Comment Re:do they have a progressive view? (Score 1) 336
The solution to Detroit's problems is what the voices in my head tell me "no Texas in Michigan", and what they really mean by that is "no taxes in Michigan." All you got to do is set the corporate tax rate to something like 0.00005%, or even -0.00000003%, i.e. a rebate) and personal income tax to something like half or quarter of what it is now, and watch the entrepreneurs like chip companies and their employees from around the world flock to Michigan, and fix the state budget through their 7 or 8% sales tax. Unfortunately this is not completely good news to the present population becoming displaced by the "more skilled" and educated attracted by the scent of honey, because they will be displaced, like native americans were displaced, and only later did they reap the benefits of simple things like having a horse, or a gun - there were two sides to being displaced, the positive, and the negative. Unfortunately the chip companies cannot rely on present Michigan workers, because they cannot follow simple instructions to the letter, because in making a chip not a single mistake is allowed in a sequence of thousands of steps, or each mistake is very costly, and the discipline required in a micron filtered dust free environment is tremendous. Only the best military boot camp trained people can function in such an environment, or people from Korea, Japan, or Taiwan, who take their job and follow orders just as seriously without any formal military training. In fact that's one of my biggest deficiencies, not having been through such a bootcamp, and I cannot follow simple instructions either, make mistakes left and right. One possible way for people(about to be displaced if taxes are lowered) to crawl out of the being on welfare desperation without any prospect of a job, is to sign up for private prisons, without commiting a crime, and work as prison laborers, for $1/day, having communal housing and communal dining and bathroom facilities, just like it's done in China with pretty much all labor, which there is nonprison. Such prison situations avoid the minimum wage issues that hinder American competitiveness in the global marketplace, a minimum wage which is by the way unfairly low when you consider the cost of educating 3 kids and paying for gas and mortgage. We're trying to pretend that $900/mo is a fair rent or mortgage in face of $8/hr minimum wage and $3.50/gal gas commute, and food prices dependent on that 4/gal diesel trucking cost. So people could sign up for prison, but be allowed to leave any time they wish if they haven't commited a crime, and in fact it could be used as consideration, crime equity, against some future petty crime, such as shoplifting, but not capital crimes, such as violence. You also cannot raise your kids under such circumstances, so you have to find someone like grandparents, or one of the two parents doing the childraising, while the other works, just like it's done in China, where parents see their kids raised by the grandparents once per year on their yearly 1 week vacation when they can visit their hometown or village hundreds of miles away from their jobs. So the people not doing any child raising or at least one of two such people could get off welfare and pay for their own cheap housing and food this way, keep busy with something like making a broom, and enjoy each other's company. In prison solitary confinement is considered a harsh sentence, and out in the real world a lot of people on welfare are stuck with a very small circle of people in their lives out of necessity, solitary confinement by necessity, but there are some people who prefer solitude even if not necessary. So these people could keep looking for a job while in such a prison, and of course this means they'd be stuck for 30-50 years in this "looking for a job" situation while working as prison slaves, but I had personally much rather be a prison slave than be sitting on welfare, and be chastised by people who don't really understand my situation that I'm lazy and the only reason why I don't have a job is because I'm lazy and I'm not looking hard enough to find one. Shawshank Redemption is a good movie about institutionalized life, and how getting out on parole leads to suicide. People would rather work for a dollar a day, or even nothing, as long as they have a clean place to sleep, good food to eat, and each other's company, and they are not piling on credit card and mortgage debt. Being out in the real world with 8/hr minimum wage, but making $12-15/hr and paying a 45 year mortgage on a $299,999 house, paying gas, childcare and education for kids, when you add up all of it you still make at least like $-4 to $-1/hr, and the way to compensate for that, at least till the housing crash, was to refinance your home every 5 years that is revalued to 349,999 by then, and take out the 50 grand equity you just obtained by this pie in the sky revaluation. I used to work briefly in a place, as a coop student, that had a uniform across the board union pay of $17.85/hr, which comes to like 36000/yr, and there was so much overtime abuse that even the janitor, who by the way was also qualified as a reactor operator and took all kinds of overtime functions, made like $100,000/yr, with a high school diploma. The who gets what, the dividing up of the cake on 20mill yearly profit was 10 mill to the owners, 10 mill to the workers, which came to like 100,000/worker for 100 people when you added up all the benefits. These workers were lazy as hell, they sat around all day like in a clubhouse, discussing politics and elections, and anything that needed to be worked on was an excuse for overtime. Many of them pulled 5 of 7 days of 16 hrs straight, which means they pretty much lived there, and they slept some on the job too. But one thing they made sure of was that the pounds of product was made every day, and it was top quality. Work smart, not hard. Because of the union abuses the place got shut down, every building got erased to the ground, it's plant grass now, and the company moved to Mexico, where people worked for $5/day doing the same thing.
