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Ted Kennedy: one-person reason to oppose term limits (most of the time, anyway).
tbladesays
..we definately should have voted the bum out last election. I certainly would never want a legislator that passionate on my side. A freshman Senator would have been a much better choice.
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:0)
shiltonesays
Why can’t we have a corrupt corporate fascist or mealy-mouthed moderate like everybody else?
marcus-gralysays
She doesn’t look like any of the Democratic Senators.
shanesays
Really, what’s the point of this apoplexic tantrum? Did it change anyone’s vote? Get some of the Repub amendments taken off the table? I’d rather see a clear, rational refutation of the amendments at question or an explanation of how the minimum wage is not a deadweight loss to the economy. Bloviating about how the Republicans “are offended by working men and women” is just as hyberbolic and unwarranted as the neocon cry of “liberals want us to lose the war.”
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—>Shane
steverinosays
Republicans already know all the “clear, rational refutations.” They don’t give a damn. That’s not what their johns left money on the bed table for.
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The Republicans know that openly killing this bill is political suicide. That’s why they are trying to be sneaky about it. Ted is dead on for calling them out.
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Sorry.
shanesays
…the minority party cares a whit about Kennedy’s rant? Or will the MSM actually play a sound bite of Kennedy that will be seen as a positive by moderates? I just see another potential reinforcement of the “liberals argue through emotion, not facts” attack coming from the right. The majority of times I’ve seen Kennedy covered in MSM over the last while, he’s showing this kind of vitriol. (It may be just the coverage I recall, I’ll admit.) Like the boy who cried wolf, I don’t see his ranting at everything as helping the Dem/Progressive cause, when it becomes tuned out, and our senior senator becomes a national running gag. I’m not disagreeing that the Republicans are throwing poison pills at the minimum wage bill left and right, or that Kennedy is wrong on substance (aside from some hyberbolic rhetoric.) How the message is delivered makes a difference, and I don’t think red-faced impotent bluster is what the left should be aiming for.
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—>Shane
steverinosays
captured the White House twice and held Congress for a decade through polite, carefully-parsed academic twittering.
shanesays
…it was through back room deals, relying on three second sound bites, limiting debate beyond historical norms, and divide and conquer politics! Thanks for setting me straight!
The majority of times I’ve seen Kennedy covered in MSM over the last while, he’s showing this kind of vitriol.
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That’s why he’s doing this. It will make the news.
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The vast bulk of Americans finally find truth in the message that the Republicans are trying to enrich their patrons by screwing the Middle Class. Ted on the telly will hammer that home again. At this point, getting hammered on prime-time television is about the only thing that Republicans respond to.
jksays
First of all, weren’t most of you who are so adimittly supporting this behavior in favor of procedurally stopping the amendment for voting on homosexual marriage? Now when the republicans use similar maneuvering it is being “sneaky about it” and Senator Chappaquiddick is right for “calling them out”. How inconsistent is that?
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Second, how many people will actually benefit from raising the minimum wage? The vast majority of people who earn minimum wage are not supporting families; around 15% of all employees in the country who make minimum wage are single parents or the only bread winner in a family with kids. They are entry level people who’s salary will increase as their value as an employee increases. What would be the benefit of increase the salary for people who are not doing anything to increase their value as an employee?
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Increasing minimum wage will likely not result in more or the same amount of people working at a higher salary, it will result in less people working at the higher salary. You’re not going to pay more for the fast food hamburger or the six pack of Bud. So how will businesses deal with the hirer minimum wage? They will do the work with less people; they will ask more of fewer employees or they will do some of the work them selves. The end result would be less jobs. How much help would being out of work be for those people?
Actually, I believe that most on this site were FOR voting on the amendment at the ConCon – even though most of us are against the amendment itself. We believe in this whole “law is good” thing.
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As to the minimum wage – the evidence indicates that you’re wrong. In states and countries that have a good minimum wage, the Middle Class as a whole does better. The increase typically comes out of the bank accounts of the Rich.
garysays
As to the minimum wage – the evidence indicates that you’re wrong. In states and countries that have a good minimum wage, the Middle Class as a whole does better. The increase typically comes out of the bank accounts of the Rich.
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For the record, Gary S. Becker and Richard A. Posner
diagree with you: “The strong bipartisan support for increasing the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour from the current $5.15 — a 40% increase — is a sad example of how interest-group politics and the public’s ignorance of economics can combine to give us laws that manage to be both inefficient and inegalitarian.
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An increase in the minimum wage raises the costs of fast foods and other goods produced with large inputs of unskilled labor. Producers adjust both by substituting capital inputs and/or high-skilled labor for minimum-wage workers and, because the substitutes are more costly (otherwise the substitutions would have been made …”
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I looked at the statistics on this page (see my post). In fact that is where my info that “15% of all employees in the country who make minimum wage are single parents or the only bread winner in a family with kids” comes from. This site does not disagree with anything I posted. This site also does not do any comparison of the increase in minimum wage relative to employment.
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So I don’t understand how this disputes anything that has been posted.
garysays
EPI has a definite union bias and therefore its own reason for supporting minimum wage currently proposed.
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But, seriously, there’s good arguments on the other side such that, with all the various opinions, the minimum wage proposal, if passed, probably will do no harm, but very little good. But, if it is raised too high (and who knows how high that is?), then it will actually harm the very people it’s intended to help, by making them unemployed. A cry for minimum wage does however, provide great talking points for the Democrats.
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I’m happy to provide conservative or libertarian sources but they’re readily available with minimal searching.
I’m not actually in a union – I’m a greedy co-owner of a means of production.
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Unions are like Capitalism – they are awful, but better than any alternative.
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The Middle Class did better, year after year, when unions were expanding. Unions started to get clobbered in the 1970s. Oddly enough, the median nonsupervisory wage peaked in the 1970s, and has been dropping since (adjusted for inflation, of course). Hmmm…
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Do you remember the 1970s? When a family of four could live a middle-class existance on a single workin’ stiff’s salary? Can’t even do it on two salaries today. That’s what happens when unions evaporate.
jksays
Manny,
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I apologize if I misrepresented your opinion but I do recall many being upset on this blog about the push for a vote on the homosexual marriage amendment. And I did also mean you in the generic sense referring to the people on the liberal side of the political spectrum that were attached legislatures and supporters of the amendment for putting “hate in the constitution”. And as someone who identifies himself as a conservative (never a republican), I agree with your position on the subject. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Either the state should allow everyone to marry or, if I had my preference, the state would get out of the marriage business all together and everyone would have to set up private agreements with lawyers. But this is the subject for other threads.
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Some of these sites agree with my position, others disagree. The bottom line is that the current leading economic theory is that raising the minimum wage will reduce labor demand.
steverinosays
The bottom line is that the current leading economic theory is that raising the minimum wage will reduce labor demand.
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I imagine this is indeed the consensus at lunchtime at the Cato Institute. However:
From the same source you sited (by the way, your link doesn’t work, could you please repost because I couldn’t find where you were citing from on the EPI website and I would like to read it)
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“While the FPI study has been frequently cited by supporters of increases in the minimum wage, the study is based on faulty statistical methods, and its results provide an inaccurate picture of the effect of state-level minimum wage increases. This paper, by Dr. Joseph Sabia of the University of Georgia, presents a more careful and methodologically rigorous analysis of state-level minimum wage increases. His results confirm the consensus economic opinion that increases in the minimum wage decrease employment, particularly for low-skilled and entry-level employees.”
but in this case, to paraphrase Dickens, the law is an ass.
steverinosays
like a sad baloon.
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But anyone who can hear the audio knows that Teddy is not actually engaged in a polemic against Roberts Rules of Order.
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The Republicans are trying to torpedo the restoration of the minimum wage without America finding out what they’re doing. Teddy is simply making sure America knows.
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But we do appreciate your tender concern about keeping the hourly cost of labor as low as possible. Could you kindly link to your doubtless numerous posts complaining about the average SP 500 CEO’s hourly wage of $6,500?
jksays
I am not seeing the difference between what the Rs are doing now and what the Ds tried to do about the homosexual marriage amendment. Ted Kennedy is probably doing a service by calling attention to what is going on; but the Ds in Mass tried to kill the amendment without people knowing until Mitt and local talk radio called attention to it. Both are trying to kill a bill/amendment by procedural moves as quietly as possible to avoid the political fall out.
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But back to the subject at hand. I have never complained about the high wages of CEOs because I believe (and I am sure I will be lambasted for this too) that the free market should decide the wages. If CEOs free market wage is $2 Mil a year, so be it. I don’t think we should put any type of limit on it. Just like I don’t believe we should put a floor on wages. My position has nothing to do with protecting the poor or the rich, it has to do with the economic theory I believe in. Which is that the laws of supply and demand should be allowed to operate with as little interference as possible.
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Could you please explain to me why you think high wages for individuals are such a problem. I am always curious why some people feel the need to point out high wages as being problematic especially in a argument for raising the minimum wage. Wouldn’t a better solution to low living wages be to assist unskilled labor in obtaining a skill that would allow them to be paid a higher wage? As I have pointed out before, how many people are actually trying to support a family on the minimum wage? According to EPI, about 14% of all the workers who make minimum wage. Less then 1% of everyone in the work force over the age of 25 are working for minimum wage.
stomvsays
Which is that the laws of supply and demand should be allowed to operate with as little interference as possible.
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The laws of supply and demand seem to be allowed to operate with lots of interference on one side and not much on the other side. As such, not only are they not working well in some markets, but they consistently screw over the same side. Imagine that.
jksays
Could you please elaborate on “interference on one side and not much on the other side”? I am not really following your point.
stomvsays
this is exactly why lobbyists exist — to make sure that the unfair world is unfair in their client’s benefit.
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Poor people don’t have good lobbyists.
jksays
I will in general agree with your point that lobbyists effect the system. But I would look to correct that problem by reducing the influence lobbyists have rather then increasing the minimum wage. How to do that, I am not really sure, let me think on that and I’ll get back to you.
How can you possibly say this and believe it? This is such a neocon talking point:
They are entry level people who’s salary will increase as their value as an employee increases. What would be the benefit of increase the salary for people who are not doing anything to increase their value as an employee?
Some observers contend that because many small businesses are labor intensive and largely employ low-wage workers, they will experience sharp cost increases when the minimum wage is increased, leading them to reduce employment levels. However, this report examined recent state-by-state trends for small businesses employing fewer than 50 workers and found that employment and payrolls in small businesses grew faster in the states with minimum wages above the federal level than in the remaining states where the $5.15 an hour federal minimum wage prevailed.
This report also found that total job growth was faster in the higher minimum wage states. Faster job growth also occurred in the retail trade sector, the sector of the economy employing the most workers at low wages, in the higher minimum wage states.
The simplistic introductory economics prediction that an increase in the minimum wage will result in job loss clearly is not supported by the actual job growth record.
? Employment in small businesses grew more (9.4 percent) in states with higher minimum wages than federal minimum wage states (6.6 percent) or Ohio.
? Inflation-adjusted small business payroll growth was stronger in high minimum wage states (19.0 percent) than in federal minimum wage states (13.6 percent) or Ohio.
More data became available in 1998, allowing further analysis. Between 1998 and 2003:
? The number of small business establishments grew more in higher minimum wage states (5.5 percent) than in federal minimum wage states (4.2 percent) or Ohio.
? Small business retail employment grew more in higher minimum wage states (9.2 percent) than in low minimum wage states (3.0 percent) or Ohio.
? Retail payroll grew more in higher minimum wage states (12.3 percent) than in low minimum wage states (6.4 percent) or Ohio.
? States with high and low minimum wages had similar growth in number of restaurants, restaurant payrolls, and restaurant employment.
What’s even more despicable is that the much-touted higher minimum wage is still not a living wage in much of the country.
jksays
What does neocon even mean anymore?
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I could site an equal number of economic sources that support my position that wages raise as people develope skills that increase thier value as employees. But do I really need to? Isn’t this just common sense?
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As far as the portion of my statement that I think you realy have an issue with….”What would be the benefit of increase the salary for people who are not doing anything to increase their value as an employee?”
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I feel this is a legitamite question. Less then 1% of the work force in America over the age of 25 works for minimum wage. This indicates that the vast majority of unskilled labor that enters the work force at a minimum wage job develope job skills that allow them to get higher wage in a realatively short time frame. As I have asked in a previous post, wouldn’t a better solution to low living wages be to assist unskilled labor in obtaining a skill that would allow them to be paid a higher wage?
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You may feel I am being “patronizing and disdainful” but a simple fact of our society is that some people will not do anything to help themselves. They are always looking for someone else to do it for them.
stomvsays
1. The people who make $0.30 over the prevailing minimum wage will also get a raise (on average) when the minimum wage bill goes through — that is, they’ll also still make just more than minimum wage. Not $0.30 more, but perhaps $0.20 more.
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The same goes for folks who make $0.50 over minimum wage, $1.00 over minimum wage, etc.
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Not only will all people who make somewhere between $5.15 and $7.25 get a raise (not just those at $5.15), but those who currently make more than the old minimum of $5.15 will end up (again, on average) making more than the new minimum of $7.25. So, we’re talking about far more than just the folks who make minimum wage.
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2. The people making minimum wage are working so many jobs to pay rent and buy groceries that they have no time for obtaining skills, except the skills they get on the job.
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So, by just looking at those making $5.15, you’re ignoring (tens of?) millions of wage earners who will get raises with a minimum wage hike, both immediately (to $7.25 in two stages) but also above that level because they’re doing work that’s worthy of more wages than minimum. Furthermore, if minimum wage isn’t a living wage, there’s simply no way to work enough hours to provide for basic needs and gain skills needed for a significant increase in pay.
jksays
Stomv,
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Your first point goes back to another point that was made in a different part of the thread. While you may be correct that some people who are above the minimum wage will also get raises there is another problem with raising the minimum wage that is not addressed in this type of logic. To quote myself,
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“Increasing minimum wage will likely not result in more or the same amount of people working at a higher salary, it will result in less people working at the higher salary. You’re not going to pay more for the fast food hamburger or the six pack of Bud. So how will businesses deal with the hirer minimum wage? They will do the work with less people; they will ask more of fewer employees or they will do some of the work them selves. The end result would be less jobs. How much help would being out of work be for those people?”
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This principle holds true for other jobs where wages are above the minimum wage. To further elaborate on that point, a factory worker that is now earning $7.50 an hour is not going to get an automating raise because the minimum wage goes up. Where would that money come from? More likely the factory owner would say that $7.50 is what the job pays in order to keep profits where they need to be.
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As far as your second point, for every person you point out that said it was too hard to work their way out of the economic situation, I can point out a person that did just that. I just don’t buy this as an excuse. There are already many programs and advantages that are out there for people who try and better themselves. And we should continue to fund most of those and even increase funding on others such as Pell Grants and subsidized school loans. In addition, skills that are gained on the job is the primary reason why, as I said before, less then 1% of people in the work force over the age of 25 make the minimum wage.
But I don’t know how people can still believe the “people can do well if they put their minds to it/people who don’t have enough money are lazy/all it takes is a skill to get a better job” dogma that has characterized Republican “greed is good” administrations from Reagan onward. It’s a convenient “blame the victim” device that allows them to distance themselves from the realities facing the working poor–the inability, no matter how many jobs you hold down–of raising a family, let alone getting ahead, with the kind of wage the average job offers. I’ve met people who hold down three jobs and can barely make ends meet.
moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the “lowliest” occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.
And let me tell you, it was eye opening even for a self-professed bleeding heart liberal.
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You say
I could site an equal number of economic sources that support my position that wages raise as people develope skills that increase thier value as employees. But do I really need to? Isn’t this just common sense?
Yes, that is common sense. But it’s not common business practice in a society where
I used to get trained frequently in my last job, as a secretary. I learned at least easily ten software applications and web design/usability skills plus took courses in management in the seven years I was there. My raises were barely cost of living, and that was what everyone got.
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Another claim you make in your argument is
a simple fact of our society is that some people will not do anything to help themselves. They are always looking for someone else to do it for them.
Hmmm, I think there are more rich white men looking for someone else to work their menial jobs, raise their families, and fight their wars for them than there are poor folks takin’ it easy, living the good life on welfare and unemployment.
jksays
It has been the motivating factor since the beginning of time. And I would not characterize it as Republican thought but as capitalist, free market economic theory.
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As far as your position about raising a family and ignoring the working poor. Your position on this is being a reason for raising the minimum wage is not backed up by the statistics. Only about 14% of all of the people on minimum wage are the bread winners of the family and less then 1% of everyone in the workforce over the age of 25 make the minimum wage. In addition, there is substantial economic theory that increasing the minimum wage will reduce the number of jobs available at the lower rates.
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I have read Nickled and Dimed and I also read another book by her, I believe it was called “Bait and Switched” which was about people who had marketable skills and ended up broke anyways. Both of these books were good, well written and told good stories about failures in our society. I am not going to deny that these were compelling and tugged at the heart strings but they did not change my opinion. If you believe in free market capitalism then you have to except that just like people have the right to succeed, they also have the right to fail. Our system is a capitalist system, that is how the founders established our country and that, IMHO, is why we are the preeminent world super power.
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We can put programs in place to assist the people that fail (i.e. welfare, WIC, career retraining, etc.) but raising the minimum wages is not the answer for helping these people.
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I don’t see how what you cited about the wages of CEOs disagrees with my position. Those wages are set by the free market system. We don’t live in a socialist system, we don’t live by “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” type of philosophy. Yes, CEOs make a ridicules amount of money, so do lawyers, doctors, etc. That is what motivates most people to do all the work required to reach these positions. Remember, “Greed is Good”. And just a little fun point like yours about the average CEO earning as much in the first half of the first day of the new year as a minimum wage employee will earn in a year. Due to our graduate tax system (even though it is not as graduated as some would like) the average CEO has to work until mid May or June before they actually earn a dollar for themselves. For wife and I last year it was May 17th, after that we actually got to keep what we made.
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One last thing, your point “I think there are more rich white men looking for someone else to work their menial jobs, raise their families, and fight their wars for them than there are poor folks takin’ it easy, living the good life on welfare and unemployment.” Not a valid point in my opinion, with the exception of the fight their wars part. The rich white men as you put it pay for those services, creating economic growth at that. For the war part, I agree with you. There are too many of the middle and lower class in the armed service but that’s because we have a volunteer system and the armed service is one of the ways to get marketable skills. That being said, I would be in favor to a system similar to Isreal where all citizens that have graduate high school or reached the age of 18 have to serve for a couple of years. Put that on the ballot and I’d vote for it.
stomvsays
I don’t see how what you cited about the wages of CEOs disagrees with my position. Those wages are set by the free market system.
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Sorta kinda. It’s true that investors (and by that, I mean institutional investors, since they hold the bulk of shares in nearly every sizable public corporation) could dump shares of companies with overpaid CEOs, but they haven’t. Why not? Well, for one thing, $30,000,000 divided by 2 billion shares (HD, for example), isn’t very much money. It’s one and a half cents per (HD = $40.00) share. So, from an investor side, who cares? Why would an investor not invest in HD over $0.015 per share, when each share is paying $0.90 per year in dividends? It’s in the margins, and so the market just “doesn’t care.”
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Combine that with the fact that the regulations for corporations aren’t a “free market” and you’ve got a system that should be looked at.
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Look: there is no “free market” in America. Everything is regulated, and those regulations influence the market. The influence isn’t random — somebody wins, and somebody loses, and those somebodies are usually predictable.
jksays
The basic difference between you and I is that I feel we should correct the problem by removing some of those regulations.
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As far as your HD examples goes, I believe the market does care. Sticking with HD, if the dividend returned was say $0.05 per share and the divided cost of the CEO’s salary was $0.015 per share, investors would likely dump that stock (ones that do thier research at least).
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In your example it is less then 2% of a good yearly dividen. If I were invested in that stock I wouldn’t care either. Pay the man who captains the ship all that money if he can continue to produce that dividen.
mem-from-somervillesays
isn’t that what the previous days were for? Apparently that wasn’t working.
Yesterday, 69 years after the minimum wage was first established, 28 U.S. Senators did just that when they voted “yes” on an amendment from Colorado Republican Wayne Allard that would have scrapped the federal minimum wage.
…that presidential hopefulls Senators McCain, Brownback, and Hagel gain in voting to eliminate the federal minimum wage? Should one of those men be the nominee, how would he justify it in a debate when a Dem confronts him on the issue? Are there that many people who think minimum wage elimination is a good idea that it isn’t a liability?
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Is it about immigration, making it less attractive for immigrants to work in certain US states due to a low minimum wage (Kansas’s State minimum wage is like $2-something and five states don’t have any state minimum wage?)
jksays
Eliminating the minimum wage is based in economic theory. I hope there are enough people out there that understand economic theory and don’t just react with platitudes like “just what about the working class people don’t you like?!”
“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
Irving Fisher, Yale economist, several days before the stock market crash of 1929.
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Milton Friedman, the economist of the Right, claimed that Fisher was the greatest economist that the US ever produced.
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Yikes!
geo999says
He doesn’t need to understand, much less care about, secondary effects, because most of his constituents don’t either.
geo999says
kbuschsays
It’s probably the necessity for Republicans of appealing to the Chamber of Commerce and similar funding sources. The evangelicals in the Republican camp are only just now and very slowly beginning to think that worrying about teh gay and lives in petrie dishes might be on a par with stuff like poverty.
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It seems less likely to me that there is a huge libertarian wing in the G.O.P. that demands to be appealed to — otherwise the FISA issue would have riled more Republican Senators than it did. So I doubt anyone is voting out of libertarian orthodoxy.
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Lakoff in Moral Politics and his recent book on freedom talks about the odd deification of the market conservatives seem to display. A lot hinges on how conservatives define “moral” which is quite different from how you or I would. In addition to the wonderful What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Franks has also written One Market Under God which I have not read but which may also take up this curious question.
tbladesays
You’re the first person to accuse me of trying too hard not to be cynical!
joetssays
The 3 Senators you mentioned have something very much in common: they usually stick to their guns more so that pursue something they don’t agree with for political advantage. They vote to eliminate it because they feel it’s the right thing to do.
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I know this is going to cause backlash, but try to deny it: minimum wage to the Democrats is taxes to the Republicans. Every time they want to score a few cheap, easy points, they rally the base by promises to [raise the minimum wage][cut taxes]. It’s become just another hot-button to get some air-time and push the polls a couple percent one way or the other. I’m not saying that doing either doesn’t do anything for anyone, but the reasoning behind it has gone from selfless to selfish.
lightirissays
And this is why we love our Uncle Ted. What a thing of beauty. You rock, Sen. Kennedy. How honored we are to have you.
jpsoxsays
I can’t find the whole 24 minutes anywhere on youtube. I want to know what he was saving his last 5 for, if that was only how he got warmed up.
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I’m so proud of him.
stomvsays
Generally speaking, you don’t have to use all your minutes. You can “hand off.” I know virtually nothing about proceedings or Roberts Rules, etc… so someone who knows what’s up please tack on the right answer. 😀
geo999says
Time alloted for debate is usually apportioned equally to two persons from opposite sides of the aisle, who will lead the debate, and control the time for their side.
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They, in turn, will yield specific blocks of time to various speakers from their party.
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The speakers may use all of their time, or;
seeing that the clock is running out, ask for more time of their leader, or;
they may yield back any unused time, which can be used later in the debate.
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It is common practice for speakers to ask for a time check, especially if they have been yielded, say, 20 minutes or more, so that they won’t lose track of time, and get cut off before they get to finish their argument.
Lately I’ve been nostalgic for Rep. James Traficant. Don’t really know why. Among many other things, he was great at yielding to the chair. Some of his yield quotes included:
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“Beam me up. This is not a trade policy. This is a giveaway. I yield back what high-paying jobs with benefits we have left. “
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“Tell me, Mr. Speaker, how many more Americans must be abused before Congress secures our border? Beam me up. I yield back a massive problem that can and will not be solved. “
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“I yield back what manufacturing jobs we have left in America.”
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“I am firmly convinced those experts at the White House are smoking dope. I yield back the fact that there is no 5-day waiting period on Chinese nukes. Think about that. “
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“The truth is, our trade policy is about as effective as tits on a boar hog. Mr. Speaker, I yield back our stupidity and I yield back our other cheeks. “
geo999says
Sen. Kennedy most likely did not control the time for his side in this debate.
Otherwise, instead of requesting a time check, he would have said “I yield to myself such time as I may consume”.
“When does the greed stop?”
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Ted Kennedy: one-person reason to oppose term limits (most of the time, anyway).
..we definately should have voted the bum out last election. I certainly would never want a legislator that passionate on my side. A freshman Senator would have been a much better choice.
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:0)
Why can’t we have a corrupt corporate fascist or mealy-mouthed moderate like everybody else?
She doesn’t look like any of the Democratic Senators.
Really, what’s the point of this apoplexic tantrum? Did it change anyone’s vote? Get some of the Repub amendments taken off the table? I’d rather see a clear, rational refutation of the amendments at question or an explanation of how the minimum wage is not a deadweight loss to the economy. Bloviating about how the Republicans “are offended by working men and women” is just as hyberbolic and unwarranted as the neocon cry of “liberals want us to lose the war.”
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—>Shane
Republicans already know all the “clear, rational refutations.” They don’t give a damn. That’s not what their johns left money on the bed table for.
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The Republicans know that openly killing this bill is political suicide. That’s why they are trying to be sneaky about it. Ted is dead on for calling them out.
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Sorry.
…the minority party cares a whit about Kennedy’s rant? Or will the MSM actually play a sound bite of Kennedy that will be seen as a positive by moderates? I just see another potential reinforcement of the “liberals argue through emotion, not facts” attack coming from the right. The majority of times I’ve seen Kennedy covered in MSM over the last while, he’s showing this kind of vitriol. (It may be just the coverage I recall, I’ll admit.) Like the boy who cried wolf, I don’t see his ranting at everything as helping the Dem/Progressive cause, when it becomes tuned out, and our senior senator becomes a national running gag. I’m not disagreeing that the Republicans are throwing poison pills at the minimum wage bill left and right, or that Kennedy is wrong on substance (aside from some hyberbolic rhetoric.) How the message is delivered makes a difference, and I don’t think red-faced impotent bluster is what the left should be aiming for.
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—>Shane
captured the White House twice and held Congress for a decade through polite, carefully-parsed academic twittering.
…it was through back room deals, relying on three second sound bites, limiting debate beyond historical norms, and divide and conquer politics! Thanks for setting me straight!
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—>Shane
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That’s why he’s doing this. It will make the news.
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The vast bulk of Americans finally find truth in the message that the Republicans are trying to enrich their patrons by screwing the Middle Class. Ted on the telly will hammer that home again. At this point, getting hammered on prime-time television is about the only thing that Republicans respond to.
First of all, weren’t most of you who are so adimittly supporting this behavior in favor of procedurally stopping the amendment for voting on homosexual marriage? Now when the republicans use similar maneuvering it is being “sneaky about it” and Senator Chappaquiddick is right for “calling them out”. How inconsistent is that?
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Second, how many people will actually benefit from raising the minimum wage? The vast majority of people who earn minimum wage are not supporting families; around 15% of all employees in the country who make minimum wage are single parents or the only bread winner in a family with kids. They are entry level people who’s salary will increase as their value as an employee increases. What would be the benefit of increase the salary for people who are not doing anything to increase their value as an employee?
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Increasing minimum wage will likely not result in more or the same amount of people working at a higher salary, it will result in less people working at the higher salary. You’re not going to pay more for the fast food hamburger or the six pack of Bud. So how will businesses deal with the hirer minimum wage? They will do the work with less people; they will ask more of fewer employees or they will do some of the work them selves. The end result would be less jobs. How much help would being out of work be for those people?
Actually, I believe that most on this site were FOR voting on the amendment at the ConCon – even though most of us are against the amendment itself. We believe in this whole “law is good” thing.
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As to the minimum wage – the evidence indicates that you’re wrong. In states and countries that have a good minimum wage, the Middle Class as a whole does better. The increase typically comes out of the bank accounts of the Rich.
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For the record, Gary S. Becker and Richard A. Posner
diagree with you: “The strong bipartisan support for increasing the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour from the current $5.15 — a 40% increase — is a sad example of how interest-group politics and the public’s ignorance of economics can combine to give us laws that manage to be both inefficient and inegalitarian.
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An increase in the minimum wage raises the costs of fast foods and other goods produced with large inputs of unskilled labor. Producers adjust both by substituting capital inputs and/or high-skilled labor for minimum-wage workers and, because the substitutes are more costly (otherwise the substitutions would have been made …”
Minimum Wage Issue Guide: Facts at a Glance
Manny,
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I looked at the statistics on this page (see my post). In fact that is where my info that “15% of all employees in the country who make minimum wage are single parents or the only bread winner in a family with kids” comes from. This site does not disagree with anything I posted. This site also does not do any comparison of the increase in minimum wage relative to employment.
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So I don’t understand how this disputes anything that has been posted.
EPI has a definite union bias and therefore its own reason for supporting minimum wage currently proposed.
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But, seriously, there’s good arguments on the other side such that, with all the various opinions, the minimum wage proposal, if passed, probably will do no harm, but very little good. But, if it is raised too high (and who knows how high that is?), then it will actually harm the very people it’s intended to help, by making them unemployed. A cry for minimum wage does however, provide great talking points for the Democrats.
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I’m happy to provide conservative or libertarian sources but they’re readily available with minimal searching.
I’m not actually in a union – I’m a greedy co-owner of a means of production.
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Unions are like Capitalism – they are awful, but better than any alternative.
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The Middle Class did better, year after year, when unions were expanding. Unions started to get clobbered in the 1970s. Oddly enough, the median nonsupervisory wage peaked in the 1970s, and has been dropping since (adjusted for inflation, of course). Hmmm…
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Do you remember the 1970s? When a family of four could live a middle-class existance on a single workin’ stiff’s salary? Can’t even do it on two salaries today. That’s what happens when unions evaporate.
Manny,
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I apologize if I misrepresented your opinion but I do recall many being upset on this blog about the push for a vote on the homosexual marriage amendment. And I did also mean you in the generic sense referring to the people on the liberal side of the political spectrum that were attached legislatures and supporters of the amendment for putting “hate in the constitution”. And as someone who identifies himself as a conservative (never a republican), I agree with your position on the subject. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Either the state should allow everyone to marry or, if I had my preference, the state would get out of the marriage business all together and everyone would have to set up private agreements with lawyers. But this is the subject for other threads.
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As far as what I posted on this subject, I pulled my information from various sites and here they are:
http://www.bls.gov/c…
http://www.epionline…
http://www.uvm.edu/~…
http://www.cato.org/…
http://www.swlearnin…
(I apologize, I don’t know how to create links on this blog)
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Some of these sites agree with my position, others disagree. The bottom line is that the current leading economic theory is that raising the minimum wage will reduce labor demand.
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I imagine this is indeed the consensus at lunchtime at the Cato Institute. However:
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From the same source you sited (by the way, your link doesn’t work, could you please repost because I couldn’t find where you were citing from on the EPI website and I would like to read it)
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“While the FPI study has been frequently cited by supporters of increases in the minimum wage, the study is based on faulty statistical methods, and its results provide an inaccurate picture of the effect of state-level minimum wage increases. This paper, by Dr. Joseph Sabia of the University of Georgia, presents a more careful and methodologically rigorous analysis of state-level minimum wage increases. His results confirm the consensus economic opinion that increases in the minimum wage decrease employment, particularly for low-skilled and entry-level employees.”
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Link (http://www.epionline…)
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As I has included in my earlier post, I didn’t just go the Cato Institute, that was one area I reviewed.
There were plenty of us who were against voting on the amendment because we don’t believe that people should be allowed to vote to deny other people of their civil rights, and we trust the voters less than the legislature.
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I am generally part of the
but in this case, to paraphrase Dickens, the law is an ass.
like a sad baloon.
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But anyone who can hear the audio knows that Teddy is not actually engaged in a polemic against Roberts Rules of Order.
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The Republicans are trying to torpedo the restoration of the minimum wage without America finding out what they’re doing. Teddy is simply making sure America knows.
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But we do appreciate your tender concern about keeping the hourly cost of labor as low as possible. Could you kindly link to your doubtless numerous posts complaining about the average SP 500 CEO’s hourly wage of $6,500?
I am not seeing the difference between what the Rs are doing now and what the Ds tried to do about the homosexual marriage amendment. Ted Kennedy is probably doing a service by calling attention to what is going on; but the Ds in Mass tried to kill the amendment without people knowing until Mitt and local talk radio called attention to it. Both are trying to kill a bill/amendment by procedural moves as quietly as possible to avoid the political fall out.
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But back to the subject at hand. I have never complained about the high wages of CEOs because I believe (and I am sure I will be lambasted for this too) that the free market should decide the wages. If CEOs free market wage is $2 Mil a year, so be it. I don’t think we should put any type of limit on it. Just like I don’t believe we should put a floor on wages. My position has nothing to do with protecting the poor or the rich, it has to do with the economic theory I believe in. Which is that the laws of supply and demand should be allowed to operate with as little interference as possible.
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Could you please explain to me why you think high wages for individuals are such a problem. I am always curious why some people feel the need to point out high wages as being problematic especially in a argument for raising the minimum wage. Wouldn’t a better solution to low living wages be to assist unskilled labor in obtaining a skill that would allow them to be paid a higher wage? As I have pointed out before, how many people are actually trying to support a family on the minimum wage? According to EPI, about 14% of all the workers who make minimum wage. Less then 1% of everyone in the work force over the age of 25 are working for minimum wage.
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The laws of supply and demand seem to be allowed to operate with lots of interference on one side and not much on the other side. As such, not only are they not working well in some markets, but they consistently screw over the same side. Imagine that.
Could you please elaborate on “interference on one side and not much on the other side”? I am not really following your point.
this is exactly why lobbyists exist — to make sure that the unfair world is unfair in their client’s benefit.
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Poor people don’t have good lobbyists.
I will in general agree with your point that lobbyists effect the system. But I would look to correct that problem by reducing the influence lobbyists have rather then increasing the minimum wage. How to do that, I am not really sure, let me think on that and I’ll get back to you.
How can you possibly say this and believe it? This is such a neocon talking point:
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This has been proven false many times, for example: States with Minimum Wages above the Federal Level have had Faster Small Business and Retail Job Growth:
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Or this, Good for Business: Small Business Growth and State Minimum Wages:
What’s even more despicable is that the much-touted higher minimum wage is still not a living wage in much of the country.
What does neocon even mean anymore?
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I could site an equal number of economic sources that support my position that wages raise as people develope skills that increase thier value as employees. But do I really need to? Isn’t this just common sense?
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As far as the portion of my statement that I think you realy have an issue with….”What would be the benefit of increase the salary for people who are not doing anything to increase their value as an employee?”
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I feel this is a legitamite question. Less then 1% of the work force in America over the age of 25 works for minimum wage. This indicates that the vast majority of unskilled labor that enters the work force at a minimum wage job develope job skills that allow them to get higher wage in a realatively short time frame. As I have asked in a previous post, wouldn’t a better solution to low living wages be to assist unskilled labor in obtaining a skill that would allow them to be paid a higher wage?
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You may feel I am being “patronizing and disdainful” but a simple fact of our society is that some people will not do anything to help themselves. They are always looking for someone else to do it for them.
1. The people who make $0.30 over the prevailing minimum wage will also get a raise (on average) when the minimum wage bill goes through — that is, they’ll also still make just more than minimum wage. Not $0.30 more, but perhaps $0.20 more.
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The same goes for folks who make $0.50 over minimum wage, $1.00 over minimum wage, etc.
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Not only will all people who make somewhere between $5.15 and $7.25 get a raise (not just those at $5.15), but those who currently make more than the old minimum of $5.15 will end up (again, on average) making more than the new minimum of $7.25. So, we’re talking about far more than just the folks who make minimum wage.
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2. The people making minimum wage are working so many jobs to pay rent and buy groceries that they have no time for obtaining skills, except the skills they get on the job.
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So, by just looking at those making $5.15, you’re ignoring (tens of?) millions of wage earners who will get raises with a minimum wage hike, both immediately (to $7.25 in two stages) but also above that level because they’re doing work that’s worthy of more wages than minimum. Furthermore, if minimum wage isn’t a living wage, there’s simply no way to work enough hours to provide for basic needs and gain skills needed for a significant increase in pay.
Stomv,
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Your first point goes back to another point that was made in a different part of the thread. While you may be correct that some people who are above the minimum wage will also get raises there is another problem with raising the minimum wage that is not addressed in this type of logic. To quote myself,
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“Increasing minimum wage will likely not result in more or the same amount of people working at a higher salary, it will result in less people working at the higher salary. You’re not going to pay more for the fast food hamburger or the six pack of Bud. So how will businesses deal with the hirer minimum wage? They will do the work with less people; they will ask more of fewer employees or they will do some of the work them selves. The end result would be less jobs. How much help would being out of work be for those people?”
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This principle holds true for other jobs where wages are above the minimum wage. To further elaborate on that point, a factory worker that is now earning $7.50 an hour is not going to get an automating raise because the minimum wage goes up. Where would that money come from? More likely the factory owner would say that $7.50 is what the job pays in order to keep profits where they need to be.
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As far as your second point, for every person you point out that said it was too hard to work their way out of the economic situation, I can point out a person that did just that. I just don’t buy this as an excuse. There are already many programs and advantages that are out there for people who try and better themselves. And we should continue to fund most of those and even increase funding on others such as Pell Grants and subsidized school loans. In addition, skills that are gained on the job is the primary reason why, as I said before, less then 1% of people in the work force over the age of 25 make the minimum wage.
But I don’t know how people can still believe the “people can do well if they put their minds to it/people who don’t have enough money are lazy/all it takes is a skill to get a better job” dogma that has characterized Republican “greed is good” administrations from Reagan onward. It’s a convenient “blame the victim” device that allows them to distance themselves from the realities facing the working poor–the inability, no matter how many jobs you hold down–of raising a family, let alone getting ahead, with the kind of wage the average job offers. I’ve met people who hold down three jobs and can barely make ends meet.
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There is a book you should read, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. She
And let me tell you, it was eye opening even for a self-professed bleeding heart liberal.
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You say
Yes, that is common sense. But it’s not common business practice in a society where
I used to get trained frequently in my last job, as a secretary. I learned at least easily ten software applications and web design/usability skills plus took courses in management in the seven years I was there. My raises were barely cost of living, and that was what everyone got.
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Another claim you make in your argument is
Hmmm, I think there are more rich white men looking for someone else to work their menial jobs, raise their families, and fight their wars for them than there are poor folks takin’ it easy, living the good life on welfare and unemployment.
It has been the motivating factor since the beginning of time. And I would not characterize it as Republican thought but as capitalist, free market economic theory.
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As far as your position about raising a family and ignoring the working poor. Your position on this is being a reason for raising the minimum wage is not backed up by the statistics. Only about 14% of all of the people on minimum wage are the bread winners of the family and less then 1% of everyone in the workforce over the age of 25 make the minimum wage. In addition, there is substantial economic theory that increasing the minimum wage will reduce the number of jobs available at the lower rates.
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I have read Nickled and Dimed and I also read another book by her, I believe it was called “Bait and Switched” which was about people who had marketable skills and ended up broke anyways. Both of these books were good, well written and told good stories about failures in our society. I am not going to deny that these were compelling and tugged at the heart strings but they did not change my opinion. If you believe in free market capitalism then you have to except that just like people have the right to succeed, they also have the right to fail. Our system is a capitalist system, that is how the founders established our country and that, IMHO, is why we are the preeminent world super power.
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We can put programs in place to assist the people that fail (i.e. welfare, WIC, career retraining, etc.) but raising the minimum wages is not the answer for helping these people.
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I don’t see how what you cited about the wages of CEOs disagrees with my position. Those wages are set by the free market system. We don’t live in a socialist system, we don’t live by “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” type of philosophy. Yes, CEOs make a ridicules amount of money, so do lawyers, doctors, etc. That is what motivates most people to do all the work required to reach these positions. Remember, “Greed is Good”. And just a little fun point like yours about the average CEO earning as much in the first half of the first day of the new year as a minimum wage employee will earn in a year. Due to our graduate tax system (even though it is not as graduated as some would like) the average CEO has to work until mid May or June before they actually earn a dollar for themselves. For wife and I last year it was May 17th, after that we actually got to keep what we made.
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One last thing, your point “I think there are more rich white men looking for someone else to work their menial jobs, raise their families, and fight their wars for them than there are poor folks takin’ it easy, living the good life on welfare and unemployment.” Not a valid point in my opinion, with the exception of the fight their wars part. The rich white men as you put it pay for those services, creating economic growth at that. For the war part, I agree with you. There are too many of the middle and lower class in the armed service but that’s because we have a volunteer system and the armed service is one of the ways to get marketable skills. That being said, I would be in favor to a system similar to Isreal where all citizens that have graduate high school or reached the age of 18 have to serve for a couple of years. Put that on the ballot and I’d vote for it.
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Sorta kinda. It’s true that investors (and by that, I mean institutional investors, since they hold the bulk of shares in nearly every sizable public corporation) could dump shares of companies with overpaid CEOs, but they haven’t. Why not? Well, for one thing, $30,000,000 divided by 2 billion shares (HD, for example), isn’t very much money. It’s one and a half cents per (HD = $40.00) share. So, from an investor side, who cares? Why would an investor not invest in HD over $0.015 per share, when each share is paying $0.90 per year in dividends? It’s in the margins, and so the market just “doesn’t care.”
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Combine that with the fact that the regulations for corporations aren’t a “free market” and you’ve got a system that should be looked at.
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Look: there is no “free market” in America. Everything is regulated, and those regulations influence the market. The influence isn’t random — somebody wins, and somebody loses, and those somebodies are usually predictable.
The basic difference between you and I is that I feel we should correct the problem by removing some of those regulations.
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As far as your HD examples goes, I believe the market does care. Sticking with HD, if the dividend returned was say $0.05 per share and the divided cost of the CEO’s salary was $0.015 per share, investors would likely dump that stock (ones that do thier research at least).
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In your example it is less then 2% of a good yearly dividen. If I were invested in that stock I wouldn’t care either. Pay the man who captains the ship all that money if he can continue to produce that dividen.
isn’t that what the previous days were for? Apparently that wasn’t working.
so, apparently, that didn’t count.
From AFL-CIO Blog:
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More at Huffington Post.
…that presidential hopefulls Senators McCain, Brownback, and Hagel gain in voting to eliminate the federal minimum wage? Should one of those men be the nominee, how would he justify it in a debate when a Dem confronts him on the issue? Are there that many people who think minimum wage elimination is a good idea that it isn’t a liability?
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Is it about immigration, making it less attractive for immigrants to work in certain US states due to a low minimum wage (Kansas’s State minimum wage is like $2-something and five states don’t have any state minimum wage?)
Eliminating the minimum wage is based in economic theory. I hope there are enough people out there that understand economic theory and don’t just react with platitudes like “just what about the working class people don’t you like?!”
“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
Irving Fisher, Yale economist, several days before the stock market crash of 1929.
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Milton Friedman, the economist of the Right, claimed that Fisher was the greatest economist that the US ever produced.
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Yikes!
He doesn’t need to understand, much less care about, secondary effects, because most of his constituents don’t either.
It’s probably the necessity for Republicans of appealing to the Chamber of Commerce and similar funding sources. The evangelicals in the Republican camp are only just now and very slowly beginning to think that worrying about teh gay and lives in petrie dishes might be on a par with stuff like poverty.
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It seems less likely to me that there is a huge libertarian wing in the G.O.P. that demands to be appealed to — otherwise the FISA issue would have riled more Republican Senators than it did. So I doubt anyone is voting out of libertarian orthodoxy.
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Lakoff in Moral Politics and his recent book on freedom talks about the odd deification of the market conservatives seem to display. A lot hinges on how conservatives define “moral” which is quite different from how you or I would. In addition to the wonderful What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Franks has also written One Market Under God which I have not read but which may also take up this curious question.
You’re the first person to accuse me of trying too hard not to be cynical!
The 3 Senators you mentioned have something very much in common: they usually stick to their guns more so that pursue something they don’t agree with for political advantage. They vote to eliminate it because they feel it’s the right thing to do.
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I know this is going to cause backlash, but try to deny it: minimum wage to the Democrats is taxes to the Republicans. Every time they want to score a few cheap, easy points, they rally the base by promises to [raise the minimum wage][cut taxes]. It’s become just another hot-button to get some air-time and push the polls a couple percent one way or the other. I’m not saying that doing either doesn’t do anything for anyone, but the reasoning behind it has gone from selfless to selfish.
And this is why we love our Uncle Ted. What a thing of beauty. You rock, Sen. Kennedy. How honored we are to have you.
I can’t find the whole 24 minutes anywhere on youtube. I want to know what he was saving his last 5 for, if that was only how he got warmed up.
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I’m so proud of him.
Generally speaking, you don’t have to use all your minutes. You can “hand off.” I know virtually nothing about proceedings or Roberts Rules, etc… so someone who knows what’s up please tack on the right answer. 😀
Time alloted for debate is usually apportioned equally to two persons from opposite sides of the aisle, who will lead the debate, and control the time for their side.
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They, in turn, will yield specific blocks of time to various speakers from their party.
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The speakers may use all of their time, or;
seeing that the clock is running out, ask for more time of their leader, or;
they may yield back any unused time, which can be used later in the debate.
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It is common practice for speakers to ask for a time check, especially if they have been yielded, say, 20 minutes or more, so that they won’t lose track of time, and get cut off before they get to finish their argument.
Lately I’ve been nostalgic for Rep. James Traficant. Don’t really know why. Among many other things, he was great at yielding to the chair. Some of his yield quotes included:
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“Beam me up. This is not a trade policy. This is a giveaway. I yield back what high-paying jobs with benefits we have left. “
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“Tell me, Mr. Speaker, how many more Americans must be abused before Congress secures our border? Beam me up. I yield back a massive problem that can and will not be solved. “
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“I yield back what manufacturing jobs we have left in America.”
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“I am firmly convinced those experts at the White House are smoking dope. I yield back the fact that there is no 5-day waiting period on Chinese nukes. Think about that. “
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“The truth is, our trade policy is about as effective as tits on a boar hog. Mr. Speaker, I yield back our stupidity and I yield back our other cheeks. “
Sen. Kennedy most likely did not control the time for his side in this debate.
Otherwise, instead of requesting a time check, he would have said “I yield to myself such time as I may consume”.