Lack of quality goods hurting us?

originally posted by: deadlyhope
a reply to: seeker1963

Hmm I'm not taking this to court - I mean, for the sake of posting on ATS.

Corporation means corrupt billionaires.

Socialism means extra welfare legislation.

Shill means you disagree with someone.

Troll means you don't understand them.

Just gotta keep up XD

So are you saying every Corporation is a money making machine designed to suck the life out of it's workers?

Just trying to find some clarity in your blanket statement due to your programmed hatred of the word "Corporation".

Like I said, I know a person who owns a corporation who makes less than 6 figures a year, and he is his only employee. Is he a money hungry evil corporation?

Cute how you referred to me as a shill or troll, but sorry to disappoint you! I am a single male who finds it quite comfortable to live on under 18k a year!

Live with in your means rather than hating those who you are too lazy to emulate!

a reply to: seeker1963

Huh? I did not call you either of those things!

I am saying that ATS has it's own... Dialect? It's own definitions for words, quite often.

On ATS corporation means evil multinational billionaire sociopaths.

It does not mean small business guy who created his own S-Corp.

I realize it's faulty, but it's nonetheless true. Arguing about grammar thread after thread gets pretty old when it comes to terms like socialism, for instance. It's simply the easiest word for people to use, so they use it. Doesn't make it right, or ideal, or anything..

I wasn't calling you a troll or shill.

I'm saying, here on ATS, calling someone a "shill" often just means you don't like what they have to say. It's used far, far more often than it actually applies, in my opinion. Doesn't make it an ideal situation - But believing every thread with the word " shill " or "corporation" in it means the very definition of that term, is just faulty.

a reply to: seeker1963

Lack of good quality goods hurting us?

Deliberate poor quality goods are extremely expensive to buy due to their churn (replacement) rate

Deliberate poor quality goods are environmentally unsustainable.

Tell that to the agenda 21 crowd and see what they say.

a reply to: deadlyhope

When everyone gets paid more, and all the goods become more expensive, that's what we call 'runaway inflation'.

The Vimes theory of Socioeconomic unfairness

"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."

Which is jokey way highlighting a valid point that many things cost more (and not just in relative terms) when you are poor.

a reply to: Bedlam

Do all markets truly impact each other in exaggerated ways?

If only quality burgers were made and all costed three dollars or more, would houses really sky rocket in cost? Would cars suddenly only be available to the rich?

originally posted by: deadlyhope
a reply to: Bedlam

Do all markets truly impact each other in exaggerated ways?

If only quality burgers were made and all costed three dollars or more, would houses really sky rocket in cost? Would cars suddenly only be available to the rich?

The economy is a staggeringly complex set of differential equations. There are people that spend large numbers of your tax dollars trying to ferret them out. Because if you knew them, you could effectively control the world.

But yes, everything affects everything. Sometimes in unusual ways. If you take a job that wasn't meant to support a family, let's say newspaper delivery, and say 'wow, we need to have every low level manual job earn a wage that's able to buy someone a house and support three kids', then as you raise them all up to get 15-20 bucks an hour, everyone who's doing NON-trivial work, say EMTs, nurses, store managers and the like are going to say 'if you can get 15 bucks an hour to deliver newspapers, damn if I'm going to get a business degree/BSN/etc and get 12 an hour', so now they're getting 25. And it ripples through the rest of the jobs, and now everyone's making BANK, right?

Nope. What happens is that the cost of goods go up. And then you get huge inflationary pressure, the currency devalues, on and on. Not that long ago, as history goes, that was enough of an issue in the US that we had to put wage/price freezes into place to cool it down.

There is no magic unicorn where everyone is rich and things are cheap and savings earn huge income etc. It's like holding corks underwater with your fingertips. You might manage one but not all of them.

a reply to: Bedlam

A minimum wage is not meant to make everyone rich (not saying you are suggesting this but there does seem in many posts on ATS a fundamental misunderstanding about what its meant to do).

It is meant to make sure that there is a basic income level that no one falls below and is slightly redistributive as while earners income above may go up it will generally not go up by as much (at least not in relative terms).

There are circumstances when raising the minimum wage can be inflationary. For example if employers where in general paying a high relative wage against the price of goods our there was little capacity in the economy by to increase supply (low un/under employment). I don' think either of these things is true at the moment.

That is not to say no goods/services prices would be affected by a minimum wage increase. Industries where the salary bill make proportion of total costs and many workers are on minimum or near minimum wage would probably see an increase.

It then kind of comes back to the original OP. Are a lack of cheap #### burgers to high a price to pay for increasing living standards of the lowest paid in society?