Your political views....

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^^^^

Society is really only as rich as its poorest citizens.

Well.... no, I am not making an "obvious logic error".

My point of "poorly targeted" still is on track. Even further, people paid above it are not MORE likely to be impoverished than the people AT it, so there is little to no reason to think that the distribution will change dramatically between current minimum wage and the conceived idea of the minimum wage. Even further, poverty is usually really more of an issue for people who lack jobs. This is on page 8 here: http://epionline.org/studies/vedder_06-2001.pdf
"Only a very small proportion of America’s poor are actually workers with a high level of involvement in the labor force. For example, in 1999, less than 12 percent of persons over 16 who were poor actually worked full-time. Fifty seven percent did not work at all.16 The poverty rate among full-time workers was 2.6 percent; among nonworkers it was 19.9 percent (it was 13.1 percent for part-time workers).17 Thus, poverty is primarily a phenomenon among nonworkers"

So, if 57% of impoverished individuals are not working, then the claim of "poorly targeted" is entirely on track. Helping the impoverished would have to be a matter of direct aid, and given that there is little to no reason to think that minimum wages will INCREASE employment as a matter of economic logic, there is little to no reason to think that this will help the poor.


Well, banking regulations and low government debt may have something to do with economic shocks, but I am less sure about high foreign investment or low unemployment. Both of those latter two are partially matters of economic conditions, and a high level of integration into the world can include vulnerability to shocks in other parts of the world, or caused by frenzies in other parts of the world. I mean, high foreign investment was part of the cause of the Asian Financial Crisis, as the foreign investment flooded in, and the economy was not really prepared for all of this, lacking a lot of the institutional framework to handle this massive influx.

Not really, it is is really about as rich as the majority or median or some other approximation of its citizens. The reason being that if we took your statement seriously, then two or three massively impoverished people surrounded by billionaires, would mean a very poor society, while a society filled with at worse only mildly impoverished people would be richer, but no rich individuals, would be richer. This does not match any intuition we would likely have about the wealth of any given society.

Don't really care for politics. To me politics is like tossing a bunch of beta fish into a tank together and seeing who comes out on top.

You don't like tossing a bunch of beta fish into a tank together and seeing who comes out on top??? How odd!

To begin with I was merely making a simple outline of my political beliefs, now you are just, as usual being argumentative. Every month or so, you seem to just decide to attack everything I write.

Yes poverty has to do with employment, thank you captain obvious. Now as to your statement surrounding underemployment; there are things like penalty rates for casual workers that bosses can be forced to pay for under employing or keeping their employees on casual contracts. A stable workplace relations scheme that keeps most of its workers above the poverty line takes more than the minimum wage, but the min wage is an obvious part of establishing the bedrock. If you honestly do not like the min wage, or think it serves no function in raising the poverty level, go live somewhere where they do not have it and work a casual low-paying job.



Foreign investment and low unemployment relate directly to consumer confidence and therefore to economic health. You don’t get brownie-points for point out that extremes of either can be bad for economic health.

I cannot answer the poll. It's a very simplistic view of politics.

I'm Libertarian.

Center-right. I think some things need to be regulated (the economy, defense, etc.), but things that are half-assed attempts to legislate morality should be off-limits to the government (same-sex marriage, censorship, possibly medical marijuana)

You mean you don't think that I actually honestly disagree with you?

91, I am known for being a libertarian, of course your brand of totalitarianism is going to cause remark on my end.


Most of my jobs have never paid a minimum wage anyway. I live in the US, and over here, an unskilled job for young adults has in the past tended to be a few dollars above minimum wage. I have not had a minimum wage job since our new went into effect, but I've not really had a job that paid that close to it either.

I don't even accept your framing of the issue. The purpose of a workplace is to do work, and frankly, I would actually imagine that even if the minimum wage does not do a lot to employment, it would still do a lot to costs of services, which for places that actually do provide cheap goods, would increase prices, which WOULD negatively impact the poor. After all, the labor cost increases are going to be passed through, and to some degree passed through to the consumer, and the poor unemployed consumer is thus going to be worse off.

Even further, a lot of minimum wage jobs aren't really looking for the "stable workplace relations scheme", but rather a lot of minimum wage jobs are jobs that most people only work at temporarily anyway. I see no real reason to increase labor costs for these positions, especially if in most cases, these are second income earners rather than primary income earners. If there is a welfare initiative, it can be directed a LOT better.


My brownie point is actually for pointing out that all you really described at the moment was an economy that was currently healthy, which.... doesn't say anything about how well it would handle a shock, only that it is currently healthy.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 22 Jan 2011, 11:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

I "guess" i could be center-right, like TimTex. =/

(edit: typing on an touchscreen, fixing the natural errors that result from this)

Interesting definition of totalitarian, I have actually been described as libertarian by the standards of my own country. I personally find the definitions in use within the United States do no in any way really describe my views. Economically I am for some forms of government intervention and unionization which I suppose could make me totalitarian to a person with little regard for proportionality. Socially I am conservative, though I have lobbied for legal recognition for same sex couples in relation to tax, inheritance and next of kin, though I am against same sex marriage (this is not to invite further pointless discussion on the matter, we have both said our piece). So unless you consider any object moral standard totalitarian, your statement once again appears to be polemical.

Your claims about how the market should work are really not realized when one looks at the economy I live in. We have relatively high wages and low unemployment. If you are looking to see how the Aussie economy deals with shocks, look at the GFC, it should be recent enough to meet your definition. Australia has over time encouraged industries that favor higher wages, although even waiters here make enough that they consider tipping rude. The result is a well balanced economy, with a focus on low debt and consumer confidence.

Last edited by 91 on 22 Jan 2011, 11:35 am, edited 6 times in total.

What jobs are these??? Here in maine, the unskilled jobs are almost entirely minimum wage. My job as an assistant manager at a convenience store pays $7.96/hr which is only 46 cents above min wage.

Point out the "unskilled jobs" that are paying "a few dollars" above minimum wage...

You have to recognize that I have not actually had a minimum wage job since the new minimum wage kicked in.

The last low-skill job I had was data entry for a library and it was $9.68 an hour, and mostly held by young adults, and it was just repetitively filling in a spreadsheet.

I suppose another job I had was actually a job with training, so it is hard to say whether it is unskilled (you didn't have to have the skills to take the job) or what to call it, but it was $8 dollars an hour, I think.

The lowest job I had was $7 an hour, and this was before the new minimum wage laws came into existence.

That's actually incredibly shocking because everything you have written has tended to express ideas that are highly socially conservative and highly economically oriented towards regulation. And this is consistent.


You mean as a general rule you are in favor of government intervention. If you disagree, then please, tell me some issues where deregulation and tax removal and all of that are really concerns for you.


My statement WAS polemical.

That being said, I don't take your position to be that of an "objective moral standard". Even libertarians can talk about objective moral standards, so.... it does not follow.


Right, and that makes the economy you are working with odd in the international scale. Frankly, given that most of what I read about focuses on Continental Europe and the first world Americas, this makes explanation very difficult, because it seems likely that there are some factors in the supply and demand over in the overall market structure that may be playing a critical role in how this all works, but without going into depth, the first response is going to be based upon the basics of microeconomic theory.

Following those basics of microeconomics, many of my positions make sense, with the outliers needing further study for understanding.

@AG

You asked me for some economic policies that favor low taxes and deregulation.

I am in favor of the floated dollar, tax cuts on business startups, removing incentives that make planting crops of wine grapes (this is quite an issue where I live) tax deducatle, thereby lowering the price and driving out local farmers. I am also against cap gains taxes on first homebuyers. So altogether I am not particularly economically interventionist, by the standards of where I live.

Actually, those are really very minor issues, and ones that many more interventionist people can agree upon. All you really want is just a better tax structure with very specific alterations. I don't really see this as broad-enough to get to your point of being relatively libertarian where you live, especially given that by stronger libertarian standards, the very selectiveness of your alterations IS interventionist.

The floated dollar is the most libertarian of those policies really, but the floated dollar is also just a common policy anyway.