L.A. raises minimum wage to $15/hr

If cities/states want to do this, they should. Let's see if it works.

Should we get rid of the home mortgage interest deduction, and the child tax credit as well, or are those good loopholes? Charitable deductions?

What about state and city taxes, should you be allowed to deduct those from your federal taxes?

 

Knowing what we know now, should President Clinton have signed NAFTA?

 

Home mortgage interest, we could -- England phased it out and it didn't hurt. We should certainly eliminate mortgage interest deductions for second homes.

State and city, don't have a huge feeling, but if it evens things out, sure.

ETA: One thing that should be gone is charitable deductions to churches.

 

No. My opinion of NAFTA hasn't changed. It's enriched companies, investors and top management, but it has also cost too many U.S. manufacturing jobs while failing to raise living standards for working-class Mexicans.

 

In the early part of this century when the millionaires were taxed out the wazoo, many of this gilded age skinflints became some of the nation's greatest philanthropists near the end of their lives.

Doubt they would have been so generous if Uncle Sam didn't have his hand out.

 

I wonder what the world would look like if there was not a stock exchange. I'm guessing 99% of the throat cutting in the financial world is to make a stock price higher.

 

No stock exchange? You think that would be a good thing?

 

I've lived in L.A. and San Francisco. SF is, by far, the hardest place to live off of $15. That being said, it's not that hard for a younger person.

Want to make a dent in rent? Get a roommate, or maybe even a few. There are plenty of ways to get by in multiple aspects of life.

Where I can see this being an issue is with older people, who have families to support. $15 isn't going to cut it. You would hope they would have the time an experience to get to a higher wage, but that doesn't always happen in our current climate.

Also, people outside of these places don't realize how expensive it is. Rent within San Francisco city limits, in even shitty areas, is fucking ridiculous.

 

What's the advantage of it?

 

It doesn't have to be, it's by design, and it hurts the national economy:

A new study by Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago and Enrico Moretti of the University of California, Berkeley, calculates that the United States economy would be nearly 10 percent bigger if just three cities — New York, San Jose, and San Francisco — had loosened their constraints on the supply of housing and let more people in during the past few decades. Let that sink in: 10 percent bigger.

To get that number, the economists imagined a world in which those three cities had average land-use regulations, rather than the highly restrictive ones you see in practice. Over time, millions more workers would have flocked to those cities, becoming more productive and helping the whole economy grow. The average worker would be making $6,000 more a year than they are. Annual economic output would be more than $1 trillion higher as of 2009. We'd all be better off.

The High Cost of Expensive Townhouses -- NYMag

 

How about we severely restrict the practice of buying off politicians? For every dollar over $250
that is donated to any politician or PAC, require $3 to be donated to a job-creation fund.

There's your Citizens United.

 

I don't understand that. So because workers can find places to live in those three cities, those jobs just don't exist anywhere in the US of A?