French 'Millionaire's Tax' Gets Constitutional Go-Ahead

Solving the problem by refusing to admit that it exists? That's VERY weak! Markets that are dominated and defined by employers are not markets. They are corporate mechanisms. There are also 24 hours in a day, and the sun rises in the east.

 

That's how it is with lather-rinse-and-repeat libertarians. They are trained to cues but have a very limited range of responses prepared and available. You tend to get the same ones over and over and over again. Speaks volumes.

 

Because it is. The fact that you refuse to give an example that can then be analized in greater detail than platitude talking points about "evil corporations" is telling.

So.. manipulation of the market, justifies abandoning the concepts of the market, because its manipulated?

How about this crazy concept. Lets stop manipulating the market.

Now you are on to attacking me because you won't provide a single corporation which is dictating labor rates.

You are watching the corporations dictate wages? Which one?

 

You won't give an answer either.

The "markets" are not dominated and defined by the employers. Neither are the wages. That is BS victimization non-sense.

I know this concept is extremely difficult for people to understand, but its quite simply so I will try again.

If the number of low skill workers decreased, the wages for those positions would increase as employers are forced to compete for workers. *BOOM* Head exploded. Crazy concept.

So... how do we get the number of low skilled workers to decrease? How about educating them? Taking them from low skill workers to skilled tradesman. They will earn more as we already have a shortage of skilled labor in this country. Moral of the story, a society that works towards more and more skilled labor earns more money FOR EVERYBODY.

Instead.. we have factions of our society that don't want to encourage people to self improve, but rather incentive low wage through mandatory pay increases manipulating the market and simply causing inflation.

This is precisely why I have to wonder if the motivation of the left is to actually support policy that helps people, or is it simply a means of attempting to get something for nothing.

If the number of low skill workers in this country was cut in half tomorrow... you wouldn't need to mandate an increase to the minimum wage. The market.... learn it.

 

I think millionaires and their caddies are due for a reality check.

 

Never said evil corporations, this isn't a whining contest, I don't hate rich people, etc... etc...

You chose one. Show me a major mega corporation, that doesn't have a member of each of the two party systems sock puppets in their pockets, and having the market manipulated through some sort of government interference or beneficial legislation that allows them to basically dictate wages by keeping them artificially low.

GE, Walmart, hell any member of the hotel/motel associations in any town USA. They keep licenses to a minimum, so they have the least amount of competition, but they have to have a few so they don't get ousted as a monopoly when monopolizing is exactly what this small handful of businesses in cahoots with one another are doing. They establish room rates (you see them on the inside of the door in most places), and control wages so they maximize their profits and have no real reason to compete with one another. In fact if they had to cut costs to actually compete they would simply be shooting themselves in the foot, and loosing money they don't have too. They know exactly how many rooms are up for grabs in an annual period or a particular season, who will be using the rooms, and the maximum they can each charge and still maximize their profits. The game is fixed in most situations for the top dogs.

Why do you think so much emphasis is placed on making sure the to big to fail good old buddies club continues to get bailed out by good old uncle sugar?

Seems they made their own beds and if they can't adjust their wages from the top to meet those losses they are responsible for sustaining, then in a real market someone else would/could step in under cut them and fill the void they are no longer filling. Instead the politicians they own realize the gravy train will effect their bottom line so they make sure that money comes rolling in no matter what or who they have to %$#@ to get er done.

Sorry you are insulted by the term intellectual dishonesty. No offense meant just stop doing it and stay honest. You can't agree the market is artificially manipulated, understand that costs and wages are controlled for maximum profits in almost every major industry, and then stand by the 'well its just the market'.

That is like having a pirate ship blow a hole in your ship, and when it sinks you choose to blame the ocean. That's just the way it is.

 

Never happen as long as the two party scam stays in control of the government piggy bank.

 

The next time they f-up there ain't gonna be no bailouts.

 

Yes there will, and the next time, and the next time, and so on and so forth.

Follow the money and you will see from where it is funneled too who their real masters are.

 

This isn't the first financial bailout.

 

Dude, the answer is that you refuse to discuss the forest so that you can use such outlier trees as you can find in a typically dishonest attempt to use those to uphold what is an inherently fallacious argument. You think this sort of scam hasn't been seen before or something? It's standard fare on the right-wing. We've seen this sort of dishonesty over and over again.

Seriously? What is the countervailing locus of power that balances markets in which one side is comprised of giant monolithic corporations? Particulalry in the corporate heaven of significant numbers of people being unemployed? Go ahead...fill in the blank.

No, it's simple economics to anyone who understands simple economics.

It's a clumsy appeal to supply-and-demand as painted in the first few days of Econ 101 with an assumption of perfect markets, which we of course do not have. All this is toddler-level material that has become the all too familiar cry of business major strumpets who never went any further than that.

Dude, there are demands for low-skilled labor. It's the markets for that labor that are the problem, not the education levels of the workers in them. A restaurant owner's problem is not that his busboys can't do calculus. The problem is that markets for low-skilled (and other) labor are dominated and controlled by 800-pound gorillas for their own and nobody else's interests. When productivity gains are shunted more and more into corporate profits and less and less into wage gains, economic multipliers decline and aggregate demand falls. This is why the Bush Tax Cuts for the Rich were predicted to fail and promptly did. Creating and then amplifying the sort of increasingly top-heavy income distribution that we have today is a recessionary impulse in and of itself. But of course most of this is going right over a lot of peoples' heads.

Entirely out of the loop once again. Minimum wage increases of a magnitude consistent with historical precedents do not result in any measureable increase in either unemployment or inflation. Whether you realize it or not, you are worshipping at the altar of worthless snake oil ninsense here.

And I have to wonder why clueless right-wing bots don't simply snap out of the trances that their dishonest programmers have put them under. The truth is out there. Why are so many so afraid of it?

 

The bailouts of 2008-09 were not done as any sort of favor to banks or Wall Street. They were done because the everyday economy that includes YOUR job and YOUR house and YOUR savings was at serious and increasing risk. YOU were the one being protected in those bailouts, and bailouts would be used again to protect you if the situation were ever again as bad as Bush had let it become.

 

The bailouts weren't done as a favor to the banks or Wall Street, it just worked out that way. $million dollar bonuses are just serendipity, I guess.

So, as it stands, all Wall Street has to do is say "hey, we f-up again. Make ME whole and we'll stop putting investor money at serious risk (wink wink)".

 

Correct. They were done as a favor to everyone whose well-being depended on a functioning global economy, something we would not have had if the financial system had collapsed as it very nearly did.

Millions of dollars are not even remotely consequential. The bonuses were in any case embedded in contract law that the government could not have reached short of an outright nationalization of the banking system. Many were advocating that at the time, but Obama and Geithner preferred to hold that as a very last option.

Yes, that's what faux-populists will try to tell you. But the government will be no more likely to stand by and watch as the 1% destroys the lives of the 99% in the future than they were in 2008-09. This is not out of concern for the 1%,

 

I was in favor of the bailouts just as I was in favor of Obama. What I am not in favor of is the fact that we didn't learn from the collapse and that no one has been taken to task for the collapse. And we seem to be right on schedule for another round of collapse and displacement.

 

How and what did we not learn? Plainly, we need a viable global financial system. That was the whole reason for taking action to begin with. Meanwhile, the Big Five Wall Street investment banks are all gone, along with the brokers and securitizing operations they fed off of. Dodd-Frank and the CFPB have been added. Want more? Make some suggestions. Meanwhile, the original crisis occurred because of a lack of liquidity, and today the financial system is awash in it. People worry about assets, but the DJIA is worth less today in inflation-adjusted terms that it was at the end of 2000. I'm afraid I'm not seeing anything to suggest that we are somehow right on schedule for another round of collapse.

 

Stop right there.

You are moving the goal posts now.

You said that corporations determine wages, not the market.

That is totally different than what you just said above.

 

Dude. If your going to make an accusation, be able to back it up. The rest is just an attack on me because you can't or won't.

The size of the company has nothing to do with it.

Answer me one simple question. Why do surgeons make the money they do? Ill just answer for you.

Because they negotiate the higher salary and have the power to negotiate based on a limited number of qualified surgeons.

It doesn't matter if they work for a huge hospital, or a small private practice.... they earn a competitive rate.

Now lets flip it around. Why do Walmart employees make the salary they do? Because they have little negotiating power. They will make nearly the same regardless of which job they take.

The employer has nothing to do with wages, the market does.

Here we go.

"The market isn't accurate, because it prevents me from blaming low wages on the people actually responsible for their low wages"

Supply/Demand is the fundamental market force in place for all of man kind. Always has been. Its simple. Only a fool would attempt to operate outside of it as it they

You can dismiss it all you want for your self perceived intellectual ideologies. Its people like yourself that typically institute policy contrary to this simple market system, and then claim its the markets fault when it backfires.

And where done here. It isn't worth going any further.

Bus boys don't make minimum wage because there is some big corporate conspiracy to under pay them. This is victimization BS like always.

They make minimum wage, because if they were to demand more, there is another unemployed guy right behind them who has the skills to do the job for minimum wage.

End of story.

There are too many low skilled workers, and not enough available positions.

If low paying workers want to make more, they need to figure out how to either lower the available supply of workers, or increase demand. You have to have negotiating power to demand something. I don't know how I can make that any clearer.

 

Apparently unbeknownst to you, labor markets in general are grossly distorted in that they lack any sort of countervailing power to sit across the table from the concentrated power of employers. The purpose of such concentrations of power is in fact to distort markets so as to exploit resources and jack up profits. One popular way to do this is to depress wages in a way that allows an employer to externalize some of his costs of production. That's what happens when full-time employees are not paid enough to support themselves and become eligible for public assistance. This is no different from dumping industrial waste into waterways or pumping harmful toxins into the atmosphere. It keeps prices low and profits high by sticking somebody else with part of the tab. These costs should have been borne by a corporation's customers and stockholders but are externalized and passed on to taxpayers instead. A person with any experience at all in economics would see the essential criminality in that right away. It's only the deluded and totally out-of-the-loop who manage to overlook it.

This is not of course a problem that will be solved through training and educating low-wage labor. Such a notion focuses (in a ludicrous manner) on laborers when it is in fact the distortion of labor markets that is the source of the problem. When the fox is in the henhouse, the answer is not to tell the hens that they need to go to the gym more often. But that's exactly the level of childish delusion you have introduced here.

And as you would have known if you had invested any time at all in studying the recent history of the matter, minimum wage increases of a magnitude consistent with historical precedents for them do not result in any measureable increase in either unemployment or inflation. Claiming as you have to the contrary simply marks you as one who has not for whatever reason been able to keep up.

The bottom line here is that the world is not at all the way your crudely partisan and untrained eye wants to see it. You have been called out by me and by others on your total BS and accomplished nothing at all in the way of redeeming yourself. Repetition and the waving of magic wands haven't cut it for you and won't. You make the right choice in promising to run away.

 

It's the same thing. A collaborated effort, to use the government to manipulate the market in a small minorities favor. It's exactly what I have been talking about since the beginning. One business or even a hand full of businesses do not have the power that can be wielded when the government is their tool of destruction.

There is no market, there hasn't been an actual market for decades that wasn't completely manipulated by the interference of the best government corporate money can buy? This ridiculous notion that the market is viable is your straw man.

 

So now it isn't businesses determining labor wages, but government due to corporate influence?

Why does a type writer repair man make so little? It has nothing to do with Walmart or Washington.

Call it a strawman all you want, the market is in fact a real thing and really does exist. Labor is determined by simple supply and demand just like everything else. Brain surgeons make a lot... because there aren't many of them. End of story.

 

Supply and demand determines everything. Absolutely laughable.

 

I will not acknowledge something that doesn't exist. The market as you continue to point out is fixed, it doesn't exist except as designated by the best government corporate money can buy. Supply and demand is also controlled, by over taxing, over regulating, and exemptions (preferential treatment) for the selective few who are allowed to dominate just about every industry on the planet.

A typewriter repairman? There is a difference between wage freezing/stagnation and a job that no longer exists.

I thought we had already covered intellectual dishonesty?

 

You keep saying that, yet fail to ever provide an example or proof that such thing exists that drives down wages. You saying it doesn't make it true.

So Walmart cashiers are paid under $10 an hour because of taxes, regulation, and exemptions?

Stagnation? We have a shortage of qualified people in the math and science fields to meet demand in this country. The unemployment rate of people with at least a bachelors degree in college is extremely low.

The problem. We have more unqualified and unskilled people than the market demands. Then you have a choir of people arguing that people without skills and without qualifications should make X dollars just "because".

Point being... lets talk about Wanda, a fictional Walmart employee who has been with the company for 6 years. She has a GED, two school age kids, and works 30 hours per week at the custom service desk. Now, please, explain to me why she make $8.50 an hour is a result of taxes, regulation, and exemptions... and no the fact that Walmart could find somebody else to do her job in under an hour.

 

If you can't see the proof, how is more facts going to change your total denial? You don't believe that every politician in the two party scam is selected and owned by corporate interests, propped up and promoted by the corporate media? NO? That is just sad.

40 years of government cronyism has created this situation.

Why are there so many people dependent on government subsidies, and the wallyworlds of the world?

Because the economy/market is manipulated, and has been fabricated into its present state by the best government corporate money can buy.

The tax code is a product of the rich, invented by their needs, and controlled by the government they own. They get the breaks and smaller businesses/middle class America are forced to cover, driving them out of the competitive bracket. Over regulation is the downfall of most of the private businesses that were forced out of business from 1970 through the 1980's. Over regulation and unnecessary regulations are not distributed evenly across the board. The chosen few are granted exemptions, breaks, and grants to offset the burden meant to eliminate the smaller competitors so as to maximize profits in every key industry in the nation.

Where have you been? Why are you not paying attention to how this country is being manipulated and milked?

Really? Then why are the colleges/universities raking in billions in government secured student loans and producing graduates who are only qualified to get a job at Wallyworld, or 7-11?

A market that has been fabricated and created to begin with. The market doesn't exist except in this dream world you have created in your mind.

I did, you simply ignore the reality, that is why we are now talking about Wanda the imaginary wallyworld employee. Why don't we talk about Chuck who is $100,000.00 in debt has a bachelors degree, can't find a job in his chosen field of expertise ( a computer technician by the way), and is working at the 7-11 as a night manager down the road from where I live because of his computer skills, making $11.75 as a casual part time employee working 32 hours a week? He also works at the Dollar Store 32 hours a week, as a cashier because of his experience as a 7-11 employee. But there is hope he has applied at wallyworld, and if he gets a job there in 10-15 years he might become an assistant manager and break the $25,000 a year threshold.


What does this have to do with rich people being taxed in France? Other than the fact that they will still be rich, get exemptions and tax breaks that will relieve them of that tax obligation? This is all a show for the working class to make them feel like their government is working for them, when it is common knowledge that the government, any government, works for the small minority of the rich, not for the greater good of the majority. That is just the illusion every great political sock puppet presents.