JayB

"Conservatives want everyone to live in the 1950's, liberals want everyone to work there."

"She's the fattest person in the world to have a baby and gets paid by her online fans to eat. Some even pay for food to be delivered to her door. Mother-of-two from Ohio in the US, Donna Simpson, 44, has carved out a niche online where men who like large women can watch her eat - at a price. "You know how you've got your regular size models and they post pictures of themselves in their bikinis and in sports cars? Well that's what I do for men that like fat women," she said in a telephone interview." http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/paid-to-eat-woman-fattens-up-bank-balance-by-scoffing-food-online-20110714-1heto.html

I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT SO YOU MUST NOT EITHER! HI KEVBONE, LET'S BE FRIENDS! Hey, if I was an expert on the subject of European and International finance like Jay here such to the degree that I had all of the answers to a complex economic situation like Greece and Ireland, I certainly would be doing something more meaningful and positive with my ideas than just spurting off about it on cascadeclimbers. The statement following "would" is orders of magnitude less likely to be true in any reality that you will ever inhabit than the statement following the "if." So where does that leave you?

PIIGS = Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain. The governments done in with debt as are private households and once again everyone's leaving Ireland to find work. Just because they are ideologically appealing to you with low taxes and crap services doesn't mean they are actually healthy. As a household debt to disposable income ratio of 190% would show. Should have read "rest of the PIIGS" The key difference between Ireland and the rest is that their debt ratio exploded as a result of a stupid decision to bail out their banks with the national treasury, not because of long term structural deficits. In one case, you wipe out the one-off debts and there's no gap between taxes and expenditures to worry about. In the other case the gap between taxes and expenditures opens up again immediately after the old debt is wiped out, and keeps growing indefinitely.

Yes. I'm making it all up. When the yields on the bonds that Greece is trying to sell spike, it's because I am speculating about their fiscal situation on the internet.

Ireland actually has a fairly productive private sector that can deliver production that equals or exceeds what the country consumes. Not the case with the PIIGS. Ireland chose to bail out its banks by assuming all of the debts that the banks accumulated by making retarded loans for the purchase of wildly overvalued properties with money they borrowed from the Germans. Ireland can restructure it's way out of insolvency. Greece is a structurally insolvent basket case that will never be able to generate the output required to satisfy the population's consumption demands without massive injections of money made elsewhere.

Damn, da ho damn global capitalist system done got isself in uh big ol' pickle! Whut tha hell y'all gon' do about it dis time? Governments won't pay for things that can't be paid for, and will ultimately have to default by inflation, benefit cuts, or both. Insolvent basket cases will opt for default primarily by inflation, non-basket cases lean more towards benefit cuts.

That's the bottom line w/Greece. The Euros are soon going to have to come to the conclusion that the pain is going to be shared and the German and Swiss banks are going to take a haircut on this one. The Germans are particularly pissed they are propping up Greece when, really, they are propping up German banks. The can has been kicked down the road only for a couple months. Once back from the August break I think a reality is going to settle in on the finance ministers. 1st option is immediate default. 2nd option is going all-in and making every penny of debt issued in the EU a "Eurobond," which will eventually allow the insolvent nations in Euroland to bring down the whole EU. Exponentially expanding entitlement obligations on top of a rapidly inverting demographic pyramid = default unless per-capita output grows enough to cover the difference between what the society in question actually produces and what it consumes. Greece, EU, or Central Falls, RI - the math is the same everywhere.

Nope - just more math! The above table assumes a doubling of real income over the duration of employment, but doesn't account for pension spiking, so it actually understates the amount of salary that would need to be set aside to cover pension benefits. Nor does it account for the cost of retiree health benefits. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/business/central-falls-ri-faces-bankruptcy-over-pension-promises.html

I've created a thread in Spray for any political rants related to this topic. Not sure if a comment is appropriate for this forum but feel inclined to speak out? Post it in Spray. Go nuts... http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/1026015#Post1026015

Post all of your politcal rants related to State Park funding here for everyone else's edification and amusement.....

Think the distribution of probabilities clusters around "up" pretty strongly in the long term, but if things are scary in Europe that will probably drive down the yield on all US government debt in the near term. How about you? Seems like this is a useful illustration of a few points that get lost in discussions of economics and finance. 1)Things that can't go on for ever, don't. 2)Debts that can't be repaid, won't. In this case the thing that couldn't go on forever was an endless expansion of entitlements beyond the society's capacity to pay them, and the debts that can't be repaid are those that were run up to cover the gap between production and consumption. Don't think we're immune to starring in a blockbuster sequel to what's going on in the Eurozone. Eventually we'll hit the real debt limit, which is when no one will loan you money anymore.

Reverse thread drift: Country Yield Change Yield High Spread Spread High Germany 2.67 -0.16 0 Ptgal 13.31 +0.39 Y 10.64 Y Ireland 13.34 +0.43 Y 10.67 Y Greece 17.02 +0.16 14.35 Spain 5.96 +0.28 Y 3.29 Y Italy 5.61 +0.34 Y 2.94 Y

What if the wages are too low to be livable? Really there should be no protection against this? The ultimate protection would be the right of anyone who didn't want to accept a job at a particular wage to refuse it. That's what protects ~97% of the workforce that makes more than the minimum wage right now. No one will fix cars for minimum wage, for example, because there are lots of people who can profitably employ them at several times that rate and are willing to pay them much more. For the rest, I don't think it'd actually be much of a problem in practice since virtually everyone that participates in the labor force picks up skills, habits, connections, knowledge etc that allow them to increase their earnings over time. Most are young and just entering the work-force, are living under someone else's roof, etc. Interns are an extreme case - many literally get paid nothing but are willing to work for free in exchange for training, connections, etc that they believe will result in bettor opportunities and higher pay later on. Having said that - transfer payments in the form of a negative income (like the EIC) are a great way to foster work-force participation without pricing the least skilled people out of the labor market entirely. Under that kind of a scheme it'd be possible for a single mom working to support her family to earn three times what a wealthy retiree was who was working just to get out of the house - even though they were working in the same capacity at the same place. The long-term effects of being locked out of the workforce are so much worse than working for low wages for a period of time that we should be much more concerned with the former than the latter.

You got it ass-backwards. Most labor saving technology is geared toward dumbing down the operator, diminishing the skill set, and cheapening the cost of labor not skilling up. If the owner is the operator what happens to the cost, and value of his labor in the above scenario? WTF? This conversation and the scenario you outline above centers on employers and workers. Now you're shifting the goalposts? Get back to me when you find some intellectual honesty and/or a belief in the legitimacy of your own arguments. Per your original statement, a guy digging a ditch with a shovel will diminish his skills and his wages if he decides to become a backhoe operator. His shoveling output is 10,000X higher but he only gets a measly doubling of his wage! Ditto for the guy who has $100K worth of electric tools to make cabinets with, vs the guy who uses hand tools. Same with the million dollar combine operator vs the guy with the scythe. Et....cetera. Were you really trying to make a serious argument?

Those are wonderful dogs, my heart goes out to the owners, and a big kudos goes out to OMR for heading out there to search for it and try to save it. Will keep my fingers crossed for Sasha.

You got it ass-backwards. Most labor saving technology is geared toward dumbing down the operator, diminishing the skill set, and cheapening the cost of labor not skilling up. If the owner is the operator what happens to the cost, and value of his labor in the above scenario?

And there lies the rub, eh? Who the f*** is going to implement the innovations? It's a matter of proportionality and it has just been tilted in one direction lately. You mean who is going to operate the robots? Anyone who is willing to accept the wages the owner is offering in exchange for doing so. Normally the more complicated and expensive the machine, the more the operator makes - but the ratio of wages to capital investment decreases as the stuff they're using gets more expensive. 747 Pilots make ~5X more than bus drivers despite the fact that they are operating something that's ~100X as expensive. (guestimates).

you'll just have to demonstrate it. BTW you still have to provide a source and a link for your data Transfer payments and benefits existed in 1979 as well. Moreover, benefits are on average smaller now than in 1979. crickets ... Mark Perry (economist). Blog is "Carpe Diem."

"Indirectly - social security benefits are needed most at the bottom end of the bracket - those disabled and those with low retierment buffer. In budget talks (current example is appropriate) SS always seems to lead the discussion out of proportion to say more usless programs - pick almost any military one. Thus ensuring its stability by taxing the upper income brackets - seriously - why is income that is taxed capped at $106,800? WTF" -SS was/is marketed as a means of sequestering personal savings to provide a self-funded safety net in old age. AFAIK the thinking was that taxing up to a particular threshold would provide a sufficient safety net.

This is a key issue. Productivity being driven by the workers but profit being held by the minority. That is not a productive model. Well, unless you are lucky enough to be in the upper echelons. Let's assume that there's a robot that amplifies a single worker's productivity 10-fold. Same guy working with his hands cranks out 10X less stuff. His employer invests in the robot and trains the employee how to use it. Employee owns his new robot-operating skill set. Employer owns the robot. How should the returns from the increase in productivity be divided? Not an entirely trivial question when the employer is the one who identifies the opportunity to increase output by investing, takes the business risk by sinking the money into the investment, assumes all costs of maintaining it, training the employees to operate it, etc. IMO the returns that the employee are entitled to are those that they arise from increasing skill, knowledge, etc.

Great link!

The people making $8 an hour are at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, you dumbass. Is paying them $5 going to make them better off? -5$ per hour as an entry point into the labor market is much better than being permanently unemployable at a higher wage rate and never entering the job market. -~3% of the workforce earns minimum wage, longitudinal studies show that these are transitional jobs for people entering the workforce for the first time, and that they don't stay stuck at those wage rates for very long. -You can use the tax code to channel transfer payments to people in this labor pool with dependents, etc and dramatically increase their income without trying to force employers to pay wage rates above their marginal productivity (EG prevent anyone from hiring them). We're already doing this with the EIC. -Final answer: Yes. They'd clearly be better off.

Don't think that's inconsistent with the data in the table. Thank-goodness for transfer payments and the value of benefits that they get in lieu of money wages! Now that we're done with that - here's another thing that's unambiguously better than it used to be:

So the rich are getting richer - and no, I don't believe that is inflation adjusted at least when you compare it to: just think how much better it'll be in the future Jay_B when there are even more underployed youth to sneer at! -Who is sneering at underemployed youth? -Setting minimum wage rates above their marginal productivity will guarantee unemployment. Structural unemployment will increase in direct proportion to the gap between the minimum wage and the marginal productivity of the least skilled/productive folks in society. Very bad for all of the people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder that progressives pretend to care about.