How do you know this? In order to know if a person can reduce his bills, you need to know about him, his lifestyle, and his living arrangements. Where does he live? How many roommates does he share rent with? What food does he purchase? Does he cook from scratch, buy convenience foods, or eat fast food? Does he buy beer or cigarettes? Where does he acquire his clothing? Does he have cable TV? An iPhone? A car? If you want to flatly state that a person can't reduce his bills, then you have to tell me everything about him and his lifestyle. I'll find a way for him to reduce his bills. He should increase his personal capital so he can apply for a higher paying position. You are aware that there are higher paying positions, right?
A second job can add additional income too. There's no law stopping a person from working more than 40 hours a week. I worked a total of 5840 hours one year.
Have you ever taken the time to understand what a living wage is by definition? You will note from that definition your questions become fundamentally moot. The minimum-mandatory cost of living isn't based upon the individual person or their personal expenditures. The Living Wage is a quantified amount based upon the costs of what are considered essential expenditures for households. Please refer to the MIT Living Wage Calculator that was created based upon a scientific survey of the varying costs throughout the country. There are no better minds than those a MIT that spent huge amounts of research time to accomplish this massive undertaking. Review the Living Wage Calculator and you'll learn a little bit about the listed (minimum) costs throughout the country http://livingwage.mit.edu/ Of note I don't agree 100% with the MIT analysis although I can't provide a compelling argument against any specific value assigned. What I disagree with is that MIT only addressed "annual" expenditures but a working person must also be funding lifetime expenditures during their working career that they will have to fund when they're no longer working (e.g. retirement accounts). Typically financial experts state that a person should be investing 10% of their annual income for retirement that would need to be added to the MIT amounts listed. We also have to note that the MIT calculator is highly complex because it covers so many different family demographic and every county in every state in the United States. This obviously has to all be compressed into a single value that can be used across the nation regardless of the family. It's ends up being a compromise solution similar to my Exemption for the income tax. So let's see. Many enterprises require janitorial services so someone has to do that work for the enterprise. So how are they supposed to increase their "personal capital" and increase their income as a janitor and how much can they logically increase they wages in this profession. Don't try to give me some crap about changing professions because being the janitor is a very respectable profession but the median hourly pay for a "Custodian Janitor" is only $10/hr and can be as low as $8.24/hr according to the research I've done. So we have a legitimate job category and you're saying that the person fulfilling this job description can increase their "personal capital" and earn a living wage so please explain how they will do this. "Go find another job" doesn't cut it because that's not increasing their "personal capital" relative to the job being discussed. How does the janitor earn a living wage is the question that has to be answered?
You're grasping at straws. There are those that aren't earning a living working two jobs and, as a person that worked "unlimited" overtime for years, the physical and mental capabilities are limited to about 50-55 hours a week over an indefinite period of time. Sometimes I worked more per week but it was never over a period longer than about three weeks because eventually you become totally exhausted. We can also note that time between jobs must also be accounted for as "unpaid" hours worked. Then there are some that can't even work a full 40 hours because they might be a parent and the cost of childcare after school is more expensive than the wages they receive. It would be a losing financial situation if they work more hours.
Well that doesn't fit with what you said, or with my point at all. You said: "They can't reduce their bills[...]" As I said in my prior post, you don't know that they can't reduce their bills without knowing their current situation and what they could do to reduce their expenditures. You said people can't reduce their expenses. This is a blanket statement not based in fact. I really don't care what figure someone calls "minimum-mandatory". If a person has expenses that are higher than his income, he needs to figure out a way to reduce his expenses or increase his income. If being a janitor doesn't pay him what he needs, he needs to increase his human capital so that he can find employment in a different job category.
Not enough "corporate raiding in it for you"? Structural unemployment happens. Why complain now. - - - Updated - - - why do you believe other nations would not "retaliate" with tariffs of their own; and potentially escalate into a "tariff war"? Why do you believe something as unrelated as tariffs, would have the effect of increasing wages?
Here is what the US, should be specializing in: In their model, trade allowed countries like America to economise on labour, by concentrating on capital-intensive activities that made little use of it. Industries that required large amounts of elbow grease could be left to foreigners. In this way, trade alleviated labour scarcity. Source: http://www.economist.com/news/econo...s-stolper-samuelson-theorem-inconvenient-iota It isn't like the wealthiest don't have enough money.
When was that? That has never been true, from a purely, capitalist perspective. Crony capitalism is the best we can hope for. Corporate raiding even liquidates pension funds, in some cases. That happens merely for the sake of the profit of lucre. Increasing the minimum wage increases the standard of living of the least wealthy, and should "trickle up".
Why do the rich always want to become richer, faster. Why do you believe spending more discretionary income sooner, rather than later when possibly inflated, is what the least wealthy tend to do. In any case, the inflation canard is just that. There are not enough minimum wage jobs to make inflation, that bad. Quantitative easing didn't do it; why should labor providing "commodity input" to the economy, be any worse?
structural unemployment happens in a free market, and in highly competitive real capitalism new jobs are readily available to replace those lost. not when communism adopts a living wage with government force to fix the crony capitalism of too big to fail companies. a good negotiator with many years of experience as a successful free market capitalist will ensure other nations don't retaliate in a tariff war, and everyone walks away with what they are entitled too. America has more leverage in negotiations with many other countries because it is a resource rich land, which is why it is the leader of the free world today. structural unemployment happens when jobs are outsourced for cheap labor, and immigrants come to work for cheap labor. tariffs raise wages by forcing America's free market to employ Americans, who are not known to work for peanuts. this will balance the budget by creating more high wage jobs with people who are net contributors and pay taxes, and less net recipients who work for low wages whose taxes don't go toward the budget, or don't work at all.
I thought it was because we were the first nation to develop nuclear weapons, then went on to spend ten-times more than any other nation on our military, and finally used military interventionism and threats as opposed to diplomacy in our foreign affairs. Of course economically China has recently passed the United States but it's not a part of the "free world" which was a nefarious criteria limiting comparisons. Not that I'd use China as an example but then I wouldn't use the United States either.
I am not sure why you believe new jobs are readily available under "highly competitive" capitalism. Most third world economies simply don't have the government we do; and, they also don't have the standard of living we do. What we have had for over a generation, is a War on Poverty. easier said than done when our politicians feel they can "fail at diplomacy" simply because they have recourse to our exorbitantly expensive, superpower. structural unemployment happens, regardless. why complain when it actually improves our standard of living? a fifteen dollar an hour also raises wages; along with fourteen dollars an hour for unemployment compensation, simply for being unemployed, to solve simply poverty and the capital effects, of Capitalism's, natural rate of unemployment. a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage will also help capitalists discover more modern solutions at potentially, lower cost.
actually we are leader of free world because our Founders believed in freedom, as do modern Republicans, and unlike modern libturd Democrats who believe in govt. 1+1=2. Why do you think they spied for Stalin??
wrong, America is the greatest country in human history by far. We are empire of liberty as Jefferson said. If our system was not far far superior 1000 Vietnams would have eaten us alive long ago as would our own internal dissension. Now do you understand.
And 'THAT' is a fact! That applies not only to individuals but to governments as well in keeping with this threads topic of balancing a budget.
“Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none.” ~ Thomas Jefferson The United States of today is hardly the nation that Thomas Jefferson advocated.
This is one of the most delusional statements ever because Republicans of today are opposed to most of what the founder of America stood for. For example the founders created the Constitutional secular government for the United States but today 57% of Republicans want to dismantle the US Constitution and impose a Christian theocracy in America. http://www.politicususa.com/2015/02...stitution-christianity-national-religion.html The political ideology for America was contained in two lines from the Declaration of Independence and Republicans today oppose that ideology. Republican today believe that only "White US citizens" have rights and they openly oppose the "Liberty" of people to peacefully immigrate from other nations to the United States. George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson all supported open borders for the United States but Republicans today oppose it. The Declaration of Independence clearly establishes that all of those subjected to the authority of government (all permanent citizen and non-citizen residents) should be entitled to provide "consent" to the government but Republicans oppose non-citizen voting. In fact both Article I and the 17th Amendment specifically states that members of Congress are to be elected by the "People" and not just the "Citizens" of the United States and the people are counted every ten years by the US Census and includes all of the citizen and non-citizen permanent residents of the United States. The 14th Amendment include the "equal protection" clause and just yesterday the GOP in the House voted to continue to allow discrimination against LGBT people by private contractors of the US government. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/house-lgbt-amendment-discrimination-fight-223366 In 2012 the Supreme Court struck down Section 4b of the Voting Rights Act that established criteria to protect the Right to Vote for minorities based upon the 14th and 15th Amendments solely because the criteria was from 1964 and out of date. The GOP controlled House and Senate have refused to address creating a new criteria to protect the Right to Vote and have, at the state level, been passing Voter ID laws that the Federal Courts are having to strike down because they're discriminatory laws preventing minorities to vote in violation of the 15th Amendment. The National Motto of the United States established in 1776 was E Pluribus Unum ("From Many, One") but Republicans are opposed to multiculturalism where the "many" come together in support of "one" political ideology. The Republican Party of today can't even claim to be the Party of Lincoln because it's become the Party of Andrew Johnson that made the infamously racist statement, "This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men." Republicans oppose the "Natural Right of Property" as expressed by John Locke and instead embrace the "Ownership of Property Established by Title" that was a (conservative) holdover from the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. Virtually everything expressed in the Political Ideology for America that the founders stood for the Republican Party of today opposes.
because, he was starting to goad us into the Best form of Socialism in the World. Some on the left, simply took up the challenge. Not our fault the right prefers to make a profit through lucre, for capitalizing on the "hellish conditions of warfare on Earth".
I believe we should compete with the Chinese in building new cities, simply to lower our tax burden for section 8 costs.
competition does not include giving all of our living wage manufacturing jobs away to China so they surpass us economically, because the rich in America are invested in developing economies instead of our own.
rich liberals like Clinton sent jobs away to china under NAFTA with their rich conservative friends, it had nothing to do with liberal policies just getting slave labor from poor foreigners.
When I first moved to Asia my son and I lived on $3 a day for a year just to see what it was like. We rented a house, paid our utility bills and ate quite well. The company I had retired from was hiring there and paying a starting wage of about $3 an hour. Considering that most people applying for the jobs had been earning a little less than $3 per day performing hard labour, I wouldn't call it slave labour or slave wages but far much less than the wages that were previously paid to those performing that job in the U.S. A few decades later the wages have not increased that much but neither has the cost of living. And I now live comfortably and well on about $10 a day, but occasionally splurge and buy a new computer or something else non-essential. While I would not place the blame solely on Liberals or Conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, I would place it primarily on government. There's little difference between politicians who continue to get elected.
you need to do some research on economics. simply increasing our wages to beat the cost of social services will improve our standard of living; especially when combined with better utilization of unemployment compensation resources.
