Study analyzes the impact of minimum wage hikes in CA

OneEyedDiva said:
I've always thought that the reluctance to increase minimum wages was an excuse to keep poor people poor. I dare any politician who was against it to live off the incomes of those who are on minimum wage. Well, except for Senator Corey Booker (N.J.). He allegedly did it a few years back when he was mayor of Newark, N.J. I forgot for how long but it may have only been a couple of weeks.
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He used food stamps for a week. I like Sen. Booker but I remember his first purchase on a $35 weekly budget was a $9 bottle of extra virgin olive oil.
 
Irishdude said:
He used food stamps for a week. I like Sen. Booker but I remember his first purchase on a $35 weekly budget was a $9 bottle of extra virgin olive oil.
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I guess he really likes that olive oil. We use olive oil that costs about 1/2 of what Filippo Berio olive oil costs. What a douche.
 

dilettante said:
There are plenty of more complete "tests" of these theories, and at national scale running for far, far longer.

North Korea is one. Cuba another. Communist China under Mao. USSR under Stalin. Italy under Mussolini. Germany under Hitler.

All of these attempted to run an economy under socialist theory of exactly this kind.
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I think the examples you listed are an entirely different experience than the concept of a UBI or GBI. They were examples of despots who sucked their people dry while pushing the idea that the state was more important than the individual. A UBI monetary system (especially as the Mincome effort was designed), was for the benefit of those who are very low income and struggling for survival.
 
Debrah N. said:
I think the examples you listed are an entirely different experience than the concept of a UBI or GBI. They were examples of despots who sucked their people dry while pushing the idea that the state was more important than the individual. A UBI monetary system (especially as the Mincome effort was designed), was for the benefit of those who are very low income and struggling for survival.
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All business could be dealt with the motives being the well being and sustainability that the business provides instead of the profits they can make, no matter what business it is. But, that concept is too radical for us to implement it.
 
StarSong said:
His daughters are an anomaly. That they're such a rare exception rather proves my point.

Most Black females in the US must jump far more hurdles and deal with daily doses of ugly bigotry than do White males.
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Ok. I apologize for my privilege and move on.
 
dilettante said:
But they're not. Each of them had a UBI.
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The difference might be that those systems didn't allow for a continuing effort to improve ones situation within a capitalist society (as Manitoba's Mincome experiment did for example). For a family who's having to decide between shoes for their children's bare feet and rent, an extra $100 a month can make a massive difference to their well being. And too I would guess that when Mincome was first tested, the idea was that WHEN an individual or family reached a certain point in their earnings, they'd have been dropped from the program. Or if because they were disabled or old, they would have been able to stay on it and their health would have had better protection as they were able to afford a healthier diet, or their medications or pay for heat....

I'm not in favour of giving EVERYONE in a country, UBI. I'm totally in favour of means testing any kinds of interventions and aid.
 
Paco Dennis said:
There would be no need for a minimum wage in a classless society. I see no reason to have an upper class with such staggering differences in personal wealth. It makes the whole system of domestic tranquility impossible. I wonder why we don't hold our constitution as the guide to wages/personal wealth. Whatever and how ever it is arranged, it should be for the well being of the masses.
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Paco, what you describe sounds like socialism. Would you mind naming a socialist society that has produced the wonderful results you describe?
 
ElCastor said:
Paco, what you describe sounds like socialism. Would you mind naming a socialist society that has produced the wonderful results you describe?
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I am no scholar about socialism. It doesn't seem fair that the worth of a humans labor can be so meaningless. Some people live in trash, some get to live anyway they want. That's all.
 
ElCastor said:
Paco, what you describe sounds like socialism. Would you mind naming a socialist society that has produced the wonderful results you describe?
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Wasn't a classless society what Marx was advocating for?

I think they came close to that in the Soviet Union. Laborers and doctors often lived in the same apartment buildings. Not exactly a "wonderful" situation, except for maybe the laborers. But even living in the same buildings, there were still "classes." Educated people looked down on and disrespected the uneducated.

The only place where a true "classless society" is found is in communes.
 
HermitHogan said:
Wasn't a classless society what Marx was advocating for?

I think they came close to that in the Soviet Union. Laborers and doctors often lived in the same apartment buildings. Not exactly a "wonderful" situation, except for maybe the laborers. But even living in the same buildings, there were still "classes." Educated people looked down on and disrespected the uneducated.

The only place where a true "classless society" is found is in communes.
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I worked for several years with a young Cambodian refugee. His father had been an a senior officer in the Cambodian Air Force. For that upper class sin he was executed as were Many Cambodians. The same would have happened to my friend and his mother had the socialists (communists) gotten their hands on him or her. They went into hiding. He got a job on a rice plantation, but one day was returning from his work in the fields when some friends stopped him to warn that government men were looking for him. That was the end of his rice work.

He went into hiding, found a bicycle, and used it to carry goods into Thailand. What he earned he used to buy more goods to sell. A few months of that and he got his mother and himself on a refugee flight out of Thailand to San Francisco. My employer got him into a night class to learn English. I never knew him when he wasn’t in a night class studying something. He worked with me introducing computers to a Bank we both worked for, saved his money, and bought a house. Last I heard he was a big shot with a company in Oregon.

So much for wonderful Socialism and evil Capitalism.
 
ElCastor said:
I worked for several years with a young Cambodian refugee. His father had been a senior officer in the Cambodian Air Force. For that upper class sin he was executed as were Many Cambodians. The same would have happened to my friend and his mother had the socialists (communists) gotten their hands on him or her. They went into hiding. He got a job on a rice plantation, but one day was returning from his work in the fields when some friends stopped him to warn that government men were looking for him. That was the end of his rice work.

He went into hiding, found a bicycle, and used it to carry goods into Thailand. What he earned he used to buy more goods to sell. A few months of that and he got his mother and himself on a refugee flight out of Thailand to San Francisco. My employer got him into a night class to learn English. I never knew him when he wasn’t in a night class studying something. He worked with me introducing computers to a Bank we both worked for, saved his money, and bought a house. Last I heard he was a big shot with a company in Oregon.

So much for wonderful Socialism and evil Capitalism.
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ElCastor said:
I worked for several years with a young Cambodian refugee. His father had been an a senior officer in the Cambodian Air Force. For that upper class sin he was executed as were Many Cambodians. The same would have happened to my friend and his mother had the socialists (communists) gotten their hands on him or her. They went into hiding. He got a job on a rice plantation, but one day was returning from his work in the fields when some friends stopped him to warn that government men were looking for him. That was the end of his rice work.

He went into hiding, found a bicycle, and used it to carry goods into Thailand. What he earned he used to buy more goods to sell. A few months of that and he got his mother and himself on a refugee flight out of Thailand to San Francisco. My employer got him into a night class to learn English. I never knew him when he wasn’t in a night class studying something. He worked with me introducing computers to a Bank we both worked for, saved his money, and bought a house. Last I heard he was a big shot with a company in Oregon.

So much for wonderful Socialism and evil Capitalism.
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I can see why you hate evil socialism.
 
ElCastor said:
I worked for several years with a young Cambodian refugee. His father had been an a senior officer in the Cambodian Air Force. For that upper class sin he was executed as were Many Cambodians. The same would have happened to my friend and his mother had the socialists (communists) gotten their hands on him or her. They went into hiding. He got a job on a rice plantation, but one day was returning from his work in the fields when some friends stopped him to warn that government men were looking for him. That was the end of his rice work.

He went into hiding, found a bicycle, and used it to carry goods into Thailand. What he earned he used to buy more goods to sell. A few months of that and he got his mother and himself on a refugee flight out of Thailand to San Francisco. My employer got him into a night class to learn English. I never knew him when he wasn’t in a night class studying something. He worked with me introducing computers to a Bank we both worked for, saved his money, and bought a house. Last I heard he was a big shot with a company in Oregon.

So much for wonderful Socialism and evil Capitalism.
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Socialism is an economic system in which major industries are owned or controlled by workers rather than by private businesses. If you have a representative system of government that controls the means of production, that could be considered "socialism" since the workers would have a say in how businesses operate, even if they didn't work in that particular industry. Their say would come in the form of representatives.

Medicare insurance is a good example of socialized insurance. It's government run, but since our government is (theoretically) representative of the people, it's publicly controlled. Granted, the case could be made that our government is run by corporations, so that takes power out of the hands of the people.

In a totalitarian system, such as what was in Cambodia, the workers have absolutely no say in major industries, so it wasn't socialism. It could better be described as government run capitalism.
 

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