Re: McDonald’s fresh hope to turn around slumping sales: Ordering burgers from a mach
First of all, I don't support a doubling of the minimum wage, but some do, and it would be appropriate in some very high cost locales, but not in my region. $15 an hour is higher than the median wage in many Tennessee counties. And whether I support it or not, it's not going to happen. Maybe to $10, which is what it was roughly 50 years ago.
But we're both guessing on the impact. You like your guess, I like mine.
Your guess avoids logic and real world developments of the last 50 years. I don't "like" mine, it's just what is going to happen.
OK, and poverty would have been lower without the anti-poverty programs? SS should go away? How about Medicare? Or just welfare and food stamps? Medicaid?
It appears the answer is yes in some cases. They don't seem to be helping. That isn't saying that there aren't the possibility of better programs that the money would be better spent on, however, just that the programs of the last 40 years have been abysmally inept.
Mandatory spending between 1993 and 2013 outpaced inflation by more than a factor of three (Inflation was 61%, Mandatory spending rose 200%), and poverty rates didn't change. Surely you don't see this as a success?
Of course that is what I said. Can you quote me? Thanks...
That is the effect of what you advocate. Rather than make more skilled jobs you'd rather protect unskilled jobs.
OK, like I said, you have to read your posts for the weasel words.
Which is, ironically, your weasel-words way of saying you defend your choice to argue using straw men.
Welfare and social services are an "idiotic tangent" in a discussion of poor unskilled workers? And I don't know which thread you're following, but the "idiotic tangent" of social services etc. has been a key part of this discussion.
Yes they are, because when we are discussing JOBS you try to change the subject to a subject that is pretty much the OPPOSITE of jobs.
Me: "Unskilled workers jobs are threatened by innovation, Does the government owe them anything?"
You: "
BLAAARG!! YOU WANT KILL WELFARE AND CHILDREN!!!"
I didn't infer anything. The point is if McD lays off 100,000 and 500 new robot manufacturing and distribution jobs emerge, that's quite a different story than if 40,000 robot making jobs emerge. I was just trying to get some idea of what kind of replacement levels you anticipated.
Yes, you intentionally inferred a comment about welfare from a comment I said
that had nothing to do with welfare. It isn't a matter of "parsing for weasel words", it's a matter of you learning how to read in general without dumping a truck load of your own garbage on what the other person wrote.
And the reason why my "vision of the way forward" is impaired is we have been hearing the conservatives cheer progress as you call it, free trade, modernization, etc. and the results are in and wages at the bottom are declining, flat in the middle for decades, we've offshored production jobs so in this reality those jobs making robots will be in China where workers make $2 an hour and there are no pesky environmental rules, few new jobs are created here, and worker productivity is up with all the automation, but wages for everyone but the very top are stagnant or declining. So the empty rhetoric doesn't convince me anymore - facts aren't consistent with it.
When have we actually had a situation that matches this free trade and modernization? Jobs are going off shore because it is cheaper, companies are leaving because taxes are lower. You and every other nanny-state promoter ignore the simple fact that it is DEMOCRAT policies that are driving jobs over seas and driving companies to countries with lower taxes.
You also ignore the reason why so many jobs ended up going to China, and the US lost it's edge over Japan in the automotive and technology markets: US Protectionism created s**ty products in the 70s and 80s.
And the manufacturing jobs lost over seas were replaced with a booming services market in IT and contruction. Your way of processing information seems to rely heavily on zero sum logic... sprinkled with a healthy dose of the bigotry of low expectations for low income workers.
And I'm not fearful of letting go of unskilled labor so much as recognizing it will happen. And the "idiotic tangent" was what to do when that happens? Maybe you support expanding EITC, and support Medicaid expansion and ACA subsidies, and other ways to subsidize the wages at the bottom. Or maybe you agree with the other person who says "Screw em." I don't know, you won't say - you're considering the other side of the coin as an idiotic tangent.
I'm considering the other side of the coin as a tangent, and in fact, you are engaging in begging the question in your approach as well as assuming you know my position well enough to argue against it when I haven't said anything.
Also, I am going to rescue your abandoned graphic to make my point:
Note that the only decline in the poverty rate in that 40 year span has been in the retirement population, poverty in working age families has increased, and in the end it is a wash with no net change in the national poverty rate.