Posted on 01/29/2014 5:14:08 AM PST by gooblah
“Listening to the State of the Union, I can't help but feel invigorated,” Jason W. Schaver, a Fulton, Ill., resident said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I'll bet you felt the same way when you heard that you could keep your healthcare plan and doctor, and that your premium would go down by $2500/year, didn't you? How's that working out?
Idiot. Not even USEFUL idiot -- USELESS idiot!
Far too many of your type in the US, today, pal.
You may deserve the gov't you get, but I don't!
Most Americans are going to be economically destroyed because they are ignorant.
Because only Free Market Capitalism works and whenever the government controls something like wages, the unintended consequences cost the economy and the American people prosperity and freedom. Look at the 18 trillion dollar deficit as proof.
It's catchy and memorable, therefore good propaganda. It fits his third-world anti-American attitude, and resonates with the urban parasite class. It's cut from the same cloth as Jesse Jackson's insistence on speaking in inane rhymes. The low information voters, the left side of the bell curve, the parasite class find such things clever and therefore favor them. You rightly see it as idiocy, but Maximum Leader wasn't talking to you. He was talking to the people who want to take your stuff at gunpoint.
Mark Levin did indeed say that on radio recently. He's hardly the first person to mention that fact. He and others (including us right here on FR) need to keep on mentioning that fact until even the Low Information Voters get it.
To a point. It doesn't work for anyone but the business owners if they don't have to pay a reasonable salary for workers. "Fair trade", border control, and tariffs would protect local economies.
Da comrade. I now have my mind right. You are talking to a 45 year businessman here... I have owned up to 5 successful businesses running at the same time. I am now down to one and I am closing it up this year and retiring. You can work to pay my employees unemployment. Being self employed... none for me.
About ten years ago, an acquaintance decided to do it and start a turtoring business. We did real well, were highly thought of and successful. Two things caused it not to work. One was that as she grew the business, the regualtions on workplace, certifications, and accounting became impossible. The other was that the public schools through federal programs started subsidizing (mostly ineffective) tutoring programs throwing extra money to public school teachers.
Until regulations and the feds picking the winners and losers pulls way back, starting and growing a business is almost impossible.
What's wrong is that reality doesn't work that way. If it did, we could just declare that the minimum wage was $500 per hour and everybody would be rich overnight. And of course, the IRS would receive a huge increase in tax payments as the average part time McDonalds worker filed an income tax return showing a $750,000 income.
But wages in the real world aren't set by somebody's declaration, they are set by what the value of the person's labor is in the marketplace, relative to the other choices an employer has. So if somebody selling hamburgers really cost $500 per hour, than the hamburger they are selling needs to cost something like $70.00. So the new McDonalds dollar menu would be the $70.00 menu. And a gallon of gas would cost something like $250.00.
Of course there would be a period of time during which prices had not adjusted to the new wage rates, and during that interval employers have to not hire people at the new wage rate. Instead of hiring they would either replace the employees with machines, or move the labor to somewhere where the employees cost less per hour. Like China or India.
If you look carefully at who benefits from inflating the wages of workers you only find one party - the Democratic party, because income taxes are not indexed for inflation. Right now the part time McDonalds worker pays very little in taxes. But notice that when their salary is inflated, as in my example, the federal government gets a larger share of their income. Of course the employee loses out, since the prices of goods they buy increases in parallel with the increase in their salary, but they now have to pay more to the IRS.
Artificially increasing wages only reduces employment opportunities for new workers, and masks the real problem which is ever increasing costs from government, and its distortions of the marketplace that burden all workers and businesses.
Would you agree that invaders and other unnecessary foreign labor is unnaturally depressing wages?
The contractors, I agree with you about. Please don't think I am talking Obo's side, but I have met people working for the contractor that were making quite a bit less. Frankly I am in favor of eliminating the minimum wage altogether. Minimum wage jobs are you stepping stone into the real world of work. they should not be your main source of income after a certain age.
Lots of factors determine wages, including of course the number of people who are willing to perform a particular job, and their productivity and the price they are willing to do the work for.
People who are present in our nation illegally may be willing to work for lower wages than other workers, and there are some employers who will take advantage of that to reduce their costs. Needless to say they may also avoid other costs created by the government, since they are willing to violate the law.
I would agree that the failure of the government to enforce the immigration laws creates a number of adverse consequences, including the situation where businesses that comply with the law are at a competitive disadvantage in some markets. One example would be some types of construction work. That's one reason why the government should not simply decide not to enforce some laws, some of the time for their own political purposes.
An increased supply of equally qualified workers, willing to do a particular job, at a particular place, should decrease the wages necessary to hire the workers, if there are not other factors with a larger effect, and if the supply exceeds the local demand. That's a consequence of the effect of supply on pricing, and independent of where the workers happen to have come from.
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