The non-existent Trump economic miracle.

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Sunday, August 30, 2026 16:38
VIEWED: 7873
PAGE 1 of 1

1KIKI

Friday, October 16, 2020 2:50 AM

Goodbye Middle Class: Half Of All American Workers Made Less Than $34,248.45 Last Year

If you are making less than $3,000 a month, you have plenty of company, because about half of the country is in the exact same boat. The Social Security Administration just released new wage statistics for 2019, and they are pretty startling. To me, the most alarming thing in the entire report is the fact that the median yearly wage was just $34,248.45 last year. In other words, half of all American workers made less than $34,248.45 in 2019, and half of all American workers made more than $34,248.45. That isn’t a whole lot of money. In fact, when you divide $34,248.45 by 12 you get just $2,854.05. Needless to say, it is not easy to survive in America today on just $2,854.05 a month, and this may help to explain why we have been seeing so many people fall out of the middle class in recent years.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/goodbye-middle-class-half-
of-all-american-workers-made-less-than-34248-45-last-year

Now, that measure of central tendency - 'the median' - is only slightly less useless in a highly skewed distribution than 'the average'. The number one really wants to see would be 'the mode'. But nobody reports that because it would leave high-income earners out of the picture entirely and paint too accurate a picture of the American workers.

SECOND

Friday, October 16, 2020 7:38 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Goodbye Middle Class: Half Of All American Workers Made Less Than $34,248.45 Last Year . . . this may help to explain why we have been seeing so many people fall out of the middle class in recent years.

Has America always been a rich nation with many poor people? Yes, it has.

And, 1kiki, don't act surprised that the top 1% have figured out how to claw back some of the wages paid to the middleclass. There is only one thing to stop the top 1% . . . the government. But the 1% can control the government because the top 50% of voters, who are doing well enough, gave control to government officials who very loudly declare their allegiance to the 1% who are the top Capitalists.

You can complain, 1kiki, but America won't improve for the bottom 50% of voters as long as voters in the top 50% of wealth or income keep electing officials who will always do what is best for voters in the top 1% of wealth or income. From my position in the top 1% I'm personally thankful that the lower 99% don't clearly comprehend what is so obviously going on because if they did, my taxes would increase and my business would have more limits on what I can do with it.

The US has a lot of money, but it does not look like a developed country
https://web.archive.org/web/20170310142823/https://qz.com/879092/the-u
s-doesnt-look-like-a-developed-country/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

REAVERFAN

Friday, October 16, 2020 8:28 PM

SECOND

Friday, October 16, 2020 9:19 PM

Ever heard of Speedy Cash? www.speedycash.com/

They charge 729% interest on Texas loans. www.speedycash.com/rates-and-terms/texas

In a properly run country, that interest rate would get the CEO of Speedy Cash arrested.

In Massachusetts, Speedy Cash is not allowed to operate. The middle class can thank their Senator, Democrat Elizabeth Warren, for pointing out that Speedy Cash is run by crooks. In Texas, GOP Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz can see no problem, and never will, with how this company operates. www.speedycash.com/rates-and-terms/massachusetts

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Friday, October 16, 2020 9:55 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
This is Alex Smith. He died this year at age 26 because he couldn't afford insulin in America.

Back in 1996, when Eli Lilly’s Humalog first came out, the price for a 1-month supply of insulin was $21. But now 29.3 million patients are paying anywhere from $300 to $800+ a month for their necessary insulin. So, why has the price of insulin increased so much over the years? The world may never know since pharmaceutical companies continue to hold their tongue when asked about it.

www.ajmc.com/view/the-deadly-costs-of-insulin

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

CAPTAINCRUNCH

Friday, October 16, 2020 10:24 PM

Desperate Trump tries to buy Senior votes with Chump change:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trumps-election-eve-drug-disco
unts-for-seniors-get-snagged/ar-BB1a4kHz

Trump's election-eve drug discounts for seniors get snagged

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s plan to mail millions of seniors a $200 prescription savings card has hit legal and budget roadblocks, making it unlikely the government can carry it out before Election Day.

Democratic lawmakers have raised questions about whether the administration has the authority to order on its own billions of dollars in Medicare spending for what the Democrats say are political reasons. Administration and congressional officials say such questions have bogged down review of the plan by agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the White House Office of Management and Budget.

A White House official had no comment on the status of the prescription cards, which Trump announced with a flourish last month during a health care speech in Charlotte, N.C.

The Medicare agency, or CMS, said in a statement: “We know that many seniors struggle to afford their medication and because of these high costs may forgo treatment. The administration is committed to lowering out-of-pocket costs for our nation’s seniors. We will provide more information about the prescription drug cards soon.”

One administration official said the odds are 75-25 the plan will not happen. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss back-and-forth internal deliberations.

Earlier this month, Reps. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., Richard Neal, D-Mass, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., questioned the legality of Trump's plan, saying in a letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar that “the president now appears to be attempting to buy votes just weeks before the election using taxpayer dollars.”

The lawmakers' objections appear to have hit a nerve in the administration. Among them:

— The White House asserted that Medicare could legally send out the discount cards under its authority to conduct “demonstration programs” testing new ideas. The $200 would test if extra cash made seniors more likely to stay on their medications and avoid costly hospitalizations. But sending cards to nearly all Medicare recipients is not a test, the lawmakers said. For example, there wouldn't be a control group against which to measure any results. Therefore, such a mass mailing would not meet legal standards for a Medicare demonstration program testing new ideas.

— The cost to taxpayers has been estimated as high as $7.8 billion, not counting administrative expenses. The money would come from Medicare's Supplemental Medical Insurance Trust Fund. But spending for the cards has not been authorized by Congress, which has the power of the purse. A congressional official said that if the Trump administration approves the plan, it in effect would create a budgetary “trap door” through which future administrations could try to spend billions of dollars without congressional oversight. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal analysis.

When Trump announced the plan as part of a Sep. 24 speech calling attention to his health care agenda, it seemed like the discount cards were about to go in the mail. People wondered if they would bear the presidents' name.

The cards would allow seniors to save $200 off their prescription copays. Trump initially said 33 million Medicare recipients would get the cards, but administration and congressional officials said the latest estimate is 39 million.

“Nobody has seen this before,” the president said, with trademark salesmanship. “These cards are incredible. The cards will be mailed out in coming weeks.

“I will always take care of our wonderful senior citizens,” Trump added. “Joe Biden won’t be doing this.”

The plan came as a surprise to rank-and-file officials at HHS and CMS who were expected to carry it out, said the administration official, addi

SIGNYM

Friday, October 16, 2020 11:05 PM

But this has been going on for DECADES. Long before Trump, and even long before Obama.

The only thing that happened under Trump is the same thing that happened under Obama, GWB etc: NOTHING. NOTHING happened to reverse the trend.

AFA healthcare costs in the USA ... has anyone wondered why they're SO HIGH in the USA, compared to other nations? Yanno, not just that coverage is incomplete, but that it soaks up 18% of our GDP and we STILL have bad healthcare?

I certainly have. Solve that conundrum, and you've got the healthcare crisis figured out.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

SECOND

Friday, October 16, 2020 11:30 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
But this has been going on for DECADES. Long before Trump, and even long before Obama.

The only thing that happened under Trump is the same thing that happened under Obama, GWB etc: NOTHING. NOTHING happened to reverse the trend.

AFA healthcare costs in the USA ... has anyone wondered why they're SO HIGH in the USA, compared to other nations? Yanno, not just that coverage is incomplete, but that it soaks up 18% of our GDP and we STILL have bad healthcare?

I certainly have. Solve that conundrum, and you've got the healthcare crisis figured out.

There is no conundrum, no confusion about why American healthcare is expensive compared to other countries.

American healthcare provider prices are incredibly high. The way to rein in the cost of healthcare services is by targeting the massive variation in providers’ prices. We can do that by making prices more transparent, making these markets more dynamic, and really blunting the monopoly power that a lot of large healthcare providers have, which has allowed them to raise prices.

In making these changes, there are certainly roles for insurance companies, employers, and patients, but frankly, the largest role is for the federal government. Right now, for a hospital to get paid by Medicare it has to report quality data. I think hospitals should also be required to report their prices.

And critically, we need antitrust enforcement. We have to stop some of the extraordinary mergers that have been occurring with rapidly increasing frequency over the last 10 to 15 years. That’s what is giving hospitals more market power and allowing them to extract higher prices.

Prices vary tremendously across the U.S. and within geographic areas. Across the country, the price of a knee replacement can vary by up to a factor of 17—the most expensive hospital is 17 times as expensive as the least expensive hospital. Within geographic areas, that can be, for knee replacements, up to a factor of eight. Lower-limb MRIs, when you set aside the reading of the MRI, don’t have much quality variation, yet, as an example, the most expensive hospital in Miami is charging nine times as much for an MRI as the cheapest provider.

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/why-is-healthcare-so-expensive

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

REAVERFAN

Saturday, October 17, 2020 1:00 AM

Or, we could just have nationalized free healthcare like every other country in the 1st world.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/484301-22-studies-a
gree-medicare-for-all-saves-money

SECOND

Saturday, October 17, 2020 1:13 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Or, we could just have nationalized free healthcare like every other country in the 1st world.

"That's Communism!"

I could call Ted Cruz or John Cornyn, my US Senators, to tell me why that can't be done, but it was easier to ask a few Trump lovers at work. Their answers ranged from "That's Socialized Medicine" to "We are not Canadians" to "It would destroy America!"

As long as Republicans have the power, they will never allow free healthcare.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Saturday, October 17, 2020 1:36 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:

And he probably voted for Obama, so that he could have his healtjh care taken away.

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Saturday, October 17, 2020 1:40 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

Goodbye Middle Class: Half Of All American Workers Made Less Than $34,248.45 Last Year

If you are making less than $3,000 a month, you have plenty of company, because about half of the country is in the exact same boat. The Social Security Administration just released new wage statistics for 2019, and they are pretty startling. To me, the most alarming thing in the entire report is the fact that the median yearly wage was just $34,248.45 last year. In other words, half of all American workers made less than $34,248.45 in 2019, and half of all American workers made more than $34,248.45. That isn’t a whole lot of money. In fact, when you divide $34,248.45 by 12 you get just $2,854.05. Needless to say, it is not easy to survive in America today on just $2,854.05 a month, and this may help to explain why we have been seeing so many people fall out of the middle class in recent years.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/goodbye-middle-class-half-
of-all-american-workers-made-less-than-34248-45-last-year

Now, that measure of central tendency - 'the median' - is only slightly less useless in a highly skewed distribution than 'the average'. The number one really wants to see would be 'the mode'. But nobody reports that because it would leave high-income earners out of the picture entirely and paint too accurate a picture of the American workers.

That linky crashes my browser, so it cannot be read.

f you are making less than $3,000 a month, you have plenty of company, because about half of the country is in the exact same boat. The Social Security Administration just released new wage statistics for 2019, and they are pretty startling. To me, the most alarming thing in the entire report is the fact that the median yearly wage was just $34,248.45 last year. In other words, half of all American workers made less than $34,248.45 in 2019, and half of all American workers made more than $34,248.45. That isn’t a whole lot of money. In fact, when you divide $34,248.45 by 12 you get just $2,854.05. Needless to say, it is not easy to survive in America today on just $2,854.05 a month, and this may help to explain why we have been seeing so many people fall out of the middle class in recent years.

And of course all of the figures that I am sharing with you in this article are just for 2019. This year, we have seen more than 63 million Americans file new claims for unemployment benefits as the U.S. economy has imploded during this pandemic, and so the final wage numbers for 2020 could be quite a bit worse than the numbers for 2019 were. Please keep that in mind as you go through the rest of this article.

Once upon a time in America, a single income could easily support a middle class household in most cases, but those days are long gone.

The cost of living has been rising far faster than our paychecks have, and as a result many Americans have been working themselves to the bone just to survive financially from month to month.

To give you an idea of just how bad things have gotten, I would like to share with you some key numbers from the report that the Social Security Administration just released…

-32.26 percent of American workers made less than $20,000 last year.

-44.79 percent of American workers made less than $30,000 last year.

-56.46 percent of American workers made less than $40,000 last year.

-65.91 percent of American workers made less than $50,000 last year.

Today, the poverty level for a household of five in the United States is $30,680.

That means that close to half of all workers in this country do not even make enough to get a family of five above the poverty level.

Wow.

There are tens of millions of Americans that are referred to as “the working poor” because they are living in poverty even though they are employed and are working extremely hard. Many of you that are reading this article know exactly what I am talking about. Some of you are working way more than 4

SECOND

Saturday, October 17, 2020 3:00 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
And he probably voted for Obama, so that he could have his health care taken away.

The story says Alec Smith was a Republican and a Trump voter.
www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/01/641615877/insulins-high-c
ost-leads-to-lethal-rationing

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Saturday, October 17, 2020 3:21 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN
And the release:
https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2019
That table shows 169 million wage earners.

From the Social Security Administration table, 50.88% of wage earners will earn less than $35,000 per year. Let us look at only that 50.88%.

Why America is the World’s First Poor Rich Country
https://eand.co/why-america-is-the-worlds-first-poor-rich-country-17f5
a80e444a

The average American has a relatively high income, that of a person in a nominally rich country. Only his income does not go very far. Most of it is eaten up by attempting to afford the basics of life. We’ve already seen how steep healthcare costs are. But then there is education. There is transport. There is interest and rent. There is media and communications. There is childcare and elderly care. All these things reduce the average American to constantly living right at the edge of ruin — one paycheck away from penury, one emergency away from losing it all.

But this isn’t true for America’s peers. In Europe, Canada, and even Australia, society invests in all these things — and the costs of basic necessities societies don’t provide are regulated. For example, I pay $50 dollars for broadband and TV in London — but $200 for the same thing in New York — yet in London, I get vastly more and better media for my money (even including, yes, American junk like Ancient Aliens). That’s regulation at work. And when basic goods like healthcare or elderly care or education are provided and managed at a social scale, that is when they are cheapest, and often of the best quality, too. Hence, healthcare costs far less in London, Paris, or Geneva — and life expectancy is longer, too.

So if you are earning $50k in America, it is a very different thing than earning $50k in France, Germany, or Sweden — in America, you must pay steeply for the basics of life, for basic necessities. Thus, incomes stretch much further in other countries, which enjoy a vastly higher quality of life, even though people there earn roughly the same amount, because they pay vastly less for basic necessities. Americans are rich, but only nominally — their money doesn’t buy nearly as much as their peers does, where it matters and counts most, for the basics of life.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Saturday, October 17, 2020 11:35 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Or, we could just have nationalized free healthcare like every other country in the 1st world.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/484301-22-studies-a
gree-medicare-for-all-saves-money

But that's not true. "every other country" does NOT have nationalized free healthcare.

Canada has single payer, where the government cuts out the insurers and pays (private) healthcare providers directly.

France's medical workers, OTOH, are a mixture of public (working for government) and private (paid by government). Public insurance is available to all, as is private insurance, but whether you choose public or private insurance, you MUST have insurance. It is mandatory.

Australia, too, has a mixture of public/private healthcare, paid for by government, but because public healthcare is more cost-effective the private entities are being swamped out.

In Britain, healthcare is funded by taxes, not insurance, and healthcare providers work directly for the government. That is the only truly "nationalized" healthcare system that I know of.

Germany has a system of what is called "Multipayer" system which includes both public and private insurers.

What seems like a simple statement of fact is not so simple after all.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

1KIKI

Saturday, October 17, 2020 1:23 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
But this has been going on for DECADES. Long before Trump, and even long before Obama.

The only thing that happened under Trump is the same thing that happened under Obama, GWB etc: NOTHING. NOTHING happened to reverse the trend.

That's what I'm saying. I'm not blaming Trump for the impoverishment of the average American. Over all the years and all the politicians, there's certainly plenty of blame to spread around for the fix we're in.

I'm just saying he didn't turn it around. Of course, being a domestic issue Trump has very little control over this. So I'm not even criticizing him for it either.

I'm just pointing out the pathway between Trump can do no wrong, and Trump can do no right.

SIGNYM

Saturday, October 17, 2020 4:46 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
But this has been going on for DECADES. Long before Trump, and even long before Obama.

The only thing that happened under Trump is the same thing that happened under Obama, GWB etc: NOTHING. NOTHING happened to reverse the trend.
That's what I'm saying. I'm not blaming Trump for the impoverishment of the average American. Over all the years and all the politicians, there's certainly plenty of blame to spread around for the fix we're in.

I'm just saying he didn't turn it around. Of course, being a domestic issue Trump has very little control over this. So I'm not even criticizing him for it either.

I'm just pointing out the pathway between Trump can do no wrong, and Trump can do no right.

Trump CANNOT create an economic miracle. I never expected him to.

Many Presidents, starting with Nixon and all the way thru Bush1, Clinton, Bush2 and Obama worked MIGHTY HARD to help industry offshore manufacturing jobs and convert the USA into a "financialist" center.

How can a President, over the course of four years, reverse decades of economoc treason? Seriously, what would it take to bring even 100,000 manuacturing jobs back to the USA?

Well, you can start by imposing tariffs on incoming goods to make "made in America" more cost competitive, and you can repatriate overseas money to come home by making USA corporate taxes more in line with international ones (like Ireland) but unless you can FORCE a company to .... say ... use that money to build a steel plant or a chemical plant or a cotton mill or aluminum refiner ... they will take all that
extra" money and use it to buy back stock.

This isn't a case of Trump, or any President, or even Congress not having the authority to do that, it would be stepping into a whole new world of nationalization, where you would have state-owned (or at least government-financed or government-mandated) enterprises, like China and its SOEs.

I think this is the conundrum FDR faced, because infrastructural spending goes only so far to stimulate the economy. Once you've paved the roads and electrified rural America and built railways and giant dams.... unless you have a thriving PRODUCTIVE economy, the roads and railways will be empty and the electricity will be unused. But then, there was the war and all of the sudden the govenment needed millions of tons of steel and copper and cotton and butter, and the actual PRODUCTIVE economy came to life because the government ordered it so.

So a President and a willing Congress would have to invoke something like a war measures act ... hopefully without an actual shooting war ... to mandate a production restart. And BTW you should forget about the USA "competing' on the world stage, elbowing aside such cheap-labor environmental miscreants like China and India. USA goods will always be non-competitive against those nations if we want to have a decent stadard of living at home, so the best we can hope for is self reliance. Of course, transational capitalists would be unsatisfied with not making "maximal" profit (whch they can do overseas) so this is where the heavy hand of government comes in.

I don't see any way around nationaliation of major industries ... or at least direct government loans for production restart ... for that economic miracle to happen. If you can think of another way, let me know.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

1KIKI

Saturday, October 17, 2020 5:30 PM

To get back to Trump/ republicans v Obama/ democrats ...

Various administrations have had an active hand in securing corporate maximal profits, from Kennecott Copper and Anaconda in Chile in the 1920's to a hundred years later with Apple in China ... and IP, outsourcing, and free trade agreements in between. I'm just pointing out that the destruction of US manufacturing wasn't entirely due to corporations; the government expended resources and adopted policies, agreements, and laws to make it so. Perhaps without the government's involvement, the process would have been slower.

SECOND

Saturday, October 17, 2020 7:38 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Trump CANNOT create an economic miracle. I never expected him to.

I expected him to. It is easy to do so when Congress cooperates with the President and the result was that Trump did produce a miracle.

Remember the CARES Act? I do. That was the economic miracle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARES_Act

CARES was to be followed by a second miracle, the HEROES Act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEROES_Act

Why is there no HEROES Act?
Because of Mitch McConnell. Since Mitch does not believe Trump will be reelected, Mitch will not help President Biden create a miracle similar to Trump's.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/521225-mcconnell-shoots-down-18-tr
illion-coronavirus-deal-breaking-with-trump

Signym, you might want to look closer at the economic miracle of WWII. That President's miracle was putting to work 16,112,566 Americans in the United States Armed Forces. Those Americans had active purposes and real goals to accomplish. In sharp contrast, Trump's miracle was to pay 30,000,000 Americans with no purpose other than waste time and do nothing until Covid-19 miraculously went away. To do more would have required government planning, but Trump doesn't know how to plan.
www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/cares-act-measures-strengthening-
unemployment-insurance-should-continue

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

REAVERFAN

Saturday, October 17, 2020 7:41 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Or, we could just have nationalized free healthcare like every other country in the 1st world.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/484301-22-studies-a
gree-medicare-for-all-saves-money

But that's not true. "every other country" does NOT have nationalized free healthcare.

Canada has single payer, where the government cuts out the insurers and pays (private) healthcare providers directly.

France's medical workers, OTOH, are a mixture of public (working for government) and private (paid by government). Public insurance is available to all, as is private insurance, but whether you choose public or private insurance, you MUST have insurance. It is mandatory.

Australia, too, has a mixture of public/private healthcare, paid for by government, but because public healthcare is more cost-effective the private entities are being swamped out.

In Britain, healthcare is funded by taxes, not insurance, and healthcare providers work directly for the government. That is the only truly "nationalized" healthcare system that I know of.

Germany has a system of what is called "Multipayer" system which includes both public and private insurers.

What seems like a simple statement of fact is not so simple after all.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

You have it in Russia. Right, comrade?

God, you're stupid. Every fucking post. Pure stupid.

SIGNYM

Saturday, October 17, 2020 9:16 PM

Quote:
REAVERBOT:
Or, we could just have nationalized free healthcare like every other country in the 1st world.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/484301-22-studies-a
gree-medicare-for-all-saves-money

SIGNY: But that's not true. "every other country" does NOT have nationalized free healthcare.

Canada has single payer, where the government cuts out the insurers and pays (private) healthcare providers directly.

France's medical workers, OTOH, are a mixture of public (working for government) and private (paid by government). Public insurance is available to all, as is private insurance, but whether you choose public or private insurance, you MUST have insurance. It is mandatory.

Australia, too, has a mixture of public/private healthcare, paid for by government, but because public healthcare is more cost-effective the private entities are being swamped out.

In Britain, healthcare is funded by taxes, not insurance, and healthcare providers work directly for the government. That is the only truly "nationalized" healthcare system that I know of.

Germany has a system of what is called "Multipayer" system which includes both public and private insurers.

What seems like a simple statement of fact is not so simple after all.

REAVERBOT: You have it in Russia. Right, comrade?

You get your ass handed to you by making a stupid statement, and your only response is more stupidity?

God, you're stupid. Every fucking post. Pure stupid.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

SIGNYM

Saturday, October 17, 2020 9:22 PM

Quote:
SIGNY:
Trump CANNOT create an economic miracle. I never expected him to.

SECONDRATE: Signym, you might want to look closer at the economic miracle of WWII. That President's miracle was putting to work 16,112,566 Americans in the United States Armed Forces. Those Americans had active purposes and real goals to accomplish. In sharp contrast, Trump's miracle was to pay 30,000,000 Americans with no purpose other than waste time and do nothing until Covid-19 miraculously went away. To do more would have required government planning, but Trump doesn't know how to plan.
www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/cares-act-measures-strengthening-
unemployment-insurance-should-continue

It sounds like you want Trump to start a war.

Do you?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Saturday, October 17, 2020 11:03 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
But this has been going on for DECADES. Long before Trump, and even long before Obama.

The only thing that happened under Trump is the same thing that happened under Obama, GWB etc: NOTHING. NOTHING happened to reverse the trend.
That's what I'm saying. I'm not blaming Trump for the impoverishment of the average American. Over all the years and all the politicians, there's certainly plenty of blame to spread around for the fix we're in.

I'm just saying he didn't turn it around. Of course, being a domestic issue Trump has very little control over this. So I'm not even criticizing him for it either.

I'm just pointing out the pathway between Trump can do no wrong, and Trump can do no right.
Trump CANNOT create an economic miracle. I never expected him to.

Many Presidents, starting with Nixon and all the way thru Bush1, Clinton, Bush2 and Obama worked MIGHTY HARD to help industry offshore manufacturing jobs and convert the USA into a "financialist" center.

How can a President, over the course of four years, reverse decades of economoc treason? Seriously, what would it take to bring even 100,000 manuacturing jobs back to the USA?

Well, you can start by imposing tariffs on incoming goods to make "made in America" more cost competitive, and you can repatriate overseas money to come home by making USA corporate taxes more in line with international ones (like Ireland) but unless you can FORCE a company to .... say ... use that money to build a steel plant or a chemical plant or a cotton mill or aluminum refiner ... they will take all that
extra" money and use it to buy back stock.

This isn't a case of Trump, or any President, or even Congress not having the authority to do that, it would be stepping into a whole new world of nationalization, where you would have state-owned (or at least government-financed or government-mandated) enterprises, like China and its SOEs.

I think this is the conundrum FDR faced, because infrastructural spending goes only so far to stimulate the economy. Once you've paved the roads and electrified rural America and built railways and giant dams.... unless you have a thriving PRODUCTIVE economy, the roads and railways will be empty and the electricity will be unused. But then, there was the war and all of the sudden the govenment needed millions of tons of steel and copper and cotton and butter, and the actual PRODUCTIVE economy came to life because the government ordered it so.

So a President and a willing Congress would have to invoke something like a war measures act ... hopefully without an actual shooting war ... to mandate a production restart. And BTW you should forget about the USA "competing' on the world stage, elbowing aside such cheap-labor environmental miscreants like China and India. USA goods will always be non-competitive against those nations if we want to have a decent stadard of living at home, so the best we can hope for is self reliance. Of course, transational capitalists would be unsatisfied with not making "maximal" profit (whch they can do overseas) so this is where the heavy hand of government comes in.

I don't see any way around nationaliation of major industries ... or at least direct government loans for production restart ... for that economic miracle to happen. If you can think of another way, let me know.

It might be better to say Relative Economic Miracle.
Some expectation levels of miracle are outlandinsh. But compared to 8 years of Obamanomics, Trumpanomics has been a relative miracle. And this was during the debris of Obamanomics, to boot.

The figures indicate that less tha half of the US population are "wage earners" according to SocSec data. And it shows that half of those "wage earners" are at the level of the $34K. But it also denotes that about 26% of th

SIGNYM

Saturday, October 17, 2020 11:16 PM

Quote:
SIGNY:
But this has been going on for DECADES. Long before Trump, and even long before Obama.

The only thing that happened under Trump is the same thing that happened under Obama, GWB etc: NOTHING. NOTHING happened to reverse the trend.

KII: That's what I'm saying. I'm not blaming Trump for the impoverishment of the average American. Over all the years and all the politicians, there's certainly plenty of blame to spread around for the fix we're in.

I'm just saying he didn't turn it around. Of course, being a domestic issue Trump has very little control over this. So I'm not even criticizing him for it either.

I'm just pointing out the pathway between Trump can do no wrong, and Trump can do no right.

Well, you DID manage to get SECONDRATE to finally post something other than nonsense, so there's that. I was shocked to see him posting exactly what I've been posting all along: our economy over the decades/centuries has been molded by the rich, for the rich. But I'm more interested in what CAN be done, and what it would take to get there.

Quote:
SIGNY: Trump CANNOT create an economic miracle. I never expected him to.

Many Presidents, starting with Nixon and all the way thru Bush1, Clinton, Bush2 and Obama worked MIGHTY HARD to help industry offshore manufacturing jobs and convert the USA into a "financialist" center.

How can a President, over the course of four years, reverse decades of economoc treason? Seriously, what would it take to bring even 100,000 manuacturing jobs back to the USA?

Well, you can start by imposing tariffs on incoming goods to make "made in America" more cost competitive, and you can repatriate overseas money to come home by making USA corporate taxes more in line with international ones (like Ireland) but unless you can FORCE a company to .... say ... use that money to build a steel plant or a chemical plant or a cotton mill or aluminum refiner ... they will take all that
extra" money and use it to buy back stock.

This isn't a case of Trump, or any President, or even Congress not having the authority to do that, it would be stepping into a whole new world of nationalization, where you would have state-owned (or at least government-financed or government-mandated) enterprises, like China and its SOEs.

I think this is the conundrum FDR faced, because infrastructural spending goes only so far to stimulate the economy. Once you've paved the roads and electrified rural America and built railways and giant dams.... unless you have a thriving PRODUCTIVE economy, the roads and railways will be empty and the electricity will be unused. But then, there was the war and all of the sudden the govenment needed millions of tons of steel and copper and cotton and butter, and the actual PRODUCTIVE economy came to life because the government ordered it so.

So a President and a willing Congress would have to invoke something like a war measures act ... hopefully without an actual shooting war ... to mandate a production restart. And BTW you should forget about the USA "competing' on the world stage, elbowing aside such cheap-labor environmental miscreants like China and India. USA goods will always be non-competitive against those nations if we want to have a decent stadard of living at home, so the best we can hope for is self reliance. Of course, transational capitalists would be unsatisfied with not making "maximal" profit (whch they can do overseas) so this is where the heavy hand of government comes in.

I don't see any way around nationaliation of major industries ... or at least direct government loans for production restart ... for that economic miracle to happen. If you can think of another way, let me know.

And of course REAVERBOT is such a dunderhead that he doesn't realize that AOC and I are almost on the same page as this. WHAT IS THE GREEN NEW DEAL EXCEPT THE GOVERNMENT-MANDATED AND GOVERNMENT-FUNDED RESTRUCTURING OF THE AMERI

1KIKI

Saturday, October 17, 2020 11:48 PM

average wage index = AWI (reported as median/ average/ mode(percent of total))
Thanks to the helpful chart I was also able to include the 'mode' measure of central tendency.

YR .. ....AWI mean/ .... median/ /........mode(percent)
2007 ....25,737.20/ .... 38,760.95/ .... 2,040.04(16.21)
2008 ....26,514.38/ .... 39,652.61/ .... 2,030.99(15.82)
2009 ....26,261.29/ .... 39,054.62/ .... 2,016.31(16.11)
2010 ....26,363.55/ .... 39,959.30/ .... 2,016.50(16.04)
2011 ....26,965.43/ .... 41,211.36/ .... 2,019.42(15.56)
2012 ....27,519.10/ .... 42,498.21/ .... 2,024.79(15.17)
2013 ....28,031.02/ .... 43,041.39/ .... 2,041.13(14.84)
2014 ....28,851.21/ .... 44,569.20/ .... 2,066.40(14.27)
2015 ....29,930.13/ .... 46,119.78/ .... 2,088.66(13.68)
2016 ....30,533.31/ .... 46,640.94/ .... 2,084.76(13.34)
2017 ....31,561.49/ .... 48,251.57/ .... 2,094.50(12.96)
2018 ....32,838.05/ .... 50,000.44/ .... 2,094.19(12.47)
2019 ....34,248.45/ .... 51,916.27/ .... 2,100.95(11.92)

https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2007
https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2008
etc

I'm not even seeing a 'relative' economic miracle under Trump.

SECOND

Sunday, October 18, 2020 12:51 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
SIGNY:
Trump CANNOT create an economic miracle. I never expected him to.

SECONDRATE: Signym, you might want to look closer at the economic miracle of WWII. That President's miracle was putting to work 16,112,566 Americans in the United States Armed Forces. Those Americans had active purposes and real goals to accomplish. In sharp contrast, Trump's miracle was to pay 30,000,000 Americans with no purpose other than waste time and do nothing until Covid-19 miraculously went away. To do more would have required government planning, but Trump doesn't know how to plan.
www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/cares-act-measures-strengthening-
unemployment-insurance-should-continue
It sounds like you want Trump to start a war.

Do you?

Trump could sign The HEROES Act, if he really believed he will win the election. What would Trump have to do to get that bill on his desk? www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6800/text

Trump would have to lobby 13 GOP Senators to vote for it. With 47 Democratic Senators already guaranteed to vote for it, it would become law. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn't bring the bill to a vote because he believes Trump will lose the 2020 election. In that case the HEROES Act would be helping President Biden, which is bad for the GOP. The best way for the GOP to win Congressional seats in the 2022 election is for the Senate to withhold money from President Biden to make sure he fails in his first two years.

Trump seems to agree with McConnell that he will lose the 2020 election. Therefore Trump is NOT lobbying GOP Senators to vote for the HEROES Act.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

REAVERFAN

Sunday, October 18, 2020 1:16 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

You get your ass handed to you by making a stupid statement, and your only response is more stupidity?

God, you're stupid. Every fucking post. Pure stupid.

You lost. If you had the maturity of an adult, you'd be able to admit that, but like your idol Trump, you're just a screaming man-child with no conscience or morals.

I don't imagine you make a lot as a paid Russian troll. Stupid, amoral, AND a broke-ass bitch.

SIGNYM

Sunday, October 18, 2020 2:14 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

You get your ass handed to you by making a stupid statement, and your only response is more stupidity?

God, you're stupid. Every fucking post. Pure stupid.

You lost. If you had the maturity of an adult, you'd be able to admit that, but like your idol Trump, you're just a screaming man-child with no conscience or morals.

I don't imagine you make a lot as a paid Russian troll. Stupid, amoral, AND a broke-ass bitch.

Yep, our resident lunatic is going ballistic.

So, how about AOC's plan to turn the USA into the USSA by nationalizing and regulating .. well... everything? Am I the only one to see the irony of supporting that plan?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

1KIKI

Sunday, October 18, 2020 2:37 AM

Yeah, I don't pay attention to him anymore, except to call him an idiot from time to time.

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Tuesday, October 20, 2020 4:05 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
average wage index = AWI (reported as median/ average/ mode(percent of total))
Thanks to the helpful chart I was also able to include the 'mode' measure of central tendency.

YR .. ....AWI mean/Increase .. median/ /........mode(percent)
2007 ....25,737.20/ ..000000.. 38,760.95/ .... 2,040.04(16.21)
2008 ....26,514.38/+0,777 .... 39,652.61/ .... 2,030.99(15.82)
2009 ....26,261.29/--0,247 .... 39,054.62/ .... 2,016.31(16.11)
2010 ....26,363.55/+0,102 .... 39,959.30/ .... 2,016.50(16.04)
2011 ....26,965.43/+0,602 .... 41,211.36/ .... 2,019.42(15.56)
2012 ....27,519.10/+0,554 .... 42,498.21/ .... 2,024.79(15.17)
2013 ....28,031.02/+0,512 .... 43,041.39/ .... 2,041.13(14.84)
2014 ....28,851.21/+0,820 .... 44,569.20/ .... 2,066.40(14.27)
2015 ....29,930.13/+1,079 .... 46,119.78/ .... 2,088.66(13.68)
2016 ....30,533.31/+0,603 .... 46,640.94/ .... 2,084.76(13.34)
2017 ....31,561.49/+1,028 .... 48,251.57/ .... 2,094.50(12.96)
2018 ....32,838.05/+1,277 .... 50,000.44/ .... 2,094.19(12.47)
2019 ....34,248.45/+1,410 .... 51,916.27/ .... 2,100.95(11.92)

https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2007
https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2008
etc

I'm not even seeing a 'relative' economic miracle under Trump.

Does this improve your vision?
2019 was more than twice the averagte increase during Obamanomics.

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Thursday, October 22, 2020 4:29 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Goodbye Middle Class: Half Of All American Workers Made Less Than $34,248.45 Last Year

If you are making less than $3,000 a month, you have plenty of company, because about half of the country is in the exact same boat. The Social Security Administration just released new wage statistics for 2019, and they are pretty startling. To me, the most alarming thing in the entire report is the fact that the median yearly wage was just $34,248.45 last year. In other words, half of all American workers made less than $34,248.45 in 2019, and half of all American workers made more than $34,248.45. That isn’t a whole lot of money. In fact, when you divide $34,248.45 by 12 you get just $2,854.05. Needless to say, it is not easy to survive in America today on just $2,854.05 a month, and this may help to explain why we have been seeing so many people fall out of the middle class in recent years.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/goodbye-middle-class-half-
of-all-american-workers-made-less-than-34248-45-last-year

Now, that measure of central tendency - 'the median' - is only slightly less useless in a highly skewed distribution than 'the average'. The number one really wants to see would be 'the mode'. But nobody reports that because it would leave high-income earners out of the picture entirely and paint too accurate a picture of the American workers.

2019 - $34,248 (+1407)
2018 - $32,838 (+1277)
2017 - $31,561 (+1028)
2016 - $30,533 (+603)
2015 - $29,930 (+1079)
2014 - $28,851 (+820)
2013 - $28,031 (+512)
2012 - $27,519 (+554)
2011 - $26,965

1KIKI

Thursday, October 22, 2020 11:09 AM

https://byjus.com/maths/mode/

The value occurring most frequently in a set of observations is its mode. In other words, the mode of data is the observation having the highest frequency in a set of data.

The value that appears MOST FREQUENTLY in the wage data set from 2007 - 2019 is the yearly wage value ~ $2000 - $2100. Which means those values are the MODE.

As I've mentioned many times before, there are 3 measure of central tendency: the mean, the median, and the mode. In a 'normal' distribution, all those values are the same. But in a highly skewed distribution, where there's a hump near one end and a long tail at the other end, both mean and median become less useful if you want to find out where the bulk of your data resides. In the case of wages (not income) the highest frequency of the data is at the very low end.

The government formally reports the mean and median, because they look better. It doesn't report the mode because it looks bad, but you can determine it from the data.

https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2007
https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2008
etc

SIGNYM

Thursday, October 22, 2020 1:30 PM

So to get back to the econmic miracle that wasn't ...

The same as when we discuss "socialism" or "Fascism" we need some groundrules about definitions.

an ECONOMY is people exchanging goods and services. Where you have no production of goods to exchange, you have no economy.

FINANCIALISM is "making money on money". Thomas Picketty wrote a whole 600-page book about that: Capital in the 21st Century. In brief, he explains that if "modern" capital can make 6% by lending and speculation instead of 3% thru production, moeny will move to higher-profit financialism and avoid all the headaches of supply chains and labor unrest and environmental regulations and all of the disruptions that production is heir to.

What Trump has "accomplished" is exactly what OBAMA "accomplished" ... thanks to the very generous lending and money-printing by THE FED, "asset" prices (stocks), real estate, hedge funds, and bonds have exploded in value. Financialism. But unless the manufacturing economy recovers significantly, there is no "economic miracle" to speak of.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Thursday, October 22, 2020 11:28 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
https://byjus.com/maths/mode/
The value occurring most frequently in a set of observations is its mode. In other words, the mode of data is the observation having the highest frequency in a set of data.

The value that appears MOST FREQUENTLY in the wage data set from 2007 - 2019 is the yearly wage value ~ $2000 - $2100. Which means those values are the MODE.

As I've mentioned many times before, there are 3 measure of central tendency: the mean, the median, and the mode. In a 'normal' distribution, all those values are the same. But in a highly skewed distribution, where there's a hump near one end and a long tail at the other end, both mean and median become less useful if you want to find out where the bulk of your data resides. In the case of wages (not income) the highest frequency of the data is at the very low end.

The government formally reports the mean and median, because they look better. It doesn't report the mode because it looks bad, but you can determine it from the data.

https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2007
https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2008
etc

You seem to be saying that the most important figure is those making $2,000 per year, or effectively the unemployed - while actually excluding the unemployed.
I am missing the concept of why this is a valid focus of data about wage earners or working folk at large.

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Thursday, October 22, 2020 11:39 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So to get back to the econmic miracle that wasn't ...

The same as when we discuss "socialism" or "Fascism" we need some groundrules about definitions.

an ECONOMY is people exchanging goods and services. Where you have no production of goods to exchange, you have no economy.

FINANCIALISM is "making money on money". Thomas Picketty wrote a whole 600-page book about that: Capital in the 21st Century. In brief, he explains that if "modern" capital can make 6% by lending and speculation instead of 3% thru production, moeny will move to higher-profit financialism and avoid all the headaches of supply chains and labor unrest and environmental regulations and all of the disruptions that production is heir to.

What Trump has "accomplished" is exactly what OBAMA "accomplished" ... thanks to the very generous lending and money-printing by THE FED, "asset" prices (stocks), real estate, hedge funds, and bonds have exploded in value. Financialism. But unless the manufacturing economy recovers significantly, there is no "economic miracle" to speak of.

I sense that Germany is what you consider Financialism, on a global scale.

Can you agree that Trump has made progress, working to reverse Obamanomics but it can't be done overnight? You don't think that this would be a Relative Economic Miracle while far from an actual miracle?

1KIKI

Friday, October 23, 2020 1:35 AM

Perhaps you need to re-read the thread title and OP:

The non-existent Trump economic miracle.

Goodbye Middle Class: Half Of All American Workers Made Less Than $34,248.45 Last Year

SIGNYM

Friday, October 23, 2020 3:21 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
https://byjus.com/maths/mode/
The value occurring most frequently in a set of observations is its mode. In other words, the mode of data is the observation having the highest frequency in a set of data.

The value that appears MOST FREQUENTLY in the wage data set from 2007 - 2019 is the yearly wage value ~ $2000 - $2100. Which means those values are the MODE.

As I've mentioned many times before, there are 3 measure of central tendency: the mean, the median, and the mode. In a 'normal' distribution, all those values are the same. But in a highly skewed distribution, where there's a hump near one end and a long tail at the other end, both mean and median become less useful if you want to find out where the bulk of your data resides. In the case of wages (not income) the highest frequency of the data is at the very low end.

The government formally reports the mean and median, because they look better. It doesn't report the mode because it looks bad, but you can determine it from the data.

https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2007
https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2008
etc
You seem to be saying that the most important figure is those making $2,000 per year, or effectively the unemployed - while actually excluding the unemployed.
I am missing the concept of why this is a valid focus of data about wage earners or working folk at large.

Because that is what THE MOST wage earners make.

Here is a problem with the other measures of central tendency:

You have ten baseball players sitting on a bench. One of them makes a million dollars, four of them make $10,000, and five make $1,000.

What is the average? (Roughly $100,000)
What is the median? (About $10,000)
But what do MOST of the players earn? $1000.

In this case, the average is a completely irrelevant figure, the median only slightly more reflective, but the mode tells you how MOST of the players are faring.

That distribution BTW may sound unrealistic, but it's like the USA distribution: it is highly skewed.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

SECOND

Friday, October 23, 2020 5:58 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So to get back to the econmic miracle that wasn't ...

The same as when we discuss "socialism" or "Fascism" we need some groundrules about definitions.

an ECONOMY is people exchanging goods and services. Where you have no production of goods to exchange, you have no economy.

FINANCIALISM is "making money on money". Thomas Picketty wrote a whole 600-page book about that: Capital in the 21st Century. In brief, he explains that if "modern" capital can make 6% by lending and speculation instead of 3% thru production, moeny will move to higher-profit financialism and avoid all the headaches of supply chains and labor unrest and environmental regulations and all of the disruptions that production is heir to.

What Trump has "accomplished" is exactly what OBAMA "accomplished" ... thanks to the very generous lending and money-printing by THE FED, "asset" prices (stocks), real estate, hedge funds, and bonds have exploded in value. Financialism. But unless the manufacturing economy recovers significantly, there is no "economic miracle" to speak of.

There are TWO books on capital by Piketty. The latest, “Capital and Ideology” (2020):

For Piketty, rising inequality is a political phenomenon. The social-democratic framework that made Western societies relatively equal for a couple of generations after World War II, he argues, was dismantled, not out of necessity, but because of the rise of a “neo-proprietarian” ideology. Indeed, this is a view shared by many, though not all, economists. These days, attributing inequality mainly to the ineluctable forces of technology and globalization is out of fashion, and there is much more emphasis on factors like the decline of unions, which has a lot to do with political decisions.

But why did policy take a hard-right turn? Piketty places much of the blame on center-left parties, which, as he notes, increasingly represent highly educated voters. These more and more elitist parties, he argues, lost interest in policies that helped the disadvantaged, and hence forfeited their support. And his clear implication is that social democracy can be revived by refocusing on populist economic policies, and winning back the working class.

Piketty could be right about this, but as far as I can tell, most political scientists would disagree. In the United States, at least, they stress the importance of race and social issues in driving the white working class away from Democrats, and doubt that a renewed focus on equality would bring those voters back. After all, during the Obama years the Affordable Care Act extended health insurance to many disadvantaged voters, while tax rates on top incomes went up substantially. Yet the white working class went heavily for Trump, and stayed Republican in 2018.

Maybe the political science consensus is wrong.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200308071004/https://www.nytimes.com/202
0/03/08/books/review/capital-and-ideology-thomas-piketty.html

Free download of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (2014) and “Capital and Ideology” (2020) at

https://libgen.unblockit.lat/search.php?req=Thomas+Piketty+capital

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Friday, October 23, 2020 6:13 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Perhaps you need to re-read the thread title and OP:

The non-existent Trump economic miracle.

Goodbye Middle Class: Half Of All American Workers Made Less Than $34,248.45 Last Year

One well known way to increase incomes for people making the least is increasing the minimum wage. Trump won't do it.

Increasing the minimum wage is very popular.

Empirical economics research has grown increasingly optimistic about the possibility of a $15 per hour wage as some cities have experimented with it.

At the same time, it’s become extraordinarily popular with the public, drawing a large amount of support even from rank-and-file Republicans.

Back during the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly suggested he would support a minimum wage increase — albeit perhaps to $10/hour rather than $15/hour.

As president, he’s completely abandoned that idea. And it’s part of a larger transformation, through which a guy who was perceived as ideologically moderate in 2016 has become increasingly right-wing and extreme on basic economic issues. Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, said he’s for raising the minimum to $15/hr, as Democrats generally are.

https://www.vox.com/2020/10/22/21529733/donald-trump-minimum-wage-deba
te

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Friday, October 23, 2020 8:06 PM

SECOND: Or, Picketty could just have said this

Quote:
“The ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that their imposed, ruling-class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone”

Or this

Quote:
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

or this

Quote:
Take away a nation's heritage and they are more easily persuaded.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

1KIKI

Friday, October 23, 2020 9:09 PM

"One well known way to increase incomes for people making the least is increasing the minimum wage."

Prove it. Find (and reference) the percent of US workers making the minimum wage, adjust the national average to account for an increase to $10, and show it makes a difference larger than the one already found on the tables.

QUOTES AND LINKS showing an increased minimum wage will change the lowest rung of the national wage table more than $100/yr - or it didn't happen.

SECOND

Friday, October 23, 2020 9:34 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
"One well known way to increase incomes for people making the least is increasing the minimum wage."

Prove it. Find (and reference) the percent of US workers making the minimum wage, adjust the national average to account for an increase to $10, and show it makes a difference larger than the one already found on the tables.

QUOTES AND LINKS showing an increased minimum wage will change the lowest rung of the national wage table more than $100/yr - or it didn't happen.

That's a homework problem, and to the Russian troll who is defending Trump's refusal to raise the minimum to $15/hour I will say, "Fuck you, you goddamn idiot."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Friday, October 23, 2020 9:36 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND: Or, Picketty could just have said this

Quote:
“The ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that their imposed, ruling-class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone”

Or this

Quote:
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

or this

Quote:
Take away a nation's heritage and they are more easily persuaded.

It is time for dueling quotes:

"The history of inequality cannot be reduced to an eternal clash between oppressors of the people and proud defenders. On both sides one finds sophisticated intellectual and institutional constructs. To be sure, on the side of the dominant groups, these constructs are not always devoid of hypocrisy and reflect a determination to remain in power, but they still need to be studied closely. Unlike the class struggle, the struggle of ideologies involves shared knowledge and experiences, respect for others, deliberation, and democracy. No one will ever possess the absolute truth about just ownership, just borders, just democracy, just taxes and education. The history of human societies can be seen as a quest for justice. Progress is possible only through detailed comparison of personal and historical experiences and the widest possible deliberation.

Nevertheless, the struggle of ideologies and the quest for justice also entails the expression of clearly defined positions and clearly designated antagonists. Based on the experiences analyzed in this book, I am convinced that capitalism and private property can be superseded and that a just society can be established . . ."

-- from the conclusion of Capital and Ideology (2020)
Get the free book here: http://library.lol/main/F373B4D589A0E25F564F05714B66683C

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

1KIKI

Friday, October 23, 2020 9:44 PM

Quote:
I refuse to support in the slightest the assertions I posted and prefer to personally attack instead.

fify

Quote:
all you need do is google http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62934&p=28

SIGNYM

Friday, October 23, 2020 9:59 PM

The problem with raising the minimum wage is that it will encourage businesses to automate jobs out of existence.

Unless there is a government commitment to full and meaningful employment (has to be government, business always wants to reduce expenses and in the long run that means getting rid of employees) including a commitment to industrial production, you will just be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

1KIKI

Friday, October 23, 2020 10:07 PM

When SECOND claims that increasing the minimum wage will substantially impact the wages of the lowest tier of workers (the mode) this is what he didn't want to post in support:

Quote:
In 2019, 82.3 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.1 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 392,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 1.2 million had wages below the federal minimum. Together, these 1.6 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 1.9 percent of all hourly paid workers.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2019/home.htm

Because there are so few workers in that category, if every worker below or at minimum wage were to have their wages raised to $10/hr it would have only a very small percent effect on the US wage structure.

SECOND, to quote back to you some snark you posted to me:

Quote:
all you need do is google http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62934&p=28

SECOND

Friday, October 23, 2020 10:18 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
When SECOND claims that increasing the minimum wage will substantially impact the wages of the lowest tier of workers (the mode) this is what he didn't want to post in support:
Quote:
In 2019, 82.3 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.1 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 392,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 1.2 million had wages below the federal minimum. Together, these 1.6 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 1.9 percent of all hourly paid workers.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2019/home.htm
Because there are so few workers in that category, if every worker below or at minimum wage were to have their wages raised to $10/hr it would have only a very small percent effect on the US wage structure.

SECOND, to quote back to you some snark you posted to me:
Quote:
all you need do is google http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62934&p=28

So is the official GOP position to not raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15/hour because there are only 1.6 million who are making exactly $7.25 or less?

Yes, the GOP is strongly opposed: Two state Republican leaders added their voices Monday in opposition to a proposed constitutional amendment that would gradually boost the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Florida. Republican Party of Florida Chairman Joe Gruters, a state senator from Sarasota, and incoming House Speaker Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, described the ballot initiative as “a Trojan horse,” “a trapdoor,” and “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” that will bring to Florida “failed policies” from liberal cities where streets are “covered in poverty, riots, crime.”
www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/news/2020/09/29/florida-fight-minimum
-wage.html

I will fire you before I will raise your wage even one penny above $7.25/hour, says GOP Party platform.
www.gop.com/minimum-wage/

During last night's debate, Trump says the minimum wage should be set by the states. This implies that there shouldn’t even be a minimum wage.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/10/liveblogging-the-final-presiden
tial-debate/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Saturday, October 24, 2020 1:35 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
https://byjus.com/maths/mode/
The value occurring most frequently in a set of observations is its mode. In other words, the mode of data is the observation having the highest frequency in a set of data.

The value that appears MOST FREQUENTLY in the wage data set from 2007 - 2019 is the yearly wage value ~ $2000 - $2100. Which means those values are the MODE.

As I've mentioned many times before, there are 3 measure of central tendency: the mean, the median, and the mode. In a 'normal' distribution, all those values are the same. But in a highly skewed distribution, where there's a hump near one end and a long tail at the other end, both mean and median become less useful if you want to find out where the bulk of your data resides. In the case of wages (not income) the highest frequency of the data is at the very low end.

The government formally reports the mean and median, because they look better. It doesn't report the mode because it looks bad, but you can determine it from the data.

https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2007
https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2008
etc
You seem to be saying that the most important figure is those making $2,000 per year, or effectively the unemployed - while actually excluding the unemployed.
I am missing the concept of why this is a valid focus of data about wage earners or working folk at large.
Because that is what THE MOST wage earners make.

Here is a problem with the other measures of central tendency:

You have ten baseball players sitting on a bench. One of them makes a million dollars, four of them make $10,000, and five make $1,000.

What is the average? (Roughly $100,000)
What is the median? (About $10,000)
But what do MOST of the players earn? $1000.

In this case, the average is a completely irrelevant figure, the median only slightly more reflective, but the mode tells you how MOST of the players are faring.

That distribution BTW may sound unrealistic, but it's like the USA distribution: it is highly skewed.

Two of you seem to be responding as one. Do not be offended if I reply to one but the other thinks differently.

Your claims about Mode seem to exhibit logic failure.
For 2019, you are using the figure of 2,100.95, which is the average of the arbitrary range size of $5,000 applied to $0.01 - $4,999.

With a Federal Minimum Wage of $7.25 per hour, any wages below $15,080 are essentially unemployed or Part Time employ.

With an arbitrary range of 0-49,999 the average of $3,216 - and this would be your Mode with all income ranges at $50,000.

For an income range of 0-2,000 the percent would be about 6% or less. With the income range of 0-1,000 the percent would be surely less than 4%.

Both of those ranges, including the range you claim is the Mode are vastly monopolized by unemployed who earned a few minutes of hours of work. But you are not including all of the Wage Earners who were unemployed completely.
Shadow Stats reported in Dec 2019 that the Unemployed who were not included as Official Unemployed because they had been unemployed for more than a year (all of 2019) was more than 13% of the Labor Force, or about 22 million Americans.

This 13% is by far the largest percentage compared to your arbitrary range of $5,000, or a more reasonable range of $2,000 or $1,000 - and thus the actual Mode which you keep denying is the Income of $0.00 for the year, with more than 13%.

And that is the same figure for the Mode for every year since Obama's first year.
So what point does you claim make if every year the actual Mode is $0?

A more reasonable usage of data might be to use the cut-off of $15,080 as being unemployed.
This would have 114.7 million people earning a total of $19.618 Trillion, for an average of $171,000.

But weighting your claimed data with up to 6% unemp

1KIKI

Saturday, October 24, 2020 3:14 AM

Quote:
KIKI - ]In 2019, 82.3 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.1 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 392,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 1.2 million had wages below the federal minimum. Together, these 1.6 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 1.9 percent of all hourly paid workers.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2019/home.htm

Quote:
SECOND - So is the official GOP position to not raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15/hour because there are only 1.6 million who are making exactly $7.25 or less?

So it's the official democratic position to focus exclusively on the minimum wage as their pretense of 'caring' about workers, even though it'll help only 1.1% of all wage workers (1.9% of all hourly workers, which are only 58.1% of all hourly plus wage workers)?

And if democrats don't do any different, how are they any better?

Quote:
all you need do is google http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=62934&p=28

1KIKI

Saturday, October 24, 2020 4:00 AM

JSF

First of all, the SS Wage Statistics deal with people who are earning a paycheck - not the unemployed. Unemployment benefits aren't wages. So your argument that low wage workers are "essentially" unemployed, and trying to pass them off in that category, is in error. They may be working very few hours, and their wages may be abysmally low, but they're working. Instead of trying to fudge away the data, realize that, indeed, the wage data posted in the SS Wage Statistics is as dire as the lives most working people are living.

When you're dealing with a continuous variable - like wages - it's a common and acceptable practice to divide the data into 'slices' and subject those slices to statistical evaluation. "With an arbitrary range of 0-49,999 the average of $3,216 - and this would be your Mode with all income ranges at $50,000." It's a well known problem that picking arbitrary ranges can affect statistical evaluation, so the practice is to create as many ranges as you can possibly work with, to more accurately reflect the distribution shape of the original data. Picking a very arbitrary and very large range is also misdirected.

"With a Federal Minimum Wage of $7.25 per hour, any wages below $15,080 are essentially unemployed or Part Time employ." Yes ... and that's another problem that goes unaddressed by the focus on the minimum wage - the many many people who work gig, ad hoc, part-time, or less than part-time work.

"But you are not including all of the Wage Earners who were unemployed completely." And that's still another problem with the government stats like mean and median wage - it misses all the people who aren't working at all. And that includes the formally unemployed as well as those who've dropped out of the labor marker entirely, and therefore not counted in any unemployment statistic.
Another way to look at unemployment is to look at the labor participation rate.
After a drastic slide post 2007
https://i.insider.com/529f21b6eab8ea780a58f40b?width=1085
it leveled off around 2015.

And it hasn't improved since then.

I'm not seeing an economic miracle for people who work for a living, and certainly not one under Trump.

SIGNYM

Saturday, October 24, 2020 1:47 PM

Quote:
Both of those ranges, including the range you claim is the Mode are vastly monopolized by unemployed who earned a few minutes of hours of work...A more reasonable usage of data might be to use the cut-off of $15,080 as being unemployed.
This would have 114.7 million people earning a total of $19.618 Trillion, for an average of $171,000.

What you are arguing for is a change in definition of "unemployed/employed". The current definition of "employed" means anyone who has earned ANYTHING in the past month, no matter how trivial. YOU would move those people over to the "unemployed" category even tho they are not receiving unemployment benefits.

For what purpose or benefit is this re-catagorization, other than to artificially raise the apparent wage curve? Are those minimally-employed people in reality any wealthier? Is the population as a whole better off after you've fudged the numbers to look better? Aren't you simply trying to bolster your claim that Trump created some sort of "economic miracle" with phony statistics?

MOST people are working meaningless jobs for a few hours a week, for low pay. You seem to be trying to goose your numbers into acceptability.

But it is what it is, dood, no matter how you turn those definitions around.

A lot... and, I mean a LOT... more needs to be done. About 7.5 MILLION manufacturing jobs were lost since 1980. Unless something happens to bring a few MILLION of those jobs back, I'm not holding my breath for that "miracle".

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/beyond-bls/the-fall-of-employment-in
-the-manufacturing-sector.htm

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

SECOND

Saturday, October 24, 2020 4:32 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:

SECOND - So it's the official democratic position to focus exclusively on the minimum wage as their pretense of 'caring' about workers, even though it'll help only 1.1% of all wage workers (1.9% of all hourly workers, which are only 58.1% of all hourly plus wage workers)?

The Democratic Party Platform is https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/

The GOP has said it will prevent every item in that platform from becoming law.

Look at the headings, 1kiki, at
https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/building-a-stronge
r-fairer-economy/.

Protecting Workers and Families and Creating Millions of Jobs Across America

Raising Wages and Promoting Workers’ Rights

Enacting Robust Work-Family Policies

Investing in the Engines of Job Creation

etc. etc.

The GOP will fight against all of it.

Or, 1kiki, look at entire paragraphs: The United States is alone among advanced economies in guaranteeing neither paid sick leave nor paid family leave for all workers. This puts excessive burdens on working families, and especially working mothers, even in the best of times, and is catastrophic for public health in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Democrats will implement paid sick days and a high-quality, comprehensive, and inclusive paid family and medical leave system that protects workers from the unfair choice between attending to urgent health or caretaking needs and earning a paycheck. We will fight to ensure workers are guaranteed at least 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave for all workers and family units, to enable new parents to recover from childbirth and bond with their newborns, foster or adopted children, and allow all workers to take extended time off to care for themselves or ailing loved ones.

Wherever you look, 1kiki, the GOP will be opposed to it all. Especially this section:
"ACHIEVING UNIVERSAL, AFFORDABLE, QUALITY HEALTH CARE"
https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/achieving-universa
l-affordable-quality-health-care/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, October 24, 2020 6:42 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
A more reasonable usage of data might be to use the cut-off of $15,080 as being unemployed.

That settles it then.

I've been unemployed since December of 2009.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, October 24, 2020 6:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
The problem with raising the minimum wage is that it will encourage businesses to automate jobs out of existence.

Unless there is a government commitment to full and meaningful employment (has to be government, business always wants to reduce expenses and in the long run that means getting rid of employees) including a commitment to industrial production, you will just be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

They don't need a higher minimum wage to use as an excuse for that now.

3 of the 4 jobs I was laid off from were either from automation, or just straight up reduction of work force which entailed making everybody who stick around work like dogs to keep their shitty job. (Something which they know full well they can get away with in even the best days of our shitty labor market in the last 20 years).

Raise the minimum wage to $15 overnight and you're going to see millions of extra jobs shed within a year.

They can probably manage to do it without the cost of goods being raised too much, but if you thought you had a hard time finding an employee to assist you in the stores now, just wait until the minimum wage gets hiked to more than double of what it is today.

That's also not to mention how many small businesses, particularly restaurants who operate on a razor thin budget already, will go out of business.

But I get the argument though...

25 years ago, minimum wage jobs were for kids and nearly exclusively were held by kids. Now that I've been working them again during the last 10 years, seeing a kid working one is the exception to the rule. The last job I had, most of the adults working it also had a 2nd or even a 3rd job to pay all the bills.

I can't imagine a life where you had to work an 8 hour shift at one thankless job only to get in your car and drive your sad ass to another one before you could go home and sleep. :(

Do Right, Be Right. :)

SECOND

Saturday, October 24, 2020 8:25 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Raise the minimum wage to $15 overnight and you're going to see millions of extra jobs shed within a year.

They can probably manage to do it without the cost of goods being raised too much, but if you thought you had a hard time finding an employee to assist you in the stores now, just wait until the minimum wage gets hiked to more than double of what it is today.

That's also not to mention how many small businesses, particularly restaurants who operate on a razor thin budget already, will go out of business.

But I get the argument though...

25 years ago, minimum wage jobs were for kids and nearly exclusively were held by kids. Now that I've been working them again during the last 10 years, seeing a kid working one is the exception to the rule. The last job I had, most of the adults working it also had a 2nd or even a 3rd job to pay all the bills.

I can't imagine a life where you had to work an 8 hour shift at one thankless job only to get in your car and drive your sad ass to another one before you could go home and sleep. :(

You sound precisely the same as a Texas Republican businessman arguing against raising the minimum wage. Just shut the hell up and raise the wage, then see what happens. Remember the story about the business owner who raised minimum wages to $70,000? I heard a thousand times from idiotic and rich Republicans (and some Democrats who weren't any better informed than Rush Limbaugh) that the business would fail because it doesn't give all the rewards for success to the business owner. Instead, it prospered.
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-51332811

Run the experiment. Raise the wage to $15/hour. Or run the reverse, which we actually have been doing for years because of inflation, and lower the minimum wage. We already know what happens. You can see the bad results everywhere you look in Texas.

Some American Corporations have raised the minimum, but have not tried in the US
www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/us-denmark-economy.html

Starting pay for the humblest burger-flipper at McDonald’s in Denmark is about $22 an hour once various pay supplements are included. The McDonald’s workers in Denmark get six weeks of paid vacation a year, life insurance, a year’s paid maternity leave and a pension plan. And like all Danes, they enjoy universal medical insurance and paid sick leave.

One reason Denmark was more effective than the United States in responding to the crisis is that no Dane hesitated to seek treatment because of concerns about medical bills.

Abu Sayeed knew that Americans working in fast food don’t do so well. “I heard about the movement,” he said, trying to remember its name. “Fight for something. Fight for $20? What was it?”

“Fight for $15,” I explained. “They want $15 an hour.”

There was an awkward silence. He nodded sympathetically. Then he tried not to sound condescending.

“I feel for them,” he said earnestly of American workers at McDonald’s. “We are from the same brand.”

Some American companies scoff that a $15 minimum wage or stronger unions would be a disastrous blow to business. Denmark challenges that narrative, for it shows that it’s possible to have a thriving economy that pays workers decently and treats them respectfully.

Workers get their schedules a month in advance, and they can’t be assigned back-to-back shifts. American politicians speak solemnly about the dignity of work, but you’re more likely to find it in Copenhagen than in New York.

This wasn’t always so. The golden age of American capitalism, from 1945 to 1980, was a period of high tax rates (up to 91 percent for the very wealthy), strong labor unions and huge initiatives, such as the G.I. Bill of Rights to help disadvantaged (albeit mostly white) Americans. This was a period of rapid growth in which income inequality declined — and in some ways it looked like today’s Denmark.

One Republican strategy this year has been to demonize Democrats as socialists who would destroy t

SIGNYM

Saturday, October 24, 2020 10:44 PM

Quote:
6IXSTRINGJACK:

Raise the minimum wage to $15 overnight and you're going to see millions of extra jobs shed within a year.

They can probably manage to do it without the cost of goods being raised too much, but if you thought you had a hard time finding an employee to assist you in the stores now, just wait until the minimum wage gets hiked to more than double of what it is today.

That's also not to mention how many small businesses, particularly restaurants who operate on a razor thin budget already, will go out of business.

But I get the argument though...

25 years ago, minimum wage jobs were for kids and nearly exclusively were held by kids. Now that I've been working them again during the last 10 years, seeing a kid working one is the exception to the rule. The last job I had, most of the adults working it also had a 2nd or even a 3rd job to pay all the bills.

I can't imagine a life where you had to work an 8 hour shift at one thankless job only to get in your car and drive your sad ass to another one before you could go home and sleep. :(

SECOND: You sound precisely the same as a Texas Republican businessman arguing against raising the minimum wage. Just shut the hell up and raise the wage, then see what happens. Remember the story about the business owner who raised minimum wages to $70,000? I heard a thousand times from idiotic and rich Republicans (and some Democrats who weren't any better informed than Rush Limbaugh) that the business would fail because it doesn't give all the rewards for success to the business owner. Instead, it prospered.
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-51332811

I would bet you dollars to donuts that that was a privately-held company, but unfortunately that is not how most of our large businesses are run.

The particular compnay that you mention took a reduced profit INSTEAD OF paying its workers shitty wages. But large corporations that are publicly held are beholden to their stock owners to either pay the highest dividends or pursue the highest stock prices. They do that because they're competing with other publicly traded companies. they aren't interested in #widgets produced or customers served, they're focused on servicing their LBO loans and their stock prices. I've seen the difference between privately-held Stater Bros and publicly held Kroger/Ralphs.

And the companies that are privately owned are usually SMALL ... restaurants, gas stations, beauty and nail salons, etc usually DBA running on very thin profit margins already. So unless you change the structure of who owns large businesses (non-local stock holders, banks) and also manage to take greed out of the equation, very few large businesses can, or will, follow this example.

*****

So, I looked up the Democrat's platform on "job creation". (I tend not to pay too much attention to platforms because they're just empty promises, for the most part, but I digress.)

Quote:
Democrats support the creation of an infrastructure bank , a public bank that will leverage public and private resources to build infrastructure projects of national or regional significance, including in rail and transit, clean energy and water infrastructure, broadband, and affordable housing. Projects that receive assistance from the bank will be required to follow Buy America and Buy Clean provisions, pay Davis-Bacon prevailing wages, utilize project labor agreements, and ensure employers remain neutral in workers’ organizing efforts.

Infrastructure jobs. Even FDR ran into the limits of infrastructure investment, and HE was solidly committed to them! If this creates "hundreds of thousands" of jobs it is a pittance compared to the 7.5 MILLION jobs lost since 1980. You still need production at home. How about a public bank to finance steel mills and cheical plants and textiles and energy production? Or the government t

SECOND

Sunday, October 25, 2020 5:37 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Infrastructure jobs. Even FDR ran into the limits of infrastructure investment, and HE was solidly committed to them! If this creates "hundreds of thousands" of jobs it is a pittance compared to the 7.5 MILLION jobs lost since 1980.

A $1 trillion investment in infrastructure spending would create as many as 11 MILLION jobs through 2027. This stimulus will restore the growth path of job creation that was derailed by the Great Recession. Some political analysts argue that this proposal would compel the Republican Party to uphold the campaign promises made by President Trump, in order to maintain support from blue-collar workers, who helped elect him.
https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/trillion-dollar-infrastr
ucture.pdf

You might have noticed that Trump wrote no infrastructure bill. Why? Ask him about it in his second term. (The GOP Senators didn't want to pay for it, but that's just between you and me. I'm unsure if Trump knew. Maybe somebody should tell him?)

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

WHOZIT

Sunday, October 25, 2020 8:28 AM

If Trump wins I wonder how many libs will kill themselves...asking for friend?

SIGNYM

Monday, October 26, 2020 11:08 PM

Quote:
SIGNYM:

Infrastructure jobs. Even FDR ran into the limits of infrastructure investment, and HE was solidly committed to them! If this creates "hundreds of thousands" of jobs it is a pittance compared to the 7.5 MILLION [MANUFACTURING SIGNY] jobs lost since 1980.

SECOND: A $1 trillion investment in infrastructure spending would create as many as 11 MILLION jobs through 2027. This stimulus will restore the growth path of job creation that was derailed by the Great Recession. Some political analysts argue that this proposal would compel the Republican Party to uphold the campaign promises made by President Trump, in order to maintain support from blue-collar workers, who helped elect him.
https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/trillion-dollar-infrastr
ucture.pdf

You might have noticed that Trump wrote no infrastructure bill. Why? Ask him about it in his second term. (The GOP Senators didn't want to pay for it, but that's just between you and me. I'm unsure if Trump knew. Maybe somebody should tell him?)

a) Have the dems committed to a trillion dollar program?

b) I don't know what "11 million jobs through 2027" means. Do they mean 11 million each year through 2027? Or do they mean 11 million job-years? I guess SECOND should read this and explain.

c) Are these jobs permanent? Or do they go away once the spending goes away? That's the problem with infrastructural jobs ... since they definitely contribute to the "public good" but generally don't have a revenue stream attached, they aren't self-sustaining.

d) I note the phrase "As many as" and wonder whether they're counting the multiplier effect (secondary job creation) and what the LOWER bound is.

d) Who is paying for this? How about we gore the Pentagon's budget?

Good for "pump priming" but unless you commit to MAKE AT HOME and tariffs to make American-made good internally cost-competitive, it's NOT self-sustaining.

It's not a bad idea, and I have nothing against infrastructural jobs, and my wet dream is a revival of the civilian conservation corps to do all the forest management, wetland restoration, urban-forest planting, invasive species killing, renovation for energy conservation, and all of the environmental remediation that we so desperately need.

BUT. It's incomplete.

Dems are promising one-third of the solution, Trump is working on the other third, but we need both. Together. Plus directed investment into production and manufacturing.

But if the dems force Trump's hand into creating an infastructural program, so much the better. My guess, tho, is that if Biden wins this promised program will wind up where all dem promises go ... into corporate profits. Just like the ACA and bank bailouts.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Saturday, October 31, 2020 11:05 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
JSF

First of all, the SS Wage Statistics deal with people who are earning a paycheck - not the unemployed. Unemployment benefits aren't wages. So your argument that low wage workers are "essentially" unemployed, and trying to pass them off in that category, is in error. They may be working very few hours, and their wages may be abysmally low, but they're working. Instead of trying to fudge away the data, realize that, indeed, the wage data posted in the SS Wage Statistics is as dire as the lives most working people are living.

When you're dealing with a continuous variable - like wages - it's a common and acceptable practice to divide the data into 'slices' and subject those slices to statistical evaluation. "With an arbitrary range of 0-49,999 the average of $3,216 - and this would be your Mode with all income ranges at $50,000." It's a well known problem that picking arbitrary ranges can affect statistical evaluation, so the practice is to create as many ranges as you can possibly work with, to more accurately reflect the distribution shape of the original data. Picking a very arbitrary and very large range is also misdirected.

"With a Federal Minimum Wage of $7.25 per hour, any wages below $15,080 are essentially unemployed or Part Time employ." Yes ... and that's another problem that goes unaddressed by the focus on the minimum wage - the many many people who work gig, ad hoc, part-time, or less than part-time work.

"But you are not including all of the Wage Earners who were unemployed completely." And that's still another problem with the government stats like mean and median wage - it misses all the people who aren't working at all. And that includes the formally unemployed as well as those who've dropped out of the labor marker entirely, and therefore not counted in any unemployment statistic.
Another way to look at unemployment is to look at the labor participation rate.
After a drastic slide post 2007
https://i.insider.com/529f21b6eab8ea780a58f40b?width=1085
it leveled off around 2015.

Quote:
And it hasn't improved since then.

I'm not seeing an economic miracle for people who work for a living, and certainly not one under Trump.

After 2008 things leveled off under the thumb of The Rock-The-Vote Democraps from the 2006 election. Unti Obama in 2009 started feverishly shipping jobs to other countries, sabotaging the economy. That you seem to be able to see. Trump stopped this repetitive downslope, and then started to improve. Then your chart ends. Since Sept 2018, EVERY SINGLE MONTH was better than the same month prior year, until Libtard lockdowns. Building an economy is much harder (which conservative always try to do) than destroying it, which Dems always try to do.

It is a shame you cannot see it.

1KIKI

Saturday, October 31, 2020 11:45 PM

1993 2001 Clinton

2001 2009 Bush (2007 BearStearns; 2008 The Great Recession)

2009 2017 Obama

I can see just fine.

Can you?

JAYNEZTOWN

Thursday, October 23, 2025 10:31 PM

US hits $38T in debt, after fastest accumulation of $1T outside of pandemic
https://thedailyrecord.com/2025/10/23/us-debt-38-trillion-government-s
hutdown-inflation/

Trump sounded ‘exhausted, incoherent and stupid’ in his speech to military top brass, says retired general
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-ti
red-incoherent-speech-military-generals-b2837688.html

JAYNEZTOWN

Saturday, April 25, 2026 10:58 PM

Dow CEO says clearing the Strait of Hormuz logjam will take almost a year

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/23/dow-ceo-says-clearing-the-strait-of-ho
rmuz-logjam-will-take-almost-a-year.html

JAYNEZTOWN

Sunday, June 21, 2026 7:13 PM

Condemned to plutocracy? The relentless rise of US inequality

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/21/us-inequality-plutocra
cy

JAYNEZTOWN

Tuesday, August 18, 2026 8:07 PM

In Trump’s Economy, Companies Offer ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ for Utilities as Costs Surge
https://www.commondreams.org/news/buy-now-pay-later-loans

The U.S. just paid its highest 30-year borrowing cost since 2001
https://fortune.com/2026/08/14/us-bond-sale-25-year-high/

JAYNEZTOWN

Sunday, August 30, 2026 4:38 PM

In Trump’s Washington, Ballooning National Debt Stirs Little Action
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/27/us/politics/national-debt-trump-rea
ction.html