Economics

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Stop Making These Stupid Comparisons!

Nobody is saying that!

I am so sick of these kinds of arguments:  “Oh, so you want $15 an hour for flipping burgers when our firefighters get paid less than that?  Who do you think you are, scum?”192816

Stop making those stupid comparisons! No one asking for a decent wage for a crappy job of standing over a boiling vat of fries for eight hours a day is saying that they are the only ones underpaid. Fast food workers are underpaid and our military is underpaid. These concepts are not mutually exclusive.

Why can’t we all admit that a large percentage of our population is underpaid? Until Reagan dismantled our economy, whenever things improved, salaries increased for everyone, upper and lower class. Now an improved economy only benefits the 1% at the top. Can’t we all agree that pretty much everyone needs a salary increase?

After all, the money to pay firefighters doesn’t come from McDonald’s anyway. Raising the wage for hamburger flippers won’t decrease other people’s salaries. Let’s lift everyone up. And even if we only lift some up at first, it doesn’t mean others don’t deserve it, too and should also be lifted as soon as possible.

But this is what they want — they want us fighting over the scraps because then we’re ignoring the huge wealth inequality that really exists in our country, and it’s not about whether someone should get a few extra dollars an hour.

But back to the main point: Stupid comparisons. I’m seeing way too many of these.

“Caitlyn Jenner is brave.” “Yeah, well not as brave as these soldiers!”  Yes, we know. No one said she was. It is possible for more than one person to be brave, you know.

“Black lives matter.” “All lives matter!” Yes, of course all lives matter, but sometimes we need to bring attention to some of them! It doesn’t mean they are the only lives that matter!

I mean, seriously, it’s gotten out of hand. As one comedian said recently, these kinds of arguments are like someone running into a fundraising event to fight cancer and yelling, “There are other diseases, you know!”

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That’s not what Karl Marx said

I am constantly amazed at how many people think Karl Marx led the Russian Revolution and was all in favor of suppressing the public and stamping out all that is good in the world. I have seen political views being called “Marxist” that Karl Marx himself would have hated.

Let’s put this in perspective: Marx was observing how terrible life was for working people during the start of the industrial revolution. Children were working for pennies a day in unsafe factories seven days a week without adequate food, shelter or medical care. Europe and America were turning into a sort of feudal system where the rich trampled upon the poor, and it appeared that it would never change.Original_Marx_Brothers

Marx thought that the only solution to this was a revolution, after which would be the establishment of communism. His idea of communism is like the hippies thought in the 60s: We’ll all work together, live in a commune (hence “communism”) and share equally, with no one above anyone else.

His view was that by sharing in this way, everyone could benefit.

Keep in mind that Marx, being an economist, was mostly talking about the economy. Marx was not against democracy. He saw democracy as “the road to socialism” and before he died, he even backed away from the idea that a revolution was needed (having observed the progress that was made in America thanks to unions). Marx was not against freedom of speech or other basic rights. He imagined that the people would still vote for their leaders but that the leaders would not be richer or better off than anyone they represented.

All of this is impossible, impractical, and will never happen.

But his ideas were still appealing to those people on the bottom rungs of society, and so when Lenin and Stalin brought about the Russian Revolution, they claimed they were doing this to bring about communism and thus help everyone. They lied. Obviously, Stalin did not have any intention of installing a democracy or allowing free speech, any more than Mao did in China using the same rhetoric.

And that’s the problem. As wrong-headed as Marx was about society and what solutions were needed to fix the problems he saw, he thought his ideas would benefit people, not enslave them. He was not evil incarnate. He was trying to make things better. His theory was warped by those who used it to accomplish their ends.

Keep in mind that Marx died in 1883, thirty-four years before the Russian Revolution. He had already begun to change his theories about what was needed to solve the vast inequalities in society, and it’s pretty clear that he would not have supported Stalin’s brutal regime which pretended to be communist.

Now, for those of you who skimmed over this and are now calling me a Marxist: No, I clearly am not. (Unless you mean Groucho.)  Communism, which robs humans of individuality and discourages individual thought and incentive, will never work. And neither will capitalism, which rewards the rich and the powerful while enslaving the majority. The solution is what basically every country in the world now has: a socialist system somewhere between those two extremes.

The debate is over where on the scale we should be.

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Aiming low

“I had to work three minimum wage jobs to get by, and I made it, so I don’t see why minimum wage should be increased!”

This is a mindset I have never quite understood — things were bad for you, and therefore we shouldn’t try to make them better for other people?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDIGaiNO270

Raising the minimum wage so people don’t have to work three jobs just to get by seems like a good idea to me. Besides, every time we raise the minimum wage, the economy improves. (If people have more money, they spend it, and the economy improves. Duh.)

But today I want to discuss that attitude. Can someone explain it to me? I’ve seen it many times, always from some conservative who thinks that we should lower our standards instead of raising them.

“Those damn unions want to increase wages and working conditions!” they scream. “Why should they get paid so much more than I do?” Well, that’s a very good question. Maybe you should be unionizing too so that you could get paid a better wage.  Why not raise everyone up instead of bringing others down?

Why can’t we increase standards instead of aiming for the lowest common denominator?

 

 

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A test for my conservative friends

Seriously.  Forget that Obama is President for a minute.  Or pretend there is a Republican in there.

And then look at the economic numbers.

Unemployment is at 6.1%, the lowest it’s been since 2007.

There have been 63 straight months of economic expansion.obama_100906.gi.top

The budget deficit has been reduced tremendously.

The stock market has set records and is at its highest ever.

Consumer confidence is high, home sales are increasing, and we avoided a major depression.

And according to the conservative business magazine Forbes, “This is the best private sector jobs creation performance in American History.”

Forbes finds that in every measure of the economy, Obama’s Presidency has outshone all previous recent Presidents, including Reagan.

If Obama was a Republican, they would be shouting about his accomplishments.  Do you agree?

Now, mind you, this is Forbes making this comparison.  There is one place where the economy has gotten worse, and that is the discrepancy between the rich and poor.  The US looks more and more like pre-revolutionary France every day, where there is no longer a sturdy middle class.  Forbes, of course, doesn’t care about that — many economists seem to only care about how Big Business and the rich are doing.  But that’s also what most Republicans think about, too, so why aren’t they cheering on Obama’s economy?

I know, I know — silly question.

 

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Government Profits on Student Loans while we suffer

Should the US Government be profiting from student loans?  Is the government’s job to “make a profit”?

One of the reasons the economy is not in great shape is because students are so in debt trying to pay back student loans.  (Let’s leave the discussion about why college costs so much for later).   If money is being spent paying back loans, it’s not getting spent on homes, cars, appliances, and goods that help the economy as a whole.    loans

A recent bill would have reduced the student loan percentages to a reasonable amount (but still, ironically, higher than when the government lends money to GM and the banks).  It was shot down by Republicans (duh).  Why?  What possible reason would they be against this?  How does this bill do anything but help all students, liberal and conservative alike, from blue states to red states?

Oh, right.  It was being paid for by increasing taxes on millionaire and billionaires, and we can’t have that, because they’re the “job creators” who will stimulate the economy.  (Remember that?  When the Bush tax cuts first went into effect, they were supposed to do that?  Remember when that happened?  Ha ha!  Aren’t we a bunch of chumps!)

So once more the government took the side of the 1%, ignoring 99% of the people they are supposed to be representing.

One of the reasons it failed as well is because of all the lies being spread all over the internet about it.  More than once I tried to explain to people who falsely claimed that this was “an Obama loan forgiveness program” that would let students get off without paying anything.  “I paid my loans, how can these freeloaders get away with it?”  Facts never matter to these people, and of course, only a few would admit that the law did no such thing, but you can guess which news station was promoting that meme, can’t you?

 

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“Taxation is thievery” nonsense

Nobody likes paying taxes.  Some libertarians take that to the extreme and claim that taxation is thievery.  They paint a picture of the evil government pointing guns at the helpless citizen (usually naked and wearing a barrel for some reason) implying that it is absolutely wrong for any government to demand that citizens contribute to society.

They long for a world where the government expects nothing from its citizens — you know, like no society that has ever existed in the history of the world.

Humans are social creatures, and unless you live in a shack in the woods away from everyone, you are expected to contribute to the society that provides benefits to you.  Even primitive societies demand that you take your turn gathering berries or weaving.

To demand otherwise is just selfish.

This does not mean that we can’t complain about the unfairness of our tax system.  I do that all the time.  We have a hugely unbalanced system where the average person foots the bills so the rich and the corporations don’t have to.  We could close loopholes and adjust our tax system to be fairer while reducing (if not eliminating) income tax on the majority of Americans — and we’d still be able to balance a budget.

And we can also complain about what the money is spent on.  I also do plenty of that.  We spend too much on things we don’t need, and not enough on things we do need.

There is a lot to criticize about our tax system and where the money goes.

But to turn that into “all taxation is thievery” — well, that’s just selfish nonsense.

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Poor little congress

Retiring Congressman James Moran just can’t live on his measly $174,000 a year salary.

“I think the American people should know that the members of Congress are underpaid,” he said. “I understand that it’s widely felt that they underperform, but the fact is that this is the board of directors for the largest economic entity in the world.”   monopoly

He added that some members sleep in their offices or in “small little apartment units” when they are in Washington, D.C.

You may be surprised to learn that the President is getting paid less than when George Washington was in office (adjusted for inflation).  Congress only started getting an annual salary since the Civil War (before that it was on a per diem basis) and while it is less than it was 100 years ago when adjusted, it’s still higher than it’s been some years.

There is an argument to be made that if the salaries are too small, qualified people just won’t seek the job.  The best example I can think of locally is here in Pennsylvania, where we elect District Magistrates.   These judges do not have to be lawyers.  They mostly sign warrants and handle traffic tickets and other small claims, but over the years have been given more and more responsibilities for criminal cases, too.  In exchange, the salaries and benefits have increased and now lawyers often run for and win these positions, because previously the salary was so low it wasn’t worth giving up your practice.  (Mind you, I’m talking about salaries in the $70,000 range, not the $174,000 range.)  Most lawyers like me are still paying off huge student debts and I don’t think many people would say a $70,000 salary is unreasonable for that job.

Congress, however, has many perks we don’t get, and they’re getting paid a lot more than $70,000.  Yes, they have to do lots of travel back and forth to their districts but there are expense accounts for that.  And there doesn’t seem to be a dearth of people running for their positions.  Do we really think people who believe the salary is too low are our best representatives?

Meanwhile, the divide between Congress and the people they represent keeps growing, with more than half of Congress made up of millionaires.   While the average American watches their earning power dwindle as the economy putters along, the rich just keep getting richer, and that includes the millionaires in Congress.  No wonder so many of them don’t understand what we are going through.

So no, Congressman Moran, I don’t think Congress is underpaid.   Maybe if some of the very rich aren’t interested in running for office because it doesn’t pay enough, we might get more average Americans running.

And that could be a good thing…

 

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When we became an oligarchy

An oligarchy is a government run by a small group of elitists;  in our case, the very rich.  (In which case, perhaps the better term is a plutocracy.)  Today’s Supreme Court ruling was the final deciding factor.

How did we get here, in a place that Teddy Roosevelt warned us about?    money

1.  Reagan’s tax cuts.  It started under Reagan when the tax rates on the super rich were dropped tremendously.  Soon after this, we started going into great debt (unnecessary wars didn’t help any).  Infrastructure started falling apart, education was cut, opportunities started vanishing, and they took the middle class with them.  And the rich got even richer and, therefore, more powerful.

2.  The removal of regulations.  Reagan again.  From the very beginning, our economy went through periods of prosperity and crash, on the average of every seventeen years.  There was the Panic of 1819, the 1837 Crisis, the Panic of 1873, the Panic of 1893, the 1907 Banker’s Panic, and so on up to the Great Depression. Then Franklin Roosevelt put in controls and restrictions on Wall Street and banking and lo and behold, no depressions and no recessions for fifty years. Reagan comes in and removes those and bang! The S&L crisis, the 2001 recession, the 2007 Mortgage crisis, and the 2008 Bush collapse.  But more importantly, the lack of regulations produced less competition as huge businesses and banks gobbled up smaller ones and created monopolies.  This gives us great income inequality, where the vast majority of wealth in America is concentrated in the very few at a level comparable to the period before the French revolution.

3.  Gerrymandering.  This isn’t new, but it has gotten so absurd that it keeps those in power there, with hardly any challenges to incumbents.  Therefore, there is no one “stirring up the pot” and bringing in new blood to change things.  In certain districts, it is impossible for the other party to challenge the incumbent party.  This is terrible for democracy, which — like capitalism — needs competition to survive.

4.  The removal of campaign contribution limits.  With Citizen’s United and today’s McCutcheon decision, the Supreme Court has vested power in the filthiest rich at the expense of the rest of us.  You have to be daft to deny that money is power, and what these decisions do is to create the two great fictions that “corporations are people” and “money is speech.”  This means those in power now have even more means to keep themselves in power, by being able to spend unlimited, uncontrolled, and unregulated money in politics.

Because, according to the Supreme Court, if you bribe a politician quietly behind the scenes, it’s a crime.  But if you do it as a campaign contribution anonymously, it’s protected speech.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this latest nail in democracy’s coffin but for now I am just too angry to think.

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Capitalists except when Obama does it

The Obama administration recently announced that the regulation of domain names for the internet, which has been controlled by the government, will soon be decided by the free market. dot-com-domain-seisure  So of course conservative groups who rail against government regulation cheered loudly, congratulating Obama for supporting capitalism.

Ha ha! Just kidding!

Just a few days ago we saw how conservatives love capitalism and the free market (except when government regulations help their Big Money contributors).   

And how the basic premise behind Fox News is “Whatever Obama does, we’re against it.”

So I don’t have to let you know how Fox reacted, do I?  

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Capitalists when convenient

You can no longer buy a Tesla in New Jersey.

Governor Chris Christie’s bureaucracy just passed a regulation that requires all automobile companies to use franchises to sell their cars.    Tesla_Roadster_Japanese_display

If you can think of any possible reason why such a regulation is needed, please let me know.

This only affects electric car manufacturer Tesla, now prohibited from selling its vehicles in New Jersey since they sell direct.   This regulation prohibits the citizens of New Jersey from being able to shop for a legal product they may want to purchase.  The only beneficiaries of this are the gas-burning automobile manufacturers.  Hey, speaking of them, did you know that they donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Christie re-election campaign?  Pure coincidence, I am sure.

Chris Christie and his Republican friends may talk about the “free market” but clearly that only applies to their  rich friends.  (I could make a similar argument about cable companies and other monopolies that are sanctioned by governments.)

Conservative and libertarian groups who are honest and true to their ideology are outraged (as are liberal groups, of course).   The New Jersey state legislature can still try to pass legislation to redact this (assuming they can get enough votes to override Christie’s veto).