I see many leftish or very leftish posters in this thread, and poor Mr. Pechtel single-handedly holding down the rightish position, (I don't accuse Loren of being a right-winger, but he is taking the anti-Left stance on this issue.)
It's hard for me to get involved since I am a
centrist. A radical, vociferous, and easily-irked centrist to be sure, but a centrist. I seek a Middle Path. This means I often
don't have an answer to Yes/No questions. 
But I can try to provide an objective "centrist" view on some of the questions that have come up.
- As for top American executives earning much more than their counterparts in other countries, I think this was once true. But, for better or worse, I think the developed world is largely following the U.S.A. in many ways, just 5 or 10 years behind.
- A big difference relevant here is Welfare. Many European countries have free or heavily subsidized childcare. In the U.S. some mothers are required to work to receive welfare, but spend most of their wages on babysitter.
- Medical care is free in most developed countries. In the U.S. it's an opportunity for employers to coerce their workers, who may lose insurance if they're severed. How much help was Obamacare? I don't know, but employer-provided health insurance just does not make sense and obviously reduces the wage employers can afford to pay.
- Land prices have naturally risen as the population-to-acreage ratio rises. The values of intellectual property (and capital machinery, e.g. robots) have skyrocketed. Skilled and very-skilled labor is now valued much more highly than unskilled labor. For these reasons the "share of the pie" which goes to unskilled and semi-skilled labor has naturally shrunk. Universal benefits are needed, rather than minimum wage hikes. (Wang's approach is wrong. I've outlined my sounder approach but to no applause, so I'll give up!
)
- The need for minimum wage in the USA is partly due to America's high income inequality.
List of countries by share of income of the richest one percent is a page that turned up while looking for a Wiki page giving trade stats per GDP. (Nope, those Wiki pages have been removed or corrupted.) Netherlands has 6.2% of income going to the richest one percent; Japan 10.4%; Germany and UK 12.5%; and USA a whopping 22.5%.
- The labor union movement in the U.S. a century ago was heroic -- a true highlight of the American Dream. It led to better working conditions, restrictions on child labor, a 40-hour work week, and so on. With those accomplishments in the past and already successful, the love that present-day progressives have for unionization is partly a matter of nostalgia.
- Some employers certainly deserve condemnation. I read that very abusive labor of 14 -year-olds (and younger!) is coming back in to vogue. But legislation -- or rather wresting political control away from greedy billionaires -- is the way to counter child abuse, not unions.
One topic is whether wage hikes will push jobs away from the U.S., increasing our trade imbalance. I won't take a stand on that issue, but want to address what looked like a misconception.
A good way to think of inter-country transactions is to note that transactions net to zero. (NO, NO -- I'm not speaking of whether "trade is a zero-sum game." --
It's more about the zeroing which is automatic in double-entry accounting.) When I buy a $100 widget from a foreign country, my $100 banknote goes out while the widget comes in. Later the foreigner will use that $100 of American money to buy American land, American stock, or American bonds. (Or trade it to an English bank for pounds, who settle a dollar-debt in France, who .... finally buy the American assets.) If the U.S. imports $1 trillion more than it exports, foreigners have an extra $1 trillion in dollars that will re-enter the country to buy stocks, bonds, whatever.
Balance of Trade and Balance of Payments show somewhat different things -- and all should be expressed as a percent of GDP. A decade ago I'd be careful to choose the best indicator. Now, however, it's hard to find even one useful table! This may be in part due to the rise of paywalls, and partly due to just the general rise of stupidity.
So I use
https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=67094 to show Balance of Payments per GDP, Q1-2023
USA -3.2%
UK -2.3%
Japan +1.9%
China +2.8%
Germany +5.4%
Don't put faith in these exact numbers, but the general trend can be trusted. The two biggest Anglophonic countries have HUGE "payment" deficits (and HUGE trade deficits, but I got tired of Googling for a proper table), but this is NOT a general symptom of the developed West since Germany has a HUGE surplus.
ANYWAY the misconception I wanted to address was what looked like a claim that a big trade deficit just mimics the early USA. NO.
It is true that the US had a trade deficit during its first century, then a trade surplus for another century, and has recently plummeted into a huge trade deficit. But the natures of the present trade deficit and the deficits in the early 19th century are VERY different.
During the 19th century, the USA industrialized very rapidly. This required rapid growth in
capital, i.e. the importation of machinery and related material. But that capital was put to work and made the USA prosperous. Dollars (i.e. silver and gold) flowed out to pay for that capital machinery. (I'll guess many of those supplying the machinery took their dollars back to the US and became citizens of that promising country.)
But the present trade deficit is NOT being used to convert an agrarian society to an industrialized one. It is simply a matter of "living beyond one's means" with the dollar's strength being exploited by borrowers. That this is NOT a natural symptom of the present-day developed West is shown by the huge SURPLUS that Germany is running. Larry Summers and Paul Krugman are both on record as describing this deficit as a very serious problem, perhaps more serious than the government funding deficit.
Basically all methods of driving up wages are ways of reducing the labor pool. Someone has to lose.
Research has shown that the demand for labor is often much less elastic than one might guess.
I was using "bad" to describe low wage.
Why? That seems like the sort of highly confusing use of language that you'd want to avoid, if you were expecting people (including yourself) to be able to think through your arguments effectively.
Sorry bilby. It's easy to choose a second-best word when one is exasperated and firing off rebuttals to tired arguments.
Wasting a round of rejoinders to call attention to a word that was only 2nd-best is just a distraction. NOT helpful.
If it's worth responding at all, is it worth the courtesy of pruning the nested quotes?
