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Journal Marxist Hacker 42's Journal: I was wrong yesterday- It's not just Oregon 17

Journal by Marxist Hacker 42
Nope- apparently supply and demand is MUCH more complex than many people think. In other words Paying Americans More Creates Jobs as opposed to the common wisdom that if you pay Americans More, you have to cut Other Americans out of your payroll to pay for the increased payroll. What does this mean? It means my main objection to a minimum wage is greatly reduced. Not eliminated- there's still the fact that for every $1 a rich person makes, somebody at the bottom of the pay scale makes only $.02- and it's the rich guy who drives inflation up, not the poor guy. But the fact that state after state after state can up their minimum wage *without* acompanying job loss takes a lot of the fear of supply and demand away. Now if we could just have a reasonable experiment with an explicit Maximum Wage- as opposed to the implicit one that was in effect when our government was paying off WWII debt between 1947 and 1960.

I guess Henry Ford was right and Bill Ford is wrong.
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I was wrong yesterday- It's not just Oregon More

I was wrong yesterday- It's not just Oregon

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  • That's probably the last time you'll see the words "government paying off debt" in a sentence in your lifetime.
    • That's probably the last time you'll see the words "government paying off debt" in a sentence in your lifetime.

      I hope not- after all, there have been instances of our government paying off debt far more recently than that, and with lower tax rates too (Clinton and the Republican Congress in 1997-2000 paid off a ton of this country's governmental debt). But I think after Shrub the Younger, we'll need to see the 95% marginal tax bracket again to pay off his shenannagins. And that- well, it's going to happ
      • Even more so, the US policy is to respect and pay off *all* debts that it owes.

        No, we're not paying them all off immediately, and we keep a large accrewing amount stored up, same as any American household. (Most people have a large debt stored up, where if they lost the collateral that was backing it up, like their house, they'd be so impossibly in debt that it would make you cry.)

        So, the thing here is that the US *is* making debt payments all the time. But just like the average American household we've g
        • Even more so, the US policy is to respect and pay off *all* debts that it owes.

          Or at least- did. A lot of the Republican plans floated for Social Security include defaulting on the loan that paid for the tax cuts. But I guess, since none of those plans have been enacted yet, it's still our policy- for now.

          No, we're not paying them all off immediately, and we keep a large accrewing amount stored up, same as any American household. (Most people have a large debt stored up, where if they lost the collate
          • when Venezula and China finally give up on the "be nice" act and attack- starting out by demanding immediate payment on all of their bonds

            Nah, it's worth more to them to have a debt than demand repayment. It's like a loan shark. Yeah, he wants his money back, but he's not going to destroy you over it. No, at worst he's going to make it just hurt.

            Hell, same with a Bank, only they make it hurt in your wallet, instead of in the knees that are now sticking out the other side of your leg.
            • Nah, it's worth more to them to have a debt than demand repayment. It's like a loan shark. Yeah, he wants his money back, but he's not going to destroy you over it.

              Most loan sharks I know do destroy you over it when you get overextended to the point that you can no longer pay- they start with your kneecaps and move up, week after week, demanding payment until you are dead and they take whatever they can get out of your wallet.

              No, at worst he's going to make it just hurt.

              Already doing that- they're now
              • Most loan sharks I know do destroy you over it when you get overextended to the point that you can no longer pay- they start with your kneecaps and move up, week after week, demanding payment until you are dead and they take whatever they can get out of your wallet.

                Usually they take whatever they can from your wallet every "encounter". True, eventually the cops pull your dead blood-spattered body from a garbage bin, and the loan shark insist, "I wouldn't kill him, guy owes me money!" But when the cops fin
                • Usually they take whatever they can from your wallet every "encounter". True, eventually the cops pull your dead blood-spattered body from a garbage bin, and the loan shark insist, "I wouldn't kill him, guy owes me money!" But when the cops find out that the guy wasn't going to be able to pay it off at all, loan shark goes down.

                  And what would happen when the loan shark is a country? Do we dare even TRY to find out?
                  • And what would happen when the loan shark is a country? Do we dare even TRY to find out?

                    Well, it depends on how much military force one has over the other. I mean, with us and Iraq, if you believe the "War for Oil" assertion (or are just willing to accept it long enough to discuss this point) then the US decided we were done waiting on Iraq to do what we wanted them to do, so we could get their oil. So, we walk in.

                    But take somewhere like... Jamaica. If we owed them lots and lots of money, there's still n
                    • Well, it depends on how much military force one has over the other. I mean, with us and Iraq, if you believe the "War for Oil" assertion (or are just willing to accept it long enough to discuss this point) then the US decided we were done waiting on Iraq to do what we wanted them to do, so we could get their oil. So, we walk in.

                      Exactly my point. Why should China be any different? They've got nukes and could easily raise an army of a couple hundred million to kick our army's ass.

                      But take somewhere like
                    • I see it as being EXTREMELY soon- they've done globalization right and are almost self- sufficient now.

                      Same world, different mythos. :) What can I say. Of course, I'm not highly focused on political things.

                      Of course, from the people in Europe, you'd hear them saying that the Arabs are going to be causing havoc before China.

                      Someone's going to get stupid and start something eventually, but... I just refuse to believe that people are stupid enough to get killed over this stuff. Of course, at that point it's
                    • Of course, from the people in Europe, you'd hear them saying that the Arabs are going to be causing havoc before China.

                      Of course, that's because in Europe the Arabs are ALREADY causing a great deal of havoc. It's time for another King Stanislaw- but Poland is no longer a democratic republic and no longer can produce such mettle.

                      Someone's going to get stupid and start something eventually, but... I just refuse to believe that people are stupid enough to get killed over this stuff. Of course, at that poi

  • From GW Bush's Cleveland appearance, March 20, 2006 [whitehouse.gov]:

    Q Mr. President, with the war in Iraq costing $19,600 per U.S. household, how do you expect a generation of young people such as ourselves, to afford college a time like this, when we're paying for a war Iraq?

    The President: Yes. Well -- hold on for a minute. Hold on. We can do more than one thing at one time. And when you grow your economy, like we're growing our economy, there is an opportunity to not only protect ourselves, but also to provide more

    • Last Thursday I had a letter to the editor of the Oregonian published. I recommended that before we give them guest workers, we re-legalize 12-15 year olds to work in the fields piecemeal- the same idea we used to get the harvest in for the 180 years previous to the child labor crackdown of 1984. It's the reason why children get a summer vacation- to help on the farms- and it teaches kids to work.

      Either that- or they need to raise the wage to $10/hr.

      • It also teaches kids:

        • good personal hygiene habits, in the daily struggle to scrub blueberry stains from their hands
        • the value of a rounded diet when getting sick eating too many strawberries
        • observational skills after a mistaken grab at a bit of poison oak growing as a weed in the rows
        • why it's a very good idea to at least get a high school diploma

        BTW, in my previous post, Bush was quoted mentioning an onion grower he'd met at the airport. I am willing to wager that there was no such person, and was in

        • Yep- I find our current Commander-in-Chief to be rather wanting in the ability-to-tell-reality-apart-from-the-voices-in-h is-head department...
        • 2nd reply- no onion grower would say any such thing. The reason? Onion harvest is actually DIGGING- and has been automated for the last 40 years. (I know, I grew up close to Lake Labish in the central Willamette Valley- plenty of onion growers around, and if you needed feed for your animals, you could always find one or two at the end of the season with a surplus of already-spouted onions they'd let you have by the ton because it cost them almost nothing to harvest them).

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