Crackpot's Guide to Political Outrage

[Shroom Man 777]

Shut the fuck up you limp-dick whining rich brat bitch. I won't have you sullying the good people keeping this country afloat, the good people who those of us who aren't whining privileged liberal ivory tower intellectual poor inner city drug-dealing youths are willing to defend, because you bottom-feeding naked littering scum are nothing better than inmates and by God there's no way in hell I'm gonna let you take over this asylum country like they did in Australia or whatever fucked up miserable diseased country full of socialists you know-nothing twats would have this great United States become!

Between the thousands of desperate angry outraged people crowding all those cities and filling it with the stink of their unwashed moneyless bodies, and the few good dozens or hundreds of perfumed rich men and women in expensive tailored suits in the polished skyscrapers earning billions of dollars while the rest of you earn nothing but our ire and derision, you KNOW who we're gonna stand for, and who's worth fighting for, and who's worth keeping in this country god gave us!

[Samuel]

So does anyone have any programs that would achieve the OWS goals? The big problem isn't decrease inequality (which while difficult politically, is easy economically), but raising conditions for the bottom half.

[JointStrikeFighter]

It's not difficult at all; raise tax in rich. Fund the shit out of education. Problem solved.

[Samuel]

It's not difficult at all; raise tax in rich. Fund the shit out of education. Problem solved.

That doesn't actually solve the problem. For starters, it requires there to be jobs to take the newly educated individuals. Given the high unemployment, I'm not sure if that is true. It also doesn't change the income for people on the bottom. Unless everyone is getting a bachelors degree or more, you are still going to have people stuck with low and stagnant wages.

[Simon_Jester]

No, i'm someone who doesn't want his children to inherit a world where the inmates are running the asylum. I sweat my fucking balls off for 8 years working in a plastics factory putting myself through school because nobody was handing me a free fucking education. I work 50+ hours a week in a a bank branch in the inner city. The people i work with are educated professionals who actualy give a shit about the people they serve every day. We are not evil oppressors drinking the tears of the poor out of champagne flutes. I will not be lectured to by a bunch of whiny goddamn malcontents Fuck you and the high horse your rode in on.

You remind me of that whole ridiculous "We are the 53%" thing Eric Erickson started as a counter to the 99%.

In addition to what Oni Koneko Damien just wrote, I would also recommend you read the following, in order to get some perspective on what the whole Occupy thing is about, what they think of people like you, and what they want to achieve.

Its a diary on DailyKos that got quite a lot of criculation...

Max Udargo said it a hell of a lot better than I did. Probably a lot better than I could. Thanks.

It's not difficult at all; raise tax in rich. Fund the shit out of education. Problem solved.

Well... it's a start. But there are problems, Samuel is right there.

It's not difficult at all; raise tax in rich. Fund the shit out of education. Problem solved.

That doesn't actually solve the problem. For starters, it requires there to be jobs to take the newly educated individuals. Given the high unemployment, I'm not sure if that is true. It also doesn't change the income for people on the bottom. Unless everyone is getting a bachelors degree or more, you are still going to have people stuck with low and stagnant wages.

Even if everyone gets a bachelor's, that doesn't guarantee high wages. When people with a bachelor's are a dime a dozen, the bachelor's becomes the new standard of education: employers don't give you bonus points for doing something that anyone can do. 100 years ago, high school diplomas were rare and respected; college degrees rarer still. 50 years ago, high school graduates were cheap and plentiful to hire, and college degrees were still fairly rare. Nowadays, college degrees are so common that it creates credential inflation, and the four year college degree becomes a bare minimum necessity to avoid becoming poor. Which means lots of people shoveling money into college education, and student loans piling up to levels that cannot be repaid. It's a mess.

Changing who pays for this kind of education system will not solve the problem, though it may reduce the pain- as you say.

Things to do... Let's start by defining the problem. Many problems are much easier to solve after you've defined your terms.

One part of the problem is that people are working- effectively, being required to work- fifty or more hours a week to make ends meet. It's predictable that an employer would rather have 400 people working 50 hours a week than 500 people working 40 hours a week, but multiplying that out across the whole economy is a recipe for high unemployment, because companies have no incentive to hire anyone new when they can just crack the whip over the people working for them now, and when there are plenty of experienced "human resources" out of work to be hired to replace them if they don't like it.

Anyone who knows even a smattering of economics should be able to look at the labor economy of today and recognize that it's a buyer's market- and draw the conclusions about how well that's going to work out for the people selling their labor.

Can that be fixed? What would we have to do to make it happen?

There are, of course, other parts of the problem. That's just one of them.

The one thing I'd say is that the question "who is going to pay for all this" has to be answered with "Tax the rich. Tax capital gains. Restore taxes to Clinton levels, maybe even to pre-Reagan levels." Because it's blindingly obvious that welding our country's fortunes to Wall Street and the stock market and the CEOs hasn't worked, isn't working, and won't work in the future. It worked for a while thanks to elaborate shell games played with debt and financial instruments, but it can't be made to work again- the engine of prosperity that we used to get us through the Bush years is too broken down to be repaired, and will have to be replaced by a system that runs along different lines.

Which means we have to stop the bleeding somehow, and the money has to come from somewhere, and if we could get it from anywhere but the millionaires we wouldn't have such a big problem in the first place.

[Samuel]

It's predictable that an employer would rather have 400 people working 50 hours a week than 500 people working 40 hours a week,

? Don't you have to pay overtime for those workers?

because companies have no incentive to hire anyone new when they can just crack the whip over the people working for them now, and when there are plenty of experienced "human resources" out of work to be hired to replace them if they don't like it.

That doesn't explain the problem. That explains why there is a problem in a depression, but these people obviously believe that the problem isn't just the recession. In fact the stuff D Turtle put up is trends over the past decades (although the person who wrote the article admited they weren't in total agreement with the protestors).

The one thing I'd say is that the question "who is going to pay for all this" has to be answered with "Tax the rich. Tax capital gains. Restore taxes to Clinton levels, maybe even to pre-Reagan levels." Because it's blindingly obvious that welding our country's fortunes to Wall Street and the stock market and the CEOs hasn't worked, isn't working, and won't work in the future. It worked for a while thanks to elaborate shell games played with debt and financial instruments, but it can't be made to work again- the engine of prosperity that we used to get us through the Bush years is too broken down to be repaired, and will have to be replaced by a system that runs along different lines.

It worked during the 90s. If I may get slightly off track, the classical model is that long run wages are determined by productivity and we had higher gains in the 1990s. The problem is that since the the 1970s the productivity growth rate slowed down.

Personally I want to figure out how to increase productivity growth rates again because that is the optimal solution, but if it was politically easy, I'm pretty sure politicans would have done it already.

That leaves redistribution, but the problem is figuring out what to put the money into to help out the bottom half. The only thing that comes to mind is abolishing the payroll tax and funding social security from income taxes (payroll is regressive and a tax on employment.), but that is only a one off improvement.

For those curious, my perspective on this is from my labor economics courses and The Power of Productivity by William Lewis. The point in labor economics is that growth in inequality is from 2 seperate trends, one pushing up and the other down. Free trade, a decline in the real value of minimum wage (mostly affecting women), immigration, technological change and a drop in labor force participation (mostly affecting men) are the cause of the increase in inequality.

The problem is these aren't exactly fixable. The only one that can be easily changed is the minimum wage. I'm not sure that would be a solution. An extension of the EITC might by a better option.

[aerius]

So does anyone have any programs that would achieve the OWS goals? The big problem isn't decrease inequality (which while difficult politically, is easy economically), but raising conditions for the bottom half.

It can be done, but it would fuck things over in many parts of the world in the short to medium term. We can make things better for the bottom half in the US but it'll screw over all the countries to which the US has outsourced its labour & manufacturing. A bunch of multinational corporations would also be screwed since their current business models rely on cheap labour and outsourcing everything to 3rd world countries. The short version is the US would have to completely redo its trade policy, tax codes, economic & fiscal policies, and somehow get its society & corporations to work for the long term benefit of everyone instead of chasing short term quarterly gains.

[Simon_Jester]

It's predictable that an employer would rather have 400 people working 50 hours a week than 500 people working 40 hours a week,

? Don't you have to pay overtime for those workers?

You do, but there's per-worker overhead to factor in. I may be wrong about how the calculation turns out. I suppose.

Of course, now that I really think about it, some employers are going to the opposite extreme: they'd rather pay 800 people to work 25 hours a week, and have an excuse not to pay any of them benefits. Which is one reason you get so many people holding down two jobs- and yet, at the end of the day, you still have the same number of people employed, because those 800 people are taking up another 800 part-time jobs elsewhere if they want to make ends meet.

I suppose the more general point is that employers have strong incentives to turn the labor market into something that gives them all the bargaining power and lets them extract the maximum amount of work from the minimum number of people for the minimum amount of money. If we're trying to keep unemployment under control and ensure a decent standard of living for our people, that's not going to help us.

because companies have no incentive to hire anyone new when they can just crack the whip over the people working for them now, and when there are plenty of experienced "human resources" out of work to be hired to replace them if they don't like it.

That doesn't explain the problem. That explains why there is a problem in a depression, but these people obviously believe that the problem isn't just the recession. In fact the stuff D Turtle put up is trends over the past decades (although the person who wrote the article admited they weren't in total agreement with the protestors).

Many of these trends were bad before the recession but became vastly worse after it began- things that you could live with even if they were annoying before, you can't live with now. There's also more people with little to lose.

There's been a problem with high worker turnover for a long time, really: frequent layoffs and relocations of facilities mean more people competing for each job, which still gives the "If you don't, someone else will" advantage to human resources.

It worked during the 90s. If I may get slightly off track, the classical model is that long run wages are determined by productivity and we had higher gains in the 1990s. The problem is that since the the 1970s the productivity growth rate slowed down.

Fair enough- but I'd argue it worked during the '90s partly because of non-repeatable trends. What we did in the '80s was working at the time, and continued to work into the '90s, but to get it to keep going past 2000, we had to continue the tax cuts and deregulation and selling off of assets overseas and leveraging of debt harder and harder. We were hitting diminishing returns.

In 2007-08, our returns really started to diminish, and trying to repeat the 1990s isn't going to work because we've shot our bolt.

That leaves redistribution, but the problem is figuring out what to put the money into to help out the bottom half. The only thing that comes to mind is abolishing the payroll tax and funding social security from income taxes (payroll is regressive and a tax on employment.), but that is only a one off improvement.

For those curious, my perspective on this is from my labor economics courses and The Power of Productivity by William Lewis. The point in labor economics is that growth in inequality is from 2 seperate trends, one pushing up and the other down. Free trade, a decline in the real value of minimum wage (mostly affecting women), immigration, technological change and a drop in labor force participation (mostly affecting men) are the cause of the increase in inequality.

The problem is these aren't exactly fixable. The only one that can be easily changed is the minimum wage. I'm not sure that would be a solution. An extension of the EITC might by a better option.

Right. Or we might honestly want to go for a state-guaranteed minimum income- just to provide basic stability. The continental European model has its problems, but they don't have to worry so much about people dying from impacted teeth or child malnutrition.

[Samuel]

Of course, now that I really think about it, some employers are going to the opposite extreme: they'd rather pay 800 people to work 25 hours a week, and have an excuse not to pay any of them benefits.

I've been looking for work. All the slots are less than 32 hours because that falls under part time. I think that is a more accurate view of the labor market.

I suppose the more general point is that employers have strong incentives to turn the labor market into something that gives them all the bargaining power and lets them extract the maximum amount of work from the minimum number of people for the minimum amount of money. If we're trying to keep unemployment under control and ensure a decent standard of living for our people, that's not going to help us.

It wouldn't have any net effect on unemployment, but would reduce the standard of living. I'm pretty sure the causes of unemployment are seperate from stagnant wages.

There's been a problem with high worker turnover for a long time, really: frequent layoffs and relocations of facilities mean more people competing for each job, which still gives the "If you don't, someone else will" advantage to human resources.

The problem I see with this and other causes you are proposing is the are one time events. They will result in a drop in income increases, but they don't result in long run stagnation.

Right. Or we might honestly want to go for a state-guaranteed minimum income- just to provide basic stability.

The problem is expense. If you want to provide the minimum wage (7.25) for a full time worker (40 hours, 50 weeks) for 300 million you get 4.35 10^12

4 trillion dollars for an economy of 15 trillion. You can try altering the formula different ways, but a minimum income people can live off of is difficult to provide.

If you provide it only to those not working that is still half the population.

[Simon_Jester]

Of course, now that I really think about it, some employers are going to the opposite extreme: they'd rather pay 800 people to work 25 hours a week, and have an excuse not to pay any of them benefits.

I've been looking for work. All the slots are less than 32 hours because that falls under part time. I think that is a more accurate view of the labor market.

You're right- but it puts us in the same problem. 400 people working two jobs is no better than 400 people working one job at twice the hours, and arguably worse.

It wouldn't have any net effect on unemployment, but would reduce the standard of living. I'm pretty sure the causes of unemployment are seperate from stagnant wages.

Stagnant wages imply stagnant demand for most goods and services, which in turn means reduced demand for jobs in areas that provide those goods. It's not inevitable that this will trigger high unemployment, but it sure doesn't help. Especially if there's a threshold effect in place, and I suspect there is.

5% unemployment doesn't mean people permanently out of work, or not many of them. 10% unemployment does, and a quick look at U6 makes it even more clear that we have a lot of potentially productive workers unable to find jobs. Being permanently out of work takes you out of the consumer base in a way that being briefly between jobs doesn't.

There's been a problem with high worker turnover for a long time, really: frequent layoffs and relocations of facilities mean more people competing for each job, which still gives the "If you don't, someone else will" advantage to human resources.

The problem I see with this and other causes you are proposing is the are one time events. They will result in a drop in income increases, but they don't result in long run stagnation.

If they alter the economic client in which laborers are hired, the effects become permanent. There's nothing in the laws of nature that guarantees that productivity increases will have to proportionately benefit workers.

The problem is expense. If you want to provide the minimum wage (7.25) for a full time worker (40 hours, 50 weeks) for 300 million you get 4.35 10^12

4 trillion dollars for an economy of 15 trillion. You can try altering the formula different ways, but a minimum income people can live off of is difficult to provide.

If you provide it only to those not working that is still half the population.

Even if the "guaranteed minimum" is less than minimum wage, it's still something, which can be used to supplement extremely scanty part-time income and make a living in times of economic crisis.

[weemadando]

I love how people overlook that by increasing wages you'd be increasing individual spending and thus increasing total value of the economy.

Inflationary? Sure. But at a low level that's a lot less damaging than rampant poverty.

[Samuel]

Stagnant wages imply stagnant demand for most goods and services, which in turn means reduced demand for jobs in areas that provide those goods. It's not inevitable that this will trigger high unemployment, but it sure doesn't help. Especially if there's a threshold effect in place, and I suspect there is.

It sounds like it would fit, but we need to test it. If there is one thing economics has taught me, theories that seem to work have a bad habit of turning out to be wrong.

Any ideas? It would be a good practice test for me to learn to use rapid miner.

There's nothing in the laws of nature that guarantees that productivity increases will have to proportionately benefit workers.

There is in neo-classical economics. Employers will continue hire workers as long as wages are lower than the workers productivity. In addition workers in the service sectors will see wages rise, otherwise they will be bid away to other labor. This requires the economy to be in equilibrium though.

Trade could mess with this quite handly. The US economy can be in equilibrium, but since China's isn't wages are lower (not to mention their artificially low currency) which means as workers overseas get productive enough, they replace American labor, keeping American wages lower.

See anything wrong in my analysis?

Even if the "guaranteed minimum" is less than minimum wage, it's still something, which can be used to supplement extremely scanty part-time income and make a living in times of economic crisis.

Yeah, but the figure I mentioned was larger than the US budget. Say we cut Defense to a fourth, pay of the debt and use the interest and use the entire social security budget that gives us 1.4 trillion. Without the military, we get .9 trillion.

Of course, that is a pipe dream- seniors will never give up social security. We could get this by raising taxes, but that is always going to be a sticky point.

I love how people overlook that by increasing wages you'd be increasing individual spending and thus increasing total value of the economy.

Inflationary? Sure. But at a low level that's a lot less damaging than rampant poverty.

We aren't, but how do you make sure the increase in wages doesn't just go away? The US had increasing real wages from 1950-1970 for everyone for example. Having a short term solution doesn't seem to be what the protestors want. Of course, it is hard to tell- the majority of them might want jobs (one of the reasons I wanted to know what their platform is).

[Simon_Jester]

Stagnant wages imply stagnant demand for most goods and services, which in turn means reduced demand for jobs in areas that provide those goods. It's not inevitable that this will trigger high unemployment, but it sure doesn't help. Especially if there's a threshold effect in place, and I suspect there is.

It sounds like it would fit, but we need to test it. If there is one thing economics has taught me, theories that seem to work have a bad habit of turning out to be wrong.

Any ideas? It would be a good practice test for me to learn to use rapid miner.

Sorry, no ideas. I really don't know what to do with this- a lot of economic theories don't work, and a lot of them are utterly unsuited to fixing the present crisis, because it isn't as simple as "if we increase productivity wages will rise!" Productivity has grown (albeit slowly) for decades without real wages growing.

If the problem is that productivity isn't outpacing inflation, then I can understand that, but now we find ourselves in an economic condition where worker conditions are rapidly getting worse, and where an increasing number of aging baby boomers in need of this wonderful medical technology we invented since the last round of the Great Depression can't afford it.

Getting out of this is going to require thinking of a sort different than what got us into it, I'm pretty sure of that, but I can't say much more with any confidence or certainty.

There's nothing in the laws of nature that guarantees that productivity increases will have to proportionately benefit workers.

There is in neo-classical economics. Employers will continue hire workers as long as wages are lower than the workers productivity. In addition workers in the service sectors will see wages rise, otherwise they will be bid away to other labor. This requires the economy to be in equilibrium though.

Trade could mess with this quite handly. The US economy can be in equilibrium, but since China's isn't wages are lower (not to mention their artificially low currency) which means as workers overseas get productive enough, they replace American labor, keeping American wages lower.

See anything wrong in my analysis?

Without a very detailed analysis of the assumptions of "in equilibrium" and a complicated picture of the social context... I don't know. High unemployment can disrupt the link between productivity and wages, because you can use it to intimidate more work out of employees without paying them more. Part-time jobs can disrupt it too, because people are accepting the same after-tax wage (to pay the bills) but without the benefits, which means that total hourly wages decline for a worker providing the same productivity.

Yeah, but the figure I mentioned was larger than the US budget. Say we cut Defense to a fourth, pay of the debt and use the interest and use the entire social security budget that gives us 1.4 trillion. Without the military, we get .9 trillion.

Of course, that is a pipe dream- seniors will never give up social security. We could get this by raising taxes, but that is always going to be a sticky point.

I know.

I've seen schemes for financing such an arrangement before; means-testing and the like would be utterly vital if it could be done at all. My point, I guess, is that we need to think very seriously about poverty relief, because the status quo is making it impossible for people to engage in basic human activities like educating their children and starting families. If we can't provide that, then it's not hard to see the argument for a structural reform of the economy.

I love how people overlook that by increasing wages you'd be increasing individual spending and thus increasing total value of the economy.

Inflationary? Sure. But at a low level that's a lot less damaging than rampant poverty.

We aren't, but how do you make sure the increase in wages doesn't just go away? The US had increasing real wages from 1950-1970 for everyone for example. Having a short term solution doesn't seem to be what the protestors want. Of course, it is hard to tell- the majority of them might want jobs (one of the reasons I wanted to know what their platform is).

Well, I think a lot of them would at least not be shouting so loud if they had jobs, and job prospects, that let them live their lives under some conditions better than "I must slave now to keep food on my table and a roof over my head, with no allowance for the future and no margin of safety if disaster strikes tomorrow."

As noted in that letter quoted on the last page, anyone with sense realizes that this isn't sustainable. Working two jobs and having so much stress in your life that you can't seriously consider settling down and raising a family may be at least survivable for a few years, but the prospect of having to deal with it until you get old enough for it to kill you is something people will fight against.

I think the main source of the protest is the growing fear among the younger generation (to a lesser extent, everyone else) that developed-world levels of prosperity will not be there as they move through their adult lives, for reasons that aren't their fault and that they didn't create. And that Wall Street will have managed to eat it all, leaving them with nothing, without being held accountable for their actions.

So short term economic relief is probably a huge part of what they want- but they also want to see the system changed so that Wall Street can't simply absorb all the wealth and power in the country and leave the average citizens to deal with the risk and work double-time to cushion Wall Street from ever having to suffer consequences for its actions. Which is the way they perceive the system operating today.

Declines in the standard of living wouldn't be so galling if they were matched by declines in the fortunes of the wealthy, and if the government showed signs of caring more about preserving the standard of living or at least keeping up a degree of damage control.

[K. A. Pital]

Wow, Crackpot's posts were really insulting. So because "nobody gave" him a free education, his position is that everyone must suffer like he did? So because he is a tiny working cog in the banking machine, he presumes he can change it from within?

*cries* Such good intentions, such little understanding. I've been practicing as a cog in the banking sector while I was still at the uni. And you know what? I'm not going to defend any of the rich fucks I saw there.

Banks are fucking ugly finanical oligarchic tools designed to sip the tears of the poor through straws from champange glasses.

That's my last statement on the issue. And I know that many First Worlders do know about suffering; especially with the latest crisis. Oni's post only demonstrates that more clearly. I used to have an attitude that the First World is rich and its workers are part to the opression. However, right now as the First World lower classes rise up to protest injustice, I lend them solidarity.

I am now here in the First World and I see that people aren't living as cool and smooth and dandy as some would like to say. Even here, in the Center, where money flows unbounded, people sometimes struggle to make ends fucking meet.

"Moral high horse"? The opressor and the opressed are never equal. End of line.

[Akhlut]

No, i'm someone who doesn't want his children to inherit a world where the inmates are running the asylum. I sweat my fucking balls off for 8 years working in a plastics factory putting myself through school because nobody was handing me a free fucking education. I work 50+ hours a week in a a bank branch in the inner city. The people i work with are educated professionals who actualy give a shit about the people they serve every day. We are not evil oppressors drinking the tears of the poor out of champagne flutes. I will not be lectured to by a bunch of whiny goddamn malcontents Fuck you and the high horse your rode in on.

I don't want my kid to go into fucking tens of thousands of dollars of debt to have a chance at living a life that isn't minimum wage hell. I want my son to live a life where he isn't continually fucked by the Gordan Gekkos of the world who game the system so they can make billions instead of millions while my wife and I are stuck playing the Red Queen's race, where we have to run as fast as we can just to stay in the same place.

I'm fucking sick and tired of falangist fuckwits defending people who would just as soon grind them down to make a buck. I'm sick of a bunch of whiny bitches who get bray like jackasses when other people actually try to change how things are going now, because they sure as hell aren't working for the great majority of people right now.

Fuck you, buddy. My first post-college experiences were finding work as the economy melted down. I got employed just enough hours to make it impossible to get a second job and I lived from paycheck to paycheck for three goddamn years, while everything I read and see essentially says it's not going to get better for a very long time, if at all. At least, not if we don't change how we operate on the ground here.

So, fuck you. Yeah, we're malcontent, because the system is garbage yet you defend it out of some sort of perverse white-knighting for a group of people who doesn't need defenders while striking out at people who have been fucked by the system repeatedly.

[Rogue 9]

I'm just going to throw this in here. The Occupy Wall Street movement is not hard to understand; in fact I'd go so far as to say you have to willfully misunderstand it if you're going to misunderstand it at all.