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Thread: Muddling For Solutions

  1. #81
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    At least those on welfare can still take expensive vacations.

    https://www.foxnews.com/us/massachus...-hawaii-report
    Philippians 2:10-11

    To argue with a person who renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. ~ Thomas Paine

    “The greatest conspiracy theory is the notion that your government cares about you”- unknown.

  2. #82
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    Quote Originally Posted by flenna View Post
    At least those on welfare can still take expensive vacations.

    https://www.foxnews.com/us/massachus...-hawaii-report
    One of my high school jobs was in a grocery story and there was a lady who shopped there that was always dressed very well and drove a new Cadillac or Mercedes while paying with food stamps.

    So I got to see that side of it along with the people that sent their kids in to buy 3 cent pieces of gum so the change could be used to fund cigarette purchases.

  3. #83
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    I had forgotten to add that half the states have a minimum wage more than the federal.

    The points I continue to try to make are:
    Our standard of living in very high
    You can go from poor upbringing to very successful
    The achievements of successful people do not “take” things that would have gone to poor people

    We support too many people doing nothing
    We import too many people doing nothing
    We have exported and over regulated and driven far too much of what makes the backbone of a successful nation
    “Where weapons may not be carried, it is well to carry weapons.”

  4. #84
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    Quote Originally Posted by flenna View Post
    Interesting, I have not read his work either. We have record unemployment, food and transportation availability unlike anytime in history. We have an obesity epidemic (especially among the poor) and everyone has a new car or two in the driveway. Yet people are leaving their chosen religion in epic numbers and humanism and secularism are on the rise. We have banned God from the public arena, replaced Him in schools with a multitude of humanistic and hedonistic studies and turned to government for our guidance. I think the problem is complex on the surface but below it is really the huge spiritual void in today's modern society.
    I think you nailed it on the head here. The sermon this weekend was about joy, and the difference between joy and happiness. Happiness is temporary and based on your happenings/circumstances, but true joy comes from the presence of God and can lift our spirits even in terrible times. The reason I mention this is one of the main ways we can grow in our joy is our perspective, particularly when things don't go our way. We can have gratitude or we can grumble.

    You could say it's all about perspective. We have people living in large houses, driving multiple cars, eating plenty of great food with all the luxuries they could imagine, yet they're miserable because Karen up the street has a newer car and a prettier house or someone on social media is always posting about their beautiful vacations that you don't get to take.

    We don't tend to look at those less fortunate than us and think, "Wow, I'm truly blessed to have what I have. I live a life that billions of people in this world would kill to have." Instead we compare our circumstances to those we perceive as having it better than us, and that makes us miserable.

  5. #85
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    Quote Originally Posted by lsllc View Post
    So what happens when people make more? They demand more. When there is more demand, price goes up. It’s simple. Purchasing power parity. It’s a thing. Essentially, we get more of the inflation you guys are bitching about.
    That's not inflation. You're describing normal behavior of the price system, a signal about relative value of the goods in question.

    Inflation is a characteristic of the money supply relative to production. Inflation causes rising prices, not the reverse.

  6. #86
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    Quote Originally Posted by ramairthree View Post
    I had forgotten to add that half the states have a minimum wage more than the federal.

    The points I continue to try to make are:
    Our standard of living in very high
    You can go from poor upbringing to very successful
    The achievements of successful people do not “take” things that would have gone to poor people

    We support too many people doing nothing
    We import too many people doing nothing
    We have exported and over regulated and driven far too much of what makes the backbone of a successful nation
    Having elites that aren't allowed to fail does prevent others from succeeding though. Someone that saved their pennies should have been able to buy GM, AIG, and other too big to fails at auction.

  7. #87
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    Quote Originally Posted by jsbhike View Post
    Having elites that aren't allowed to fail does prevent others from succeeding though. Someone that saved their pennies should have been able to buy GM, AIG, and other too big to fails at auction.

    I agree. It’s not government’s job to save private industries that aren’t saving themselves.

    GM vics are trash. At one point, not bad but here lately? Why bother.

    Too much pork.

  8. #88
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    I am not saying I understand why tons of insurance CEOs make ten million a year or more, and more a million and up, and why the average insurance broker executive salary is 250k a year.

    Their entire job is to pay people taking care of you as little as possible, and get people and businesses paying as much in premiums as possible. That’s billions a year taken from individuals and businesses, kept by insurance companies, and not paid for actual medical care.

    I also don’t understand why automotive and other senior executives get hired and paid millions a year, then Sales tank, moral tanks, reputation tanks, and they leave with a severance in the millions for failing and making things worse.

    I am not saying there are not excesses and wastes.

    Worker demands and union fights for increased pay and benefits have driven out some formerly competitive Amercian facilities.
    Some city employee pay and pensions are off the charts for the quality density of the positions and not sustainable.
    Regulation and compliance have driven entire industries OCONUs.
    Automation of formerly skilled and unskilled positions have driven away jobs.
    Double income families take two instead one job.

    There are a ton of factors that have changed employment in the US. Compared to America’s peak, we have more competition, more on the dole, entire departments eating pay that did not used to exist, administration 1000’s of percent higher, etc.

    Nothing I know to fix those sorts of things. But where else can you go from drop out parents to Ph.D., MD, MBA and hit top percentile income in a single generation?

    Wealth is not a fixed size pie. Someone succeeding on the up and up does not take somebodies piece of the pie.the pie changes.
    If I save up ten pieces of gold and start raising goats, and Firefly saves up ten and starts raising chickens, and SteyrAug saves up ten, and starts raising hogs,
    And we keep using the same 30 pieces of gold back and forth buying eggs, dummies, fermented goats milk, cheese, steak, etc, from each other, we may swap that 30 pieces around a lot, but we also start having more goats, chickens, and cows.
    And we trade or sell those for other stuff.
    Without taking anyone else’s piece of the pie.
    Branch that out into a lot of other things- lumber, crops, etc. and it explains how a cop making 80k a year can start a PSD company and now makes 800k a year without stealing somebody else’s pie. Or a guy that was a SF medic becomes an MD and makes 500k a year and no other person starves because of either of their successes.

    The main gist I take from all of this class and income divide talk I see seems to revolve around successful people have somehow robbed unsuccessful people. That is not true ar all. If you and I start working part time at Autozone when we were in HS, and you have been their full time since graduation and make crap and have crap benefits- and after graduation I started a Pot-O-Let rental service- and now make ten times as much as you a decade later-
    My success and pay are not why you are not rich and successful.
    “Where weapons may not be carried, it is well to carry weapons.”

  9. #89
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    This is a good snapshot of what is going on:

    Understanding The U.S. Economy: Lots Of Rotten Jobs


    Steve Denning, Senior Contributor, Forbes

    “It doesn’t make any difference whether a country makes computer chips or potato chips!” —Attributed to Michael Boskin, Chairman of President George H. W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors

    When U.S. unemployment is at a 50-year low, why do so many people have trouble finding work with decent pay and adequate predictable hours? A new economic indicator—the US Private Sector Job Quality Index (JQI)—gives the answer: we have lots of jobs, but they are increasingly low-quality jobs.

    “The problem is that the quality of the stock of jobs on offer has been deteriorating for the last 30 years,” says Dan Alpert, an investment banker and Cornell Law School professor. The JQI is built and maintained by Alpert and his fellow researchers at Cornell University Law School, the Coalition for a Prosperous America, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. (As to how the JQI is constructed, see the technical note below.)

    So, when tomorrow morning at 8.30 a.m. EST, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announces the monthly official unemployment statistics and the administration trumpets “the best economy in history,” we will know why that isn’t true.

    The quality of jobs today is not quite as bad as it was in 2012, but it’s much worse than it was in 1990s and the early 2000s. Overall, we are seeing a secular decline in job quality.

    The JQI not only offers “a real-time read on the quality of U.S. jobs.” It indicates solutions to problems that economists have puzzled over for decades.

    1. If Unemployment Is So Low, Why Don’t Wages Go Up?

    Economists have long wondered: if unemployment is so low, why aren’t we seeing more rapid wage increases? In fact, median salaries have been mostly stagnant in the U.S. for the past several decades. The strong relationship between unemployment and inflation was based on data first observed by New Zealand economist, William Phillips in 1958 and the resulting ‘Phillips Curve,’ and is still part of the standard policy doctrine of most central banks.

    Yet over the last decade, there has been an apparent disconnect between low unemployment and wage inflation. This has been attributed to lower participation rates among prime and younger workers. But that’s not the whole story.

    “A far more substantial factor severing the earlier connections between unemployment and inflation, however, is the changed composition of the employment base itself,” states the JQI White Paper. “The channel through which this occurs is fairly simple: If a greater proportion of jobs produce incomes below the mean of all jobs (i.e. a reduction in the level of the JQI), than they did in the past, then an increase in the proportion of people working will have a lesser impact on household incomes—and therefore aggregate demand—than in the past… Despite central banks in the U.S., the Eurozone, Japan, and the U.K. having pumped more than $10 trillion into their collective economies over the past decade, aggregate demand remains tepid.””

    2. Why Is Participation In The Workforce So Low?

    Another perennial debate among economists is: why is participation in the workforce so low? Tens of millions of working-aged Americans are still not formally employed and have no apparent interest in sending out a resume. If the job market is so hot, why are so many people sitting on the sidelines? One frequently cited explanation is the growing proportion of older generation workers. Now we have another more important element. Workers don’t re-enter the workforce because many of the the jobs themselves are rotten.

    3. Weren’t Manufacturing Jobs Replaced By Other Jobs?

    The U.S. manufacturing workforce has declined dramatically in the past three decades from 23% of total US civilian employment in 1970 to just 8% in May 2019. Since overall unemployment is now so low, the lost manufacturing jobs must have been replaced by other jobs. But were they better or worse jobs? Now the JQI White Paper has the answer. “Lost manufacturing jobs were chiefly replaced by lower-wage/lower-hours service jobs.”

    The decline in U.S. job quality over the past three decades is closely associated with the decline in manufacturing jobs. As the 1990s progressed, U.S. firms enthusiastically embraced the outsourcing of manufacturing to Asia, while the so-called Asian Tiger economies— Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea (all following the Japanese export model)—accelerated manufacturing at an enormous speed during the 90s. The U.S. manufacturing jobs were eventually replaced, but with low-value-low quality jobs.

    4. Why Didn’t High Tech Save the U.S. Economy?

    Many looked to the category of jobs known as Professional and Technical Services as a path for the economy to “move to higher ground.” Professional and Technical Services were supposed to offer high pay, growth in employee numbers, and an opportunity to increase productivity. In fact, the JQI does report that employment is up 41% in this sector and the average weekly pay for non-managerial workers of $1,575 exceeds the pay of many other industries.

    But that’s not enough to rescue what the economy lost in manufacturing. “The sector—with its 7.5 million non-managerial employees (7% of all private sector non-managerial jobs) is simply not large enough to weigh heavily in the national totals and the welfare of the labor force at large. Therefore, the ‘moving to higher ground’ hypothesis is far too slender a reed on which to build a national economic growth strategy for a nation of 327 million people.”

    The idea of the ‘higher ground’ proponents was that the U.S. economy would take the high value work and become the idea and design base for the world’s great companies, while Asian economies would be left with the low-value ‘workshop,’ building the products.

    “This theory has been proven to be incorrect,”
    says the JQI White Paper. “South Korea began that way in the 1960s, deferentially approaching leading US and European companies to learn about the latest manufacturing techniques. As time went on, it learned that designing the products and owning the brand names was far more lucrative. Today, South Korea is the world’s leading manufacturer of cellphones, televisions, and other consumer products. China, now the world’s manufacturing behemoth, hasn’t missed this fact… With other countries targeting what they see as high-value industries, the U.S. is not just in danger of, but actually has been, forced into greater reliance on low-value, low-growth industries, offering lower-wage, lower-hours jobs.”

    5. Why Has U.S. Productivity Stalled?

    Another standard economic puzzle has been the failure of productivity to increase over the past decade. Not really a surprise, says the JQI White Paper. “As more highly productive goods-producing jobs have declined over the past three decades, in favor of more, generally less productive categories of service jobs, it should be axiomatic that labor productivity gains would stall. And, comparing the trend of non-financial labor productivity growth from 1947 through 2009 to that from 2010 to date, then near-flatlining of productivity growth has been historic in its degree and duration.”

    6. What Do The New Jobs Actually Look Like?

    What do the new jobs actually look like? The JQI White Paper paints a grim picture. “The success of superstar companies like Google or Apple or Pfizer should not blind us to the fact that today Leisure & Hospitality is our largest sector with 14,7 million non-management employees. It’s a sector that pays such workers $16.58 an hour and the average worker works just 25.8 hours a week – resulting in average weekly income of $428. (Benefits like health insurance in the sector are small to nonexistent.)”

    What were policy makers thinking while all th0se high-quality manufacturing jobs were being shipped to other countries? A clue comes from the remark attributed to Michael Boskin Chairman of President George H. W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors: “It doesn’t make any difference whether a country makes computer chips or potato chips!”

    His flippant remark has proven tragically incorrect. “When all that a country has left is the domestic manufacture of processed foodstuffs,” concludes the JQI White Paper, “you end up with a lot of unhealthy and unwealthy workers who are in dire shortage of security, much less dignity. A republic that offers no better than this cannot long endure.”

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevede...o#77cd025f2d97
    Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President... - Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln and Free Speech, Metropolitan Magazine, Volume 47, Number 6, May 1918.

    Every Communist must grasp the truth. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party Mao Zedong, 6 November, 1938 - speech to the Communist Patry of China's sixth Central Committee

  10. #90
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    Quote Originally Posted by ramairthree View Post
    .

    Worker demands and union fights for increased pay and benefits have driven out some formerly competitive Amercian facilities.
    To compete with the rest of the world American pay rates would have to be 3rd world levels. Sounds awesome. The most prosperous time in american history had High taxes on the rich and plentiful unions.
    Some city employee pay and pensions are off the charts for the quality density of the positions and not sustainable.
    So they have a good union that gets them good benefits. Why not join them and get good pay with a good job?
    Regulation and compliance have driven entire industries OCONUs.
    Regulations exist for a reason, They keep the Environment clean and Workers healthy and alive.
    Automation of formerly skilled and unskilled positions have driven away jobs.
    Automation eliminated jobs.
    Double income families take two instead one job.
    Because people have been conned into think unions and taxes for the ultra rich are bad.
    The people that are upset about the haves and have nots are mad because the group of people that benefited the most from unions and social programs are the same people that say no one else can have the same things.

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