I don't know about completely striping reproductive rights, but I wouldn't object to everyone, rich or poor, having to procure a procreation license. Say each person is allowed up to one license provided they can be proved by some objective measure to be a competent future parent. Your right to a license may be bought and sold so that people who want more children and are capable of supporting them may do so provided they can find others willing to not have more children. Although honestly it sounds like a lot of central planning and I think that's been proved to be sufficiently complex enough that we're unlikely to ever accomplish it in a satisfactory manner.

There are two issues that exacerbate the problem of wealth inequality.

1. Very wealthy people even if they spend money on waste that doesn't improve productivity still likely earn more money from their wealth, than they can readily waste. For them to actually start losing significant chunks of their wealth requires very long chains of poor decisions.

2. Poor people are on the opposite end of the spectrum. Yes, they can accumulate and build significant wealth if they are dedicated to it and leverage their productivity in ideal ways over the course of a lifetime. However a single poor decision or misfortune can set them back decades.

In the end I would argue that rich people are frequently rich because of good fortune whether stumbling on a new product at the perfect time or being born into wealth. Rich people stay rich because out society is structured in such a way that their wealth affords them every advantage and insulates them from their own bad decisions, while the poor have little to no advantage and can be crippled financially for years by singular poor decisions. Can we change our economic or social structure to even things out a little or at least narrow the gaps? I believe we can, and I think living wages are a good place to start although gauraunteed basic income sounds more ideal to me.

I actually kind of noticed this thing happening when I lived out west for a few years. At the time minimum wage was just over $5 an hour. But every since fast food burger joint I saw that actually advertised what they'd pay was offering $10 an hour as a starting wage. The minimum wage was clearly not enough to bring in workers and so the defacto minimum had raised its self. Granted even that wouldn't have been close to a living wage given the extremely high cost of living there but it was interesting to me at the time that it was happening at all.

The problem is that people each have their own individual dams and a huge number of them are completely bone dry while others are growing with no end in sight. Saving and investing your money is very sound fiscal practice. In theory the money flows from dam to dam but in reality we have a few dams that grow ever larger while more and more dry up. The Big dams might let out a slow trickle but most of what flows out from them is ending up in other very large dams instead of propagating out to the smaller dams. It is essentially an inherent weakness of a tax system that does not tax wealth, although of course taxing wealth comes with it's own mountain of troubles.

"This argument about government subsidies is way too fucking idiotic to have picked up this much steam."

Our country currently provides a number of benefits to people who are below specific arbitrary income levels. When companies deliberately keep their employees wages low enough that they continue to qualify for those benefits then their workforce is being subsidized by government. Hence the company is being subsidized by government.

The minimum wage was made into law decades ago when corporate abuse of employees was pretty rampant. Because their was a large surplus of labor wages could be kept very low because some other starving peasant would be willing to do your job for less because anything he got was better than the nothing he had and would stave off starvation just a little longer. Government basically stepped in and told businesses that if they wanted to continue as licensed legal businesses they would need to pay a minimum or, practically speaking, living wage.

I don't think anyone has anything against a person working extra jobs to earn more for themselves, or pooling resources with another to afford more room in the budget. A living wage doesn't affect any of that, so I'm not sure what you're going on about.

What personal liberties and choices are you talking about here? Maybe the liberty to pay a peasant as little as possible to keep them coming back while they rely on government subsidies to survive? If you want to run a business with employees then pay them a living wage so the rest of us aren't subsidizing your venture, or get out of the way so someone else can do it.

There are two problems with this that I can think of right off the bat.

A. Full employment is a fairytale dream. Today we already have an abundance of people with 4 year degrees that are flipping burgers to scrape by because there simply are not enough jobs requiring their services. Being qualified for better work does not matter if those jobs simply do not exist. As society advances technologically we are going to have more and more unemployed and under employed people as a percentage because we need less people working to provide the goods and services that we as a society need. This is not actually a problem depending on how those people are dealt with.

B. Minimum wage was established with the intent of it being a living wage. Over time that has been eroded but there is no good reason for us not to try and fix it. The minimum wage being less than a living wage is essentially subsidizing all businesses that rely on paying their employees below a living wage. I thought we wanted a free market wherein businesses rose or fell based on their own merits, not government bailouts?

Yes, raising the minimum wage will raise the cost of all products and services that rely on minimum wage workers. That means fast food burgers will go up in price, but so will those cold cuts and bread from the grocery store. Pretty much every consumable and service you purchase will be affected in some way. The pertinent question though is how much will those costs go up, and how long will it take for the rising tide of minimum wage to also raise your own salary. The more gradual the minimum wage increase is the smother this will all happen, California's five year schedule sounds pretty reasonable to me.

You forgot the option where the poor become a large and dissatisfied enough class that they force a change in the system, violently or not.

Of course it is being done over time to lessen the negative consequences. It should be obvious to anyone that thinks about it for a few minutes that raising the cost of labor in very large steps quickly is a bad thing to do. If it goes up gradually though it gives businesses time to adjust their finances and strategies, and the workers the same.

Will costs rise, yes, but the rise in cost for services and consumables should be smaller than the rise in pay. The only long term negative of this that I've heard is that bad businesses might be out competed by their competitors, oh wait, that isn't actually a negative if you believe in free markets and such.

If we're talking about a computer driven truck there certainly could be enough time. It depends on how powerful of a system it has and whether or not it is continuously monitoring all of its surroundings to begin with.

You ask a good question about your motivation to pay more taxes to support a more socialistic system, with no perceived benefit.

I would propose that you, and I as tax payers, would benefit. Society is constantly changing, and if you hadn't noticed in the US we seem to be incarcerating more and more people on a daily basis. The money for those prisons doesn't just fall from heaven like the mana of old. Poverty breeds crime like almost nothing else, and the future trend appears to be continued growth of poverty while the middle class dwindles. One way or another we are going to be paying more taxes to deal with the problems that poverty breeds, and prisons and crime is just part of that.

So the question really becomes, can we reduce the ill affects of poverty on society by adopting a more socialistic system for the same or cheaper cost than simply treating the symptoms? And that's strictly the money side of things, what would be the dollar value of lowering the chance of becoming the victim of crime? Or knowing that you can take a risk on starting your own business, or chasing some other dream, without exposing your family to being destitute should you fail?

A good stand mixer is multipurpose because it can be used for a variety of tasks. It can whisk, it can mix, and it can knead. Those are things it can do without fancy attachments, using attachments it can do a whole range of other things.

Not that it matters, I was just pointing out the silliness of a such a poorly worded quote. Maybe it was a mis-quote.

That does seem excessive. Mine uses half a cup more water than rice, unless it's brown rice which needs half a cup extra or something. The thing uses a thermostat I believe to determine when the rice is done so no timers are needed. It basically boils the water and as soon as it detects the temperature climbing past the boiling point, signifying the water has all boiled off, it reduces the temp to the keep warm setting. I wonder if there are types of rice for which this wouldn't be sufficient, not that it matters in the USA the stores typically only have a couple varieties for sale.

Vaccination is good on the whole, I don't argue against that. I do not see my right to life as being greater than another persons right to medical self determination. I wouldn't force someone to give me a kidney, blood transfusion, or bone marrow let alone be vaccinated to preserve my life.

The solution being used for vaccinations is unproductive for similar reasons as you cited for my example. By excluding the unvaccinated children from school you force them into homeschooling. Homeschooling, while it can be done well, frequently just leads to a deeper level of indoctrination. The parents are making decisions you don't agree with and so the solution is to punish the child and ensure they'll likely receive an even worse education? What do you think will happen when they grow up and have children of their own? After being forcibly ostracized as children they will simply be even more deeply entrenched in whatever points of view and beliefs that led their parents to not vaccinate them. I would rather foot the bill for a duplicate school system just to handle unvaccinated kids than exacerbate the problem by forcing them into homeschooling.

The quote was something about serving a single purpose. Each of those things really only has one purpose.

Thanks for the link.

I wish they had studied more than just MMR. At least the Febrile Seizures are essentially just an extra expense since they don't cause any long term issues and aren't damaging on their own. But that is an important thing to know and be aware of.