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Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

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Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#131

Post by onetimemanytime »

downandout wrote: post #108
onetimemanytime wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Taxpayers not only recouped everything from the 2008 bailouts, they actually earned a $15.3 billion profit. How is that “socializing their biggest failures”? Taxpayers should have behaved like hedge funds behave with one another...merciless. Want cash cause no one else loans to you? Sure, hand 95% of the business. The difference between what I said and $15.3 Billion is the gift.

The government is not a hedge fund. It has no expertise in running businesses. Had they done what your are suggesting, the markets wouldn’t have reacted the way they did, the companies would have gone bankrupt under government mismanagement, the economy would have continued to crater, and not $1 of the money would have been recovered. It turns out that the architects of this bailout were very smart about the way they…

>>Had they done what your are suggesting, the markets wouldn’t have reacted the way they did, the companies would have gone bankrupt under government mismanagement, the economy would have continued to crater, and not $1 of the money would have been recovered.

Nah. Keep the management, they run the business not owners. In fact give them raises and bonuses. It's not like managers had other employment options.

But either way, they did get a lifesaving bailout, regardless of the merits or whether US got their money back

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#132

Post by jbverschoor »

Aunche wrote: post #123
stretchwithme wrote: post #64

A society with no technology has hardly any wealth gap. People who can leverage multiple technologies can multiply their efforts. Mass communication, mass distribution and automation of all sorts. But Wall Street bonuses are subsidized by the fact the government socializes their biggest failures. Bailouts just encourage them to take greater risks, leveraging debt in dangerous ways that will blow up the system again.

> Bailouts just encourage them to take greater risks, leveraging debt in dangerous ways that will blow up the system again. In practice, this hasn't happened. As a whole, financial institutions are more risk-adverse than ever. Keep in mind, that they don't want another Dodd-Frank.

Why do you think so? The whole GME thing could potentially bring infinite losses

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#133

Post by speedplane »

WalterBright wrote: post #114
speedplane wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Billionaires are criminal by definition Sadly, billionaires aren’t criminal by definition (no such laws), but the existence of billionaires sure does cut against the idea of a perfect market (in a “perfect” market there cannot be profits).

> in a “perfect” market there cannot be profits I'm curious what your definition of a perfect market is. In free markets, without profits the companies will fail.

There is a mathematically based definition of a perfect market. It’s only an approximation of real life, but it’s heavily used: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/perfectcompetition.asp

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#134

Post by xupybd »

silverpepsi wrote: post #82
xupybd wrote: post #14

NZ just raised our min wage to $20 an hour. I work at least 50 hours a week. A teenager at MacDonalds now earns a good fraction of my income if they work the same hours. Despite my 4 year degree, near decade of experience and the responsibility's that I hold.

Market signals can't go backwards in time so I feel like everyone replying is looking at this the wrong way. The learning here is that some fraction of new versions of this gentleman or lady xupybd will have a stronger market incentive to not go to the trouble and risk and just go for the guaranteed $20/hr making more competition for the $20 hr no education jobs. Maybe the higher IQ people will push average teenagers…

Exactly this. I was working low wage jobs 6 days a week. That made me realize I couldn't support a family living like that. I went and got an engineering degree.

I'm not sure I would have done that now.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#135

Post by vixen99 »

speedplane wrote: post #103
rStar wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

billionaires are criminal by definition, and their existence proves the absence of a (econ 101 style) market in whatever industry they came from. we can only fix this problem through efficient regulation of monopolies.

> Billionaires are criminal by definition Sadly, billionaires aren’t criminal by definition (no such laws), but the existence of billionaires sure does cut against the idea of a perfect market (in a “perfect” market there cannot be profits).

So which particular billionaire-funded business adventures would you like to see abandoned or especially, never begun?

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#136

Post by donw »

f6v wrote: post #111
stretchwithme wrote: post #64

A society with no technology has hardly any wealth gap. People who can leverage multiple technologies can multiply their efforts. Mass communication, mass distribution and automation of all sorts. But Wall Street bonuses are subsidized by the fact the government socializes their biggest failures. Bailouts just encourage them to take greater risks, leveraging debt in dangerous ways that will blow up the system again.

What kind of technology enabled wealth gap in feudal society? It seems it was more about religion being used to subdue people.

> What kind of technology enabled wealth gap in feudal society?

In short: Weapons.

On the pre-gunpowder battlefield, the mounted, armored knight was roughly equivalent to the modern light tank.

It is incredibly hard to take out an armored knight with the kind of weapons or tools which would have been available to peasants or serfs, so it doesn't take that many knights to keep enough peasants in-line to build a very wealthy kingdom.

Religion during this era functioned much more like the modern civil service than what you or I would recognize as a church, and this also included both education and state security functions.

When firearms became commonplace, this game totally changed. Previously, weapons, even the longbow, took years to master well enough to be combat effective. With muskets, you can turn a group of ignorant peasants into a fighting force capable of taking on armored cavalry in a few months, possibly even weeks.

The Enlightenment, as well as our ideas about "equal treatment under the law", were the direct result of this force parity.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#137

Post by Melting_Harps »

Aunche wrote: post #123
stretchwithme wrote: post #64

A society with no technology has hardly any wealth gap. People who can leverage multiple technologies can multiply their efforts. Mass communication, mass distribution and automation of all sorts. But Wall Street bonuses are subsidized by the fact the government socializes their biggest failures. Bailouts just encourage them to take greater risks, leveraging debt in dangerous ways that will blow up the system again.

> Bailouts just encourage them to take greater risks, leveraging debt in dangerous ways that will blow up the system again. In practice, this hasn't happened. As a whole, financial institutions are more risk-adverse than ever. Keep in mind, that they don't want another Dodd-Frank.

> As a whole, financial institutions are more risk-adverse than ever.

And this includes Hedgefunds, like Melvin Capital, Citadel and the like? Doesn't the Robinhood and GME thing DIRECTLY contradict what you're saying?

Furthermore, they are over leveraged on real estate in teh US and BlackRock accounts for every greater RE holdings than post 2008 housing crisis.

I'm not sure what you are talking about, Dodd-Frank is like Glass-Steagall, they'll just make up rules when the bailouts are required (Goldman Sachs 2008), just like airliners laid off a large majority of their staff despite the bailouts in the first Trump bailout being issued to ENSURE they wouldn't and they took the money either way.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#138

Post by speedplane »

f6v wrote: post #111
stretchwithme wrote: post #64

A society with no technology has hardly any wealth gap. People who can leverage multiple technologies can multiply their efforts. Mass communication, mass distribution and automation of all sorts. But Wall Street bonuses are subsidized by the fact the government socializes their biggest failures. Bailouts just encourage them to take greater risks, leveraging debt in dangerous ways that will blow up the system again.

What kind of technology enabled wealth gap in feudal society? It seems it was more about religion being used to subdue people.

Guns germs steel! Read the book.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#139

Post by downandout »

onetimemanytime wrote: post #131
downandout wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government is not a hedge fund. It has no expertise in running businesses. Had they done what your are suggesting, the markets wouldn’t have reacted the way they did, the companies would have gone bankrupt under government mismanagement, the economy would have continued to crater, and not $1 of the money would have been recovered. It turns out that the architects of this bailout were very smart about the way they…

>> Had they done what your are suggesting, the markets wouldn’t have reacted the way they did, the companies would have gone bankrupt under government mismanagement, the economy would have continued to crater, and not $1 of the money would have been recovered. Nah. Keep the management, they run the business not owners. In fact give them raises and bonuses. It's not like managers had other employment options. But eith…

they did get a lifesaving bailout, regardless of the merits or whether US got their money back

They did, and given the systemic importance of the companies that received this money, that was a gift not only to the companies, but to the entire economy. We wouldn’t have an economy today had they not done this. Today we are capable of giving away trillions with no hope of recovery in part because of what was done in 2008 - and it was done at no cost to taxpayers.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#140

Post by Udik »

rdiddly wrote: post #127
Guthur wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? Gaps are not even remotely what we should be focussed on and are purely based on jealous or indirect aggression. Concentrate on living standards and opportunity that will help far more people than trying pull down a vanishingly small number of people.

It's not just that Joe is rich while Bob is poor. Joe is rich because Bob is poor. And vice versa. It can't be any other way. Grasp that and you've got the whole thing. Sure, focus on living standards and opportunity, but those are just two more metrics that illustrate the same inequality.

> Joe is rich because Bob is poor. And vice versa. Grasp that and you've got the whole thing.

Well, why should I grasp that? Just prove it's true and I'll be convinced. But I bet you can't prove it, and you just feel it must be like that.

Edit: happy to be proved wrong. Make an effort.

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