Too bad that's never happened ever. People will be charitable or not with or without the existence of government assistance. If I volunteer, I don't think to myself "gee why am I even bothering these welfare lovers already have all the help they need". No one thinks like that, and in the event that someone does think like that they'd be the kind of ultimate selfish dick who wouldn't let a moment of their precious time be spent on the good of somebody else no matter what the situation is.
Straight from the horses mouth. Whoops!We've seen in US history and the present elsewhere what a lack of minimum wage leads to, and that is slave wages. If a business owner can pay their people crumbs and let all the wealth pool at the very top to benefit them, that is what they will do. Most minimum wage jobs don't go anywhere even now. Wal-Mart cashiers don't work really hard and one day become big shot executives, contrary to popular belief.
Well, besides the fact that this makes absolutely no sense from a historical standpoint, as wages and living standards were shooting up well before the 1930s (when the first minimum wages were put in place), this also ignores the fact that the employees themselves are going to try to get themselves the best deal as well. Unless you're in a country with lots of people, very few places to work, and no real skills like Honduras, the workers are going to be able to get themselves decent jobs regardless because their skills make them hard to replace. Not to mention that, if that logic actually followed, just about everyone would be getting paid minimum wage today.
Now besides all that, you also fail to consider that if an employer doesn't consider an employee worth more than minimum wage, the employee just won't be hired in the first place, whereas they might consider temporarily hiring them at an exceptionally low wage for a period just to train them, and then increase it afterwards. The only people who actually benefit are those who make just slightly under minimum wage, since were they making much more they'd simply be laid off.
Please explain how lower wages is possibly going to lead to higher wages.
And what kind of "more opportunities" are you imagining? Because the only opportunities available would be other, below-minimum-wage drudgery jobs. That's definitely the kind of opportunities you want when you're already working two jobs to support your family and can't afford to do anything about your chronic back-pain; the chance to start all over again from the lowest of low positions.
Face the truth, man. The reason minimum wage laws had to be made in the first place was that people were being abused. Workers are still being abused all over the world where there aren't any laws like these. The same thing would happen again in the US or Europe if we were to remove ours.
What next, will you be arguing we should do away with all workplace safety regulations again as well?
More opportunities from the experience gained on the job. Experienced workers are worth a lot more than inexperienced workers, even if they're working a cheap job.
This is a
fairly well documented fact, at least among minimum wage workers. Their wages rise quite quickly over time as they gain experience, and the overwhelming majority have moved well beyond the minimum wage within ten years. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of minimum wage workers
aren't raising families, and can live off of such small incomes for a time.
This contains alot of assertions. Would private charities become more effective? That would require more people to pay into them (would they?), which would remove incentive for investment. "far more capable of providing assistance than the government" Why? The governmnent makes far more money much more reliably and has far more infestructure in place, it would seem they are much more capable.
Yes, the government is more reliable in securing money for the poor. It also has far less motivation to give it out properly, has a standing army of bureaucrats involved in gathering aforementioned money, and creates a pile of unintentional problems along the way.
I agree that American healthcare needs reform, but not in that direction. Many first world countries have larger and more efficient government health care programs (eg NHS) and most have had them more several decades and have managed to support them through economic booms and busts.
Yet even those "efficient" programs are still pretty damn expensive, and they've got problems that even the US doesn't have to boot (eg. very long waiting lists for treatment).
It's fairly well documented that the bulk of American healthcare expense growth occurred following the times where the government tried to make it "more affordable". Remember, in 1964, when Medicare was introduced to deal with costs, the inflation adjusted yearly cost of healthcare was on average in the realm of $3,000. It sure didn't solve
that problem!
"The end of the minimum wage would mean most would start with lower wages, but as they built up experience they would end up making far more than they would have otherwise" Would they end up making more? Would this apply to everyone or would there be significant chunks of the populace working for $2 an hour, relying on the unpredictable availability of charity?
This would apply to everyone who actually worked reliably over a long term. Employers generally tend to hire those with lots of work experience, even if they don't have many skills, because they know they'll come to work on time, do their job, etc rather than skip work or do a bad job and get fired. The number of people actually getting paid $2 an hour would be vanishingly small, and largely composed of people with no prior work experience.
Most people in the top bracket are earning that much, that is why they are in the top bracket (the top bracket is 388,351, which is alot of money). It is true though that the absurdly rich are undertaxed, but this could be solved by increasing taxes (for example tax extra house purchases, or even some sort of Robin Hood tax).
This is not a problem solved by decreasing taxes, it is solved by fixing regression in the tax system and making it more actually-progressive.
Yet the
richest people aren't necessarily in that bracket, whereas the generally
hardest working are. Again, it doesn't distinguish between how long you've been making over that, whether the money is actually going to your benefit, etc. If I work five years for next to nothing and then in one year my project works out and I make $500,000, do I actually have enough money? In actuality, I've been making $50,000 a year, yet the government treats this as though I'm "rich".
There was nothing stopping any private company from researching an internet-like infestructure. Infact there is little crowding out (except in regards to understandably restricted things like nuclear weapons etc). Alot of research is contracted out to universities/private companies as it is anyway.
There is crowding out because the people most able to create such infrastructure in the first place end up hired by the government instead. The internet may not be the same as it is today without ARPANET, but it seems likely that something similar would have been created otherwise. Plus, private companies created just about everything the government needed to make the internet possible in the first place, AND were responsible for it being something actually worth using today. For example:
UNIX: Invented by Bell, 1969
FORTRAN and hard drives: invented by IBM, 1956
Packet data transmission over lines: Bell, 1958
Integrated circuits: Texas Instruments, 1958
"most useful inventions have a tendency to be outlandishly expensive for what they're worth", Is this an opinion?
Do you think trillions of dollars per noteworthy invention from the DoD are worth it, considering the fact that many of them may very well have been developed for less a bit later regardless?
My diagram has showen virtually no correlation between Capital Gains tax. It is understandable that a ridiculous level of tax would hurt incentives, but the low correlation would suggest that the tax is already so low that it is having virtually no effect.
Capital Gains increases investment and savings, whereas GDP is measured by spending. The correlation between the two is going to be next to nonexistent when monetary policy is taken into effect, which basically drowns out any effect of increased investment. Were interest rates dynamically determined by savings rather than by the Fed, the effects of a Capital Gains tax would be noticeable on interest rates and on long term growth.
That is because it is a global recession. I don't see how being closer to a laissez-faire capitalism system would prevent this from happening (especially given that most of the fault is placed on private investors). America's huge debt and its less socialist/interventive government policies (as opposed to most of europe) do not seem to have helped.
This recession is not the indicator that government intervention/tax is unsustainable (These happen from time to time, plus economic crises are an expected part of capitalism). I woudn't be agains't a flexable policy though, one that can adjust depending on the economic situation etc. But permanently ending some of these things does not seem necessary.
The global recession is largely the result of the Federal Reserve alongside various corporatist measures taken in the 2000s. Saying "its just the private investors" ignores a lot of key points in the first place.
Besides that, most of these welfare projects are doomed because of demographics, not just economic sustainability. For example, Social Security relies on there being a relatively small amount of elderly recipients compared to workers, which isn't likely to be the case in even ten years.
I agree that they (Medicare and Medicaid) are not very sucessful. They cost alot and are not very effective. Alot of Eurpoean countries have some form of socialized medicine (the biggest example being the UK's NHS) and are for the most part not in need of these programs (at least not near the same level as the US). I would think that reforms towards something like this would be capable of providing more efficient health care to the poor, and (hopefully) away from facelifts and other inefficient wastes-of-money the private sector has created.
The raising age limit is to coincide with the increasing age that people work upto as well as the increasing life expectancy. Something will probably have to be done, mind you, do deal with the aging baby boomers.
See above. It's worth noting that a lot of the reason European healthcare is cheaper is because they actually do look for cost cutting measures. In the US, there is a gigantic system of government imposed regulations that make costs go up by necessity. For example, a doctor will almost always recommend the "best" treatment, even when it costs 100x as much and is only 2x as effective, an insurance company will pay for it (insulating the consumer from the costs) because of various state mandates, the pharmaceutical companies will charge insane amounts because they're basically a cartel (due to high costs of entry imposed by the FDA among others) and because of patent law. If some new "wonder drug" comes out with significantly better results than older drugs but insanely high costs, the American doctor is obligated to recommend it regardless of cost whereas the European doctor will either wait for the generic version of it to come out at significantly cheaper cost or else recommend a cheaper treatment.
Currencies backed by the gold standard is unreliable, there is a reason why most countries abandoned it (Great Depression). To transfer from one currency to anoter still requires aquisition of the physical currency, it would become messy dealing with dand aquiring these currencies, regardless of being backed by gold.
Then they could be backed by something else. That's the whole point of competing currencies; they don't HAVE to be backed by anything, they'd just tend to so as to retain their value.
Pulling out would not at all be fairly simple, when a company has large stores of cash of a certain type (eg a bank), swapping that around for another currency would be quite a complex process. Ontop of that now the people who go to purchase/withdraw now have to work with different currencies.
Okay. So Company A has its reserves in Cool Bux, which are backed by, say, platinum. However, Cool Bux is inflated or has some other problem, so Company A pulls out by taking their platinum and going to something else. Now at this point, either (A) they have a pile of platinum, which can be exchanged for another currency and all is well or (B) Cool Bux was running with fractional reserves and doesn't actually have enough platinum, in which case the standard procedures for any bank going bankrupt occur. Regardless, Company A still gets its money's worth in the end.
So long as the currency is backed by something recognized as being valuable, people will tend towards accepting it. Conversion of some kind may be required, but that would hardly result in everyone rejecting all but one currency (not to mention the internet would make it fairly trivial to convert from one currency to another).
Now people won't be stuck with the "consequences of whatever boneheaded policy" private money producers make (Because there is nothing stopping them from being as bad as the government).
If private money producers screw up, they go bankrupt and lose their stuff. Not to mention the fact that they keep each other in check through fluctuating exchange rates.
First of all, you want an example of what "Private Charities" do when government gets out of the way? Plenty of examples in Africa!
Some stellar examples there. Of paticular note is the gift of books to starving people and the requirement of conversion to their religion for any aid.
Yea, private charities? To hell with that, I'd rather have half my barely over minimum wage check be taken. It could be the next Stephen Hawking being fed only with foodstamps right now. Will voluntarilly provide it? Nope. I could use that money for purposes of greater immediate benefit to me. I do provide to charities, but nowhere near what the government does in my name. People don't have to starve because of it. You honestly think YOU, person about to argue with me, that you are any different? That without the government you'd pay the same or more to a charity that helps as free of conditions as the Government? Or maybe you think Bibles are tasty.
A lot of African countries have had their food production destroyed by massive influxes of foreign aid, which destroys the farmers' ability to compete in the short term and ensures both dependency and starvation in the long term. Furthermore, internally speaking, the bulk of sub-Saharan African countries are either big warzones or have socialist governments of some kind, neither of which have great potential for internal charity (which relies on there being more people not in poverty than there are in poverty).
Now, the other thing... Rich people and taxation. I personally don't advocate taxing assets more, and nobody is. Farmers are usually multi-millionares on paper, and barely making it in reality.
No, what you are seeing here is advocacy of increased taxation on rich income. Capital Gains, regular income, other income sources. If you are making $250,000 a year, your problems aren't managing less than $500 in savings to protect a person who is in an unstable job and helping a unemployed sister and brother and nephews eat. Your problems are keeping your relatives from abusing you and taking another $500 that week to gamble with.
Why do I know this? I make less than $40000 a year. Supporting my family while protecting another person is my burden, but that other person's unstable job is employed as a caretaker for someone earning about $155000 a year(by my best guess based on the assets they talk about infront of that other person, which they do freely.)
When people talk about how unfair it is to tax the rich, I remember that Capital Gains are taxed lower than my income. If the rich can't stand a little more taxes, they can afford an airplane ticket out. I can't. So yea, it's not about assets, but income.
Yet the tax code, as you said yourself, doesn't distinguish. Old money isn't taxed whereas new money is, which actually reduces social mobility.
Plus, if the rich actually do take an airplane ticket out, then you actually have to pay more to make up the difference. That isn't exactly an ideal result.
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