Originally posted by Lokrian
Wouldn't it have been nice if companies had offered decent living wages without workers having to organize to fight for those rights?
Wouldn't it be nice if a business owner could just put out a job offer and someone could choose to accept it or not? If the business owner didn't make a fair offer, nobody would want to work for him/her and then the business would fail.

Wouldn't it be nice if the people who accept the job had some kind of appreciation that someone else risked their own money to start a business that created the job? Especially since this same person probably started a number of other businesses that failed before they finally found something that worked.

If you don't like the wage (and benefits), either don't take the job or start your own business. It is pretty simple, isn't it?


Originally posted by Lokrian
The workers are every bit as much a part of the success of industrialization and mass production and consumption as the leadership. You can't MAKE thousands and thousands of ANYTHING without a lot of people working together as a team. Period. The end.
It is true that workers are a part of the process. But guess what: the workers that are a part of the process right now are foreign workers. I hope the unions are happy. They have reaped what they sowed.

When you artificially force a business to spend more money on labor (via wages and benefits) than the free market would normally demand, businesses are compalled to move elsewhere.

Demanding more than the business is willing and able to provide is just ignorant of reality. The only system that works is for a business to say "We will pay X with benefits Y for you to do Z." If you try and *force* a business to provide more that this (through extra-market or legislative means), they leave. That is just a FACT.

You can jump up and down and throw tantrum after tantrum if you want, but that just won't change reality. We are seeing with our own eyes what happens when you try and control labor costs through legislation and union blackmail- THE JOBS LEAVE THE COUNTRY.


Originally posted by Lokrian
And we are back to talking about the wonderful benefits of third world labor again. I guess the fact that Chinese rural workers are basically contract slaves with no right to even a rudimentary education just sort of bounced right off you the last time we talked about why it is that the third world is so "competitive". Why did we even bother to have a civil war if shooting people or running them down with tanks if they try to get treated like human beings is the way forward?
I guess it "bounced off you" the last time I tried to educate you that these people in the third world are THRILLED when a company moves a factory to their country. It is totally dishonest propaganda that these workers are systematically and uniformly enslaved or abused. There is no economic incentive to do so. When the company moves from the US to a third world country, they are able to provide wages and benefits that are superior to what existed before them by many orders of magnitude.

It is a pig headed example of classic American blindness to refuse to accept that workers in other counties are PSYCHED to get the jobs our businesses provide when they leave the US.

We may think working for $1 a day is horrible, but when the workers in that country were making between $0 and $1 a month prior to the US company's arrival, that's a pretty awesome improvement.

Think about that the next time you praise a union for blackmailing higher wages and more benefits than the business can afford, is willing, or feels comfortable paying. That's what sends them packing.


Originally posted by Lokrian
The problem is that neither Europe nor the third world wants any part of our spoiled elite class. If the U.S. worker stops putting up with it, there is no place left for them to go. I don't fear standing up to the rich at all. The economy will run just fine without funneling obscene resources to a handful of greedy incompetents.
This makes absolutely no sense at all. What are you talking about? What is the US Worker currently "putting up with?" Being given a job? Having someone take all the risk and do all the hard work to create a functioning company that is able to give them a job? Wow, that sure is something horrible to "put up with."

These "elites" create all the jobs and all the wealth. Without them, the economy is sunk. The true statement is that if the entrepreneurs of our country "stop putting up with it", there will be NO JOBS and therefore no U.S. workers.

There are plenty of utter economic failures throughout history that prove quite nicely that command economies don't work.

Entrepreneurs and business owners are the most important economic engines in our country. Without them, we have nothing- absolutely nothing.


Originally posted by Lokrian
Ever wonder how it is even possible that the top few percent of wage earners pay 30%+ of taxes in the USA? You know significant numbers of studies estimate that the top few percent OWN 90%+ of all there is to own

...

There are too many resources in the hands of too few people.
You made a critical mistake even attempting to trot out this tired, false, class warfare BS. This is truly my favorite political lie to dispell.

As reported in the NY Times regarding the recent tax cuts: "People with the bottom fifth of income, for example, averaging earnings of $16,000 a year saw their effective tax rate drop to 5.2% from 6.7%."

A new CBO report produced at the request of congressional Democrats confirms that tax cuts since 2001 increased the share of federal income taxes paid by the highest earners.

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/57xx/doc5...edTaxRates.pdf (warning: PDF FILE!)

The tax cuts actually made the tax system more progressive. The highest 20% of earners now pay a larger share of federal income taxes than they would have without the tax cuts.

The overwhelming majority of federal income taxes are paid by the very highest income earners. The top 1% of income earners pay about 34% of all income taxes. The top 5% pays 53.25%. The top 10% of high income earners, pay 64.89%. The top 25% of income earners pays 82.90% of all federal income taxes.

A common lie of the Class Warfare Pimps is that the "rich" (whom they refuse to define) have a higher % of total income than their % of taxes. This is false.

http://www.irs.ustreas.gov/pub/irs-soi/01in01ts.xls

Code:
Adjusted gross income share (percentage):

Top 1%          Top 5%          Top 10%         Top 25%         Top 50%
17.53           31.99           43.11           65.23           86.19
 
Total income tax share (percentage):

Top 1%          Top 5%          Top 10%         Top 25%         Top 50%
33.89           53.25           64.89           82.90           96.03
The United States also has greater income mobility (the ability for someone to move from one income quintile to another, like from the lowest to the highest) than any other industrialized nation.

The class warfare garbage needs to stop. It only harms our country by creating animosities that should not exist. Politicians on the left know this is an easy, if dishonest, to get votes because the bottom 50% of the population pays less than 4% of all taxes while earning almost 14% of all income. The bottom 50% also happens to get the majority of government benefits paid out to them. What a coincidence, eh?

Republicans use religion and morality to scam the voters while Democrats use class warfare. Both tactics are repugnant. Class warfare is easier to dispell, however, because cold hard facts disprove it. Morality is, unfortunately, much fuzzier.