Why did Trump tear-gas migrants at the border?

[DBT]

Those at the bottom of the heap sacrificing a part of their own lives, struggling to make ends meet, so that those who are . . .

Yes, those at the "bottom" sacrificing etc. are made better off by cheap labor. Forcing the labor cost to go up artificially, against market supply-and-demand, makes those at the "bottom" worse off. It forces up the price level, forcing all those at the bottom to pay higher prices, thus making them poorer.

What you tend to overlook is that workers were better off decades ago (stats provided), and workers were improving their standard of living until a certain political ideology came to the fore, Reaganomics, Thatcher, etc, implementing policies that favour the rich at the expense of ordinary workers. At which point wages went into decline, stagnating for decades while the beneficiaries of the new regime, tax breaks, loopholes, anti strike laws, low awards for workers, etc, enjoyed substantial increases in the salaries and benefits.

It is not that there is insufficient wealth in the developed world, USA, Australia, etc, but that wealth has increasingly concentrated to the upper layers of society. More for the top. Less for the bottom. Driven by policy that is designed to benefit the rich while keeping those on the bottom from improving their incomes and their lives.

This is the situation you promote.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Those at the bottom of the heap sacrificing a part of their own lives, struggling to make ends meet, so that those who are . . .

Yes, those at the "bottom" sacrificing etc. are made better off by cheap labor. Forcing the labor cost to go up artificially, against market supply-and-demand, makes those at the "bottom" worse off. It forces up the price level, forcing all those at the bottom to pay higher prices, thus making them poorer.

What you tend to overlook is that workers were better off decades ago (stats provided), and workers were improving their standard of living until a certain political ideology came to the fore, Reaganomics, Thatcher, etc, implementing policies that favour the rich at the expense of ordinary workers. At which point wages went into decline, stagnating for decades while the beneficiaries of the new regime, tax breaks, loopholes, anti strike laws, low awards for workers, etc, enjoyed substantial increases in the salaries and benefits.

It is not that there is insufficient wealth in the developed world, USA, Australia, etc, but that wealth has increasingly concentrated to the upper layers of society. More for the top. Less for the bottom. Driven by policy that is designed to benefit the rich while keeping those on the bottom from improving their incomes and their lives.

This is the situation you promote.

Workers were better off decades ago? Only because the people at the bottom of the pile weren't counted as they weren't white & American.

And when you look at the stats now what you see is an increasing divergence in income, not the rich pushing everyone else down. Even most of the people in the upper quintile are workers, not the rich.

 

[DBT]

What you tend to overlook is that workers were better off decades ago (stats provided), and workers were improving their standard of living until a certain political ideology came to the fore, Reaganomics, Thatcher, etc, implementing policies that favour the rich at the expense of ordinary workers. At which point wages went into decline, stagnating for decades while the beneficiaries of the new regime, tax breaks, loopholes, anti strike laws, low awards for workers, etc, enjoyed substantial increases in the salaries and benefits.

It is not that there is insufficient wealth in the developed world, USA, Australia, etc, but that wealth has increasingly concentrated to the upper layers of society. More for the top. Less for the bottom. Driven by policy that is designed to benefit the rich while keeping those on the bottom from improving their incomes and their lives.

This is the situation you promote.

Workers were better off decades ago? Only because the people at the bottom of the pile weren't counted as they weren't white & American.

And when you look at the stats now what you see is an increasing divergence in income, not the rich pushing everyone else down. Even most of the people in the upper quintile are workers, not the rich.

I wasn't talking about the race issue, discrimination by colour or gender. That has additional elements. Elements that should not have been present in the first place. It's a different issue.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

Left-wing labor theory and snake-oil economics and employer-bashing don't "lift" the living standard of poor workers.

The presence of an ever growing class of people in society who feel marginalized, underpaid, struggling to make ends meet, feeling unable to ever satisfy their own needs and wants, are a threat to the cohesion of that society.

Right, so let's not impose unnecessarily-high costs onto them by driving up the cost of production, e.g., the labor cost, and thus increasing the cost of living to those struggling to survive.

Instead, let's take advantage of opportunities to hire cheap labor, e.g., immigrant labor, and other ways to keep down the production costs.

So it doesn't matter that it is possible to lift the standard of living for MW workers without a huge rise in the cost of goods and services, . . .

If the rise in cost is so little, it's only because that "lift" in their living standard was so little, if any at all. If the MW labor cost is raised very high, it not only causes significant upward pressure on prices, but it also results in some job losses in the lower-wage category.

We have one case where the MW increase was enough for the impact of it to be measured, in Samoa in 2007. Since then the negative consequences have been so bad that the MW increases have had to be repealed or delayed or suspended several times. https://www.saipantribune.com/index...e-hikes-until-cnmi-a-samoa-economies-improve/

This is virtually the only case where the impact from MW increase could be observed and measured, as a fact, so that even the MW proponents had to recognize the failure and need to repeal or delay the increases. There is no evidence that MW increase is ever successful, and the promoters of it always have to include conditions which keep the increase low and spread out over several years, because they know the increases have a negative impact which is noticeable if the increases are high enough for the impact to be measurable.

MW proponents cannot give any evidence to prove net positive impact, other than to show that if the MW increase is small enough, there is no measurable harm done. But where the increase is significant enough for the impact to be measurable, the outcome is negative, because of the job losses and price increases, as in Samoa where the results were measurable.

. . . these still being quite affordable for the well off with the aim of making life easier for those on the bottom, . . .

In theory only, but not in fact. In this one case where the results are significant enough to be measured, the result was to make life worse for those on the bottom.

Of course you can limit your analysis of the results by looking at only those workers who kept their jobs and experienced a higher income. But this deliberately ignores the negative consequences on other workers/job-seekers and on all consumers who have to pay the resulting higher prices.

So we have one case study which shows objectively the real results, which are negative for those on the bottom, not positive, and even proponents of the higher MW have had to acknowledge these negative results and support repealing or suspending the increases. But by contrast, there is NO case where the overall results were shown to be positive, except where only the labor union fanatics and left-wingers claim to have proved there was no measurable harm, according to their left-wing think tanks and their "studies" of cases where no measurable results were really possible because the MW increase was too small and too spread out over many years to allow significant measure of the results.

. . . and in the process putting more money into circulation and helping lift the overall economy of the Nation?

Theory only, no facts to support this.

Any additional money put into circulation is offset by the higher prices and inflation due to the higher labor cost, leading to decreased demand and decline in the overall economy.

Wishful thinking and promises to the poor are not good enough. The simplistic formula of punishing employers and hating capitalists by forcing them to pay workers more than their market value does not do anything to improve the overall economy, even for the poor.

The only solution for lower-value workers is for them to increase in value, or to improve their performance, so that they produce the higher value, rather than just being paid a charity increase out of pity for them, which inevitably imposes costs onto others, especially consumers who have to pay for it.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

Republican politicians constantly talk about immigration because white supremacists constantly talk about it. This is just how they let the white supremacists know that they are with them.

Gassing children is meant to send an even stronger message to white supremacists about how closely aligned the Republican party is with them.

Perhaps.

Similarly we can speculate about the message they send to labor fanatics who preach Marxist slogans against cheap labor which puts downward pressure on wages.

The right-wing pundits and Republican politicians do not address messages openly to the white supremacists, but they do address open messages to the labor fanatics, telling them that the immigrants threaten their jobs and cause downward pressure on their wages.

They also preach against the greedy employers who hire the undocumented workers, making an appeal to the employer-bashing instincts of the left-wingers, maybe trying to compete with the Bernie Sanders camp for the employer-bashing prize.

So these Republicans are also "with" the left-wing labor crusaders as well as with the white supremacists.

 

[DBT]

In theory only, but not in fact. In this one case where the results are significant enough to be measured, the result was to make life worse for those on the bottom..

Not so. There are actual examples where the minimum wage is higher than in the US, yet the prospect of the cost of living blowing out was not an issue, and is not an issue. Australia is an example. Only that wage stagnation has eroded income value and spending power in recent years, while at the same time those in the higher income brackets enjoyed regular increases in salary, significantly improving their own standard of living with no one crying over inflating prices.

A double standard. One for the top, another for everyone below

This is what you ignore. I have provided the stats several times in different threads, including this one.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What you tend to overlook is that workers were better off decades ago (stats provided), and workers were improving their standard of living until a certain political ideology came to the fore, Reaganomics, Thatcher, etc, implementing policies that favour the rich at the expense of ordinary workers. At which point wages went into decline, stagnating for decades while the beneficiaries of the new regime, tax breaks, loopholes, anti strike laws, low awards for workers, etc, enjoyed substantial increases in the salaries and benefits.

It is not that there is insufficient wealth in the developed world, USA, Australia, etc, but that wealth has increasingly concentrated to the upper layers of society. More for the top. Less for the bottom. Driven by policy that is designed to benefit the rich while keeping those on the bottom from improving their incomes and their lives.

This is the situation you promote.

Workers were better off decades ago? Only because the people at the bottom of the pile weren't counted as they weren't white & American.

And when you look at the stats now what you see is an increasing divergence in income, not the rich pushing everyone else down. Even most of the people in the upper quintile are workers, not the rich.

I wasn't talking about the race issue, discrimination by colour or gender. That has additional elements. Elements that should not have been present in the first place. It's a different issue.

I'm saying the glory days weren't real, it's just the bottom jobs were pushed off to people who didn't matter by the standards of the time.

 

[DBT]

I wasn't talking about the race issue, discrimination by colour or gender. That has additional elements. Elements that should not have been present in the first place. It's a different issue.

I'm saying the glory days weren't real, it's just the bottom jobs were pushed off to people who didn't matter by the standards of the time.

The stats say otherwise. The figures make it clear that the purchasing power of middle class has been steadily declining over the last few decades due to wage stagnation. It then follows that the middle class were better off before this stagnation took a hold.

The Middle Class Squeeze;
''Recent trends indicate wages have stagnated and income inequality has worsened, reducing income available to middle-class families: U.S. median income ("real" or adjusted for inflation) fell from a peak of approximately $57,000 in 1999 to $52,000 in 2013, a decline of about $5,000 or 9%.''

While U.S. middle-class family incomes have stagnated as income shifts to the top, the costs of important goods and services continue rising, resulting in a "Middle Class Squeeze

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

Right. Cheap labor is good for everyone. Except the cheap laborer.

No, it's good for them too (or 99% of them). ALL consumers benefit from cheap labor, including all the wage-earners, who pay lower prices as a result of cheap labor.

Can you really be called a consumer when all you can barely afford is food and shelter?

Of course, when they spend their money at Walmart they are consumers, and they can afford more and consume more as a result of the cheap labor.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

Some benefit more than others. But EVERYONE benefits from cheap labor.

The workers who are a part of that pool of 'cheap labour' don't get to profit.

Good example of a falsehood, contradicted by verifiable objective facts, making "economics" in effect scientific, subject to verification and falsifiability.

It's obvious that those workers are consumers who also benefit from the lower prices. They can be observed as consumers in the market paying the same prices as everyone else, which prices are subject to the downward pressure from the lower production costs.

That there are workers in one of the richest nations on earth who are paid barely having enough to survive week to week, sometime not even that, depending on government subsidies, is not a falsehood, so their spending power as consumers is also minimal

And the gap has grown over the course of decades;

''Figure 1 displays the changes in the inflation-adjusted earnings of workers at different points along the national income distribution scale since 1961. In earlier times, when the nation was prosperous, the rising tide lifted all boats; wages for workers at all levels grew at roughly the same rate, a trend that continued into the 1960s. But beginning in the 1970s and accelerating through the ’80s and early ’90s, the fortunes of working Americans at the opposite ends of the income ladder have panned out very differently. By 1994, full-time male workers in the bottom 10 percent of the national income scale were earning no more than their counterparts of nearly 35 years before.

This really is irrelevant. But if we assume the worst, all this means is that this 10% of the male workforce remained the same, while 90% of males and all female workers rose higher in income. So what's the whining about?

Of those 10% lowest, many were even lower before reaching that lowest income level. Some were immigrants who had to struggle up to that level from their earlier level. The very poorest do not drag down the living standard of anyone else, even though some of them drag down the national average. Instead of obsessing on national averages, we must consider the overall improvement of individuals.

And even where there is some downward trend you can cite, this was not caused by cheap labor.

Workers with incomes in the top 10 percent, meanwhile, were doing far better than the same group did in decades past. The strong economy of the last few years has sparked some rebound in the wages of bottom-tier working men, but a substantial gap remains between their incomes and those of male workers whose earnings are closer to the national average.''

Numbers like these, even if correct, don't in any way disprove the point that cheap labor is good for the economy. Artificially driving some wages up, or artificially keeping out migrant workers in order eliminate cheap labor doesn't provide any net benefit, but only makes us all worse off.

That some of the more skilled workers make greater gains than others, thus causing more inequality, does not change the fact that cheap labor is good for everyone, including the less skilled.

But don't worry -- Trump is doing his best to keep out or eliminate some of the cheap labor. So he's paying attention to your concerns, even though the result will be to make the economy worse. But he is accepting your premise that cheap labor is bad for the economy, and if he has to tear-gas another few thousand migrants to make your point, then so be it -- he'll do whatever it takes.

 

[DBT]

Numbers like these, even if correct, don't in any way disprove the point that cheap labor is good for the economy. Artificially driving some wages up, or artificially keeping out migrant workers in order eliminate cheap labor doesn't provide any net benefit, but only makes us all worse off.

That some of the more skilled workers make greater gains than others, thus causing more inequality, does not change the fact that cheap labor is good for everyone, including the less skilled.

But don't worry -- Trump is doing his best to keep out or eliminate some of the cheap labor. So he's paying attention to your concerns, even though the result will be to make the economy worse. But he is accepting your premise that cheap labor is bad for the economy, and if he has to tear-gas another few thousand migrants to make your point, then so be it -- he'll do whatever it takes.

You haven't actually provided research to back your claim that keeping a significant percentage of workers and their families poor. You have only asserted your belief.

But assuming for the sake of argument that it is true, what about the ethics of deliberately keeping a significant percentage of the population poor in order to achieve what is probably a marginal improvement in the economy?

What if it was you in that position? Would you consider it a fair bargain?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The Middle Class Squeeze;
''Recent trends indicate wages have stagnated and income inequality has worsened, reducing income available to middle-class families: U.S. median income ("real" or adjusted for inflation) fell from a peak of approximately $57,000 in 1999 to $52,000 in 2013, a decline of about $5,000 or 9%.''

It's called the great recession. We had a bunch of phantom gains in the 2000s, followed by a blowup that hurt most people.

While U.S. middle-class family incomes have stagnated as income shifts to the top, the costs of important goods and services continue rising, resulting in a "Middle Class Squeeze

"Selected" = "Cherry picked". Be very careful with Wikipedia as a source on anything political.

 

[DBT]

The Middle Class Squeeze;
''Recent trends indicate wages have stagnated and income inequality has worsened, reducing income available to middle-class families: U.S. median income ("real" or adjusted for inflation) fell from a peak of approximately $57,000 in 1999 to $52,000 in 2013, a decline of about $5,000 or 9%.''

It's called the great recession. We had a bunch of phantom gains in the 2000s, followed by a blowup that hurt most people.

While U.S. middle-class family incomes have stagnated as income shifts to the top, the costs of important goods and services continue rising, resulting in a "Middle Class Squeeze

"Selected" = "Cherry picked". Be very careful with Wikipedia as a source on anything political.

You miss the point. This information is not exclusive to Wikipedia. It is not something conjured out of thin air.

The 'middle class squeeze' began well before the GFC.

There are many factors driving wage stagnation, the decline of union membership, legislation being passed that heavily penalizes workers for disrupting industry by striking for better pay and conditions, individual contracts instead of collective bargaining, being some of the factors driving a declining incomes.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It's called the great recession. We had a bunch of phantom gains in the 2000s, followed by a blowup that hurt most people.



"Selected" = "Cherry picked". Be very careful with Wikipedia as a source on anything political.

You miss the point. This information is not exclusive to Wikipedia. It is not something conjured out of thin air.

The 'middle class squeeze' began well before the GFC.

There are many factors driving wage stagnation, the decline of union membership, legislation being passed that heavily penalizes workers for disrupting industry by striking for better pay and conditions, individual contracts instead of collective bargaining, being some of the factors driving a declining incomes.

In other words, pay no attention to the bad data, take it on faith.

 

[DBT]

It's called the great recession. We had a bunch of phantom gains in the 2000s, followed by a blowup that hurt most people.



"Selected" = "Cherry picked". Be very careful with Wikipedia as a source on anything political.

You miss the point. This information is not exclusive to Wikipedia. It is not something conjured out of thin air.

The 'middle class squeeze' began well before the GFC.

There are many factors driving wage stagnation, the decline of union membership, legislation being passed that heavily penalizes workers for disrupting industry by striking for better pay and conditions, individual contracts instead of collective bargaining, being some of the factors driving a declining incomes.

In other words, pay no attention to the bad data, take it on faith.

That remark doesn't appear to relate to what I said, or the information and data I posted.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

A new poll: What is the true source of money?

1. Money comes from money trees.

2. Money comes from having politicians like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump produce "jobs! jobs! jobs!" for us in the factories they bring back from China.

3. Money comes from saving "our jobs" from illegal aliens who invade our country and steal them from us.

4. Money comes from driving up the labor cost as high as possible, so workers are paid more than their market value so they get more money in their pockets to spend.

5. Instead of obsessing on where "money" comes from, what matters is to get all producers to create the greatest value possible at the lowest cost to consumers who must pay for it -- and all the rest is snake-oil economics.

(Hint: the last choice is always the correct one.)

It's obvious that those workers are consumers who also benefit from the lower prices.

But they don't benefit from having less money to spend.

Each one benefits from all the others having less money to spend. Every consumer benefits from all the workers (except himself/herself) being paid less for the same output.

Lumpenproletariat, you give me the impression that you believe that consumers are some privileged class which deserves to get everything for next to nothing.

At the lowest possible price which the competitive market can offer. Of course. Why should consumers ever have to pay any higher than that? Isn't this the premise for antitrust law?

Isn't any competition good, to reduce costs and cause lower prices (or reduced price increases) for the same output?

You also fail to address the question of where consumers' money comes from. . . . it's almost as if you believe that they pick it off of money trees.

Which consumers? Do they all get their money from the same place?

I plead guilty to not comprehending your money-tree parable.

Do you mean we need Trump's border wall to prevent illegal aliens from stealing all our jobs and all the money? Do you mean we need Bernie's "good-paying jobs" in order to create the money? or we need to "bring back the factories" from China as the source for our money?

So then, the "Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!" crusade is all about how the money is created, and without those "Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!" from Sanders and Trump, we wouldn't have any money?

And it's about forcing employers to pay workers higher than their market value, driving up the labor cost and the prices all consumers have to pay? So without these artificially-high wage levels, there'd be no money for anyone to spend? You think that's how the "money" is created?

 

[lpetrich]

Lumpenproletariat, define "market value". Also, how would you tell if someone was being paid *below* market value?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In other words, pay no attention to the bad data, take it on faith.

That remark doesn't appear to relate to what I said, or the information and data I posted.

I pointed out the data was cherry-picked and thus worthless. You're going on assuming it's true.

 

[DBT]

In other words, pay no attention to the bad data, take it on faith.

That remark doesn't appear to relate to what I said, or the information and data I posted.

I pointed out the data was cherry-picked and thus worthless. You're going on assuming it's true.

The mere act of ''pointing out'' is not sufficient to prove the claim you are making. The stats I provided are not cherry picked. It is a body of information, evidence, that shows that middle class incomes have in fact been declining in value over several decades....for the reasons outlined in the studies.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

Whatever the problem is, the solution is not employer-bashing and suppressing cheap labor.

Those at the bottom of the heap sacrificing a part of their own lives, struggling to make ends meet, so that those who are . . .

Yes, those at the "bottom" sacrificing etc. are made better off by cheap labor. But forcing the labor cost to go up artificially, against market supply-and-demand, makes those at the "bottom" worse off. It forces up the price level, forcing all those at the bottom to pay higher prices, thus making them poorer.

What you tend to overlook is that workers were better off decades ago (stats provided), and . . .

Which "workers"? Some have become better off because they are more competitive, while others have fallen behind relative to others, because they're less competitive.

. . . and workers were improving their standard of living until a certain political ideology came to the fore, Reaganomics, Thatcher, etc, implementing policies that favour the rich at the expense of ordinary workers.

Until you identify WHICH workers you mean, you're just spewing crybaby rhetoric. Stop putting ALL the proletarians into the same category -- unless you're pretending to be Karl Marx. Until you recognize them as individuals rather than as faceless members of a herd, your rhetoric is no more valid than the Communist Manifesto. The fact is that some workers are better off and others are worse off. Most of the old-style factory workers are worth less today and might be worse off because of their lower value. You can't explain their lower status today unless you also address their lower value, which is the cause of their lower income status.

The policies of free trade and more wage competition have made the more competitive workers better off and some of the less competitive ones worse off. If you cannot address that point, then you are just spewing snake-oil economics.

At which point wages went into decline, stagnating . . .

Only wages of the less competitive. The wages of the more competitive have kept pace or have increased relative to the general population.

. . . stagnating for decades while the beneficiaries of the new regime, tax breaks, loopholes, anti strike laws, low . . .

Competitive workers don't need to organize strikes. They just demand higher compensation or threaten to quit. If they're worth what they demand, they get it, and if they don't get what they demand, it's because they're not worth it.

Some incomes stagnate because the value of the income-earners is stagnating.

But even if some of the tax laws or other policies were wrong and produced some bad results, it does not follow from this that any workers/producers should be paid more than their value as determined by supply-and-demand in the competitive free market. You can't lump all the workers together and pretend that because some of them experienced lower incomes that therefore they were victimized by some bad policies. The main reason some incomes declined is that the value of those workers declined. And their only solution to this, to reverse it, is to improve their performance or their value in the market.

You can't simply assume that all workers must continue to be paid at a certain high level without any decrease ever in their income. Some go down because their value went down. The changing market conditions can reduce their value. You have to face that when you evaluate the changes. They are not entitled to a certain high income as a permanent guaranteed benefit regardless of their changing market value.

. . . while the beneficiaries of the new regime, tax breaks, loopholes, anti strike laws, low awards for workers, etc, enjoyed substantial increases in the salaries and benefits.

Some incomes increased while others decreased. Usually these changes are due to increasing or decreasing value of those workers/producers, not some injustice in the tax policies or other laws.

However, if you can identify certain policies which produced bad results, then those are bad policies. Probably some tax cuts or other changes were bad. This does not change the fact that artificially propping up wages makes us all worse off. When the government artificially props up anyone's income or otherwise interferes with the market prices, it makes the economy worse, regardless of other factors making it better or worse.

If you are right that some policies have rewarded the rich (or some of them) too much, then the solution is to tax those rich at higher rates, and put that revenue into needed infrastructure and into debt reduction or other benefits to society. The solution is not to artificially prop up the wages of the less competitive wage-earners whose value is declining and who are throwing a tantrum and hate employers who are paying them only what they're worth rather than paying them higher out of pity for them. They are not entitled to charity incomes and pity.

It is not that there is insufficient wealth in the developed world, USA, Australia, etc, but that wealth has increasingly concentrated to the upper layers of society. More for the top. Less for the bottom.

Some go up, others down. There's always some "gap" between rich and poor, or gaps, and the inequality sometimes increases, sometimes decreases. No one has proved what the inequality gap should be, or that it has to always decrease.

Come up with solutions other than employer-bashing, or forcing them to provide pity payments to low-value workers. If your diagnosis of the problem is correct, the solution is not to punish employers per se or those who are more competitive, or to disregard the merits of a competitive free market which benefits everyone by getting all producers to improve their performance as the proper route for them to increase their income.

Driven by policy that is designed to benefit the rich while keeping those on the bottom from improving their incomes and their lives.

What you're saying might make some sense if you can identify a "policy" which is preventing "those on the bottom" from improving their performance and making themselves more valuable in the market. But if all you're demanding is to prop up "those on the bottom" who are decreasing in value, by paying them higher out of pity for them, then it would be better to let them continue at "the bottom" where they're paid only what they're worth.

The "policy" should be designed to benefit those "rich" who are earning their higher income by means of their higher performance. If their better performance causes them to become "rich" (or richer), then it's good that they are benefiting as a reward for their better performance.

If you want to tax some of this benefit at a higher rate, this does not violate the competitive free market. The law of supply-and-demand and the principles of rewarding superior performance and more competition does not necessarily mean lower taxes or no tax increases.

This is the situation you promote.

Why can't you name which "policy" you mean? There are many policies -- some of them might resemble what you're describing, but others are rewarding those whose performance is superior, which is a good situation to promote. And a policy is not automatically wrong because it benefits some of the rich or hurts some of the poor.

Any policy which automatically props up the incomes of all wage-earners, regardless of their performance, is a bad situation which makes everyone worse off and should not be promoted. It would be just as bad as a policy which automatically props up the profits of all capitalists regardless of their performance, or of any other category of producers.

E.g., the Bernie Sanders/Donald Trump solution of bringing all the jobs back from China, to prop up labor costs and rewarding some factory workers who don't improve their performance, is the wrong situation to promote. It would force (or is forcing) higher costs onto ALL 330 million Americans, for nothing in return.