@Baldimo,
Baldimo:
Why not I'm sure you believed Obama when he said "If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance..."
Until Congress works on the plan or any plan all I can really do pass judgement on the outline.
Me: It's pretty simple to figure out whether it will reduce your own taxes or not. And with brackets being reduced to three for the benefit of the rich, it is also pretty easy to see what it would do to the tax bill of others, too. In addition, there is plenty of commentary out there from tax experts in government who have examined the idea. You don't have to just trust. This is not big enough to be even a shadow of the ACA.
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Me: Is it "their own money?
You: Why wouldn't it be?
Me:Do you realize that productivity and incomes of the top 1% went way, way up in the last 15 years but workers' real wages have been flat for 30 years?
Baldimo:
I keep hearing that but no one actually proves it except to use the min wage as their argument. The implication is that no one has increased their income in 30 years outside of min wage going up. I don't think that is actually true.
Me: Actually there is no "implication". The statement is clear itself. Maybe you don't know the difference between "real wages" and "nominal wages".
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Baldimo:
I know what a basic technical support person makes and I have a good idea of what advanced technical support people make. I can tell you that there is a big difference in skills required to fix someone's home email password and fixing an entire companies digital storage array's, I know this because I have done both jobs over the last 18 years and the more I know how to do the more I get paid and the better jobs I get. 15 years ago someone working a help desk made more money then the people who do that work today. Why is this? It's easy work and people with those basic skills are a dime a dozen so they are paid less than their predecessors who had rare knowledge.
Me: Right and I was a software developer P/A for 22 years. Tracking each person's income as they develop their skills and their value to business is not a valid indicator of the performance of wages over time. Being a person with an analytical background and career, I'm sure you see that.
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Baldimo:
Didn't those workers participate in producing that increased productivity and increased income of the top 1%? The top 1% didn't share it. If both CEO and worker participated in increasing productivity, shouldn't both benefit from the increase?
I think you are giving "workers" more credit than is warranted. The last 30 years has seen a major increase in automation which has fueled the increase of productivity. There are less workers today getting more done because of automation, have you ever watched an episode of How It's Made?
Who do you think is paying for the creation and production of automation machines, the worker or the person/persons who operate the company?
Me: Automation is irrelevant to my point, which you didn't understand. So allow me to elaborate.
When a person starts a business, he starts either with a personal investment to fund it, or a bank loan. In most cases it's a bank loan. And at the start on day one, he has no business income. He hires people to do work. He, himself, works doing various tasks from production along with the employees to planning strategies for marketing and organizing. And he earns money. From the money coming in he allocates for different needs and purposes: wages, debt amortization, rent, utilities, services, maintenance, future expansion, and profit to name a few.
Who produced the money to pay for all that? Answer: they all did. The owner contributed the concept and planning and the worker provided his work as directed. So that is where the money for growth and expansion, the money to pay off the start-up costs and debt, and the money for the profit came from. The workers had a role in creating all that.
And when the company has grown to a multi-national corporation with annual sales of hundreds of millions of dollars, it is still a fact that the workers had a role in creating all that. But they had NO SAY in what to do with the income and profits. If the workers did 80% of the work and the business owner's planning, strategy, and marketing accounted for the remaining 20% of the value of that corporation by some particular metric, then we have to ask ourselves why it is that the owners (in a corporation the top executives and the Board members) own 100% of the business PLUS they get an income that is much, much greater than what the top managing employee is paid. They all created it together, but most of it goes to the owner. THAT is "the growth of business under capitalism."
So I then said:
"And actually, if you understand growth of businesses under capitalism, you would know that the workers were responsible for most of that income increase and most of the value of the company. But you don't understand that."
To which you quickly replied:
"I explained above why I think this comment is crap." But you didn't understand my original comment, so your answer here was wrong in relation to it.
