Holy non-sequitur Batman, of course raising wages doesn't do anything for the unemployed, because they are not working, by definition.
No, being poor is not having enough money to live at a standard considered normal for the society that one lives in. Much of your confusion could be avoided simply by looking in a good dictionary. If you increase wages people will have more money.
I know it's not the definition of "poor", I'm talking about the reality of poor--and the reality is they are rarely working full time, many are not working at all.
The reason that we need to boost wages is to raise the wages of the working poor. Poverty is caused by the low wage rates of the working poor. Most poor work, often at multiple jobs, and they generally work harder than most of the middle and upper class.
Whether it's one or multiple jobs the important issue is hours.
I don't have any tolerance for people who don't work for a living, by living on unearned income*, whether they are rich or poor, whether it is coupon clipping or direct government aid. I know from previous discussions with you and most of the people here that you disagree with this, believing that the rich should be able to sit on their asses if their grandfather was also rich.
It's not that we consider this desirable, but that we consider the harm of preventing it to be greater than the harm it causes.
But this is dangerous for capitalism. Wealth becomes ever more concentrated in the upper class, drawing the wealth from the poor and the middle class. This reduces the life blood of the economy, aggregate demand, which reduces investment. It can also eventually result in social unrest, which will finally result in a discontinuous over reaction the other way. Reference the French and Russian revolutions for example. Even when it is not this serious, this concentration of wealth is undemocratic, especially if you have the insanity of a court ruling that corporations are people and money is free speech.
Whether wealth is concentrated has little to do with idle rich passing the money on to their children. That's a tiny portion of the economy.
And most people here believe that we should have a guaranteed minimum income, paid by the government. This is also dangerous. As we have seen repeatedly, the recipients of the government money will be demonized as freeloaders. And whatever the government subsidizes the government gets more of. If the government subsidizes low wages then we will get more low wages and the wages that are low will never be raised.
You're making a mistake here--assuming that high wages are a goal. They aren't. The economic status of workers is the goal, wages are simply a means to it.
I have repeatedly pointed these things out to you as well as addressed your best arguments.
No, raising wages slowly over time doesn't raise costs or unemployment, it lowers profits.
Your repeated pointing doesn't make it true. A slow raise in wages above market reality will not produce an effect that can be seen above the noise. That doesn't mean it won't have an effect.
You talk about lowering profits--but in the long run profits are basically fixed. If profits are too low companies that fail aren't replaced, supply drops, prices rise, profit rises. If profits are too high new players enter the market, supply rises, prices and profits drop.
No, we don't have to have an infinite pool of profits before we can raise wages, that is beyond silly.
Of course it's beyond silly--the point is that it's necessary for many of the leftist arguments to make sense.
Too much of the aggregate income paid in profits results in,
[The concentration of wealth into ever fewer hands. You say that the wealth dispurses, meaning that one person's wealth is spread over time and generations to more and more people, which is true. But what I am referring to is looking at the whole economy, not just a single family, that without a program of active redistribution, that capitalism will concentrate the wealth in fewer and fewer hands, that the wealth will flow up from the poor and the middle class, that income and wealth inequality gets worse.
You're forgetting that corporate profits are paid out to shareholders--many of which are the retirement accounts and pension accounts of the average person.
Inflation of real estate, stocks, bonds, will increase, putting a drag on the economy. All of the benefits from globalization, that is lower costs for consumer products, has been canceled out by the increased costs of housing and of a college education.
Housing is going up because of the scarcity of land in desirable locations.
Increased financial market instability as an unregulated Wall Street dreams up more zero sum financial instruments to try to absorb the ever increasing amounts of excess financial capital in the hands of the rich, such as the credit default swaps and the subprime mortgage backed securities that were so instrumental in causing the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.
While I agree this is happening it has nothing to with the distribution of wealth, but rather people dreaming up ever more complex ways to do things. 1929 taught us the danger of allowing too high a debt ratio in the investment economy and rules were put in place to limit it. The fundamental problem in 2008 was Wall Street dreaming up new means of investing that worked around the limits that 1929 taught us were needed. Unfortunately, we didn't learn our lesson this time around and the problem remains.
