And what does anyone hear from ObamaRahma on this?

And the madness goes on and on…

WaPo and Fox Noise in agreement.

That says all you need to know about WaPo today. And someone actually had the audacity to call the WaPo a “liberal rag” on these very forums recently. HA! WaPo and liberal ain’t even in the same time zone. WaPo and Fox Noise, now they’re in the same zone. The Twilight Zone.

Will this madness never end…..

Fuck that. In the last few weeks I have also heard talk of getting rid of both social security and medicare. It is the Walmarterization of America. Jeebus.

At this point there’s not all that much difference between the Washington Post and the Washington Times. Just sayin’….

Yes please, cut the minimum wage, send that money to the Wall Street geniuses that decimated our economy…

It is the Walmarterization of America.

Worse. It is the crumbling of the Empire.

‘evenin’, all.

I’d love to see our elected officials stripped of insurance, pensions, etc. and forced to work for minimum wage, even though it is much more than they deserve.

Hey Ron.

ratfood! And how are you tonight?

As if you can afford to live on minimum wage in most of the country. (You might be able to do it if you have room for a garden and a chicken coop and maybe a rabbit hutch. Good luck with that in a city.)

Never better, and yourself?

This is just incredible, do NONE of the asshats across the land have ANY sense of the pulse of the masses?

They are angry, out of work, lack healthcare, food, housing, education and more.

And till the 1% puch the meme to worsen the conditions?

General public backlash is building, and ‘they’ won’t be able to contain it because it will FAR exceed anything they ever dreamed it would be. In terms of sheer volume, alone.

Pure insanity. Pure, pure insanity.

economically, this makes no sense. positively shrubian.

In a recession, businesses shed workers and then stretch their remaining labor resources rather than hiring anew. This continues until they see tangible improvements in the demand curve for their products. Once that demand recovery is perceived in earnest and lagging the recovery by quite a bit, businesses will eventually start hiring again until the labor market tightens and a new equilibrium is reached.

All things being equal, I believe that making workers cheaper before they reach that critical point would tend to delay the demand recovery rather than somehow cause an employment recovery before demand improves.

Stupid rethug supply-side economics.

I got $5.00 on them being able to make it until lunchtime on day one.

FYI, the notion that raising the minimum wage hurts low wage workers has been pretty thoroughly debunked by respectable economists.

Having said that, I heard John Taylor speak at lunch today, and he was completely incomprehensible, in an incredibly simplistic way. (Don’t ask.) The level of economic discourse has deteriorated more than I could have imagined when I was forcefully “retired” a decade ago.

But study after study has shown that….

Study after study has shown that eventually you will find a study that confirms what you already believed in the first place.

Still treading water, Noah…

You ever wonder if giving every American enough money to make them rich would actually cost less than what our government spends making everybody poor?

Ya, that’s pretty much what I mean by “never better.”

Not what the 1% wants.
They want the control.
They DEPEND on an inequity to be who they are.

/preachinchoir

Insight!

Fuck them. Fuck these fucking fatcat fucks and the fucking bowlegged mules they fucking rode in on. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

these rethugs and journalistic pundits claim they believe in free markets and then get to work distorting and undermining those markets whenever their religious superstitions about how those markets work contradict proven realities. They live in a fantasy world, where demagogic rhetoric and jingoism about markets trump the markets themselves.

fracking supply-siders.

They’d still have that, I’m talking about making everybody rich, not SUPER rich.

Yeah, I know the math doesn’t work… unless we can bribe the CBO to cook the books.

Can’t tell, are you fer or agin ‘em?

Yep.

Out here in rural Oregon the local farm paper has two constant bitches:

1. the minimum wage.
2. the estate tax (which hurts small farmers, don’t you know)

My response to that is that we should raise the tax on land because it would:

1. force the landowner (who may or may not be an actual farmer) to use his land more intensively (say, growing blueberries instead of grazing two llamas) which would increse his yield per acre.
2. create more demand for labor which would then cause wages to rise.
3. over time, reduce the selling price of land which would lower the price of entry into farming which would also increase competition for labor causing wages to rise.

What would be “in it” for the landowner, you ask?

1.A more vibrant, diversified farming community.
2. More money to spend on improvement of community and personal property as opposed to the money landowners currently must spend on bank interest for expensive machinery they must purchase for “capital intensive” agriculture.
3. the estate tax problem will be obviated since inflated land price need no longer be capitalized into the valuation of their estate.
4. a stronger liklihood that his children will stay in the community and make lives there. (for reasons, see above)

You’d just have the remaining private farms sold so the land could be repurposed into ugly-ass condos.

eCahn,

is it 38 billion in taxes, or taxes on 38 billion?

“Treasury Shares To Be Offloaded Over 12 Months After Investors Balk At Overpriced Toxic Holdings.”

Reduce the minimum wage AND mandate paying hard earned money to the shitheads at insurance co. Aint that like fomenting instability.

Farming, as near as I can tell in the mid-Hudson, is a labor of love, not a viable business model. Don’t know if it’s the same in rural Oregon.

The only “success” locally had been to have some of the farmers on the town open space planning committee. Recognize that their land is their 401(k) and try to figure out how to help them realize some value of their land without building a gazillion houses on it. It’s not easy.

Don’t understand your question.

You think it’s really that good? :}

WAPO MUST DIE!

Are you fucking kidding me?

A thought I’ve been having ever since the mortgage crisis hit is, if the average wage had kept pace with the gains in productivity and general increased wealth over the last 30 some years, would we have had that crisis? The average person would have had more money all along. The wealthy would have had less and perhaps we might not have seen the creation of all those bizarre mortgage related investment products. Everything always seems so simple to us beginner neophytes.

And people wouldn’t be in as much debt.

Maybe the corporate execs wouldn’t be paid as much, but after the first million a year, it’s all surplus, AFAICT.

Refering to CITI IRS bailout, off topic but I figured you’d know. sorry and thanks.

only way to get farmers near cities to stay on the farm is to increase the cash yield per unit of land – usually through the introduction of new and additional cashflow streams (new crops, high return organics, agro-tourism, etc). The future value of the incremental and diversified streams are capitalized into land values, effectively forestalling the threshhold trigger point at which the after tax sellout price of the land to development is greater than the non-conversion capped value.

any other means of trying to manipulate land values usually just end up lowering the trigger point to urban conversion.

Productivity results from the substitution of capital for labor and the benefits accrue to the owners of capital.

Sorry, not up to speed on that topic.

Banks loan farmers money for equipment and seed; they want the return on that as soon as they can get it, and that forces farmers into growing crops that might be marginal in a saner world.

HOT DAMN!!!!!!!!!!!

They’ve got Woods athlete of the decade and Helicopter Ben Man of the Year, this is the Post of All Time (PAT)!!!

lol,

100% agree, and great post. Dammit I end up going through thousands of keystrokes trying to say what you just did in seconds. Thank ya!!

worse… these days half the time productivity improvements usually just means labor-stretching, without adequate capital investment. It’s exactly the sort of bullshite wapo and faux appears to be endorsing.

again: fracking supply siders.

Think of vampires and the whole thing gets a whole lot clearer.

yep. and that behavior pattern just lowers the threshhold conversion trigger point that drives farmers from the land and ensures that the land sprouts condos sooner.

There are restrictions for that sort of thing in Oregon. A tax may have unintended consequences, though. But my point was that people in their narrow view of wanting to keep their taxes and expenses low and their property values high see no connection between the policies they push for and the much lamented decline of the rural community they presume to support, and always attribute it to something other than their own selfishness.

The short form:
People from the city move to the country for its ‘quietness’, then start complaining about the noise and the dirt and the smells, and the farmers are then forced (because the new residents have enough votes and money to influence the zoning people) to sell up and move farther out.

the real reason idiots like the authors of this tripe find traction among readers:

illiteracy. the last bookstore in the city of Laredo just closed for lack of business…. a trend in many American cities.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34452179/ns/business-retail/

Well, the bookstores help that along by pushing the ghostwritten rightwing crap, as if the people who buy books don’t have other opinions.

Productivity results from the substitution of capital for labor and the benefits accrue to the owners of capital.

I don’t know if the vampire thing made sense, but I felt comfortable with it This kind of talk, while I’m sure it’ll add up fine from some perspective, leaves me a little more uncomfortable. Like I gotta watch my wallet.

Wow . . . the power of bad ideas never ceases to amaze me. I guess neoliberal trade policies and union busting aren’t depressing our standard of living fast enough. Here are a couple of ideas you’ll never hear anyone talking about to get folks back to work:

Shorten the workweek and close the manager loophole so that businesses will have to hire more people or pay overtime. This will have the added benefit of giving people more time with their families.

Allow people to receive unemployment insurance and COBRA for up to a year while retraining for a new career.

Allow people to pay into a fund to take a “sabbatical” of a year at 80% of regular pay for every 7 years of work without losing their job or benefits. People could use the time to go back to school, raise kids, build a house, do missionary work, travel or watch soap operas.

I have more, but like I said, no one would consider any of it.

If there isn’t enough aggregate demand to keep the economy stable at current wage levels, how is a broad wage cut supposed to boost demand?

Such an action couldn’t possibly lower prices enough to make up for the $13 Trillion of wealth destruction we recently underwent, and there’s also almost zero likelihood that such production savings would find its way into lowered prices at all; the trend in broad production savings (technological or labor-cost shocks) is to put them into margins, not into price reductions.

What they’re offering as a solution is an incentive toward a deflationary spiral. It’s beyond non-sensical, it’s dangerous.

agreed. nicely summarized.

Fuck the Washington Post and all the animals that work there.

Bring down the min wage huh? Okay like that’s reality, it won’t happen its political suicide for one thing. 70% of Americans don’t make enough anyway, why do you think Payday Loans have skyrocketed with no end in site and why Banks are jumping onto that act as well?

I suggest you all read if you haven’t already Prof. Michael Zweig report on just how much it takes to live in most urban areas. In Los Angeles where I live its $30K a year. I made $17K last year, how do you expect results to be?

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/27/why_dont_barack_obama_and_john

And they wanna cut Min Wage? They really want people to rush the White House don’t they? They’ll take Fox down with them trust me…

before their done dividing us and squeezing us, they’ll have all the splintered insurrection they need to rationalize the next round of draconian decimation of the constitution

well, there’s always the Army, eh?

I’m proposing that everyone who thinks the minimum wage should be lowered to increase employment should take a $8/hour paycut, so that their employer can hire an unemployed person and therefore help the economy! It’s time for these idea-heads to do a little personal sacrifice!