Political sectarianism in America

[Nick Danger]

What's the difference between 12.14 an hour and 7.25? Quick math! He did all that work for the both of us so please don't tell me you missed his point entirely. It's already been adjusted for cost of living. So if American minimum wage workers make 7.25 an hour and it purchases 7 dollars and 25 cents of stuff and Australians make a wage per hour that purchases the equivalent of $12.14 who would you rather be?

In conclusion, pull your fuckin' head in cobber. Filghy is a strong debater generally but economics is his wheelhouse. I'm gonna sit back, enjoy a budweiser and watch;

I think you missed something, Bronco - my math was subtracting 12.14 from 15.00, not 7.25 from 12.14. It would be very, very difficult to find anyone in the USA actually working for $7.25/hr. I don't know anyone personally who does, no surprise there, but I do know people with teenage offspring, and even those kids don't work for $7.25. In fact, the point I was trying to make is that most unskilled workers here already get paid the Australian minimum wage. I just passed an Arby's today offering $11.50 to start, slinging roast beef and potato cakes one would assume.

When I started working, the minimum wage was $3.15/hr. The next year it went up to $3.35. And that's what you made if you were a teenager. But it just ain't like that anymore.

I think there is this mass delusion that we have a class of people in the USA who are actually working for minimum wage. EVEN ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS WITH NO SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS MAKE MORE THAN THAT.

Also, if economics was in Flighty's wheelhouse he'd be a Republican.

Edit: And let me just add this - there's a reason the minimum wage has been stagnant for so long. Remember I said when I started working, it was $3.15, then $3.35. Not long after that it went up again, ever so slightly, and again, every couple years IIRC. It was an issue, a talking point, BECAUSE BACK THEN, PEOPLE ACTUALLY WORKED FOR MINIMUM WAGE.

If people were still working for minimum wage we'd have confronted the ridiculousness of it long ago - of course $7.25 is way too low. But it hasn't been problematic because it's no longer used as a frame of reference, EVERYBODY makes more than that now.

[filghy2]

Fact is, Flighty, that we can't take our economic cues from Australia. They have completely different needs and problems. They aren't a big manufacturing country, for example, so most of their machinery is imported, most of their vehicles are imported, most of their electronics are imported. They export a lot of beef whereas the USA eats most of what it kills. They've got their own stock market. They export most of their oil. They've got pretty much the same history of slavery as the USA (replace "Africans" with "Pacific Islanders") but they don't have to answer for it because, I suppose, they aren't the USA. They aren't nearly as diverse as the USA, and in fact until 1973, only white Europeans were allowed to immigrate. That's not racist, BTW, only the USA is racist.

I think the USA is a unique economy (just like most economies are but the USA is always MORESO), and we'll have to wait to be certain about the impact of the $15 minimum wage. We can predict and pontificate but we won't know until we walk a mile in those $15 shoes. I've made my prediction.

It seems you must have got most of your ideas about Australia from about 1973, including your earlier population figures. It's actually one of the world's most multicultural countries nowadays - 30% of the population are immigrants and another 20% are children of immigrants. That's a much higher share than in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_Australia

What you appear to be arguing on the minimum wage is that even the most unskilled worker can currently earn around $12/hr but if it increases to $15/hr they are all going to lose their jobs.

[Stavros]

https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/

[Nick Danger]

It seems you must have got most of your ideas about Australia from about 1973, including your earlier population figures. It's actually one of the world's most multicultural countries nowadays - 30% of the population are immigrants and another 20% are children of immigrants. That's a much higher share than in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_Australia

What you appear to be arguing on the minimum wage is that even the most unskilled worker can currently earn around $12/hr but if it increases to $15/hr they are all going to lose their jobs.

Garbage, Flighty. You can try spinning the numbers for other people but don't even try that shit on me. The fact that 30% of the population are immigrants does not indicate racial diversity. The vast majority of those immigrants are white Europeans (primarily British) - perfectly in line with the immigration policies of the not-so-distant past.

I'm looking at numbers here - https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/...stralians.html - which say that 86.4% of the Australian population are white Europeans and 13.6% are a combination of Aboriginals, Chinese, Indian, and Other.

All these websites can't be full of shit, Flighty, but you most certainly can.

Regarding the minimum wage, my point is that the employers of the USA are already in a market in which they are paying wages higher than the minimum. Whether that figure is $12/hr or $9/hr or whatever - that part depends primarily on the real estate surrounding the business - it's higher than what they are REQUIRED to pay.

A lot of businesses are very low-margin businesses. Restaurants are notoriously so, but it might also surprise you to know that most brick-and-mortar retail stores are also low-margin businesses that rely on high volume to make a profit.

I've got a childhood friend who manages a small chain of restaurants. We've had conversations about that business, we're both businessmen, and he's always told me that there are two keys to producing a profit with a restaurant - tips and food cost. If the tips are good the employees will stay, if the food cost is kept to a minimum the restaurant will make a modest but consistent profit. He usually finishes that by referring back to a long-standing joke between the two of us that I'll let you ponder on your own - "Also, Nick, clean as you go." (hard stare followed by intentionally insincere smile)

My business is different. I'm a low-volume, high-profit business. My business relies much more on how many people I can get in the door than it does on how much I'm paying my people. But I've pretty much plateaued on that and am doing fine. A $15 minimum wage isn't going to affect me at all except to the extent it affects the entire economy.

But MANY businesses in the USA are of the former variety. Retail, printing, grocery, and clothing come to mind. So let's just say that most of the employees of those businesses are making $12/hr. Then suddenly you have to pay them all $15/hr. That's a sudden 25% increase in payroll ACROSS THE BOARD. For businesses that are already paying their employees more than they have to pay them while also barely pushing up enough profit to keep the investors happy.

I'll tell you right now, Flighty, I don't think most unskilled workers deserve $15/hr, even as little as that is. I think if you live in a capitalist economy, you get yourself some goddamn job skills or you pay the price for it. A responsible and productive life is not rocket science. If we could get half of these people off their asses and motivated to add some personal value to the economy, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

But they're going to get their $15/hr so fine. It's going to be at the expense of the investors and job creators who have made this nation the greatest and wealthiest empire in the history of the planet. And in conjunction with all the environmental clampdowns, over-regulation, hiring quotas, union promotion, benefit requirements, and every other meddlesome method the Democratic brain-trust can come up with to redistribute this country's wealth, it's going to crash the economy. We're ripe for it. That's my opinion. Time will tell. Four years of time.

[filghy2]

But they're going to get their $15/hr so fine. It's going to be at the expense of the investors and job creators who have made this nation the greatest and wealthiest empire in the history of the planet. And in conjunction with all the environmental clampdowns, over-regulation, hiring quotas, union promotion, benefit requirements, and every other meddlesome method the Democratic brain-trust can come up with to redistribute this country's wealth, it's going to crash the economy. We're ripe for it. That's my opinion. Time will tell. Four years of time.

I'm sure you said much the same at the start of every previous Democrat administration. The economy didn't crash under Clinton or Obama. There was not even a recession in these periods, let alone the second Great Depression you have predicted.

[Nick Danger]

I'm sure you said much the same at the start of every previous Democrat administration. The economy didn't crash under Clinton or Obama. There was not even a recession in these periods, let alone the second Great Depression you have predicted.

That's actually not true. I think I've told you before that I'm just fine with the back and forth between the two parties. We get Republican administrations to fix our economy, and Democratic administrations to change our diapers. In the end there's a balance that works.

But this time is different. The Democratic Party has never been this progressive before. They feel they have a public mandate because they managed to get nearly every drug addict, petty criminal, and all-knowing teenager in the country out in the streets threatening to burn the whole thing down if they don't get their way. They have co-opted the media to an extent never before seen. There was more media dissent against the NatSocs in pre-WWII Germany than there is against the new progressive agenda in the USA today.

"Progressive" is merely Orwellian doublespeak of course.

Then there's the pandemic. We're weak. My business is suffering. What about yours, Flighty? You thriving right now? If you are you must be selling masks, hand sanitizer, or guns.

Like I said, we're ripe for a killing blow. And the Democrats are holding an axe, in the form of the White House and control of Congress. God help us if the Supreme Court falls weak.

[broncofan]

I guess it's appropriate that this exchange is in the political sectarianism thread because my post you quoted when you first decided to venture to the politics forum was about whether Republicans can go back to being principled conservatives.

You say the Democratic Party is far left but I see Biden as mostly a moderate. I will agree that nobody should ever acquiesce to vandalism or violence in protests but I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating the degree of complicity for Democrats. The issue of police brutality is a real one and the need to protest unlawful force is important. The need for the protests to be non-violent is essential but I'm not really sure I want to get into a back and forth again about Republican v. Democratic complicity in this country's institutional breakdown.

During a pandemic there is no way for things to magically go back to status quo ante. You can minimize the medical and economic pain through diligence. Instead of asking how Filghy is doing personally, how about asking how Australia is doing? Have they benefitted from being vigilant about the spread of the virus? Have their public health measures cost them economically as much as our uncontrolled viral spread has cost us? They have suffered 35 deaths per million people. We've lost 1,561 people per million. Quick math that looks like they have 2% of the number of deaths per capita.

If you want there to be more media dissent, offer viewpoints in which reasonable people can disagree. If you have a President who tells people covid will magically disappear, that vaccines will take three months from March 2020 to be available, that doctors are fabricating death numbers then you will have a unanimous opposition in the media against this fictional worldview. If you have a President who says there was election fraud, who accuses every city with a large Black population of fraud, and makes outrageous and incendiary charges about shredded ballots and manipulated machinery, you will have a wall of opposition among educated people.

Biden is not far left. Merrick Garland is not far left. I have seen people on twitter with large followings who were literally involved in the alt-right say that Garland and Biden are extremists. This departure from reality will have consequences for all of us. We've already felt some of them. Come back to planet earth.

[Nick Danger]

I guess it's appropriate that this exchange is in the political sectarianism thread because my post you quoted when you first decided to venture to the politics forum was about whether Republicans can go back to being principled conservatives.

You say the Democratic Party is far left but I see Biden as mostly a moderate. I will agree that nobody should ever acquiesce to vandalism or violence in protests but I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating the degree of complicity for Democrats. The issue of police brutality is a real one and the need to protest unlawful force is important. The need for the protests to be non-violent is essential but I'm not really sure I want to get into a back and forth again about Republican v. Democratic complicity in this country's institutional breakdown.

During a pandemic there is no way for things to magically go back to status quo ante. You can minimize the medical and economic pain through diligence. Instead of asking how Filghy is doing personally, how about asking how Australia is doing? Have they benefitted from being vigilant about the spread of the virus? Have their public health measures cost them economically as much as our uncontrolled viral spread has cost us? They have suffered 35 deaths per million people. We've lost 1,561 people per million. Quick math that looks like they have 2% of the number of deaths per capita.

If you want there to be more media dissent, offer viewpoints in which reasonable people can disagree. If you have a President who tells people covid will magically disappear, that vaccines will take three months from March 2020 to be available, that doctors are fabricating death numbers then you will have a unanimous opposition in the media against this fictional worldview. If you have a President who says there was election fraud, who accuses every city with a large Black population of fraud, and makes outrageous and incendiary charges about shredded ballots and manipulated machinery, you will have a wall of opposition among educated people.

Biden is not far left. Merrick Garland is not far left. I have seen people on twitter with large followings who were literally involved in the alt-right say that Garland and Biden are extremists. This departure from reality will have consequences for all of us. We've already felt some of them. Come back to planet earth.

Biden is a rubber-stamp career politician, with a media-suppressed history of voting along white supremacist lines, who is currently barely aware of his surroundings. He's one year older than my father and I know for a fact that my father is losing it upstairs. Whether Biden is a true progressive or not isn't relevant, he's as much a figurehead at this point as the Queen of England. I think he has "handlers."

If he dies, and he very well might, we'll have Kamala Harris, a slightly-unhinged, hypocritical sociopath with a long (and again, media-suppressed) history of supporting aggressive and heavy-handed law enforcement against the working class while protecting elites from prosecution.

That's my opinion of the USA's current executive branch. So now that we've got that out of the way...

Let's take a hard look at the comparison you're making between Australia and the USA regarding their handling of the pandemic. I'll grant you the numbers without even looking them up, we'll go ahead and accept that Australia has suffered many fewer deaths per capita than the USA, I'm sure that's true.

So you can say, "See, this proves that they handled the pandemic much better from a policy perspective," or you COULD say, "Makes perfect sense considering Australia is a completely isolated country with one of the world's most restrictive entry policies."

And why does no one ever want to talk about the cost of the lockdown? Suicides are at an all-time high. Depression is at an all-time high. Crime statistics are through the roof. The economy is suffering badly. We're now raising an entire generation of children who have lost a full year of education and social development; who can even calculate what the final cost of that will be? All this to save the lives of a relative handful of old people and lungers. Trump is not a genius - well, maybe an accidental one sometimes - but he's no dipshit either. He knew immediately that the cure would be worse than the disease.

Loss of life is not a be-all end-all. We're all going to die. Quality of life matters at least as much. We, humans, still settle our petty political differences by sending our best and brightest to fight each other to the death by the millions, but we haven't outlawed war. Japan lost 20,000 people in the 2011 tsunami, and it's definitely going to happen again. So why aren't they vacating the country, moving inland? Because 20,000 people is a sacrifice they are (and should be) willing to make in order to maintain their society and culture. The USA loses 35,000 people a year to auto accidents, yet we have never even considered the idea of outlawing cars.

We're never going to agree about this, Bronco, and I'm fine with that. But your attempt to de-legitimize my view with a statement like "Come back to planet earth" is mere hyperbole. The pandemic lockdown question is a philosophical one, not a scientific one.

[broncofan]

I'll respond to this later. I've read it and appreciate some of your points. Notably, yes quality of life is important and I'm not saying that only the policies that save every life imaginable at any cost are worth pursuing. I'm saying the costs in terms of isolation are real, but that there are ways to mitigate suicide and drug deaths without giving up completely on public health. Also, lockdowns are only ever a decent idea when things have gotten out of control by certain metrics. They should be used very sparingly and only when hospital capacity is low.

Australia is not the only country that has fewer deaths per capita. There are 183 out of 193. But you know what? Other economies have also taken less of a hit than ours. I want to emphasize that. Some economic harm is inevitable, and having uncontrolled viral spread is worse for the economy than moderate public health policies.

Here's another comparison: Canada has one third the number of deaths per capita as the U.S. They are in colder climate, they have tons of large cities with most of their country on our northern border. They have no intrinsic advantage.

If we were as successful as Canada, we would have 333,000 fewer deaths! Think about that. Are suicides up by 333,000 because of lockdowns? I'm not even sure Canada has had many more lockdowns. Maybe they promoted mask compliance. Maybe they didn't promote huge maskless rallies.

[Nick Danger]

I'll respond to this later. I've read it and appreciate some of your points. Notably, yes quality of life is important and I'm not saying that only the policies that save every life imaginable at any cost are worth pursuing. I'm saying the costs in terms of isolation are real, but that there are ways to mitigate suicide and drug deaths without giving up completely on public health. Also, lockdowns are only ever a decent idea when things have gotten out of control by certain metrics. They should be used very sparingly and only when hospital capacity is low.

Australia is not the only country that has fewer deaths per capita. There are 183 out of 193. But you know what? Other economies have also taken less of a hit than ours. I want to emphasize that. Some economic harm is inevitable, and having uncontrolled viral spread is worse for the economy than moderate public health policies.

Here's another comparison: Canada has one third the number of deaths per capita as the U.S. They are in colder climate, they have tons of large cities with most of their country on our northern border. They have no intrinsic advantage.

If we were as successful as Canada, we would have 333,000 fewer deaths! Think about that. Are suicides up by 333,000 because of lockdowns? I'm not even sure Canada has had many more lockdowns. Maybe they promoted mask compliance. Maybe they didn't promote huge maskless rallies.

I think I ranted about this once before and got a little carried away, to the point that I surprised even myself with my callous indifference about these people's lives. But I don't feel any differently now that I'm about to rant about it again.

Because who are we talking about here, Bronco? The elderly. The congenitally unhealthy. The weak. People who already had low quality of life and were going to die soon enough anyway. I knew Joe Diffie, the country singer, and I remember calling a mutual acquaintance when I heard he'd died of the covid. Turns out both of us had the exact same thought when we got the news - "Really, not the pills and booze?"

We're trading a lot for these people's lives, Bronco. And we could have just left it up to them. I think I ran down my Can't-Miss Covid-19 Prevention Technique For The Chronically Vulnerable before - isolate YOURSELF.

I've said pretty much all I have to say about the covid. I get your point of view, Bronco - all human life is precious. A lot of people feel that way. It's not. We throw it away all the time. Every time they build a skyscraper over 15 stories in New York City, there are going to be 5 deaths. But they build them anyway, because human life has a dollar value.