Job Losses Spike, 1/3 Can't Pay Rent, Depression Imminent

1) define 'acceptable' (hint: acceptable means you can afford it. if you can't afford it, its unacceptable .. both to you, and to the broader community - who will have to pick you up when your poor choices go pear-shaped).

2) fresh food is readily available all over the First World. rice and beans can be bought everywhere, and fresh in season fruit and vegetables are always cheap and plentiful. want animal protein? buy cans of low sodium tuna and eggs.

3) everyone has access to electricity, don't they? either on grid, or via solar. explain yourself!

4) make do with public transport if you can't afford a car. or live somewhere you can walk to everything you need.

5) public schools exist everywhere. we're all free to make the most of them and excel. it doesn't take money or luck, it just takes commitment and hard work.

 

You are correct. Because ultimately the idea that the "corps" are paying for those taxes is an illusion. WE are paying for them, and they're just collecting them, from us, and remitting them to the government. What makes it even more insidious is that most people don't realize it, and it's a hidden tax (on us) that we have no way of calculating how much it costs us. The only difference from these taxes and run of the mill sales taxes is that sales taxes are itemized on your bill.

 

They won't be in business for very long if they don't. It's just like COGS. We pay for that too, even if the business we bought the stuff from is writing an aggregate check to the wholesaler or manufacturer of whatever "stuff" we're talking about.

 

Acceptable: above poverty employment for all, in a world of plenty. Get back to me when incarceration rates for blacks are similar to whites.

Unacceptable: Increasing starvation around the world, in a world of plenty.

There's plenty of food in the world. The problem is not everyone can afford to buy it.

Not everyone can afford it. Pensioners staying in bed to keep warm in Australia is well known.

Yep .. GD stuff, people hitchhiking around the countryside all over again. You're a real charmer...

"Your schools and hospitals are broken , .....your young men are in prison". Trump.

Go back to your knitting, Madame Defarge.

 

Significant foreign content ? Mmmmm OK...
Let's start with - Stop buying Plastic products and clothes from the country that brought Corona to the world
Buy USA made !!

 

That's because the dysfunctional neoliberal system requires a level of unemployment (NAIRU) to keep inflation in check. Unemployment... the ultimate definition of "non-productive".

btw, Your idea of "productive" is as sterile as your concept of survival.

Tell that to the producers (of endless consumer junk) that would go broke, taking out millions of jobs with them if advertising was eradicated (which it should be.) But the Arts may be very productive, enhancing the quality of the community's intellectual and spiritual life.

Those factors you described as productive may only - or need only - account for a small proportion of the economy and the nation's wealth, as AI and IT and automation proceed. eg, food production requires c. 2% of the workforce these days.

Except in your world, where you want everyone living in poverty to move to the countryside and support themselves by growing their own food.....

Given that poverty in cities causes demoralization which is a factor in crime, then poverty will have to be eradicated by government intervention. That will require overturning the neoliberal UNemployment system.

That's why equality of opportunity is a guaranteed job, after the individual reaches his highest potential grade.

Yes, a meritocracy, with guaranteed minimum above-poverty participation, regardless of where you live.

Everyone wants to work. And a spot at maintaining a public park certainly beats poverty level welfare.

Like I said, given the private sector can never create enough above poverty jobs, whether as employer or employee, then the government needs to step in.

Poverty causes demoralization, which is a factor in crime. Read Les Miserables. Everyone wants to work. Get back to me when black incarceration rates are the same as for whites.

 

Hey, we have clean air, well sorta, and our rivers don't burn. There's that.

 

I spoke of shirts, you wear coffee?

 

Or they'll be less profitable.

Very true. Taxes are just another business cost.

 

Consumers can punish them by buying goods from other producers--when they can figure out some or all of it was made in China.

 

You drink shirts?

 

No, you shifted gears and went off the deep end of the coffee cup. Imported coffee is not the problem but imported shirts destroyed an industry.

 

You don't know about "fair trade" coffee, do you?

 

Probably not. What kind of liberal unicorn poop would that be?

 

Have your ever been to Australia?

Today it's 57F in Melbourne, 59F in Sydney, 64F in Perth, and 68F in Brisbane. This is their equivalent to our January 12.

 

You got all worked up over Third World wages and you don't know about fair trade coffee. Hmmm. Seems as though you only care about foreign workers when you want to put them out of a job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade_coffee

 

But the rest oif the planet managed to get through the first wave

The entire globe knows we wuck donkey balls at pandemics.. Wish we had kept Oblakman's Pandemic Research Council. couple of hundred mil might have saved us trillions in debt

 

I tried to get into Oz once.. Customs asked me if I had a criminal record.. I asked "Do I Need One?"

 

1) You spoke specifically of acceptable HOUSING. I asked you for your definition of acceptable housing, and gave you mine. Mine is correct, of course. Housing is unacceptable if you can't afford it, and rely on hard-working strangers (ie, the state) to subsidise it.

2) Exactly. Yet you're worried about fat Americans (and Australians) who blow all their dough on burgers, meat, and convenience foods, then complain they can't afford spinach.

3) Even the poorest First Worlder can easily afford the cheapest (and healthiest) diet on earth: rice, beans, in-season fruit & vegetables.

4) Why aren't those pensioners living with family, if they can't even afford electricity? Why aren't their families helping them pay for electricity? How did those pensioners end up in a situation where almost everything was done wrong? IOW, failure to live with family, and failure to raise family which would later meet their costs, and failure to save money for old age to cover the cost of electricity? Asian and other migrant families would never let this happen. This is a SOCIAL failure, not a Govt failure. This is just people choosing unwisely. Preserve your empathy for those who are genuine, and don't make such terrible life decisions.

5) On the contrary, our schools and hospitals are great. At least they are in this country ... America is another story.

 

Where did coffee enter the conversation about offshoring our manufacturing base? My example of cheap foreign goods undercutting American goods was shirts. How did you get on the coffee bs I don't believe I ever said we shouldn't import coffee.

 

1) If you can't find work, make yourself a job in the family collective. Do all the cooking and cleaning etc, so that those who work outside in the world can focus on their jobs. How do you think people survive in the Third World? Not by sitting down and whining. They go out and collect crap to sell to crap merchants. They raise chickens. They do whatever they have to do, but they never sit down. That's productivity.

2) My idea of productive is predicated purely on survival, and my concept of survival is food and housing.That's the limit of any Govt's business, after all. Provide the tools for survival to the people. We live in democracies, so we get to choose whether we'll use those tools or not, and how much we use them. Remember always ... freedom to choose means freedom to fail. You cannot insist 'everyone wins' without making yourself a dictator. North Korea. Interfere with peoples' free choices beyond that and you are overreaching in outrageously paternalistic fashion.

3) The arts? People are starving, you know. Why do you 'alternative model' types always think like aristocrats?

4) On the contrary, I'm very glad that so many people are prepared to risk living in cities. Freedom of choice, remember. If their lives implode due to economic collapse and/or pandemics, they will have chosen that fate. We'd never risk it. Way too expensive, and we would always want the means of feeding ourselves in a complete collapse.

5) How will you force people to take those jobs? What will you do when they refuse to work?

6) See number five, above.

7) Seriously, you have to be kidding when you say that everyone wants to work. Open your eyes, guy. And even if in some fantasy world everyone DID want to work, how are you going to force them to take the job cleaning the park, when they want an office job or nothing?

8 ) Bullsh!t. Poverty does NOT cause crime. The Third World is full of very poor people who never commit crime. Poverty and crime in the First World are both due to the same thing - excess. Excess of safety and privilege. It's failure to think in terms of survival. It's thinking like an aristocrat - sneering at the boring and colourless self-discipline of the peasant.

 

In a way... in 2014 CIA economist Jim Rickards warned us that something like this might soon be attempted by China and her allies.

FORGET IRAN, IRAQ, UKRAINE
THIS IS WHERE WWIII STARTS...

 

Australia is a very nice country.

 

Given most of our white folk are descended from criminals.

 

Fact: currency-issuing governments CAN (with minor changes of rules re reserve bank and treasury) spend money into the private sector, without taxing or borrowing from the private sector.

[The constraints the government faces are available resources and the nation's (public and private sector) productivity].

Now the rest of your post is merely a reflection of your ideology that personal responsibility ALONE determines outcomes for individuals. That is incorrect. We have 2 centuries of discrimination - still with us in the form of employment discrimination - against blacks that proves your ideology to be wrong.

So, given my first paragraph above, government can eliminate this employment discrimination with a jog guarantee.....at no cost to you.

Nothing to do with "aristocratic thinking"; in fact in 1790 the aristocracy in France lost their heads for insisting personal responsibility is the only factor in determining outcomes....that is the "aristocratic thinking".