I just voted.

[Gulo Blue]

I'm not ignoring it, I just think it's second order at best and the primary driver is supply.

Good. There we're not in disagreement over the phenomena, just how big a deal it is. I wonder if there's evidence out there either way.

 

[tinselwolverine]

No, I think you're right, this is probably going to happen...hey I have a snappy catch phrase for this...

From each, according to their ability; to each, according to their need...

I need a lot of shit, and I really can't do very much...

We could call each other comrade and shit..."comrade, you look like you're horny...I will shingle the roof on this hot July day, and man the deep fryer; why don't you go and try to get laid...?"

 

[Sbee]

I've had tough, long days at the office as well but the standard for hard work in a non-labor position is a bit different than hard work for a physical laborer - skilled or not. At least, having done both, my standard is different.

I didn't accuse you of making that argument about McD's. I was having that argument w/ Sbee and bigguns. But the need for welfare is not evidence that a worker's labor is being undervalued. You can ignore the reality of competition all you want but the fact that there are lower needs low skilled workers willing to do the work for less than the cost of living is the primary driver of the clearing price for wages.

I understand the market forces of labor at play here, my point is that full time employees shouldn't have to be on any kind of public assistance. A way to do this would be for these large employers to pay a wage that enables the employee to provide food, shelter, and healthcare without leaning on the government for help. If you don't agree with this, fine, but then don't bitch about a large welfare state because you don't get to play both sides of the fence on this one.

 

[Spartanmack]

I understand the market forces of labor at play here, my point is that full time employees shouldn't have to be on any kind of public assistance. A way to do this would be for these large employers to pay a wage that enables the employee to provide food, shelter, and healthcare without leaning on the government for help. If you don't agree with this, fine, but then don't bitch about a large welfare state because you don't get to play both sides of the fence on this one.

So McDonalds should pay a cashier in NYC enough to provide food, shelter and health care? For just him/her or their family? Should their wages depend on how many kids they have or should we set teh standard at a family of say 6, and pay everyone that amount, whether they have a bigger or smaller family? That's just absurd.

Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can't we do things like reform the tax code to spur private sector investment and bring higher value manufacturing jobs back here? Oh yeah, because have to tax those evil corporations for the sin of making profits and we have to kowtow to unions and guarantee them above market wages and benefits plus obscene pensions and other deferred comp, rubber rooms, bullet proof job security and then blame those evil Republican CEOs when they ship jobs to Malaysia.

 

[Michchamp]

I've done physically busy (cash register/grocery bagging) and physically demanding (post hole digging/post setting) jobs. Your cut off for what counts as hard work is BS. They're hard work in different ways. Besides, if that's somehow relevant to payscales, what boulders are they pushing around on Wall St.?

it's not that they work hard on Wall St., it's the "special skills" they bring to the table. They're so brilliant, nobody can do their job, not even rocket scientists. and if you tax them more, they'll just throw up their hands and stop doing the valuable work they do for society, and we'll all starve.

they will go be ditch diggers or bricklayers instead because they like hard work so much, and be fine making minimum wage doing it, because that is then the fair value of their labor, and they're very concerned with ensuring econ 101 theories are true in real life.

or so I understand from reading this thread.

I understand the market forces of labor at play here, my point is that full time employees shouldn't have to be on any kind of public assistance. A way to do this would be for these large employers to pay a wage that enables the employee to provide food, shelter, and healthcare without leaning on the government for help. If you don't agree with this, fine, but then don't bitch about a large welfare state because you don't get to play both sides of the fence on this one.

check this out.

 

[Gulo Blue]

they're very concerned with ensuring econ 101 theories are true in real life.

It's not that econ 101 theories don't work in real life. It reminds me of this joke:

Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, "I have the solution, but it only works in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum".

It's very difficult to create the conditions required for these theories. It takes a lot of regulation. And things like public assistance for people under certain wage levels work against those conditions. Not to say we want to do away with that stuff, but we're only trying to approach a roughly free market, so the theories work as principles instead of laws.

 

[Spartanmack]

it's not that they work hard on Wall St., it's the "special skills" they bring to the table. They're so brilliant, nobody can do their job, not even rocket scientists. and if you tax them more, they'll just throw up their hands and stop doing the valuable work they do for society, and we'll all starve.

they will go be ditch diggers or bricklayers instead because they like hard work so much, and be fine making minimum wage doing it, because that is then the fair value of their labor, and they're very concerned with ensuring econ 101 theories are true in real life.

or so I understand from reading this thread.



check this out.

Some of the most successful people on Wall St are rocket scientists. We have 5 of them in our front office. It's the whiny communist lawyers that can't cut it here.

 

[Gulo Blue]

Some of the most successful people on Wall St are rocket scientists. We have 5 of them in our front office.

How big is your front office? I mean, 5 guys with dynamics and controls backgrounds...sure. But they come from lots of fields. If you had 5 former rocket scientists, you either have tons of people with that skill set, or your HR dept is taking the whole "rocket scientist" thing too literally.

 

[tinselwolverine]

It's not that econ 101 theories don't work in real life. It reminds me of this joke:

That is an awesome farm joke.

Do you know the one about the stud rooster, or the one about the special pig?

 

[Michchamp]

...


It's very difficult to create the conditions required for these theories. ...

It's basically impossible. these simplistic models you learn in entry level economics courses are predicated on firms making 0 profit, in perfectly competitive markets, who also don't cheat and engage in wage theft (and get away with it), and who employ workers who have perfect knowledge of the labor market themselves and no costs to quitting/moving to take a new job if they have to.

so in spartanhack's mind, it's impossible for Walmart to engage in wage theft, or pay workers less than subsistence wages, because those workers would just quit and go find better paying jobs. They incur no costs related to relocation, having to make longer - if not impossible - commute times, and have complete knowledge of what each employer pays and how they treat their employees (those things are part of the model), because that's what he learned in Econ 101.

 

[Gulo Blue]

It's basically impossible.

Building perfect physics 101 models is impossible. That why we have engineers figuring out what's close enough to work.

If I were hiring rocket scientists to work on Wall St., I'd go find a meteorology/climate science Ph.D. or two. Someone that's created big, highly detailed, chaotic simulations.

 

[Gulo Blue]

That is an awesome farm joke.

Do you know the one about the stud rooster, or the one about the special pig?

No! What do you got?

 

[Spartanmack]

How big is your front office? I mean, 5 guys with dynamics and controls backgrounds...sure. But they come from lots of fields. If you had 5 former rocket scientists, you either have tons of people with that skill set, or your HR dept is taking the whole "rocket scientist" thing too literally.

The firm is over 100 people and we have several quant trading teams that all do different things. 2 of them have astro-physics PhDs on their team, one team has a nuclear physicist and another is headed by a guy that led a team that built super computers at IBM. Not sure if he's technically a rocket scientist, but he could be if he chose that path. The 5th guy is just a math PhD (we have a few of those) but he's been described by others as being like C3PO except he speaks more languages. And we're just one firm. When I was on the sell side, the guy that ran the algorithmic trading business had a PhD in astro-physics from MIT and had worked at NASA and he hired mostly technical people with top tier academic pedigrees.

Point is there are lots of incredibly smart people working on Wall St but in Michchump's world, we're just a bunch of meatheads, sticking it to Main St and using pension money to fund steak dinners and strip clubs every night - and squandering insider trading profits on hookers, ferraris and midget tossing parties on private jets.

 

[tinselwolverine]

Okay...so there's this farmer, and for him, farming is for shit.

He's about to lose the land. So anyways, one day, this traveling salesman comes by, shows the farmer a rooster, and says to the farmer, he says "this here is a stud rooster. This here stud rooster will solve all your farming woes."

So anyways, the farmer, desperate that he is, parts with his last penny to purchase the stud rooster.

BAM!!!!


Shit on the farm changes dramatically - miraculously (figuratively speaking, so as to not offend either the believers nor the atheist here) for the better.

The crops are springing out of the ground, the eggs are springing out of the chickens, the calves are springing out of the cows, and they bulls? They're pretty much just springing.

Even the farmer is finally gettin' a little action again from ol' Mrs. McDonald.

So, anyways, one day the farmer gets up and goes outside, and to his dismay - the stud rooster is laying on its back; its neck twisted, its tongue dangling out the side of its beak, and a swarm of buzzards circling overhead.

The terrified farmer rushes to the stud rooster, and kneels next to him in a panic.

The stud rooster looks up at the farmer, smiles and gives him a little wink.

"No, I ain't dyin.' It's just, if ya wanna fuck a buzzard, ya gotta play their stupid game..."

 

[Sbee]

So McDonalds should pay a cashier in NYC enough to provide food, shelter and health care? For just him/her or their family? Should their wages depend on how many kids they have or should we set teh standard at a family of say 6, and pay everyone that amount, whether they have a bigger or smaller family? That's just absurd.

Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can't we do things like reform the tax code to spur private sector investment and bring higher value manufacturing jobs back here? Oh yeah, because have to tax those evil corporations for the sin of making profits and we have to kowtow to unions and guarantee them above market wages and benefits plus obscene pensions and other deferred comp, rubber rooms, bullet proof job security and then blame those evil Republican CEOs when they ship jobs to Malaysia.

no, let's have it your way, corporations can drive wages and expenses down and low skill workers can all be indentured servants. We can have this economic death spiral where workers get paid next to nothing, can afford next to nothing and companies just have to keep making cheaper shit.

 

[Sbee]

it's not that they work hard on Wall St., it's the "special skills" they bring to the table. They're so brilliant, nobody can do their job, not even rocket scientists. and if you tax them more, they'll just throw up their hands and stop doing the valuable work they do for society, and we'll all starve.

they will go be ditch diggers or bricklayers instead because they like hard work so much, and be fine making minimum wage doing it, because that is then the fair value of their labor, and they're very concerned with ensuring econ 101 theories are true in real life.

or so I understand from reading this thread.



check this out.

great article but that would never fly here for these reasons

He noted proudly that a full-time Burger King employee made enough to live on. ?The company doesn?t get as much profit, but the profit is shared a little differently,? he said

 

[Spartanmack]

no, let's have it your way, corporations can drive wages and expenses down and low skill workers can all be indentured servants. We can have this economic death spiral where workers get paid next to nothing, can afford next to nothing and companies just have to keep making cheaper shit.

That's not what's happening in non-unionized auto plants in the south but why let pesky things like facts get in the way of your socialist agenda?

 

[grandy]

no, let's have it your way, corporations can drive wages and expenses down and low skill workers can all be indentured servants. We can have this economic death spiral where workers get paid next to nothing, can afford next to nothing and companies just have to keep making cheaper shit.

Pretty sure there'd be riots before then.

 

[Sbee]

Check this one out, I know the right winger on here won't read it

essentially McDonalds blatantly pushes employees to get on public assistance to subsidize their low wages.

I shouldn't have to flip part of the bill so someone McDonalds can report higher earnings

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/...orker-a-budget-solution-Apply-for-food-stamps

 

[Sbee]

That's not what's happening in non-unionized auto plants in the south but why let pesky things like facts get in the way of your socialist agenda?

false equivalency there, I'm talking about McDonalds with almost 500k employees and Walmart with over 2 million. I know you can point to some small sample size as a retort.

Are the southern manufacturers making $8 an hour and using our tax dollars to make ends meet?