With great fanfare and excitement Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker signed a pay equity act into law at the Massachusetts State House. While there are many good things about this bill, including this: Employers in Massachusetts will be barred from forcing prospective employees to divulge how much they were making at their last job. , I have a question.
Does anyone think that this bill will raise the collective wages of laborers in the commonwealth? If women are paid a low amount today and in two years time, they will receive a raise in wages, where does the funding for that higher wage come from? Are employers going to recalculate the labor costs in their business model and increase that amount, making less profit? Yeah, I don’t think so.
My hunch is that employers will simply, slowly, quietly, lower the wages of male employees in “innocent” ways in order to bring equilibrium to their payroll reports. So yes, while Mom and Aunt Bess, and sister Sarah will be getting a slight raise, Dad, Uncle Louie and Ernie will have their raises put on hold for a while. In short, the crumbs will be distributed more equally, but there will not be an increase in crumbs.
To some, like the single mom, this will be a big win. However, to the mom who is dependent on child support payments from her ex-husband, his lower wage is going to translate to a smaller check for her. In the end, as they say, there ain’t no free lunch and if anyone thinks that the .1% and the employers are going to fund this, well, you’re probably waiting for the Reagan trickle down as well.
Personally I’ve never been quite sure how you account for other variables or how/why previous legislation on this matter hasn’t worked.
What’s next from you, a claim that women take jobs from male “breadwinners”?
Let me see if I’ve got this straight — we should continue paying women less than men so that we can perpetuate the exploitative and oppressive (for both genders) child support system?
As a father who PAID child support in this state for more than twenty years, let me explain as patiently as I can just how wrong your last paragraph is. Child support awards have been determined by the income of both parents since the child support guidelines were promulgated in the early 1980s. The wage disparity between men and women screws fathers in two ways:
1. It increases support awards paid by fathers, because fathers earn more, and
2. It makes mothers more likely to depend on their soon-to-be ex-husbands because the mother’s job, with lower income, is more likely to be viewed as “expendable” when the demands of parenting climb.
When women are paid the same as men, mothers are more likely to be the family breadwinner, and fathers are more likely to be stay-at-home dads. When women are paid the same as men, courts are more likely to award physical custody to fathers and more likely to award child support obligations to mothers who are breadwinners.
In this diary, you’ve jammed your foot even further into your mouth. Your sexism, so apparent already in your commentary about our nominee, reveals itself for what it is in the flagrantly sexist diary.
Please speak to the issue and leave your vulgar comments about me out. I know I repulse you with my progressive pro-labor stance, but please keep that out of the debate.
THIS POST reeks of sexism, and that stench repulses me. That stench has nothing whatsoever to do with being “pro-labor”.
I see a lot of sexism in your comments that you attribute to me. What have I written that is sexist? Do you know how to copy and paste?
“However, to the mom who is dependent on child support payments from her ex-husband, his lower wage is going to translate to a smaller check for her.”
This entire diary is a screed that ultimately criticizes a much-needed law that should have been passed decades ago. That, itself, is sexist.
Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that it was blacks who were being paid seventy cents on the dollar compared to whites. Suppose the law in question was therefore focused on blacks instead of women.
How does the following sound to you:
Your diary is arguing to perpetuate discrimination. In its original form, discrimination against women. In my hypothetical recasting, discrimination against blacks. Interestingly, your decision to talk about child support is sexist no matter what racial component is present.
The fact that you don’t recognize the sexism in your diary is itself evidence to support my criticism.
Okay, the law is sexist. The world is sexist. How is my question sexist?
In your blind rage against anyone who dares not worship at the alter of the almighty Clintons, you have simply missed the entirety of my post and the question it asks:
When women get equal pay, where does the money come from?
Add that to your list of unanswered questions I have asked you over the past few months.
Your question was answered by CMD on Friday, and you acknowledged your agreement with the answer. I answered your question less than an hour after you asked it another time.
It seems to me that you once again ignore the ignore the answers that you so stridently demand.
that the deficit created by paying women less than men will be eliminated by paying men less and transferring that amount to women to balance the scales. And so, in total, the working class gains a net zero. Agreed?
This law is intended to address clear, flagrant, and long-standing discrimination against women. Working class men have benefited from that discrimination. I agree that men have been the beneficiaries of centuries of gender discrimination, and that their advantages accruing from that discrimination will be reduced by this law.
I also agree that this law does not address the wealth and income disparity that is so destructive to our society.
Congratulations. That’s all I was after.
Last I checked from the federal government records, this is the hierarchy of earnings on average
Asian-American men > Asian-American women > white American men > white American women > black American men > black American women > Latino-American men > Latino-American women > Native Americans (and other)
But your garbage ass white feminist take is that as long as white women make as much as white men, while white people made exponentially more than black people and most people of color (excluding Asian-Americans), then that’s awesome, and that to address the rest of how racist and unfair society is in poverty an earnings, “Well, we’ll get to that some day.”
That’s just not at all what I wrote … pure and invented nonsense.
It’s past “seem”. It’s observable reality. Therefore, answers, no matter how urgently demanded, are unnecessary.
*
To confirm one of your earlier points, somervilletom, a longer comment:
Consider Haidt’s moral foundation theory and how it applies to liberals versus conservatives. Cross-cultural studies suggests that there are five dimensions on which moral systems are built: (1) care/harm, (2) fairness/cheating, (3) loyalty/betrayal, (4) authority/subversion, and (5) sanctity/degradation (“purity”). (A sixth has recently been added.)
Liberals tend to heavily weight the first two — almost to the exclusion of the the last three. Conservatives tend to rely on all three (“My country right or wrong.” “Support the President.” “Protect the flag.”) Mr May’s commentary likewise veers into the latter three.
For #3, we have in-group/out-group: either you’re a Bernie supporter or a Wall Street sell-out. For #4, we’ve had all kinds of hero worship. For #5, we’ve certainly had our share of purity.
So essentially what we’re seeing is a conservative (someone who for many, many years was quite conservative) embrace a few liberal leaders and a few liberal causes. However, the underlying moral mechanism is not one that is typically liberal.
…somebody co-opting the struggle of black people to attempt to score some lazy rhetorical point about sexism.
Got to love this blacks vs. whites and women vs. men trope where there’s no such thing as black women and all the complexities and different histories can just be crassly equated.
Tom, one of the things I find so loathsome about your Don Quixotesque is how beyond all your over the top decrying of imagined sexism in others is how much your understanding of sexism and feminism for a person your age is embarrassingly undeveloped. It’s like you overhead someone ranting about beer commercials and the objectification of women’s bodies and the Republican War on Women, and then assumed you knew everything you needed to know about feminism and would take it upon yourself to destroy all the liberal misogynists in your mist. There’s no reason to believe that you have any idea whatsoever how much your kind of vitriolic performative allyship is utterly destructive and loathed by people who you claim you’re carrying the mantle on behalf of.
And I say this knowing that my comment will likely be deleted, but your analogy would only make sense if you were talking about white people paying REPARATIONS to black people. If not, and you just want to co-opt the exploitation of black people to attempt to show what a great ally you are and what a bad, bad sexist whoever it is you’re attacking at the moment, then go fuck yourself.
Tom is in no way justifying racial disparities nor advocating the delay in rectifying them. He is pointing out how in his view the arguments used by the diarist about achieving gender equality mirror those that express hesitation about achieving racial equality. He is saying that the objection to the diarists arguments might be more obvious if the variable were race rather than gender.
You really, really need to make sure you understand. Nothing I wrote should have left you with this conclusion that I argued that Tom was justifying racial disparities. Granted, I get that what this is about – my critique of people like Tom is quite possibly, very behind the comprehension of him or yourself for whom dabbling into these issues by just calling people sexist is sufficient in order to believe of oneself that he is a good ally.
…since my complaint about misreading comments got an uprate from the person I was referring to (and a couple others) I figure I’m on pretty solid ground, though you are always welcome to clarify as we all have to do from time to time.
As christopher observes, I fear you misunderstood my recast of jtm’s original text. My intent was to make the sexism in that original text more evident by retargeting it at race instead of gender.
I note that a similar technique is often useful in sensitizing people to ageism. It is astonishing how many companies still proudly trumpet things along the lines of “We are young and innovative” or “We are young, creative, and energetic”. It sometimes helps when those phrases are rewritten as “We are white and innovative” and “We are white, creative, and energetic”. Most people cringe at the latter formulation, and that cringe is the point of the exercise.
Your comment is an excellent flame, by the way. Had I intended the analogy as you supposed, it would be appropriate and effective. I hope you’ll reconsider in light of the explanations from christopher and me.
When folks like you get called out by your antics, you assume that your critics must have misunderstood you, for you must have the much more rational position.
Here’s the thing though. When folks like myself, call out the characters like yourself, we know exactly what we’re talking about, what you wrote, and what our reasons were for criticizing it. These kinds of antics that you engage in are garbage. No amount of fleshing them out with further analogies will make them be less of garbage.
It’s quite obvious how the further you have to stretch something to a more extreme example or by changing the variables to make it something more abhorrent, the more you don’t feel you can address the actual arguments on their own merits.
You cynically co-opted the systemic and historical subjugation and exploitation in order to accuse someone of being sexist for bringing up that how businesses could conceivably respond to new legislation to ensure equality amongst the separate demographics of their workers.
If anything, you could have argued that it was “concern trolling.” That would have been a legitimate point.
Instead, you decided to try to discredit the point by accusing the person of being some reactionary sexist, when you could have simply made the point that we all agree that there shouldn’t be disparities in income according to biological sex, and that perhaps we should come up with stronger laws or better, more active research to ensure that doesn’t happen.
So, you put someone on the defensive, and it turns into “Yes, you are a sexist” “No, I’m not a sexist.” “Yeah, but if you said that about black people, you’d no it was racist.”
He didn’t make any claim about the natural abilities, intelligence, or rights of women. So, what have you really?
He hasn’t been nearly as personal with you as you have been with him. Drop your constant references to Wall Street Manipulated Democrat and a weeks old comment about the money having to come from somewhere and maybe you can talk.
Really? Forget that he is willing to sell out to the .1% and screw labor just to “win” an election?
…WHAT is right as opposed to WHO is right! For the record, HRC is a much bigger fan of labor than she is the 1% and labor likewise is supportive of her.
Good one.
Note that
isn’t necessarily proof of what you claimed above.
HRC is a much bigger fan of labor than she is the 1% and labor likewise is supportive of her.
How so? Was her choice of “Right to Work is OK” Tim Kaine as her VP that shows how she is a big fan of labor?
Clinton will headlined two events in Laguna Beach, including a $33,400-per-person event hosted by Stephen Cloobeck, the CEO of Diamond Resorts. At night on Tuesday, Clinton will venture to Northern California for an event in Piedmont hosted by Quinn Delaney and Wayne Jordan, philanthropists and real estate developers in the Bay Area. Top ticket price for that event is $100,000 for a couple. Yeah, she’s no fan of the 1%.
Presidential candidate headlines high-dollar fundraisers – story at 11! Because as your favorite BMGer once said – the money has to come from somewhere!:)
Also, Tim Kaine consistently scores in the 90s from AFL-CIO
In your obsession with me, you neglected to offer where this extra income for women will come from. And you’ve also failed to explain the difference between a heart attack in Finland versus one in the USA.
n/m
I’d like a direct answer to a question and not a personal attack, if you are capable of that.
OK, what I’m going to say might scare you, but I want you to be very careful. It’s critical that you don’t move or it might see you…
No Tom, please don’t move your head to look. It might kill you…
There’s a sexism hovering behind you, and it wants to drink your blood. Don’t look it in the eyes, Tom!
Oh thank God. The sexism was vanguished by your steely resolve!
Oh my God, no Tom, no!!!! I was wrong. The sexism didn’t die, but it went to hide under your bed. Tom, don’t go to sleep there or the sexism will come to steal your soul and your use up all your child support loot!
…on your comment of unadulterated hyperventilating was accidental.
I’ve said this a few times already, your post are trollish and really don’t add anything to this site.
My sense is that you are not completely a troll, even though you create troll posts. My sense is that you hold a right wing anti-government view as you probably you have your whole life, and within this warped view you have somehow shoehorned in a thought that “I want stuff too”, so I’m joining the Democrats. This is very stupid as it’s not what the Democratic Party is about.
I’ve had enough of all these moronic posts and false statements.
…which is why the internets in their wisdom developed the term “concern troll”, which fits JTM nicely:)
Between you and wallstreettom you ought to be able to come up with a reply.
You seem to agree that CMD answered this question rather well.
You are starting to sound like those who seem to think that raising the minimum wage will result in either increased taxes or higher consumer prices. Experience in other countries contradicts the assumptions.
Dig deeper
He’ll ignore any answer you provide, christopher.
…who in turn have more disposable income if they are getting paid more. (sorry, kbusch)
…as the 1% takes more and more?
…if the 1% only patronized each other. Henry Ford believed his workers should make enough to afford that which they produce and this is that principle on an economy-wide scale. If wages go up there is more demand. If there is more demand more people have to be hired to keep up. If more people are hired that’s even more people with money to spend which in turn creates additional demand. Thus the economy spirals upward and more and more people (yes, including the 1%) do better.
They get the money from increased productivity resulting from having a happier, properly compensated workforce. Just like raising the minimum wage.
The fact is that practically no employers micro-manage individual salaries as if it were a zero-sum game. If you get a raise, it doesn’t mean that it automatically comes out of someone else’s salary. Suggesting that it does displays a willful ignorance in how things actually work. The fact that you ONLY make this argument when it comes to equal pay for women, leaves you open to the obvious inference that your thinking on this issue is sexist.
It needs to be said that some white working-class men raised the same objections to civil rights legislation. The claim then was that protection against race-based wage discrimination would come at the expense of wages for white men.
I think that’s what CMD was somewhat cryptically observing in his earlier comment.
But what about the guy who will not get a raise this year because his employer needs to equalize the payroll? Will his productivity go down?
Maybe that guy — who has been sucking 20+% of the wages of the woman working next to him doing the same job on the same line — will find a way to survive.
I really don’t understand why you belabor this tired canard. The fact that white working class men profited from discrimination against blacks was NOT an argument against efforts to stop that discrimination. The fact that white working class men shamefully STILL profit, today, from discrimination against women is not an argument against equal pay for equal work.
The 1% is going to object to anything that threatens to take money out of their pocket. Working-class people should not allow themselves to be manipulated into exploiting other working-class people. If working class white men want to be joined by working class black men and by working class women regardless of race in the fight against exploitation by the 1%, then those white working class men have to be willing to give up those special advantages that the 1% have used to buy their loyalty.
This really isn’t hard.
…between do you assume this is a zero-sum game, or try to expand the pie. We should always prefer the latter.
If we change the labor laws (and tax code) for all, not just this limited area. Anything less is just, as my Australian friend would say, “wiping your ass with a hoop.”
…and at the federal level I just tonight saw a Clinton ad reminding us she plans to do much of that as well.
My greatest hope is that Mrs. Clinton is privately ashamed at the past legislation that her husband was a part of and that her personal goal is to right all those many wrongs.
The first President Clinton accomplished a lot of great things as the preponderance of the results bear out. HRC was also a solid mostly progressive Senator. All you have to do is check the endorsements and other measurements of her place on the spectrum.
But you keep making it so. Why that is so is only known to you.
I have never heard of anyone “equalizing” their payroll. is that even a thing? But yes, sometimes business do limit raises or even lay off people if the company is not doing well enough. But that happens all of the time for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with equitable pay policies.
I’m for single payer, reigning in Wall Street while the guy with the blue dog from Somerville is not (same with his buddy) and you accuse ME or being a Republican pretending to be a Democrat!
You claim to like certain shibboleths, but the net impact of your posts and comments are to interfere with the implementation of anything recognizably progressive into actual policy. Whether it’s examining tiny corners of policy that you find wanting, attack the Democratic Party and its candidates, or slandering anyone who actually works for an agenda, your net contribution is negative.
So either you are pretty much a troll who is more clever than danfromwalthan and his friends, or you are crushingly ignorant of the fundamentals of politics in a democratic system. And I won’t even get into your love for personal grudges, which is just silly online.
I respect you are a somewhat creative troll, but since you’ve apparently gotten hooked onto the thrill of attention, it appears you’re ramping up, like EBIII tends to do for certain stretches. I’m not going to interact with you anymore as you seem hostile toward the idea of reconsidering your ideas; it’s just a shame you’re able to tempt other people down the dead end that is discussing politics with you.
Is how repetitive this is becoming. John has a good voice and offline works very hard for his DTC and the candidates he believes in. We have many mutual friends who have attested to his passion and hard work. Unlike others here, I don’t hold his Republican past against him, and don’t think his constantly attacking Clinton from the left can fairly be decried as “sexist right wing drivel”. I do think it’s fair to say they are boring, repetitive and usually lacking in substance.
If anything he reminds me of another friend of mine who converted to Catholicism from evangelism and kept the same zeal and black and white thinking from his past. We used to get into real rows over Vatican II and still argue about Pope Francis. He still wishes Pope Benedict was in charge. I feel John is similar. His values are our values, only more so in his mind, but his way of articulating and arguing about them is a holdover from his days as a talk radio and Fox News acolyte where shouting slogans substitute for data and debate.
…is on the merits, most of us probably agree with most of his policy preferences.
1
If Employer X has $Y budgeted for salary, and (setting aside the sometimes difficult question of what is “equal work”) Group XY has an unfairly large share and Group XX has an unfairly low share of $Y, then the equitable distribution of $Y means that Group XY’s share decreases.
That’s pretty much how it goes when unfair advantages are rectified.
That was what I was attempting to get across.
You got the point across. You apparently still fail to recognize the sexism implicit in your complaint.
It’s a question. Your obsession with attacking me for exposing you as a Wall Street sellout is getting out of hand.
Could I suggest again that this commentator has ceased to be someone anyone needs to respond to?
Thanks.
I assume you are counting personal attacks which I believe you said you would start as of the 9:53 comment this morning. Both of the comments you counted were made yesterday!
Not untypical intellectual dishonesty.
But thanks for ONE.
A budget isn’t a sacred document set in stone. It is quite possible for Employer to raise the salary line item in a budget, and cut somewhere else. Employer may not want to because that’s work, and most people avoid work if they can. However, if s/he is forced to by law, than Employer has a couple options:
-Reduce non-salary expenses elsewhere (compensation at the top, expense accounts, advertising that has no impact, cut dividends)
-Raise revenues (raise prices by a nickel)
-Access cash (the staggering sums of cash the most successful corporations keep in offshore bank accounts)
The reason there are trillions of dollars of corporate cash socked away or in the bank accounts of the managerial class is the claim that budgets are sacred and if they have to pay people a living wage, gee, there’s nothing else they can do. Don’t believe it.
And I am not saying it’s not going to be the case in some areas, but in my experience with owners and payroll, they have a formula that they compare with others and while not set in stone, there are standards. Again, I do support this legislation but I strongly believe that the people who fought for it need to fight on for a a higher minimum wage, health care, paid parental leave and so much more.
You’re right, and plenty of people ARE fighting for all those things.
Nice people. Watch for my next post.
I don’t truck with pre-clearing the rationalizations of the 1%.
They can afford to raise wages for all. As Christopher mentions, many of us are doing the work of making that happen, of making them do so. the 1% would like to sink that by dividing us into male/female, old/young, and so many other categories. Don’t let them.
…how much the peanut gallery went for your jugular and attempted to derail this discussion to what a sexist or troll you are. Should be pretty obvious that it touched a nerve to see such reactions of desperate evasion from so many grown men.
Of course there are unintended consequences from any change, and of course the capitalist will not take a financial hit if he or she does not need to. I applaud any reform to address unfair treatment of workers, but we should also be able to be intellectually mature enough to be able to answer questions calmly and to consider the ramifications.
There’s no reason to believe that men won’t take a cut in salary to lower them to women’s salaries ***for all companies where the wage disparity is conscious and who do not want to attempt to subvert it***. Are we really going to pretend that there’s no race to the bottom under American capitalism’s desire to profit off the work of others and save money on labor costs?
Men pay more for health care under the Affordable Care Act as it would be unfair for women to pay more (even though the cost of their insurance is frequently more because of additional services). C’est la vie.
And Aetna just announced it was leaving something like 13 of the 15 states with ACA exchanges.
Tinkering here or there won’t address the systemic issues of how this economy functions and who it’s become structured to most benefit.
Zealots like Tom would be better served to understand the difference between a married set of a white woman and a white man working in a white collar industry vs. a divorced set of a lower income white man and white woman. It’s not clear that he is able to process anything beyond his own experiences working in IT and having to pay child support.
Zealots like Tom would also be well served to understand that no matter how much a reform was set out to help whichever marginalized and historically oppressed group, the people on the top of the pyramid nearly always figure out a way to pull a few strings here or there to ensure they actually wind up being the ones benefitting most from the new order.
Take for instance Affirmative Action. A zealot like Tom would likely attack you as being a racist for pointing out some of the problems, imagining that he’s just encountered a Pat Buchanan acolyte in the wild, before stopping to reflect and educate himself to discover that the biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action, contrary to the racist narratives of decades, is white middle-class women, and thus white middle-class men (who have been their husbands having more income come into their households), and of course their white middle-class children. Yet, those who have believed they were most benefitting by it, have been black people. Those most engaged in fighting for AA have been black people. And those who have been most opposed, naturally, have been white women and white men.
There are much larger class issues and race issues, and generations upon generations of exploitation, subjugation, and systemic racism, marginalization, and deprivations and exclusion from resources, but hey, all that…well, we’ll get to is some day, right? As for now, yaaay, women are now making the same as me!!! See, it says here right on this law! That’s how it’s going to be! We fixed inequality!
Not content to entirely misunderstand what I wrote in a different comment (perhaps my intent wasn’t obvious enough), here you go off on a wild flame attacking some caricature instead of anything I’ve read or written here. We’ve both been here long enough that I’m disappointed by all this.
There are far too many unsupported assertions and outright errors in this comment to address each one-by-one — I’ll not get into a Gish-gallop flame war. Just as a for-instance, I invite you to cite data demonstrating that women have higher medical costs than men. I think you’ll find that actuarial reality is much more complex than that, and requires factors such as age and demographics to be even remotely meaningful.
You bring up affirmative action. I’m not sure what you’re attempting to say in your second-to-last paragraph. I do know that I’ve supported affirmative action since its creation. The nascent affirmative action regulations were used as an example in my undergraduate sociology classes (alongside the equally-new environmental standards then being promulgated) — I have long familiarity with the strengths and weaknesses of the affirmative action program. I don’t know if I’m a “zealot” about affirmative action or not. I do know that I’ve been familiar with the points you make since they were first raised in the 1970s. Please get over yourself.
I agree that the statistics of how pretty much ALL such programs ultimately benefit the white majority highlight the difficulties of such matters. I suspect that this phenomenon is a consequence of the very existence of that overwhelming white majority. As you observe in your final paragraph, we indeed collectively face much larger class issues, race issues, and — even more so — issues of gender exploitation.
I don’t know about anyone else here. I certainly don’t think this law is going to “fix” very much, just as I don’t think our recent increase in the minimum wage is nearly as wonderful as some of our elected officials would have us believe. Each is, however, a necessary and small step.
I’d like you to please choose someone else as your cardboard stand-up upon which you paint whatever dastardly opinions you’d like to attack as you compose a screed — or not do it at all. You don’t know shit about me, you’ve never met me, and you have no basis other than your own biases to construct your projections.
I’m happy to discuss issues with you, that’s why we’re each here. I don’t think it’s asking to much too request that you not put words in my mouth or thoughts in my head.
or
TBH, no, I don’t know anything of you other than what you’ve written here over the past 2 years that I’ve been a member.
I appreciated your take on things before you became obsessed with how horrible the hypothetical security issues were about Hillary Clinton’s email, before that concern completely vanished after you saw the first Democratic debate, and a complete 180 was adopted about how any criticism of her is part of a Republicans plot that sexist Democrats have fallen prey to.
Outside of this notable extreme vacilation, It’s probably easier to get a better feel for your positions and perhaps just 2-3 others (given how long your comments – like mine – are).
You don’t seem like a particularly happy person, and you don’t seem like someone who would pursue getting involved locally to make the world or even your immediate community a better place.
But everything I’ve said has been based on what you’ve written (your behavior here as you have presented it).
I appreciate the more measured tone of this comment.
Neither of us know anything about each other beyond what we write here (in fact, that’s one of the things I started the monthly BMG Stammtisch, it makes it much easier for people to connect as people rather than online persona).
I like to believe that my neighbors and local community figures appreciate my participation in both, but I suppose we never know.
So I see no conflict between the two quotes you offer. I am disappointed by the intensity of your apparent hostility towards me and by what strikes me as your distortions of what I’ve written. I suppose you are equally critical, apparently for different reasons, of my commentary here. I don’t see my second statement as in any way inconsistent with my first.
So, in direct response to the question of your title (“Which one, Tom?”), I answer “both”.