Paul Ryan, Crusader for the Poor

[AthenaAwakened]

Athena,

Do you believe that there are any individual behaviors that contribute to poverty

I think individual behaviors can and often do contribute to whether or not an individual lives in poverty, but that individual behavior does not cause the inferior schools poor children attend, food deserts in poor neighborhoods, hire interest rates poor people pay, a welfare system that encourages spending over savings, police and judicial system that disproportionally arrest and convict poor people, drug policies and laws that attach higher penalties for, say, crack than powdered cocaine. Poor folk do not pass trade and tax laws that encourage outsourcing and off shoring. Poor folk don't make the minimum wage or right to work laws.

Payday loans, predatory lenders, liquor distillers, and the tobacco industry all have lobbyists on the hill passing rules and regulation that allow them to prey on poor people. Everytime public funds get cut and public programs get reduced or eliminated, escaping poverty becomes that much harder. And it ain't poor folk doing the cutting.

and/or make it more likely for one to enter poverty and fail to escape it?

If so, how much of a factor do you believe these behaviors are to poverty in the US (i.e., if none of the behaviors existed, how much of a difference would it make on poverty)? Are you basing this on gut feeling or data?

 

[Axulus]

It's a complex issue, the nature and character of an individual is shaped by genes and environment: opportunity, social conditions, work availability, natural talents, business opportunities, the aptitude to utilize the available options....

I agree, it is a combination of the two. However, when I read AA's posts, she seems to put all the blame on society for any and all poverty. Loren seems to put all the blame on the individual behaviors. It just seems like two extremists on the opposite sides to me.

 

[Axulus]

I think individual behaviors can and often do contribute to whether or not an individual lives in poverty, but that individual behavior does not cause the inferior schools poor children attend, food deserts in poor neighborhoods, hire interest rates poor people pay, a welfare system that encourages spending over savings, police and judicial system that disproportionally arrest and convict poor people, drug policies and laws that attach higher penalties for, say, crack than powdered cocaine. Poor folk do not pass trade and tax laws that encourage outsourcing and off shoring. Poor folk don't make the minimum wage or right to work laws.

Payday loans, predatory lenders, liquor distillers, and the tobacco industry all have lobbyists on the hill passing rules and regulation that allow them to prey on poor people. Everytime public funds get cut and public programs get reduced or eliminated, escaping poverty becomes that much harder. And it ain't poor folk doing the cutting.

and/or make it more likely for one to enter poverty and fail to escape it?

If so, how much of a factor do you believe these behaviors are to poverty in the US (i.e., if none of the behaviors existed, how much of a difference would it make on poverty)? Are you basing this on gut feeling or data?

OK, good. You agree that it is a combination of the two, societal factors and individual behaviors that result in the condition of poverty. Shouldn't any societal or government policy, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness vs. cost address both those societal factors you mention as well as disincentivizing the individual behaviors and providing counseling/education to reduce the prevalence of those behaviors? You seem to focus exclusively on the societal factors, which limits effectiveness by not offering a more comprehensive solution.

Furthermore, some of the solutions you propose have unintended consequences that cause their own harm. We must also be careful to avoid them or minimize them.

 

[SimpleDon]

Athena,

Do you believe that there are any individual behaviors that contribute to poverty and/or make it more likely for one to enter poverty and fail to escape it?

If so, how much of a factor do you believe these behaviors are to poverty in the US (i.e., if none of the behaviors existed, how much of a difference would it make on poverty)? Are you basing this on gut feeling or data?

Of course, individual characteristics and abilities are a factor on where one person sits on the social ladder of success. The problem is with the ladder, not with the individuals. There is no reason for the lower rungs to be so low. The lowest paying jobs should pay more so that the individuals who work at those jobs have a decent wage and a decent life.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

The literal Cliff Notes version of the causes of poverty

Poverty is an exceptionally complicated social phenomenon, and trying to discover its causes is equally complicated. The stereotypic (and simplistic) explanation persists—that the poor cause their own poverty—based on the notion that anything is possible in America. Some theorists have accused the poor of having little concern for the future and preferring to “live for the moment”; others have accused them of engaging in self‐defeating behavior. Still other theorists have characterized the poor as fatalists, resigning themselves to a culture of poverty in which nothing can be done to change their economic outcomes. In this culture of poverty—which passes from generation to generation—the poor feel negative, inferior, passive, hopeless, and powerless.
The “blame the poor” perspective is stereotypic and not applicable to all of the underclass. Not only are most poor people able and willing to work hard, they do so when given the chance. The real trouble has to do with such problems as minimum wages and lack of access to the education necessary for obtaining a better‐paying job.

More recently, sociologists have focused on other theories of poverty. One theory of poverty has to do with the flight of the middle class, including employers, from the cities and into the suburbs. This has limited the opportunities for the inner‐city poor to find adequate jobs. According to another theory, the poor would rather receive welfare payments than work in demeaning positions as maids or in fast‐food restaurants. As a result of this view, the welfare system has come under increasing attack in recent years.

Again, no simple explanations for or solutions to the problem of poverty exist. Although varying theories abound, sociologists will continue to pay attention to this issue in the years to come.

http://www.cliffsnotes.com/sciences...-stratification/causes-and-effects-of-poverty

 

[SimpleDon]

Mobility in the US is largely a myth, moving in either direction. The most reliable predictor of any person's success in the US is the parents' class and income.

A while back someone presented some data, 10% of those in the bottom quintile will eventually reach the top quintile. Sounds pretty good to me.

So you believe that 10% of the poor are capable of climbing into the upper class? Because someone presented some data? And you believe that 10% sounds pretty good to you?

How does 4%* sound to you?

* Pursuing the American Dream: Economic Mobility Across Generations, The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2012, page 2, here http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/le...conomic_mobility/PursuingAmericanDreampdf.pdf

Only 4 percent of those raised in the bottom quintile make it all the way to the top as adults, confirming that the “rags-to-riches” story is more often found in Hollywood than in reality. Similarly, just 8 percent of those raised in the top quintile fall all the way to the bottom.

Do you believe that only 4% of the poor are capable of climbing to the top based on their ability? Or that 92% of the children of the rich possess the extraordinary abilities that would justify them occupying the highest rungs of society, abilities that only 4% of the children of the poor possess?

Extraordinary people who are born poor will have bad nutrition and poor schooling and will most likely still die poor. An near idiot born to wealthy parents will have the best of everything, the best schools, tutors, internships and will die rich, but not before they are able to do so much more damage to the economy because they will control so much money and power.

Bad nutrition is an issue--but blame the parents. You can get adequate nutrition cheap, it just isn't as easy as the crap I always see the food stamp people buying.

Poor schooling--schools are to a very large degree a reflection of the students, not the cause. The inner city schools are crap because they get students whose parents don't care.

Ah, yes, your blame the parent defense of inaction. Or rather, we can't do anything about poverty, government is too busy enriching the rich to deal with poverty, besides it is the parents!

And you believe that this is something that society as a whole has no business trying to improve? Doesn't society as a whole suffer from 15% of its members living in poverty?

Of course we do, but we can't do anything about it because of the parents! They want to be poor! They want their children to be poor!

The point of my post is that for whatever reason, the poor don't eat as well, don't get as good of education as the middle class. The solution is to eliminate poverty for the poor who work, the vast majority of them, by raising their wages to raise them into the middle class.

The people in the middle class also don't commit as many crimes as the poor, or for that matter, as the rich.

Another problem solved!

(I have broken my response into pieces to try to reduce the wall of words phenomenon.)

 

[AthenaAwakened]

I think individual behaviors can and often do contribute to whether or not an individual lives in poverty, but that individual behavior does not cause the inferior schools poor children attend, food deserts in poor neighborhoods, hire interest rates poor people pay, a welfare system that encourages spending over savings, police and judicial system that disproportionally arrest and convict poor people, drug policies and laws that attach higher penalties for, say, crack than powdered cocaine. Poor folk do not pass trade and tax laws that encourage outsourcing and off shoring. Poor folk don't make the minimum wage or right to work laws.

Payday loans, predatory lenders, liquor distillers, and the tobacco industry all have lobbyists on the hill passing rules and regulation that allow them to prey on poor people. Everytime public funds get cut and public programs get reduced or eliminated, escaping poverty becomes that much harder. And it ain't poor folk doing the cutting.

OK, good. You agree that it is a combination of the two, societal factors and individual behaviors that result in the condition of poverty. Shouldn't any societal or government policy, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness vs. cost address both those societal factors you mention as well as disincentivizing the individual behaviors and providing counseling/education to reduce the prevalence of those behaviors? You seem to focus exclusively on the societal factors, which limits effectiveness by not offering a more comprehensive solution.

Furthermore, some of the solutions you propose have unintended consequences that cause their own harm. We must also be careful to avoid them or minimize them.

Should each one teach one? Yes.

Since going back to school and getting my business administration and accounting degrees eight years ago, I have been donating my time to teach financial workshops. They started off as fairly basic personal finance classes. I taught how retail banking worked, how to balance a check book, gave tips on budgeting and how to stick to a budget. Pretty basic stuff. Did a lot lecturing on delayed gratification and setting personal goals.

Then I began to know the people I was teaching. Most were working people who didn't make enough money to live without public assistance. Many had signed their children up for the limited slots in the charter schools being started in our area because they believed those charters would provide a better chance for their children. Many didn't have bank accounts and need more help filling the increasingly difficult forms for shrinking amounts of aid.

Some were good savers and managed to pinch a little from here and snatch a little from there, but as some as they got a few hundred put away, tires blew out, stoves stopped working, traffic tickets and court costs, things that happen to middle class and make life uncortable but don't put life into precarious positions like getting fired or getting evicted or having not electricity this month.

I began to look around the neighborhood in which people lived and found the infrastructure conducive to debt perpetuation, poor health and high anxiety. The classes evolved from personal finance to economic self defense. This is not about helpful charity worker handing out sage advice about bulk buying and coupon clipping. These people are in a fight for their lives, ingage in a deadly endeavor many call "the game"

And as the scarcrow says in THE WIZ

You can't win
You can't break even
And you can't get out of the game.

So now we, not just me lecturing but the classes educating each other, learn how to change "the game."

 

[SimpleDon]

(I am sorry to do this, with the site shutdown I only had this one response to Loren to work on. I have broken it up to try to avoid the wall of words but even at that I have failed. )

Continued from above.

Both are losses to our country, the poor extraordinary who lacks opportunity and the village idiot who ends up with too much money and power because of the industry of their parents or grandparents. I am thinking of a recent president who seemed to owe everything to who his parents and grandparents were and nothing to his own personal abilities.

Both should be allowed to seek their own levels in society based on their own abilities. But they are prevented by basically the same problem. Our obsession with providing the already rich with ever more money, money that they can leave to their children and grandchildren through many generations undiminished. It concentrates ever increasing amounts of money and the power that comes with money in fewer hands. Often putting it in the hands of incompetent people. It has shifted money away from wages into ever increasing profits, money collected mostly by the already rich.

The cost to society to implement this would be too great. There are two issues:

1) You have to say that hard work doesn't bring rewards of a form that can be given to one's children.

Why is this an issue? If we were to increase the inheritance tax wouldn't the rich have to work harder to make money to leave to their children? Why do you want to remove the incentive for them to work harder?

2) In practice you end up chopping down the successful while providing basically no help to those on the bottom.

You are trying to have it both ways. You say that everyone should be rewarded based on their abilities, except if their parents or grandparents or more distant ancestors worked hard and innovated then they don't have to do anything to be rewarded.

You have a different standard for the rich. The modern equivalent of dynastic privilege.

Why do you chop down the successful while providing basically no help to those on the bottom?

The question is how much incentive is needed to provide the innovation and work rates that grows the economy. You seem to be saving that the rich need ever increasing amounts of money to have the proper incentive and the poor need to be starved to have the proper incentive. Basically that the rich need more money to have the proper incentive and the poor need less money to have the proper incentive.

Do you have any idea of the amount of money that the US has intentionally redistributed from the poor and the middle class to the rich, from wages to profits, over the last thirty plus years of supply side economic fiscal policies?

It is about 1 trillion dollars this year alone, more than twenty trillion dollars in total. This was done for a failed social experiment to see if intentionally redistributing money to the rich to provide more money available for investment would benefit society as a whole. It didn't.

Why do you think that the cost is high? I am not talking about added costs. I am talking about the distribution of the income, rolling back supply side economics. People in the US earned about 7 trillion dollars in adjusted gross income in 2009 according the IRS. The bottom 50% earned about 1 trillion dollars total of the 7 trillion. The upper 10% earned about 2½ trillion dollars. How much do think that we would have shift from the top to the bottom to eliminate poverty, a half trillion dollars? This is providing help to the low end.

The US is the richest country in the world with the highest per capita income in the world. If many many different countries like Sweden can distribute their income so that they have no poverty, why can't the US?

Do you believe that poverty is a problem?

Do you think that poverty is needed to provide the proper amount of incentive to the poor to work?

Do you believe that we should be using government programs to subsidize low wages and high profits?

Or do you agree with the liberals that the way to get rid of something is for the government to subsidize it?

And Sweden, unlike the US, has no real poverty. It is at the low end a middle class country. No kids are hungry stunting their development. The society invests heavily in human capital, in education. No qualified students are denied a college education because they can't afford it.

No qualified students in the US are denied college, either. It might be loans instead but they can go.

What Sweden doesn't have is the culture of poverty that we have.

What don't you understand in "...Sweden, unlike the US, has no real poverty?" It seems to be a straight forward statement.

Obviously you can't have a culture of poverty if, and this is the important part, if you don't have any poverty.

Once again, this is the point of my proposal, to get rid of the evils of poverty, to get rid of the culture of poverty by getting rid of poverty.

And you admit that the poor don't get as good of an education as the middle and upper class. Do you think that this would have any bearing on whether or not the poor go to college? Or on their chances of success in college?

Do you see a downside to running up a ~$100,000 debt when you are say 24 or so?

Yet more below.

 

[SimpleDon]

The last installment. Continued from above.

People who are willing to work shouldn't be poor. They shouldn't have to rely on government programs to get by. We would gain so much by moving more people into the middle class. Moving more into the middle class would improve our human capital. Moving more people into the middle class should reduce crime. We would increase our sagging economic demand too, the main thing that is blocking our recovery from the GFC&R.

The problem is that they aren't willing to work.

The vast majority of them do work.

Wait. If they are unwilling to work I don't see why you believe that it would be so expensive to raise their wages? The wages that they don't earn because, according to you, they aren't willing to work?

Increase the minimum wage. Introduce sector wide wage negotiations to level the playing field between companies and their employees without putting anyone's company at a competitive disadvantage because they pay higher wages. You remove wages from competitive pressures.

Minimum wage: Drive unemployment even higher.

We have been through this so many times. If wages are raised it makes no sense for employers to lay off workers. If wages are raised it cuts profits. If the employer lays off workers not only do they lose the profits from the higher wages of the remaining workers, they lose all of the profits from selling the extra products that the laid off workers would have produced. Laying off workers when faced with higher wages makes no sense, it reduces profits.

Which of these statements don't you understand? Why do believe that increases in the minimum wage results in widespread unemployment?

Even neoclassical economics of the free market, that so many here claim to believe in, says that increases in the minimum wage, or any wage for that matter, can only result in unemployment if the economy is at full employment and full utilization of our production resources, the same as admitting that it can never happen. I agree, but if we were at full employment and full utilization of production resources there would be no reason to raise the minimum wage, in fact we would be looking for ways to avoid wage and price driven inflation.

Sector wide negotiations: About as level as cliff! And you'll outsource even more jobs as everything that can possibly be moved will be because no company can make a profit in such a realm.

No, it doesn't. Every company pays the same wages for the same work. Of course, companies can make profits. All it does is that it takes wages out of competitive pressures. It prevents one company from reducing wages to gain a competitive advantage. It is the way that the majority of the European countries keep wages high and keep the income distribution from always building to favor the rich, like it does in the US.

This is the system that I am familiar with from working in Germany. Germany has a trade surplus. Sweden has a much lower trade deficit than the US does, as a percentage of GDP. We have a huge trade deficit, the largest in the world and we have lower wages at the lower end than either country. If increasing the wages of lower paid workers meant that more work goes overseas how do you explain this?

I am constantly amazed at people like you who warn about jobs going overseas where people earn a dollar an hour if we increase the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9.00 an hour. As if we are not competing

No competition means basically certain incompetence.

I am not proposing no competition, I am proposing that we take wages out of the competition. That we avoid a race to the bottom in wages.

Over the years we have taken many things out of the pressure of direct competition; child labor, unsafe workplaces, intentionally dangerous products, the six day greater than 40 hour workweek, unlimited pollution, monopolies and cartels, etc. These were removed from the available accepted means for companies to compete with one another for either non-economic reasons, they were harmful to individuals or to society, or for economic reasons, they harmed the working of the economy itself.

Wages are the way that the economy distributes resources to the majority of the people. Wages are the main source of demand in the economy, which after more than thirty years of increasing the supply side we find ourselves, not too surprisingly, short of. These are two very good reasons to remove wages from the competition.

Looking at the whole economy, what we are doing here, increasing wages decreases profits. There is no free lunch in income distribution considering the whole economy. If you increase wages you decrease profits.

I can't help but notice that you didn't address my argument that the reduced social mobility prevents incompetent upper class individuals from dropping down to poverty, where I assume that you believe that they belong. As the other side of coin of extra ordinary poor being able to climb their way out of poverty if they are able, then don't you believe that incompetent underachievers in the upper class should drop down in the social and success ladder to a level more deserving of their limited abilities? Surely this part of your creed too?

Or is 8% good for you? Do you believe that 92% of the upper class kids are extraordinary in the way that only 4% of the poor kids are?

I went to a prep school on scholarship with the children of the rich. I can tell you from personal experience that there are no more extraordinary kids in the upper class, just a large number of unmotivated ones that won't have to work for success and they know it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You keep trying to deny that poverty is self-caused and your justifications sound about as good as the tobacco executives denying that cigarettes are addictive.

You can argue that an individual is in poverty because he put himself there, but not that he caused poverty.

Do you think people living in developing.nations working of pennies a hour self created the poverty in which they live?

Do you think sharrecroppers in the 1920s created the poverty in which they lived?

Of course they didn't in those conditions. I'm talking about what's going on here and now. You're not helping your position!

 

[ksen]

inb4 "infinite pool of profits"

 

[AthenaAwakened]

inb4 "infinite pool of profits"

I see what you did there

 

[ksen]

What Sweden doesn't have is the culture of poverty that we have.

What you really mean is that Sweden doesn't have as many black people that the US has, amirite?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It's a complex issue, the nature and character of an individual is shaped by genes and environment: opportunity, social conditions, work availability, natural talents, business opportunities, the aptitude to utilize the available options....

I agree, it is a combination of the two. However, when I read AA's posts, she seems to put all the blame on society for any and all poverty. Loren seems to put all the blame on the individual behaviors. It just seems like two extremists on the opposite sides to me.

I think the environmental factors matter but the limits are not anything like insurmountable. The personal factors are basically insurmountable, though--when someone in poverty strikes it rich they generally end up back in poverty.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

A while back someone presented some data, 10% of those in the bottom quintile will eventually reach the top quintile. Sounds pretty good to me.

So you believe that 10% of the poor are capable of climbing into the upper class? Because someone presented some data? And you believe that 10% sounds pretty good to you?

Remember that in a perfect world only 20% could possibly make it.

Ah, yes, your blame the parent defense of inaction. Or rather, we can't do anything about poverty, government is too busy enriching the rich to deal with poverty, besides it is the parents!

I'm not saying nothing can be done. I'm saying that the solution has to lie in education rather than pretending it's due to discrimination. The first step to solving a personal issue has to be recognizing it--and all the talk of discrimination being the cause gives people an easy out, so long as they have that they won't see the real issue.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

You can argue that an individual is in poverty because he put himself there, but not that he caused poverty.

Do you think people living in developing.nations working of pennies a hour self created the poverty in which they live?

Do you think sharrecroppers in the 1920s created the poverty in which they lived?

Of course they didn't in those conditions. I'm talking about what's going on here and now. You're not helping your position!

And yet you are arguing that poverty exists because people just won't stop being poor. They just won't be forthright foursquare people who make only good decisions, and will just work and work hard.

But you never say where these jobs are. Or how the people are supposed to get to them.
You say if they work hard and do the right things, they will be reward and then you say to ditch the minimum wage and allow the market and management to decide what the poor are allow to make as wages.

You are mum about job losses due to bubbles bursting, bubble constructed not be the poor but the moneyed elite. To poor had no say in the decisions, policies and practices that cause a crash, but they sure are effected by those decisions.

And yet you will not entertain the idea that poverty, which grows and shrinks with overall economic expansions and contraction, is a social condition in the united states. Anywhere else, yes.

if poverty grows and shrinks due to forces within society, why do you think that the cause of poverty is poor folk?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

(I am sorry to do this, with the site shutdown I only had this one response to Loren to work on. I have broken it up to try to avoid the wall of words but even at that I have failed. )

Continued from above.

The cost to society to implement this would be too great. There are two issues:

1) You have to say that hard work doesn't bring rewards of a form that can be given to one's children.

Why is this an issue? If we were to increase the inheritance tax wouldn't the rich have to work harder to make money to leave to their children? Why do you want to remove the incentive for them to work harder?

The problem is when you tax too much you find people deciding it's not worth it, they either quit working hard or else leave for greener pastures.

It's also focusing on the wrong things--the amount taken in by the inheritance tax only brings in a little over $10 billion and the number of people who don't have to work because of inheritance is minimal. Focusing on it is a matter of envy, not legitimate need.

2) In practice you end up chopping down the successful while providing basically no help to those on the bottom.

You are trying to have it both ways. You say that everyone should be rewarded based on their abilities, except if their parents or grandparents or more distant ancestors worked hard and innovated then they don't have to do anything to be rewarded.

You have a different standard for the rich. The modern equivalent of dynastic privilege.

I recognize that the number who gets free rides is small, the cost of fixing it is too high.

Why do you chop down the successful while providing basically no help to those on the bottom?

The question is how much incentive is needed to provide the innovation and work rates that grows the economy. You seem to be saving that the rich need ever increasing amounts of money to have the proper incentive and the poor need to be starved to have the proper incentive. Basically that the rich need more money to have the proper incentive and the poor need less money to have the proper incentive.

The value of the next dollar goes down as you have more of them.

Do you have any idea of the amount of money that the US has intentionally redistributed from the poor and the middle class to the rich, from wages to profits, over the last thirty plus years of supply side economic fiscal policies?

You're assuming your conclusion here--I don't buy it that we are intentionally redistributing from the poor to the rich in the first place. It's simply human nature. Until the recent blow-up we were running around an 80:20 ratio--which is what we normally see all over the place where there's no meddling.

The US is the richest country in the world with the highest per capita income in the world. If many many different countries like Sweden can distribute their income so that they have no poverty, why can't the US?

I don't believe the lack of poverty in Sweden is due to redistribution, but rather a lack of a poverty culture.

And you admit that the poor don't get as good of an education as the middle and upper class. Do you think that this would have any bearing on whether or not the poor go to college? Or on their chances of success in college?

Do you see a downside to running up a ~$100,000 debt when you are say 24 or so?

Yet more below.

It's not the best thing but it works--they'll make enough to pay it back.

 

[ksen]

I don't believe the lack of poverty in Sweden is due to redistribution, but rather a lack of a poverty culture.

There it is again! There's no poverty in Sweden because there's not as many black people to deal with.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The last installment. Continued from above.

The problem is that they aren't willing to work.

The vast majority of them do work.

When you look at the bottom of the pile you find very little work.

Wait. If they are unwilling to work I don't see why you believe that it would be so expensive to raise their wages? The wages that they don't earn because, according to you, they aren't willing to work?

The problem is the higher you raise the minimum wage the harder it is to get on the ladder too success.

We have been through this so many times. If wages are raised it makes no sense for employers to lay off workers. If wages are raised it cuts profits. If the employer lays off workers not only do they lose the profits from the higher wages of the remaining workers, they lose all of the profits from selling the extra products that the laid off workers would have produced. Laying off workers when faced with higher wages makes no sense, it reduces profits.

The reality is they cut workers. What happens is that they cut out the least profitable parts of their business because they have been driven into the red.

Sector wide negotiations: About as level as cliff! And you'll outsource even more jobs as everything that can possibly be moved will be because no company can make a profit in such a realm.

No, it doesn't. Every company pays the same wages for the same work. Of course, companies can make profits. All it does is that it takes wages out of competitive pressures. It prevents one company from reducing wages to gain a competitive advantage. It is the way that the majority of the European countries keep wages high and keep the income distribution from always building to favor the rich, like it does in the US.

This would only make sense if you removed the possibility of labor actions. Without that protection they're free to extract all profit--which means companies will go under when bad times hit.

For an example of this in action look at airlines. Every downturn and we see a bunch of Chapter 11s and sometimes 7s.

I am constantly amazed at people like you who warn about jobs going overseas where people earn a dollar an hour if we increase the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9.00 an hour. As if we are not competing

We see it happening, although these days we are seeing robotics being the threat.

 

[Canard DuJour]

- Some people are poor because they're feckless and irresponsible.

- There is institutional poverty so that diligent responsible people are poor.


Both are true. One does not make the other untrue.

Most welfare recipients now work. We already produce goods and services in surplus. If all the feckless and irresponsible people suddenly went diligent and responsible, there'd likely be no less poverty but further downward pressure on wages.

Mr Ryan's maundering about whether such character change should be effected locally or federally is a classic piece of conservolibertarian obfuscation. Issue-framing 101.