So, this is how a Milennial sees a solution to the "Living Wage" issue....

originally posted by: DeadFoot
It really doesn't matter if you think demand has a heavier weight on the supply/demand price model, if you give everyone 25k a year then the supply of money goes up an the demand for money goes down, devaluing the dollar.

The money comes from taxes, it's not printed from nothing. Therefore the supply doesn't change.

Also, your idea that giving corporate more money guarantees new jobs has been proven fallible many times. If a company gets more money on their net and now they can afford some sort of machinery that replaces a staffed position, then they will absolutely do it, which would eliminate jobs, and it happens all the time.

That does happen, but the solution isn't to not progress. It's to have the remaining people each work fewer hours. The work week was 70 hours before the industrial revolution, in 1900 it was 60, in 1920 it was 45,in 1945 it became 40. Productivity has drastically increased since then and we haven't adjusted the work week to compensate. With a shorter work week, there are more jobs to go around.

Just a question to all those in favour of not giving welfare to the poor

How do you all feel about the crooks and frauds who destroyed the economy in 2008 and got bailed out by your own tax money ?

I guess welfare is only okay when it's going to those already rich right ?

a reply to: Discotech

"It's alright, they absolutely definitely payed it back."



In all seriousness, another thing worth mentioning are the billions and billions of dollars of subsidiaries that go to huge companies, like the Koch one.

originally posted by: Discotech
Just a question to all those in favour of not giving welfare to the poor

How do you all feel about the crooks and frauds who destroyed the economy in 2008 and got bailed out by your own tax money ?

I guess welfare is only okay when it's going to those already rich right ?

Re-Watching Zeitgeist: Addendum ATM and I agree with your statement 99%. The remaining 1% is the play on words that the Zeitgeist docs like to toss out there.

Fact is - your statement is 100% correct. I agree to help those who need it, but only the ones who 'really' need it. Not those corporations who suck the life out of the worker for their bottom line.

a reply to: SlapMonkey

Wow.

Your whole talk about people not deserving a 'living wage' is rather disturbing.

Regarding the burger flipper analogy . . . I am working in electrical engineering (intern) and can tell you that 90% of engineering graduates are 100% worthless to ANY firm. They can't solder, they can't name any of the tools, they don't know the legacy systems, they don't know the current standards, and finally they probably don't know much about the firm they are working for beyond snippets from the company web page they can use to highlight their 'enthusiasm' for wanting to work.

They don't deserve a living wage by your standards, unless you think passing a few tests here is what qualifies someone for such a thing.

Here's how much millennials are earning annually across the US

Millennials came of age during a tough economic time: Student debt has reached an all-time high, and the job market is more competitive than ever. As a result, young people today aren't earning as much money as their parents did when they were young. So how much are they making?

Using data from the Minnesota Population Center's 2014 "American Community Survey" in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, we found the median annual total personal income for employed millennials. We used the Pew Research Center's definition of millennials: Americans born between 1981 and 1997.

The medians ranged between a low of $18,000 per year in Montana and a high of $43,000 in the District of Columbia. How do you stack up?

(median means that it is the data point where half are above and half are below)

Now you talk about education possibly being a ticket to a living wage . . . Look at how much that ticket costs.

About 70 percent of 2013 graduates left college with an average of $28,400 in debt.

Now if you go look at the map of median incomes let me note that earning $60,000 as a millennial puts one in the top 10% or earners.

Most of these people are in debt at 150% of their annual income directly from graduation.

The Life And Death Of The Summer Job

In 2014-2015, the school year just ended, the total of tuition, fees and room and board for in-state students at four-year public universities was $18,943. The maximum Pell Grant didn't keep pace with that: It was $5,730. That left our hypothetical student on the hook for $13,313.

A student would now have to work 35 hours a week, every week of the year, to get by. To cover today's costs with a low-skilled, minimum wage summer job? Over 90 days, a student would need to work 20.24 hours a day.

Can you work 20 hours a day?

People who have been educated and earn their degrees are not being paid enough to afford rent, loan payments, food, travel to work (if NOT in a city), etc.

Top 10% earn 49.9% of all income in America

The share of total U.S. income earned by the top 1 percent increased from 20.1 percent in 2013 to 21.2 percent in 2014, Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez reported Monday.

The top 10 percent share also rose, from 48.9 percent of all income in 2013 to 49.9 percent in 2014.

Those were the highest shares claimed by the top 10 percent since 1917, setting aside the year 2012, when earners shifted significant amounts of income from the future to the present in order to avoid new taxes on high incomes resulting from the expiration of some Bush-era tax cuts.

FBB

originally posted by: FriedBabelBroccoli
a reply to: SlapMonkey

Wow.

Your whole talk about people not deserving a 'living wage' is rather disturbing.

It doesn't matter if it disturbs you or not--it's my own personal opinion not meant to please everyone. I read through your entire response to me, and I don't find it disturbing as much as just solidifying my point. You claim engineers in your field (well, your future field, as being an intern does not exactly let you claim that it is your current field of employment) are ignorant to their jobs and don't deserve a living wage. I agree, as I keep claiming that a living wage is not something that is deserved, but something that is earned. If these people are getting a wage that is disproportionately high to their skills brought to the job, that is an employer issue--if it were my company, I'd fire them and find people who know what they're doing.

You complain about student debt--no one forces these students to go to college when they do or to do it in such a way as to rack up such debt. There are absolutely ways to get around major student-loan debt and still get a good degree. My BFA degree cost me a total of $8,000 in student loans, and had I been paying attention better, I could have probably gotten away with no debt at all.

Can you work 20 hours a day?

Yup...in fact, having been in the military, I remember working longer than 24 hours without sleep many, many times. Often times, I would go in at 5am and not leave until well after midnight--it was actually a pretty regular occurrence. And if you broke down the hours military members are expected to be available to work and actually do work, you'd probably be really concerned with the wage that a military member receives.

Whining to me about wage gaps and living wages and anything else you brought up is pointless, because I started my working life at age 15, and more than thirty years later, I have seen my income range from $4.25/hour up to what I make now--I'm not rich by any means, but I do make more than the average American. And it wasn't because of chance, or going to the right school, or having a living wage handed to me, or white privilege, or growing up wealthy (I did not), or any other excuse that naysayers to hard work and earning what you get can conjure up--I have worked my butt off to get to where I am, and I make no apologies for my stance on how pathetic I see the call for a "free" handout of a standard living wage to be.

originally posted by: Aazadan
The money comes from taxes, it's not printed from nothing. Therefore the supply doesn't change.

But the amount of tax dollars coming in to IRS would decrease because, if the government were being fair about it (and they wouldn't be), that $25k would not get taxed. That's a substantial decrease in revenue--but if they didn't tax it, they would have to supplement it by either raising taxes on income from individuals' jobs, or increase it on businesses' wages. Either way, it takes the same amount of money away from the producers while providing for the lethargic, apathetic Americans who would do little or nothing to supplement that free allowance from the gov't.

originally posted by: SlapMonkey
But the amount of tax dollars coming in to IRS would decrease because, if the government were being fair about it (and they wouldn't be), that $25k would not get taxed. That's a substantial decrease in revenue--but if they didn't tax it, they would have to supplement it by either raising taxes on income from individuals' jobs, or increase it on businesses' wages. Either way, it takes the same amount of money away from the producers while providing for the lethargic, apathetic Americans who would do little or nothing to supplement that free allowance from the gov't.

The 25k does get taxed though. It gets taxed as sales tax, then it gets retaxed as payroll taxes in the jobs it creates, and taxed again and again as it cycles through the economy.

a reply to: Aazadan

Hold on--what jobs would "free" money create?

And do you think that all of this re-taxing and re-taxing and re-taxing is a good thing? (plus, sales tax doesn't go to the federal coffers, it goes to state and local)

You're pointing out a major problem that already exists--our income is taxed and taxed and taxed and taxed to a point where it's either laughable or infuriating (I cycle between the two, but stay mostly on the infuriated side). What makes you think that giving away billions of dollars isn't going to increase the taxes on actual income even more, and why do you not recognize that taxing income, then giving back that revenue as income, then taxing it, then giving it back, equates to nothing more than a federal pyramid scheme, even though it would get back much less than it gives, meaning that the remaining balance would fall on the backs of people who choose to actually make an income on top of the free money?

originally posted by: SlapMonkey
a reply to: Aazadan

Hold on--what jobs would "free" money create?

And do you think that all of this re-taxing and re-taxing and re-taxing is a good thing? (plus, sales tax doesn't go to the federal coffers, it goes to state and local)

You're pointing out a major problem that already exists--our income is taxed and taxed and taxed and taxed to a point where it's either laughable or infuriating (I cycle between the two, but stay mostly on the infuriated side). What makes you think that giving away billions of dollars isn't going to increase the taxes on actual income even more, and why do you not recognize that taxing income, then giving back that revenue as income, then taxing it, then giving it back, equates to nothing more than a federal pyramid scheme, even though it would get back much less than it gives, meaning that the remaining balance would fall on the backs of people who choose to actually make an income on top of the free money?

Who the tax money goes to is irrelevant. There are certain services that society needs/wants in order to function and those services are going to be provided by government or by someone else, we won't simply go without. A state vs federal sales tax is nothing more than an accounting measure to determine who gets that money, it will still be spent on those services. This is equally true if we have no tax for that service as the money instead goes to a company to provide it rather than to the government. All of it is literally exactly the same in this regard, the only difference is that a private company has to make a profit and is thus superior for services that are wants where utmost efficiency is important while a government is funded through taxes and is therefore superior for services that we instead want to give to everyone rather than most, at the cost of some efficiency.

As far as what jobs free money (as you put it) creates, at lower income levels a person spends all of their income. None of it is tucked away in savings or investments, instead it is all spent directly in the local economy. If someone is living on $1000/month for example, if you give them $200 that $200 will be spent on needs or perhaps a luxury they would like. As a persons income level rises however the percentage of their income that they're spending on day to day needs declines, this is the same logic as why we have progressive tax rates.

$25,000 to everyone results in those at lower income levels directly spending an additional $25,000 per year which inevitably filters back to the government through taxes (how many times that money has to be spent and respent in order to be collected is a function of the tax rate, 1/tax % to be specific).

However, $25,000 to people making $100,000/year already doesn't result in another $25,000 entering the economy. Instead it results in $25,000 sitting in the banks and being used to make more money.

For the record I was initially using 15k and not 25k as that's roughly equal to Norways basic income, I only bring that up now because it's relevant to my above point. $15,000 is distributed and respent more efficiently than $25,000 is because at $25,000 it stands to reason that a larger percentage of it will be saved and kept out of the economy. Ultimately, the numbers you choose matter very little which is why I didn't mention it before but this seemed to be a good time to bring up that clarification.

originally posted by: Aazadan
Who the tax money goes to is irrelevant. There are certain services that society needs/wants in order to function and those services are going to be provided by government or by someone else, we won't simply go without. A state vs federal sales tax is nothing more than an accounting measure to determine who gets that money, it will still be spent on those services. This is equally true if we have no tax for that service as the money instead goes to a company to provide it rather than to the government. All of it is literally exactly the same in this regard, the only difference is that a private company has to make a profit and is thus superior for services that are wants where utmost efficiency is important while a government is funded through taxes and is therefore superior for services that we instead want to give to everyone rather than most, at the cost of some efficiency.

Dammit...have to rewrite all of this response because my internet locked up.

Okay, my basic point is that it does matter to which government the taxes go, because the smaller the government (generally speaking, such as at the municipal level), the better tailored the services and products for the taxpayer can be, therefore resulting in better efficiency at the end result. I will, however, concede that all governments have a certain baseline of inefficiency, but it generally seems that the bigger the entity (e.g.: Federal versus municipal), the larger the amount of inefficiency (and corruption).

There is no logic that lies behind the idea that the federal government can do everything as well as or better than the government that is more directly represented by and interacting with their local population. The federal government shouldn't be telling Florida that they must do something (say, govern their state-run healthcare system) with the same mandates as Alaska's healthcare. That literally makes no sense. This goes for a multitude of other things over which the federal government usurps control, where, IMO, the 10th Amendment gets trampled on in lieu of bigger and bigger federal government--something that this country was specifically designed for and created to limit.

... As a persons income level rises however the percentage of their income that they're spending on day to day needs declines, this is the same logic as why we have progressive tax rates.

There is no logic to a progressive tax system, other than to take massive percentages of one's income the more fiscally successful that they become. This is a terrible system, and I see it as tantamount to punishing success in a system that is designed to reward it--it's incongruous with capitalism, IMO.

Plus, your statement is flawed, because you're assuming that as income level rises, their living conditions stay exactly the same, meaning they just have more disposable income. We both know that's not always the case.

$25,000 to everyone results in those at lower income levels directly spending an additional $25,000 per year which inevitably filters back to the government through taxes (how many times that money has to be spent and respent in order to be collected is a function of the tax rate, 1/tax % to be specific).

However, $25,000 to people making $100,000/year already doesn't result in another $25,000 entering the economy. Instead it results in $25,000 sitting in the banks and being used to make more money.

This is absolute speculation--there are plenty of people near the $25,000 income level who live without debt and with fiscal piece of mind, even if they don't have thousands in the bank. There are also those making $100,000/year who are drowning in debt and claiming bankruptcy because they are living beyond their means.

There are zero absolutes when it comes to judging someone's financial health by income alone, and those of you who appear to judge people's fiscal soundness solely by the number they put on line 22 of the 1040 tax form, you fail to take into account real-life variables that can make that number irrelevant as to if someone is in the red at the end of each month.

For the record I was initially using 15k and not 25k as that's roughly equal to Norways basic income, I only bring that up now because it's relevant to my above point. $15,000 is distributed and respent more efficiently than $25,000 is because at $25,000 it stands to reason that a larger percentage of it will be saved and kept out of the economy. Ultimately, the numbers you choose matter very little which is why I didn't mention it before but this seemed to be a good time to bring up that clarification.

It's okay to save money...it doesn't keep it out of the economy at all, and furthermore, it's what allows banks to give out loan after loan after loan to people putting money back in to the economy. If you can't understand that, I'm uncertain that continuing this discussion is worth my time, as that's a basic reality of our economy and how banking works.