Greeks Bearing Gifts....

[prole]

I'm not even sure you know what that means. Feel free to post some spank material to illustrate your 'point', though. Reality will still be here when you get back.

 

Feel free to tell us exactly how you would change the compensation structure of CEO's compared to the rank-and-file fixing your oft-cited wealth gap. Let's hear some concrete explicit steps rather than typical progtard whining and hand-waving.

 

I would think the oft-cited charts would make that answer obvious, roll back the "Reagan Revolution": retie wages and benefits to gains in productivity, enforce rules against union busting, tax the shit out of the global casino, deficit spending in the near-term to fund infrastructure and improvements in education while putting people to work, limit the access and influence of corporate cash in the political system, re-regulate finance, break up the big banks and/or run them as public utilities, close loopholes, limit tax offshoring, and prosecute avoiders and evaders, write off onerous debt for homeowners facing foreclosure, reduce health care costs by the only means available, a national single-payer health care system, penalize corporations seeking to reduce environmental and labor costs through offshoring and other 'race to the bottom' advantage-seeking behavior, tighten rules around repatriation of corporate profits, etc. Darn, did I mention CEO compensation?

[prole]

But hey, the whole discourse limited to "do we cut off our hands or our feet" should be fun to watch for another 3-5 years...

[rob]

also, capital gains should be taxed as income

[KaskadskyjKozak]

I'm not even sure you know what that means. Feel free to post some spank material to illustrate your 'point', though. Reality will still be here when you get back.

 

Feel free to tell us exactly how you would change the compensation structure of CEO's compared to the rank-and-file fixing your oft-cited wealth gap. Let's hear some concrete explicit steps rather than typical progtard whining and hand-waving.

 

I would think the oft-cited charts would make that answer obvious, roll back the "Reagan Revolution": retie wages and benefits to gains in productivity, enforce rules against union busting, tax the shit out of the global casino, deficit spending in the near-term to fund infrastructure and improvements in education while putting people to work, limit the access and influence of corporate cash in the political system, re-regulate finance, break up the big banks and/or run them as public utilities, close loopholes, limit tax offshoring, and prosecute avoiders and evaders, write off onerous debt for homeowners facing foreclosure, reduce health care costs by the only means available, a national single-payer health care system, penalize corporations seeking to reduce environmental and labor costs through offshoring and other 'race to the bottom' advantage-seeking behavior, tighten rules around repatriation of corporate profits, etc. Darn, did I mention CEO compensation?

 

Sounds like a great recipe for an immediate and total economic collapse. And I sure don't see anything individual - or combined set of changes - actually changing the fact that there are always a very few very rich who run everything and the vast majority living at a much lower standard.

 

[prole]

Sounds like a great recipe for an immediate and total economic collapse.

 

We're there, bro!

 

...the fact that there are always a very few very rich who run everything and the vast majority living at a much lower standard.

 

There's actually a metric used to study this. WE'RE 44TH! Believe it or not, you might have seen it mentioned earlier in this thread if you were paying attention. I can repost it for you if you need help.

 

 

[ivan]

there are always a very few very rich who run everything and the vast majority living at a much lower standard.

the debate, good sir and as you must be aware, is of course not wether there should be a dichotomy, but how extreme that dichotomy should be.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Sounds like a great recipe for an immediate and total economic collapse.

 

We're there, bro!

 

...the fact that there are always a very few very rich who run everything and the vast majority living at a much lower standard.

 

There's actually a metric used to measure this. WE'RE 44TH! Believe it or not, you might have seen it mentioned earlier in this thread if you were paying attention.

 

 

Oh, it's awful. How DO you refrain from slitting your wrists?

[prole]

Making you look like a complete ass on a daily basis helps!

[tvashtarkatena]

I'm not sure you have much to do with that. He's pretty good on his own.

[prole]

There's a certain Zen quality about it.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Making you look like a complete ass on a daily basis helps!

 

How long do I need to stop posting before you off yourself? It is very tempting.

[prole]

Making you look like a complete ass on a daily basis helps!

 

How long do I need to stop posting before you off yourself? It is very tempting.

 

Fairweather's back from his "sabbatical", so...

[sobo]

The bummer is that leveling down ("my benefits, wage, and pension package sucks and is getting suckier by the year, we should make everybody else's suck as bad as mine") has become the conditioned response...

Sounds like the basic premise behind the concept of "redistribution of wealth" to me...

This redistribution of wealth? The one that's actually happening rather than the rhetorical one that's dragged out any time improving the lives of regular people is mentioned?

 

This relates to the issue of "shared sacrifice" as well. Why are we even discussing squeezing what are really just marginally better off workers when American finance, corporations and wealthy individuals whose incomes grew by leaps and bounds during the great redistribution, are sitting on a cash hoard in the trillions, and are positively thriving in the midst of austerity?

I think it is less of wanting to drag folks down to a common level than shared sacrafice during hard times. Working folks see what happens in their business - folks taking pay cuts to keep a team together, for instance. And they expect something similar with taxpayers money

Jim caught the drift of my comment. I find it irksome that the WFSE did not even consider a little "shared sacrifice" on everyone's part in order to keep everyone's job. Instead, they flatly said, "No!" to a reasonable request to do that. I don't think that's the kind of representation that I would want in the current economic climate. Guess we'll see how many chairs get pulled away when the music stops...

[JayB]

The bummer is that leveling down ("my benefits, wage, and pension package sucks and is getting suckier by the year, we should make everybody else's suck as bad as mine") has become the conditioned response...

Sounds like the basic premise behind the concept of "redistribution of wealth" to me...

This redistribution of wealth? The one that's actually happening rather than the rhetorical one that's dragged out any time improving the lives of regular people is mentioned?

 

This relates to the issue of "shared sacrifice" as well. Why are we even discussing squeezing what are really just marginally better off workers when American finance, corporations and wealthy individuals whose incomes grew by leaps and bounds during the great redistribution, are sitting on a cash hoard in the trillions, and are positively thriving in the midst of austerity?

I think it is less of wanting to drag folks down to a common level than shared sacrafice during hard times. Working folks see what happens in their business - folks taking pay cuts to keep a team together, for instance. And they expect something similar with taxpayers money

Jim caught the drift of my comment. I find it irksome that the WFSE did not even consider a little "shared sacrifice" on everyone's part in order to keep everyone's job. Instead, they flatly said, "No!" to a reasonable request to do that. I don't think that's the kind of representation that I would want in the current economic climate. Guess we'll see how many chairs get pulled away when the music stops...

 

Purely tactical.

 

The thinking is that once things improve it's much easier to rehire the folks that got canned during the downturn at existing wage/benefit rates than it is to recapture the lost ground for everyone at the next round of negotiations.

 

Seems odd to me, since things may not turn around for a long while, and historically they've done pretty well at the "negotiating" table.

 

Makes for an amusing exercise for the participants, and may even fool onlookers - but the outcome is always the same.

 

It's the political equivalent of a serial John taking a prostitute for dinner and a movie.

[prole]

Jim caught the drift of my comment. I find it irksome that the WFSE did not even consider a little "shared sacrifice" on everyone's part in order to keep everyone's job. Instead, they flatly said, "No!" to a reasonable request to do that. I don't think that's the kind of representation that I would want in the current economic climate. Guess we'll see how many chairs get pulled away when the music stops...

 

And my question is: where is the "shared sacrifice" on the part of those most capable of bearing it, namely those who made the most substantial gains while workers across the board were backsliding (who, along with workers that were able to maintain some footing, are now being asked to bear the brunt of austerity)?

Edited November 29, 2011 by prole

[Jim]

..... along with workers that were able to maintain some footing, .......

 

Yea. Thanks taxpayers!

[JayB]

What percentage of the productivity gains are derived from A) innovation, B) capital investment or C) both vs D)people working harder or picking up additional skills?

 

I'd guess it's about 90% A,B, or C in the US and 10% training/education and effort on the part of workers.

 

Like it or not - I suspect that determines where the upside of productivity gains goes, but I also suspect that workers have realized a higher percentage of the payout from the productivity gains than they've been responsible for generating via D.

[JayB]

Then there's also the possibility that some of the gains have been misattributed:

 

US Productivity Measures Overstate Domestic Gains: Explains Lack Of Workers' Wage Gains And Lack Of Job Growth: McKinsey & Co.

From McKinsey & Co, "Not all productivity gains are the same. Here's why." by Michael Mandel and Susan Houseman, June 2011:

 

Under ordinary circumstances, economic theory would tell us that an industry with rising productivity would pay higher wages and/or boost employment. However, real wages for many production and nonsupervisory workers stagnated in most tradable industries during this period, even as jobs disappeared. Notably, the durable goods manufacturing sector showed only a 0.2 percent cumulative increase in real wages for production and supervisory workers from 1990 to 2008, despite more than doubling in productivity over the same stretch, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 

But recent work suggests a resolution to this apparent paradox. [see, for example, Susan Houseman, Christopher Kurz, Paul Lengermann, and Benjamin Mandel, “Offshoring Bias in U.S. Manufacturing,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2011. See also Michael Mandel, “Implausible Numbers: How our current measures of economic competitiveness are misleading us and why we need new ones,” February 2011.] The key is to understand that the US government’s systems for tracking the national economy were never designed to deal with offshoring or global supply chains. In particular, shifts in global sourcing to take advantage of lower costs—the very essence of globalization—are inco rrectly picked up in the US economic statistics.

 

As a result, the apparent strong growth in the productivity or value-added per job in tradable industries actually combines three very different effects:

 

* Improvements in domestic production processes

* Gains in global supply chain efficiency

* Productivity gains at foreign suppliers.

 

Each of these components of “productivity growth” has different implications for real wages and for the creation of new jobs. Understanding the distinctions among them can improve understanding of our current situation and open up new avenues for policy.

***

It matters greatly for wages and employment whether rising value-added per worker is being driven by domestic production improvements, supply chain efficiencies, or by productivity gains abroad.

 

http://misunderstoodfinance.blogspot.com/2011/06/us-productivity-measures-overstate.html

[j_b]

66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

 

[j_b]

61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

 

[j_b]

83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

[j_b]

A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.

 

[j_b]

Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

 

[j_b]

In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.

[j_b]

As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets