The Progressive Agenda means the Right to Earn a Living Wage for All Americans.

What is this "subsidized payroll" crap? Got any proof or are you just spewing lefty nonsense?

 

Right now those cheaper goods are the only way that hardworking Americans who are being denied a living wage can make ends meet. The rush to the bottom is gutting the middle class and expanding poverty.

Yes, the amount of labor is the problem and that is why it is not a racist issue but one of corporations violating the law of the land and being allowed to get away with it. There should be an expanded federal agency (repurpose the DEA?) tasked with enforcing that all employees are legally entitled to work in the USA and corporate execs must face mandatory jail time if they are found to be in violation. Nothing else will stop the illegal immigration.

There are a glut of workers because of the loss of a living wage that could support an entire family. Now with two full time working parents still not earning enough it has reached a critical breaking point.

And that is when things will change either for the better or the worse. We can continue to ignore the ever growing income disparity and then the worst outcome will become inevitable or we can take reasonable steps now to change course for the better.

There will be opposition to making these changes but the alternative is not worth the high price we will all be paying.

 

Oh look, more word salad that means diddly squat.

 

No problem.

You started the thread and made some claims, yet refused to give details about how your plan should be implemented. Instead, you gave a vague response of "paying the bills". Do you not realize there is a huge difference between individuals' bills, so "paying the bills" has no meaning when used to establish what a "living wage" would be? Some people are able to live on the current minimum wage. Bill Gates' bills are considerably higher. Paying the bills for some means $200 a month for cigarettes, $200 a month for alcohol, and $200 a month for dope, and $200 a month for the latest and greatest cell phone, and $100 a month for cable tv. Are we to include that in the living wage?

You act like those of us who question your plan are not very intelligent, but your unwillingness to flesh out your plan must mean that you are very naive about how things work. When you say "pay the bills" but refuse to go into detail, I can only think that you believe in "from each according to ability, to each according to need."

 

Alt right DOG WHISTLES duly noted and ignored for derogatory reasons.

 

I think this gets back to the "paying the bills" issue. We must define what a living wage is. You claim that two full time working parents can't earn enough to support a family. They could if they lived within their means. The problem isn't the wage, it is that some people want too much luxury and come to expect it as an entitlement. They want luxury, but aren't willing to put in the sacrifice and hard work to obtain it - because "they deserve it." If you want a "living wage," then go out and earn it. Millions of people do it already.

 

Are you saying that no one wastes money? Do you include these things in your "living wage"? Please define what it takes to "live".

 

Progressives work??????????????????????

 

In the United States where we have Constitutional rights, capitalism and a free market system.

 

And this touches on why we must be careful what we do to business and producers. The more we have in this country, the more opportunity is created. When they all run out of the country to produce their goods, we become a low-wage service industry economy.

It is always interesting and satisfying when a liberal and conservative can just keep talking on a rational and unemotional level and find areas of agreement. I have been saying this for a long time; that illegal immigration hurts workers and that we should use e-verify to work. All workers, citizens and legal immigrants, would eventually receive a picture ID card with a chip in it. Employers could insert the card into a chip reader and click on "Send". The system would verify citizenship or legal status. If you didn't have the card, you couldn't work. If you overstayed your visa, you couldn't work, etc. The chip could even contain a digital fingerprint, and the employer could have a fingerprint reader. Yes, we do have that technology.

Once this system was fully instituted, it would be very difficult to get by in this country if you were not here legally. And yes, employers who deliberately break the law should be prosecuted. Penalties should be progressive for repeated violations.

I think this would dry up the flow of illegals into this country, and then we could control the flow of legal immigrants and not end up with a glut of workers willing to work for peanuts.

It's not a race issue; it's an economic one. If all those Latinos were lily white and spoke English, but everything else was the same, we would be facing the same economic problems they cause the country. One thing I wish liberals would do is to stop accusing people who want strong borders and strong immigration procedures of being racists. We're not. We are anti-crime, pro-safety, and pro-worker.

 

Having agreed that we need to clamp down on corporations violating the law of the land we can get back to the issue of corporate jobs moving out of the nation.

There is an interesting inner city program in Ohio. In essence they took a look at the jobs that could not move out of the city since they were essentially part of the infrastructure of the city itself albeit owned by corporations. There was a large hospital and it handled the needs of the people who lived and worked in the city itself. They formed a worker owned corporation to handle all of the services that the hospital required such as laundry and meals. This worker owned corporation paid living wages and returned all profits to the workers themselves. The net effect of this was that corporate profits that would normally have gone to shareholders elsewhere now remained within the inner city itself. This meant that the people living in the inner city now had disposable income to spend on upgrading their own standard of living. It also meant that the city tax base increased because more workers were making more money. That resulted in more funding for schools and infrastructure.

This model of worker owned corporations scales all the way up to competitive multinationals like Mondragon that was growing profits when other corporations were laying off millions of workers after the 2008 economic collapse.

There is no reason why worker owned corporations cannot be formed WITHIN the United States to replace the corporations that will leave when we make these legislative changes. The net benefits are that hardworking Americans will receive living wages and bonuses in the form of profits providing them with disposable income that would otherwise have gone out of circulation. Local, state and the federal government will see higher tax revenues which again remains within the nation and goes towards infrastructure and other beneficial programs.

There is no law that requires that only for profit corporations must have exclusive rights to our economy in order to extort the maximum in shareholder dividends. We the People can choose to keep the profits of our labors to ourselves and make far better use of them than they are currently doing sitting in the offshore bank accounts of the wealthy 1% elite.

We do NOT need for profit corporations to create jobs and opportunities when we can do it for ourselves for the benefit of ourselves. In fact the net result is not only more jobs and opportunities but a better future for our children and grandchildren.

FTR none of the above is socialist because it is based entirely upon capitalism and competes on the open capitalist markets we currently have in place. All that changes is how the corporations function. Rather than exploiting hardworking Americans and removing profits from our economy the worker owned corporations are the epitome of self reliance and entrepreneurship and increase the quality of life for everyone rather than just the 1%.

 

Most countries have some type of constitution and capitalism versus socialism is kind of the whole point of this thread.

 

Most shitholes do, yes.

 

Yes, like South Africa where the President of South Africa wants to change their constitution to strip white farmers of their land.

 

I debunked you I was not debunked and I proved evidence proving it.

 

I have never supported a republican but nice try.

And he is not. He is even more foolish than any republican politician.

 

There is no such theft of wealth from the poor and middle class.

You did in fact advocate redistribution of wealth.

Everyone with a wage makes a living wage as has been proven here on this thread.

 

All facts not dogwhistles.

Ignored because as always you lack the intelligence to refute those facts.

 

Facts that lefties do not like are called "triggers".....

 

Seth, thank you for the above, it made me realize that I got off to a bad start with the OP. The topic of this thread does interest me, so I will continue to discuss it, even though there is a good possibility that the OP has me on ignore.

To the OP, or anyone else who cares to answer:

Concerning this living wage, would it be similar to the minimum wage that currently exists in the United States, only higher?

Would it be mandated globally, nationally, at the state level, or locally?

Would it be an across-the-board minimum that an employer could pay, or would it vary by occupation?

 

So are you saying that most countries with constitutions are shitholes or that most shithole countries have constitutions?

 

So you wouldn't want to live in South Africa, even though it has a lower cost of living?

 

I got this far in your answer to me, and this sentence raised some concerns and questions.

What legislative changes?

I don't want to run off the corporations. I want to do everything we can to make doing business here in the U.S. attractive to business. I want it to be so attractive that they'll want to locate here, and, at the same time, I want us to have a shortage of workers so they'll compete for them. Meanwhile, the country can use controlled and targeted immigration to provide just enough workers so that new businesses may operate, but not with a wage-killing glut of workers.

I am certainly not opposed to the concept of worker-owned companies. I would be opposed to having laws mandating how a business is run, however. "For profit" and "worker owned" companies can coexist, can't they?

 

What you believe has nothing to do with philosophy. Philosophy is about finding objective truth.

You mention a modest apartment, cheap used car, food, clothing to get by, and that is what you think a full-time job should pay. The first problem is that you're starting from a subjective goal and trying to make your idea something that ought to be. This is Hume's is-ought problem. You've made a statement of what ought to be from what is. What "is" is the fact that a lot of full-time jobs don't pay enough for those things. It might be a nice idea, I'm sure, but you can't automatically get an ought from an is. There is a crucial step missing which is getting to an ought from an is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem

Not everybody agrees that something ought to be done to reduce the murder rate in Chicago. Most notably the people committing all those murders might disagree with you, although you might find a more receptive audience in the cemeteries.

The "is" (objective truth) is that a lot of people choose to live in the worst parts of Chicago, and quite a few people who choose to live there also choose to make it what you and I would call a pretty bad place to live, which is why we choose to live somewhere else. You might think that they ought to change, but I don't live there so I'm quite happy they all choose to live near each other. I think of them as roaches in an apartment complex. It might be nice if there weren't any roaches anywhere in the apartment complex, but there are. Let's just be happy that they're happy to stay where they are.

Would it be ethical for the people in roach free apartments within the building to force their way into the roach apartment armed with cans of raid and start spraying the place down until there isn't a single roach left? The roaches might not be very happy, and neither would the tenant (Rahm Emanuel is the roach hotel tenant).

It seems to me that the ethical thing to do is build a wall around the city. They're happy killing each other, we're happy they're not killing us, and everybody gets what they want. It's a win-win.

 

Thanks for the feedback, Belch. Agree or disagree, I always find your remarks worth the read. Cheers!