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Comment by talkingtab | Hacker News Reader

For those who do not know this, in the USA, our choice is not just between government controls and corporate controls. There is a third element, one that is supposed to be primary. We are supposed to live in a place where we people enact laws. This is not the case. The simplest test is simply to ask "Cui Bono". Who benefits from the laws enacted? For example, do the laws enacted favor drug companies and help them charge $1000 per month, or do the laws help keep drug cost under control? Do the laws enacted ensure that workers earn a living wage, or do they ensure that corporations can charge whatever price they want and pay as little as possible?

What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people

This is not rocket science. And it is stupid. At some point fewer and fewer Americans will be able to afford the things corporations sell. If you are a predator and you kill off your prey, you will die.

We, the people, need to start enacting laws that benefit the people. First and foremost is one that reverses Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This decision by the Supreme Court represents the height of incompetence or stupid.

Why is this not happening? Are the opinions and situation of common Americans ongoing and visible? Or does the NYT cater to wealthy corporate advertisers? Does it feature articles like "What house can you buy Portland, Maine with $1.5 million" while the number of homeless in Portland, Maine is staggering. Is the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos (aka Amazon) really going to talk about corporate excesses? Since our media is now utterly dependent on corporate advertisers, which of those media are going to oppose corporate excesses?

We need to fix this.

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This idea that anyone who doesn’t agree with your economic policy is obviously a paid plant is painful. I just listened to an R and D both wildly misconstrue the abortion issue as if one side wanted to murder children and the other wanted to control women’s bodies. Spend a few minutes honestly imagining the opposition has good intentions. Seek out what they think they mean.

The data on higher minimum wages is not clear and it is not obvious it would benefit all Americans (or even the poorest Americans). Even if I agree with you, your rhetoric costs you an ally.

> This is not rocket science

No, its economic policy and its arguably much much more complex than rocket science. We’ve been thinking about rockets for about 100 years, political economy for about 2500.

> I just listened to an R and D both wildly misconstrue the abortion issue as if one side wanted to murder children and the other wanted to control women’s bodies.

Only one side of this is, in fact, being misconstrued, as is evident by the recent deaths of women in states with abortion bans:

https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-ambe...

False balance is its own form of fallacious thinking.

Q.E.D.

Abortion is the ultimate debate; with no clear answer from any biological, moral, legal, ethical, philosophical, or even religious clause, and science leaning the "wrong" direction depending on social "norms".

Social norms are friction against the ability to be honest with peers - that are nearly all going to be incentived to lie about their actual opinion, and project the opposite (but vote the way they are told anyway)

The consequences are not necessarily the motivations.

I don't want to get too far afield here, but just in the interest of the parent point about assuming good faith, please take a look at this article if you have time: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/05/dr-warr...

"Up until around 32 weeks," and not all with medical diagnoses. And this is under current law. Can you say that everyone should be completely comfortable with this?

From the OP:

> and the other wanted to control women’s bodies

and you:

> Can you say that everyone should be completely comfortable with this?

So... control of women's bodies, as claimed in the OP? Why is it necessary for you to be comfortable?

If a given abortion is in fact murder, and I have some power to stop it (through politics or otherwise,) I feel uncomfortable inasmuch as I am allowing murder, and I feel it ethically necessary to resolve the discomfort. This moral consideration does of course balance against many others, including the preventable deaths of mothers that the OP highlighted.

Looking from outside of US its quite confusing how society of the free the country of libertarians… even makes this debatable. Its quite literally commanding someone what they can or cannot do about their body.

Looking at this from outside the US, it is quite bizarre to see how 2 extreme positions dominate the abortion debate there. Ultimately, the question is at which point the embryo should be considered a human being, who's life deserves some form of legal protection. One extreme position is that there should be no legal protection at all until birth. The other extreme would be granting full legal protection from conception. Both positions are fringe positions in Western Europe. The way the debate is radicalized in the US as a mater of fundamental human rights, feels like it leaves little space for the kind of compromise that most Europeans would accept as the only sensible position.

People who are not comfortable with it should simply not seek this particular care for themselves.

> The data on higher minimum wages is not clear and it is not obvious it would benefit all Americans (or even the poorest Americans).

You've been duped [1].

There is an extensive scare campaign around raising the minimum wage that is motivated by one thing only: allowing the wealthy to retain more of the profits generated by their workers. That's all that's happening here.

There is a well understood principle hhere too called the alienation of labor [2]. To summarize, without pushback workers will become increasingly estranged from and unable to produce the products they produce.

This is ultimately bad for the corporations that are exploiting them and the society as a whole because if nobody has any money, then there are no customers for your business. Over recent decades we've extended this by invoking debt. Housing debt, student debt, medical debt, credit card debt. These are temporary patches to a system that is fundamentally exploitative.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

[2]: https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/press-release/new-stu...

You didn't actually argue against the point though. How is it obvious that raising the minimum wage benefits all Americans? The people making wage already don't "have any money" yet the economy is fine anyways since they don't make up the majority of spending. Debt has been high forever.

Marx is right, the only thing that matters is labor + capex to create products / services. If rich people want to move money around buying expensive crap that's marginally better and isn't too much harder to produce, we should encourage that. As of now, most of the S&P 500 focuses on producing products for the common man or other businesses. This is exactly what you'd want to see and I don't see why we should rock the boat and reduce the total labor spent on the needs of the average person (minimum wage labor).

> an extensive scare campaign around raising the minimum wage that is motivated by one thing only: allowing the wealthy to retain more of the profits generated by their workers. That's all that's happening here.

This is not an honest summary of the literature.

Every recent increase in the minimum wage in America has produced zero to positive local employment effects [1][2][3][4]. Per your source, however, it also causes (non-monetary) inflation [5]. Moreover, we find in other countries that there is a limit to the tactic: in France, minimum-wage increases significantly decrease employment [6].

So no, people expressing scepticism towards minimum-wage increases are being duped no more than those being told it's corporate propaganda. They're asking legitimate questions that have nuanced answers. (It's also reasonable to ask if rural Alabama might have a different minimum wage from New York City.)

[1] https://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2013-02...

[2] https://www.nber.org/papers/w4509

[3] https://sp2.upenn.edu/study-increasing-minimum-wage-has-posi...

[4] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.35.1.3

[5] https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/press-release/new-stu...

[6] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

Item 5 seems weird to me…

1/ it pulls data from Uber eats. Many restaurants added “vanity” service charges to bills to provide visibility to the law changes. Instead of increasing menu prices, they add a mandatory service charge. I don’t know if this is accounted for in Uber eats takeout/delivery pricing

2/ most of the restaurants are fast food chains (think McDonalds). Full service business is included, but the sample size is much smaller. Even if it’s full service, the user isn’t “serviced” as these are delivery/takeout prices.

3/ the analysis is only national chain restaurants.

> if one side wanted to murder children and the other wanted to control women’s bodies. Spend a few minutes honestly imagining the opposition has good intentions

Why should I? One side is happy to push absolute known BS about "post birth abortions", about harvesting of fetal body parts for everything from alternative medicine to a quest for immortality.

The time for "assume good faith" is long, long, long gone. These arguments are not in good faith. And I can rule out good intentions when you can't even have a sincere argument about it and lie through your teeth, knowingly and deliberately about it.

For the sake of argument: if a foreign power would want to destabilize the US there are few better ways than promoting ideas like the above as much as possible.

If compromise isn't possible on any issue because the other side is evil incarnate and completely unreasonable - well that doesn't leave many nice places where a democracy can go.

It's not really a choice but a demonstration of intelligence and empathy. Still, if you deliberately decide to remain ignorant, or simply fail to understand the opposition's position even despite your best efforts, it shouldn't surprise you when you also fail to convince people your position is the correct one.

Once you reach this stage, your commentary pretty much just becomes elaborate whining, which makes a poor impression of yourself and actually pushes people away from your position. At best you might get some likes on social media though, which can feel nice.

Most of the web consists of this, so if that's what you prefer, I guess it's just going with the flow.

What position is that?

The one where it is okay to be absolutely, and objectively, dishonest, to get what you want?

When you have people who say "I don't actually care if your position is correct", your position that it is somehow my obligation to cater and pander to them, and that it is a failing of mine to not be willing to do so is farcical.

This is literally idiocracy in the making.

If I make a poor impression on people by repeatedly shutting down their horseshit about doctors performing "abortions" up to a week or a month after birth, or that babies are being harvested in the basement of a pizza parlor for their adrenachrome, and you're more concerned about how I should be "understanding" of that perspective, again, you're also supporting the idiocracy.

As anodyne as this post appears, there is real brilliance is linking the inability to convince others of your point with the inability to imagine other people's point of view. Just wanted to thank you for this one.

> if you ... simply fail to understand the opposition's position ... your commentary pretty much just becomes elaborate whining

So, so good.

> One side is happy to push absolute known BS about "post birth abortions", about harvesting of fetal body parts for everything from alternative medicine to a quest for immortality

Doesn't that increase the chances that one side consists of a significant number of good people who have simpy been duped? How does demonising them help?

Many people think incest, rape, and vitally-risky abortions total something more than 7% of abortions. Not remotely close.

Knowing that the vast abortions are preventable and essentially extremely ethically lazy birth control may also be a factoid worth "evangelizing".

   Embryonic stem cells only come from four to five day old blastocysts or younger embryos. These are eggs that have been fertilized in the laboratory but have not been implanted in a womb.

https://www.cirm.ca.gov/myths-and-misconceptions-about-stem-...

Ironically, 'science' and 'religion' actually oppose each other as to when "life" begins. Which ironically neither side can even cognitively process, because they are so blinded ideologically.

"And why should I change? If I change, I loose everything! I loose my self! Who in their right mind would accept such a fate? That's why..." - Amalthus, circa 4058 Alrest.

> What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people.

There are people trying to abolish the minimum wage in the US.[1] "Abolishing the federal minimum wage would help small businesses. Some economic theory suggests it would lower labor costs, expand the worker pool, raise profits, and reduce costs for consumers, as businesses tend to pass off the burden onto them. Also, ending it would delay the automation revolution. At a time in which ChatGPT – the AI chatbot that answers questions – is all the rage, more jobs get lost to machines every day (Burton & Wolla, 2021). The first ones to go are minimum-wage jobs. “Increasing the minimum wage decreases significantly the share of automatable employment held by low-skilled workers,” according to Professors Lordan of the London School of Economics and Neumark of UC Irvine (Lordan & Neumark, 2015). Cost-effective measures such as AI and self-service counters become less appealing when one isn’t forced to pay workers more."

Plus, it's weakly enforced. "Wage theft" is bigger than burglary, larceny, and robbery combined.[2] That doesn't include misclassification as an "independent contractor".

[1] https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2023/03/10/opinion-the-case-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft

Those people are right because the minimum wage is a very bad policy, especially for the low-skilled.

Where are these "low-skilled" people you think should be paid less than $7.25 an hour going to live? Shanty towns? Tent cities?

Yes.

That is where they live now, and are told they aren't allowed to work, or else their substituent welfare money they are dis-afforded (against their collective interests long term).

They can be something, and feel something, than the federal definition of "so low its illegal"

It also is blatantly unfair. Why enforce a minimum wage for legal workers, when illegal workers will ignore it (gun argument!?) and the border is open (but not for guns???).

> It also is blatantly unfair. Why enforce a minimum wage for legal workers, when illegal workers will ignore it?

Hm. That suggests an idea. A higher minimum wage for illegal workers.

Employers get a choice. Verify immigration status with E-Verify/RealID, and pay at least minimum wage. Or don't, and pay at least twice the minimum wage.

Offer sizable rewards for reporting wage theft. 3X penalty at least. Jail if the total stolen passes the felony threshold.

Now that would stop illegal aliens from taking low-end jobs in the US.

  >Now that would stop illegal aliens from taking low-end jobs in the US.

"twice minimum wage" may still be enough for employers looking to take advantage of those who don't know better.

You can be worth a million dollars but if you are lied to, you will work for bread.

> the border is open (but not for guns???).

The border is open for guns and it's a huge problem for Mexico to have a country with such insane gun policies next door.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2024/05/2...

That is the problem for the narco-state and its corrupt policies, and shitty corrupt border patrol/customs.

Our border is open to human trafficking, domestic infiltration, and massive practically a neo-chemical weapon.

Their parents' basement, usually. Low skilled jobs are frequently stepping stones or temporary respites on the way to better jobs. But if you yank them out of their reach, by jacking up the pay and so forcing the employers to either hire more productive workers or automate, the same people would be earning the true minimum wage - $0. And unlike the previous case, they would never gain any experience and use it to get the next, better job.

I hope you're aware not only youth work on minimum wage jobs. Some of them are not going to get better jobs (and aren't on their way there), they are stuck in those jobs and you are proposing they shouldn't ever see a raise because if not those jobs will cease to exist.

I'd like to see some hard data and sources for this assumption, it's quite a big one and since you started the argument with the unrealistic view that those jobs are only stepping stones to better ones or performed by youngsters with access to their parents' home I cannot trust your argument prima facie.

It's better to have a job paying $5 an hour than no job at all, which is what you're proposing.

  >I'd like to see some hard data and sources for this assumption,

"prove that this illegal thing would be good systematically at a macro-economic level when it being illegal has not shown to be good"

  >this assumption, it's quite a big one and since you started the argument with the unrealistic view that those jobs are only stepping stones to better ones or performed by youngsters with access to their parents' home

Fuck, ya got me. Let's try the opposite: lets give economically vital careers to homeless babies... that makes a lot more sense.

What percent of those drugs exist explicitly because they can charge high prices for them? Are companies going to continue to invest countless millions developing drugs they have no chance to recoop?

I'd argue everyone benefits from a world where cures exist but are expensive, when the alternative is everything that exists is affordable, but progress halts.

Then everyone should pay.

For some reason, only we do. As far as the crazy-high prices.

> Then everyone should pay. For some reason, only we do. As far as the crazy-high prices.

Who are the “we” and who are the “they” in your telling?

The US.

The rest of the world. Including many countries host to major drug companies.

Somehow I don’t think they’ll let those companies’ R&D departments starve if the US stops paying $700 for things that cost other countries $120, or what have you.

I remember reading that part of the problem is that Medicare/Medicaid is not allowed to actually negotiate prices with drug companies but must pay the list price. That seems ridiculous and a legally sanctioned way to basically milk the government and co-insurance payers is money. It appears to have been addressed by the Biden administration though: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/10/22/biden-harris-admin...

This view is a bit too simplistic when the "countless millions" is often paid by taxpayers. Taxpayers pay the company to develop a drug, and then the company gets to seek profit by maximally exploiting taxpayers who paid for the drug.

We don't need to forcefully regulate drug companies, all we have to do, as taxpayers, is ask for something in return for our tax dollars. "We will pay to develop your drug, but then we get to regulate the price, and you'll still make a reasonable profit. That's the deal, take it or leave it." No force, no compulsion, just us taxpayers asking for something in return for our dollars and coming to an agreement before handing over our dollars.

I wasn’t aware that taxpayers funded drug development.

Can you share examples? I am genuinely asking.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/where-drugs-come-c...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/us-tax-dolla...

Also, the prohibition on letting Medicare negotiate drug prices could be seen as taxpayer funded drug development, assuming that money were used to fund drug development rather than enrich shareholders.

Will some news[1] articles[2] that refer to government and think-tank papers suffice or are you looking for spreadsheet-level data?

[1] https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/08/29/hhs-selects-the-fi...

[2] https://www.levernews.com/americans-paid-11-billion-to-make-...

From this [1] 2017 report:

> pharmaceutical and biotechnology sales revenue increased from $534 billion to $775 billion between 2006 and 2015

> worldwide company-reported R&D spending, most of which went to drug development (rather than research) ... $89 billion in 2015 dollars

> During the same period, federal spending, which funded a greater amount of basic research relative to industry, remained stable at around $28 billion

So only ~11% of total revenue was being reinvested, mostly into drug development.

And basic research was funded largely by federal spending.

[1] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-40

Drug development is a pretty critical component of getting a drug to the consumer, unless you don't consider completing human clinical trials and receiving FDA approval to be valuable

As if science and medicine didn't exist before it was about padding some executive's bank account with a few million more.

How many medicines are required just to treat issues brought on by unrepentant greed in other industries? Does Ozempic treat obesity and diabetes or does it treat the lack of regulation in food quality and advertising? How much cancer is an outcome of greed in exchange for disregarding public health, how much depression is the outcome of greed and economically-produced hopelessness, on and on.

How have so many people lost their hearts and minds to this tail-chasing madness?

The median human is vastly healthier today than any time before industrialisation.

The comment we're both responding to is about the validity of modern pharmaceutical research and what kinds of medicines they produce as an outcome of US federal government investment. "Before industrialization" is over 400 years ago.

Sure. The median human today is vastly healthier than before WWII. The median American is vastly healther today than pre-War.

None of these statements relate to the comment thread you're responding to IMO. Are you saying that the median human today is "vastly" "healthier" because of medications developed by American pharmaceutical companies, that they are "healthier" because of medications created to alleviate the outcomes of pollution/greed? What point of the discussion said humans are not healthier than they once were?

it is a question of who is going to subsidize global pharma R&D?

same drug costs $10k in US is sold for $5k in EU and $10 in India.

The biggest question is: Why should US consumer subsidize pharma R&D so that pharma can sell it globally and hoard profits in Switzerland?

note: all pharma companies are incorporated in a way to pay de-minimus tax in US/EU/Asia via transfer pricing schemes and hoard all extra profits in Switzerland because of Swiss laws taxing licensing IP only at 15%

example:

  1. Pharma, Inc sells drug for $10,000 in US

  2. it licenses IP from Swiss entity and swiss entity charges it $9999 royalty

  3. Pharma, Inc pays US tax on $1 of profit at 35%

  4. Swiss entity records $9999 profit and pays 15% tax

so US consumer is screwed in the end.

US consumer think twice: do you want to pay $10,000 for a drug + $20,000 in insurance premium+copay when you can travel to India/Egypt/Turkey/Germany and get the same treatment for the same brand name drug for 1/10 (or 1/1000 of cost).

We need to talk about geographical arbitrage of healthcare costs more

"What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people"

Can you give a source on this one, you state it like it's something obvious and studied but I don't follow? I'm curious how this policy doesn't result in increased off shoring in a world where USA doesn't control 100% of resources, and a theoretical world this would result in inflation normalizing against the increased monetary supply.

There are lots of examples of countries having much higher minimum wages without the consequences you mentioned.

Reality? What sources are you citing? Are you paid to post this?

How do you offshore a car wash, for example?

I buy one of TSLAs robots and remote control it from a foreign country claiming it AI.

We're talking about stuff that exists here.

That ain't cheaper!

Nobody pays $7.25/hr in 2024, as nobody will work for that. McDonald's here is paying $15/hr and in the past 10-15 years have completely rebuilt their stores and kitchens and preparation processes to reduce labor needs.

The 7.25 rate was set in 1996. Adjusted for inflation, 7.25 is worth 15 today. There are thousands and thousands of jobs paying less than 15/hr.

In NC, where I live, the average wage for an entry-level crew member at McDonalds is $12.16, effectively 20% lower than the original purchasing power of the 1996 minimum wage.

https://www.indeed.com/cmp/McDonald%27s/salaries?location=US...

That's garbage. Quarter of a million Americans work for minimum wage, (i.e. exactly $15,079 annually) according to tax filings by employers.

This does not include those in tipping industries where they are allowed to have a base pay of under the minimum wage.

https://www.zippia.com/advice/minimum-wage-statistics

From that link, "that is only 0.15% of the working population" and nearly half of those workers are teenagers, i.e. it's a first-time, likely part-time job.

I stand by my claim that (essentially) nobody is working for minimum wage in 2024.

these are people specifically choose to work under the poverty limit to be eligible for safety net welfare: EBT/SNAP/WIC/Medicaid and then work for cash unrecorded.

like they work 4hr/day and accumulate ~1000 hours/year and then work off w2-payroll

In Australia, the minimum wage is 16.12 USD. Minimum wage employment is not vulnerable to off-shoring (shelves must be packed in the local warehouse), but is to automation.

Looking at a few studies online, it seems as though there is no long term correlation between increasing the minimum wage and inflation.

I think you hit my points nail on the head. Automation is the upper bound, I'm not convinced on your latter point because market forces typically act before minimum wage, which I think a different comment or brought up in relation to McDonalds.

Just so it's clear I think if there is a legal solution to this it's on taxing the high end of incomes, inheritances, and capital gains, not the low end.

> I'm not convinced on your latter point because market forces typically act before minimum wage

If there were a long term inflationary effect, then industries particularly sensitive to minimum wage costs should have significantly higher prices in Australia compared to the US. That doesn’t appear to be the case; perhaps they absorb the additional costs in the profit margin. It can’t have no effect, but it’s clearly not as simple as you were implying.

> shelves must be packed in the local warehouse

There are offshore clothing manufacturers that arrange the clothes on racks and pack them in the containers.

Once the package reach the destination they do directly on display. This "saves" the company from having to pay someone higher wages for arranging clothing displays.

The companies will always chose lower costs wherever they can get away with.

Agree on all points, but there’s on crucial thing you’re missing. The government was always created BY rich people FOR rich people. All the founding fathers were rich or well connected to rich people. Some owned slaves. Most countries are like this anyway, only a few very notable exceptions.

Singapore comes to mind, their government focuses extremely on improving life for the common person.

Well they're certainly not improving life for people who will lose their housing predicated on heterosexual marriage if they transition, or attempting to murder anti-corruption activists.

Tell me explicitly what the difference between 1 person and 100 people are. What happens to their rights when you go from 1 to 1,000,000, what you can strip from them when you go from 1 to 335,893,238.

Enumerate specifically at which number rights begin to be eliminated, and why. Be careful, you might not like what the people actually think of you when you strip their rights from them. But since you are so adamant about the "stupidity" of Citizen's United, you ought to have an actual stance here. There is a number here, tell me, and everyone else here, what that number is, we don't even need to touch the rights if you are too skittish to answer.

"We, the people" is a phrase that means something very specific, take a bit of caution that you are not using it nefariously.

It's not incompetence or stupidity in the Supreme Court, it's oligarchy and it has been for a while.

See the Powell Memo written by a future Supreme Court Judge in the 1970s for details.

Research has shown that democratic support is not what gets laws passed in the US, but corporate support.

generally i share your sentiment but your arguments are rather weak - let me play the devil's advocate here:

- drug prices: research is expensive and assuring safety by extensive testing is even more expensive.

- minimum wage: if wages are higher then many jobs won't be economically sustainable any longer and then the former employee is becoming unemployed plus still sustained service are more expensive now.

- house prices: first of all it's not being homeless vs owning a home. secondly lower house prices, less incentive to build, fewer houses, more expensive apartments, more homeless people.

the problem is we try to solve problems with money. not going to work any longer. worked for a while while the fabric of society was still sufficiently in tact. isn't any more. we have to ask spiritual questions. yes, i know it's a trigger word. but that's how it is. you wanna know what society is now about - spend a day on instagram. a majority of the youth seems to be obsessed with clips about guys punching each other in the face or stomach while keeping a straight face. it's no longer - mommy i want to be an astronaut when i'm old - it's mommy i want to fight, bully and be able to keep a straight face when someone kicks me in the guts while someone else films it and i hope some equally shallow dame sees it and we found a family based on values i learned from some sun glasses wearing guy on tiktok who talks like a retarded drill sergeant.

there is no hope ...

> Why is this not happening?

We don't have consensus around the solution. Also, look at our current election. The problem isn't corporate money in politics. It's just money in politics.

> Since our media is now utterly dependent on corporate advertisers, which of those media are going to oppose corporate excesses?

The ones not dependent on advertising.

>At some point fewer and fewer Americans will be able to afford the things corporations sell. If you are a predator and you kill off your prey, you will die.

I some times wish that were actually the case. Revolutions don't happen until people can't afford bread. So they're drip feeding us just enough to keep things on that edge. In a lot of ways life is cheaper and easier now for consumers overall. Everyone can afford a big screen TV, smartphone, etc. Consumer goods are kept at that level. But assets have simultaeneously reached levels that are completely unattainable for 90% of people. They want to keep us in this "constant now" where there are no thoughts of retirement or wealth or ownership of anything. Just a nonstop struggle to keep the lights on in a way that's just bareable enough to not rock the boat.

>What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people

Really? I imagine that a very large percentage of the voting public, almost certainly a majority, benefits more from cheap services than they do from the minimum wage. The median weekly wage in the US is ~$1150, which is 4 times as much as someone would make from working 40 hours at the federal minimum wage. There is some upward pressure on wages overall when the minimum wage is raised but my understanding is it's negligible beyond a narrow threshold. So most Americans wouldn't see any personal benefit from doubling the federal minimum wage (making it higher than at any point in US history, adjusted for inflation). On the other side of the equation, nearly everyone purchases labor intensive services from people working near minimum wage, at least occasionally.

None of that is to say the minimum wage is a bad policy, but in the same way most people probably wouldn't want to pay a sales tax that raised the earned income tax credit, many people would be upset about the higher prices that followed a minimum wage increase. That's basically what happened during the pandemic; a very tight labor supply resulted in wages going up dramatically at the bottom end of the income ladder and the resulting inflation was very unpopular.

Yes, indeed, slavery (which is effectively what minimum wage work is) makes things cheaper.

Not sure that's sustainable though.

We need to evaluate our governance system like we evaluate a system full of tech debt that's killing people:

Stop it with minimal nonconsensual death & reactor fundamental design principles.

It's the only ethical way out of such a system.

Very well articulated. Standing right next to you, fist raised, ready to share the word.

I don't disagree with, say, reversing Citizens United but really what you list here is a bunch of symptoms.

> Why is this not happening?

Because Americans, as a whole, have zero class consciousness, thanks the hyper-individualism of liberalism and possibly the most successful propaganda campaign in history ie the Red Scare.

We have people who unironically will champion for the likes of Jeff Bezos to pay less in taxes and will identify more with Bezos than their fellow worker.

The wealthy and the corporations embarked on an intentional journey to destroy class consciousness and to buy the government. It's fascism, pure and simple. They even say it out loud [1]:

> "This is a tough question, but this is maybe the question that confronts us right now. There's this guy Curtis Yarvin who's written about some of these things," Vance said,

This isn't fringe. This is from Peter Thiel's alleged blood boy [2] and VP candidate, JD Vance. What did Yarvin say?

> "If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia," Yarvin says in the clip.

[1]: https://www.salon.com/2024/10/01/rachel-maddow-sounds-alarm-...

[2]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to...

> What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people

Not a great example. The evidence of its effectiveness is mixed, and the burden of the wage increase hits small businesses early. The Walmarts of the world are better equipped to cope.

Maybe it's a good idea, maybe not; I'm just saying it's not obvious.

>Why is this not happening?

This is like asking why stupid people aren't smart.

Or, how about a fourth way? Maybe government is not supposed to replace mom and dad? Where in the us constitution does it say the role of government is to be a charity, or leverage in some Marxist struggle?

The corps want you to reproduce and die young.

> What is the federal minimum wage? Who benefits from it being $7.25 an hour? Not the common people

Source on that. Higher federal minimum wage causes low profit, manufacturing jobs to move off shore. The higher the federal wage the more automation becomes a higher ROI. The more those in poverty have to spend, the more competition for scarce resourcing (e.g. housing), and the more housing inflates in cost.

Simply raising federal minimum wage doesn't necessarily benefit all.

You could deal with that through subsidy. Make the minimum wage livable, then any industry you want to keep onshore for strategic reasons you help out. Free market lovers might hate this but effectively the government does this anyway by definition for everything provided for free.

> Make the minimum wage livable, then any industry you want to keep onshore for strategic reasons you help out

This is a model for shit labour productivity à la the Soviet Union or Argentina. Much better to have no minimum wage and a UBI, to avoid distorting your industry through your wage policy.

Why? Subsidy is saying: you know you can only compete with China if you pay $5 an hour, so pay $10 and we will pay the rest because having a steel manufacturing industry is important to the government. Maybe the sub is based on productivity rather than wage. $ per tonne.

> Subsidy is saying: you know you can only compete with China if you pay $5 an hour, so pay $10 and we will pay the rest because having a steel manufacturing industry is important to the government

I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying everyone who has tried something like this wound up with a sclerotic industry. At a certain point, you wind up with the subsidy grantor deciding who can and cannot participate in the industry. Those already in don't want competition. The rest follows quite simply. (Moreover, your export market gets constrained because foreign countries will overcorrect undoing your subsidy with tariffs.)

We do this sort of thing in America. It's why we have booming shipbuilding and steelmaking industries.

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