[RD] Liberal States win the Tax Experiment
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Timsup2nothin
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Clearly you have never worked night shift in an open air value added lumberyard located in the middle of Kern County farmland. Admittedly, our bugs cannot be mistaken for helicopters like they are in some other places I've been.
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
Open up basically any version of Sim City, and make sure taxes are as low as possible, and the only government service you're allowed to fund is police stations.
Let the hospitals, schools, colleges, libraries, and roads go to utter dog feces. Don't do anything about the polluting industries, and put them as close as possible to tenement apartments. Wait 50 years.
Tell me if that's a city you'd want to live in. Kind of reminds me of China. Great place, all Americans want to live there.
Build a different city, and ensure there are top of the line services, even if you have to charge above the standard 7 percent tax rate. Wait 50 years.
Do you want to live there?
It's not even a hard question. People who suck at governing are the people who believe governing is evil, and it must be sabotaged from the inside of an elected office.
Tax breaks don't magically create jobs. Stagnant wages don't either. But keep on believing it does. Maybe manufacturing jobs will come back, once the wages in the United States fall below those in China, Pakistan, and India. If that's the goal, that plan can work. Just make sure workers in the united states get paid 15 cents an hour, and we can compete with those jobs.
If that's a goal worth pursuing, by all means, pursue it in your own state. In the meantime, I'll stick with the policies that are proven to work, where most of the country chooses to live, the places that generate the most jobs, the highest incomes, and the best standard of living. Oh, and places where there's a decent minimum wage and societal safety nets even for those just entering the economy, at the bottom of it, or unable to work.
Liberals build societies that work.
Let the hospitals, schools, colleges, libraries, and roads go to utter dog feces. Don't do anything about the polluting industries, and put them as close as possible to tenement apartments. Wait 50 years.
Tell me if that's a city you'd want to live in. Kind of reminds me of China. Great place, all Americans want to live there.
Build a different city, and ensure there are top of the line services, even if you have to charge above the standard 7 percent tax rate. Wait 50 years.
Do you want to live there?
It's not even a hard question. People who suck at governing are the people who believe governing is evil, and it must be sabotaged from the inside of an elected office.
Tax breaks don't magically create jobs. Stagnant wages don't either. But keep on believing it does. Maybe manufacturing jobs will come back, once the wages in the United States fall below those in China, Pakistan, and India. If that's the goal, that plan can work. Just make sure workers in the united states get paid 15 cents an hour, and we can compete with those jobs.
If that's a goal worth pursuing, by all means, pursue it in your own state. In the meantime, I'll stick with the policies that are proven to work, where most of the country chooses to live, the places that generate the most jobs, the highest incomes, and the best standard of living. Oh, and places where there's a decent minimum wage and societal safety nets even for those just entering the economy, at the bottom of it, or unable to work.
Liberals build societies that work.
Every time I tried to cut back on transit funding in Simcity 2000, I always regretted it.
Spoiler :
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
http://www.epi.org/blog/14-states-r...ages-of-more-than-4-6-million-working-people/
Liberal policies in action- directly impacting the pocketbooks of the people that end up spending every dime they earn, pretty much. And because it is spent in the local economy, that money gets passed around. It doesn't go in the pockets of poor people and stay there. The money ends up in the hands of businessmen and tax collectors. It all goes right back in the pockets of the rich. It simply also makes poor people's lives better before it does.
Now, watch the employment rate. Are any of these states facing a sudden economic downturn? No? Unemployment is steadily dropping. How about jobs? Number of jobs and employed persons dropping? No? How about Wall Street. Are people suddenly unable to become filthy rich? No? Highest it's ever been?
Hmm. Seems like people who don't drink the Tim Worstall kool-aid know what they're doing.
Gotta love the big rant comment at the end of that article.
"They're for high school students with no skills or financial obligations as well as retirees and stay-at-home moms who just want to keep busy and earn a little extra money. People shouldn't expect to be able to support a family out of wages from these jobs."
Then you look at the table and see it ranges from like 3 percent to over 18 percent, on average about 10 percent of each state getting impacted by it.
It's only 1 in 10 workers or more. No big deal. It doesn't help anyone.
I also find it very curious how the myth persists of the person who has no financial obligations who works at these jobs makes up any significant percentage of the workforce. Having worked dozens of jobs in several states over the past 20 years, I have run across maybe 10 people out of 1000 that had the job, but only did it to get out of the house and keep busy. A comparable amount of "high school students" as well. Everyone I knew was working full time.
Gotta love the contradiction of the "stay at home mom" who also works just to "earn a little extra money". It earns so little that you spend over half of it on a babysitter and the rest goes to a second vehicle that you then have to maintain. There were moms working those jobs, though, because the fathers of their children were earning minimum wage and required a second income to support that family. In the 1970s the wage was enough to sustain a family, as of now it isn't enough to sustain a single person in a 1 bedroom apartment.
There were precisely zero "moms" that worked just for the fun of it, or to earn a little extra spending money. 100% of them relied upon that money to pay for rent and food. Most of them required government services in order to make ends meet.
You'll note that the rising wages did not harm job creation.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/History_of_US_federal_minimum_wage_increases.svg
You'll also note that the history of the United States is one where the minimum wage rises periodically to stem inflation and to raise the standard of living for the workers who are always producing more, and more efficiently, and making the US richer than any other country, despite being not even close to the most populated.
That history is based on a premise that a person can work a job and therefore earn enough to pay for their own needs. It's not a complex idea.
A new religion is spreading throughout the conservative thought universe, which upends the established fact of what the wage floor does. They decry it as unnecessary and actually something that impedes growth, citing dogma rather than evidence to make that argument. The actual facts of what happens can be found. Not just within a state, but between states, and even outside of the United States. This is something you can study empirically. But the new religion is that prices on everything BUT labor can rise, but wages should remain stagnant or be lowered even further, because demand is caused by suppliers saving 35 cents on labor on a 10 dollar pizza, while 20 percent of the population (and rising) can no longer afford to eat a pizza because their wages don't even touch their necessary expenses.
This doesn't work in the real world.
In the real world, shrinking real wages causes demand to disappear. If you work near the wage floor, as a large percentage of the population does, you no longer take trips, see movies, or make frivolous purchases. In turn, you have a rising pool of employed persons, but less people shopping at the mall, and more people shopping at Wal-mart. Demand decreases.
It's not even hard to model why that is in your head. If you make 1200 per month in wages, and spend 1100 a month on necessary expenses, you aren't spending tons of money in the local economy. You are employed, but you're not moving the economy. If your wages were to rise by 100-200 per month, your investment in the local economy triples.
If you make 15000 per month, and suddenly save 2000 extra dollars a month in taxes, you do not go out and spend that extra 2000 a month and put it back into the economy. And if you're running a pizza joint that is not experiencing higher demand, because the only people earning more money in this economy is the top 1 percent, and everyone else is cutting back due to their chicken feed wages, then you don't take that 2000 a month and hire another person. There's no demand for it. It stays in your pocket.
You spend the 2000 a month on another worker if and only if there's a demand for at least 4000 more dollars worth of your product per month at that location. A thing which will never occur if wages are stagnant. People don't suddenly have a mountain of extra money out there for no reason. And employers don't employ people as a charity. They only do it when there's enough demand.
And if the minimum wage does go up, the employers don't pay the difference. They always raise the prices and pass on the expense. No one will lose a job if demand stays the same. And no one stops ordering pizza if the price is now $10.50 instead of $10, reflecting the extra 5 percent in labor costs of a minimum wage increase. Mostly because everyone else's wages also rise after that. So a 20 percent wage increase for the poor translated into a 5 percent rise in prices, which also translated into people earning more than the minimum also getting a wage bump, until it goes high enough up the income ladder that no one noticed the difference. If anything, demand increased, and all that money went back into the local economy. As opposed to what happens when the Waltons get to keep several million more dollars apiece when there's a tax cut, and it just sits there, far, far away from the local economies of the stores they own, creating no new jobs, and no higher incomes.
Not difficult to follow why that is. Because they have no interest in creating new jobs or higher incomes. It's not their responsibility. It's ours. We're a self-governing people.
What creates demand, jobs, and better incomes, is a well-funded and efficient system that provides needed services, and guarantees a livable starting wage. That is what exists in every liberal state. Those states do very well, population wise, and job wise, and pay into the federal government as opposed to leeching from it like the red states do. But all of this involves critical thinking and looking at data, and not swallowing Breitbart's garbage every day as if it were the gospel. The rich do own the media, and they pay Tim Worstall to type up several articles a week on why the minimum wage is bad for workers.
The problem is, some of us are dull-witted and uncritical enough to believe it.
Liberal policies in action- directly impacting the pocketbooks of the people that end up spending every dime they earn, pretty much. And because it is spent in the local economy, that money gets passed around. It doesn't go in the pockets of poor people and stay there. The money ends up in the hands of businessmen and tax collectors. It all goes right back in the pockets of the rich. It simply also makes poor people's lives better before it does.
Now, watch the employment rate. Are any of these states facing a sudden economic downturn? No? Unemployment is steadily dropping. How about jobs? Number of jobs and employed persons dropping? No? How about Wall Street. Are people suddenly unable to become filthy rich? No? Highest it's ever been?
Hmm. Seems like people who don't drink the Tim Worstall kool-aid know what they're doing.
Gotta love the big rant comment at the end of that article.
"They're for high school students with no skills or financial obligations as well as retirees and stay-at-home moms who just want to keep busy and earn a little extra money. People shouldn't expect to be able to support a family out of wages from these jobs."
Then you look at the table and see it ranges from like 3 percent to over 18 percent, on average about 10 percent of each state getting impacted by it.
It's only 1 in 10 workers or more. No big deal. It doesn't help anyone.
I also find it very curious how the myth persists of the person who has no financial obligations who works at these jobs makes up any significant percentage of the workforce. Having worked dozens of jobs in several states over the past 20 years, I have run across maybe 10 people out of 1000 that had the job, but only did it to get out of the house and keep busy. A comparable amount of "high school students" as well. Everyone I knew was working full time.
Gotta love the contradiction of the "stay at home mom" who also works just to "earn a little extra money". It earns so little that you spend over half of it on a babysitter and the rest goes to a second vehicle that you then have to maintain. There were moms working those jobs, though, because the fathers of their children were earning minimum wage and required a second income to support that family. In the 1970s the wage was enough to sustain a family, as of now it isn't enough to sustain a single person in a 1 bedroom apartment.
There were precisely zero "moms" that worked just for the fun of it, or to earn a little extra spending money. 100% of them relied upon that money to pay for rent and food. Most of them required government services in order to make ends meet.
You'll note that the rising wages did not harm job creation.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/History_of_US_federal_minimum_wage_increases.svg
You'll also note that the history of the United States is one where the minimum wage rises periodically to stem inflation and to raise the standard of living for the workers who are always producing more, and more efficiently, and making the US richer than any other country, despite being not even close to the most populated.
That history is based on a premise that a person can work a job and therefore earn enough to pay for their own needs. It's not a complex idea.
A new religion is spreading throughout the conservative thought universe, which upends the established fact of what the wage floor does. They decry it as unnecessary and actually something that impedes growth, citing dogma rather than evidence to make that argument. The actual facts of what happens can be found. Not just within a state, but between states, and even outside of the United States. This is something you can study empirically. But the new religion is that prices on everything BUT labor can rise, but wages should remain stagnant or be lowered even further, because demand is caused by suppliers saving 35 cents on labor on a 10 dollar pizza, while 20 percent of the population (and rising) can no longer afford to eat a pizza because their wages don't even touch their necessary expenses.
This doesn't work in the real world.
In the real world, shrinking real wages causes demand to disappear. If you work near the wage floor, as a large percentage of the population does, you no longer take trips, see movies, or make frivolous purchases. In turn, you have a rising pool of employed persons, but less people shopping at the mall, and more people shopping at Wal-mart. Demand decreases.
It's not even hard to model why that is in your head. If you make 1200 per month in wages, and spend 1100 a month on necessary expenses, you aren't spending tons of money in the local economy. You are employed, but you're not moving the economy. If your wages were to rise by 100-200 per month, your investment in the local economy triples.
If you make 15000 per month, and suddenly save 2000 extra dollars a month in taxes, you do not go out and spend that extra 2000 a month and put it back into the economy. And if you're running a pizza joint that is not experiencing higher demand, because the only people earning more money in this economy is the top 1 percent, and everyone else is cutting back due to their chicken feed wages, then you don't take that 2000 a month and hire another person. There's no demand for it. It stays in your pocket.
You spend the 2000 a month on another worker if and only if there's a demand for at least 4000 more dollars worth of your product per month at that location. A thing which will never occur if wages are stagnant. People don't suddenly have a mountain of extra money out there for no reason. And employers don't employ people as a charity. They only do it when there's enough demand.
And if the minimum wage does go up, the employers don't pay the difference. They always raise the prices and pass on the expense. No one will lose a job if demand stays the same. And no one stops ordering pizza if the price is now $10.50 instead of $10, reflecting the extra 5 percent in labor costs of a minimum wage increase. Mostly because everyone else's wages also rise after that. So a 20 percent wage increase for the poor translated into a 5 percent rise in prices, which also translated into people earning more than the minimum also getting a wage bump, until it goes high enough up the income ladder that no one noticed the difference. If anything, demand increased, and all that money went back into the local economy. As opposed to what happens when the Waltons get to keep several million more dollars apiece when there's a tax cut, and it just sits there, far, far away from the local economies of the stores they own, creating no new jobs, and no higher incomes.
Not difficult to follow why that is. Because they have no interest in creating new jobs or higher incomes. It's not their responsibility. It's ours. We're a self-governing people.
What creates demand, jobs, and better incomes, is a well-funded and efficient system that provides needed services, and guarantees a livable starting wage. That is what exists in every liberal state. Those states do very well, population wise, and job wise, and pay into the federal government as opposed to leeching from it like the red states do. But all of this involves critical thinking and looking at data, and not swallowing Breitbart's garbage every day as if it were the gospel. The rich do own the media, and they pay Tim Worstall to type up several articles a week on why the minimum wage is bad for workers.
The problem is, some of us are dull-witted and uncritical enough to believe it.
Zkribbler
Deity
I don't know what you mean by :broke." Like every other state, California is required to balance its budget every year, and every year it did so. Is that "broke?" Like many other states, when the Great Recession hit, California balanced its budget by cutting spending. Is this "broke?" However, as with every other state and nation that tried austerity, California found that reduced spending strangled the economy. So Californians voted to increase taxes and increase spending. That worked.
You claim that California is "a primary beneficiary of a resurgent American economy," but you failed to explain WHY it is California which leads the nation in economic growth at twice the national average. Remember, conservative dogma claims that an economy with high taxes, high wages and heavy regulations must fail.
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
Except when they don't, like Detroit and DC.
For every example you give, there is a counter-example and a parallel example in a conservative area, like Texas. Ideologies don't build societies, motivated people do.
J
Timsup2nothin
Deity
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Naturally J assumes Texans are just innately superior people. That whole "created equal" business is just liberal propaganda in his universe.
Meanwhile, Detroit, DC, and Texas are in the same society. They can make different variations within the structure of the US monetary system, but even California isn't completely in control of our own destiny (unfortunately). Coming up on forty years of proven failure trickle down economics it's actually surprising that more places aren't showing the damage as badly as DC and Detroit as well as Kansas and Louisiana and Mississippi and etc etc.
How does pointing out that liberals at the local level can't overcome the problems caused by conservatives at higher levels disprove the point?
AppleDumplingHead
Emperor
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Humans are equal and at the same time no one is equal. In the former part of that sentence we're discussing the value of human life and dignity, and it doesn't require liberalism to respect that within other beings. The latter part is about value of merits, and while the human life itself is intrinsically valuable, one's contribution to the rest of the whole may be, and often is, decidedly not equal.
So it's a matter of this, when you point to a person, what are you saying "that is", and this gets lost in language, just as concepts I discussed in the theologian thread. "That", I feel, appropriately, in a matter of law, is a being who would like very much, for "himself", to work to relieve any manner of suffering for himself and those he views as extension of self. "That" is also a complex composite of nurture and good or bad decisions, and in that position, in that frame of mind, we are certainly not all equal, nor all all views expressed equal, nor thusly, obviously, are all actions perpetrated equal. In that understanding, there are, very much, gradients, and, in addition, those values are not static but dynamic.
If 11 people vote for president, some are female, some are minority race, one might be insane from birth defect, one might have blown her mind apart from drug abuse, one is a Yale grad, two are community college grads, one doesn't know how to read, one doesn't even speak English, two are borderline learning-deficient, some have jobs, two have actual careers, one is elderly, can we come to a genuine consensus who is best for the presidential position? No. Not on your life, because the understanding of each of these is not going to be equal in any form, yet some strive to assert each of those has a legitimate and valuable vote to cast.
This, I feel, is the largest pitfall of liberalism. It's an unfortunate aspect of a lofty idea. We have exactly the amount of liberalism represented in our Constitution for people to be appropriately represented. We don't need more stuffed in our faces, when common sense dictates otherwise. If a couple kids think they're Napoleon, we don't need all schools to suddenly be mandated to serve croissants. If a person feels slighted because someone chides them for being gay, it doesn't mean an attack on a straight person should merit lesser punishment. If a person is academically inferior, it doesn't mean he should get a free ride through life on the basis of his ethnicity. It has become madness, the pursuit to find this peaceful medium, and that madness needs to end.
So it's a matter of this, when you point to a person, what are you saying "that is", and this gets lost in language, just as concepts I discussed in the theologian thread. "That", I feel, appropriately, in a matter of law, is a being who would like very much, for "himself", to work to relieve any manner of suffering for himself and those he views as extension of self. "That" is also a complex composite of nurture and good or bad decisions, and in that position, in that frame of mind, we are certainly not all equal, nor all all views expressed equal, nor thusly, obviously, are all actions perpetrated equal. In that understanding, there are, very much, gradients, and, in addition, those values are not static but dynamic.
If 11 people vote for president, some are female, some are minority race, one might be insane from birth defect, one might have blown her mind apart from drug abuse, one is a Yale grad, two are community college grads, one doesn't know how to read, one doesn't even speak English, two are borderline learning-deficient, some have jobs, two have actual careers, one is elderly, can we come to a genuine consensus who is best for the presidential position? No. Not on your life, because the understanding of each of these is not going to be equal in any form, yet some strive to assert each of those has a legitimate and valuable vote to cast.
This, I feel, is the largest pitfall of liberalism. It's an unfortunate aspect of a lofty idea. We have exactly the amount of liberalism represented in our Constitution for people to be appropriately represented. We don't need more stuffed in our faces, when common sense dictates otherwise. If a couple kids think they're Napoleon, we don't need all schools to suddenly be mandated to serve croissants. If a person feels slighted because someone chides them for being gay, it doesn't mean an attack on a straight person should merit lesser punishment. If a person is academically inferior, it doesn't mean he should get a free ride through life on the basis of his ethnicity. It has become madness, the pursuit to find this peaceful medium, and that madness needs to end.
Zkribbler
Deity
Texas: Lousy education, lousy health care. 39th in standard of living. http://politicsthatwork.com/graphs/standard-of-living
Neonanocyborgasm
Deity
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- 4,695
States with high taxes, high wages, and strong regulations trounce states with low taxes, low wages, and few regulations.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...as-tax-experiment_us_584e19a2e4b0bd9c3dfd4e67
High taxes allow the state to invest in its people, their education, their infrastructure, their health care, their environment. This attracts businesses looking for people with high skills. Businesses like the clean environment and a workforce that is motivated to succeed. Because businesses are doing so well, they can afford to pay high wages, which leads to a high standard of living.
California is booming.Kansas and Texas are struggling
News flash. Keynesian economics works the same way today as it did since the 1930s.
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
Try this one.
https://www.oecdregionalwellbeing.org/US48.html
Texas does have six of the ten poorest counties lining the border. It is a drag on the overall ratings. However, it is also the state the most people are moving to (highest influx of citizens). California is the state the most people are moving from. Except for foreign immigration, California would have had negative growth for the last 20 years.
Where is your information on healthcare? That's new to me.
Also, consider this. California has the nation's highest poverty rate, almost 25%, allowing for cost of living.
http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article2916749.html
J
Last edited:
Zkribbler
Deity
It is just something I remembered. I just searched "health care by state" and came up with this chart:https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-best-health-care/23457/
It shows Texas as 35th. I remember it being lower, but maybe I'm thing of the health care access rate, where it's 49th.
As you point out, immigrants [mainly Asians] are flooding into the state. I remember years ago reading an LA Times article which says that 102 different languages are spoken at home in L.A. County. Elementary schools are a train wreck, but California has the best [or near best] universities in the world..
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
Timsup2nothin
Deity
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Just the other day a Stanford Grad, a Cal Tech Grad, and a Harvey Mudd Grad were turned away by the local aerospace company because of an influx of Texas Aggies.
/kidding
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
ftfy ;D
Timsup2nothin
Deity
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That wouldn't have been kidding though.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
thats why I took out the kidding part ;D
Zkribbler
Deity
I forgot you had Rice, Texas's only university in the top 50, according to US News & World Report. Of course, California has Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, USC, UCLA, UCSB, UCI, UCD,UCSD. Like Rice, their tuitions are all in the high $40s, except for USC in the low $50s, and the six listed campuses of the UC, where the tuition is less than $15k. That's the point.
