Kinja reply list

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JarrodAllen23Hamilton Nolan
6/16/15 12:55pm
It’s fun to pretend that raising minimum wage to $15 won’t cause inflation. And is he serious about this statement:

“the fundamental law of capitalism is: when workers have more money, businesses have more customers, and need more workers”

That is a masterpiece of circular logic. Not only is that not a fundamental law of capitalism, it makes no sense on any level. He’s imagining that wealth creation occurs when wages are raised, which is ludicrous. If higher wages for everyone meant more customers for all businesses, doesn’t it follow that really high wages would mean even more customers. If every business started paying everyone $100K, all those workers would have so much money to spend every business would be wildly successful, right? Except there is only so much money. A business can only have work force that it can pay from its revenue. Business screw their employees on the lower end and I agree a minimum wage is necessary. But forcing businesses, especially small businesses, to pay a high minimum wage on the same revenue means they either have to raise prices of services and products to cover the increased cost of labor, which would drive inflation, or have fewer employees, driving unemployment. This isn’t really subject to dispute, regardless of how much he wants to dismiss it. He imagines that money is created out of thin air.

The merits of a minimum wage can be fairly debated but for the proponents of raising it, they better hope this guy isn’t the tip of the spear.
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  NicoJarrodAllen23
  6/16/15 1:25pm
  Or, you know, not give themselves million dollar bonuses every year.......... seems more beneficial to society.
  
  Don't get me wrong, people on top have every right to make more money, but when you make more in a year than you could possibly spend in a lifetime, it's time to invest in your damn business and employees.
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  JarrodAllen23Nico
  6/16/15 1:39pm
  Totally agree that executive compensation is totally fucked, but that’s not even close to the whole story. There are millions of small businesses that scrape to get by whose owners make a middle class income or less. You can’t just tell them to magically start paying a wage that the business can’t support. Something’s got to give.
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MaMaYoYoHamilton Nolan
6/16/15 12:34pm
Can someone breakdown his OT comments a bit? Is he saying Pres. Obama is about to announce some OT rule making more people eligible for OT at 40+ hours a week? Or is he saying it will be changed to something like 35+ hours? Or is he saying the opposite? “Raising the threshold” is confusing to me in this context.
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  Max LMaMaYoYo
  6/16/15 12:41pm
  I read it as the salary above which you are no longer eligible for OT is going to be raised. I’m not certain, but I read it as, if you make over $23,600 you aren’t required to be paid for your OT work, and Obama is going to raise that threshold to a number he doesn’t list. So hypothetically, if they raised that threshold to $30k, you’d get new OT pay to people who make less than $30k, but more than the current threshold which is $23,600. Again, not certain I read that right, but that makes sense to me.
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  LooseSasquatchMaMaYoYo
  6/16/15 12:41pm
  It sounds to me like he’s saying that they’re going to raise the threshold for workers eligible for OT, which I think means that if you were salaried and made say, $50k a year, you weren’t eligible for OT pay, but now they’re going to raise the threshold so that if you make $100k you’re eligible.
  
  Not sure if that’s correct, but that’s the gist that I got from reading it. . .
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under_electricliteHamilton Nolan
6/16/15 12:36pm
I think the idea that giant profitable corporations should pay their workers enough so that they don’t need food stamps—since when is that left wing?

Uh, FUCKING THIS!! Our discourse in this country has been remodeled and twisted into such knots to where this simple piece of fact is considered scandalous by the radical right.

We could travel back in time to the 50’s and ask people if profitable businesses should pay their workers enough to not be on assistance and they’d look at us cockeyed for having the temerity to think there was another option.
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  Hello_Madam_Presidentunder_electriclite
  6/16/15 12:45pm
  I know - working a solid week and supporting your family are supposed to be conservative ideals. Those “good old days” they like to talk about? Living wages for low level jobs, and the GI Bill, are solely responsible for the nuclear family. Right now we’re destroying our rising professionals with student loan debt, and making it so low income folks have little to no hope for higher education because they can’t work themselves through college.
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  KatyaBallzovHello_Madam_President
  6/16/15 2:43pm
  I can’t tell you how many times I have had to explain to oblivious Boomer relatives that no, these days you can’t just stumble out of high school, get married and have kids and support everybody on one income, and I don’t CHOOSE to work these insane hours (as they give me the side-eye for not going to every last school recital and having piping-hot meals with the entire family every night around the table). And houses aren’t ridiculously cheap, and you have to monitor your kid’s education like a hawk because the public school system has been gutted. They have NO IDEA how easy it was - the road was paved for them. They thanked future generations by ignoring the potholes, and now we get to deal.
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ThereIsASeasonTurnTurnTurnHamilton Nolan
6/16/15 12:26pm
Show me an example of where high wages drove down employment.

Europe would like to show you how that works. The textile manufacturing towns of Scandinavia, Britain, then Spain, Portugal and many, many more ceded their industries to cheaper places. I’m sure you can find that in the US.
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  weirwoodtreehugger3ThereIsASeasonTurnTurnTurn
  6/16/15 1:09pm
  Norway has really low unemployment.
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  ThereIsASeasonTurnTurnTurnweirwoodtreehugger3
  6/16/15 1:11pm
  Norway has a booming resource based economy. Way to compare Bah-FUCKING-rain and the rest of the OECD.
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Medieval KnievelHamilton Nolan
6/16/15 12:29pm
This guy’s full of shit. You could pay me $1,000 an hour, and I’m still not going to the gym or the yoga studio.
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  Hi, it's me AGAIN?Medieval Knievel
  6/16/15 12:31pm
  Yeah, but you’ll pay for the membership and delude yourself into thinking you’ll go.
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  Slow MutantHi, it's me AGAIN?
  6/16/15 12:33pm
  That’s the most American thing every said on this site.
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flamingolingoHamilton Nolan
6/16/15 12:35pm
It’s ridiculous to think that people won’t want to create those gains if the tax rate’s a little bit higher. Of course they will. In fact they’ll want to work harder to get it, because they get to keep less of it.

Yep. The relatively higher taxes of the post-WWII era never deterred people from pursuing wealth or engaging in innovation or investing in their businesses.

Trickle-down theory was a lie dreamed up by greedy plutocrats and sold to ordinary Americans by rightwing economists as a way of supposedly creating greater wealth for everyone. In reality, the only time the middle class grew in a healthy way was when the federal government invested in it via things like the GI Bills and investments in infrastructure and education.

Throw in the choice of political elites to allow selective globalization (e.g. policies that protected high income professionals like doctors but not manufacturing jobs) and the result is what we’re seeing today: the shrinking of the middle class and less class mobility.
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  kyngfishflamingolingo
  6/16/15 12:44pm
  Yes yes yes. I can't tell you the number of times my conservative friends tell me about how their granddad worked his ass off in a minimum wage job and still bought two houses and started a business. I wonder if people understand the labor and economic environment people had in the 50s and 60s
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  flamingolingokyngfish
  6/16/15 2:35pm
  Exactly. I don’t think many people are aware of the fact that if minimum wage, for example, had kept pace with inflation, it would be around $20 an hour. And that it is more common for contemporary low-wage workers to be on call for last-minute and short shifts, which makes holding 2 jobs pretty much impossible.
  
  People are trying to better themselves, but the system is more interested in ensuring (certain kinds of) labor is as cheap as possible.
  
  Are doctors and lawyers and bankers today making much less in real terms than their equivalents back in the 1950s and ‘60s? Of course not—immigration laws make it far more difficult to import highly educated/trained professionals from abroad, but “free trade” policies make it easy to export industrial and manufacturing jobs overseas. That’s why the argument that technology and globalization inevitably led to a wage squeeze is so ridiculous. It’s only happening to certain people.
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the johnHamilton Nolan
6/16/15 12:26pm
Your state legislature is held hostage by the same nitwits that hold hostage the federal [government]. People who have confused suffocating collectivism, which is bad, for a necessity to solve collective action problems, which is what all human endeavor is based on.

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FlamingTelepathHamilton Nolan
6/16/15 1:21pm
“I think the idea that giant profitable corporations should pay their workers enough so that they don’t need food stamps—since when is that left wing? How did that become “leftie?” That doesn’t seem leftie to me.”

That’s a pretty standard “leftie” position, Nick.

It also happens to be the correct, common sense, and fair position. I love that Nick Hanauer is speaking out about this stuff as a billionaire, but at the same time I hate when you get guys like this who are afraid to just admit they espouse a left-leaning idea, and feel the need to qualify it this way. Rightist economic policy clearly hasn’t been working for the majority of people and its 30- to 40-year record of failure is quite clear. It’s well past time to start pushing the other way, so let’s own it. There are a few other left-leaning positions we need to create momentum on, in health care, environment and election reform, so don’t espouse a left-leaning position while backhandedly implying it’s ‘crazy’ or ‘wrong’.
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  m9105826FlamingTelepath
  6/16/15 1:53pm
  That’s really not a left-leaning view though. In a sane mind, that would be such a non-committal statement that it’s almost silly. That would be like saying “People need air to live” or “The sky sure is blue today!” in terms of shock value in ANY other first world country. For some reason, in the US, it’s leftist nonsense. Like he said... he hasn’t moved left, the US has moved sharply right.
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  FlamingTelepathm9105826
  6/16/15 3:33pm
  You’re doing it too. Just because it happens to be sane and correct, people can’t seem to call it what it is because the idea that something is “left” has been so demonized.
  
  It is absolutely a left-wing view. AND THAT’S OKAY. The right wing view is to say fuck them, pay them as little as you can and profit as much as you can. The left wing view is to say, wait a minute, lets even the playing field here a bit so the worker gets more of the value he or she is creating.
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whiplashhHamilton Nolan
6/16/15 1:09pm
Personally, I believe that a vast majority of minimum wage earners don’t deserve $15 per hour. There, I said it.
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  Nicowhiplashh
  6/16/15 1:45pm
  Personally, I’d rather companies pay a minimum wage that people can survive on so our tax dollars don’t subsidize their pay. I don’t care what the fuck anyone deserves, this is a wealthy ass nation and if you work full time you shouldn’t need government assistance. You like mcodnald’s enough to decide that we’ll all pay their employees wages so they don’t have to?
  
  You think the Walton’s kids deserve 3bil/year?
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  whiplashhNico
  6/16/15 2:06pm
  Nope, and most don’t deserve that gov’t check either. It’s a fucked up system, but they don’t deserve $15. Give them $10-12 and see what happens, fuck 15.
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CaptainButtersHamilton Nolan
6/16/15 12:27pm
Best case scenario, he avoids the guillotine. Worst case scenario, he’s the last one on the guillotine.
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  Slow MutantCaptainButters
  6/16/15 12:36pm
  This is the stuff that bothers me. If you are a Billionaire (or millionaire, or you just have large sums of cash) and you care about keeping your money to the detriment of your fellow man, you’re an asshole. If you do not have as much money as you think you should have, and you believe that violence is the way you should get it, you are also an asshole. There’s assholes on both sides of the table. (not saying you think this way. Your comment actually reads to me as if you completely agree with me and are mocking the others.)
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  CaptainButtersSlow Mutant
  6/16/15 12:49pm
  Yes and no. My comment is mainly just a observation of our economic equality as compared to the French Revolution. If I was a billionaire I’d probably play the fence like Nick here where you scream the pitch forks are coming all the while seeing the success of your pitchfork selling business. In truth we will never be like the French revolt (due to the fact that we know better, I hope) but I hear his statement as if he’d be the first person to say I told you so while checking up 0n this Cayman Island bank account from his Gulf Stream.
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