Unions, Taxes, and Class Warfare

[Lokrian]

Originally posted by Aristotle
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?

That's what happens even with unions. The only difference is huge numbers of people all agree not to work for an employer. Collective bargaining. It's not some sort of evil plot; it is simple free market economics. Collective bargaining is necessary to offset collective ownership. The same advantages to the investor that make incorporation a good way to spread risk also makes it a handy bargaining tool for employers to drive wages down.

Originally posted by Aristotle
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.

Again, you refuse to acknowledge that the only reason employers are in the driver’s seat here is because of laws which artificially increase their ability to influence the open market. There IS no open market. It is already unfairly skewed. It is that way by design, to spread risk so that individual investors don't go broke over and over, and they are GOOD LAWS, but they cause an artificial downward pressure on wages. It is a large organization with massive resources vs. one worker at a time. Organization merely remedies this situation, setting things back on an even keel.

Originally posted by Aristotle
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.

That bounced off me because I told you I actually worked with some of them, and they are not as happy as you make out. I worked with Mexicans who came over the border. They do it because Mexico is corrupt, not because it is a wonderful thing in their lives to come and work for wages substantially lower than the national average. I imagine the smiling faces of slave laborers in India that you saw were artificially taken and presented to you in that light by organizations with something to gain from making people feel good that their clothes are being made by people with living standards that approach stone-age levels in some cases. Sure they are happy to be making more. Who wouldn’t be? They’re not idiots after all. Just like a slave is happy to get out from under the lash of a particularly surly owner, so too are the wage slaves of the third world happier when they move up to a slightly less abusive situation. It’s not enough. It is downright evil.

We need laws that put a requirement of measurable improvement in living standards in these nations in order to maintain low tariffs. If workers do not continue to make substantial improvement in their living standards, the wealthy of that nation should be cut off from our healthy markets, and be forced to try to make a few dollars off their own destitute populations instead. They will remember in short order why it was that they wanted to be able to sell in the States.

Originally posted by Aristotle
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.[

Again, unions do not blackmail. They simply refuse en masse to work for an employer. Laws protecting their right to do so are to balance the collective bargaining abilities of large corporations which are artificial legal entities in their own right.

If I saw substantial increases in living standards in those countries where wages are a dollar an hour, I would probably see this as you do. I do not see it. The improvement is there, and real, but it is not increasing living standards at any acceptable rate.

Originally posted by Aristotle
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?

No one ever in the history of the world ever "gave" someone a job. The job itself is an exchange. I work for you if you pay me. If you don't pay me, I don't work. Using artificial means to make me work cheap, from threatening to kill me to withholding food, clothing and shelter through artificial manipulation of the job market, are immoral.

Originally posted by Aristotle
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."

All the hard work? All the hard work of fronting some excess cash to see if something will make money? How hard do you honestly think it is to see when something is looking profitable and go ahead and start a business? And if the business flops, do the employees not lose as well? Of course they do. No one goes to get a job doing something they think is not going to make money in the long term.

This is the way that the truly wealthy try to divide the working classes. The real entrepreneur is actually more like a middle manager. If his idea fails, he is fired by the fact that his business flops. The more money one has up front though, the better chance any business has. As you approach that top 1%, the amount of economic potential in the form of saved resources begins to approach the level of the foolproof. You can live off the interest the BANK gives you after your wealth reaches a certain level, much less investing with just a tiny modicum of common sense. You don’t have to have a single idea all of your life. You just need to pick the best of the dozens and dozens of people pleading with you for the money to try something because there is no loose cash in the economy for them to save up and try it on their own.

Originally posted by Aristotle
These "elites" create all the jobs and all the wealth.

There's the politics of fear. Unfortunately, even a meager inspection of the facts proves this to be untrue. It is the worker that actually creates, physically creates, wealth. Elites (those who own the means of production - land and natural resources) have ideas. If their ideas suck, the really don't deserve any more advantage than workers do. But they have it in the form of corporate laws and the capacity to incorporate to have disproportional influence on government and the market.

Originally posted by Aristotle
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.

That is exactly the point you comment about, "What are you talking about?" You think individual entrepreneurs, or ESPECIALLY the wealthiest of our elites, are going to physically pick up and move themselves to Mexico or India or China? Europe? None of these places want them, and the typical American business man would not know what to do with themselves in the third world cultures, most of which are also extremely corrupt. Likely as not they would lose everything they had to outright corrupt dealings without the might of the U.S. to back their interests abroad.

They don't have the option to stop puting up with it. They will either begin to treat workers better, or they will step aside for someone else who will. They don't have other options available that any of them could tolerate.

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

I'm not a communist. I just don't buy that collective bargaining has become a bad thing. It is still necessary to overcome the advantage of laws governing incorporation.

Originally posted by Aristotle


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

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

This is exactly what I said. The top 1 percent, ONE of every hundred, have incomes that approach 20% of all the income that exists. This gross inequality is compounded DAILY. They already own WAY more than the average American, and the disparity is growing. They pay out of their gross excesses. They do not have to choose between medicine and food. They have to choose between Mercedes or BMW.

The top 5% make nearly a third of ALL the INCOME there IS.

The top 10% approach 50% of ALL the INCOME there IS. This is a huge drag on the economy, as a handful of people not only own more already, but suck up all the available income that could be used to improve the lifestyles of the average workers.

Originally posted by Aristotle
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 certainly does. Inconceivably wealthy people need to stop trying to scare people into believing they actually do anything worth the obscene amounts of money they bilk the economy out of. If you like income mobility, then making our income mobility even higher will not hurt your feelings. Making wages more egalitarian will shrink the distance between the richest and the poorest, making the distance to travel between rich and poor smaller, increasing that mobility and making it more reactive to real time conditions in the economy, which is exactly what makes a free market superior to a centrally controlled one. Huge wage and wealth disparities create an artificial barrier between moving from labor to management, thus giving people who already have resources an unfair and counterproductive advantage in the decision making processes that govern the market.

Originally posted by Aristotle
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 dispel, however, because cold hard facts disprove it. Morality is, unfortunately, much fuzzier.

I wish you had some idea how it sounds to a LOT of people when you complain how unfair it is that the bottom 50%, fully HALF of ALL Americans, are only making 14% of all the income there is, and yet you begrudge them a lower tax percentage. This is what fuels the class warfare - the utter lack of concern about gross inequalities.

And as I said in my other post, not a single fact or figure is available concerning what percentage of all wealth is owned by what percentage of people. If the income distribution is this skewed, imagine how the compounding effect of that income distribution is padding the advantage of the very wealthy.

And yet they cry as if you are sawing off their limbs if they are called on to give out of their amazing excess for the good of the nation. The poor bleed for their country. They literally give their blood. The rich whine for themselves.

I make a reasonable living, and I have never been a member of a Union. I am just of the opinion that workers deserve a healthy lifestyle. If foreign nations want that for themselves, let them reform their governments. I don't want policy that merely shuffles domestic jobs off to nations where tin pot dictators and/or incompetent and crooked businesses. If slave labor was the way to go, the south would have won the civil war. Treating people like beasts has the extra, added disadvantage, aside from being immoral, of having a depressive effect on innovation. Why work so hard to make things easier or safer when you aren't the one doing the work?