quote:Originally posted by Dogbreath: I wonder if in 10 years or so after the political fallout from the ACA implementation blows over if this might be the next major domestic issue being debated. With inequality levels rising at a steady rate since the end of the 90s, effectively ending abject poverty via a GMI might be necessary (or at least prudent and beneficial) to maintain social and economic stability.
Other than the effects you mention I'd be curious about the effects it would have on drug use, theft, and murder rates as well as incarceration rates. These seem to be tied to desperate and impoverished people.
I'm actually worrried more about the bureaucratic overhead. As you mentioned, it's entirely possible to merge social security and disability payments into a GMI and reduce paperwork and accounting to a point where it might actually save us money. In practice, though, getting the government to cut bureaucracy (even when it's logical, expedient, and easy to do) is like pulling teeth, while they're frighteningly good at creating new bureaucracy. I've met and worked with a good deal of GS's, and there's been more than one occassion where I've noticed someone held a job that was completely redundant, but stayed in it because terminating the position was more trouble than it's worth.
One thing I'd like to mention is that the Republicans have already succeeded in taking some whacks at the ACA, so in "ten years" we might very well see it "discredited" because it was successfully sabotaged.
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quote:An interesting idea I saw proposed recently is to modify the EITC to essentially turn it into a guaranteed living wage. It would pay out monthly rather than yearly, and basically "cover" the gap between what you make and whatever the living wage is. I.e, if you're making the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hour) and working full time, and the "living" wage is $25,000/year single (or $50,000/year for married without children. Each child would raise that number), then you'll receive a check for $833 every month to cover the $10,000 wage gap.
Another requirement would be that you work at least 30 hours a week, and I think the same age and tax stipulations that apply to insurance should also apply here: you have to be 26 or older or married and you can't be filed as a dependent on someone else's tax return. The disability system would remain in place for disabled persons, and the welfare program/unemployment would remain for those unemployed. I think there should also be some additional provisions for parents: if you're the primary care giver for children 5 and under, that should count as your full time job. If they're between 6 and 12, you should only have to work part time. (20 hours/week)
I'm not a fan of the work requirements. I love your exception for stay at home parents. That's one of the biggest problems with our current welfare system as far as cash payments go. Daycare is just too expensive.
Now, previously a person might say "well, working at McDonalds for minimum wage just isn't worth it." With the boost of a guaranteed minimum income, working ANY job is worth it because you get a huge extra payout.
But, simply put, there aren't enough jobs out there. If we announced this tomorrow, I guarantee every job in America that COULD be filled, would be filled, by which I mean, if a job goes unfilled, it's not for lack of applicants. If you demand that people work essentially fully time to get their benefits, you'll still have millions who can't find a job. Maybe the numbers would shift someone as millions of parents drop out of the workfore to stay home with their kids, but I suspect many would still be left out in the cold.
quote:Not that I think this idea would have a snowball's chance in hell of passing in the current congress (despite, I think, being proposed by a Republican congressman
Marco Rubio has a plan that's somewhat similar to this. I don't remember all the details, but it's a plan that, on the face of it, no one would be able to guess comes from an avowed conservative Republican.
quote:I wonder if in 10 years or so after the political fallout from the ACA implementation blows over if this might be the next major domestic issue being debated. With inequality levels rising at a steady rate since the end of the 90s, effectively ending abject poverty via a GMI might be necessary (or at least prudent and beneficial) to maintain social and economic stability.
Other than the effects you mention I'd be curious about the effects it would have on drug use, theft, and murder rates as well as incarceration rates. These seem to be tied to desperate and impoverished people.
Without some sort of catalyst, I don't think 10 years is enough. 2016 might shape up to be a year we have a serious talk about poverty, the type of conversation no one has really even tried to have since 2004 when John Edwards' "Two Americas" campaign. When he torpedoed his political career, he torpedoed poverty as a campaign issue for a decade. We're talking about it more now, and even Republicans have had to fold it into their discussions. But the sort of wholesale change that would be required to really, REALLY tackle poverty would require a shift in American priorities and politics like we haven't seen in a generation.
The last time we made that sort of national effort to SOLVE rather than PATCH poverty was Johnson's "Great Society." Most people remember it as a failure, but the truth is that it actually worked while the funding was there. When Nixon killed Great Society funding for urban relief programs, school performance dropped, poverty went back up, housing collapsed, etc. Where would we be now if we had 50 years of Great Society work fully funded? Probably in a much better place.
I suspect that if we did something like a GMI, drug use, theft, murder rates, and lots of other crime statistics would go into free fall over a decade. We'd still need to change a few other key laws, since most of America's prison population is for drug offenses, and of those drug offenses, most are for weed. But I think we're headed in that direction generally anyway.
quote:I'm actually worrried more about the bureaucratic overhead. As you mentioned, it's entirely possible to merge social security and disability payments into a GMI and reduce paperwork and accounting to a point where it might actually save us money. In practice, though, getting the government to cut bureaucracy (even when it's logical, expedient, and easy to do) is like pulling teeth, while they're frighteningly good at creating new bureaucracy. I've met and worked with a good deal of GS's, and there's been more than one occassion where I've noticed someone held a job that was completely redundant, but stayed in it because terminating the position was more trouble than it's worth.
I don't see why you couldn't just eliminate the bureaucracy for most of those programs. Food stamps, disability, etc all require a lot of man hours because applicants have to navigate a large set of requirements. How much do you make, what are your bills, let me see your medical records, let me get a consult, etc etc. If, by and large, that was simply reduced to "I don't need you to submit anything, I'll just have the IRS send us records of every AGI below X for Y dependents and we'll send them the right amount of money" then the system could almost be entirely automated.
Right now the amount of paperwork poor people have to do to get aid is very, very high. Ideally with a GMI system, most of that would be eliminated. I feel like that's one of the problems Republicans would have with it. They spend an awful lot of time worrying over whether or not aid recipients are "worthy" of aid. You have to fit a certain moral profile to be considered worthy, you have to be destitute enough, etc. Anything that smacks of a handout without all those hoops, even if it helps more, even if it costs less, will rub them the wrong way.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Now, previously a person might say "well, working at McDonalds for minimum wage just isn't worth it." With the boost of a guaranteed minimum income, working ANY job is worth it because you get a huge extra payout.
But, simply put, there aren't enough jobs out there. If we announced this tomorrow, I guarantee every job in America that COULD be filled, would be filled, by which I mean, if a job goes unfilled, it's not for lack of applicants. If you demand that people work essentially fully time to get their benefits, you'll still have millions who can't find a job. Maybe the numbers would shift someone as millions of parents drop out of the workforce to stay home with their kids, but I suspect many would still be left out in the cold.
You know, I wonder if this is something that has been studied in depth? Contrasting number of open job positions vs. the number of unemployed? Like I was about to disagree with you because I believe there are in fact enough jobs for everyone, and then realized I have absolutely no solid evidence that that is true.
It did make me contemplate for a while why there are so many job openings that go unfilled while there are also so many desperately poor unemployed people. Besides the obvious factors (education or experience don't satisfy the employers expectations, etc.) I think location, transportation and social stratification may play a significant part.
Many years ago I worked a brief stint as a manager at a coffee shop that paid it's employees $8.50/hr. We were constantly understaffed and rather desperate for employees, but the most of the applicants I ever got were high school kids, who are notoriously unreliable. They would work a few months and get bored and quit, or stop showing up, so life at said coffee shop really sucked because we just couldn't seem to keep anyone.
For a while I thought "wow! how is it possible that there are so many unemployed adults in this city, yet I can't get any of them to come work here?" Then I realized something:
The coffee shop was in a very affluent suburb - I myself drove 25 minutes every day to get to work. There were no bus stops near by, and the city I lived in had absolutely atrocious public transportation. If you were to try and get there from the "ghetto" it would take at least 2 hours of busses and walking if you didn't have a car. Which meant the only unemployed people willing to take the job who could *get* to the job were local high school kids... who didn't really need the job or the money in the first place, and mostly worked for the novelty or because their parents made them.
Which made me realize something else: the reason why quite a few (though to be fair certainly not all) Republicans hold this view that minimum wage jobs are for high school kids, or that there's plenty of jobs out there for people just willing to work, live in places where this is actually true. I certainly know a lot of business owners in the service industry in that area of town would constantly complain about how hard it was to hire enough staff, so I can see how growing up in that culture could warp your understanding of reality when it comes to these sorts of jobs.
Meanwhile, in the "ghetto", there were comparatively very few service industry jobs within a reasonable distance because nobody with the money to frequent those sorts of establishments went anywhere near it. Most of those neighborhoods (I lived in one for a while) would have a gas station, a CVS, and maybe a fast food restaurant - as opposed to areas in the suburb with similar population levels with whole strip malls full of various restaurants, coffee shops, boutiques, clothing stores, computer stores, etc. etc. etc.
The best solution to this problem would be a mix of better public transportation, as well as a reversing the trend and dismantling of the stratification in place - i.e, having wealthy neighborhoods next to poor ones, and communities full of people of vastly different levels of prosperity. Of course the main thing keeping this from happening is I think concerns about security and violence, which would be greatly lessened by the drop in crime caused by implementing a GMI... and it turns into a catch-22 type situation. I'm not sure if there's any remotely simple solution, though yours may be the *best* one so far.
quote:Marco Rubio has a plan that's somewhat similar to this. I don't remember all the details, but it's a plan that, on the face of it, no one would be able to guess comes from an avowed conservative Republican.
As someone who has been friends with a Republican politician for a very long time and is nominally a Republican (in the same way OSC is a Democrat, which is to say, barely at all), I can tell you the Republican Party is far more diverse and in some cases intelligent about subjects like this than you may think, especially when you get into the state level. Of course, I think the GOP party line is currently so schizophrenically, disingenuously absurd that I couldn't in good conscience bring myself to *vote* for them, mind you, but I think it used to be a great political party and hope it dies a quick death before making things even worse.
quote:I don't see why you couldn't just eliminate the bureaucracy for most of those programs. Food stamps, disability, etc all require a lot of man hours because applicants have to navigate a large set of requirements. How much do you make, what are your bills, let me see your medical records, let me get a consult, etc etc. If, by and large, that was simply reduced to "I don't need you to submit anything, I'll just have the IRS send us records of every AGI below X for Y dependents and we'll send them the right amount of money" then the system could almost be entirely automated.
Right now the amount of paperwork poor people have to do to get aid is very, very high. Ideally with a GMI system, most of that would be eliminated. I feel like that's one of the problems Republicans would have with it. They spend an awful lot of time worrying over whether or not aid recipients are "worthy" of aid. You have to fit a certain moral profile to be considered worthy, you have to be destitute enough, etc. Anything that smacks of a handout without all those hoops, even if it helps more, even if it costs less, will rub them the wrong way.
Yes, this is the crux of the problem which is why I think reducing the bureaucracy might be incredibly difficult here. The Republican Party (and perhaps some Dems too) has decided that moral policing is paramount in these matters, so you'll see absurd amounts of time and resources being spent finding out if someone *deserves* a handout when, as you said, it would cost a lot less to simply *give* the handout and let the IRS determine how much. (Thus the EITC idea) The fact these grave moral concerns about money are coming from a party that simultaneously bills itself as the party of practical, pragmatic and amoral economics, the party of "it's not our place to say whether a corporate CEO deserves $50 million a year while the majority of his employees are below the poverty line, if he can demand that sort of salary he should have it", is incredibly frustrating to me.
And yet I somehow feel that an overhaul of our incredibly broken and bloated social welfare programs into a simplified consolidated system as discussed - despite being the more practical, cost effective, and pragmatic approach to the issue - would realistically never happen, for reasons listed above, as well as because these bureaucracies are powerful forces in their own right and there are a lot of people working within them that would fight to delay the change tooth and nail for as long as possible. Perhaps I'm simply being too pessimistic.
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posted
A guaranteed minimum income would be just absolutely amazing and do wonders for the country but it's so completely implausible politically that you might as well write it off as a never gonna happen thing. You also couldn't trust the system to be managed very well for at least a decade, or possibly indefinitely, given our clowns in legislature.
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posted
So...the newly rich jerks db was refering to that burn through their hefty income for the appearance of excessivness but are often heavily in debt...are pumping cash into the economy with their bone headed over spending?
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: So...the newly rich jerks db was refering to that burn through their hefty income for the appearance of excessivness but are often heavily in debt...are pumping cash into the economy with their bone headed over spending?
Oh, I'm not sure competitive acquisition, hyper-consumerism and the financing large amounts of debt with the ever-looming threats of default, bankruptcy and foreclosure are *good* for our economy or lead to a very stable and happy population, but yes, they pump cash into it at any rate.
In the "trickle up" economy we live in where increasingly large amounts of wealth end up in the pockets of fewer people, there's something to be said for being ethical with your consumption. And as annoying as they are, I think the fact that a growing trend amongst yuppies nowadays is competition based on which small mom-and-pop organic fair-trade conflict free vegan holistic homeopathic fix-geared privilege-aware shop they bought their acquisitions from (and how small and not corporate said shop is) is a positive trend, though possibly an irrelevant one in the grand scheme of things.
I'm curious as to why said people are "jerks".
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posted
In previous discussions we were referring to embezzling hedge fund managers & MDs who pulling in millions & pay their most valued employees peanuts.
I dived my wife's raises by her years at that job...four cents a month.
Three new BMWs in seven years.
Jerk is putting it lightly.
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posted
How many employees do you think hedge fund managers have, SW? How much do you think a MD makes? I referred to CEOs and employees, but I don't think a CEO pays his most valued employees peanuts...
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quote:You know, I wonder if this is something that has been studied in depth? Contrasting number of open job positions vs. the number of unemployed? Like I was about to disagree with you because I believe there are in fact enough jobs for everyone, and then realized I have absolutely no solid evidence that that is true.
It did make me contemplate for a while why there are so many job openings that go unfilled while there are also so many desperately poor unemployed people. Besides the obvious factors (education or experience don't satisfy the employers expectations, etc.) I think location, transportation and social stratification may play a significant part.
Something else to consider is I don't think the US has EVER had 0% unemployment. Economists actually consider Full Employment to be somewhere between 3 and 5% unemployment. Think of not just the current unemployment rate but also the work force participation rate. We're currently at the lowest labor force participation rate in decades, and as people return to the work force by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, the unemployment rate will either stay static or go up for a couple of years. Now, if the LFPR actually returns to something like a historical norm, we'll need millions of jobs. To get to 0% unemployment? Millions and millions more.
There simply aren't that many jobs that people - especially a massive number of undereducated people - can easily fill. You'd have to pair these work requirements with a massive worker training program (not a bad idea anyway), and you'd still have a lot who couldn't find a job of any sort.
quote:Many years ago I worked a brief stint as a manager at a coffee shop that paid it's employees $8.50/hr. We were constantly understaffed and rather desperate for employees, but the most of the applicants I ever got were high school kids, who are notoriously unreliable. They would work a few months and get bored and quit, or stop showing up, so life at said coffee shop really sucked because we just couldn't seem to keep anyone.
For a while I thought "wow! how is it possible that there are so many unemployed adults in this city, yet I can't get any of them to come work here?" Then I realized something:
The coffee shop was in a very affluent suburb - I myself drove 25 minutes every day to get to work. There were no bus stops near by, and the city I lived in had absolutely atrocious public transportation. If you were to try and get there from the "ghetto" it would take at least 2 hours of busses and walking if you didn't have a car. Which meant the only unemployed people willing to take the job who could *get* to the job were local high school kids... who didn't really need the job or the money in the first place, and mostly worked for the novelty or because their parents made them.
Yeah. There was a big story here recently about how a 54 year old man walked 21 miles EVERY DAY to get to work and back. He had to walk from downtown Detroit all the way up to Rochester Hills, which is crazy. He took the bus for a small chunk of it, but there were huge gaps where he'd walk for miles. He didn't get home until almost midnight every night, and had to leave at like 4am to get there. And he was never late for years. The problem was that most of the cities between his job and his house didn't have buses. So he had to walk for miles to get to the next bus system. It's a mess around here.
And it's still an improvement over how it used to be. There are some famous cases, especially in Northern suburbs, of how architects and city planners actually engineered neighborhoods to keep the poors and blacks out. There's a mall in New Jersey that actually engineered all the freeway overpasses nearby to make it impossible for buses to approach the mall, so black people couldn't get to it, even though all the workers at the mall were black. Luckily, now we just screw them via apathy rather than intentional racism. Nice!
quote:As someone who has been friends with a Republican politician for a very long time and is nominally a Republican (in the same way OSC is a Democrat, which is to say, barely at all), I can tell you the Republican Party is far more diverse and in some cases intelligent about subjects like this than you may think, especially when you get into the state level. Of course, I think the GOP party line is currently so schizophrenically, disingenuously absurd that I couldn't in good conscience bring myself to *vote* for them, mind you, but I think it used to be a great political party and hope it dies a quick death before making things even worse.
I believe it's possible. I know plenty of decent Republicans. But it's not my experience with state or local politics. Most everything that would really, quickly, help poor people in need is something that's opposed by the Republican zeitgeist, which is an incredibly powerful force of nature right now.
quote:Yes, this is the crux of the problem which is why I think reducing the bureaucracy might be incredibly difficult here. The Republican Party (and perhaps some Dems too) has decided that moral policing is paramount in these matters, so you'll see absurd amounts of time and resources being spent finding out if someone *deserves* a handout when, as you said, it would cost a lot less to simply *give* the handout and let the IRS determine how much. (Thus the EITC idea) The fact these grave moral concerns about money are coming from a party that simultaneously bills itself as the party of practical, pragmatic and amoral economics, the party of "it's not our place to say whether a corporate CEO deserves $50 million a year while the majority of his employees are below the poverty line, if he can demand that sort of salary he should have it", is incredibly frustrating to me
I feel like the Rand Paul types actually could move the narrative on this. If the fiscal pragmatist wing of the party can shout down the moralizing bloviators, there's an alliance to be had that might actually help people AND save money.
quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: In previous discussions we were referring to embezzling hedge fund managers & MDs who pulling in millions & pay their most valued employees peanuts.
I dived my wife's raises by her years at that job...four cents a month.
Three new BMWs in seven years.
Jerk is putting it lightly.
The previous question aside - along with the fact you seem unsure what a hedge fund is or that how a hedge fund manager makes his money and the vast difference between that and how a MD makes money, or the fact that you seem to overestimate how much money a MD makes by about a factor of ten - I want to get down to the jerk idea.
Do you think he was underpaying your wife relative to the salaries of other administrative assistants in the area? Or that he should have paid her a lot more out of the kindness of his heart? Do you know how much he gave to charity? (Doctors are known to be among the most generous donors (has to do with typically being more empathetic than most people) - this along with their tendency to spend excessively means that they usually have a lot less wealth than their income would suggest)
Or, to put it another way, you and I and everyone else posting in this thread live at a standard of living - with all the security, nutrition, luxury and leisure time, entertainment, education, clothing, etc. - that a large percentage of the world's population can only dream of. Does that make us jerks?
I could move my wife and I into a tent on the beach and live off of Ramen Noodles cooked in my Jetboil, and literally feed a small village in Africa with the exorbitant amount of money we currently use to rent our tiny house. We haven't, though. Does that make us jerks?
I don't think a sense of anger at everyone more prosperous than you is really productive or healthy - it could be applied towards you just as easily by the billions of people at a standard of living lower than yours. The goal shouldn't be to bring everyone else down to your standard of living (which is an arbitrary mark), but to bring people *up* to a certain standard of living. Does this require a flattening out of the top 5% or so - higher capital gains taxes, salary caps for CEOs, better trade regulation, illegalization of exploitative lending practices - to achieve? Absolutely. Does it require pitchforks and torches against the "jerks" lucky enough to make more money than you do? Nope.
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Something else to consider is I don't think the US has EVER had 0% unemployment. Economists actually consider Full Employment to be somewhere between 3 and 5% unemployment. Think of not just the current unemployment rate but also the work force participation rate. We're currently at the lowest labor force participation rate in decades, and as people return to the work force by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, the unemployment rate will either stay static or go up for a couple of years. Now, if the LFPR actually returns to something like a historical norm, we'll need millions of jobs. To get to 0% unemployment? Millions and millions more.
I should state upfront that this isn't a subject I'm at all an expert at (indeed, I have been educating myself as this conversation progresses), so take what I have to say with a grain of salt.
But I think the lowering LFPR is something of a statistical anomaly that can be explained by several factors. I.e, it's obvious that it's decreased across the board since the late 90s/early 2000s (when the economy was very strong), but people who bemoan how it's been dropping since the 70s aren't considering the larger picture.
If you look at the graph I linked, among people 25-54 it's actually about 15% higher than the 1950s, and was 20% higher at the peak around 85% in 2000. (which we will hopefully return to over the next few years) I also think that part of the drop over the past few years relates to the massive number of jobs cut by the military, and the number of veterans who are now back in college/trade school using their GI bill, preparing themselves for a different career.
On the other hand, even though the percentage of people 55 and older remaining in the workforce has started to rise again, I don't think it's keeping pace with the rate our population is aging in sheer numbers.
Which isn't to say you aren't right - a change from 80% participation amoung people 25-55 to 100% would be millions and millions of people - but once you carve out primary caregivers for children (of which there are millions), disabled (physically or mentally), incarcerated, etc. from that number I'm not sure if the remainder is actually that significant.
quote:There simply aren't that many jobs that people - especially a massive number of undereducated people - can easily fill. You'd have to pair these work requirements with a massive worker training program (not a bad idea anyway), and you'd still have a lot who couldn't find a job of any sort.
What do you think of the recent talk of free community college? I think we've reached a point where it's now unreasonable (though not unheard of) to expect to advance, or even start, in any career field without some level of technical education.
quote:I feel like the Rand Paul types actually could move the narrative on this. If the fiscal pragmatist wing of the party can shout down the moralizing bloviators, there's an alliance to be had that might actually help people AND save money.
Maybe.
Hopefully. A fiscally conservative party that actually targeted the cause of so much government overspending - our massively bloated, inefficient, often redundant pork barrel mess of a bureaucracy - rather than targeting "handouts" and "welfare queens" which are, in the grand scheme, a small portion of that spending... we would be a lot better off politically.
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quote:If you look at the graph I linked, among people 25-54 it's actually about 15% higher than the 1950s
That's true, but, that's mostly because pre-1960s, the LFPR for women was 20-30%. It was considered socially unacceptable for a married woman to work in America until the 60s, and really until the 70s. They were considered selfish for taking up jobs that single women might need. Having a two-earner household was something you kept quiet in a lot of places.
When women started to really enter the labor force in large numbers, it spiked the overall LFPR starting in the early 60s before evening out in the 90s. Labor studies folks think that both the participation rate of men and women will probably be on a downward curve for decades, due to issues like old age and health problems, but also due to more men staying home with kids, or more men simply not being able to find jobs. But still, it's difficult to compare our LFPR to the 1950s and think we're in a good place just because it's better than that. I think the late 1970s is probably a better gauge.
I think you're largely right that when you carve out the exceptions, it's millions and millions of people. But still consider the unemployment rate. It has NEVER gotten to 0%, which means in America, there have, since we began counting, ALWAYS been people who want a job but don't have one.
There are also inflationary pressures to worry about when we reach 0% unemployment, but I don't pretend to understand what they are. I'm a labor historian, not an economist
quote:What do you think of the recent talk of free community college? I think we've reached a point where it's now unreasonable (though not unheard of) to expect to advance, or even start, in any career field without some level of technical education.
I think it's a good idea, but I think it's only HALF an idea. First off, free tuition is fantastic, and focusing on community colleges is a great idea. But for many people this will still be a luxury they can't afford. The very poor need to be able to pay all their living expenses and still GET to class, which can often by very very far away from where they actually live. So most will try to squeeze this in, somehow, between taking care of kids and working 40 hours a week. Free tuition suddenly doesn't sound like all that much to a lot of people.
The second problem I see is that it needs to take one more step, which is to foster apprenticeship programs between businesses and community colleges. Lots of companies are doing this. I know we do it at GM all over the country. Companies go to a school and say "we need X, Y, and Z but can't find anyone qualified." Then the school and company work together to agree on the training, the school trains them and they work at the company as a sort of ongoing internship with a guaranteed job when they graduate. Everyone wins.
Without that, you're going to get a lot of people who graduate with an Associate's Degree and no clue what to do with it. I graduated with two BAs and an almost MA and still found job hunting an exercise in futility for a year, because I never took the second step (well, in fairness to me, I DID take the second step, but then the economy shifted and my career path imploded while I was in school). So if we're going to focus on worker training and two-year degrees, awesome, but let's really dig in and make sure those degrees will lead to immediate jobs for people.
quote:Hopefully. A fiscally conservative party that actually targeted the cause of so much government overspending - our massively bloated, inefficient, often redundant pork barrel mess of a bureaucracy - rather than targeting "handouts" and "welfare queens" which are, in the grand scheme, a small portion of that spending... we would be a lot better off politically.
I don't have much hope. We're talking about the party who, at the state level, keeps passing drug testing requirements for welfare recipients, where they spend many times the amount they save just to out a tiny handful of people who test positive. This gets us back to that morality "deserving" issue we just talked about. The Right is going to have to stop demonizing poor people if they want to make headway on this issue. On the other hand, the Left could really do a better job at defending poor people. No one makes single white moms take a drug test before they can receive child tax credits on their returns or a gazillion other benefits people get from the government that never get politicized like food stamps.
posted
My wife was a nurse, not a secretary. And she was being under paid for her job and the area. In seven years, she got two, one dollar raises. Meanwhile she had access to the practice finances and knew exactly how much net profit there was.
I am not correcting you because I wish to discuss this with you any further, but instead to mention to be careful of your assumptions, as if you make too many it tends to derail conversations and piss people off.
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: My wife was a nurse, not a secretary. And she was being under paid for her job and the area. In seven years, she got two, one dollar raises. Meanwhile she had access to the practice finances and knew exactly how much net profit there was.
And she told you this doctor was "pulling in millions" of dollars net income? From salary.com the median salary for a family practice physician is $183,175/year, with the 90th percentile (top 10%) making $234,608/year. Plastic Reconstructive Surgeons, who are on average the highest paid type of doctor, make $347,688/year, with the 90th percentile outliers being $512,027/year. Somehow this doctor was able to make many times the salary of even the highest paid physicians. What exactly did he do?
quote:I am not correcting you because I wish to discuss this with you any further, but instead to mention to be careful of your assumptions, as if you make too many it tends to derail conversations and piss people off.
They were questions actually, not assumptions. The asking of a question implies a lack of information on a subject and a desire to be informed, which is more or less the opposite of an assumption. I'm curious as to why you think answering my questions is "correcting" me.
Also, I don't think getting "pissed off" is a common or reasonable response to being asked simple factual questions about claims being made. Especially when you make sweeping statements with rather startling or unusual claims, I don't think it's reasonable to expect people not to ask you to clarify your position.
But more to the point, I want to know your answer to why doctors (or even this particular doctor, though you earlier were pissed off at the entire top 2%) are jerks. Or whether or not almost everybody else is a jerk.
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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I attempted a line by line rebuttal, however my phone lacks the capabilities. Apparently precision text editing is one of the things smart phones just can't do.
Anyway. Let me sum up...you make WAY more assumptions than questions and all that hedge fund malarkey you mention (again) just how clearly the -fact- that I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground just comes off as condisention & snobbery.
Whatever. I know this is not leading to anything useful.
I ask you to respect that I am tapping out & leave it alone.
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: That's true, but, that's mostly because pre-1960s, the LFPR for women was 20-30%. It was considered socially unacceptable for a married woman to work in America until the 60s, and really until the 70s. They were considered selfish for taking up jobs that single women might need. Having a two-earner household was something you kept quiet in a lot of places.
When women started to really enter the labor force in large numbers, it spiked the overall LFPR starting in the early 60s before evening out in the 90s. Labor studies folks think that both the participation rate of men and women will probably be on a downward curve for decades, due to issues like old age and health problems, but also due to more men staying home with kids, or more men simply not being able to find jobs. But still, it's difficult to compare our LFPR to the 1950s and think we're in a good place just because it's better than that. I think the late 1970s is probably a better gauge.
I think you're largely right that when you carve out the exceptions, it's millions and millions of people. But still consider the unemployment rate. It has NEVER gotten to 0%, which means in America, there have, since we began counting, ALWAYS been people who want a job but don't have one.
There are also inflationary pressures to worry about when we reach 0% unemployment, but I don't pretend to understand what they are. I'm a labor historian, not an economist
The sudden increase of women in the workforce is indeed something I hadn't accounted for fully when interpreting the data. In any respect, I don't think we disagree too broadly on the means of implementation - I have no qualms with rolling unemployment (which conveniently is $2,000/month here) into this system and extending it more or less indefinitely, other than than the fact that unemployment is largely funded by state taxes and paid by employers and it might be tricky legally speaking.
On second thought though, a GMI would probably have to be partially funded by state taxes as well due to vastly different living expenses state-to-state. Which brings up a lot of interesting questions as far as how this money is to be raised - i.e, greatly increasing the "GMI tax" for employers who pay their employees under whatever the state GMI is would be an effective "soft" enforcement of a liveable minimum wage, as well as preventing employers from just dropping all their employees under the GMI level but above minimum wage down to minimum wage to take advantage of the GMI. (and a delightfully sneaky one too )
quote:I think it's a good idea, but I think it's only HALF an idea. First off, free tuition is fantastic, and focusing on community colleges is a great idea. But for many people this will still be a luxury they can't afford. The very poor need to be able to pay all their living expenses and still GET to class, which can often by very very far away from where they actually live. So most will try to squeeze this in, somehow, between taking care of kids and working 40 hours a week. Free tuition suddenly doesn't sound like all that much to a lot of people.
The second problem I see is that it needs to take one more step, which is to foster apprenticeship programs between businesses and community colleges. Lots of companies are doing this. I know we do it at GM all over the country. Companies go to a school and say "we need X, Y, and Z but can't find anyone qualified." Then the school and company work together to agree on the training, the school trains them and they work at the company as a sort of ongoing internship with a guaranteed job when they graduate. Everyone wins.
Actually, this is exactly how the relative I was talking about earlier got her job. The community college she attended had business partners for almost every associates program, and during her last semester hooked her up with an "externship" to a business. (which also counted as college credit) Both of them profited from this: the business got 5 months of free labor and got to screen a potential employee extremely thoroughly before making an offer, while she got job experience, college credit, something to throw on her resume and a job offer the day she graduated.
From my reading, this is actually an increasingly common trend among employers and community colleges (especially employers, who are saving buttloads on HR, advertisement, free labor, interviews, etc.), and seems to be the ideal way of transitioning people into those $15-$20/hr technical jobs with upward economic mobility.
Also, said relative was able to finish her degree mostly online, and only had to go into school one day a week (the day her husband wasn't working, conveniently enough) - I think they're doing a better job of helping low income people advance than you might imagine. (though I agree it's not *enough*)
quote:Without that, you're going to get a lot of people who graduate with an Associate's Degree and no clue what to do with it. I graduated with two BAs and an almost MA and still found job hunting an exercise in futility for a year, because I never took the second step (well, in fairness to me, I DID take the second step, but then the economy shifted and my career path imploded while I was in school). So if we're going to focus on worker training and two-year degrees, awesome, but let's really dig in and make sure those degrees will lead to immediate jobs for people.
Arguably (and this isn't meant to open a whole new can of worms, though it might) this is because traditional universities are somewhat behind the times, or simply aren't as interested in getting their alumni employed (I mean, they don't prioritize it), whereas a community college is all about employment and, IME any way, are much more effective at this and have a lot more in the way of employment services. I know that's probably confirmation bias, so don't take it too seriously. Also, the degree you got is more specialized and rarefied, which means it's probably somewhat harder to connect with a job right away. (and I also assume that once you finally got that job, the higher income you get makes up for the amount of time you were unemployed)
quote:HI don't have much hope. We're talking about the party who, at the state level, keeps passing drug testing requirements for welfare recipients, where they spend many times the amount they save just to out a tiny handful of people who test positive. This gets us back to that morality "deserving" issue we just talked about. The Right is going to have to stop demonizing poor people if they want to make headway on this issue. On the other hand, the Left could really do a better job at defending poor people. No one makes single white moms take a drug test before they can receive child tax credits on their returns or a gazillion other benefits people get from the government that never get politicized like food stamps.
It's more of a wistful hope than an expectation of reality. The older and wiser I get, the more dissatisfied with the American political system I become. Progress *is* being made though, and while we're seeing a lot of the ugly backlash and ignorance that follows in it's wake, I think we're going to continue forward. I don't know how interested my generation will be in maintaining the status quo once the majority of baby boomers die off. (20 or 30 years from now, or maybe more depending on how many of the diseases that seem to kill most people in their 80s are cured/mitigated in the next 20 years)
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: I attempted a line by line rebuttal, however my phone lacks the capabilities. Apparently precision text editing is one of the things smart phones just can't do.
Anyway. Let me sum up...you make WAY more assumptions than questions and all that hedge fund malarkey you mention (again) just how clearly the -fact- that I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground just comes off as condisention & snobbery.
Whatever. I know this is not leading to anything useful.
It's quite telling that your response to anyone questioning you after you making some rather preposterous statements is - rather than either clarifying/defending your position or admitting you were wrong - to accuse them of "condisention" and snobbery. I'm not convinced that that wouldn't be your go to response no matter how politely and inoffensively I worded my questions, so no, I don't buy it.
quote:I ask you to respect that I am tapping out & leave it alone.
*Shrugs* It's a public forum, you're welcome to post or not as you see fit. Again, though, it's not reasonable or polite to demand people not respond to your posts. It's not like I'm going to harass or berate you for choosing not to reply.
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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I'm very glad I no longer allow myself to throw a hissy fit, because I'd love to bitch slap you verbally. I used to spend a decent amount of time at it...line by line rebuttals, chalked full of little barbs. I was half way into writing one too.
Breathe. Calm.
Here goes...
I feel baited by you and the little snubs you have been pretty evenly distributed between whining about imaginary attacks and actal discussion.
So...I'm going to take a break from direct interactions with ya for a week or so and see if we can try again fresh. Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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If the conversation continues -- and it's fine by me either way -- I'll add to Dogbreath's note of MD salaries that typically 30-40% overhead comes out of that salary; i.e., is a percentage of "salary" never seen by the physician. I am in solo practice at a newly started up clinic, and my overhead is currently 60% of my salary.
In terms of what goes into my bank account, I make about the same per hour as my front desk staff person, and we each make about 1/2 per hour of what I pay my nurse.
Obviously, that will eventually change. (IhopeIhopeIhope ) But in assessing medical professional's income, it is vanishingly rare for overhead to be factored in. It should be, if you are interested in talking about income the physician actually sees show up in his or her bank account.
Posts: 831 | Registered: Jul 2005
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I was referring to the practice proffits. My wife worked for the largest cardiologist group in the county. She was the head MDs medical assistant. She gets very grumpy with me when I refer to her as a "nurse" as in her circles that conotates an RN or LVN, I.e. someone working under their own medical license. To be fair her MD is NOT a jerk. He always was encouraging to my wife's continued education as well as being very flexible as my wife had our children & then after had diminishing capacities as she became disabled. However. I am still upset that he allowed his evil, possibly embezzling office manager & the lazy good for nothing Supervisor MA make tuns of bucks while my wife, the apple of his eye mind you, single handedly supervised almost every aspect of the office for the same pay as the receptionist.
I might still be a bit emotional about it.
Anyway. I find it a jerky behavior to underpay employees. I find it deplorable in fact. It makes me quite angry.
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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If the conversation continues -- and it's fine by me either way -- I'll add to Dogbreath's note of MD salaries that typically 30-40% overhead comes out of that salary; i.e., is a percentage of "salary" never seen by the physician. I am in solo practice at a newly started up clinic, and my overhead is currently 60% of my salary.
In terms of what goes into my bank account, I make about the same per hour as my front desk staff person, and we each make about 1/2 per hour of what I pay my nurse.
Obviously, that will eventually change. (IhopeIhopeIhope ) But in assessing medical professional's income, it is vanishingly rare for overhead to be factored in. It should be, if you are interested in talking about income the physician actually sees show up in his or her bank account.
CT: In fact checking the stats I pulled from salary.com, I found some rather depressing information about family practices that I chose not to include for the sake of simplicity. (Not that it did me much good ) Apparently a 62% overhead is considered "typical", at least according to that article, which seems rather insane since that's coming from the doctor's supposed salary.
I have several friends who are doctors (two of whom are serving as missionaries atm) and had a medical student as a roommate for a while. (and am married to a woman who intends to pursue a doctorate in physical therapy, which isn't at all an MD but is somewhat related) After 10-12 years of poverty during school/residency and soul-numbingly difficult classes, one gets to look forward to working 60-80 hours a week while trying to pay down outrageous student loans and malpractice insurance. But if you manage to establish yourself and start a practice, pay off all your debt, and become somewhat affluent, (and these are all big ifs here) God forbid you reward yourself for all that hard work and dedication by buying yourself something nice. You jerk.
quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: I was referring to the practice proffits.
quote:To be fair her MD is NOT a jerk.
Then:
quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: In previous discussions we were referring to embezzling hedge fund managers & MDs who pulling in millions & pay their most valued employees peanuts.
I dived my wife's raises by her years at that job...four cents a month.
Three new BMWs in seven years.
Jerk is putting it lightly.
So the practice itself was the jerk, and was buying itself new BMWs? Orrrr? Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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P.S. That very short list of people who I would count on to disagree with gentleness that I referred to previously...among a few others, your name CT came to mind. Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Believe me, I understand that this topic brings up a tinderbox of issues. Like you, Stone Wolf, I cannot stand to see worker exploitation. (And thank you for your kind comment!)
quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: Anyway. I find it a jerky behavior to underpay employees. I find it deplorable in fact. It makes me quite angry.
If there's anything to take away from the majority of my posts in this thread (especially re: my discussion with Lyrhawn) it's that I too think this is a very bad, indeed deplorable situation, and it's one that really needs to be addressed by our society, and soon. I've outline a few of my (admittedly undereducated) ideas of how to do this as best as possible.
I think, however, it's extremely important to understand why things like this happen if you want to effect change in a meaningful and positive way. I don't think a generalized sense of rage towards the top 2% is helpful, nor do I think is anger directed at people who happen - by chance or diligence or thrift or timing - to have more material posessions than us is productive.
I have attempted for several days to explain to you, to the best of my own understanding, why this happens and why the torches and pitchforks as you put it may not be directed at the right people. I realize you just see this as me "baiting" you, and I find myself both frustrated and disappointed by this. Frustrated that you still assume hostility on my part (despite numerous attempts by several people and myself to tell you that it is simply not there), that you think I would seriously spend so much time writing all of this just to bait or provoke you (for some twisted mental game?), and that you feel the need to lash out violently and get so angry over having your beliefs questioned. Disappointed mostly in myself, for putting so much time into this and in the end failing to get through to you. I still don't understand this grudge of yours (which you reference to justify your dislike of me, yet accuse me of whining when I ask you what it is) but I would ask you to rethink your belief that I'm just trying to antagonise you.
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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You do yourself a major disfavor to exaggerate & over simplify this situation, both my supposed "rage" to your supposed lack of antagonism.
The truth is far greyer.
For my part I find you annoying, especially your repeated claims of my attacking you or holding a grudge.
The truth I annoy you and if you were to have even a modicum of perspective you would see it almost every single post addressed to me.
Wake up and smell the bullschite man.
My supposed grudge was based on me saying you were a hot head (like myself and MOST of the board)...and you hot headedly getting mad and demanding why I could -possibly- think that of you.
Get over it. I'm trying.
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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The part that makes me a tad bonkers is you have the cojenes to still be claiming that you only motivation is educating poor violent StoneWolf, and your frustration at "not getting through to me".
When I said...you know...he isn't a jerk actually, I'm emotional about this.
And far from taking a personal sense of satisfaction from finally, with all your patience & kindness & guidance getting through to me, you snark at me about the practice buying cars.
I'm not saying I'm a saint, you are saying you are. The truth is you are just another dog in the pit growling over bones...and just can't seem to see it.
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: I'm not saying I'm a saint, you are saying you are. The truth is you are just another dog in the pit growling over bones...and just can't seem to see it.
(The delicious irony of that post is that now, at this point you have finally reached the sort of snark and antagonism you've been accused of all this time, and even then I would be surprised if it had a fraction as much hostility as will certainly be read into it. Also, if attempts at dialogue were golf strokes it feels like you'd be in the triple digits by now.)
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Rakeesh: It's just meant to be funny actually - if you had posted something absurd I would've used it as a reply to you. I debated whether or not to post it in my head, but decided if he was ok with sam's comment that he'd probably see the humor in it.
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: I'm a bit confused...but happy that everyone seems cheerful! :-)
It's an expression of confusion (similar to sam's) over the bizarre metaphor you used and your rather baffling last 2 posts in general. I thought about asking you what the heck you were talking about, but then, realizing questions only seem to anger you more, decided on a humorous expression of confusion. (from a great movie, too)
If I were to guess, based on the quoted metaphor alone, we approach internet conversations with vastly different levels of levity and emotional investment, and perhaps aggression. I'm not sure how else a dogfighting ring as an analogy for Hatrack makes sense.
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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It wasn't an analogy about the whole 'Rack...it was me saying your multiple decorations of a lack of hostility coupled with...hostility...are illogical. As are your characterizations of my "attacks". You are a rough rider. A tough ombre. As am I. We play too rough for outrage or indignation.
My point is you don't get to have it both ways. You don't see Lyr or CT mixing it up. Or BB and Bob S. getting angry.
I'm okay with a bit of rough handing, but not under the pretense that I alone am the sole source of hostility.
Does this make sense?
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: It wasn't an analogy about the whole 'Rack...it was me saying your multiple decorations of a lack of hostility coupled with...hostility...are illogical. As are your characterizations of my "attacks". You are a rough rider. A tough ombre. As am I. We play too rough for outrage or indignation.
My point is you don't get to have it both ways. You don't see Lyr or CT mixing it up. Or BB and Bob S. getting angry.
I'm okay with a bit of rough handing, but not under the pretense that I alone am the sole source of hostility.
Does this make sense?
Decorations?
Look, I've expressed to you that there is no intended hostility on my end, and I feel like you would have a hard time finding any evidence of such. (Especially since last time you were asked to you suddenly had phone problems and said you didn't have the time to tell me) Even if such evidence does exist, it's apparently 2 years in past. Not that I'm sure anything I say at all will convince you of that, since you apparently somehow interpret any gesture of good will or attempt at appeasement on my part as arrogance, or an attempt to claim moral superiority. But you can't say I haven't tried.
That's all sort of ancillary to the point here. I'm not making any claims of (or decorating myself for?) nobility or sainthood or kindness. I'm simply asking for you to converse with me in a reasonable manner. Getting angry and talking about "bitch slapping" me because I asked you to answer a few basic, factual questions is not normal or reasonable.
Being emotionally invested in a certain topic (like wealth) and making incorrect assumptions or sweeping generalizations is perfectly normal and something I think everyone here has done. But getting enraged at someone for attempting to point out some of the gaping logical flaws in your statement - or even engage you in a discussion to find out why you hold those views - is certainly not, nor is it reasonable.
And getting personal - mocking someone's military service or occupation, disparaging their personal character, publicly discussing whether or not they have personality disorders, making threats of violence - is definitely not ok.
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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Slipping in to madness if if even 20% of what you say is true.
I'll spend some time on the laptop and copy & paste so GD much that you will be incapable of spewing such half truths & out and out lies.
Because I'm -sure- all that evidence I'll present you will not fall on deaf ears and I won't be wasting my very precious & limited time to prove to you how dead ass wrong you are.
Give me a few days and all your whining & bull will be explained in such excruciating detail even someone with your lack of personal insight will be convinced.
Declarations dip nut, not decorations. Did you really not instantly know what I meant? Or is this another example of how just simple fact seeking questions enrage me. Pathetic.
Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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I think that the distinction that DB is making is an important one. There is a big difference between those who works hard, have acquired a necessary set of skills, and who provide a needed products or services and those who, by dint of already having access to capital make billions by making other billionaires even richer. Often, they are concentrating wealth rather than producing it. They don't necessarily create anything of value or create jobs. Conflating the different types of wealth-holders feeds into the conservative narrative that concern about income disparity is really only envy and greed. It contributes to the idea that there is no systemic injustice, just a bunch of whiny, lazy have-nots.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: I think that the distinction that DB is making is an important one. There is a big difference between those who works hard, have acquired a necessary set of skills, and who provide a needed products or services and those who, by dint of already having access to capital make billions by making other billionaires even richer. Often, they are concentrating wealth rather than producing it. They don't necessarily create anything of value or create jobs. Conflating the different types of wealth-holders feeds into the conservative narrative that concern about income disparity is really only envy and greed. It contributes to the idea that there is no systemic injustice, just a bunch of whiny, lazy have-nots.
A large portion of my friends being conservatives, it gets pretty frustrating talking to them about concepts like systematic inequality, economic oppression/injustice, worker exploitation, and various means of rectifying this (usually a conversation whenever "obamacare" comes up) because they've bought that narrative hook, line, and sinker.
I know this is an issue you're fairly passionate about Kate. What's your impression of Lyrhawn and my (and SW, sam and orincoro's) discussion about a GMI and it's implementation? Of the different things causing or exacerbating poverty nowadays - the hoarding of vast amounts of capital by the very few, educational barriers, cultural barriers, transportation issues, the ghettoizing of certain racial and cultural groups and the lack of opportunities in said ghettos, and I'm sure plenty of things I'm not mentioning... - how much of a positive impact do you think a GMI would have? It certainly seems like the easiest solution to implement from a top-down perspective. (not that it would by any means be *easy*)
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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Part of my frustration is that I did take something away from this and I was never that mad at rich people to begin with. In my original reference to pitchforks & torches I -specifically- say I'm not there yet...NOT raging.
The term "jerk" in my book isn't a bid deal just some one who steps on others toes without foreknowledge. Assholes subscribe to their own jerkness...i e wilful ignorance.
However that being said I do have a fairly large anger to employers who underpay. Couple with that that my wife & I had several fights where she refused to ask for a raise for some crazy ass reason I've never understood to this day...
Anyway...no mater what else I end up taking away from this I kno I still have to work on my deep breathing exercises. Posts: 6683 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Give me a few days and all your whining & bull will be explained in such excruciating detail even someone with your lack of personal insight will be convinced.
Declarations dip nut, not decorations. Did you really not instantly know what I meant? Or is this another example of how just simple fact seeking questions enrage me. Pathetic.
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