"Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'

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Ok? There is no such thing as a fair wage, there are only labor market distortions. Not only that, but as I already pointed out, many minimum wage workers are above the poverty limit.


Ok? So? I really tend to doubt that labor market distortions would be that bad at all. Basically, all you really are arguing is just a bit of a redistributionary effect between the somewhat poor, but Joe middle class is still Joe middle class. I already put forward the fact that I had heard of studies that claimed that minimum wages do not help poverty, so really, your argument does not address the whole of my argument. Frankly, the best you might be able to argue is that women should have lower taxes as women have always been a more elastic component of the labor market.


Yes, so does the minimum wage. So, I really don't see your arguments as being that powerful or even necessarily that valid.


The entire world exploding due to the EITC will work out fine. Really though, the gang bangers go around killing people because they don't have any opportunity under any system other than through criminal activities. The criminal kids aren't doing their job because they make loads off of it, but rather because it is their only perceived way to make loads.

You are right, there are problems with the design of the mechanism, but that does not mean it isn't the more effective mechanism.


This isn't about race, this is about the best solution for alleviating poverty. Frankly, an EITC is better than traditional welfare methods anyway and I think you would know that, as at the very least it adapts to the changes in income in a manner that don't cause people to lose money when changing jobs so much as more traditional welfare.

Well, right, poverty numbers are often forgotten in political debate, I remember hearing this before given the poverty initiatives that make the poor unpoor that don't show up on income.

It's a wage that will attract labor without them figuring in government handouts as part of the wage package.

EIC is just a bandaid, first the country needs to revamp the tax system and stop the inflow of cheap labor. What happens to all the welfare to work mothers once their kids are grown up or shot which ever comes first ? they can't survive off McWages.

I'm in vermont, 99% white people and the wage issues aren't any different here than most other states. So no it has nothing to do with race at all. i just used a white guy qualifying for EIC and other people not as a example of playing favorites that wouldn't fly for a second. Nobody should be paid less based on anything or paid more either for doing the same job in the same manner.

All the governement is doing is protecting companies from unions. The illegals are one way because they flood the labor market and government handouts passify enough people to keep them from raising hell over the pay and turning to unions.

The government attacked the Teamsters because they had control of a monster pension fund and had a credit union and managed their own health care fund. New York Bankers and wall street swindlers didn't like it one bit they couldn't rob them blind and get a cut of the action.

Wall Street mafia also didn't like having a monster pension fund owning so much stock and watching the walfare street criminals like hawks. Union pension funds keep a good eye on companies when they are major shareholders of them.

todays dems are just poverty pimps.

Jobs with dignity is what it's all about, some flunky working for UPS can hold his/her head high when asked who they work for. Same deal with a mailman, society doesn't look down on them because they earn a decent wage. Working at wal-mart and getting government aid is degrading.
used to be a sears store in my town, thing was real old. Adults made a career out of their jobs in the place, raised families, had benefits. Old the guy down in the basement tool & equipment section had been there for decades, blue haired betty up on the second floor in home furnishings the samething. Sears paid to keep the union out. Wal-mart ain't worried about no stinken union, they had a former member of their board of directors in the white house and now in the senate.

Sure young Biff wants the poverty pimps to keep down the little people,his family might have to pay their servants union wages if the government don't transfer wealth from the UPS guy to their servants and other labor they exploit so they can have a country estate and send Biff off to yale like young george.

Jimmy Carter & Paul Volcker the wall street criminal appointed to head the federal reserve and take care of labor. just look at the stock market chart posted a few pages ago, stocks did nothing for years until Carter and his wall street henchman Volcker wasted the working class by putting 10% of them out of work so they would kill each other for jobs.

From the end of WW2 to 10% unemployment thanks to Volcker all the wealth created in the country was going to the working class. The rich where still rich, but the household net worth in the working class was growing. They had paid for homes or lots of equity in them, pension coming and the power to get raises to cover inflation, which was killing the bankers because they lent out money at low rates and where getting paid back crap after inflation was taken into account, Paul Volcker fixed all that for the bankers, carter appointed him.

Like I said, my room-mate is on disability, slowly weaning himself off of it. If he can get himself back into the workforce proper, into a steady job, he won't need it anymore. Then again, I'm living in the city, where a welfare check alone won't even hold up a tent. He moved here away from cheap housing specifically for work.

What I disagree with is his extremely negative attitude.

That's the spirit!

Yup. This is true. I blame this on an incompleteness in the system, though. I define mental wellness as a capability of functioning as an independent member of society. I think that those who are apparently not capable of doing so should be expected to seek psychiatric care. Apathy actually is a form of depression, and it is, to some extent, treatable.

If the system were a complete one, fewer people would be actually living on welfare. I think that the direction that the welfare state should go in from here is more toward getting people off of it. Think of it as the difference between being pro-abortion versus being pro-choice.

Do you think that the people you were referring to would just disappear when the government stopped sending them checks?

Do you think they would simply roll over into a ditch and become food for some hungry family of raccoons?

Do you think that people who are truly mentally incapable of motivating themselves to find jobs will go to the nearest temp agency over the first rumble in their tummies or their first cold winter without shelter?

Find a steady job?

Marry and have a family?

Attend church regularly?

Live the mother-sodomizing American Dream?

I've seen the people that the government won't help.

They line the streets of the major cities, hoping to beg for enough food, sell enough drugs, and pull off enough petty thefts to keep food in their bellies and drugs in their veins.

They deplete property value.

They make more work for the cops.

They destroyed West Palm Beach, where my boyfriend lives, between:
*Begging on street corners,
*Robbing people of their personal belongings,
*Causing public disturbances,
*Screwing up at the jobs they do manage to intermittently hold,
*And being outright jackasses in general, and why?

Because they're useless people? Holy CRAP!! ! Man!! You can point out the obvious!

The Swedes should create a new Nobel Prize, just for you!

I want to put into them some kind of pill that can keep them from acting this way because just throwing them out into the cold isn't an effective means of turning useless people into non-useless people. They're still going to be useless people.

The people in the cities want there to be some kind of welfare system in place so that the impoverished can live in some fumbuckville in the Appalachain Mountains instead of filling up the homeless shelters that they originally built for themselves in the event that they were down on their luck.

They'd gladly build some playground out in the middle of nowhere and send them a shipment of food once a month if they would just not pollute the benches of the parks that we create explicitly for the purpose of being pleasant places to go with their filthy, unwashed presence. What's a couple of bucks for having ten times more hours of peace and quiet in the day and not having to isolate ourselves in gated communities just to be able to let our kids out to play without having to worry about them being bothered by some idiot crackhead whose mind is too gone to realize that little children are unlikely to be carrying around any significant amount of money.

The way that I want to go about it is better, though, because I'm actually interested in doing something about the problem that causes them to be unemployed and penniless in the first place! Hopefully, if the crack can be gotten out of their veins before they spawn again, they might produce something that has a fighting chance of growing up to have a better attitude toward life.

I don't support welfare out of some intense desire to take money out of Johnnie's pockets. I support it out of a will for the world not to completely and totally suck. If there's a problem with the system, don't expect me to go running to the support of those who don't want any system in place at all. The ones who created the flawed system are at least trying.

Do you know what I call a person who doesn't want to try at all?

A loser.

You know...like the ones who live on welfare in spite of being perfectly capable of working for a living.

That's right, Johnnie B. You're just as much of a waste as the do-nothings who live their lives on welfare. You just worked the pathetic job of a truck-driver, so you could spend the rest of your life doing nothing in style. Think about it, man: right now, you're just as much of a waste of human skin as someone who lives on welfare. You're not doing anything productive. As far as I know, you're not doing anything to advance yourself. It would only take you two years to get some degree that would allow you to go into some field of work that you actually like, but instead you spend your hours trying to find ways to ridicule and demean whatever group of people you're presently holding to blame for your dissatisfaction with what you've done with your life. You had a chance to be something better than a truck driver, and you still have that chance.

Johnnie, there is an old man in one of my classes. He's a really pleasant-natured gentleman, and he's actually sat and talked to me once in a while. Obviously, he's a little old to have much opportunity to make much of a degree. He's eighty-something years old. Probably not a lot of time left on his clock. He's attending college right now, he says, because he's already done everything else he set out to do with his life. He's seen the sights, made a good legacy for his kids, and shook hands with governor. He says that he finally got everything done and had come within sight of the end, and he realized that there was one more thing on his list that he never got around to doing: he never completed college. It took this guy until he was eighty-five years old to complete college. He didn't fail at life, though. He's lived to be so old because he has always had a good attitude toward his own life and toward others. He's always done his part to make the world a better place, and he's always done his best to keep good standing with those he considered friends. He's never been bitter. He's actually been a very successful person, loving family and all. If you don't improve your attitude toward life, Johnnie, you won't even live that long. A bad attitude eats you alive. Get a better attitude, man, or you're going to die.

Umm.... yeah, that is a completely subjective thing. So, analytically we still have the issue of no "just wage".


Umm.... the entire idea of a welfare system is to some extent to be a bandaid. Frankly, I agree with the first part but don't see much ability to do the second part. I think that part of the idea is that the EITC will allow for effective incentives for improvement. Finally, nobody is arguing that the EITC is perfect anyway, so that is not the question.


The EITC is a welfare measure and we are talking about designing effective welfare measures. I don't care about your stupid little "should"'s. They are superfluous to the topic I am discussing, which are measures to best promote the economic welfare of people currently considered impoverished.


Do you honestly think that Wal-mart or McDonalds will unionize? They would sooner close down shops. Not only that, but not all minimum wage workers are impoverished, as I already argued a large number of them aren't impoverished. Frankly, this argument is an argument against all welfare measures, and if we are rejecting the legitimacy of welfare then we aren't discussing the best welfare measure, which was what I was arguing.


Um... there was merely a different distribution of it and part of that was likely due to distributionary measures at the end of world war 2 and the industrial framework at the time. Frankly though, Volcker did a necessary job as the inflation needed to be killed lest it continually get worse, this meant he had to murder employment. Frankly, we've been undergoing structural changes in the economy that are responsible for the shifts in income, blaming Volcker is attacking the thoughts of most credible economists who recognize money as simply being a medium of exchange. You'd really have a better case blaming Reagan.

I'm fixing up my place, coming out real nice. was putting siding on the garage today. I'm not the least bit sorry your types can't tax me on my productive day.



do you piss on the little people or just spit on them ? I bet you wouldn't last 1 month driving a truck because you are a spoiled weak person and would crumble. I saw lots of people crumble within a day or two and run back home.



I would call going to college going backwards, only people who can't do squat on their own need to be trained.



all the eldery people at the senior center who i volunteered to do taxes for have a different opinion along with my neighbors who i help out.



There is nothing better. I've been to key west florida, west coast, canada, met all sorts of people. Helped out total strangers a million times.Saw a white deer, sleep in the south bronx, been over the hoover dam, through blizzards and tornado's.

pretty sorry to think somebody is so shallow they base their life on a job title and how much wealth they can accumulate to try and out snob the other snobs and not have one single true friend because all those people would drop anyone in a flash who's wallet went dry. Most are married to hookers, their wife would be gone in a flash if their wallet went dry to find herself a new wallet to put out for.

you are truly delusional to think I had any desire to be part of that type of lifestyle.

The cost should be charged back to the employer. Why should other people subsidize Biff's landscaper and nanny ?



stop & shop grocery stores are union along with mny other chains. The consumer isn't saving money because the welfare slugs other places employee don't care what goes out the front door unpaid so the prices are higher to make up for the inventory shrinkage. I love shopping in the ghetto neighborhood stores because the cashiers could care less what gets scanned. Where I used to live the Lowes Home Improvement center was the worst Lowes store in the country for shrinkage.



why did inflation need to be killed, oh yeah to save the bankers profit margains. For all the people who bought houses in the mid 70's for like $40,000 having prices and wages go up made their mortgage shrink as a percentage of their income. Once they broke the backs of the unions, they where free to inch up prices while holding down wages. Now it takes two incomes to live any sort of middle class lifestyle in most cases so effectively wages have been cut in half while they keep the profit margian in tack for bankers on the home mortgages.

Why blame Reagan for what the american people have done to themselves or more like each other. He didn't tell them or force them to cut each others throats. Used to be a time when even wealthy woman would honor strikes and boycotts because they knew what it was like to be poor, now people have the screw everyone attitude as long as they have theirs. Now people justify anything by babbling THOSE people need to get an education as they jump into their imported care and run down to wal-mart to buy chicom junk. Like screw everyone to save a buck.

What's entertaining is to see the Reagan error oop's era coming to an end, he just happened to be president when the baby boomer mentality set in and now they are getting a taste of their own medicine.Peoples Bank just threw 450 of them out the door, overpaid deadwood that can be replaced by starving college students for half price and in less need of medical care so lower health insurance rates, oh well the yuppies can go get an education in how to live on chump change because nobody hires people over 50. lots of them are mortgage to the hilt because they raided their home equity to be show offs and now their home values dropped so they have little equity in them and large mortgages, it's funny as hell to see them go belly up and I find good bargains at moving sales as they are forced to downsize and sell off their high dollar furnishings and other stuff they are still paying on for pennies on the dollar.

Why? This is a matter of the government caring about the welfare of certain impoverished individuals and has little to do with the actual employment process. Not only that, but any means of doing this would not do as well as a welfare measure as the EITC. The reason why other people should subsidize Biff's landscaper and nanny is because us other people are the ones who give a s**t about this issue, and if we do it, more people will be better off than if we forced Biff to do it through any means.


If the consumer isn't saving any money then why would the consumer still choose to go there? I don't think that many people disagree with Wal-mart being efficient at what it does. They may attack it on ethics, but not other measures. Finally, I am don't buy much into the idea that labor is more competent than their employers at figuring out the best way to run the company, if only due to the incentives involved.


Inflation needed to be killed because we had stagflation!! ! The fact of the matter is that if inflation is not kept under control then it will continually plague society and make things worse for everyone in the long run. You are right, high short-run inflation can impact bankers, but stagflation is a sign of long-run inflation that can be a painful burden on society. Frankly, unionization had been decreasing before Volcker ever came in with unionization peaking in 1970, or before Volcker. Not only that, but you cannot doubt that Ronnie had some role in this entire matter anyway as a conservative president. Really though, economists Linneman, Wachter and William Carter all find that 64% of the decline in union membership is due to union wage premiums. Not only that, but frankly, unionization was never *that* big in the US as it peaked at 17 million people in the private sector in a nation of 213 million, so unions were never the dominant force in America, and I think that most evidence and logic would argue that unions ended up costing nonunionized workers in terms of both employment and wages, so really, I think that the argument that unions were the major factor in the US is wrong.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/LaborUnions.html


Ronald Reagan HATED unions. He dismantled the air traffickers union in 1981. He set up federal agencies with anti-labor appointees. Heck, his labor policy was all about removing the power of unions and liberalizing the labor market. So, yes, Reagan was responsible, and deserves more blame than Volcker who merely tried to prevent future stagflation at an incredibly high cost. Heck, the entire welfare queen idea became popular because of Reagan, which is a component of a lack of respect for the poor.

I gather you figure it will never be you cleaning Biff's toilet because the government says sorry charlie, no unemployment when Biff has work for you to do, now go clean his toilet for minimum wage because you ain't getting anything unless you work no matter how demeaning the work is and how little it pays.

It's evident you have never spent any time and really talked to people at the bottom of society. I delt with them almost daily, they hung around truckstops panhandling, offering to clean aluminum wheels, hung around warehouses offering to unload trucks. Dug threw trash cans at truckstops looking for aluminum cans.
They would sooner scrouge for a living than work for some tyrant Biff type who pisses and spits on the help.


My former 60 year old neighbor lost her job at a store she had for decades, family run place finally packed it in. She gets a job at the grocery store and is amazed what tyrants she now works for. They can be like that because they just call the unemployment office who will force the job on another victim of the new economy.

the quote is from the link

as long as people are willing to undercut other people for work, it's true and the government made sure there was excess labor who would do just that. The old timers knew they had to stick together and not steal each others jobs, than Volcker came along and put 10% of the people out of work so they would cut each other throats.

That isn't the motivation for my argument, and you have yet to really put forward a positive argument on what a better solution would *really* be.


As well, you took that quote out of its context. The author was using it to argue that labor unions would not exist without legal protection for them. That had nothing to do with Volcker. Not only that, but I put forward a good argument that labor unions led to their own downfall, and that labor unions really didn't support most of society, so really, your out of context quote does not constitute a good, valid argument.

argument ?? I have an opinion as do you.

you believe the wealthy are entilted to government subsidized labor and I don't.

you believe it's good for the little people and I don't.

unions only work if people stick together and don't undercut each other. Look at autos, the working class cuts each other throats by buying imports and don't insult my fine cars, I'll have to throw a keyboard beating on your butt.

labor markets only function if there is a limit to the supply, as long as the boarder is wide open people don't have pricing power for their labor. Exactly who is going to pay the taxes as more and more jobs don't pay a living wage and the workers require government assistance

require work licenses so illegals can't get jobs and progressively higher fines the larger the employer if they get caught with unlicensed workers. Police stations could issue them. Don't even have to make them manditory, just make the fines high enough that people won't want to take a chance hiring somebody they don't know who doesn't have a current license. Cops could give a copy to the worker and mail one to the employer so people know it's good.

bill employers for all government aid their workers qualify for and watch how fast they pay a living wage sooner than pay the government overhead involved in passing out aid to battered people.

Yes, I have an opinion, but I also back mine up with a good deal better thinking.

Also, no, I believe that out of our options for promoting the welfare of the impoverished, the EITC is a better option than many other current government solutions. Not that it is perfect or anything of that nature.


No, unions only work at promoting the good of unions. Frankly, I support people buying the cheapest, best goods that they can. The economy is supposed to work by people promoting their own interests as opposed to some collective national commune.


Labor markets only function if there is a supply of labor and a demand for labor. Your argument does not reflect a good economics background. If the border is open then the supply of skilled labor increases and the price of it decreases. You are right, there is an issue of a welfare state vs immigration, however, most government labor based issues fail under such circumstances, so really, I don't see the major issue as I don't really have a strong position on favoring government interventions.


Right, and have a massive regulatory state for preventing immigrant worker abuses, even though the costs of immigrant labor on the US probably aren't very high due to the major substitution problems of immigrant labor that cannot speak english vs other unskilled labor.


That is the minimum wage. That is the idea I just called an inferior solution and provided many arguments for the inferiority of including the fact that most economists, the experts, consider this the inferior solution. In fact, your solution is worse as you have just made poor folks an even worse deal than regular folks for employment purposes than would be found in a minimum wage based environment because fines are based upon the employment of the poor.

Its amazing to me the lengths some people will go
to justify their own personal greed

The high cost of low prices comes into play, I would sooner pay more up front than the social welfare costs related to having a giant under class stripped of their dignity by being on government aid and the cost of the government aid and it's overhead.



what is the government forced redistribution of wealth ? In a some what free market people should be basing their consumer choices on whether it's worth it to them to buy something or hire something based on the true cost, not that somebody else is paying the true cost of labor.
I'm against providing cheap servants for the wealthy and shifting the labor cost to the middle class.



Your theory means somebody would pay twice by shopping at a place that pays a living wage because first they would pay enough for whatever they bought so the merchant could pay his/her help and than they would pay again in the form of taxes to support the low income worker at a merchants compentition. People aren't stupid enough to want to pay twice, so the place that pays a living wage goes out of business and we end up with a collective where everyone works for the government out of the hiring hall called the unemployment office or welfare office who send people out on job assignments if they come in and say they have no work.

What we will end up with is being assigned jobs by a government run hiring hall and it will probably come down to payoffs as employers bribe the government workers or use political contacts to skim off the better workers who show up looking for work. I've noticed no advertising by the service industry for labor, why is that ? could it be because they have resorted to having the government send them workers out of the government hiring hall.

My cousins ex-husband got thrown out the door of Digital Equipment after decades, over 50 deadwood. Went down to apply for unemployment and they marched his butt off to truck driving school. That was the only retraining he was offered, so in effect they whored him out to the trucking industry who prefers older people because they are mature and his kids where grown so he wouldn't be whining about needing to get home weekly.

Single mother with two kids shows up at the hiring hall, they assign her to be a cashier at wal-mart and sign her up for EIC & section 8 housing, food stamps and the rest of it. If they don't have a job to assign her too, they put her on unemployment until somebody calls in looking for somebody.

The government agents at the hiring hall will tip off people they know who is looking for help when it's a good job. so all it will end up being is the connected get the better jobs like it's always been.

If i ran a small business or was in human resources, I would want a good connection down the unemployment office. Why bother putting an ad in the paper when my friend who knows if one of their friends needs a job I'll hook them up with one of the better jobs I'm in control of hiring for, so they will cherry pick the unemployed that show up and refer the better people to me.

Johnnie, I've had some time to think about the exchange that has persisted between us, and it really blows my mind how completely ridiculous that the discussion actually got. I saw from myself a level of pettiness that I have not thought possible. This is over.

I'm not even purely a "liberal" on the subject that has supposedly been under discussion. I advocate greater restrictions on welfare. My room-mate was actually one of those who were hurt by the fact that it doesn't have a protocol to get people off of it who don't physically need it. He could have been back on the job years ago. The only reason that he's pounding pavement for decent work now is that he found someone to fill his life who wouldn't allow him to keep kidding himself. If he'd been cut from it five years ago, though, he would have been established in the workforce by now. That's what he wanted to do then. He just couldn't motivate himself to do it because Uncle Sam had him chained to the check. It was keeping him down instead of lifting him up.

You would be right to say, "the system needs reform." Go ahead. Say it. It's true, man. It's a crap system as it is. I think that the purpose of the welfare system should be predominantly to help get people back into paying work, so they can make their own contribution to their country. The way I want to do it, there would be fewer people who need to "mooch" off of you, Johnnie. It doesn't do you, me or them any good to just keep them fed and sheltered if all it's doing is making sure they're guaranteed some miserable excuse for a life.

And no, my family isn't "rich." We worked hard for what we have, and most of my relatives are successful family farmers who also worked their bones clean for what they have. Besides, I lied: my father's centrist to the bone. He voted for Perot, he hated the Clintons (and still hates them, mind you), and he'd pay good money to see someone in office, from either party, who knows what the hell he's doing. Furthermore, I take after him. The only reason I'm backing Obama as anything other than an alternative to Hillary Clinton is that he got the nod from Bill Richardson, a self-described centrist. Until I heard his people were looking at Obama as their second-choice, I didn't think of Obama as anything but a box of pretty rhetoric.

And, if Hillary Clinton gets the nomination, I don't care what anybody says: I'm voting for McCain. You can call me "centrist," "moderate" or whatever the hell you want to, but mainly I just don't want to see the country go down in a wreath of flames.

The main thing I don't like about the Republicans, from what I've seen from them over the past few years, is that they behave like you, Johnnie. It's not their policies, and it's not even the war. You were calling me a moocher when you thought I was down on my luck, and you were calling me a "spoiled rich kid" when you thought I was doing well. Which is it, Johnnie? It sounds to me like all you're interested in doing is getting me down. That's why you're against the welfare state: you like to get other people down. The only problem I have with it is that it doesn't lift people up like it's supposed to, and that's what I'd like to change.

I grew up in an economically depressed rural area and thus I know quite a few poor people, and most of them are good people that just had the gods of fate sh*t on them. The fact that I grew up in such an area is a big reason why right-wing lies about the poor anger me so much, since I can see the reality of poverty with my own eyes.