"The Pitchforks are coming for us Plutocrats"

www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#.U7bDG_ldU7U

"The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages. We’ve had 75 years of complaints from big business—when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong.

Most of you probably think that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is an insane departure from rational policy that puts our economy at great risk. But in Seattle, our current minimum wage of $9.32 is already nearly 30 percent higher than the federal minimum wage. And has it ruined our economy yet? Well, trickle-downers, look at the data here: The two cities in the nation with the highest rate of job growth by small businesses are San Francisco and Seattle. Guess which cities have the highest minimum wage? San Francisco and Seattle. The fastest-growing big city in America? Seattle. Fifteen dollars isn’t a risky untried policy for us. It’s doubling down on the strategy that’s already allowing our city to kick your city’s ass."

and

"We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. It’s simply not true. There can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. I bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants I am wearing as I write, what my partner Mike calls my “manager pants.” I guess I could have bought 1,000 pairs. But why would I? Instead, I sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn’t do the country much good.

So forget all that rhetoric about how America is great because of people like you and me and Steve Jobs. You know the truth even if you won’t admit it: If any of us had been born in Somalia or the Congo, all we’d be is some guy standing barefoot next to a dirt road selling fruit. It’s not that Somalia and Congo don’t have good entrepreneurs. It’s just that the best ones are selling their wares off crates by the side of the road because that’s all their customers can afford."

and

"Capitalism, when well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse. It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or the many in the long term. The work of democracies is to bend it to the latter. That is why investments in the middle class work. And tax breaks for rich people like us don’t. Balancing the power of workers and billionaires by raising the minimum wage isn’t bad for capitalism. It’s an indispensable tool smart capitalists use to make capitalism stable and sustainable. And no one has a bigger stake in that than zillionaires like us.

The oldest and most important conflict in human societies is the battle over the concentration of wealth and power. The folks like us at the top have always told those at the bottom that our respective positions are righteous and good for all. Historically, we called that divine right. Today we have trickle-down economics.

What nonsense this is. Am I really such a superior person? Do I belong at the center of the moral as well as economic universe? Do you?"

 

Humanity Surprised It Still Hasn’t Figured Out Better Alternative To Letting Power-Hungry Assholes Decide Everything

http://www.theonion.com/articles/humanity-surprised-it-still-hasnt-figured-out-bett,36361/

 

I was called names and ridiculed for saying the exact same thing.

Oh, and our guy also say Walmart should give their employees a raise. Same as I did, only to get ripped on. He does own a yacht, though, but nobody's perfect.

 

No Baron, if you had just said that I doubt you would have been ridiculued.

 

That's absolutely true . . . in a MACRO sense.

But businesses and business shareholders work in a micro sense. "If MY expenses (i.e. payroll) are lower, then MY business will show more profit." Shareholders are not interested in waiting 3-4 years for the "higher wages/more customers" theory to come to fruition.


It's the same way we behave when we hire people to work for us. You solicit contractors to replace your roof or install tile on your floors --- the one offering to do it for the lowest price is going to be the leader in the clubhouse.

 

And the quality may not be as good, which hurts the product and ultimately hurts the business.

 

I said "leader in the clubhouse", which means he's on track to win the job unless something beats him out (a lesser portfolio or some outstanding portfolio by another worker). And the quality of the lower-priced worker may be BETTER --- the only thing you absolutely know for certain when you decide to hire is the price, which makes it pretty important.

My wife's dressmaking skills and customer service are impeccable. But her handmade creations cannot be done as quickly or as cheaply as the ones done by machine by workers in China working for 23 cents a day. That's just a fact we deal with. A very select number of people appreciate the hand-made authenticity of her work and are willing to pay $200-$500 for an outfit (which is still barely minimum wage for the labor involved). The other 99.99 percent go to Walmart.

We simply cannot get over the macro-micro divide. We are all told that the best thing FOR OURSELVES is to save money, put it toward retirement, don't waste money on extravagances or impulse purchases and not to get into serious debt.

All sound advice. On a micro scale.

But the minute 330 million Americans followed such advice, the macro economic numbers would send everyone into a panic.

 

That's true as far as it goes, but it's also the problem on both a micro and macro level. Your business works better when you hire good employees and compensate them such that they are happy to work there and morale is good.

Corporations can cost cut and overseas and do things in general that make the next quarterly report look good, which pleases Wall Street and makes the stock go up, but they often do so at the cost of long term strategic planning and investment in R&D.

Long term it makes a lot of sense.

 

Seattle and San Francisco have "kicked everyone's ass"?
I will take my manageable standard of living over theirs, thank you.
More money for me, more disposable income for the barons of capitalism.

 

What $375,000 will get you in San Francisco. Be prepared for a bidding war, though, seeing as Zillow's "Zestimate" for the property is $425,223.



http://www.sfrealtors.com/US/Home-For-Sale/CA/San-Francisco-County/San-Francisco/Bayview/1206-Shafter-Ave/3171475.html

YGBFKM

 

Guess which cities it costs close to a million dollars to buy a 1,200 square foot, two-bedroom house in?
San Francisco and Seattle.
Guess which cities food, clothing, fuel and other expenses are highest in? San Francisco and Seattle.

To paraphrase Patrick Ewing, minimum wage workers in those places will make a lot of money, but they'll spend a lot of money, too. There's more to do in those towns than in, say, Oklahoma City, but I doubt there's much difference in overall quality of life between those two cities for minimum wage workers. That'll be especially true once the local market corrects itself.
I'm not an economist, but I'll play one on the message board. My guess is, there's a short period (six months or a year) where that $6 an hour jump in minimum wage actually helps people. Then, as people can afford more, the prices start to creep up around them and it equals out. Within two or three years, we'll be hearing that the minimum wage should be $20 an hour and that the rising prices are just greedy corporations' way of taking their revenge on the poor workers.

 

Which is saying nothing of how they're also being bled dry on their taxes.
You can have Seattle and San Francisco, which have clearly "kicked everyone else's ass."