knew the consequences of paying their employees a miserly wage with no benefits and did it anyway. As an example of what has gone wrong for the working class they’re a shining example of low wages vs grandiose profits.
it makes no sense to blame Walmart for the consequences
I think it does. They have a choice of how to run their business and they chose the low wage/no benefit way. I understand the choices businesses have to make regarding medical coverage considering the way costs have risen over the last decade. But seriously, working people needing assistance with food is downright irresponsible IMO.
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The plight of low wage workers in America was pretty well documented in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich where she did work for a month at a Wal-Mart. Here she describes how workers were forced to work off the clock.
I recently went to Bentonville on vacation and the town is beautiful with nice parks and a world class art museum open for free admission courtesy of WalMart. Touring the WalMart Museum is an exercise in irony as it is filled with quotes and displays about how much Sam Walton values his ‘associates’.
Here are my photos from Bentonville
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let’s get government to continue to provide support even to people who can and do support themselves in some measure, so that it is always more economically advantageous to take some job, even one that doesn’t pay more than what the government will pay, than to not work at all.
The Earned Income Credit was a cornerstone of the Reagan era tax reforms. Raising the minimum wage decreases the tax burden on the general public while placing the onus on employers (and indirectly their customers). I am forced through my taxes to support the parsimony of WalMart even if I don’t frequent their store.
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yello:
The Earned Income Credit was a cornerstone of the Reagan era tax reforms.
Non-sequitur. The charge against Walmart is not that some of its employees take advantage of the earned income credit. The charge is that some of its employees still collect welfare.
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yello:
I am forced through my taxes to support the parsimony of WalMart even if I don’t frequent their store.
Incorrect. You are “forced”, by policies for which you advocate, to support people who don’t make enough to support themselves.
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Scott, I’m not going to debate progressive vs conservative politics today. All I’m saying is that the middle and working class have taken a big economic hit in the last two decades or so and the economy is out of whack, or balance as Mark would say. I don’t think Walmart is some big evil entity out to destroy the world but I do think they personify income inequality and corporate power and are the obvious choice to use as an example. Do they deserve the criticism? I think they do, but again, they’re not breaking any labor laws that I’m aware of and it’s their choice to run their business however they want.
I think it’s a big stretch to blame safety net policies for their labor practices but if you’re comfortable blaming liberal policies for this situation I can’t change your opinion and don’t intend to even try.
I’ll see y’all later this week hopefully……………I’ve got another busy one ahead and then out for the Holiday.
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“if a person’s skills are too meager to justify a living wage in a free labor market their only option is to rely on voluntary charity or to die.”
I’d be willing to bet that they have some sort of skill that government prevents them from utilizing due to unnecessary barriers to entry under the guise of public health/safety.
I also think any discussion of poverty is incomplete without the effect of the war on drugs and the systematic effort to destroy families through government policy. You can’t make poor men superfluous by design and then bemoan the results. Healthy, independent families, going about their lives don’t need government assistant and we can’t have that. I truly believe this situation is the exact goal of framers* behind Great Society, simply because foreseeable consequences are not unintended.. An uneducated, permanent underclass dependent on government that allows the elites to stroke their messiah complexes.
*progressive elites/thought leaders.
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*progressive elites/thought leaders.
You mean like Nixon/Reagan’s “War on Drugs” or the vast privatized prison complex, promoted by whom making men superfluous and destroying families?
Look, if this place is only going to spend time blaming liberals for the woes of the world, there’s no reason for me to be here really. I’ve always been willing to accept both mistakes and unintended or even intended consequences but I’m not willing to just accept the premise that liberals have been the instigators of every bad policy that has decimated the middle class and working poor.
I’m no progressive elite, just a working stiff, but even I can tell when both corporate power and profits have taken away the little bit of a comfort zone the little people used to enjoy. Blame liberals if you want but I don’t find it very helpful and the reality is much more complex and less convenient than that.
Anyway, I need to get back to work, as I said.
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lmsinca, the entire premise that individual entitlements are subsidizing Walmart is one that you are never going to get conservatives/libertarians to buy into. That’s simply a way for Democrats to try and appropriate the “corporate welfare” rhetoric and twist it around. Same thing with “tax expenditures” as spending.
It’s antithetical to an actual debate on the merits.
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“markinaustin, on August 25, 2013 at 11:08 am said:
I am about to posit a hypothesis. It has no moral foundation; I am not suggesting a “should”.
Here it is. It seems to me that in a competitive economy at theoretical equilibrium the lowest paid full time job would pay enough for the frugal employee to cover survival: food, clothing, shelter, transportation and health care. It seems to me that jobs that cannot pay that well in a competitive economy at equilibrium should be replaced by machinery, or the labor costs and the price of the goods and services must increase.
I know that model is not fully reflected in the actual market. But if I am correct about what I recollect about equilibria [am I?], the question is why does the actual market not fully reflect that?”
Your model leaves out the impact of household size. The wage level required to support a single person in one household is not the same as is required to support two or more people who have the same wage but who live together and share expenses.
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jnc/mark:
Your model leaves out the impact of household size.
I think there is also the problem of assuming there is some absolute, knowable amount of income that would cover “survival”. I am not sure it there is, and even it there were I am fairly positive that it is significantly lower than the threshold below which we provide welfare in the US. That being the case, it is not clear to me that wages that are less than what one can receive from welfare would necessarily reflect the absence of the equilibrium Mark is speaking of.
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Here is what I believe is the root of the issue:
“The federal minimum wage, had it kept up with American workers’ productivity, would fall somewhere between $16.50 and $22.00 per hour instead of $7.25.”
The assumption is that wages should rise in some sort of linear model with productively. I’d argue that’s a flawed assumption. If the owner of a business buys new computers for the entire staff and that results in an increase in their productivity, there’s no obvious reason why the gains from that boost should accrue to labor instead of the provider of the capital. And in fact that’s exactly what has occurred with automation.
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there’s no obvious reason why the gains from that boost should accrue to labor instead of the provider of the capital.
Those are fighting words to us neo-Marxist redistributionists.
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Those are fighting words to us neo-Marxist redistributionists.
Are you a neo-marxist or a crypto-marxist?
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Neo. Cryptos try to hide what they are behind other issues which aren’t really relevant to their real beliefs. Many hard left enviromentalists are crypto-Marxists as they use sustainability issues to mask a desire for central planning.
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jnc
lmsinca, the entire premise that individual entitlements are subsidizing Walmart is one that you are never going to get conservatives/libertarians to buy into
Hah, I gave up on that sometime yesterday. Now I’m just trying to get them to stop blaming liberal elites/progressives for setting up the conditions that Walmart has used to their advantage as if it’s just an isolated simple matter and the safety net is entirely to blame.
My being here becomes superfluous if the premise of every debate becomes liberals are to blame. I might as well just use this place as a chat room and discuss my daughter’s amazing trip to Africa, the fact that I’m training for the “Senior” Olympics (yuck), or that I baked three loaves of zucchini bread yesterday.
Sorry, this place frustrates me, as do libertarians.
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Yellow, you are familiar with David Harvey correct?
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“Many hard left enviromentalists are crypto-Marxists as they use sustainability issues to mask a desire for central planning.”
I knew there was a reason I liked you. See Naomi Klein.
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Your model leaves out the impact of household size.
The military pay system makes adjustments for marital status and family size. They also have a single-payer/provider medical system and often provide housing and meals. The United States armed forces are the most successful socialist system ever instituted.
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“My being here becomes superfluous if the premise of every debate becomes liberals are to blame.”
I don’t subscribe to that. But I do believe you can certainly credit/blame liberals/progressives for the welfare state/safety net, i.e. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and any associated consequences.
I fundamentally subscribe to Scott’s position. If Walmart announced it was no longer hiring Medicaid eligible employees to comply with the goal of not being “subsidized” by the government, liberals and progressives would be the first people up in arms.
Fundamentally, some jobs are only going to be worth a certain amount of money. Government fiat can’t convert a low skill, entry level clerk position into a sustainable middle class job. What they will succeed at is increasing the shift to automation of those jobs.
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JNC, automated productivity increase is a complex matter for analysis in the competitive model.
Remember that pricing of all units is not ultimately a function of cost in the competitive market but a function of demand and supply, and each subsidiary cost is also a function of demand and supply, treating each subsidiary cost as a “price”. When revenues cannot cover subsidiary costs and a reasonable profit producers are driven out of the market until supply has become restricted and pricing is elevated.
A productivity increase lowers cost per unit produced which allows for more production until demand is met at a new equilibrium point. Automation based productivity may have reduced the number of jobs and increased the skills necessary for the fewer jobs and thus increased, by reason of the restricted supply of the newly skilled laborers, their wages. At the same time, automation will have displaced the untrainable and sent them on a downward ride of underemployment until they have learned a new skillset. My point bring that increased productivity from capital investment often requires its reward to be split among the entrepreneur, her/his necessarily more skilled laborers, and the public in the way of competitive pricing.
Reality deviates from the model, in part because of restricted competition, in part because of global compartmentalization, in part because of disparity of bargaining power, and in part because of non-market political decisions, locally, nationally, and abroad.
I am sure there have been dissertations about this.
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lms:
My being here becomes superfluous if the premise of every debate becomes liberals are to blame.
If I think liberals are to blame for something, I can assure you it is a conclusion, not a premise.
But in any event my arguments here have not been aimed at blaming liberals for anything (although I of course think they are to blame for a lot of things). They have been aimed at countering the narrative that welfare payments are effectively subsidizing any employer who employs someone who collects a welfare check, a narrative that you introduced and to which I object.
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What they will succeed at is increasing the shift to automation of those jobs.
Or push the work effort onto the customer.I used the self-checkout line at the grocery store yesterday because the regular check-out lines were so long. markinaustin made the good point that jobs that cannot be economically justified at a living wage ought to be automated. There are just some jobs that are resistant to automation. Hotel housekeeping and strawberry picking come to mind. Labor surplus is what makes these jobs so low-paid. The problem of capitalism has always been what to do with the proles.
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“You mean like Nixon/Reagan’s “War on Drugs” or the vast privatized prison complex, promoted by whom making men superfluous and destroying families?You mean like Nixon/Reagan’s “War on Drugs” or the vast privatized prison complex, promoted by whom making men superfluous and destroying families?”
exactly.
[update — this isn’t a party ID thing, but more of the guiding ideology]
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“yellojkt, on August 26, 2013 at 9:15 am said:
…
markinaustin made the good point that jobs that cannot be economically justified at a living wage ought to be automated.”
Do you regard that as preferable from a policy standpoint to companies offering jobs that pay less than a living wage?
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“yellojkt, on August 26, 2013 at 9:15 am said:
…
The problem of capitalism has always been what to do with the proles.”
Don’t forget the inherent contradictions of capital accumulation. Yes, I remember my Marx as well.
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” Many hard left enviromentalists are crypto-Marxists as they use sustainability issues to mask a desire for central planning.”
Energy buddy calls them Watermelons … Green on the outside, Red on the Inside.
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Mark, this weekend was my husbands turn to pick a movie to go see. He selected “Two Guns” with Mark Wahlberg and Denzel…………….don’t tell him but I really enjoyed it. You both might like it as well. Purely entertaining but the exchanges between the two of them were really great. Quite a few twists and turns as well. Anyway, I’d recommend it.
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Thanks, Lms. We double dated to the movie Saturday night and David and I suggested “Two Guns” but the Higher Authority suggested either “The Butler”, “The Spectacular Now”, or “In a World…”.
We chose “In A World…” from the list provided and all four of us really enjoyed it. Satire on the Hollywood voice-over industry. Evenly entertaining and funny. Totally without the feeling of manufactured dramatic tension. An indie film, so may be a little harder to find.
I will see “Two Guns” either with another guy or as payback from the Higher Authority. She is sporting about that, btw.
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Do you regard that as preferable from a policy standpoint to companies offering jobs that pay less than a living wage?
The problem is that pure labor and supply demand calculus neglects the externalities of minimal living standards. Just because someone is willing to accept a job below a living wage (since it’s assumed an employer would be more than happy to offer one) does not mean that it should be permitted if in doing so a cost burden is placed on a third party not involved in the negotiation (and most labor negotiations are of the Hobson’s Choice variety) to cover the cost of food, shelter, and medicine (for now we will neglect the right to cable television and cellular phone service). Whatever the employer doesn’t provide has to be made up by the taxpayer, hence the argument that sub-living wages result in a subsidy to the employer.
The market is going to be a very poor mechanism for what qualifies as a living wage so other societal elements must do so. Once you decide that a person has no ‘right’ to a basic minimal standard of living and has the freedom to choose to starve to death by working for a wage below that required to sustain him or her, the problem goes away.
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“My point bring that increased productivity from capital investment often requires its reward to be split among the entrepreneur, her/his necessarily more skilled laborers, and the public in the way of competitive pricing.”
I don’t dispute any of that. I’m arguing with the premise that the minimum wage should rise in a linear progression tied to productivity gains, which was stated, but not actually justified in the original piece challenging the AEI analysis.
“The federal minimum wage, had it kept up with American workers’ productivity, would fall somewhere between $16.50 and $22.00 per hour instead of $7.25.”
Well, yes but why should it keep pace? The implicit assumption seems to be that the workers themselves are the cause of the increased productivity, i.e. working harder, have more skills, etc. I challenge that as I believe the productivity gains since say the 1970’s have been largely a result of automation and computers. Why those gains should then go automatically to minimum wage workers as opposed to the person who purchased the capital escapes me.
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“Whatever the employer doesn’t provide has to be made up by the taxpayer”
I’d argue that under your model this effect is more pronounced. You will have a higher rate of permanent structural unemployment and presumably the living wage for those without jobs will be through pure welfare.
I.e. the Western Europe model.
Edit: To further refine my point, I believe this is where the whole argument about raising the minimum wage crouched as an attack on corporate subsidies on behalf of the taxpayers breaks down. If the net effect is to increase the amount of taxes that the taxpayers will pay to make up for the lost wages (even if they aren’t living wages) that aren’t being paid, then it can’t be argued from a standpoint of attacking subsidies on behalf of the taxpayers. The fact that some people will feel better about paying for welfare payments for those who are unemployed vs those who have jobs that don’t pay a living wage is simply conceit.
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jnc:
You will have a higher rate of permanent structural unemployment and presumably the living wage for those without jobs will be through pure welfare.
I’ve always viewed the “in defense of taxpayers” argument for min wage to be little more than a smokescreen for the advancement of policies that advocates want regardless of taxpayer cost. If it could be demonstrated that raising the min wage actually tended to produce higher rather than lower taxpayer costs, I have little doubt that advocates of the min wage would still agitate for it. In my experience advocates of raising the min wage don’t tend to be the kind of people who are particularly sensitive to taxpayer costs in other contexts.
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OT: “The poor economy had little to do with the slowing growth of Medicare spending, the Congressional Budget Office says, but CBO researchers had a difficult time pinpointing the exact reasons for the historically low growth rate and said it likely is due to an array of factors that changed provider and beneficiary behavior.”
http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/racs-/-icd-9-/-icd-10/cbo-factors-other-than-recession-slowed-medicare-spending.html
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You will have a higher rate of permanent structural unemployment and presumably the living wage for those without jobs will be through pure welfare.
This is where the MMT aficionados make the case for the government as the employer of last resort, rather than WalMart. When you look at New Deal programs like the CCC and the WPA, that is exactly what was happening.
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“.I used the self-checkout line at the grocery store yesterday because the regular check-out lines were so long. ”
I try to use those. The best system is the scanner that you use as you shop. everything is bagged and ready to go before I get to the check out line. turn in your scanner, pay, and out the door. if they incorporated a credit card swipe into the scanner it would be ideal.
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The best system is the scanner that you use as you shop. everything is bagged and ready to go before I get to the check out line. turn in your scanner, pay, and out the door.
I’ve wondered what the cost-benefit on that is with reduced labor versus increased inventory ‘shrinkage’.
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I think people who will shoplift will do so. and those who wouldn’t wont.
but the “shrinkage” problem might be more of how much you by. the scanner kept a running total, so it makes it easy to track your spending. I suspect this is why there hasn’t been widespread adoption.
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the scanner kept a running total, so it makes it easy to track your spending.
Technology that decreases impulse purchases would be a drag on sales. I also fear being overcharged if I scan something in my basket and later change my mind. More to keep track of on my part. RFIDs that sum everything up when you pass a certain barrier are the way to go.
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we’ve got a trip to Disney booked for January. and they are rolling out these:
http://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2013/01/taking-the-disney-guest-experience-to-the-next-level/
it will be everything — -room key, ticket, fast pass (for resevered time slots for rides), and linked to a credit card, so if you’re shopping in a park, you just swipe your wrist and it gets billed to your account. sales up 15-20 with those who use them, IIRC a article I was reading about it. you can set parental locks and stuff for the kids.
it’s also linked to an iphone app, so you can change dining reservations, fast pass, etc all on the fly. that, and it will let the employees know who you are and where you’ve been. “hi Nova, welcome to space mountain .. hope you and NoVa jr. liked the dumbo ride that you were just on. and enjoy lunch after this, it see you’re booked for a character dining experience with winnie the pooh.”
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nova:
we’ve got a trip to Disney booked for January. and they are rolling out these:
I was there back in Feb and made use of this. Very convenient. In some ways it is better than a credit card, because at any given point you can pretty easily see how much you have spent, which you can’t so easily do with a regular credit card.
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“yellojkt, on August 26, 2013 at 11:09 am said:
You will have a higher rate of permanent structural unemployment and presumably the living wage for those without jobs will be through pure welfare.
This is where the MMT aficionados make the case for the government as the employer of last resort, rather than WalMart. When you look at New Deal programs like the CCC and the WPA, that is exactly what was happening.”
Which still isn’t about saving taxpayer money.
Edit: Except through creative use of the magic multiplier where government programs pay for themselves due to demand generated.
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good to know, scott. thanks
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