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Oh, you silly Texans, you.

http://austinist.com/2012/06/27/texas_republican_party_seeks_ban_on.php

"Naw, it couldn't be," I thought to myself, as I clicked on the link, "It's just a sensationalist headline. Or it's just Bubble messing with us."

And then I read the article.

The next thing I know, I wake up in the hospital, just after the doctors had finished surgically removing my palm from my face.

That's a rather interesting platform to run with. I do wonder if it is more about energising the base than an actual plan of how to manage public affairs, though.

Of course, I lack sufficient knowledge of US/Texas domestic politics to accurately evaluate whether parties there are really intending to push things such as these through. Some points in the official report seem like decent ideas, but many are eyebrow-raising.

TommiR said:

I lack sufficient knowledge of US/Texas domestic politics to accurately evaluate whether parties there are really intending to push things such as these through.

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So do most Americans. Most of the issues listed in that article are of the nature "These are things we wish for, but know won't happen. However it gives you an idea of the kinds of things our party stands for."

I wonder what all those engineers in Austin and Houston think about a ban on critical thinking. Maybe most of the smart people moved away once NASA shut down the shuttle program.

Republican response: Oops. Didn't mean to do that. Oh, well. It's there now.

So lets see... outlawed taxes, that's a little anarchistic, basically what I'm seeing is that the texas republican party want the streets to be patrolled by armed, underpaid citizens that lack critical thinking skills.

I see nothing bad that could come from that.

It reads like...evil. For the love of - critical thinking!?!

We don't want to challenge the beliefs these children hold - such as Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or the Monster Under the Bed. Plus, how can these children obey the "Honor Thy Mother and Father" commandment when they can think for themselves? Besides, we've already ingrained our beliefs in their parents, so that's how we pass on the mental cancer that is Texas Conservatism.

Honestly, I don't think even syphilis or The Jersey Shore could do as much damage to a mind like these people could.

Sometimes I wonder if the GOP at large looks at the activities of individual state parties and thinks "oh for the love of God! Ideas that are formed at the Republican National Convention stay at the Republican National Convention!"

How is this a thing?

HowDroll said:

How is this a thing?

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Because you can never underestimate the stupidity of human beings, nor their determination to spread it.

Zappit said:

Because you can never underestimate the stupidity of human beings, nor their determination to spread it.

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Someday I'll learn.

HowDroll said:

Someday I'll learn.

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Not if they can help it.

Would this thread be a good place to discuss the relative merits of the republican proposals, as outlined in the article?

Repeal minimum wage. Corporations don't pay taxes. Privatizing Social Security. Your basic "Up yours, middle and lower classes." Nothing that will actually help the economy. Pay the folks nothing, and they've got nothing to spend.

TommiR said:

Would this thread be a good place to discuss the relative merits of the republican proposals, as outlined in the article?

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Probably not, the majority of members here are FILTHY liberals (this needs an Invader Zim picture)

Opposition to corporate and estate taxation, in favor of consumer taxation. Some places like Estonia and Ireland have met with reasonable success with minimal or non-existent corporate taxes. Make the legal environment good for corps, they'll move in and create jobs for ordinary citizens. Or I guess that's the idea. The elimination of the estate tax is a bit funny, as is the increase in consumer taxes; as I understand, domestic consumption is a significant factor in the US economy.

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Current corporate taxation in the US is completely borked. The "base" rate is something like 30%, but quoting that number is completely disengenious because the tax code is such a complete mess replete with loopholes and grants from the government. I'm not sure what the "real" tax rate most companies pay is, probably like 20%.

Is that fair? Well, you tell me. The US has a couple of really unique value propositions for companies. First, it's where other companies are. Sure, that's a tautology, but it works (why do businesses operate in NYC?) Second, more important (but equally a tautology), the US has a TON of money. There is more money flying around here than in a New Jersey nightclub on "Make it Rain" night.

Third, the US is a secure place to do business. It sounds strange, but some companies can see the US and say "Ok, they won't be invaded. They only border two countries and they are not going to invade." Although, the way things are going in Europe and have gone in South/central America from time to time, they may be saying this: "The US will NEVER nationalize our industry". There are few countries in the world that have our level of security where this is as sure as it is here.

So...I dunno. Tax system needs to be cleaned up, but I don't think the tax rates are that high. Where else are they going to go? Greece? LOL.

Repealing minimum wage laws. I suppose it's easy to claim that predatory corporations are raking in huge profits while paying pittance to their employees. Well, successful companies try not to pay employees any more than their labor is worth, so minimum wage laws might in fact restrict them from hiring people for some tasks. Which means people who can't get a job. Little corporate taxation with lax minimum wage laws might help with unemployment.

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Repealing minimum wage laws is stupid/immoral. It implies that there are jobs that are worth less than minimum wage, which there aren't. And what it does is open people up to exploitative working conditions that have existed THROUGHOUT HUMAN HISTORY. Like seriously, worker protections exist for a reason. Republicans are stupid to forget that (one reason I still vote Dem)

Privatising social security. We're having some difficulties here in Finland with the opposite system, as changing age demographics leave fewer working people to pay for the pensions of the elderly, so a private system might have it's advantages.

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Dangerous, but could work. Trick is that it still needs to be heavily monitored/regulated. Investing SS in anything other than US treasury bonds is a terrible idea though.

Return to gold standard. It would seem to me that the gold standard is rather inflexible in case of financial turmoil, so I'm not sure if this is always such a good idea.

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Mind bogglingly stupid. There are a handful of things that I hear from people that say to me "hey ok this guy has never actually thought about his political stances and just regurgitates crap." Gold standard is one of them. Here's why it's dumb:

1) At current prices there ISNT ENOUGH GOLD IN THE WORLD to back the US currency. That's right, we outgrew gold. Which leads us to the next problem.

2) Gold backed currencies can cause deflation. If we had a gold backed currency from 1901 to present day we would have had massive deflation in our currency in that time period. Deflation is BAD. Deflation MURDERS investing, and businesses as well.

3) Gold is easily manipulated. There are only a handful of gold mines in the world. And they are in bad countries and run by pretty bad companies. Their output would directly affect the strength of the US dollar. Yeah. That's smart.

I also have to question the wisdom of endorsing any economic strategy that Ireland uses, given their financial woes at the moment. It doesn't really make me a fan, even if they've had "reasonable success."

Tress said:

I also have to question the wisdom of endorsing any economic strategy that Ireland uses, given their financial woes at the moment. It doesn't really make me a fan, even if they've had "reasonable success."

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Well, if it works in Estonia...

I find it mildly amusing that one of the things they list as being the beliefs of the Party is that:

Government Intrusion into the Internet – We oppose the government’s ability to shut down websites either
directly or through intimidation without a warrant or judicial hearing.

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When it was Rep. Smith (R - TX) who introduced SOPA.

But then, the entire document is self-contradictory multiple times over, so I'm only mildly amused.

Necronic said:

I'm not sure what the "real" tax rate most companies pay is, probably like 20%.

Is that fair? Well, you tell me. The US has a couple of really unique value propositions for companies. First, it's where other companies are. Sure, that's a tautology, but it works (why do businesses operate in NYC?) Second, more important (but equally a tautology), the US has a TON of money. There is more money flying around here than in a New Jersey nightclub on "Make it Rain" night.

Third, the US is a secure place to do business. It sounds strange, but some companies can see the US and say "Ok, they won't be invaded. They only border two countries and they are not going to invade." Although, the way things are going in Europe and have gone in South/central America from time to time, they may be saying this: "The US will NEVER nationalize our industry". There are few countries in the world that have our level of security where this is as sure as it is here.

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A 20% corporate tax rate would be nothing all that special. Solid business ecosystems can be found in many places. And money moves across borders quite fast and easy nowadays at the touch of a button. As to nationalisation, some of the US actions during the bailouts did hint something to that effect; because of an emergency I'm sure, though one could argue few modern economies would nationalise companies in anything but.

I don't know, I guess what I'm saying is that it's a pretty competitive place out there nowadays. And the US hasn't been doing all so well in relative terms in the race for some time now, and projections indicate might lose it's top spot in the near future.

Where else are they going to go? Greece? LOL.

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How about China?

Repealing minimum wage laws is stupid/immoral. It implies that there are jobs that are worth less than minimum wage, which there aren't. And what it does is open people up to exploitative working conditions that have existed THROUGHOUT HUMAN HISTORY. Like seriously, worker protections exist for a reason. Republicans are stupid to forget that (one reason I still vote Dem)

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I'm not arguing for the elimination of worker's protection laws in general. I'm approarching this from a demand/supply point of view, and theory might indicate that a minimum wage functions as a price control, potentially leading to an inefficient outcome.

Mind bogglingly stupid. There are a handful of things that I hear from people that say to me "hey ok this guy has never actually thought about his political stances and just regurgitates crap." Gold standard is one of them. Here's why it's dumb:

1) At current prices there ISNT ENOUGH GOLD IN THE WORLD to back the US currency. That's right, we outgrew gold. Which leads us to the next problem.

2) Gold backed currencies can cause deflation. If we had a gold backed currency from 1901 to present day we would have had massive deflation in our currency in that time period. Deflation is BAD. Deflation MURDERS investing, and businesses as well.

3) Gold is easily manipulated. There are only a handful of gold mines in the world. And they are in bad countries and run by pretty bad companies. Their output would directly affect the strength of the US dollar. Yeah. That's smart.

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I don't consider the gold standard as a good idea either. But there are some noted economists who seem to be in favor of the gold standard or other form of hard currency, as an alternative to the fiat money economy we now have. So I'm guessing there might be some merit to the idea, and that it might not be quite as disasterously stupid as that.

Tress said:

I also have to question the wisdom of endorsing any economic strategy that Ireland uses, given their financial woes at the moment. It doesn't really make me a fan, even if they've had "reasonable success."

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There are a couple of causes for the irish economic situation. I'm not sure the low corporate tax rate they had can really be counted as one of them.

Necronic said:

Repealing minimum wage laws is stupid/immoral. It implies that there are jobs that are worth less than minimum wage, which there aren't. And what it does is open people up to exploitative working conditions that have existed THROUGHOUT HUMAN HISTORY. Like seriously, worker protections exist for a reason.

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I have tried to make this argument so many times, only to get weak responses that I don't feel like arguing against. Free market did exist. It existed for millenia. Only completely free markets tend to go by other names like "monarchy" and "dictatorship" and "hegemony". The filthy liberal in me already sees this country as a corporate oligarchy. That's why I keep using silly terms like "private tax", because we pay them all the time. Only it's cool, you know, because OMG the company is private. Which is apparently a magical balm that absolves the taxer of all sins.

EDIT: On the other hand, I've never read the Austinist, but it's quite clearly a biased publication. I would like to see a more objective account.

TommiR said:

A 20% corporate tax rate would be nothing all that special. Solid business ecosystems can be found in many places. And money moves across borders quite fast and easy nowadays at the touch of a button. As to nationalisation, some of the US actions during the bailouts did hint something to that effect; because of an emergency I'm sure, though one could argue few modern economies would nationalise companies in anything but.

I don't know, I guess what I'm saying is that it's a pretty competitive place out there nowadays. And the US hasn't been doing all so well in relative terms in the race for some time now, and projections indicate might lose it's top spot in the near future.

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That's true enough, but I really don't see many alternative for businesses at the moment (not that that's a good argument for staying.) Europe is in a lot of trouble as is the Middle East, both represent a large amount of risk to a company.

How about China?

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China has only entered the realm of reasonable locations for international business in the last decade really due to it's history of unenforced copyrights/patents. With that out of the way they are in a better position to be a serious contender, but they still have a long way to go (10 years does not a stable country make.)

There's a good report/debate on this here:

http://intelligencesquaredus.org/de...544-china-does-capitalism-better-than-america

One particularly good section on China:

He says the Chinese, they collect less taxes than U.S. The opposite is true. The U.S. government takes about federal/state, about 30 percent of GDP. The Chinese government collects 35 percent. But that’s not the end of the story. Because in the U.S., you actually get something back from the government in the form of Social Security, health care, Medicare, Medicaid. In China, you get very little back because the bulk of government taxes are spent on government consumption, administration. If you go to China and get treated to a 20-course meal, you think great, that’s Chinese hospitality. But don’t forget, it’s being paid for by Chinese taxpayers. Not in the USA. You do not get that kind of treatment when you go to Washington, D.C.

And then you look at whether China’s growth is using less natural resources.
And here the U.S. is three times more efficient as China. Because for every dollar of GDP produced in China, China has to consume three times more in terms of its natural resources, water, clean air, land. The U.S. in other words, is a lot more efficient. Then you look at international comparisons, and here we’re using third-party numbers. And here, China does not look nearly as good as the U.S. Corruption. There’s a NGO based in Berlin called Transparency International. It publishes every year, a global index called Corruption Perception index. This index, the U.S. is ranked 24th in terms of, as the least corrupt country in the world. China is ranked 75. So if you think our average politician in Washington is corrupt, wait until you meet a Chinese politician.
Then you look at overall economic competitiveness because capitalism is known for its efficiency and competitiveness. Here, the U.S. is ranked not number one, number five. What about China? China is number 26. So way, way behind the U.S. Then you look at something like innovation ranking. The U.S.

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Dave said:

Republican response: Oops. Didn't mean to do that. Oh, well. It's there now.

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Y'all realize that Texas already exerts significant (some would say undue) influence over the Nation's education system, right? Now they're just more comfortable coming out of the closet about it.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Y'all realize that Texas already exerts significant (some would say undue) influence over the Nation's education system, right? Now they're just more comfortable coming out of the closet about it.

--Patrick

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Who is the bigger fool? The fool, or the fool who follows him?

PatrThom said:

Y'all realize that Texas already exerts significant (some would say undue) influence over the Nation's education system, right? Now they're just more comfortable coming out of the closet about it.

--Patrick

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Reading some of those changes, I have to say - sometimes they're sort-of right. I mean, I don't see a problem with teaching children about the Black Panthers besides MLK Jr. Pretending the whole of black empowerment and antiracism etc etc was entirely without any violent forefighters is just as much rewriting of history as some of the idiocies the Republicans are promoting/introducing. Of course, if you're including the Panthers, you're probably going to have to include the violent movements it was a reaction to, such as the KKK and whatever. Just an example, not intending to start a debate on anything etc etc.

Anyway, what I find especially terrifying in that article is how much of their changes aren't in any way "conservative" - they're partly revisionist, partly negationist, but the most dangerous of all: paving the way for a theocracy. The "ideal" of a USA as a Christian state strikes just as much fear into my heart as does that of countries lead by blind/fundamentalist muslims - say, Iran. More - the USA has atomic bombs and the willingness to use them.

That "theocracy" crap that the republicans have been spouting for the better part of 30 years is such a shame too. I want to be a conservative, I really do. I hate entitlement programs, and I think California and Detroit are great examples of what's wrong with liberal politics.

But I will NEVER vote republican as long as they include religion in their platforms the way they do. All the other "Social Conservatism" really. Every bit of it clashes with my views of "small government" to such an extreme that I would rather vote for economic policy I don't agree with than social policy that I think is flat out evil and unamerican.

Necronic said:

evil and unamerican.

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I can understand that. If you had an honest choice between economically liberal and economically more social, that's a fair choice. Ethically conservative or progressive, both perfectly ok. But the choice between anything and "Give up your freedoms and let yourself be led by the Bible, literally and completely" is just the opposite of anything the US is supposed to stand for. I don't understand how that message got mixed up in the regular conservative stuff.

Bubble181 said:

I can understand that. If you had an honest choice between economically liberal and economically more social, that's a fair choice. Ethically conservative or progressive, both perfectly ok. But the choice between anything and "Give up your freedoms and let yourself be led by the Bible, literally and completely" is just the opposite of anything the US is supposed to stand for. I don't understand how that message got mixed up in the regular conservative stuff.

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I'm not sure where or when, but somewhere along the lines, the gop got hijacked by a ultra right wing, fundamentalist religion crazy train

Ravenpoe said:

I'm not sure where or when, but somewhere along the lines, the gop got hijacked by a ultra right wing, fundamentalist religion crazy train

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The 1980's. Reagan was an evangelical, if I remember correctly, and brought a hard Christian slant into the GOP. It was seen as restoring morality to a party that had just been rocked by the Watergate scandal and Nixon's behavior.

The irony is that Reagan was the first of a new generation of Republicans, the ones that really started cowtowing to the religious right, and he was a student of Goldwater. Goldwater will always go down in my books as a conservative hero for how he lambasted Republicans for their evolving relationship with the religious right. Some of his quotes are pretty amazing considering how often you hear his name brought up by conservatives today as "an inspirational figure" in their political development etc:

On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both.
I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?
And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism."

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Could you imagine a Republican saying this today?

"Do not associate my name with anything you do. You are extremists, and you've hurt the Republican party much more than the Democrats have"

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See, the thing about Regan that I really can't get behind is that he is an actor at heart and was one through his entire presidency. He wasn't even replublican until he was pretty much forced to become one by Nancy's father in order to marry her.

He was a figurehead, and that's what I find scary about what he represents to America. He ushered in the era of presidents who don't generally make their own policy, they allow others to do it for them. I'm including Clinton in that as I still think Hillary had a much bigger say in his policy making than he did.

FTA:

Privatizing Social Security. Despite the long term success and stability of the Social Security retirement program,

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One word rebuttal: Galveston.[DOUBLEPOST=1341353049][/DOUBLEPOST]

Necronic said:

Could you imagine a Republican saying this today?

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Goldwater was the last true conservative in the GOP.

His foreign policy was more than a little retarded, and I don't think he would have made a good president, but he was a good conservative, and an honest one.

Necronic said:

His foreign policy was more than a little retarded, and I don't think he would have made a good president, but he was a good conservative, and an honest one.

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Did any of the others do any better, really?

Opposing critical thinking. Well, I guess the University of Texas has nothing to worry about, then.

</rimshot>

Religion is not the root of all evil guys, no matter how much you think so.

Even including religion in politics isn't necessarily bad either. Blaming religion on the GOP's "craziness" demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of religion and the part it plays in politics, people's lives and the world. Removing Christianity, for example, from the GOP likely wouldn't make the GOP seem any less "crazy" to a giant portion of Democrat supporters (Unless your sole beef is with religion in general) because a lot of fundamental policies of the GOP wouldn't necessarily change. Furthermore, people who hold extreme views would likely hold those views or views similar to it with or without religion as their personality already lends them towards such thoughts. Proposing that religious people follow the bible like a computer executes a program is an intellectually dishonest position and is more said to mock or discredit religious believers than any attempt to actually understand. There are just as many atheistic idiots in the Democratic party as there are Republican zealots and I say religion has nothing to do with it. They'd be that way regardless. The flavor of their arguments are shaped by belief but not, I believe, fundamentally changed.

Fun Fact: A lot of Chinese blame their current state of social disorder on the destruction of religion through Maoist policies that removed the "heart" from society.

Terrik said:

Religion is not the root of all evil guys, no matter how much you think so.

Even including religion in politics isn't necessarily bad either. Blaming religion on the GOP's "craziness" demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of religion and the part it plays in politics, people's lives and the world. Removing Christianity, for example, from the GOP likely wouldn't make the GOP seem any less "crazy" to a giant portion of Democrat supporters (Unless your sole beef is with religion in general) because a lot of fundamental policies of the GOP wouldn't necessarily change. Furthermore, people who hold extreme views would likely hold those views or views similar to it with or without religion as their personality already lends them towards such thoughts. Proposing that religious people follow the bible like a computer executes a program is an intellectually dishonest position and is more said to mock or discredit religious believers than any attempt to actually understand. There are just as many atheistic idiots in the Democratic party as there are Republican zealots and I say religion has nothing to do with it. They'd be that way regardless. The flavor of their arguments are shaped by belief but not, I believe, fundamentally changed.

Fun Fact: A lot of Chinese blame their current state of social disorder on the destruction of religion through Maoist policies that removed the "heart" from society.

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No one here said religion was the root of all evil, at least not in this thread. Rather, fundamentalism is. Fundamentalist Religion is a quick way into the core mindset of someone too lazy or distracted to think on their own. Like cults, they offer people a way to feel like they stand for something, without having to make decisions on their own. It offers a world of absolutes, black and white. All these ideas come in a neat package.

fade said:

I have tried to make this argument so many times, only to get weak responses that I don't feel like arguing against. Free market did exist. It existed for millenia. Only completely free markets tend to go by other names like "monarchy" and "dictatorship" and "hegemony". The filthy liberal in me already sees this country as a corporate oligarchy. That's why I keep using silly terms like "private tax", because we pay them all the time. Only it's cool, you know, because OMG the company is private. Which is apparently a magical balm that absolves the taxer of all sins.

EDIT: On the other hand, I've never read the Austinist, but it's quite clearly a biased publication. I would like to see a more objective account.

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edit: fade: I'm not sure I understood your point completely. In my view, you are saying that the labor market is not free. I'm saying that the labor market is not free, in significant part due to the price controls in force (minimum wage). Were you agreeing with me, or is there a point of contention? /edit

If I'm reading things in this thread correctly, views against abolishing minimum wage are composed of two main items:

- Disregarding the law for now, the amount of money that is the minimum wage represents the lowest hourly wage that is moral to pay a human being for their work, so the minimum wage is necessary to enforce common decency in employment conditions

- If minimum wage was abolished, then it would open the door to all manner of evils eroding other worker protections, like maximum daily hours and safety standards

As to the first, my understanding is that some people in society are not very well placed in terms of employment qualifications, for one reason or another. Those people need a source of income, preferably employment. Minimum wage puts an artificial cap on the employment opportunities companies can offer, leaving the least unfortunate out of luck and at the mercies of such unemployment benefits as there may be, and their labor resources wasted. As rational actors in the market place, they will choose the option that is most advantageous to them. If minimum wage was abolished and companies were able to hire people for tasks that are currently uneconomical to hire people for, they'd have a better chance of finding a job that is suitable to their qualifications. Even then, nobody is holding a gun to their heads.

As to the second, well, it's impossible to refute that given that nobody has a crystal ball and knows what will happen in the future. I'm just not sure one would necessarily follow from the other.

Necronic said:

That's true enough, but I really don't see many alternative for businesses at the moment (not that that's a good argument for staying.) Europe is in a lot of trouble as is the Middle East, both represent a large amount of risk to a company.

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Yes, things are currently quite messy in a lot of places. But it will pass, like it always does. We'll have to wait and see what emerges afterwards.

China has only entered the realm of reasonable locations for international business in the last decade really due to it's history of unenforced copyrights/patents. With that out of the way they are in a better position to be a serious contender, but they still have a long way to go (10 years does not a stable country make.)

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It's true that China still has a lot of work ahead of them. Not to trivialise such things as environmental, public health, and rural education problems and corruption, but these are things that can be improved upon, and I'd say will be improved upon. There are other problems as well, especially their monstrous investment rate at a time of declining exports, but things still seem manageable. And their potential is enormous.

See, I have no problem with religion, or Christianity in particular since that's the religion at issue when talking about american politics.

What I have a problem with is something that even the 10 commandments had a problem with: Taking the Lord's name in vain.

Bringing religion into politics does not just go against democratic american politics, it is downright blasphemous. I'll excuse the people doing it because I don't think they understand how fundamentally evil it is, not just politically but spiritually, but that doesn't change my view on it. What they are doing is not just dangerous to the freedom of religion that makes America wonderful, it's also claiming an authority that they do not have, that goes against the teaching of the Bible that they thump in my face.

By siding with the Sadducees, you lose the Pharisees. When the Sadducees sell you out for their own political gain, you end up with Jerusalem burning - either way.

Terrik said:

Even including religion in politics isn't necessarily bad either. Blaming religion on the GOP's "craziness" demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of religion and the part it plays in politics, people's lives and the world.

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Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In the United States, there is. The Supreme Court has ruled that 1) The First Amendment means that the government can not show favor to any one religion and 2) The government can not show favor to religion over non-religion. The Republican Party has gone off the deep end into fundamentalist Christianity, allowing it shape their position on social issues. We have fights over whether or not the theory of evolution should be taught in schools, for goodness sake! That's not normal! Religion isn't the root of all evil, but Fundamentalist Religion and unconstitutional attempts to enshrine it in law are the root of at least half of the USA's bullshit political controversy. And is frequently used to justify the other half.

TommiR said:

As to the first, my understanding is that some people in society are not very well placed in terms of employment qualifications, for one reason or another. Those people need a source of income, preferably employment. Minimum wage puts an artificial cap on the employment opportunities companies can offer, leaving the least unfortunate out of luck and at the mercies of such unemployment benefits as there may be, and their labor resources wasted. As rational actors in the market place, they will choose the option that is most advantageous to them. If minimum wage was abolished and companies were able to hire people for tasks that are currently uneconomical to hire people for, they'd have a better chance of finding a job that is suitable to their qualifications. Even then, nobody is holding a gun to their heads.

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Here's a map showing, by state, how many hours per week it takes on the current federal minimum wage ($7.25) to afford rent:


You'll note 0/50 states have a low enough cost of living to allow someone to do it in a standard 40-Hour full time work week. Usually it is somewhere near double that. Here's a link to statistical break down of the data, and here's the source. I make about minimum wage, less than a dollar though, so let's use me as an example:

I work for a major retailer, part time, and after nearly four years there I make $7.74/hour. However, after taxes and social security and the like, I make $6.40/hour (admittedly, I'm still considered a dependent of my father and I might get less taken out if I weren't). Let's imagine that I moved in to my friend Marie's apartment, where I'd have two roommates - my rent would be about $340 per month, counting utilities. If my employer had me work the maximum amount of hours allowed per week (39) every week, I'd be making about $500 every pay period, about $1000 a month, about $12,000 every year. That would place me $300 above the poverty line, after taxes. However, my employer doesn't guarantee hours (ergo, you will rarely be scheduled the same amount of hours two weeks in a row) and a shift can be anywhere between 3.75 hours and 8 hours. Even if I could manage to get 39 hours a week, it might well involve working 7 days a week. To maintain this standard of living would require that I never get sick or injured (I don't have insurance), never living with fewer than two roommates, never having my car break down, etc.

And your saying my life would be made better by being paid less?

Amazing, almost like you can't live off a part-time job. I'm shocked. SHOCKED!

Covar said:

Amazing, almost like you can't live off a part-time job. I'm shocked. SHOCKED!

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As if you can't live off a full time job, if you want your own place. Having to shack up is a problem, and not enough people are seeing it.

If the allowed hours per week is 39,how is that part-time?

1. Part time is considered to be under 30 hours per week.
2. I'd bet that if you went county-by-county on those maps, it wouldn't look as solid. I can tell you rent's a whole lot cheaper up here than it is down where I used to live - or even over by Krisken.
3. Gee, imagine that - from Massachusetts to Virginia, it takes more than 88 hours a week to pay for rent. Refresh my memory - what percentage of the county LIVES there, again?

LordRendar said:

If the allowed hours per week is 39,how is that part-time?

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Because you're lucky to be scheduled for 20. However, if you are trained in multiple areas of the store, you can pick up shifts. I don't think anyone is ever scheduled to work 39 by management. My employer doesn't consider you full time unless you work 40 hours a week.

jwhouk said:

1. Part time is considered to be under 30 hours per week.
2. I'd bet that if you went county-by-county on those maps, it wouldn't look as solid. I can tell you rent's a whole lot cheaper up here than it is down where I used to live - or even over by Krisken.
3. Gee, imagine that - from Massachusetts to Virginia, it takes more than 88 hours a week to pay for rent. Refresh my memory - what percentage of the county LIVES there, again?

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1) Tell that to my employer. They delineate full-time as 40 or more hours a week. Everyone in the store, short of management and HR, are considered "part-time" at 39 or less.
2) Fair point. However, that argument also becomes a cost of living vs. opportunities. My cost of living would likely be lower if I lived in Hell, MI, but my opportunities for employment are greater in the larger metro areas.
3) I don't know. What does that have to do with the ability of poor people to afford housing?

Still, doing that by state is misleading. New York is clearly skewed by New York City. Around here (the second biggest city in the state I might add) the hours worked is about half of the average.

blotsfan said:

Still, doing that by state is misleading. New York is clearly skewed by New York City. Around here (the second biggest city in the state I might add) the hours worked is about half of the average.

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Because I mean, come on, who the hell wants to live in Buffalo anyways?
(Have to rag on the hometown, sorry blots )

Norris said:

3) I don't know. What does that have to do with the ability of poor people to afford housing?

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Large populations drive up cost of renting/living. Given that five of the largest cities in the US are in that corridor between DC and Boston, it's no surprise rent cost is high.

LordRendar said:

If the allowed hours per week is 39,how is that part-time?

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Like mentioned, many companies don't conisder you full-time unless you work 40 hours a week. They treat it this way for things like benefits.

When I worked for Gamestop years ago as an SGA, my manager specifically told me I would be working around 38 hours per week, and that at no point was I allowed to go over 40. She told me straight up the reason for this was because the company couldn't give me an of the "full-time" benefits, so they kept me just under the threshold as a part-time employee. I even had a key to the store and handled the money nightly, but no way was I going to get medical from them, they made sure of that.

Even my newer job, I was told that if I fell under 40 hours a week (even just 39 hours a week) I would be marked as part-time and lose my medical insurance. That's just business I guess.

Norris said:

Here's a map showing, by state, how many hours per week it takes on the current federal minimum wage ($7.25) to afford rent:

You'll note 0/50 states have a low enough cost of living to allow someone to do it in a standard 40-Hour full time work week. Usually it is somewhere near double that. Here's a link to statistical break down of the data, and here's the source. I make about minimum wage, less than a dollar though, so let's use me as an example:

I work for a major retailer, part time, and after nearly four years there I make $7.74/hour. However, after taxes and social security and the like, I make $6.40/hour (admittedly, I'm still considered a dependent of my father and I might get less taken out if I weren't). Let's imagine that I moved in to my friend Marie's apartment, where I'd have two roommates - my rent would be about $340 per month, counting utilities. If my employer had me work the maximum amount of hours allowed per week (39) every week, I'd be making about $500 every pay period, about $1000 a month, about $12,000 every year. That would place me $300 above the poverty line, after taxes. However, my employer doesn't guarantee hours (ergo, you will rarely be scheduled the same amount of hours two weeks in a row) and a shift can be anywhere between 3.75 hours and 8 hours. Even if I could manage to get 39 hours a week, it might well involve working 7 days a week. To maintain this standard of living would require that I never get sick or injured (I don't have insurance), never living with fewer than two roommates, never having my car break down, etc.

And your saying my life would be made better by being paid less?

Click to expand...

Other things being equal, no individual would be better off by getting less money.

That being said, I'd like to focus on a couple of things in your post.

First, the map you showed was very interesting, but I'm not sure if it portrays the actual situation. I had a look at the data and a few other sources, and it seems to me that the Fair Market Rent (FMR) which apparently was used as the cost of living is calculated as a statistical median of rents in a specific locale. Though not being a statistician, I think this would mean that FMR represents the average rent paid for an average-sized apartment with average amenities and condition and located in an average part of town. Meaning it is the kind of apartment that someone making median wage (US 2010: >26k pa) might live in. But a typical low-income person would presumably not enjoy the same standard of living/housing as someone making over over twice as much, and would not have the same rent expense. So your map might be slightly misleading.

As to your current wage, I believe the minimum wage has an influence on it only if you think you are currently being paid more than the free market rate would be for someone qualified to handle your current responsibilities. If this is not the case, then I don't think the removal of the minimum wage would have any effect at all on the salary being paid for what you do. If it is the case, then the company is currently operating at less than optimal efficiency regarding their HR costs (due to the minimum wage requirement), and as we all know costs get transferred to the price the customer pays for a product. In which case theory would suggest the customers are paying more for what your company sells than they have to, if the company was efficient. I hope you understand that I'm approaching this from a theoretical point of view, and that while using the 2nd singular pronoun, I am referring to the bigger picture and making no calls on any single data point that might have anything to do with you specifically.

Contrast that to my job, where they call me full time and don't keep track of my hours at all. But I don't think I've ever had a week where I put in less than 40, and a great many over 50 (and a few weeks this year alone that went almost to 80).

I have a salaried job, but I refuse to go over 45. My employ handbook says 8-5, so that's what I work. There are guys who practically live here. Worse are the people who seem to take pride in how much they go over 40, and complain-brag.

fade said:

I have a salaried job, but I refuse to go over 45. My employ handbook says 8-5, so that's what I work. There are guys who practically live here. Worse are the people who seem to take pride in how much they go over 40, and complain-brag.

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In the past, management has compensated me by getting me stuff on trade - for example, when I got lasik a few years ago, it was paid for by our stations running advertising. However, lately that hasn't been the case, and I'm seeing now that, like you say, these days anyone on salary who goes 5 minutes over his schedule is a fool and a sap.

TommiR said:

Other things being equal, no individual would be better off by getting less money.

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TommiR said:

That being said, I'd like to focus on a couple of things in your post.

First, the map you showed was very interesting, but I'm not sure if it portrays the actual situation. I had a look at the data and a few other sources, and it seems to me that the Fair Market Rent (FMR) which apparently was used as the cost of living is calculated as a statistical median of rents in a specific locale. Though not being a statistician, I think this would mean that FMR represents the average rent paid for an average-sized apartment with average amenities and condition and located in an average part of town. Meaning it is the kind of apartment that someone making median wage (US 2010: >26k pa) might live in. But a typical low-income person would presumably not enjoy the same standard of living/housing as someone making over over twice as much, and would not have the same rent expense. So your map might be slightly misleading.

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Warning: Long.

The map is misleading, unfortunately, and does a very poor job of portraying the actual situation, though I'm sure that wasn't Norris' intent. I don't know whether it was an honest attempt to represent the plight of the American working class, or if the makers of the map knew that there were gross inconsistencies built in by using the median rent for various locales instead of doing a more indepth analysis by drilling down and doing a more specific, city by city price. However, that being said, one of the issues that we run into with respect to making the map more accurate, at least in my home state, is that there are so many distinct socio-economic regions in the state (Washington). Each region has its own dominant industry, median rent amount, median individual income, median household income, division of family vs. single occupancy homes, and basic needs costs. I've lived in this state for the vast majority of my life (25 of my 32 years), and even I don't know that I could list all of the various regions and sub-regions that would have to be considered when making an accurate map. I do, however, know three of them:
Region 1: Seattle-Tacoma Metroplex (POP: 3,344,813). The Greater Seattle Tacoma Metroplex incorporates the cities of Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue, Redmond, and Everett. It also includes many large suburbs (most of them cities in their own right), a combined Airforce/Army base, two Navy bases (three if you include the some of the southern-most islands, which would throw NAS Whidbey Island into the mix), several colleges and a major university, three professional sports teams, several minor league sports teams, a major international airport, several smaller regional airports, and a massive variety of industries and commerce, including, but not limited to, Microsoft, Boeing's commercial aircraft division, Boeing's military and aerospace divisions, shipbuilding, fishing, lumber, transport (trains/trucks/cargo ships), and oil refining. Wages in this area can and do fluctuate wildly. The salary for Microsoft programmers is going to be ridiculously higher than those of someone who unloads cargo containers down at the port, even though those port workers are union employees with union wages. Rent, on the other hand, has a nasty habit of not fluctuating wildly, except possibly on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. The average price of a one bedroom apartment in Seattle (using the average of 4 key neighborhoods, and using Zillow as the resource) is $1315 per month. The minimum wage in Washington state is $9.04/hr, so before taxes, benefits, etc. are taken out of your check if you make minimum wage, you earn $1518.72 per month (with an average of 21 work days per month). If you add in food and utilities, it simply is not possible to live in the city limits on minimum wage, unless you've got at least two roommates (average price for a 3br apartment is $2136/mo) and all of you would have to be working at least full time, and none of you could own a car unless you'd already paid it off and had the bare minimum car insurance. In order to be able to afford (barely) to live in a 1br apartment on minimum wage, by yourself, you would need to move at least 14 miles south of the city or 15 miles north, at which point your commute cost and time both go up significantly, and if you work in some areas of the city, they don't have transit access, so you have to have a car and then you have to be able to afford parking, gas, and insurance.
Region 2: Southeast Washington (POP: 73,322). Southeast Washington state is primarily an agricultural region, with rolling hills and the perfect climate to grow wheat, barley, lentils, and green peas. The area includes no major cities (obviously), but does include one small city, Pullman, with a population of 29,799, of which approximately 17,000 are full-time undergrad students at Washington State University. The only major industry is farming. There are no major manufacturing plants. The median rent price per month (in 2009, via city-data.com) was $707; though most (85 - 90%) of apartments in Pullman are occupied by WSU students, very few townies live in apartments. In fact, in 2009, of 19,792 households, only 2,770 were single occupant homes, including student rented apartments. It is easy to live in a one bedroom apartment in Pullman even if you're only making minimum wage, so long as you're not working for a farmer, as agricultural employers are exempt from the state minimum wage laws by and large (or they just cheat). It is not uncommon for farm employees to be paid with a percentage of year-end harvest's worth, or for them to be paid an average hourly rate of between $6 and $8. Commute costs and times are virtually nil.
Region 3: The Tri-Cities (POP: 253,340). The Tri-Cities area of Washington is... special. There are three cities; Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick. Major industries in this region include farming (which relies on irrigation from the nearby Columbia river and is mostly devoted to non-staple crops such as corn, potatoes, onions, and various types of fruit including orchard fruit), Wineries, and the US Department of Energy, which manages a nuclear reactor/research center - the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Again, like Region 1, salaries can and do vary wildly. Again, agricultural employers are largely exempt from the state minimum wage laws, and again average agricultural wage is between $6 and $8 an hour, except during harvest time, which unlike Region 2 is extremely time sensitive. Harvest wages can be as much as $15 an hour, and they call for 10 hour days, 7 days a week, for 2 or 3 weeks at a time, before going back down to $6 to $8 or being eliminated altogether. On the other hand, DoE salaries, especially for PhD holders in the area, routinely run into the $125k+ per year range. The average rent for a one bedroom apartment in the Tri-Cities is $867 per month, making it easy to afford, so long as you're not an agricultural worker. Unfortunately, the vast majority of non-DoE jobs in the area are ag jobs.

Those are only 3 of 13 regions that I could clearly delineate.[DOUBLEPOST=1341532159][/DOUBLEPOST]

TommiR said:

As to your current wage, I believe the minimum wage has an influence on it only if you think you are currently being paid more than the free market rate would be for someone qualified to handle your current responsibilities. If this is not the case, then I don't think the removal of the minimum wage would have any effect at all on the salary being paid for what you do*. If it is the case, then the company is currently operating at less than optimal efficiency regarding their HR costs (due to the minimum wage requirement), and as we all know costs get transferred to the price the customer pays for a product. In which case theory would suggest the customers are paying more for what your company sells than they have to, if the company was efficient. I hope you understand that I'm approaching this from a theoretical point of view, and that while using the 2nd singular pronoun, I am referring to the bigger picture and making no calls on any single data point that might have anything to do with you specifically.

Click to expand...

Warning: Also long. (Sorry, spoilers completely screwed up the formatting on these).

To address the second part of your argument, the free market rate, the biggest problem that many, many, many Americans have (especially right now) with the concept of the free market rate, is that we simply don't trust companies to follow it. Whether those companies are our employers or the companies who sell us our food, fuel, clothing, etc., we have a very, very hard time trusting that those companies would adhere to free market rate. And it's hard to fault people for feeling that way, because it's hard not to feel like we're being ripped off by a lot of companies right now. Companies that are making record profits (from Citigroup who had a paltry $11bn profit in 2011, to IBM with $20.4bn, all the way up to Exxon Mobil who had a staggering 2011 profit of $41.1bn), whose executives are getting record bonuses and salaries, while the middle-class American's annual salary fell 7% from 2000 to 2010. And honestly, why would these companies pay any more than they absolutely have to? The point of a company is to make money for the owner and/or shareholders. You don't make money by paying your employees more than you have to, or providing better benefits than you absolutely have to. You make money by paying the least amount you can get away with, providing the least amount of benefits, and increasing the purchase cost of your products. Citigroup laid off 4500 US employees while increasing their profit to $11bn in 2011, IBM laid off 3,000 US employees and have laid off another 1700 so far in 2012, and Exxon Mobil hides their layoff numbers sufficiently well that my Google-Fu cannot find them. For more of a breakdown, the top 4 Citigroup executives earned a combined $43M in 2011, an increase of 34% over 2010; while their employees got a 5% raise. IBM's CEO got a 30% raise in 2011, up to $31.7M, while the rank and file received "small, targeted" raises (meaning not everyone got a raise, even a cost-of-living adjustment), and IBM's traditional pension plan (company paid pension) was thrown out back in 2008 in favor of a 401(k) plan, allowing the company to save between $2.5bn and $3bn through 2013. Exxon Mobil's CEO got a 20% raise up to $34.9M in 2011, while most (but not all) of the rank and file received 3% raises.

Now, I'm not saying that everyone at those massive corps necessarily deserves a raise. I've known plenty of lazy, do as little as possible, worthless employees in my 16 years of employment. I've been one of them a time or two. And, of course, while these companies post the pay+benefits packages of their CEOs, they don't post the numbers for their everyday employees, so it's next to impossible to know what a 3% or 5% raise amounts to. But in the end, what that really means for the free market rate, is that the free market rate is a great theory; but in practice the employees just get screwed, the consumer gets pressed as hard as possible until every last drop of disposable (and sometimes not-so-disposable) income is drained out of them, and the CEOs take home record amounts of cash/cars/company jets/travel/etc.

And then there's the other issue with free market rate - determining how much each individual person's work is worth. How exactly does one put a price on all of the various types of jobs out there? What criteria would you use? Does the size of the company matter? The number of other people at the company who do the same thing you do? How long you've been with the company? How hard the job is? Whether it's a sit on your ass all day office job or an on your feet from dawn til' dusk job? Let's take my job, for example. What I do isn't very difficult. It only took 3 or 4 hours of OJT (on the job training) for me to pick up where the last person left off, but I had to draw on a lot of previously acquired knowledge and skills. Also, everything I look at all day long is confidential, and is considered a Medium Business Risk, if the info were to get out. I am the only person in all of Microsoft (worldwide) who can do my job. I don't supervise any other employees, but I am expected to be self monitored and self motivated - which I have to be, because the person I report to is a senior level manager, he doesn't have time to interact with me on a daily basis. Hell, if we talk more than once a month, that means something has gone horribly, horribly, wrong. How much is my work worth? I know how much I get paid. I know that before Sunday when my raise went into effect it was barely enough for me to pay bills, eat, get to work, and have a little money left over for fun/savings. I don't know what Microsoft is paying my consulting company for my time - but I would suspect that they're paying at least twice what I'm getting since that's the normal rate around here.

The last time there was a free market economy in the US, back before the minimum wage was established in 1938, employees got screwed left right and center. The labor unions had to fight tooth and nail to get workers' hours down to a reasonable 40 hours a week and their pay up to a reasonable amount so they could afford housing and food. These days, there are states throughout the country that are bound and determined to make unions ineffective or outright dissolve them (especially for public employees). Some of those same states want to do away with minimum wage at the same time. How is that going to build trust in a free market economy? You want to take away my benefits, take away my pension, cut my hours and/or my pay, force me to move to a different city in order to keep my job as you close down the location where I currently live, and take away my ability to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions, and you want to get rid of the minimum wage so you can pay less than that amount for new employees in the same field as mine? All while the prices of food, gas, electricity, insurance, and rent are going up? Yeah... I totally trust the free market.

*Ask any of the massive number of employees who've had to take pay cuts, or lost their benefits, or are now working two jobs instead of one just to make ends meet if they feel that the reason they're now making less money is because they were getting paid too much before hand. I can guarantee you that the $7k pay cut I had to take just to get a job again after my last company went out of business wasn't because I was being paid too much. Neither was the $15k reduction in pay my mother has taken in the past 8 years, as she moved to the private sector, to a larger city, to larger companies, where she has more work to do than ever before. Or the fact that my father had to take a second job so that he and my mom could keep making their house payments. Or my friend, the nurse in Children's Hospital's radio-oncology department, who had to take a pay cut and take on additional duties when two of her coworkers quit because they couldn't afford the pay cuts, whose boyfriend had to move in with her so they could afford rent. Or my other friend, who had to take on a lot more responsibility when he switched from working for Amazon to working for Live Nation, where he's gone from just one member of one portion of the payments team to one of the four or five people responsible for redesigning the entire payments back-end. In fact, I don't think that I know, personally, anyone who hasn't take a pay cut, or had their hours reduced, or aren't paying more for their medical/dental/vision benefits and/or more for their actual doctor visits or prescriptions, or been laid off, or some combination of them all in the past 3 years. Except my brother-in-law, and possibly his wife.

And if we're all being paid too much for what we do, then cost of living needs to come back down drastically - but if that happens, companies will see too much of a hit to their bottom line, so it's not going to happen. At least, not until several of them go bankrupt and the government decides that there's no such thing as too big to fail.

It feels like the Republicans don't want to win anything this year.

Maybe they're curious about how the Democrats felt in 2000.

Romney sure as hell isn't in any hurry to get down to business. Every AM radio talking head is wondering what the hell he's doing when Obama's been lobbing him softballs all week, and he's just watched them go by.

Firstly, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to make a very informative, well researched and well-reasoned post.

Let's get to business, then.

Gared said:

The map is misleading, unfortunately, and does a very poor job of portraying the actual situation, though I'm sure that wasn't Norris' intent. I don't know whether it was an honest attempt to represent the plight of the American working class, or if the makers of the map knew that there were gross inconsistencies built in by using the median rent for various locales instead of doing a more indepth analysis by drilling down and doing a more specific, city by city price. However, that being said, one of the issues that we run into with respect to making the map more accurate, at least in my home state, is that there are so many distinct socio-economic regions in the state (Washington). Each region has its own dominant industry, median rent amount, median individual income, median household income, division of family vs. single occupancy homes, and basic needs costs. I've lived in this state for the vast majority of my life (25 of my 32 years), and even I don't know that I could list all of the various regions and sub-regions that would have to be considered when making an accurate map

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I believe the map put up was inaccurate as an indication for the housing expenses of low-income people for two reasons. One was the scale, which you already addressed. The other things was that I'm not sure median rent (50th percentile) accurately reflects the rent that an average minimum wage worker needs to pay. Say someone makes >50k/year, meaning they are pretty well-off. The are probably not living in a median rent apartment, but have a fancier place somewhere and pay more rent. Conversely, someone who makes minimum wage probably lives much more humbly, and is paying less than median rent. Median rent seems to me to be more useful in determining the relative differences in rent prices between different locales. So pointing to the median rent for a city-scale locale and saying "this is what a minimum wage worker needs to pay for rent" might not be an accurate statement, particularly in cases where the median rent is very high in relation to minimum wage. Looking at the 25th percentile (?) on a city scale, or the median rent in a low-income neighbourhood of a city, might be more useful in determining the housing expenses of a low-income person.

Again, I'm not a statistician and on top of it have a language handicap with the more technical terms, so I might be wrong. If I am, please let me know.

To address the second part of your argument, the free market rate, the biggest problem that many, many, many Americans have (especially right now) with the concept of the free market rate, is that we simply don't trust companies to follow it. Whether those companies are our employers or the companies who sell us our food, fuel, clothing, etc., we have a very, very hard time trusting that those companies would adhere to free market rate. And it's hard to fault people for feeling that way, because it's hard not to feel like we're being ripped off by a lot of companies right now. Companies that are making record profits (from Citigroup who had a paltry $11bn profit in 2011, to IBM with $20.4bn, all the way up to Exxon Mobil who had a staggering 2011 profit of $41.1bn), whose executives are getting record bonuses and salaries, while the middle-class American's annual salary fell 7% from 2000 to 2010.

Click to expand...

Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing here, what do you understand by the concept of free market rate? Based on what I know of the theory behind it, free market rate is set by supply and demand. The point at which the curves representing these two meet on the chart is the equilibrium, where both supply and demand are balanced, and you get the price (free market rate) and quantity from that. I believe that point is generally considered to be the most efficient allocation of resources based on utility.

Now, you said that americans don't trust companies to follow free market rate. On the demand side, a company could of course offer pittance to their prospective employees, but based on the graph few if any qualified people would want to work for them for that rate. Companies need labor, so they have to offer enough money and benefits to get people to sign on. On the supply side, a person looking for work naturally wants to get as much for their skills and time as possible, but the more that is, the fewer openings there are and the tougher the competition. So they take the best deal that their employment qualifications can get them.

And then somewhere the demand and the supply meet, and there are enough workers willing to work for the wage as there are job openings available for the cost. I'm interested in your views as to how companies would be immune to this, and where exactly the 'companies screwing over americans' happens.

Or were you referring to the lay-offs and pay cuts at a time of increased profits? When demand is low (as it is pretty much everywhere nowadays) companies respond by reducing costs, in order to stay in business. This generally entails downsizing, and such adjustment procedures can have the effect of temporarily boosting profits. The perception of the companies screwing people over is erroneous I think, though perhaps understandable. However, I'm not sure what this would have directly to do with free markets.

And honestly, why would these companies pay any more than they absolutely have to? The point of a company is to make money for the owner and/or shareholders. You don't make money by paying your employees more than you have to, or providing better benefits than you absolutely have to. You make money by paying the least amount you can get away with, providing the least amount of benefits, and increasing the purchase cost of your products.

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I agree that companies try to maximise shareholder value. But what I suspect you and I disagree on is that I think this is the way it should be. If what they offer to their employees is sufficient to get and retain enough qualified people to run their operations, then companies would frankly be stupid/inefficient to pay more. I don't think it is wrong to look for the best deal, either for regular people or for companies. If you disagree with this, then I'd like to hear your reasoning for it. Companies need labor, and have to pay wages in return for it. Why should they not take the best deal on offer, whether it is the cheapest or something else?

Citigroup laid off 4500 US employees while increasing their profit to $11bn in 2011, IBM laid off 3,000 US employees and have laid off another 1700 so far in 2012, and Exxon Mobil hides their layoff numbers sufficiently well that my Google-Fu cannot find them. For more of a breakdown, the top 4 Citigroup executives earned a combined $43M in 2011, an increase of 34% over 2010; while their employees got a 5% raise. IBM's CEO got a 30% raise in 2011, up to $31.7M, while the rank and file received "small, targeted" raises (meaning not everyone got a raise, even a cost-of-living adjustment), and IBM's traditional pension plan (company paid pension) was thrown out back in 2008 in favor of a 401(k) plan, allowing the company to save between $2.5bn and $3bn through 2013. Exxon Mobil's CEO got a 20% raise up to $34.9M in 2011, while most (but not all) of the rank and file received 3% raises.

Click to expand...

I imagine the skills and contacts necessary to be a CEO of an international megacorp are quite rare, and the people who possessed them to have many takers. So they would be in a good position to negotiate on their own salary. Lots of companies want to acquire their services, so supply and demand indicate the price is going to be high.

And then there's the other issue with free market rate - determining how much each individual person's work is worth. How exactly does one put a price on all of the various types of jobs out there? What criteria would you use? Does the size of the company matter? The number of other people at the company who do the same thing you do? How long you've been with the company? How hard the job is? Whether it's a sit on your ass all day office job or an on your feet from dawn til' dusk job?

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Please see above. Their work is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, and in a free market would be based on supply and demand.

You want to take away my benefits, take away my pension, cut my hours and/or my pay, force me to move to a different city in order to keep my job as you close down the location where I currently live, and take away my ability to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions, and you want to get rid of the minimum wage so you can pay less than that amount for new employees in the same field as mine? All while the prices of food, gas, electricity, insurance, and rent are going up? Yeah... I totally trust the free market.

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As I said, in a free market the wages and benefits would depend on supply and demand. It is quite understandable that people who have a job want as much pay and benefits as possible, due to enlightened self-interest. The downside to this is that the more expensive it is made for a company to hire people, the less they will hire people (they'll adjust their operations accordingly, automate production to require less workers and such), so some other poor guy is left without a job. The idea is that the law of supply and demand moderates these things and makes for the most efficient combination, where as many people are employed as possible earning as much as possible and as much labor needs of companies are met as possible for the lowest cost possible.

Unless price controls such as minimum wage artificially elevated the costs. At which point companies hired less people than they otherwise would, leaving more people without jobs than efficiency demands. In occupations where equilibrium pay is higher than minimum wage, this would not directly apply and I don't really see what effect minimum wage or it's removal would have.

*Ask any of the massive number of employees who've had to take pay cuts, or lost their benefits, or are now working two jobs instead of one just to make ends meet if they feel that the reason they're now making less money is because they were getting paid too much before hand.

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With the decrease in demand due to the global economic crisis, companies pretty much everywhere are forced to reduce costs to stay afloat, which means lay-offs, wage cuts and all the other things you listed. It is unfortunate, but what exactly are the companies supposed to do? And they would do this, with or without minimum wage.

Gared said:

Warning: Long. [snip]

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(As a total aside, Gared , I now know you know exactly how I feel when I spend 2-3 hrs researching a mere 200-word post, like you've just painstakingly built a wardrobe out of carefully polished words. Brofist for you.)

Factoring in my raise, Kati's extra part-time income, and the ending of one particular debt (yay!), our "useful" (after-tax) household income probably went up about 15% in total. Factor in the fact that we had to replace our car and the fact that we are raising a (cute) kid, and that means our expenses (including usual COL ones like groceries) went up right around ... 12%. So that's a net increase of about 3%...oh, and Kati will be moving in with her father now, so she will have to leave her part time job and find another on the other side of the State, one which has to be kid-raising-friendly, and our house payment is scheduled to go up 2% in Sept.

Soo...yeah. If I track the paperwork very carefully, I can see that we got a raise. I don't really get to direct it or do anything awesome with it, though. This is what makes articles like this one about wage disparity, this one about the 'new' slave labor, and this one about "educating the work force for work" look more and more appealing to someone seeing things from my perspective.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

(As a total aside, Gared , I now know you know exactly how I feel when I spend 2-3 hrs researching a mere 200-word post, like you've just painstakingly built a wardrobe out of carefully polished words. Brofist for you.)

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Agreed, it is an impressive post. Gared, I tried to answer all the points you made, but if there are any you feel I missed, please say so and I'll attempt to give you my view on them.

Factoring in my raise, Kati's extra part-time income, and the ending of one particular debt (yay!), our "useful" (after-tax) household income probably went up about 15% in total. Factor in the fact that we had to replace our car and the fact that we are raising a (cute) kid, and that means our expenses (including usual COL ones like groceries) went up right around ... 12%. So that's a net increase of about 3%...oh, and Kati will be moving in with her father now, so she will have to leave her part time job and find another on the other side of the State, one which has to be kid-raising-friendly, and our house payment is scheduled to go up 2% in Sept.

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I can understand your frustration. But if I may ask, and please feel free to ignore this question if it's none of my business, do you think the current situation is due to your employers being soulless bloodsuckers, or is this perhaps more of a temporary money crunch much like those experienced by many other young couples who are hearing the pitter-patter of tiny feet?

Soo...yeah. If I track the paperwork very carefully, I can see that we got a raise. I don't really get to direct it or do anything awesome with it, though. This is what makes articles like this one about wage disparity, this one about the 'new' slave labor, and this one about "educating the work force for work" look more and more appealing to someone seeing things from my perspective.

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My take on those three articles:

The first one is interesting, though it seems to try and make a strong connection between the high corporate profits and reduction of employees' benefits. I'm not sure if this is entirely accurate. In the current economic situation where a lot of people are out of a job and not a great deal of hiring takes place, it is true that the companies may enjoy some advantage, but I think that's just one reason. There are many other reasons as well for the high profits. Earlier I listed the effects of adjustment measures, and there are others further still.

The second one strikes me as a piece of rather sensationalist journalism. Drenched in exaggerating language, it claims exploitation, hints at racism, and suggests some kind of a conspiracy between the judiciary, the executive, and the private sector. I'm not saying there are not things that need correcting in prison labor, but I wonder if the situation is truly as dire and the scale of abuses as significant as the article paints it to be. I mean, "prison-industrial complex"? Really?

As to the third one, there are some professional educators on these boards and perhaps they'd be willing to give a more informed opinion than I can on the goals of the educational system. As I've understood, education is in large part meant to teach students the skills with which they can succeed in life. I suppose job skills would rank quite highly in that. So color me unsurprised if that's what they teach.

GasBandit said:

Romney sure as hell isn't in any hurry to get down to business. Every AM radio talking head is wondering what the hell he's doing when Obama's been lobbing him softballs all week, and he's just watched them go by.

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For which we can all be grateful. Who really wants more than a month of real hard campaigning?

TommiR said:

Firstly, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to make a very informative, well researched and well-reasoned post.

Let's get to business, then.

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You're quite welcome. This has been an interesting diversion from my usual boredom during slow holiday times.

I believe the map put up was inaccurate as an indication for the housing expenses of low-income people for two reasons. One was the scale, which you already addressed. The other things was that I'm not sure median rent (50th percentile) accurately reflects the rent that an average minimum wage worker needs to pay. Say someone makes >50k/year, meaning they are pretty well-off. The are probably not living in a median rent apartment, but have a fancier place somewhere and pay more rent. Conversely, someone who makes minimum wage probably lives much more humbly, and is paying less than median rent. Median rent seems to me to be more useful in determining the relative differences in rent prices between different locales. So pointing to the median rent for a city-scale locale and saying "this is what a minimum wage worker needs to pay for rent" might not be an accurate statement, particularly in cases where the median rent is very high in relation to minimum wage. Looking at the 25th percentile (?) on a city scale, or the median rent in a low-income neighbourhood of a city, might be more useful in determining the housing expenses of a low-income person.

Again, I'm not a statistician and on top of it have a language handicap with the more technical terms, so I might be wrong. If I am, please let me know.

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The issue here is that there isn't much disparity (at least in my area, the Greater Seattle-Tacoma Metroplex referenced above) between a high-price apartment and a low-price apartment. That's part of the reason that I used the median rent for Seattle, and why I used the 4 price point neighborhoods that I did. I should have explained more about those neighborhoods in my original post, as it would have provided more of an insight into the process. The four neighborhoods used were Downtown Seattle, where all of the apartments available come in high-rise towers (or at least 10 or 11 floor complexes), Capitol Hill, which is kind of half swanky-foodie-hipster and half soup kitchen and gospel mission, University District, which is mostly apartments and houses rented to college students at the University of Washington, and Magnolia, which is a nice-ish family suburb kind of neighborhood. The only type of neighborhood not specifically included was a gang-infested, crime ridden neighborhood where there are gang related shootings and drive-bys, because whether you live on minimum wage or not, you shouldn't have to live in a neighborhood where simply standing near a window is pushing your luck if you want to live through the night. Besides, even in these neighborhoods, rent is pretty much the same as it is outside of them.

Around here, unfortunately, the difference between a low-rent apartment and a high-rent apartment in a relatively safe neighborhood can boil down to one or two things. And really, they're not important things. For a one bedroom apartment in a low-rent apartment complex you can expect to have:

• 1 bedroom, approximately 10ft x 8ft, including the closet, if there is one.
• 1 bathroom, just large enough to open the door (sometimes, if you're lucky), with a sink in a vanity made of particle board with a thin wood-grained plastic veneer, a toilet, and a bath tub with a shower head hung over it, and a mirror.
• 1 kitchen, about the size of a postage stamp, with a dishwasher that occasionally works, a two-sink setup with a garbage disposal, an electric stove with 4 burners and an oven, and a small, apartment-sized refrigerator. You might also have enough counter space to use a small to medium sized cutting board and an electrical outlet to plug in a microwave and toaster. If you're really, really lucky, you might have two outlets, so you don't have to unplug the toaster to make coffee.
• 1 living room, which accounts for about the same amount of space as the bedroom, which invariably has a sliding glass door leading to a balcony that's almost big enough for 3 people to stand on at the same time.
• Your heat will come solely from electric-baseboard heaters which haven't been upgraded or replaced since the complex was originally built, which are the most inefficient heat source short of trying to heat your home using candles.
• You will not have a washer and dryer for your clothes. The complex will, but you'll be charged $1.00 per load to wash and $1.50 per load to dry (and it will always take at least 2 cycles through the dryer to dry your laundry).
• Your complex may have a parking lot or you may have to rely on street parking. If you have to rely on street parking, you'll have to get a parking permit from the city in order to park your car, if you have one, at your apartment complex.
• Your complex will not have any other "amenities" such as a gym, a pool, a clubhouse, etc.
• Unless your apartment complex is 6 stories or more tall, it will not have an elevator.

For a one bedroom apartment in a high-rent apartment complex you can expect to have:

• 1 bedroom, approximately 10ft x 9ft, including the closet, which is guaranteed to exist.
• 1 bathroom, the same as above.
• 1 kitchen, the same as above with one exception. You are guaranteed to have two outlets, meaning you no longer have to unplug your toaster to make coffee, and you can plug in a mixer or a food processor.
• 1 living room, the same as above.
• The same heaters.
• You may have your own washer and dryer (probably not, but you may), and if not the laundry facilities at the complex will be just as bad and usually cost $0.50 more per load than the low-rent complex.
• Your complex will have a parking lot.
• Your complex might have a gym (by which they mean a treadmill, an exercise bike, and either a bowflex machine or a weight machine), a pool and hot tub, and a clubhouse where they occasionally hold community get-togethers and which residents can rent out for a fee.
• If your complex is three stories or more, it will have an elevator.

The difference in price per month between a high-price apartment and a low-price apartment can be quite staggering, but they're usually not. In fact, in an effort to do a more thorough examination of actual prices, I went through actual listings, comparing 1br apartments in various levels of complexes, in all neighborhoods of the city (including the gang-controlled ones). The results were interesting. The average difference in price between a good complex in a good neighborhood and a bad complex in that same neighborhood was $50 per month. The average difference in price between a good complex in a mediocre neighborhood and a bad complex in that same neighborhood was $100 per month. The average difference in price between a good complex in a bad neighborhood (there are some re-take the neighborhood/gentrification efforts in process) and a bad complex in a bad neighborhood is $200 per month. The largest difference in price was between a good complex in a good neighborhood, where a 1br, 1ba apartment with 950sq ft of space was $3,024 per month and the shittiest apartment I could find in the shittiest neighborhood I could find, which was a 1br, 1ba apartment with 500sq ft of space for $750 per month. That apartment is actually the basement of someone's house, in the worst neighborhood in town, and doesn't include the mandatory $100 per month in electric or the mandatory $60 per month for sewer/water/garbage that the landlord is asking for, so the true monthly cost of that apartment is $910 per month.

Unfortunately, this is just what happens when you live in a metropolitan environment, at least in this country. The majority of people who work in the city, by which I mean the heart of the city, where all of the high-rise buildings are, make minimum wage or within $1 per hour of that wage. They cannot afford to live in the city, because rent in the city is enormously high, because the only apartments available are in high-rise buildings that offer tons of amenities, great views, etc., and are marketed toward the much smaller market of high-salary employees. That means that those employees have to live outside the city, which means that they have to pay to commute to and from work in the city, which unfortunately also means that they cannot afford to live in the immediately surround suburbs, where rent prices are much less than downtown, but are still just at or above the median price of $1315/mo. The people who live in these apartments, in about the 5 to 13 mile outside the city range, are the people in that >$50k+ per year range that you were talking about (I bolded it for emphasis). They are, by and large, family dwellings, in neighborhoods with elementary, middle, and high schools, because not everyone could afford to live in the housing subdivisions in the same radial range. The people who live in these family dwellings, however, are more and more frequently become childless adult couples and/or roommates who are living in the area because it provides the best value for the price that they can afford. Families are either being pushed even further out, or are renting two and three bedroom apartments, which cost (on average) $300 to $500 more per month. That means that the people who are making minimum wage or less than a dollar more per hour, in the heart of Seattle, which makes up a good 1/3 to 1/2 of the workers in the city, have to live at least 14 miles outside the city, or in the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city.

Now, what this boils down to, ultimately, is that people who work for minimum wage, shouldn't do so in the city. They should be looking to live outside the city, sometimes as far from the city as possible. The problem with that is, there aren't nearly enough jobs that pay in that scale (or any, really) outside of the city compared to the number of possible employees. The people who are making minimum wage in Seattle are either, by and large, recent college graduates who have no experience in their career fields, and thus cannot demand higher wages, or people who've been in their career fields for 5+ years but have no college degree and thus cannot demand higher wages, or - and this is where free-market starts to creep in to the current American economic model - people whose jobs aren't worth as much to the economy, mainly the service industries (fast food, restaurant, grocery, gas station, etc.), but also including retail (clothes, consumer electronics, furniture, etc.). So, in order for only people who can afford to live in the city to work in the city, the city would have to completely eliminate fast food places, restaurants, grocery stores, gas stations , clothing stores (department stores in general), electronic stores, furniture stores, etc.; and only have office buildings where high mid-level management and upper level employees work, and all of those people would have to want to live in downtown. Unfortunately, because all of those people would have to go outside of the city to shop for anything, even food, the city would go bankrupt because there would be no tax revenue to support it. The only money they would be able to collect would be parking, real-estate tax, and corporate tax. Or (and this is a big 'or'), restaurants, grocery stores, etc. would have to pay their employees even more than the current minimum wage of $9.04 per hour, and they'd have to pass on even more of that cost to their customers, meaning that the people who do live in the city would have to pay even higher prices for everything that they buy, and they'd have to make more money to support those new prices - or they'd have to leave the city, which is what they've been doing in Seattle for the past 7 - 10 (or more) years.

Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing here, what do you understand by the concept of free market rate? Based on what I know of the theory behind it, free market rate is set by supply and demand. The point at which the curves representing these two meet on the chart is the equilibrium, where both supply and demand are balanced, and you get the price (free market rate) and quantity from that. I believe that point is generally considered to be the most efficient allocation of resources based on utility.

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That is my understanding and usage of the term as well.

Now, you said that americans don't trust companies to follow free market rate. On the demand side, a company could of course offer pittance to their prospective employees, but based on the graph few if any qualified people would want to work for them for that rate. Companies need labor, so they have to offer enough money and benefits to get people to sign on.[SUP]1[/SUP] On the supply side, a person looking for work naturally wants to get as much for their skills and time as possible, but the more that is, the fewer openings there are and the tougher the competition. So they take the best deal that their employment qualifications can get them.[SUP]2[/SUP]

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1. The issue here, is the assumption that companies need labor. They don't. If America was a closed country, like North Korea, then that would be true - though we'd have a lot more problems to deal with than free-market economy vs. minimum wage affected economy. Because the American economy cannot, at this point in time, be truly separated from the global economy, there is nothing - and I mean absolutely nothing - that requires American companies to hire American employees. This has been made even more true by the signings of NAFTA and CAFTA (the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements), which reduced - or removed entirely - tariffs which used to be charged for importing and exporting goods between the countries of North and Central America, and the United States of America. It used to be that US companies had an incentive to manufacture their goods in the US, because they could sell them in the US for less money, due to their not having to pay tariffs to import their manufactured goods from countries that could pay their workers lower wages, which would have led to cheaper production costs for the companies but a higher overall cost due to the tariffs. Now that those agreements have passed, we can build our cars, TVs, computers, furniture, etc. in Mexico, or Nicaragua, or Ecuador, or pretty much anyplace north of Columbia but Cuba, and our production costs can be much, much lower.*

2. Because of the current state of the economy, and also because there are just too damn many Americans who are looking for work right now, the supply side of the equation is so far out of alignment with the demand side, that only a very small percentage of people are getting jobs that have any real relevance to their qualifications, and therefore, jobs that compensate them what they believe they are worth. Now, some people absolutely have an inflated sense of what their time and effort is worth. I will never dispute that fact. But a lot of people don't have that over-inflated sense of self-worth. We're just trying to get enough money to eat, sleep, watch TV, and occasionally take a vacation, and not have to work until we're 90 years old just to pay for it all.

And then somewhere the demand and the supply meet, and there are enough workers willing to work for the wage as there are job openings available for the cost. I'm interested in your views as to how companies would be immune to this, and where exactly the 'companies screwing over americans' happens.

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The problem is, with US companies shifting jobs out of the country, closing manufacturing plants in the US, or going out of business entirely, it is unlikely that the demand and the supply will ever meet until the population of the US decreases dramatically. Furthermore, even if US employees were willing to work for the amount of money that foreign employees are willing to work (meaning workers in foreign countries, not employees in the US on work visas), there is no practical way that they would be able to afford rent, food, and clothing. For example, if US workers wanted to do the work that Foxconn is currently doing in China, assembling electronic devices for Apple, Microsoft, etc., we would have to work for less than $1.00 per hour (Foxconn employees, as of May 2012, were making $1.50 per hour, but we would have to be willing to work for even less than that in order to get these companies to move the jobs back to the US and build new factories or retool old ones). $1.50 per hour is $252 per month of 8 hour days with only weekends off, or $3,025 per year. And we'd have to be willing to work for less than that amount per year.

Now, the Foxconn example is rather extreme, but let's look at a few more examples. Let's look at Ford and GM, both of whom have car manufacturing plants in both the US and Mexico. US auto-workers averaged (they're all union, there's no way I'm getting my hands on the UAW's complete wage list) $33.77 per hour in 2011 in wages and benefits. In Mexico, workers for the same two companies, for the same time period, earned approximately $26.40 per day, or less than $4.00 per hour. That would be $554.40 per month, or $6,652.80 per year. For skilled labor. GM and Ford are still kind of an extreme example though, because US workers for those companies are union employees and make substantially above minimum wage. So let's look at an industry with which I am extremely familiar, which currently pays either right at minimum wage, or within $1.00 of minimum, since that's the price point that I used for my living expenses argument above - namely, the call center. A lot of Americans work or have worked at call centers, but more and more companies are moving their call center business to the Philippines, Panama, and India. I know they are, because I've worked for 3 companies who have done this exact thing. In fact, I work at one of them right now. Microsoft probably has roughly 7500 call-center employees worldwide. Less than 500 of them work in the US, the rest work in India, the Philippines, and Panama. For the vendors that we use, in the Philippines, the high-range of average employee salary per year is $2,000 less than the annual salary of someone making the federal minimum wage and $4000+ less than someone making Washington state minimum wage. Which means that, in order to get Microsoft to move their jobs back to the US (which will never happen, by the way), US workers would have to be willing to work for $5.00 per hour or less.

Also, I never said that companies are screwing over Americans; I said that the general impression among Americans is that they are. I don't actually think we're getting screwed by the corporations, so much as we're getting screwed by our own greed, bad fiscal habits, and 6 decades of lying to ourselves as a nation about how well-off we are.

Or were you referring to the lay-offs and pay cuts at a time of increased profits? When demand is low (as it is pretty much everywhere nowadays) companies respond by reducing costs, in order to stay in business. This generally entails downsizing, and such adjustment procedures can have the effect of temporarily boosting profits.[SUP]1[/SUP] The perception of the companies screwing people over is erroneous I think, though perhaps understandable. However, I'm not sure what this would have directly to do with free markets.[SUP]2[/SUP]

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1. The problem here is that companies didn't start laying off employees to reduce costs when they started seeing lower demand. Companies started laying off employees when they were making record profits, but had forecast that they would soon see lower demand. That theory is sound. Unfortunately, that theory, when applied in practice, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - as employment numbers drop, available cash flow drops, and demand for products drops. I've worked at two companies that downsized before the economy ever even hit its first pothole, in order to push their profits even higher, when they were already making record profits. Both of those companies went bankrupt when the crash hit, because they had no fat left to cut. One of them closed its doors completely, the other was absorbed by a competitor. Also, economic theorists can theorize all they want that cutting employees will only temporarily boost profits. And they're right. The boost in profits is temporary, and comes to an end when the broader economy slows down to the point where no-one has the money necessarily to keep paying pre-slowdown prices for mid-slowdown goods. The problem is, some of these corporate giants seem to have forgotten that temporary profits are not indicators of long-term growth. They've become used to paying the least amount they can, to employing the least amount of people that they can, and now the economy is struggling to goad them into hiring more people so that more people can afford to buy things and the economy can recover.

2. See above regarding perception vs. reality of companies screwing people over. However, the reason that this applies to the concept of free markets is because of the human element of pricing and consumer confidence. In theory, there is no room or accounting for human emotion. In practice, human emotion is just as important as supply or demand, if not more important. The best example of this that I can come up with is the stock markets. In a purely theoretical, emotionless market, there is no reason for the US stock markets to decline just because there are fears that the European Central Bank might lower interest rates. Now, if the ECB does lower interest rates (as they just did), then that could have a direct impact on US stocks, due to that whole global economy point; but because of human emotion, our stock markets took a double hit over the ECB's move. Last week, when there were rumors that the ECB might lower rates, investors and traders panicked and sold stocks and the markets dropped. Then, when the ECB meeting hadn't happened yet, they went back up slightly because there were rumors and opinions that they wouldn't actually drop the rate, that maybe something else would be done. Today, when the ECB did lower rates, the markets dropped again, because now the rates will influence stocks. If human emotion were removed from the equation, the first drop wouldn't have happened, and the second one may not have been as steep.

And it doesn't have to be anything as big as the global stock markets and investor panic. It can be something as small as personal beliefs and ad campaigns, like the people who disagree with gay rights who are boycotting Kraft foods (all of it) because Nabisco, one of their many divisions, ran a gay-friendly ad for Oreo cookies, one of their many products. That means that these people are so upset by one product ad that they're willing to refuse to purchase any of this list of items. Luckily, they're a small group of people and their actions, in the long run, won't amount to much. But what if it weren't a small group of people? What if even 10% of the Kraft's or Ford's or Bank of America's customers suddenly decided to use anyone other than those companies' products/services? What if, when the US was up in arms about the passage of SOPA, and the general consensus was that the movie studios were behind it, all of the people who signed the petitions or even just heard or read about the bill and were opposed to it decided never to watch a movie by those studios again? It would have been devastating to those companies. Supply and demand would dictate that even if those specific companies went out of business, either their competitors would take up the slack, or new companies would rise in their places. Unfortunately, the current feeling in America is that all companies are out to screw hard-working Americans over. And if it's not companies, it's the Government that's out to get you.

I agree that companies try to maximise shareholder value. But what I suspect you and I disagree on is that I think this is the way it should be. If what they offer to their employees is sufficient to get and retain enough qualified people to run their operations, then companies would frankly be stupid/inefficient to pay more. I don't think it is wrong to look for the best deal, either for regular people or for companies. If you disagree with this, then I'd like to hear your reasoning for it. Companies need labor, and have to pay wages in return for it. Why should they not take the best deal on offer, whether it is the cheapest or something else?

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Actually, I'm right there with you on that one, mostly. I have no problem with companies trying to maximize shareholder value. I don't think it's wrong to look for the best deal either, I do it all the time. However, one of the things that seems to be frequently overlooked in the calculation of the best deal is value. Not price. Value. Unfortunately, what makes an item valuable from one person to the next can change dramatically, and price is a constant, so it's much easier to track price. Let's take food, for example. I know that when I go grocery shopping, I have 5 options for stores to go to. All 5 of those stores offer the same selection of items (I'm going to assume general/non-specialty foods), and all are within a reasonable distance of my house. My 5 options are Top Foods, Safeway, Albertson's, QFC, and Fred Meyer's. Let's say I want to buy a cucumber, a rib-eye steak, a gallon of milk, and a 5lb bag of flour; and we're going to score product quality on a 1 to 5 scale, 1 being the lowest. Albertson's will be cheapest across the board, but their cucumber will be a 4, their meat will be a 1, their milk will be a 3, and their flour will be a 3. Safeway will be the next cheapest, but their cucumber will be a 2, their meat will be a 4, their milk will be a 4, and their flour will be a 3. Fred Meyer's and Top Foods will cost almost exactly the same, but FM's cucumber will be a 2, their meat will be a 2, their milk will be a 3, and their flour will be a 3, while Top Foods' cucumber will be a 1, their meat will be a 2, their milk will be a 3, and their flour will be a 3. QFC will be the most expensive of the five options, but their cucumber will be a 4, their meat will be a 5, their milk will be a 5, and their flour will be a 3.

Now, if all I was concerned with was price, I'd go to Albertson's and be done with it, and I'd save probably $100/mo on food. But I, personally, place more value on higher quality ingredients than I do on lower cost, lower quality ingredients, so I shop at QFC. It costs me a little more each month (actually, it costs me 1/3rd more each month), but I don't get sick as often from eating almost-rancid meat, my vegetables, meat, and milk all come from local sources so they're fresher and they give back to the local community, and my meals taste better.

Unfortunately, more and more these days, we're seeing companies hire only on price and not value, and (largely due to our own habits of consumerism) deliver products only on price and not value. Why hire someone with more "value" who has a higher price when there are so many possible employees out there who are willing to work for a lower price, even if you have to replace them more frequently? And, if your target audience has demonstrated that when an item breaks, they'll replace it, why deliver a product that has higher than necessary value when you can deliver one that costs you less to manufacture? I can go down to a store right now and buy a 40+ inch HDTV for less than $600; but if it breaks and I don't have a warranty, I have to go back down and buy another one - and all too many of my countrymen are willing to do just that. I'm not willing to do that, which means I either have to buy a more expensive TV, pay for an extended warranty, or try to repair my TV when it breaks - and most of the time these days, the TV is too difficult to repair at home, so I have to balance paying someone to repair it with paying for a new one.

But this was about hiring, primarily, and the issue here again is that companies don't need labor - or at least, not American labor. The best deal for them, even if they do get rid of minimum wage in the US, will never be to hire American workers, because so many of them have already moved all of their manufacturing and customer service out of the country. It would cost too much to move those divisions back to the US and they would never find people willing/able to work for as little as their overseas workers work for. Even if the US employees offered higher value, they'd have to offer significantly higher value at near-equal or lower price in order to account for the cost to move whole divisions of the company and rebuild factories and call centers.

I imagine the skills and contacts necessary to be a CEO of an international megacorp are quite rare, and the people who possessed them to have many takers. So they would be in a good position to negotiate on their own salary. Lots of companies want to acquire their services, so supply and demand indicate the price is going to be high.

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Don't be too sure. Citigroup's CEO, who drew a record profit last year, so under-impressed their shareholders that the shareholders tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to prevent him from getting his raise. JP Morgan Chase's CEO and CIO are on the hot-seat right now because their investment arm managed to lose them $9bn recently. Bank of America's last CEO was forced to resign after his policies brought the bank dangerously close to failure, and was paid $20M for the privilege (he actually took no compensation the year he resigned, other than his $135M retirement fund, that salary quote was from the year before his resignation). WaMu's last two CEOs ran the company into the ground, and were paid $14M and $18M the year before each of them left the company.

Please see above. Their work is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, and in a free market would be based on supply and demand.



As I said, in a free market the wages and benefits would depend on supply and demand. It is quite understandable that people who have a job want as much pay and benefits as possible, due to enlightened self-interest. The downside to this is that the more expensive it is made for a company to hire people, the less they will hire people (they'll adjust their operations accordingly, automate production to require less workers and such), so some other poor guy is left without a job. The idea is that the law of supply and demand moderates these things and makes for the most efficient combination, where as many people are employed as possible earning as much as possible and as much labor needs of companies are met as possible for the lowest cost possible.

Unless price controls such as minimum wage artificially elevated the costs. At which point companies hired less people than they otherwise would, leaving more people without jobs than efficiency demands. In occupations where equilibrium pay is higher than minimum wage, this would not directly apply and I don't really see what effect minimum wage or it's removal would have.



With the decrease in demand due to the global economic crisis, companies pretty much everywhere are forced to reduce costs to stay afloat, which means lay-offs, wage cuts and all the other things you listed. It is unfortunate, but what exactly are the companies supposed to do? And they would do this, with or without minimum wage.

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I think the rest of this has been pretty well covered above, but let me know if you think there are any specific points that I missed.

The ballad of Gared and TommiR-



Heh, wowsers.

What I'm loving here is that this is still polite, and also, that, while we're seeing more democratic/socialist views vs economic liberalism/capitalism, both sides are using rational arguments and assuming the other one's not a blind idiot. Far too rare, this sort of gentle debate/conversation. Huzzah.
Also, Gared is completely right and TommiR is a complete blind buffoon who doesn't understand how the real world works!

Bubble181 said:

What I'm loving here is that this is still polite, and also, that, while we're seeing more democratic/socialist views vs economic liberalism/capitalism, both sides are using rational arguments and assuming the other one's not a blind idiot. Far too rare, this sort of gentle debate/conversation. Huzzah.
Also, Gared is completely right and TommiR is a complete blind buffoon who doesn't understand how the real world works!

Click to expand...

I've been looking for a good, gentlemanly debate for years now, and I have quite a bit of experience in the practical side of the US economy in multiple industries, multiple states, and multiple levels of employment, so this is right up my alley.

Also, my wife brought up an excellent example for the personal opinion vs. list price argument above. Netflix. A year ago one share of Netflix stock cost $292.42. Five days later, Netflix announced major price changes and a new way that they were going to handle DVD rentals. Their stock, even though the company has scaled back some of those changes (they didn't actually create Qwikster or whatever the name of their new DVD company was going to be), and even though the CEO apologized for so badly misreading his audience, has dropped like a rock. Within a month and a half, their stock price dropped to $130.00 a share, and it's now trading at $81.89. The value of the service they offer didn't go down until very recently, when they lost their contract with Starz to offer their catalog of movies, but their worth dropped like a rock because they pissed off their customers.

Also, I neglected to include transport costs for companies manufacturing goods outside the US and selling them inside the US, and now I'm having trouble finding any records of the actual costs of transporting goods into the country. I can find plenty of data on export costs.

Gared said:

Also, I neglected to include transport costs for companies manufacturing goods outside the US and selling them inside the US, and now I'm having trouble finding any records of the actual costs of transporting goods into the country. I can find plenty of data on export costs.

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You also left out the bit where most countries still DO pay import tariffs, and on some types of goods, quite a lot. I don't want to undermine your point (I do agree for about 80% with you ), but the USA is often regarded as being one of the protectionist countries - compared to most European countries, the USA does at least make an effort to try and keep the market somewhat closed off - for the exact reasons you outlined; and "not enough" to keep low-wage jobs in the US, but "too much" to really benefit from low-wage labor (if you think it's ethically OK to profit from child labor and such, of course) abroad.

Anyway, one point I think you haven't mentioned, and which does matter, is that not every person/group/nation/etc is asproductive as the next.
For example, we still manufacture cars in Belgium, despite horrendous labor costs. One person working on an assembly line costs easily twice as much in Belgium than Poland - and we've got a free marker of goods and people between us. Transportation doesn't even begin to cost as much. However, the Belgian employee can work almost twice as fast as the Polish one - through education and training, different work ethic (arguably), ....

The same is true (in some sectors) for the USA: sometimes, it's more economical to employ more expensive employees/workers, because they can handle more work per day/week/month/given time.

This, of course, leads to ever more stress/pressure at work, resulting in burnout, heart problems, suicides, people at 40 becoming "too old to keep up",... In the context of minimum wage jobs, this can mean simply giving people more work than they can reasonably do and trying to force them to cope (e.g. our patrol guards work 12h/day, including a mandated 1 hour break. Unfortunately, they're under so much pressure to finish all their clients,never to be late at an intervention, but at the same time never to have a car accident or bereak the speed limit, etc etc, that more and more people are starting half an hour or an hour early, and/or work for half an hour or so extra, just to get 'round. This, in turn, resulted in more accidents (because people who drive a car for 14 hours on end apparently aren't that attentive and awake anymore near the end ), which caused a strict nommore-than-12-hours policy, etc etc.). When looking at higher-paid jobs, you get the standard middle manager having to work 60+ hours a week, being paid for 37 or 38, just to prove his worth and remain a "valuable asset". Queue heart attack at 45.

e managed to work just a bit less, for a bit less money. More other people'd have a job, we'd all be less stressed and less unhealthy. Of course, we'd all have to surrender some money - and some of us can't, and a lot of us don't want to. It's amazing just how much we've been brainwashed about that. People are perfectly willing to work themselves to death for a bit more money; while a bit less but more free time/less pressure/better hours/whatever would make you much happier. Unless your happiness is solely derived from "having more than your neighbour".

Err, dammit, me and my soapboxing. I'll just go sit over there and let the grown-ups continue the civil discussion that actually manages to stay on topic

Anyway, my somewhat relevant point is this: our whole society is focussed too much on money, and not enough on happiness. A minimum wage, along with maximum hours worked, is one possible way to stop the absolute excesses in one direction (see: 19th-century working conditions). However, this has caused us to overbalance in the other direction, at the cost of well-being. How or when our model of society will change, I don't know, but I'm fairly sure it'll happen....It has to. We'll all have to become a lot poorer (in the West) if we ever want everyone to have a shot at happiness and a good life.

Bubble181 said:

You also left out the bit where most countries still DO pay import tariffs, and on some types of goods, quite a lot. I don't want to undermine your point (I do agree for about 80% with you ), but the USA is often regarded as being one of the protectionist countries - compared to most European countries, the USA does at least make an effort to try and keep the market somewhat closed off - for the exact reasons you outlined; and "not enough" to keep low-wage jobs in the US, but "too much" to really benefit from low-wage labor (if you think it's ethically OK to profit from child labor and such, of course) abroad.[SUP]1[/SUP]

Anyway, one point I think you haven't mentioned, and which does matter, is that not every person/group/nation/etc is asproductive as the next.[SUP]2[/SUP]
For example, we still manufacture cars in Belgium, despite horrendous labor costs. One person working on an assembly line costs easily twice as much in Belgium than Poland - and we've got a free marker of goods and people between us. Transportation doesn't even begin to cost as much. However, the Belgian employee can work almost twice as fast as the Polish one - through education and training, different work ethic (arguably), ....

The same is true (in some sectors) for the USA: sometimes, it's more economical to employ more expensive employees/workers, because they can handle more work per day/week/month/given time.

This, of course, leads to ever more stress/pressure at work, resulting in burnout, heart problems, suicides, people at 40 becoming "too old to keep up",... In the context of minimum wage jobs, this can mean simply giving people more work than they can reasonably do and trying to force them to cope (e.g. our patrol guards work 12h/day, including a mandated 1 hour break. Unfortunately, they're under so much pressure to finish all their clients,never to be late at an intervention, but at the same time never to have a car accident or bereak the speed limit, etc etc, that more and more people are starting half an hour or an hour early, and/or work for half an hour or so extra, just to get 'round. This, in turn, resulted in more accidents (because people who drive a car for 14 hours on end apparently aren't that attentive and awake anymore near the end ), which caused a strict nommore-than-12-hours policy, etc etc.). When looking at higher-paid jobs, you get the standard middle manager having to work 60+ hours a week, being paid for 37 or 38, just to prove his worth and remain a "valuable asset". Queue heart attack at 45.

e managed to work just a bit less, for a bit less money. More other people'd have a job, we'd all be less stressed and less unhealthy. Of course, we'd all have to surrender some money - and some of us can't, and a lot of us don't want to. It's amazing just how much we've been brainwashed about that. People are perfectly willing to work themselves to death for a bit more money; while a bit less but more free time/less pressure/better hours/whatever would make you much happier. Unless your happiness is solely derived from "having more than your neighbour".[SUP]3[/SUP]

Err, dammit, me and my soapboxing. I'll just go sit over there and let the grown-ups continue the civil discussion that actually manages to stay on topic

Anyway, my somewhat relevant point is this: our whole society is focussed too much on money, and not enough on happiness. A minimum wage, along with maximum hours worked, is one possible way to stop the absolute excesses in one direction (see: 19th-century working conditions). However, this has caused us to overbalance in the other direction, at the cost of well-being. How or when our model of society will change, I don't know, but I'm fairly sure it'll happen....It has to. We'll all have to become a lot poorer (in the West) if we ever want everyone to have a shot at happiness and a good life.[SUP]4[/SUP]

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1. This is very true. I was concentrating mainly on US companies that have sent their manufacturing over to foreign countries, specifically the ones with whom we have a low-to-zero tariff relationship; but there are still a lot of countries that have to pay tariffs to export goods to the US. However, some of the more, shall we say industrious, companies have gotten around that by just having a US plant, where they can build American models of their cars and sell them for cheaper than imported models. For example, there's Mercedes-Benz US International, based in Alabama, and BMW US Manufacturing in South Carolina, and I'm sure there are many others (in fact, I know that there are Subaru, Honda, Toyota/Scion and Hyundai/Kia).

Now, these plants are paying their American employees more than they'd have to pay employees from, say, Mexico; but I don't know if NAFTA/CAFTA would exempt them from trade tariffs if they were importing cars from Mexico while being headquartered in Germany, so this way they're at least partially protected. Also, none of these plants employ UAW workers, so they may have to pay minimum wage or a more, but they don't have to pay that average of $33.77 an hour. It's actually been a big bone of contention that there are auto plants (and now aircraft plants for Boeing) in states that don't support the unions and therefor the companies aren't paying as high of wages, and the union employees are just waiting for all of their jobs to evaporate as the companies move all of the jobs to the non-union workers. But I'd like to avoid moving this conversation too far down the union/non-union line. Partly because I don't know enough about that side of things, and partly because I'm very conflicted regarding unions in general.

2. This is also a good point. However... I worry that you might be putting too much of an emphasis on how good American manufacturing workers and techniques are, compared to foreign countries. Our tech base, which should be one of the higher bases in the world, is actually quite low comparatively. A lot of manufacturing countries blow us out of the water. Our workers, while more skilled as recently as 15 - 20 years ago, are getting less and less skilled by the year, simply because the ones who were really skilled have all retired, and the younger generations haven't needed to become skilled, because we don't manufacture enough these days to keep a large skilled pool going. Unfortunately, in your example, we're Poland. Or maybe something half-way between Poland and Belgium. That'd be what, Brazil?

3. Don't dismiss this argument too quickly. This plays a much bigger part in today's woes than I would like it to, and that's unfortunate. Far too many people these days are willing to see everyone else suffer, so long as they don't have to reduce their level of quality of life in the slightest, and too many people who are outright rooting for that to happen. You see it at all levels of society. People on welfare who want to kick everyone else off of welfare (because of course, everyone else is lazy/on drugs/too stupid/milking the system), because that means that hard-working down-on-their-luck Americans like themselves will have less money to live off of. People working minimum wage jobs who want to end minimum wage, because it makes it too easy for lazy, druggy, stupid people to milk the system and get paid more money than they deserve. People who went to college on scholarships, grants, and loans, who get paid handsome salaries with full benefits and pension plans who think that the current generation of college kids and recent college grads are "entitled" for wanting the same things. I'm not saying that everyone thinks like that, or even that the majority, or even necessarily that a significant portion of the minority of people think this way, but a lot of people would rather tear their neighbors down to their level than build themselves up to their neighbors, metaphorically speaking.

4. Yes. The current system absolutely does have to change. Our current economic system is not sustainable. We've seen that, in the US, in Europe, and looming on the horizon for China. And, yes, what we're going to have to do is buckle down, work a little harder, make a little less money, spend a little less on credit, and (as corporations) understand that making record profits shouldn't be a requirement just to stay employed during an economic slowdown. However, the change is going to have to happen slowly, or else we're going to have people dying off in droves - entire generations of people. And, while that would probably be good from a purely planet-resources-centric point of view, in reality, it wouldn't be good for anybody. Unfortunately, dropping minimum wage would be a fast change, not a slow one.

And besides, the way this country has worked in the past I-don't-know-how-many-decades, we'd repeal minimum wage, but in order to get that to pass we'd have to guarantee that all employees who were currently employed and had been for more than 1 year would still be eligible for minimum wage until they voluntarily quit their current jobs. Then we'd have some companies who intentionally made life hell for their pre-repeal employees in order to get them to quit, and we'd have to have court cases for those employees to be able to either get their jobs back or carry their eligibility over to a new employer. And, we'd also have a bunch of people who weren't legitimately pressured into quitting filing the same lawsuits even if they were fired with cause, and that would tie the courts up even more. And then, after we'd gone through a massive cluster-fuck of enforcement, arguments about things being unenforceable, court cases, further economic woes, and two or three administrations, we'd repeal the repeal and minimum wage would be back - probably at a higher amount to try to dig the working class out of poverty.

5. There's another factor that I haven't touched on. Inflation. Truth be told, I just don't understand how inflation works. I don't know if higher prices for base goods cause inflation, or if inflation causes higher prices for base goods, or if both are true. What I do know is that it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me that a durable good (like a house) which was built in 1975 and sold for (median price) $104k, when kept in the same condition (not improved, but not allowed to fall apart either), sold for $50k more 10 years later, and sold for $300k more 20 years later on. I know there are taxes and inflation and all sorts of changes that happened to the country's currency valuation and a whole other load of horseshit that went into those inflated prices, but I can't help but feel that somewhere back when we decided that the same items were suddenly worth $350k more*, we screwed ourselves over. I can't honestly tell you that an hour spent picking peaches in 2012 is worth $8.79 more per hour (we do grow peaches here in Washington) than it was worth in 1938. It's the same amount of work, it requires the same amount of training (pretty much none), and you probably pick the same amount (if not less) of peaches that you did 74 years ago. What has changed is the price of those peaches, the price of fertilizer, the value of the land that they're grown on, the price required to transport those peaches to market, etc. etc. etc.

*Of course, it wasn't $350k all at once. It took 30 years for the price to climb that high.

I think I've figured out who JCM's alt is.

Gared said:

Unfortunately, this is just what happens when you live in a metropolitan environment, at least in this country. The majority of people who work in the city, by which I mean the heart of the city, where all of the high-rise buildings are, make minimum wage or within $1 per hour of that wage. They cannot afford to live in the city, because rent in the city is enormously high, because the only apartments available are in high-rise buildings that offer tons of amenities, great views, etc., and are marketed toward the much smaller market of high-salary employees. That means that those employees have to live outside the city, which means that they have to pay to commute to and from work in the city, which unfortunately also means that they cannot afford to live in the immediately surround suburbs, where rent prices are much less than downtown, but are still just at or above the median price of $1315/mo. The people who live in these apartments, in about the 5 to 13 mile outside the city range, are the people in that >$50k+ per year range that you were talking about (I bolded it for emphasis). They are, by and large, family dwellings, in neighborhoods with elementary, middle, and high schools, because not everyone could afford to live in the housing subdivisions in the same radial range. The people who live in these family dwellings, however, are more and more frequently become childless adult couples and/or roommates who are living in the area because it provides the best value for the price that they can afford. Families are either being pushed even further out, or are renting two and three bedroom apartments, which cost (on average) $300 to $500 more per month. That means that the people who are making minimum wage or less than a dollar more per hour, in the heart of Seattle, which makes up a good 1/3 to 1/2 of the workers in the city, have to live at least 14 miles outside the city, or in the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city.

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Yes, I believe you are correct in that things are organised in this fashion in most metropoles in the world, and probably also in smaller places although in a smaller scale. So, housing affordable to a minimum wage worker might be found about 14 miles outside the city. I'd assume that such distances scale in some proportion with population for other large cities.

edit: I seem to have made some error in copypasting in my original post, and the following got left out. I'll include it here:

I believe the distance a person lives from the city and their place of employment is relevant primarily according to the category of transportation needed to travel from home to work. If one lives close enough to walk to work, or whether other transportation such as a car, bus, subway or some such is needed. Now, according to my experience, the option to walk to work is a luxury few people have regardless of income level, so I don't think it is reasonable to expect the city to make such an option available for anyone, minimum wage workers included. They can arrange their daily commutes the same as the rest of us, and are free to seek employment options to accommodate this, according to their own needs.

/edit

1. The issue here, is the assumption that companies need labor. They don't. If America was a closed country, like North Korea, then that would be true - though we'd have a lot more problems to deal with than free-market economy vs. minimum wage affected economy. Because the American economy cannot, at this point in time, be truly separated from the global economy, there is nothing - and I mean absolutely nothing - that requires American companies to hire American employees (1). This has been made even more true by the signings of NAFTA and CAFTA (the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements), which reduced - or removed entirely - tariffs which used to be charged for importing and exporting goods between the countries of North and Central America, and the United States of America. It used to be that US companies had an incentive to manufacture their goods in the US, because they could sell them in the US for less money, due to their not having to pay tariffs to import their manufactured goods from countries that could pay their workers lower wages, which would have led to cheaper production costs for the companies but a higher overall cost due to the tariffs. Now that those agreements have passed, we can build our cars, TVs, computers, furniture, etc. in Mexico, or Nicaragua, or Ecuador, or pretty much anyplace north of Columbia but Cuba, and our production costs can be much, much lower (2).*

2. Because of the current state of the economy, and also because there are just too damn many Americans who are looking for work right now, the supply side of the equation is so far out of alignment with the demand side, that only a very small percentage of people are getting jobs that have any real relevance to their qualifications, and therefore, jobs that compensate them what they believe they are worth (3).Now, some people absolutely have an inflated sense of what their time and effort is worth. I will never dispute that fact. But a lot of people don't have that over-inflated sense of self-worth. We're just trying to get enough money to eat, sleep, watch TV, and occasionally take a vacation, and not have to work until we're 90 years old just to pay for it all.

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(1) I'm not sure this is accurate, either in respect to labor demand or nationality of new employees. According to US Bureau of Labor Statistics, "In the first half of 2012, job gains averaged 150,000 per month, about the same as the average monthly increase in 2011" (source here). Perhaps this is not as much as could be desired, but such a non-insignificant increase in the number of jobs, even in the current economic situation, might indicate that there is at least some confidence that things could turn for the better, and that this is only a temporary downturn. As to the nationalities of new employees, while nothing of course requires the positions to be filled with american citizens, the requirement to possess a workers' permit and the caps in place on many of them would limit the supply of foreign workers. It is of course possible for american-based international companies to invest and hire abroad, but the figures cited reflect job increases in the US. I've encountered some difficulties in detemining exactly how many workers' permits have been issued by US authorities, for example the number of H-1B visas granted for foreign skilled specialty workers seems to be a total of only about 85,000 according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, assuming I understood it correctly. This would indicate that the vast majority of the jobs created are filled by american applicants.

(2) It may well be that those nations possess an absolute advantage vis-a-vis the US in several manufacturing categories, particularly in labor intensive sectors. But wide-scale protectionism is hardly the answer. Besides creating unnecessary friction in relations with other countries, it increases prices as low-cost foreign products are subject to tariffs, and by further limiting competition from foreign manufacturers it de-incentivizes domestic manufacturers from increasing their productivity. And if protectionist policies will heavily feature in future global economy, then these drawbacks are suffered by everyone, and as exports hit tariff walls everywhere, everybody loses as efficiency plummets. Free trade theory would indicate that more gains can be made by everyone as nations focus on areas where they have an advantage, and then trade with others. What these strong areas are is not usually the direct result of decisions made by some body governing US trade policy, but rather come through market competition in free trade. Markets allocate resources efficiently also in international trade.

(3) Yes, the labor market is currently a buyer's market. But I believe this is the way it has been with every recession or other economic downturn, and things have always improved when the boom cycle comes around. And perhaps one way of boosting job creation would be is reducing the costs of labor, such as eliminating the minimum wage.

The problem is, with US companies shifting jobs out of the country, closing manufacturing plants in the US, or going out of business entirely, it is unlikely that the demand and the supply will ever meet until the population of the US decreases dramatically. Furthermore, even if US employees were willing to work for the amount of money that foreign employees are willing to work (meaning workers in foreign countries, not employees in the US on work visas), there is no practical way that they would be able to afford rent, food, and clothing. For example, if US workers wanted to do the work that Foxconn is currently doing in China, assembling electronic devices for Apple, Microsoft, etc., we would have to work for less than $1.00 per hour (Foxconn employees, as of May 2012, were making $1.50 per hour, but we would have to be willing to work for even less than that in order to get these companies to move the jobs back to the US and build new factories or retool old ones). $1.50 per hour is $252 per month of 8 hour days with only weekends off, or $3,025 per year. And we'd have to be willing to work for less than that amount per year.

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It may then be necessary to conclude that certain areas of manufacturing are just not cost-effective to operate in the USA, as things currently stand. Completely eliminating unemployment is unfeasable, and would likely lead to high inflation rates.

1. The problem here is that companies didn't start laying off employees to reduce costs when they started seeing lower demand. Companies started laying off employees when they were making record profits, but had forecast that they would soon see lower demand. That theory is sound. Unfortunately, that theory, when applied in practice, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - as employment numbers drop, available cash flow drops, and demand for products drops. I've worked at two companies that downsized before the economy ever even hit its first pothole, in order to push their profits even higher, when they were already making record profits. Both of those companies went bankrupt when the crash hit, because they had no fat left to cut. One of them closed its doors completely, the other was absorbed by a competitor (1). Also, economic theorists can theorize all they want that cutting employees will only temporarily boost profits. And they're right. The boost in profits is temporary, and comes to an end when the broader economy slows down to the point where no-one has the money necessarily to keep paying pre-slowdown prices for mid-slowdown goods. The problem is, some of these corporate giants seem to have forgotten that temporary profits are not indicators of long-term growth. They've become used to paying the least amount they can, to employing the least amount of people that they can, and now the economy is struggling to goad them into hiring more people so that more people can afford to buy things and the economy can recover (2).

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(1) I agree the self-fulfilling profecy applies on a macro scale, but as long as you have private enterprises able to make their own business decisions on HR policy, I doubt their behavior will change. Companies reap the entire benefit of reduced costs from laying off employees, while the costs of the decision, the reduction in aggregate demand, are borne by the whole society. The reduction in demand from any individual act are insignificant, but you are right and it naturally adds up when everyone is doing it. But a company is only responsible to it's shareholders, so one can count on them only to do right by themselves. As to the two example companies you mentioned, I of course do not know any of the particulars and so cannot make any clear judgements on the matter, but it would seem to me that their thinking was along the right lines. Companies downsize when they have excess capacity, as they do not want the fixed costs to drag their profits down. Given that downsizing usually takes time to effect, planning ahead and adjusting your capacity to forecasted demand is generally a smart thing to do. So I wonder if there might have been other factors that caused those two companies to go under, but as I said I don't have enough information to really make any calls on the matter.

(2) Consumer demand is quite significant in the United States I agree, but it is only one part of aggregate demand. Luckily, we are not left entirely at the non-existing mercies of self-serving corporations. The government can engage in deficit spending to increase demand and get people to keep their jobs. The central bank can lower interest rates to pump more money into circulation so that companies can expand and create jobs. Corporate taxes can be cut to reduce costs and get cheaper products into the market place, and promoting economic activity in general. The currency can be devalued to make domestic industries more competitive in relation to their foreign competitors. There are problems associated with all these things, of course, but they will get a nation out of recession, with time.

2. See above regarding perception vs. reality of companies screwing people over. However, the reason that this applies to the concept of free markets is because of the human element of pricing and consumer confidence. In theory, there is no room or accounting for human emotion. In practice, human emotion is just as important as supply or demand, if not more important. The best example of this that I can come up with is the stock markets. In a purely theoretical, emotionless market, there is no reason for the US stock markets to decline just because there are fears that the European Central Bank might lower interest rates. Now, if the ECB does lower interest rates (as they just did), then that could have a direct impact on US stocks, due to that whole global economy point; but because of human emotion, our stock markets took a double hit over the ECB's move. Last week, when there were rumors that the ECB might lower rates, investors and traders panicked and sold stocks and the markets dropped. Then, when the ECB meeting hadn't happened yet, they went back up slightly because there were rumors and opinions that they wouldn't actually drop the rate, that maybe something else would be done. Today, when the ECB did lower rates, the markets dropped again, because now the rates will influence stocks. If human emotion were removed from the equation, the first drop wouldn't have happened, and the second one may not have been as steep.

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You are correct that consumer confidence is a major factor contributing to aggregate demand. It would seem to me that your term 'human element' is very similar to such things as individual preference, or expectations in case of the stock market example. I believe theory holds that such things are a drivers affecting demand, and are accounted for by it, rather than an outside factor separate from the supply-demand graph. Demand is not static after all but continually changing based on myriad of different factors, and companies are doing their very best to influence these factors to their favor through advertising campaigns, corporate image polishing and all kinds of other stuff. And I think theory would have it that as demand increases so does the price, which is a signal for producers to ramp up supply, after which the increased number of goods on the market (competition) brings down the price.

Supply and demand would dictate that even if those specific companies went out of business, either their competitors would take up the slack, or new companies would rise in their places. Unfortunately, the current feeling in America is that all companies are out to screw hard-working Americans over. And if it's not companies, it's the Government that's out to get you.

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I imagine such feelings are not all too uncommon in times of economic hardship, when tough decisions need to be made all round. Still, I wonder if it has all that much effect, for where else except the companies would the people go to get certain needs met? Would their rancor truly be enough to cause them to voluntarily scale back on their standard of living, or is this simply a temporary phase which will blow over once this recession is over, and things will return to pretty much the way they were before?

Actually, I'm right there with you on that one, mostly. I have no problem with companies trying to maximize shareholder value. I don't think it's wrong to look for the best deal either, I do it all the time. However, one of the things that seems to be frequently overlooked in the calculation of the best deal is value. Not price. Value. Unfortunately, what makes an item valuable from one person to the next can change dramatically, and price is a constant, so it's much easier to track price.

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Am I correct in assuming you are referring to value as a sum total of labor input the prospective employee can potentially give to the company? In essence, what they will bring to the company, what they are worth, and that price is a different variable against which value must be measured? If so, then I would posit that companies hire people based on quality, which I define here to mean suitability to requirements. Companies have a job that needs doing, the people who are capable of doing that job according to the company's requirements are their recruitment pool, and from the people in this pool who apply for the position they pick the one they deem to be the best fit. Price is derived from the requirements through supply and demand, and can play a large part in their choice. The easier the employee is to replace, the larger the emphasis on low price is. The basic idea is that most times in blue-collar jobs you don't buy a Porsche where a Honda would do, for although a Porsche is a lot better in everything that matters, the better performance is surplus to requirements and therefore not worth the added expense.

Don't be too sure. Citigroup's CEO, who drew a record profit last year, so under-impressed their shareholders that the shareholders tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to prevent him from getting his raise. JP Morgan Chase's CEO and CIO are on the hot-seat right now because their investment arm managed to lose them $9bn recently. Bank of America's last CEO was forced to resign after his policies brought the bank dangerously close to failure, and was paid $20M for the privilege (he actually took no compensation the year he resigned, other than his $135M retirement fund, that salary quote was from the year before his resignation). WaMu's last two CEOs ran the company into the ground, and were paid $14M and $18M the year before each of them left the company.

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While there may be CEOs in large companies who are actually incompetent, most of the time I'd say one is dealing with a competent person who made a bad call somewhere. It might not even have been their fault, but they are responsible to the board for everything that happens in the company. If something goes wrong, it's their butt on the line.

Somebody let me know when they solve everything, because I am NOT reading all that.

Don't worry GB, while I have thoroughly enjoyed our discussion, I just don't have the time necessary to devote to these incredibly long responses. My final response on the subject will be much, much shorter. In fact, there's only one point that I really feel needs exposition.

I'm not sure this is accurate, either in respect to labor demand or nationality of new employees. According to US Bureau of Labor Statistics, "In the first half of 2012, job gains averaged 150,000 per month, about the same as the average monthly increase in 2011" (source here). Perhaps this is not as much as could be desired, but such a non-insignificant increase in the number of jobs, even in the current economic situation, might indicate that there is at least some confidence that things could turn for the better, and that this is only a temporary downturn. As to the nationalities of new employees, while nothing of course requires the positions to be filled with american citizens, the requirement to possess a workers' permit and the caps in place on many of them would limit the supply of foreign workers. It is of course possible for american-based international companies to invest and hire abroad, but the figures cited reflect job increases in the US. I've encountered some difficulties in detemining exactly how many workers' permits have been issued by US authorities, for example the number of H-1B visas granted for foreign skilled specialty workers seems to be a total of only about 85,000 according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, assuming I understood it correctly. This would indicate that the vast majority of the jobs created are filled by american applicants.

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I think you misunderstood my point. My point is not that American companies are importing labor to fill jobs that actually exist inside the borders of the US. My point is that American companies are closing jobs in the US, and opening them in foreign countries. 150k jobs per month added net (the gross figure would be closer to 520k per month, but we're losing 373k jobs per month average in the same period) would be much, much higher, if Ford weren't building Ford vehicles in Mexico because there's no longer any import tariff preventing them from selling those vehicles for a lower price than vehicles actually built in the US; and it would be higher still if banks and software companies based their US customer service (meaning service aimed at assisting customers inside the US) inside the US, but we don't. We base them in India, the Philippines, or Panama. Those are jobs which our economy will never get back.

However, all discussions and facts and everything else aside, what my point comes down to, in one paragraph is this.

I agree with you that in a theoretical world removing the minimum wage would have the net effect of increasing employment. Unfortunately, we do not live in a theoretical world, and workers in the US have seen far too steady a trend of US employers eliminating jobs in the US and sending those jobs outside the US. Additionally, if the US economy had never had a minimum wage introduced to it, then Supply and Demand economics may have worked, but if you were to try to start with today's economic picture, with the current cost of living, and suddenly eliminate minimum wage, you would have a disaster of epic proportions. Everyone would lose money, especially the corporations who rely on being able to charge the prices they do for all segments of the US consumer economy, because far, far fewer Americans would be able to afford to pay those prices. And along the way, the poverty rate of the US (though I'm sure it would even out eventually) would rival that of a third world nation. Besides which, it would be political suicide for anyone to actually attempt to remove the minimum wage, so this is all a moot point.

Gared said:

Don't worry GB, while I have thoroughly enjoyed our discussion, I just don't have the time necessary to devote to these incredibly long responses. My final response on the subject will be much, much shorter. In fact, there's only one point that I really feel needs exposition.

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Thank you, it has been a pleasure discussing this issue with you as well. If you don't mind, I'll end with clarifying my thoughts on the final point as well.

I think you misunderstood my point. My point is not that American companies are importing labor to fill jobs that actually exist inside the borders of the US. My point is that American companies are closing jobs in the US, and opening them in foreign countries. 150k jobs per month added net (the gross figure would be closer to 520k per month, but we're losing 373k jobs per month average in the same period) would be much, much higher, if Ford weren't building Ford vehicles in Mexico because there's no longer any import tariff preventing them from selling those vehicles for a lower price than vehicles actually built in the US; and it would be higher still if banks and software companies based their US customer service (meaning service aimed at assisting customers inside the US) inside the US, but we don't. We base them in India, the Philippines, or Panama. Those are jobs which our economy will never get back.

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I'm sorry if my response was poorly worded or structured, and led to confusion. I did correctly understand your meaning. My point was that, as things currently are, certain sectors of american manufacturing just aren't competitive with the low cost of manufacturing in some other countries, so as you stated a number of jobs in those sectors have been lost permanently and it is quite possible that more jobs in manufacturing industry will be lost in the future. My view is that just about the only practical way this trend could be reversed is to institute protectionist measures, which will very likely cost you and everyone else more than the benefit they bring, so the current situation might be something USA just needs to accept. However, you have a net increase in jobs employing americans even in the current economic situation, which I believe indicates that, after the economy takes a turn for the better and the slowdown is over, things will start looking a lot better as job growth in other sectors will begin to make up for the lost jobs in the manufacturing sector.

July 9, 2012 - Never Forget

Covar said:

July 9, 2012 - Never Forget

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PatrThom said:

Factoring in my raise, Kati's extra part-time income, and the ending of one particular debt (yay!), our "useful" (after-tax) household income probably went up about 15% in total. Factor in the fact that we had to replace our car and the fact that we are raising a (cute) kid, and that means our expenses (including usual COL ones like groceries) went up right around ... 12%. So that's a net increase of about 3%...oh, and Kati will be moving in with her father now, so she will have to leave her part time job and find another on the other side of the State, one which has to be kid-raising-friendly, and our house payment is scheduled to go up 2% in Sept.

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TommiR said:

I can understand your frustration. But if I may ask, and please feel free to ignore this question if it's none of my business, do you think the current situation is due to your employers being soulless bloodsuckers, or is this perhaps more of a temporary money crunch much like those experienced by many other young couples who are hearing the pitter-patter of tiny feet?

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No, I don't believe my employers are bloodsuckers, nor have I ever thought so. Lately, in fact, they have been unexpectedly generous. We were upside-down on my mortgage long before Cary came along (a situation which was the direct result of previously having to get an ex-girlfriend's name off the deed), and we (I) knowingly entered into an upside-down auto loan because we absolutely had to acquire more reliable transportation as soon as possible. What I was saying is that our necessary expenses (auto/home/insurance/medical/utilities/food/etc) appear to be increasing at a rate disturbingly close to the amount we have managed to increase our income(s). There is that axiom which states that, "Expenses will rise to meet income," but I believe that was meant to portray the tendency of people to increase their spending as their income grows, and not our current situation, which is that the effects of the costs of inflation/energy/new clothes/moving/unexpected events/depreciation/loans are coincidentally keeping pace every time we manage to increase our earnings.

I've said before that the only way we're going to make a huge leap ahead is if someone dies. Welp, two people just died, but in such a way that things are actually going to get more expensive for the immediate future, not less. Yay.

PatrThom said:

Soo...yeah. If I track the paperwork very carefully, I can see that we got a raise. I don't really get to direct it or do anything awesome with it, though. This is what makes articles like this one about wage disparity, this one about the 'new' slave labor, and this one about "educating the work force for work" look more and more appealing to someone seeing things from my perspective.

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TommiR said:

My take on those three articles:

The first one is interesting, though it seems to try and make a strong connection between the high corporate profits and reduction of employees' benefits. I'm not sure if this is entirely accurate. In the current economic situation where a lot of people are out of a job and not a great deal of hiring takes place, it is true that the companies may enjoy some advantage, but I think that's just one reason. There are many other reasons as well for the high profits. Earlier I listed the effects of adjustment measures, and there are others further still.

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The first one shows that corporate profits have increased, and it suggests that this has happened due to employing fewer workers AND paying out less in wages. In other words, the article is suggesting that companies are maximizing their profits by returning less and less of what they gain back into the economy. The graph does not account for benefits/bonuses, but I would posit that hourly employees do not normally enjoy benefits/bonuses beyond vac/sick/health. I would also posit that the people who receive the largest percentage of that compensation which is paid in the form of benefits/bonuses/stock options also tend to acquire assets (locking away value) rather than returning it to the economy. Additionally, keep in mind that corporations are immortal, meaning they can keep sitting on their profits theoretically forever, while real persons will eventually die and return their assets to the pool.

TommiR said:

The second one strikes me as a piece of rather sensationalist journalism. Drenched in exaggerating language, it claims exploitation, hints at racism, and suggests some kind of a conspiracy between the judiciary, the executive, and the private sector. I'm not saying there are not things that need correcting in prison labor, but I wonder if the situation is truly as dire and the scale of abuses as significant as the article paints it to be. I mean, "prison-industrial complex"? Really?

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There are plenty of articles and analyses out there regarding privatization. Plenty of it is biased, and unashamedly so. But as my wife (who is very smart) will point out time and time again, there are plenty of things that you do not want overseen by someone whose primary interest will be in maximizing profit, and that would be (in my estimation) pretty much anything which falls under the category of 'public interest.' Prisons, infrastructure, welfare, and some would even include health care and agriculture. It only stands to reason that any corporate-owned prison system will not sit on its hands, content to merely earn $x per prisoner housed. No, the shareholders will clamor for the board to think up new ways to extract money from their assets. Labor is one obvious answer. I think public outcry would keep down organlegging...at least at first. Some may think I am being sensational, but I honestly am uneasy at how quickly greed can wear down some people's morals.

TommiR said:

As to the third one, there are some professional educators on these boards and perhaps they'd be willing to give a more informed opinion than I can on the goals of the educational system. As I've understood, education is in large part meant to teach students the skills with which they can succeed in life. I suppose job skills would rank quite highly in that. So color me unsurprised if that's what they teach.

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The focus of the article is not that necessary job skills are/aren't being taught, it is that the curricula are ostensibly being manipulated in order to "order up" a custom-designed workforce, once which merely has all of the minimum skills required rather than allowing each individual to rise to his or her (presumably higher) level of expertise. There is no need to crush anyone's dreams if they are never allowed to develop any in the first place.

For the skeptical and/or horrified reader, let me be clear that I don't think any of these things are as serious as the articles represent. After all, they are all crafted to get attention for their respective causes, and as such they are built to play heavily on emotion, they deliberately ignore data that don't support their conclusions, and there are more than a few tautological constructs at work. Unfortunately, my faith in the ability of legislators to operate with the welfare of The People foremost in their minds has taken quite a hit lately. For instance, I thought the whole company=person and money=speech thing would get laughed out of Congress, but it got passed. This does not fill me with joy and anticipation about my kid's future.

--Patrick[DOUBLEPOST=1341877343][/DOUBLEPOST]

Covar said:

July 9, 2012 - Never Forget

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Ooo, thanks. It's my Dad's birthday, and I almost forgot to call him.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

The first one shows that corporate profits have increased, and it suggests that this has happened due to employing fewer workers AND paying out less in wages. In other words, the article is suggesting that companies are maximizing their profits by returning less and less of what they gain back into the economy. The graph does not account for benefits/bonuses, but I would posit that hourly employees do not normally enjoy benefits/bonuses beyond vac/sick/health (1). I would also posit that the people who receive the largest percentage of that compensation which is paid in the form of benefits/bonuses/stock options also tend to acquire assets (locking away value) rather than returning it to the economy (2). Additionally, keep in mind that corporations are immortal, meaning they can keep sitting on their profits theoretically forever, while real persons will eventually die and return their assets to the pool (3).

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(1) You are right, and that is an important distinction to make. In this case I would perhaps propose going with the idea of corporations cutting personnel expenses, as an umbrella term to account for all included.

(2) Agreed, if that compensation is less liquid. But a person buying some fixed assets with their yearly bonus does put the money into circulation. All in all, I think such things are quite the province of the individual person, and I believe everyone should have full rights to determine for themselves what they do with their own possessions.

(3) While companies can theoretically do that, it doesn't strike me as good business. I think shareholders would like to see corporate profits either invested into something that makes them more money, or handed out as dividends. A company which just sits on top of a pile of money is likely to see some of their indicators dropping.

My main contention with the article was the suggestion that the increase in profits was due to cutting personnel expenses, as I believe there also are many other reasons.

There are plenty of articles and analyses out there regarding privatization. Plenty of it is biased, and unashamedly so. But as my wife (who is very smart) will point out time and time again, there are plenty of things that you do not want overseen by someone whose primary interest will be in maximizing profit, and that would be (in my estimation) pretty much anything which falls under the category of 'public interest.' Prisons, infrastructure, welfare, and some would even include health care and agriculture. It only stands to reason that any corporate-owned prison system will not sit on its hands, content to merely earn $x per prisoner housed. No, the shareholders will clamor for the board to think up new ways to extract money from their assets. Labor is one obvious answer. I think public outcry would keep down organlegging...at least at first. Some may think I am being sensational, but I honestly am uneasy at how quickly greed can wear down some people's morals.

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There probably are plenty of things a bit off with the privatised prison system. I'm not that familiar with the US implementation myself. I think if laws have been broken, then the suspects are to be brought on trial. But if everything is legal, then the fault may lie in large measure with the state that failed to draw up an outsourcing contract the terms of which guaranteed some morally acceptable minimum levels of treatment for the inmates. If privatised prisons are not a stillborn idea, then it seems that the things that are wrong with it can be fixed through contractual means.

The focus of the article is not that necessary job skills are/aren't being taught, it is that the curricula are ostensibly being manipulated in order to "order up" a custom-designed workforce, once which merely has all of the minimum skills required rather than allowing each individual to rise to his or her (presumably higher) level of expertise. There is no need to crush anyone's dreams if they are never allowed to develop any in the first place.

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I'm not sure I got quite the same impression from the article. Yes, it does support the 'custom-designed workforce' concept, but teaching people only the minimum skills required is what I missed. It seems to me that an engineer or a scientist would bring more value to a business than the cleaning lady, if they were properly educated instead of barely competent (possessing minimum skills necessary).

Of course, an interesting thought experiment might be to give US citizens only basic education, eliminate visa requirements for skilled professionals, and then brain-train in the smart guys from India or somewhere. Saves on education costs, and a dumb electorate is easier to manipulate. An intriguing thought.

TommiR said:

Of course, an interesting thought experiment might be to give US citizens only basic education, eliminate visa requirements for skilled professionals, and then brain-train in the smart guys from India or somewhere. Saves on education costs, and a dumb electorate is easier to manipulate. An intriguing thought.

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Except the general opinion is that those degrees aren't worth the paper they are printed on. There's a reason that an American College Education is still seen as prestigious and that you don't often hear of American college graduates having to return to college overseas to continue practicing their profession there.

Necronic said:

That "theocracy" crap that the republicans have been spouting for the better part of 30 years is such a shame too. I want to be a conservative, I really do. I hate entitlement programs, and I think California and Detroit are great examples of what's wrong with liberal politics.

But I will NEVER vote republican as long as they include religion in their platforms the way they do. All the other "Social Conservatism" really. Every bit of it clashes with my views of "small government" to such an extreme that I would rather vote for economic policy I don't agree with than social policy that I think is flat out evil and unamerican.

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I think you and I are political soulmates. This is EXACTLY how I feel about politics as well. I fall somewhere in the gray, murky region between Democrat and Libertarian.

Come to the dark side. You know deep in your heart you are Libertarian.

(Cause, really, most of the country is, they just either don't know about libertarianism, or are too scared/hopeless to buck the 2-party duopoly).

GasBandit said:

Come to the dark side. You know deep in your heart you are Libertarian.

(Cause, really, most of the country is, they just either don't know about libertarianism, or are too scared/hopeless to buck the 2-party duopoly).

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I'm not THAT fiscally conservative I'm all about downsizing the government and entitlement reform, but I don't necessarily believe in the whole "the free market is the answer to everything! Libraries are a scourge! Any sort of taxation is theft! Let's privatize ALL THE INSTITUTIONS -- there's no way anyone will abuse the shit out of that" philosophy espoused by most libertarians. I consider myself a social liberal and an right-leaning economic moderate.

Liberals/Conservatives: When all you have is a hammer all you see is nails

Libertarians: When all you have is nothing you never see any problems.

HowDroll said:

I'm not THAT fiscally conservative I'm all about downsizing the government and entitlement reform, but I don't necessarily believe in the whole "the free market is the answer to everything! Libraries are a scourge! Any sort of taxation is theft! Let's privatize ALL THE INSTITUTIONS -- there's no way anyone will abuse the shit out of that" philosophy espoused by most libertarians. I consider myself a social liberal and an right-leaning economic moderate.

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That's still closer to libertarianism than the two "mainstream" parties. It all boils down to whether you believe the government should get bigger or smaller, be more dictatorial or less. If you said smaller and less, there is only one ideological option, because the others all want to be invasively despotic, either in your wallet or your bedroom.

Plus, electing Libertarians doesn't mean it has to be forever. Maybe after the government has shrunk back a bit, we can go back to being a political deadlock.

Yeah but libertarians believe in cutting parts of the government that I personally find to be invaluable (and probably Droll since we are apparently political soul mates but I won't speak for her.) Like the concept of Environmentalism through Free Market. That's completely absurd and anyone in west Virginia will tell you how well that works. Same goes with the abolishment of the income tax or the IRS. Ok it sounds cool, but it's completely unrealistic, and anyone who argues for something like that is far more concerned with ideology than reality. Or privatising education.

I mean, the list goes on (these are from the party platform.)

Necronic said:

Yeah but libertarians believe in cutting parts of the government that I personally find to be invaluable (and probably Droll since we are apparently political soul mates but I won't speak for her.) Like the concept of Environmentalism through Free Market. That's completely absurd and anyone in west Virginia will tell you how well that works. Same goes with the abolishment of the income tax or the IRS. Ok it sounds cool, but it's completely unrealistic, and anyone who argues for something like that is far more concerned with ideology than reality. Or privatising education.

I mean, the list goes on (these are from the party platform.)

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Do you disagree with those concepts worse than you disagree with the federal government telling you what you can and can't do with your reproductive system, or forcing you to bankroll an ever-growing system of crony economics and bread and circuses for the masses while the national debt increases geometrically?

Furthermore, do you believe the election of a Libertarian, or even a majority of libertarians, will instantly mean the abolition of the federal government? That's demonstrably not the case - the democrats had two years where they had filibuster-proof majorities in both the house and the senate as well as the presidency - and still managed to get in their own way enough to get surprisingly little done (thank goodness).

Nobody's saying that we need a libertarian despotism. But the fact of the matter is that those who favor true liberty, economic and social, are so underrepresented as to be nonexistent. The nation would be in a better place if there was a third party that was diametrically opposed to the practices of the other two.

GasBandit said:

Do you disagree with those concepts worse than you disagree with the federal government telling you what you can and can't do with your reproductive system, or forcing you to bankroll an ever-growing system of crony economics and bread and circuses for the masses while the national debt increases geometrically?

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Actually yes. I think that any of the three issues I mentioned (eliminating environmental restrictions, removing the IRS, or privatizing education) would cripple this country in ways that would take decades to reverse. The other issues may be like a cancer slowly killing us. These things would be cutting out your heart to spite your brain.

Furthermore, do you believe the election of a Libertarian, or even a majority of libertarians, will instantly mean the abolition of the federal government? That's demonstrably not the case - the democrats had two years where they had filibuster-proof majorities in both the house and the senate as well as the presidency - and still managed to get in their own way enough to get surprisingly little done (thank goodness).

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So I shouldn't be that concerned about their platform because they only talk the big game to get into office. When they get there who knows what will happen. I vote for a man (or party) based on the things that they say they want to do. What other choice do I have? I take them at their word, more or less.

Nobody's saying that we need a libertarian despotism. But the fact of the matter is that those who favor true liberty, economic and social, are so underrepresented as to be nonexistent. The nation would be in a better place if there was a third party that was diametrically opposed to the practices of the other two.

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The country would be a better place if the Republican party came back.

Edit: I should add though that while I don't think that the libertarians should really be in office, they do apply good pressure towards the republicans in maintaining some of their ideals. Many libertarians are disenfranchised republicans, and still vote republican.

Necronic said:

Actually yes. I think that any of the three issues I mentioned (eliminating environmental restrictions, removing the IRS, or privatizing education) would cripple this country in ways that would take decades to reverse. The other issues may be like a cancer slowly killing us. These things would be cutting out your heart to spite your brain.

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I think you overstate. Nobody wants dirty water and toxic air, not even libertarians. They do, however, want an easing of restrictions that are keeping a boot on the throat of american industry, particularly in quasitheological witch-hunt areas such as CO2. The IRS is a relatively recent addition to the government. Privatizing education has been shown to work rather well in other countries. And all these things can be done by degrees, not instantly. Furthermore, that metaphorical cancer has moved into the area where only heroic surgery has any hope. We can not continue in this manner. Can not.

So I shouldn't be that concerned about their platform because they only talk the big game to get into office. When they get there who knows what will happen. I vote for a man (or party) based on the things that they say they want to do. What other choice do I have? I take them at their word, more or less.

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Why? Why is it that when it's a democrat or a republican "talking a big game" or otherwise practicing politics, the answer from the masses is "oh, that's just what he HAS to say." Why do you think Libertarians are special, incorruptible ideologues who furthermore cannot be resisted by any other opposing forces?

The country would be a better place if the Republican party came back.

Edit: I should add though that while I don't think that the libertarians should really be in office, they do apply good pressure towards the republicans in maintaining some of their ideals. Many libertarians are disenfranchised republicans, and still vote republican.

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The republican party is too far gone. They have more in common with democrats than libertarians. I don't think they'll "come back," it's more likely they'll collapse. And the best we can hope for is that the less idiotic of them find their way to the Libertarian party.

GasBandit said:

I think you overstate. Nobody wants dirty water and toxic air, not even libertarians. They do, however, want an easing of restrictions that are keeping a boot on the throat of american industry, particularly in quasitheological witch-hunt areas such as CO2.

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My take on the system is that it needs to be streamlined and clarified. But the concept of a so-called witch hunt bothers me. In some cases it's true that people demonize industry that create jobs and wealth and do their best to limit pollution. But in other cases it's clear that current regulatory structures are insufficient and companies involved deserve to be demonized for their own willingness to lie, cheat, and steal at the cost of their own workers lives.

And when you have such an intense conflict of interest that things like the Marsallis bring you need some kind of impartial outside eye to make sure that people are doing things the right way. Environmentalism is a place that i feel that the free market fails completely due to the Tragedy of the Commons that exists with Air and Water as well as the opaqueness of the energy market itself (like, could I even determine if Massey energy coal was used to power my house?)

The IRS is a relatively recent addition to the government.

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Well, ok ignore the IRS, I was mainly talking about income tax stuff. Eliminating income taxes is absurd.

Privatizing education has been shown to work rather well in other countries.

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Where? (not baiting, I'm honestly curious)

And all these things can be done by degrees, not instantly. Furthermore, that metaphorical cancer has moved into the area where only heroic surgery has any hope. We can not continue in this manner. Can not.

Click to expand...

I don't think that the cancer is that bad, yet, but it is getting there. But I do agree that things can be done in degrees and that we can not continue in the manner we have been.

Why? Why is it that when it's a democrat or a republican "talking a big game" or otherwise practicing politics, the answer from the masses is "oh, that's just what he HAS to say." Why do you think Libertarians are special, incorruptible ideologues who furthermore cannot be resisted by any other opposing forces?

Click to expand...

Two reasons. One is that they are more or less an unknown in office. With democrats and republicans we know, more or less, that there is what they say and what they do. With libertarians we don't. Which brings me to number two. Look at the Tea Party. They HAVE actually been trying to do what they said they did, in part because they have so much to prove now that they have power. And it has been very destructive. They are the first significant 3rd party (if you want to call them that) in a looooonnnnggggg time. Libertarians may have the same need to prove themselves.

I'm not forgiving the sins of the Dems and Reps either. I mean, look at the title of this thread. I do judge them based on what they say as well. And I do appreciate that my attitude is pretty negative/cynical, basically arguing for maintaining a status quo, but when it comes to outlier parties I do feel like I have to take them at their word more than the mainstream duders.

The republican party is too far gone. They have more in common with democrats than libertarians. I don't think they'll "come back," it's more likely they'll collapse. And the best we can hope for is that the less idiotic of them find their way to the Libertarian party.

Click to expand...

It's the million dollar question, that's for sure. But I don't know if I'm so cynical. Look at who they brought forward to go after Obama. Not Rick Santorum, the religious right's golden boy. Not Rick Perry, the hardcore texas republican (ok he may have had a chance if he wasn't just so dumb). Not even Newt Gingrich, the 90s era dogmatic neo-con. They chose a Mormon who's own health care policy was used by a democratic presidency as a model for his own. They ignored both the Religious Right and the Neocons on this one. The only thing strikingly conservative about Romney (in the modern sense) is that he is very pro business, and that he has a really clean haircut.

He's no Goldwater. But he's a very interesting change of pace from Bush or Palin (although we have yet to see his runnning mate.)

You have a point about Romney but the man himself has been pushing further and further right in the hopes of getting elected. If they running him as he was when he was governor of Massachusetts, I might damned well vote for him. But they're not.

That's basically my problem with the Republican candidates of late. For instance, if John McCain had remained the man he was before he tried to become president (and not picked Sarah Palin for VP), I would have actually considered voting for him. But instead of pursuing the traits that made him attractive to me as a candidate, he pandered to the Far Right.

It's really their own fault for pushing me back to the Democrats every election.

Romney is no different. He's a political animal, a moderate windsock who changes his tune according to the prevailing winds. He only looks "pro business" because he's rich. Not to belittle that, it'd be much preferable to have someone in the white house who has actual, real world, commercial experience rather than someone who made a very short career of political agitation. But his past actions speak louder to me than his current rhetoric, just like McCain's did. The only hope Romney has is to make this election all about getting rid of Obama, because nobody really is enthusiastic about Romney. He just happened to be the last man standing in a field populated mostly by flawed candidates. People wouldn't be voting for Romney so much as against Obama. That's how Kerry almost won in 2004.

How I wish Herman Cain hadn't dropped out. THAT would have been an interesting election.

That's also quite possibly the case. He does kind of remind me of McCain, and he is definitely a windsock (which is a problem to say the least). He almost reminds me more of Kerry.

But one thing that still sticks in my gut (in a positive way) is the guys he beat. Every other option represented a pretty specific and "New Republican" position. They were all eschewed in favor of this guy. It could mean that the party is, as you said, incredibly fractured, and the only guy who can get through a primary that devisive is this faceless blob of a candidate. Or it could mean that the mainstream party is getting sick of the influence of it's extremist factions, and chose someone who didn't really belong to one and was more of a traditional republican.

The former is probably true, but the latter is way less depressing.

Necronic said:

Yeah but libertarians believe in cutting parts of the government that I personally find to be invaluable (and probably Droll since we are apparently political soul mates but I won't speak for her.) Like the concept of Environmentalism through Free Market. That's completely absurd and anyone in west Virginia will tell you how well that works. Same goes with the abolishment of the income tax or the IRS. Ok it sounds cool, but it's completely unrealistic, and anyone who argues for something like that is far more concerned with ideology than reality. Or privatising education.

I mean, the list goes on (these are from the party platform.)

Click to expand...

If the Free Market ruled the day, WV would soon become a state of dead men. "Move coal" was the order of the day. If safety or environmental regulations kept you from moving enough coal to suit the boss, you were replaced with someone who would move enough coal.

Oh, and did I mention that black lung disease has made a comeback? A disease that forced WV miners to defy their own union and walk out in 1969 before the union would admit existed?

The Free Market doesn't want immigration reform, either. Without all these imported Mexicans, who is going to work all these gas well, construction, and mine jobs?

DarkAudit said:

If the Free Market ruled the day, WV would soon become a state of dead men. "Move coal" was the order of the day. If safety or environmental regulations kept you from moving enough coal to suit the boss, you were replaced with someone who would move enough coal.

Oh, and did I mention that black lung disease has made a comeback? A disease that forced WV miners to defy their own union and walk out in 1969 before the union would admit existed?

The Free Market doesn't want immigration reform, either. Without all these imported Mexicans, who is going to work all these gas well, construction, and mine jobs?

Click to expand...

It's not even Coal we need for our energy needs ether. Most of it we sell to China at a grossly inflated fee to fuel THEIR economy.

There's a reason WV is considered one of the dumbest states in the Union. The mine owners need to keep it that way. Who else is going to believe all the "Friends of Coal" bullshit they keep spewing about "the guv'mint wants to shut us down and take all yer jerbs!"

TommiR said:

(2) Agreed, if that compensation is less liquid. But a person buying some fixed assets with their yearly bonus does put the money into circulation. All in all, I think such things are quite the province of the individual person, and I believe everyone should have full rights to determine for themselves what they do with their own possessions.

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Technically, you are correct. A millionaire buying a million-dollar toy at the million-dollar store will indeed return a million dollars back into circulation. Unfortunately, that million dollars is very unlikely to trickle down to people who live below the million-dollar mark. A retailer like Audi, or Tiffany's, or Bose tends not to make products in the price range of plebeian folk, so the only way they participate in the economy in a way that benefits the 99% would be by paying wages, and we already discussed that.

To use a weather analogy, the tendency would be for water which evaporates into the atmosphere to remain trapped up there, out of reach, unless some other force acts on it to cause it to condense and fall back to ground level. The more of it that gets trapped, the more heat gets held in, accelerating the evaporation process until the atmosphere has all the moisture and the ground has none.

You can see a similar dynamic in the second view in this video:


...so long as there is still momentum, there is plenty of fluidity and exchange, and there are bubbles of all sizes. But once the bubbling slows down, all you're left with is a few huge bubbles and a few thousand tiny ones, and that's how it stays without the action of any outside force.

Connections and allegory are my thing. I know these are all unrelated events, but I see such similarities in each.

--Patrick

You want to know what Democrats are? This is what Democrats are:
Massachusetts - the legislature passes a bill that makes it no longer legal to use food stamps to buy tattoos, guns, manicures, porn, jewelry, and body piercings, or to post bail. And the Democrat governor vetoes it.

This part confused me

The Massachusetts governor based his decision on the independent​

​

EBT Card Commission​

’s ruling that banning specific items was, among other reasons, difficult to enforce, according to The Herald. He did however, veto bans on the use of EBT in places like nail salons and jewelry stores.​

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I know that when I was at Walmart people weren't allowed to buy anything but food with their EBTs. If you had an order with food and other stuff, the cards would only pay for the food. I don't see how it would be difficult to enforce other than by stores lying about what people purchased.

Edit: never mind. I just remembered people did have some "cash" on their cards that they could use on other stuff. I guess thats what this is for.

That's....strange.

On the other hand is it actually an issue? Are people doing this?

GasBandit said:

You want to know what Democrats are? This is what Democrats are:
Massachusetts - the legislature passes a bill that makes it no longer legal to use food stamps to buy tattoos, guns, manicures, porn, jewelry, and body piercings, or to post bail. And the Democrat governor vetoes it.

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Well sure, it's clearly meant to discriminate against the poor.

Necronic said:

That's....strange.

On the other hand is it actually an issue? Are people doing this?

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Do you think the Massachusetts legislature would have passed it if it wasn't?

Massachusetts legislature has a special hate for guns and anything attached to them.

Unlike Texas.

--Patrick

It's just a very strange piece of legislation, since it's so completely terrible. It's hard to take at face value since it's so stupid you know?

Necronic said:

It's just a very strange piece of legislation, since it's so completely terrible. It's hard to take at face value since it's so stupid you know?

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Not at all. People who spend food stamps on the above vote. Unfortunately.

I don't think they do the "food stamps" here in Ohio anymore. Everyone's on those cards now and I can confirm that the stores train their check-out folks to know what does and doesn't count for their purchases... mainly because they've changed how they sell stuff to make it easier for poor slobs to buy the pre-made stuff. To get around the "no hot food" clause that they put in to stop them from buying fast food with the cards, Krogers and Meijer now sell cold versions of all their hot stuff.

I really don't see why you'd even try to use your EBT to try and buy non-food stuff. You only get so much a month and your funds don't carry over. You'd never get enough to buy a gun.

Ehhh.....I dunno.....

I mean, yeah, they vote. But so do a lot of people like me, who, on seeing this news, would quite likely never vote for that politician again.

Anyways. Turns out the reason that he did this was because that method was difficult to enforce due to excessive granularity, and is pushing legislation that focuses on banning EBT purchases at specific stores instead. His reasoning and alternative are backed by the commission that led to all of this in the first place.

As far as I can tell jewlry stores and nail salons still seem to be on the list of approved locations, which doesn't make sense, but there isn't a lot of good coverage on this issue so I don't know for sure what the full package he is recommending includes.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/po...format=&page=1&listingType=MA2004#articleFull

So, you know....much more to the story than the sound bite. Not surprising.

AshburnerX said:

I really don't see why you'd even try to use your EBT to try and buy non-food stuff. You only get so much a month and your funds don't carry over. You'd never get enough to buy a gun.

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Depends on how much you get a month, I suppose. I've seen servicable shotguns and low quality pistols on sale for $120.

So, in a counter soundbite. This is another reason I don't believe in de-regulation:

Because it turns out that a lot of people really ARE cheaters

This article flat out disgusts me in ways that no story about welfare ever could. You want to see cancer. THIS is cancer. Welfare states represent significant moral hazards that are dangerous. Business cultures that embrace cheating are flat out evil.

Ayup. those are the 24% they can happily fire and give a restraining order to stay the f away from other people's money.

Necronic said:

So, in a counter soundbite. This is another reason I don't believe in de-regulation:

Because it turns out that a lot of people really ARE cheaters

This article flat out disgusts me in ways that no story about welfare ever could. You want to see cancer. THIS is cancer. Welfare states represent significant moral hazards that are dangerous. Business cultures that embrace cheating are flat out evil.

Click to expand...

The difference is one is still illegal even in the hated, vilified "open market," the other is institutionalized and backed up by the government monopoly of lethal force.

True enough I guess. But consider this. Why is it that Republicans want Voter ID laws in place to increase scrutiny on voter fraud that, while illegal, is by all measures insignificant, but don't want to increase scrutiny on people who control the world economy and admit to being dishonest (and who, by the way, did a good job destroying the economy through their dishonesty, pretty recently I think you heard about it)?

Necronic said:

True enough I guess. But consider this. Why is it that Republicans want Voter ID laws in place to increase scrutiny on voter fraud that, while illegal, is by all measures insignificant, but don't want to increase scrutiny on people who control the world economy and admit to being dishonest (and who, by the way, did a good job destroying the economy through their dishonesty, pretty recently I think you heard about it)?

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I wasn't aware that wall street investment firms were the targets of environmental regulations, which is what I thought we were talking about. Additionally, you're placing all the blame on the dirty, dirty, scumbag richie-rich-rich bankers when government was just as culpable, if not moreso, for causing the economic collapse... particularly democrats such as Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who padded their nest eggs and screamed bloody racist murder if anyone ever brought up that maybe we shouldn't be financing mortgages to people who stand absolutely no chance of repaying it.

Voter ID laws, however, are plain common sense. The only believable reason to be opposed is that you plan to, or currently already do, benefit from voter fraud.

GasBandit said:

I wasn't aware that wall street investment firms were the targets of environmental regulations, which is what I thought we were talking about. Additionally, you're placing all the blame on the dirty, dirty, scumbag richie-rich-rich bankers when government was just as culpable, if not moreso, for causing the economic collapse... particularly democrats such as Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who padded their nest eggs and screamed bloody racist murder if anyone ever brought up that maybe we shouldn't be financing mortgages to people who stand absolutely no chance of repaying it.

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eh, ok that's fair enough I guess. It wasn't just wall street, there were many cooks in that pot. I would love to see a corresponding survey of industrial executives on a similar question but more environmentally based. I doubt they would be dumb enough to answer the way these guys did even if it was true. For some reason Wall Street types seem more willing to revel in their misdeeds (see GS Elevator, if anyone talked like that where I worked they would be fired in a heartbeat).

Voter ID laws, however, are plain common sense. The only believable reason to be opposed is that you plan to, or currently already do, benefit from voter fraud.

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Well, the problem of poll taxes is still there. I get that you don't agree with it. I don't know where I stand myself. But I accept that it's a complex issue (although a simple, free voter ID would fix it) hence why I don't push it.

I think it's been established now that there is not a single activity, or lack thereof, that the government does not think it can constitutionally tax you for.

Necronic said:

Well, the problem of poll taxes is still there. I get that you don't agree with it. I don't know where I stand myself. But I accept that it's a complex issue (although a simple, free voter ID would fix it) hence why I don't push it.

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This is pretty much the entire issue: The people pushing for the voter ID laws aren't willing to provide a free alternative to the driver's license/state Id/passport. Without it, it's a poll tax. Apparently the dollar it costs to make a laminated card is too much to ensure people can vote.

But then again, I still think it's stupid that Election Day isn't a national holiday. More people would vote if they didn't have to compete with their jobs and other responsibilities to do it.

Fuck it, why don't we just make all voting be done by absentee ballet? Then we don't need to worry about ids at all.

I think there are already too many people voting. But I'd not turn down a day off to do it.

But the poll tax argument is stupid. You have to have an ID to do anything else already. Rent a car or pretty much any other equipment. Fly on an airline. Open a bank account. Get a job. Drive. A. Car. If the letter of the law is so damn inflexible that having to get an ID constitutes a poll tax, then we'd be deporting illegals left, right, and center.

GasBandit said:

I think there are already too many people voting. But I'd not turn down a day off to do it.

But the poll tax argument is stupid. You have to have an ID to do anything else already. Rent a car or pretty much any other equipment. Fly on an airline. Open a bank account. Get a job. Drive. A. Car. If the letter of the law is so damn inflexible that having to get an ID constitutes a poll tax, then we'd be deporting illegals left, right, and center.

Click to expand...

I wonder what would happen if someone showed up to a polling pace in nothing but their boxers (or birthday suit) and tried to vote. Also it's a shame there's no such thing as non-profit organizations, who spend time and money getting people registered to vote.

AshburnerX said:

Fuck it, why don't we just make all voting be done by absentee ballet? Then we don't need to worry about ids at all.

Click to expand...

I don't necessarily know that you want to start down that road. The state of Washington has gone full mail-in-ballot voting over the past two years, and now the Governor keeps lobbying (successfully, I might add) for the cancellation of primary elections because it costs the state too much money to mail ballots out - and they don't even have to pay for the ballots to be mailed back, we have to pay our own postage to vote (note, I'm not complaining about having to pay 40-some-odd cents to exercise my right to vote, just mentioning that the state doesn't have to pay for the return postage). Not to mention the fact that, since the USPS is far from the most efficient postal service in the world, it's not uncommon for people to not get their ballots on time, or at all - and if that happens you have to try to find a polling place that's still open on election day so you can vote, while most of them have been shut down because "we're all mail-in voting now."

Didn't mean to side track, just wanted to use the Voter ID thing as an example of a crime that was not enforced. Pot may have been a better example, I dunno.

Anyways, back to the topic, I am kind of curious what you (Gas Bandit) thinks about Cheating (with a big C), as a libertarian. It strikes me as one of the most dangerous bits of human nature wrg to libertarianism.

Covar said:

I wonder what would happen if someone showed up to a polling pace in nothing but their boxers (or birthday suit) and tried to vote. Also it's a shame there's no such thing as non-profit organizations, who spend time and money getting people registered to vote.

Click to expand...

The largest group that was trying to get people out to vote was shut down a few years ago with clever editing.[DOUBLEPOST=1342039056][/DOUBLEPOST]

GasBandit said:

I think there are already too many people voting. But I'd not turn down a day off to do it.

But the poll tax argument is stupid. You have to have an ID to do anything else already. Rent a car or pretty much any other equipment. Fly on an airline. Open a bank account. Get a job. Drive. A. Car. If the letter of the law is so damn inflexible that having to get an ID constitutes a poll tax, then we'd be deporting illegals left, right, and center.

Click to expand...

If you are too poor as fuck to have a bank account, drive a car, fly on airliners... why have an ID?

If you can't afford a bank account you're well beyond poor as fuck. You're flat broke, homeless, and seemingly incapable of having any kind of assistance.

sixpackshaker said:

The largest group that was trying to get people out to vote was shut down a few years ago with clever editing.[DOUBLEPOST=1342039056][/DOUBLEPOST]

If you are too poor as fuck to have a bank account, drive a car, fly on airliners... why have an ID?

Click to expand...

To prove who you are. To keep from getting deported. To be identifiable after mugging/death/accident. To be able to identify yourself for things like movie theaters or bars, where you have to be over age X to enter/drink/... .

Covar said:

If you can't afford a bank account you're well beyond poor as fuck. You're flat broke, homeless, and seemingly incapable of having any kind of assistance.

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But hey, we should still let you wield power to determine the nation's future, mister absolutely incapable of functioning as an adult human being.[DOUBLEPOST=1342039391][/DOUBLEPOST]

sixpackshaker said:

The largest group that was trying to get people out to vote was shut down a few years ago with clever editing.[DOUBLEPOST=1342039056][/DOUBLEPOST]

If you are too poor as fuck to have a bank account, drive a car, fly on airliners... why have an ID?

Click to expand...

That other one in the middle. To get. a. job.

GasBandit said:

But hey, we should still let you wield power to determine the nation's future, mister absolutely incapable of functioning as an adult human being.

Click to expand...

Eh, there's plenty of people who have jobs and whatnot that are absolute scum. They get to vote.

It's not a popularity contest. Oh...well it is but its in the other direction.

Bubble181 said:

To prove who you are. To keep from getting deported. To be identifiable after mugging/death/accident. To be able to identify yourself for things like movie theaters or bars, where you have to be over age X to enter/drink/... .

Click to expand...

So it is just a way to put a yoke over our necks. Hell anyone can fake these ID cards. Why not just put RFID chips in all citizens?

GasBandit said:

But the poll tax argument is stupid. You have to have an ID to do anything else already. Rent a car or pretty much any other equipment. Fly on an airline. Open a bank account. Get a job. Drive. A. Car. If the letter of the law is so damn inflexible that having to get an ID constitutes a poll tax, then we'd be deporting illegals left, right, and center.

Click to expand...

I have another intro for that list of yours: name four things that the desperately poor frequently don't do! And then you compare apples to oranges. Different legal theories, different enforcement agencies, different legal histories, etc.

Also, it turns out that this "voter fraud" problem that's such a big issue that Republicans are calling emergency sessions about it? The same crime which you say is the only reason anyone would oppose voter ID laws? It doesn't fucking happen:

In her 2010 book, The Myth of Voter Fraud, Lorraine Minnite tracked down every single case brought by the Justice Department between 1996 and 2005 and found that the number of defendants had increased by roughly 1,000 percent under Ashcroft. But that only represents an increase from about six defendants per year to 60, and only a fraction of those were ever convicted of anything. A New York Times investigation in 2007 concluded that only 86 people had been convicted of voter fraud during the previous five years. Many of those appear to have simply made mistakes on registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, and more than 30 of the rest were penny-ante vote-buying schemes in local races for judge or sheriff. The investigation found virtually no evidence of any organized efforts to skew elections at the federal level.
Another set of studies has examined the claims of activist groups like Thor Hearne's American Center for Voting Rights, which released a report in 2005 citing more than 100 cases involving nearly 300,000 allegedly fraudulent votes during the 2004 election cycle. The charges involved sensational-sounding allegations of double-voting, fraudulent addresses, and voting by felons and noncitizens. But in virtually every case they dissolved upon investigation. Some of them were just flatly false, and others were the result of clerical errors. Minnite painstakingly investigated each of the center's charges individually and found only 185 votes that were even potentially fraudulent.
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University has focused on voter fraud issues for years. In a 2007 report they concluded that "by any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare." In the Missouri election of 2000 that got Sen. Bond so worked up, the Center found a grand total of four cases of people voting twice, out of more than 2 million ballots cast. In the end, the verified fraud rate was 0.0003 percent.

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This form of Government Control is why conservatives were against Social Security, because it forced you to have a Government Issue ID. Hell nowadays you can't take a crap in a Gov't building without showing/giving your SSN.

Well Fargo offers a checking account that costs $7 a month ($9 for paper statements) unless you have either $1500 daily balance (can be hard on a low income, I know) or direct deposit of at least $500 dollars per statement period (also known as a month), in which case the statement fee is waived. Every other bank I've been with has similar checking accounts.

GasBandit said:

That other one in the middle. To get. a. job.

Click to expand...

All you need is a SSN.

sixpackshaker said:

So it is just a way to put a yoke over our necks. Hell anyone can fake these ID cards. Why not just put RFID chips in all citizens?

Click to expand...

They want to. They are already putting them in all passports and are working on putting them in state IDs in some states. It's really only a matter of time before they start doing it to people. I think the only thing keeping them from doing it now is that it's just too damn easy to overwrite the data on the chips or steal the info from it.

sixpackshaker said:

This form of Government Control is why conservatives were against Social Security, because it forced you to have a Government Issue ID. Hell nowadays you can't take a crap in a Gov't building without showing/giving your SSN.

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and heaven forbid there's a face associated with that number.[DOUBLEPOST=1342040019][/DOUBLEPOST]

sixpackshaker said:

All you need is a SSN.

Click to expand...

Really? I can't remember the last job I took that didn't require two forms of picture identification (unless you had a passport, then you just needed that).

Covar said:

and heaven forbid there's a face associated with that number.

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For the first 50 years of S.S. it was illegal to use it as an ID. My original SSN card still said that. I am complaining about the level of private citizen control these ID's represent.[DOUBLEPOST=1342040084][/DOUBLEPOST]

Covar said:

and heaven forbid there's a face associated with that number.[DOUBLEPOST=1342040019][/DOUBLEPOST]
Really? I can't remember the last job I took that didn't require two forms of picture identification (unless you had a passport, then you just needed that).

Click to expand...

It made you feel like a free man too, I bet.

Covar said:

If you can't afford a bank account you're well beyond poor as fuck. You're flat broke, homeless, and seemingly incapable of having any kind of assistance.

Click to expand...

Bull fucking shit. Poor urban areas are just full of check cashing places, payday loan establishments, and the like. It's people who are trying to support themselves and a family on a minimum wage income, the people who live in poverty. They exist and they have just as much of a right to a voice in this country as anyone else, dipshit.

GasBandit said:

But hey, we should still let you wield power to determine the nation's future, mister absolutely incapable of functioning as an adult human being.

Click to expand...

You miss the days when wealthy, white, male landowners were the only voters, don't you?

GasBandit said:

That other one in the middle. To get. a. job.

Click to expand...

I sure as shit didn't have my driver's license when I got my first job. As I recall, I used my college ID plus my birth certificate and my SSN, also, this:

Pamela Weaver, spokeswoman of the Mississippi Secretary of State's office, today confirmed the catch-22 problem, which the Jackson Free Press learned about from a complaint posted on Facebook. One of the requirements to get the free voter ID cards is a birth certificate, but in order to receive a certified copy of your birth certificate in Mississippi, you must have a photo ID. Not having the photo ID is why most people need the voter ID in the first place.

Click to expand...

Made me wish I had a passport is what it did.

This is where Charlie could make his arguments about the USA being in a Police State... "Show your papers please."

Norris said:

I have another intro for that list of yours: name four things that the desperately poor frequently don't do! And then you compare apples to oranges. Different legal theories, different enforcement agencies, different legal histories, etc.

Click to expand...

I have never had a job that did not require me to furnish at least one picture ID, including washing dishes at the olive garden when I was 16.

They're both laws, and the purpose was to demonstrate that the letter of the law is not ironclad. Not in immigration, not in speed limits, but suddenly a buck to get an ID is tantamount to jim crow. You say it's apples and oranges, I say it's cherry picking for political gain.

Necronic said:

Eh, there's plenty of people who have jobs and whatnot that are absolute scum. They get to vote.

It's not a popularity contest. Oh...well it is but its in the other direction.

Click to expand...

That there are scum that can hold a job better than them is not an effective argument in their defense.

sixpackshaker said:

This form of Government Control is why conservatives were against Social Security, because it forced you to have a Government Issue ID. Hell nowadays you can't take a crap in a Gov't building without showing/giving your SSN.

Click to expand...

Now conservatives are against social security because it's a bankrupt ponzi scheme.

Also, it turns out that this "voter fraud" problem that's such a big issue that Republicans are calling emergency sessions about it? The same crime which you say is the only reason anyone would oppose voter ID laws? It doesn't fucking happen:

Click to expand...

Except in north carolina, I guess.

GasBandit said:

Now conservatives are against social security because it's a bankrupt ponzi scheme.

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Now it is a bankrupt Ponzi scheme because they could not keep their grubby little fingers out of it.

Norris said:

Bull fucking shit. Poor urban areas are just full of check cashing places, payday loan establishments, and the like. It's people who are trying to support themselves and a family on a minimum wage income, the people who live in poverty. They exist and they have just as much of a right to a voice in this country as anyone else, dipshit.

Click to expand...

Hey fucktard (see I can do it too!) minimum wage jobs are still more than $500 per month, which is all it takes to have a checking account that costs you nothing. It is absurd to say that someone can't afford a bank account.

Norris said:

Bull fucking shit. Poor urban areas are just full of check cashing places, payday loan establishments, and the like. It's people who are trying to support themselves and a family on a minimum wage income, the people who live in poverty. They exist and they have just as much of a right to a voice in this country as anyone else, dipshit.

Click to expand...

Actually, they do have as much of a right, which is to say, none at all. There is no federally provided right to vote. That's left to the states to decide how they get their voting in the electoral college done (and yes, some of them have the "right to vote" defined in their state constitutions). But even all that aside, you're easily shown to be wrong, because just about everything you described is a consequence of terrible choices made, which demonstrates an inability to make good choices, which if anything should be a disqualifier for voting, lest your propensity for bad decisions make the country that much worse. Oh, and I like the "dipshit" thrown in there. Really solidifies your argument.

You miss the days when wealthy, white, male landowners were the only voters, don't you?

Click to expand...

Congratulations! Your ad hominem wins you the argument! What'll you do now, go to disney world? No, I miss the days when we made at least a token effort to make sure that we weren't driving ourselves off a cliff by voting ourselves largesse from the public coffers.

I sure as shit didn't have my driver's license when I got my first job. As I recall, I used my college ID plus my birth certificate and my SSN, also, this:

Click to expand...

Did your College ID have a picture on it? Did it involve spending money, like, say, Tuition? Which is WAY more than it costs to get a driver's license?

sixpackshaker said:

Now it is a bankrupt Ponzi scheme because they could not keep their grubby little fingers out of it.

Click to expand...

This is not an argument in its favor. If it's run by government, their fingers are in it. And there was never a time where their fingers were NOT in social security, because there never was a trust fund - it's always gone directly into the general ledger.

sixpackshaker said:

So it is just a way to put a yoke over our necks. Hell anyone can fake these ID cards. Why not just put RFID chips in all citizens?

Click to expand...

I'm a continental European. I'm pretty far out into libertarianism for this region, and even so....Yeah, I wouldn't mind chipping everyone and having clear-cut, correct, good IDs for everyone and anyone. It'd make a WHOLE LOT of things a LOT easier. It'd be safer, in the end. It'd avoid a fuckton of fraud and abuse.

Not everything a government does, it does badly. The Belgian IDcards with integrated chip are pretty good. Things like address and such aren't visible on the card unless for the proper authorities or with the right PIN. Far from a perfect system, but it DOES help. Bonus points for listing all kinds of medical crap on it so that if you're brought in to a hospital, they can avoid giving you crap you're allergic to and such.

Should "everyone" have access to "all" data? Certainly not. The cop that pulls me off the road for speeding doesn't need to know about my diabetes; the hospital I'm brought into after getting hit by a speeding car doesn't have to know about my speeding tickets or my abuse charges. The guy checkingwhether I'm really me for voting, only needs to know my name and face. And so on.
Should there be SOME way to ID someone? Yes, definitely. Because there's plenty of things you can do that you're not allowed to do, but don't necessarily demand an immediate arrest or whatever. And there's plenty of other good reasons to be identifiable as well.

Bubble181 said:

I'm a continental European. I'm pretty far out into libertarianism for this region, and even so....Yeah, I wouldn't mind chipping everyone and having clear-cut, correct, good IDs for everyone and anyone. It'd make a WHOLE LOT of things a LOT easier. It'd be safer, in the end. It'd avoid a fuckton of fraud and abuse.

Not everything a government does, it does badly. The Belgian IDcards with integrated chip are pretty good. Things like address and such aren't visible on the card unless for the proper authorities or with the right PIN. Far from a perfect system, but it DOES help. Bonus points for listing all kinds of medical crap on it so that if you're brought in to a hospital, they can avoid giving you crap you're allergic to and such.

Should "everyone" have access to "all" data? Certainly not. The cop that pulls me off the road for speeding doesn't need to know about my diabetes; the hospital I'm brought into after getting hit by a speeding car doesn't have to know about my speeding tickets or my abuse charges. The guy checkingwhether I'm really me for voting, only needs to know my name and face. And so on.
Should there be SOME way to ID someone? Yes, definitely. Because there's plenty of things you can do that you're not allowed to do, but don't necessarily demand an immediate arrest or whatever. And there's plenty of other good reasons to be identifiable as well.

Click to expand...

Having everyone chipped will sure make it easier to drag the right ones off.... /godwin.

sixpackshaker said:

Having everyone chipped will sure make it easier to drag the right ones off.... /godwin.

Click to expand...

sixpackshaker said:

Having everyone chipped will sure make it easier to drag the right ones off.... /godwin.

Click to expand...

You really expect an answer to that one?

Bubble181 said:

You really expect an answer to that one?

Click to expand...

No, that's why he flagged it /godwin.

Covar said:

Hey fucktard (see I can do it too!) minimum wage jobs are still more than $500 per month, which is all it takes to have a checking account that costs you nothing. It is absurd to say that someone can't afford a bank account.

Click to expand...

What part of "there are people who pretty much spend their paycheck the second they get it in order to afford the bare necessities of life" don't you understand?

GasBandit said:

But even all that aside, you're easily shown to be wrong, because just about everything you described is a consequence of terrible choices made, which demonstrates an inability to make good choices, which if anything should be a disqualifier for voting, lest your propensity for bad decisions make the country that much worse.

Click to expand...

Being poor and having a family counts as bad decisions? Let me paint a picture for you:
I have a co-worker named Mike. Mike is a really good guy, and he's got a work ethic like no one else I know. He rides his bike from 8 Mile and Telegraph to our store at 8 Mile and Haggerty. That's somewhere around 8 miles each way, if he takes the most direct route (which I don't think can be done). In the coldest of winter and the hottest of summer, he rides his bike. Why not drive? He doesn't have a car. Why doesn't he borrow his mom's car? She doesn't have a car. Why doesn't she have a car? She never learned to drive. So he has no reliable access to a car, an almost non-existent pool of people who can teach him to drive, no degree (he's tried, but money is tight and the nearest community college is one mile from our store), and makes a couple of bucks over minimum wage. No choices made by him lead to his state of affairs. It's really easy to paint all poor people with the broad brush of being lazy, immature, etc, but reality disagrees with that.

Congratulations! Your ad hominem wins you the argument! What'll you do now, go to disney world? No, I miss the days when we made at least a token effort to make sure that we weren't driving ourselves off a cliff by voting ourselves largesse from the public coffers.

Click to expand...

And you're arguing that allowing those people living in poverty the right to vote constitutes a threat America's well being. The impoverished being overwhelmingly made of minorities. You essentially want only middle class or higher (predominantly white) people to vote. You're right, I did misrepresent you: you don't care if they're male or own land.

Did your College ID have a picture on it?

Click to expand...

Yes, but it was not the state-issued form of ID most of these voter ID laws are require.

GasBandit said:

No, that's why he flagged it /godwin.

Click to expand...

I'm aware.

Still, I lost family in the camps and thinking for even a second that I'd support anything that would even hint at those politics is just wrong and inexcusable. I demand an apology and a retraction. It's just such an obvious ploy. Hateful! Pah!
/Jewishreply

now for the worse than godwin reply

Bubble181 said:

I'm aware.

Still, I lost family in the camps and thinking for even a second that I'd support anything that would even hint at those politics is just wrong and inexcusable. I demand an apology and a retraction. It's just such an obvious ploy. Hateful! Pah!
/Jewishreply

Click to expand...

I'm sorry, I lost family in the camps too.

Norris said:

What part of "there are people who pretty much spend their paycheck the second they get it in order to afford the bare necessities of life" don't you understand?

Being poor and having a family counts as bad decisions? Let me paint a picture for you:
I have a co-worker named Mike. Mike is a really good guy, and he's got a work ethic like no one else I know. He rides his bike from 8 Mile and Telegraph to our store at 8 Mile and Haggerty. That's somewhere around 8 miles each way, if he takes the most direct route (which I don't think can be done). In the coldest of winter and the hottest of summer, he rides his bike. Why not drive? He doesn't have a car. Why doesn't he borrow his mom's car? She doesn't have a car. Why doesn't she have a car? She never learned to drive. So he has no reliable access to a car, an almost non-existent pool of people who can teach him to drive, no degree (he's tried, but money is tight and the nearest community college is one mile from our store), and makes a couple of bucks over minimum wage. No choices made by him lead to his state of affairs. It's really easy to paint all poor people with the broad brush of being lazy, immature, etc, but reality disagrees with that.

Click to expand...

Way to respond with a reply that is both subjective and a fallacious appeal to emotion. For every "Mike" you show me, assuming he exists, I will show you ten people who dicked around in high school, got in trouble with the law, got somebody pregnant before they had even the beginnings of the means to support a family, and yet still spends some of their meager money each month on smokes, booze, drugs, diablo 3, or some other such vice. The statistics show that your typical american in "poverty" actually has a higher standard of living than the average european (the AVERAGE european, not the average european in poverty, the AVERAGE european). Before 2006, this was a land of unparalleled income mobility, where the Mikes of the world stood an excellent chance of bettering their lot so long as they made the right decision. A land that made more new millionaires than any nation ever in the history of mankind. Sure, NOW we're in an economic slump (perpetuated and worsened by the very ideals you adhere to), but previous to this, you basically had to be mentally ill to be chronically poor, outside of catastrophic accidents/acts of god.

Give a poor person a winning lottery ticket, in a few years they'll be broke again. Take away an entrepreneur's wealth, in a few years they'll be at the helm of a new enterprise generating wealth again.

And you're arguing that allowing those people living in poverty the right to vote constitutes a threat America's well being. The impoverished being overwhelmingly made of minorities. You essentially want only middle class or higher (predominantly white) people to vote. You're right, I did misrepresent you: you don't care if they're male or own land.

Click to expand...

You're the one bringing race into it. And you're still committing ad hominem. I'm the one dealing with all people as equals, you're the one saying minorities can't be expected to take care of themselves. Who's the racist?

Yes, but it was not the state-issued form of ID most of these voter ID laws are require.

Click to expand...

It cost even more. You trying to rebut that you got a job with a college ID is not exactly disproving that the poor don't need an ID to get a job.

Norris said:

What part of "there are people who pretty much spend their paycheck the second they get it in order to afford the bare necessities of life" don't you understand?

Click to expand...

Hi there...

Norris said:

I have a co-worker named Mike. [...] He rides his bike from 8 Mile and Telegraph to our store at 8 Mile and Haggerty.

Click to expand...

Either you've moved, or you commute a helluva lot more than Mike. Mike lives about 2mi from me, and your store is about 3mi from my work.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Hi there...


Either you've moved, or you commute a helluva lot more than Mike. Mike lives about 2mi from me, and your store is about 3mi from my work.

--Patrick

Click to expand...

Wait, wait, wait.. he gave exact cross streets, and google maps backs him up.

But it doesn't make his example any less invalid.

Also, why the hell are you guys still in detroit?! How are you still alive?!

GasBandit said:

Wait, wait, wait.. he gave exact cross streets, and google maps backs him up.

Click to expand...

Yes, and that's why I called him out on it. His description still says "Grand Rapids," not "Farmington/Novi."

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Yes, and that's why I called him out on it. His description still says "Grand Rapids," not "Farmington/Novi."

--Patrick

Click to expand...

Ohhhh I see. Yeah, 136 miles is a hell of a commute even by Texas standards.

GasBandit said:

Ohhhh I see. Yeah, 136 miles is a hell of a commute even by Texas standards.

Click to expand...

So how long's your commute from the state of "Warning" to work?

Bubble181 said:

So how long's your commute from the state of "Warning" to work?

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About 1.8 miles.

GasBandit said:

Sure, NOW we're in an economic slump (perpetuated and worsened by the very ideals you adhere to), but previous to this, you basically had to be mentally ill to be chronically poor, outside of catastrophic accidents/acts of god.

Click to expand...

38,757,253. That is the number of people that the U.S. Census Bureau (page 27)counted as in poverty as of 2006. 13.3% of the population for which poverty status could be discerned. You're saying that nearly 40 million people in this country are lazy, mentally ill, or makers of poor decisions?

Here's an article from the same time showing the then-growing gap between the rich and poor, including this fascinating quote "In America about half of the income disparities in one generation are reflected in the next. In Canada and the Nordic countries that proportion is about a fifth." Seems like maybe your "America was land of opportunity!" rap isn't so accurate/

GasBandit said:

You're the one bringing race into it. And you're still committing ad hominem. I'm the one dealing with all people as equals, you're the one saying minorities can't be expected to take care of themselves. Who's the racist?

Click to expand...

I'm saying that minorities are disproportionately among the poor and impoverished (FACT). Ergo, any law that will have the greatest effect on the poor an impoverished, for good or ill, will disproportionately impact minorities. Up until the middle part of last century, people in this country were not equals, not under the law or in society. Not even close to it. Now, all people are (supposed to be) equal under the law. Gaining actual equality of opportunity and status under the law, undoing three centuries of stacking the deck against anyone not white and particularly anyone who was black, takes more than two generations. Shock of shocks, I'm sure. Race is still an issue, and will be for a while. Claiming its not will help precisely no one who isn't already doing fine.

GasBandit said:

It cost even more. You trying to rebut that you got a job with a college ID is not exactly disproving that the poor don't need an ID to get a job.

Click to expand...

My high school ID would have worked too. For a job, as I understand it, any kind of picture ID will do. For voter ID, you have to have a current State ID card that you need the proper documentation to obtain, all of which costs time and money.

GasBandit said:

I miss the days when we made at least a token effort to make sure that we weren't driving ourselves off a cliff by voting ourselves largesse from the public coffers.

Click to expand...

You know...there really were never any "good old days".

When you look at the Eisenhower days you had large amounts of public spending towards things like the interstate highways, or other remnants/children of the PWA.

And if you go farther back, life was pretty much hell for everyone excep Gatsby and his pals. And it wasn't great for them either.[DOUBLEPOST=1342046310][/DOUBLEPOST]

Norris said:

13.3% of the population for which poverty status could be discerned. You're saying that nearly 40 million people in this country are lazy, mentally ill, or makers of poor decisions?

Click to expand...

I think it's far more fair to say that 13% of people are too lazy/mentally ill/makers of poor decisions. But i don't think that poverty is a key indicator of that. There are plenty of lazy people with jobs. Plenty of people who make poor decisions and get away with them. And, come on, in some senses mental illness is a pre-requisite for being an A-Type.

Norris said:

38,757,253. That is the number of people that the U.S. Census Bureau counted as in poverty as of 2006. 13.3% of the population for which poverty status could be discerned. You're saying that nearly 40 million people in this country are lazy, mentally ill, or makers of poor decisions?

Click to expand...

More than that, probably. That's just the number of those who happen to be poor.

Here's an article from the same time showing the then-growing gap between the rich and poor, including this fascinating quote "In America about half of the income disparities in one generation are reflected in the next. In Canada and the Nordic countries that proportion is about a fifth." Seems like maybe your "America was land of opportunity!" rap isn't so accurate/

Click to expand...

According to the US Treasury department, half of all US taxpayers moved income brackets between 1996 and 2005. Half those in the bottom bracket moved up, and 75% of those in the top 1% moved down. Also: "Median incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two-thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period. In addition, the median incomes of those initially in the lower income groups increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the higher income groups. " Your move.

I'm saying that minorities are disproportionately among the poor and impoverished (FACT). Ergo, any law that will have the greatest effect on the poor an impoverished, for good or ill, will disproportionately impact minorities. Up until the middle part of last century, people in this country were not equals, not under the law or in society. Not even close to it. Now, all people are (supposed to be) equal under the law. Gaining actual equality of opportunity and status under the law, undoing three centuries of stacking the deck against anyone not white and particularly anyone who was black, takes more than two generations. Shock of shocks, I'm sure. Race is still an issue, and will be for a while. Claiming its not will help precisely no one who isn't already doing fine.

Click to expand...

That's a recipe for a neverending cycle of victimhood. Since LBJ, we've spent 10 trillion dollars on robin hood fiscal redistribution to eliminate poverty, and not only is there still poverty, there is MORE poverty. Generations of telling them "it's not your fault, you can't be expected to better yourselves" has made these people believe it. But all this is beside the point. You are calling me a racist to attempt to discredit my ideas, when I have not said a single racist thing. My assertions affect poor white people (gasp, they exist!) as well as poor minorities. You are asserting bad logic in saying that anything that affects the poor is racist because there are more nonwhite poor than white. That. Doesn't. Follow. You seem too worked up to argue without falling into fallacies and invective. Maybe you should go have a time out until you're ready to discuss like a grownup?

My high school ID would have worked too. For a job, as I understand it, any kind of picture ID will do. For voter ID, you have to have a current State ID card that you need the proper documentation to obtain, all of which costs time and money.

Click to expand...

Did you go to a private high school, or was that high school ID... government issued? Is that an "apple and orange" situation because most high school students aren't of age to vote?

GasBandit said:

Did you go to a private high school, or was that high school ID... government issued? Is that an "apple and orange" situation because most high school students aren't of age to vote?

Click to expand...

I went to a woefully overcrowded public high school and they issued all the kids a photo ID. It's pretty standard issue these days.

Necronic said:

You know...there really were never any "good old days".

When you look at the Eisenhower days you had large amounts of public spending towards things like the interstate highways, or other remnants/children of the PWA

Click to expand...

We're not talking about infrastructure, and you know it. The largest federal expenses these days are socialist income redistribution. Medicare/medicaid/social security. The interstates cost 500 billion in 2008 dollars over 40 years, and we're spending 3 trillion a year now (and less than a trillion of that is on the military). Hell, we blew more than the interstates cost on stimulus that didn't work.

GasBandit said:

You are asserting bad logic in saying that anything that affects the poor is racist because there are more nonwhite poor than white. That. Doesn't. Follow. You seem too worked up to argue without falling into fallacies and invective. Maybe you should go have a time out until you're ready to discuss like a grownup?

Click to expand...

While I do, on this rare occassion, agree with you (picture IDs are useful and should be mandatory; I probably go a lot further in it than you but whatever), this is a bit uncalled for as an ad hominem, and doesn't really help your point. I's all t rue, up to the last sentence which is just a snark to snark.

AshburnerX said:

I went to a woefully overcrowded public high school and they issued all the kids a photo ID. It's pretty standard issue these days.

Click to expand...

That was my point, it's a government picture ID.[DOUBLEPOST=1342048281][/DOUBLEPOST]

Bubble181 said:

While I do, on this rare occassion, agree with you (picture IDs are useful and should be mandatory; I probably go a lot further in it than you but whatever), this is a bit uncalled for as an ad hominem, and doesn't really help your point. I's all t rue, up to the last sentence which is just a snark to snark.

Click to expand...

I think I'm entitled to a little snark after all he's called myself and Covar over the last couple pages.

PatrThom said:

Yes, and that's why I called him out on it. His description still says "Grand Rapids," not "Farmington/Novi."

--Patrick

Click to expand...

I got to school from the last week of August to the last week of April at GVSU. For two years of community college, and during the summers, I live on the border of Livonia and Redford and work at 8 and Haggerty. What month is it?

GasBandit:
This debate is pointless. I'm of the opinion that we're moving toward the Gilded Age 2.0, and that people with your political views would only push us even further towards that. You're of the opinion that that people with my political views are pushing this country into an economic situation that will eventually tear it apart. We have a fundamental disagreement in our view of society, one that will not be rectified. We're never going to convince each other of anything, we both can find all the studies and expert opinions we want to back up our contentions, it's just not going to lead to anything constructive.

GasBandit said:

Did you go to a private high school, or was that high school ID... government issued? Is that an "apple and orange" situation because most high school students aren't of age to vote?

Click to expand...

A school ID card, I.E. a plastic card with your name on it next to a picture of you, be it a college ID or a high school ID, does not serve the same legal purposes as a state issued ID card or a driver's license (both are things you get from the sec of state or DMV. An employer can choose to accept it as a form of ID for purposes of employment, but it would never get you into a polling place. It simply does not carry the necessary information. I'm looking at my GVSU ID, issued by a state college when I enrolled (took me five minutes), and it has my name, a picture of me, my student number, the school's logo, a picture of the campus, the word "student", and the school's motto on it. My driver's license (cost me $25 plus a $40 road test plus a $20-ish dollar testing permit, plus a lot of hours at the sec of state) has...a shitload of my vital stats on it, including address. High school ID was the same story, but less fancy looking. If the majority of these voter ID laws considered work or school photo IDs to sufficient proof of identity, the fuss about them would be somewhat less.

EDIT: I also apologize for insinuating or outright calling you racist, and for calling Covar a dipshit. That's on me. I spend far too much of free time seeking out the arguments (and corresponding refutations thereof) of actual racists, bigots, dipshits, fundies, etc. This leads me to be far, far less diplomatic than I should when encountering people who aren't such things. I enter a world where "poor people are lazy" is usually followed by "therefore, white people are better" and forget that there is a wider world of political disagreement. Again, I apologize. I fucked up.

Norris said:

GasBandit:
This debate is pointless. I'm of the opinion that we're moving toward the Gilded Age 2.0, and that people with your political views would only push us even further towards that. You're of the opinion that that people with my political views are pushing this country into an economic situation that will eventually tear it apart. We have a fundamental disagreement in our view of society, one that will not be rectified. We're never going to convince each other of anything, we both can find all the studies and expert opinions we want to back up our contentions, it's just not going to lead to anything constructive.

Click to expand...

I can agree to disagree, but I find it a dangerous precedent. It ends arguments, and nobody wants that. Thank you, however, for returning to civility.

A school ID card, I.E. a plastic card with your name on it next to a picture of you, be it a college ID or a high school ID, does not serve the same legal purposes as a state issued ID card or a driver's license (both are things you get from the sec of state or DMV. An employer can choose to accept it as a form of ID for purposes of employment, but it would never get you into a polling place. It simply does not carry the necessary information. I'm looking at my GVSU ID, issued by a state college when I enrolled (took me five minutes), and it has my name, a picture of me, my student number, the school's logo, a picture of the campus, the word "student", and the school's motto on it. My driver's license (cost me $25 plus a $40 road test plus a $20-ish dollar testing permit, plus a lot of hours at the sec of state) has...a shitload of my vital stats on it, including address. High school ID was the same story, but less fancy looking. If these voter ID laws considered work or school photo IDs to sufficient proof of identity, the fuss about them would be somewhat less.

Click to expand...

Well, I can't speak for every state but I know my current and previous states (Texas and Colorado) both offer non-drivers-license state picture IDs for a great deal less than what you just quoted (edit- just checked, the fee for a Texas photo ID -not drivers licence- is 6 dollars), and fill any photo ID legal requirement. (I also still say that your GVSU ID cost you way more than that, even in the first semester alone... and they probably were pretty convinced you are who you say you are to issue it). If you want to talk about making school IDs valid for the purpose, I'd be amenable to that and I think so would most other people, granted sufficient levels of oversight. It doesn't HAVE to be a driver's license... there just has to be government verification of identification to vote in a government election.

You know, while we're at least moderately on the topic of Government Issued ID's, it would be great if either the individual states got together and got their individual forms all lined up, or the federal government took over document standardization for all of the states and territories, so that official government issued documents from the US could approach the usefulness of those same documents from other countries. As someone who spends all day looking at death certificates, photo IDs, birth certificates, marriage certificates, etc., I have to say that the chances of finding the necessary information contained in forms in the US - which can and does vary state to state and territory to territory - is a complete and total crap shoot. There's nothing I like more than sifting through 18 pages of various documents trying to discern someone's relationship to another person, and whether or not they're actually next-of-kin.

Oh wait, yes there is. I much prefer some of the Central and South American countries (to be honest, I'm not sure off the top of my head which ones, they just happen to be in Spanish), where I only need one document to give me the decedent's age, name, date of birth, date of death, place of death, cause of death, date of marriage (if any), name of spouse (if any), date of divorce (again, if any), name of second/third/fourth/fifth, etc. spouse, names and DoB of any children, parents' names; and one photo ID. Sweden, Norway, Finland, and The Netherlands do a pretty good job too. The only time the US comes anywhere close to providing all of that information in one handy place is if the decedent was active duty military AND died while on deployment, or if they were embassy staff AND died while overseas.

A state ID, equivalent to a driver's license for legal purposes, costs $10 here. Which is a generally affordable price. However, the place where you get them is open 9AM to 5PM, except on Wednesdays which are 11 am to 7PM. 7 locations throughout the state are open on Saturday, from 9am to Noon and 9AM to 7PM on Wednesdays. Those locations are also guaranteed to not close for an hour lunch. Suffice it to say, that makes even getting the $10 ID card a hardship (remember, Detroit is the biggest and poorest metro area in the state and has virtually no public transit) for people. However, we disagree on what constitutes "fair" and on who deserves the vote (I view it as a qualified right, you seem to view it as privilege), so that's fairly moot.

Norris said:

A state ID, equivalent to a driver's license for legal purposes, costs $10 here. Which is a generally affordable price. However, the place where you get them is open 9AM to 5PM, except on Wednesdays which are 11 am to 7PM. 7 locations throughout the state are open on Saturday, from 9am to Noon and 9AM to 7PM on Wednesdays. Those locations are also guaranteed to not close for an hour lunch. Suffice it to say, that makes even getting the $10 ID card a hardship (remember, Detroit is the biggest and poorest metro area in the state and has virtually no public transit) for people. However, we disagree on what constitutes "fair" and on who deserves the vote (I view it as a qualified right, you seem to view it as privilege), so that's fairly moot.

Click to expand...

Open six days a week, of varying hours, constitutes an undue burden? Because they can't be expected to have a day off at any point in the 4 years between elections? How do they make it to the polls on election day?

It is if you have no reliable form of transportation to wherever the nearest office happens to be. But, as I said, we seem to have different views on the status of voting as a right, so we will have differing views on what is considered undue obstacles to exercising it.

Norris said:

we seem to have different views on the status of voting as a right, so we will have differing views on what is considered undue obstacles to exercising it.

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Wait, voting isn't a right? When did that get suggested? It's patently wrong.

Honestly, I believe that everyone should have the power to direct their future, even if they do not have the ability. I don't feel that anyone should ever be stripped of the right to vote. Not for felonies, stupidity, religion, location, race, nor any other reason except death. If stupid and/or short-sighted people want to vote in such a way as to ruin their society, that is entirely their prerogative. If smart and/or long-term folks don't want to be a part of it, they can either rebel or pick up and go, and it is entirely in their best interest to do one, another, or both. Stupid people have a hard time organizing themselves (unless they are herded, presumably by a smarter person with one or more agenda), so it shouldn't take that many "smart" votes to cancel out a noticeably larger number of "dumb" ones simply because not as many dumb ones will go to the polls (for one reason or another). On the other hand, if the smart people leave, the society of the dumb will suffer its own punishment and collapse, letting the smart ones move back in again later to set up shop, presumably with their position strengthened by their time amongst a higher concentration of other smart people.

Anything...no, Everything else is flat-out discrimination.

--Patrick

Norris said:

It is if you have no reliable form of transportation to wherever the nearest office happens to be. But, as I said, we seem to have different views on the status of voting as a right, so we will have differing views on what is considered undue obstacles to exercising it.

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to be fair, us Belgians are OBLIGATED by law to vote, and our civil halls/city hall/county halls/where we HAVE to go and get our IDs every 5 years don't have opening hours that broad or easy to get to. 09h-12h 4 days a week and maybe 18h-20h once a week in most cities. Not having one is punishable with a pretty bad fine so.... You know, even IF you say it's a right to vote and there shoudn't be too many burdens in between...Those hours are relatively broad. It's not a right but a duty here and even we have to go through more trouble.

PatrThom said:

Wait, voting isn't a right? When did that get suggested? It's patently wrong.

--Patrick

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GasBandit said:

Actually, they do have as much of a right, which is to say, none at all. There is no federally provided right to vote.

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I may be reading his intent wrong there.

GasBandit said:

We're not talking about infrastructure, and you know it. The largest federal expenses these days are socialist income redistribution. Medicare/medicaid/social security. The interstates cost 500 billion in 2008 dollars over 40 years, and we're spending 3 trillion a year now (and less than a trillion of that is on the military). Hell, we blew more than the interstates cost on stimulus that didn't work.

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Wow, that's a LOT cheaper than I expected.

Edit: I wish the government would increase the age for Social Security payouts to 70. What a difference that would make, and it's so obvious that it needs to be done.

Norris said:

I may be reading his intent wrong there.

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No, you're not. PatrThom is voicing a belief, not constitutional reality. The US Federal Constitution makes no issue of an individual right to vote - only forms the electoral college and leaves their selection up to the states to figure out. And, how it works out, you're not even voting for a presidential candidate - you're really voting for an elector who has pledged to cast an electoral vote for the candidate you want. And here's the kicker... there's absolutely nothing to stop that elector from changing his mind at any time and completely disregarding/invalidating your vote. And it's all legal, constitutional, and has precedent.

Uhmmmm....that's not true:

Ammendment 24
1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

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Edit: And I should point out that 3 (scratch that it's actually like 5 or 6) other ammendments refer to "The right of citizens to vote"

Necronic said:

Uhmmmm....that's not true:



Edit: And I should point out that 2 other ammendments refer to "The right of citizens to vote"

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More than 2, but you're misreading them. Here they are, gathered off Wikipedia:

In the United States, suffrage is determined by the separate states, not federally. There is no national "right to vote". The states and the people have changed the U.S. Constitution five times to disallow states from limiting suffrage, thereby expanding it.

• 15th Amendment (1870): no law may restrict any race from voting
• 19th Amendment (1920): no law may restrict any sex from voting
• 23rd Amendment (1961): residents of the District of Columbia can vote for the President and Vice-President
• 24th Amendment (1964): neither Congress nor the states may condition the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other type of tax
• 26th Amendment (1971): no law may restrict those 18 years of age or older from voting because of their age

Those are all talking about reasons you CAN'T use to disenfranchise someone, but it still doesn't mandate enfranchisement in the first place. But don't take my word for it, you can ask Michael C Dorf, Vice Dean and Professor of Law at Columbia University, who says we don't have one (but we need one). And if he's not enough, how about the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of George W. Bush, et al., Petitioners v. Albert Gore, Jr., et al. Take a look at Section II, Paragraph B. The very first sentence there reads: "The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College. U.S. Const., Art.II, §1."

Here's how wikipedia puts it (I know, bad to quote wikipedia but it's a good place to find summaries):

The "right to vote" is explicitly stated in the US Constitution in the above referenced amendments but only in reference to the fact that the franchise cannot be denied or abridged based solely on the aforementioned qualifications. In other words, the "right to vote" is perhaps better understood, in layman's terms, as only prohibiting certain forms of legal discrimination in establishing qualifications for suffrage. States may deny the "right to vote" for other reasons.

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Or in other words, as long as you're not being stopped from voting for any of the above reasons, you can be kept from voting for any other reason the states deem fit to use. Does that sound like a "right" to you?

However, by identifying places where it is illegal to remove the right to vote explicitly implies a pre-existing right to vote. You can't restrict something that doesn't exist. I think this is one of those rare places where the 9th ammendment comes in as well (although that may be a stretch).

Ed: Also, from your supreme court reference, you missed a part

The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College. U.S. Const., Art. II,

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Well, they did that. So the citizen has a federal constitutional right to vote for electors.

Necronic said:

However, by identifying places where it is illegal to remove the right to vote explicitly implies a pre-existing right to vote. You can't restrict something that doesn't exist. I think this is one of those rare places where the 9th ammendment comes in as well (although that may be a stretch).

Ed: Also, from your supreme court reference, you missed a part



Well, they did that. So the citizen has a federal constitutional right to vote for electors.

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And if a state chooses to undo/redo it's criteria for appointing members to the electoral college, what happens to that "right?" It goes away. Isn't that against the very definition of a "right?" Furthermore, as I said... if your "right" can be abridge for any reason that government feels like except a specific list of a half dozen reasons, how is it a right?.

From USconstitution.net:

The Constitution contains many phrases, clauses, and amendments detailing ways people cannot be denied the right to vote. You cannot deny the right to vote because of race or gender. Citizens of Washington DC can vote for President; 18-year-olds can vote; you can vote even if you fail to pay a poll tax. The Constitution also requires that anyone who can vote for the "most numerous branch" of their state legislature can vote for House members and Senate members.

Note that in all of this, though, the Constitution never explicitly ensures the right to vote, as it does the right to speech, for example. It does require that Representatives be chosen and Senators be elected by "the People," and who comprises "the People" has been expanded by the aforementioned amendments several times. Aside from these requirements, though, the qualifications for voters are left to the states. And as long as the qualifications do not conflict with anything in the Constitution, that right can be withheld. For example, in Texas, persons declared mentally incompetent and felons currently in prison or on probation are denied the right to vote. It is interesting to note that though the 26th Amendment requires that 18-year-olds must be able to vote, states can allow persons younger than 18 to vote, if they chose to.

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[DOUBLEPOST=1342109147][/DOUBLEPOST]Also, Jesse Jackson Jr. sure thought we don't have a constitutional right to vote... and it spurred him to propose an amendment.

I don't disagree that the state can abridge your right to vote. And really the argument of whether or not it is a fundamental right to be able to vote is a bit beside the point, because there is one place where it is explicity stated that it can't be abridged. In a poll tax. If the voter ID system costs money to vote ,it's a poll tax.

And I know you think that the 10-20$ that a voter ID is insignificant. But that's pretty much exactly the cost the old poll taxes were that started these things. Really the argument is "How is this NOT a poll tax?" It's the same amount of money. It disproportionately affects certain groups.

The thing is, based on your repeated statements, I think that you don't really have a problem with a poll tax. Which is a valid opinion.

Except that's it's unconstitutional.

Necronic said:

I don't disagree that the state can abridge your right to vote. And really the argument of whether or not it is a fundamental right to be able to vote is a bit beside the point, because there is one place where it is explicity stated that it can't be abridged. In a poll tax. If the voter ID system costs money to vote ,it's a poll tax.

And I know you think that the 10-20$ that a voter ID is insignificant. But that's pretty much exactly the cost the old poll taxes were that started these things. Really the argument is "How is this NOT a poll tax?" It's the same amount of money. It disproportionately affects certain groups.

The thing is, based on your repeated statements, I think that you don't really have a problem with a poll tax. Which is a valid opinion.

Except that's it's unconstitutional.

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So if we subsidized the $10 to get an ID, you'd have no objection to requiring a photo ID to vote?[DOUBLEPOST=1342109547][/DOUBLEPOST]Even that aside, there's got to be a limit here. The price of gas to go to the polls, the personal cost of having to take time off work to vote, all these things cost money and impact the poor more than the rich, but you have to do them to vote. Must a naked man be allowed to vote, because clothes cost money, so requiring him to buy clothes is a poll tax?

In response to your first quesion, if it's subsidized and free of charge/financial obstruction, Im totally cool with it.

Wrg to the second part, I agree. The constitution only specifically states that you can't have a poll tax though, a fee for votif. Your examples are a bit hyperbolic, but it may be an issue. Right now though you're creating a slippery slope. Let's deal with this issue and if someone says that it's unconstitutional for him to have to wear pants then we'll deal with that as well. The similarities between this poll taxes and voter IDs seem far more significant than those between voter IDs and violating public indecency laws.

...but you know, maybe they could solve that by just having "loaner pants/shirt". For when a naked guy shows up, like in a shamcy restaurant.

Now I'm really tempted now to show up half-naked this November.

Yep. I made sure to characterize my statements as opinion, not fact.

Because the fact is that there is a system, and there are people who game that system. The people who made it, the people who use it, and the people who continue to hold up the system's "strengths" all game it because they believe that this system gives them some sort of advantage, and so they all have no incentive to change it. It's like one big, political man-in-the-middle attack on the democratic process and I roll my eyes that it was ever allowed to make it into reality. I agree that it makes the election process easier, but its black-or-white, us-or-them, all-or-nothing auto-quantization of the popular vote always makes me feel like the democratic process got replaced by electoral vote slot machines. Each candidate pulls the lever in each State until one of them wins that State's jackpot, and then that's the end of it.

--Patrick

And don't get me wrong. It IS kind of stupid to be worried about 20$ when you are required to take the day off and drive there, the price of the former is generally insignifant to the latter. But...It's what the constitution says. I think it's dumb. I think it's poorly thought out with many unintended consequences. But it is what it is.

PatrThom said:

Yep. I made sure to characterize my statements as opinion, not fact.

Because the fact is that there is a system, and there are people who game that system. The people who made it, the people who use it, and the people who continue to hold up the system's "strengths" all game it because they believe that this system gives them some sort of advantage, and so they all have no incentive to change it. It's like one big, political man-in-the-middle attack on the democratic process and I roll my eyes that it was ever allowed to make it into reality. I agree that it makes the election process easier, but its black-or-white, us-or-them, all-or-nothing auto-quantization of the popular vote always makes me feel like the democratic process got replaced by electoral vote slot machines. Each candidate pulls the lever in each State until one of them wins that State's jackpot, and then that's the end of it.

--Patrick

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If I could make one tweak to the current system it would be to get rid of the all or nothing electoral votes. The states should award an electoral vote to the candidate that wins the corresponding district, with the remaining 2 going to the winner of the state.

Covar said:

If I could make one tweak to the current system it would be to get rid of the all or nothing electoral votes. The states should award an electoral vote to the candidate that wins the corresponding district, with the remaining 2 going to the winner of the state.

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Some states do proportionally allocate electors. It ensures no national candidate gives a crap about focusing on their state. Unfortunately, that's the way it is.

Why not bring back literacy tests. Where they had to read a sentence aloud before the could vote. The sentence for blacks was normally...

"If you vote today, you are going to die nigger."

Now just update it for Hispanics and the conservatives will be back in business.

wow, auto-edit is stupid.

GasBandit said:

Some states do proportionally allocate electors. It ensures no national candidate gives a crap about focusing on their state. Unfortunately, that's the way it is.

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You're telling me that it would result in less campaigning in my State?

Covar said:

You're telling me that it would result in less campaigning in my State?

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More like it would result in your state carrying less influence in all politics national. You'll still get national advertising, just no personal appearances and no consideration once the election is over.

GasBandit said:

More like it would result in your state carrying less influence in all politics national. You'll still get national advertising, just no personal appearances and no consideration once the election is over.

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I'm in North Carolina, we're too schizophrenic to receive consideration after elections anyway. But yea, this would be a system that is ideally implemented across all 50 states (ha!).

So the USDOJ completely botched it's court case against the Texas Voter ID law. Might want to dig a little deeper than wikipedia next time, guys.

Was looking around trying to find a better source than that one since it's got some pretty serious statements in it and it's a pretty unknown source to me for it not to have references, and couldn't find one (probably will be able to in a couple of hours, news is pretty recent), but I ran across this article which is fascinating. Basically it is stating that the VoterID issue itself isn't that serious (for either side). The important issue at stake here is that if this ends up going to the SCOTUS the court is very likely going to strike down the VRA (the law that gives the DOJ the right to look at this issue), which will not only give Texas the VoterID ability, but will also roll back close to 60 years of voting rights issues that have been dealt with under "Section 5" (the same way that the VoterID issue is being managed).

Not sure how I feel about this. It's quite strange to be honest.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/16885...-its-decades-long-fight-against-voting-rights

(I know, this is a pretty leftist newspaper but it's an interesting read. Doesn't really talk abut the chances for the DOJ to win, which probably implies that the DOJ is getting hammered as described in your link.)

Necronic said:

In response to your first quesion, if it's subsidized and free of charge/financial obstruction, Im totally cool with it.

Wrg to the second part, I agree. The constitution only specifically states that you can't have a poll tax though, a fee for votif. Your examples are a bit hyperbolic, but it may be an issue. Right now though you're creating a slippery slope. Let's deal with this issue and if someone says that it's unconstitutional for him to have to wear pants then we'll deal with that as well. The similarities between this poll taxes and voter IDs seem far more significant than those between voter IDs and violating public indecency laws.

...but you know, maybe they could solve that by just having "loaner pants/shirt". For when a naked guy shows up, like in a shamcy restaurant.

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The problem is, places like Ohio and the People's Republic of Scott Walkerstan (fka "Wisconsin") allow people to apply for free voting ID's... but put it in small print at DMV's and instruct the DMV clerks to charge people for the ID's unless they specifically state they want the free ID's. That is an attempt at abridging a person's right to vote based on making them feel like they HAVE to pay a "tax" to get a voter ID.

And then there's the little old ladies living on rural farms who have never had ID's because they've never had to do so - and they've been on the voter rolls for DECADES - and they can't vote because they can't get a voter ID because they don't have any other form of identification (like a birth certificate).

Or people who have outstanding traffic tickets that are afraid that getting the voter ID will get them arrested. I have problems with both of those. Voter IDs HAVE to be 100% hassle free to get. Which isn't hard. This is the part of the argument I don't get. The fact that there seems to be resistance against "hassle free" measures makes me think that the people in charge kind of DO want disenfranchisement.

Necronic said:

Or people who have outstanding traffic tickets that are afraid that getting the voter ID will get them arrested. I have problems with both of those. Voter IDs HAVE to be 100% hassle free to get. Which isn't hard. This is the part of the argument I don't get. The fact that there seems to be resistance against "hassle free" measures makes me think that the people in charge kind of DO want disenfranchisement.

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Well, let's do the bubble rule, and follow Obama's lead with health care reform. Require ID to vote. Make it illegal not to vote. Problem solved?

Also, if you're a-skeered of getting arrested over your parking tickets... take care of your damn parking tickets.

I can't help but think that if you have enough unpaid parking tickets to get yourself arrested it's your own damn fault, and a government ID to vote has no impact on that fact.

If you have THAT many unpaid parking tickets, there's always the absentee ballot...

--Patrick

I dunno why everyone went straight to parking tickets. It's easy to have a single speeding ticket.

It changes nothing. Either way it's a ridiculous argument.

Not really. If a state does not specifically state that a misdemeanor traffic violation precludes your right to vote then it shouldn't be doing that. Honestly, why in the world should a misdemeanor traffic violation keep you from voting? If I could be a police officer with it, I should be able to vote with it.

If there's a warrant out for your arrest, I highly doubt you'd be able to become a police officer. That's the extent of your argument.

Because if you're afraid of getting arrested for parking or speeding tickets one of 2 things is going on.

1. You're a dumbass who thinks you're going to get arrested because you have a few parking tickets you haven't paid.
2. You have a warrant out for your arrest in which case you have much bigger issues on your hands than voting.

Outstanding ticket does not mean warrant. Different things (and yes, a police officer can have an outstanding ticket, it does look bad if it's found though.) But it doesn't matter. The extent of my argument is that it makes ZERO sense for the two (outstanding ticket and voting) to be related. You know what makes more sense?

By that logic anyone who is delinquent on their taxes shouldn't be allowed to vote. It's far more serious of an offense.

I don't understand.... I've voted with outstanding speeding tickets.

Is it that you can't get a driving license with an outstanding speeding ticket? Wouldn't driving without a license be the more serious offense?

Necronic said:

By that logic anyone who is delinquent on their taxes shouldn't be allowed to vote. It's far more serious of an offense.

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... I could get behind that, I suppose, if there wasn't such a problem with the IRS being an agency of retribution.

Ravenpoe said:

I don't understand.... I've voted with outstanding speeding tickets.

Is it that you can't get a driving license with an outstanding speeding ticket? Wouldn't driving without a license be the more serious offense?

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The fear is that signing up for free voter IDs will be used as a "hunt you down" list for outstanding offenses.

Right. And this is already done for getting a drivers license.

The reason it bothers me is that it is

1) Competely arbitrary: It is not intentional, it is simply an unintended consequence of managing it through the DMV. If it was intentional, it might not bother me except for

2) It's randomly punitive for almost no reason. The fact is that as it stands pretty much everyone does something that can get them a ticket on any given day. Almost all of us speed (there is no '10 mile over' law), and there are a million other little things like that. Just because the police happen to ticket someone who is unable to afford the repayment of the ticket should not put them in the same category as a felon when the only difference between them and everyone else is that they were unlucky enough to get caught and unlucky enoug to not be able to pay it off. I'm not saying that they shouldn't pay their ticket, they absolutely should. But it should not be tied to their right to vote. There is ZERO reason to tie these things together whatsoever.

Ok, so... if you have outstanding traffic tickets, and you don't have a drivers license (in which case, that would explain at least some of the traffic tickets) it's not that you -can't- get a government ID, it's that by doing so, you're giving them your information where they can find you to enforce the tickets you have.

That doesn't seem so bad to me. They're not stopping you from voting, but if you want to be a part of the governmental process, then you need to be willing to be a part of the system.

As far as I can tell they WONT give you an ID, and in some cases they may arrest you on the spot.

But even if that's not the case, I still have a problem with the other part. It seems arbitrary and bound to affect certain groups far more than others. And don't say "criminals". It will affect lazy people. And lazy people deserve to vote too darnit.