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Monkey Fracas posted:The only reason its come back into use is to try and draw some insidious connection between the Democratic party and Stalinism. I honestly can't believe people still buy all that McCarthy "Commies EVERYWHERE!!" crap. The cold war apparently really wrecked our political sensibilities or something. Is there a fringe element in Russia that runs around all like goddamn capitalism ruins everything american pigs wharrrrrgbl Eh Russia actually has a whole lot of neonazis if you'll believe that.
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Oct 4, 2012 11:16
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just out of pure residual post WWII-era misplaced nationalism?
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Just got off the phone with my crazy mom about the debate and she fires off an email to me. She was claiming that the reason wages have stagnated for forever is that the minimum wage exists.quote:• Minimum Wage law is seen to work against low skilled employees, teenagers, trainees and interns, university students and part time workers because their job opportunities get curtailed due to this law. I know it is probably a copy/paste from some think-tank somewhere.
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Oct 4, 2012 14:13
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If a company can't afford to pay employees minimum wage, then they have no business hiring anybody.
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Oct 4, 2012 14:21
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Wardark Grimhams posted:I know it is probably a copy/paste from some think-tank somewhere. It's one of those Austrian economics thing that makes sense if you don't give a gently caress about anybody.
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Oct 4, 2012 14:25
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If you want to attack the moral angle, replace "minimum wage" with "child labor laws" or "safety requirements" and ask her what she thinks about that. Businesses do not have a right to be profitable at the expense of everything else. As for it making us uncompetitive, that's total bullshit because the places that we outsource too pay wages that we flat out cannot match. China, Hounduras, and Vietnam pay the equivalent of 40 cents an hour (or less), and work their employees 80+ hours a week, in hazardous/sometimes lethal working conditions. Ask her how many people would apply for a job in the US where working for 8 hours a day wouldn't even buy them food for the day.
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Oct 4, 2012 14:25
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Thanks for the prompt replies. I had to sanitize some things in my reply to her because she keeps bringing up my uncle who had to fire people despite "selling more pools in the last year." I suspect that is a clever fabrication. EDIT: and her reply is the most FYGM reply quote:Okay let’s just agree to disagree. Since we both make way over minimum wage. I would rather see business’s do good and you would rather see the individual without skills or education do good. It is just a difference of opinion. 2nd EDIT: A second gem just rolled in quote:That really is more of a union thing to me. If we did not have unions negotiating outrages wages we could be more competitive with other countries. There is no way a person putting a car piece together should make more than a nurse caring for someone. IT was just in the facts I was reading. If someone on the line at GM made what he was worth it would be a lot lower than the Union wage in my book. My friend said it best, "She could have just written 'gently caress poor people', it would have been a lot shorter" Wardark Grimhams fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Oct 4, 2012 |
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Oct 4, 2012 14:37
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Bruce Leroy posted:I like Sandra Fluke and hate the vitriol spewed at her but it's actually a pretty good litmus test to see whether someone is a stupid rear end in a top hat or not. You'd have to be a huge moron and/or intentionally dishonest to insult Sandra Fluke in the form of slut shaming and insinuating she's promiscuous, as her testimony was about the medical benefits of oral contraceptives for other women she knows (including her lesbian classmate who lost an ovary to cysts that would have been treated/prevented by affordable birth control), not Fluke herself. The other great thing about it was Rush Limbaugh utterly embarrassing himself by showing he knows absolutely nothing about oral contraceptives. I went through this with some friends, only someone spewing poo poo they already heard, without watching the video, can honestly say she came off "as a slut". It's a good litmus test for me whether they watched the video at all. I corrected my friends and didn't hear more about it (small email threads, so no public viewing like Facebook to bring in the smacktards.) Sadly, I go into our political interactions with an open mind, but they don't argue, just pile anecdotes and feelings on top of each other. Most of the people I can have a 'good' conversation with also agree with me on a lot of political and social issues. Plus, I'm not much of a debater.
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Oct 4, 2012 14:52
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Wardark Grimhams posted:My friend said it best, "She could have just written 'gently caress poor people', it would have been a lot shorter" I don't get why some people feel that the upper crust needs more breaks; they've already got a leg up on the majority of people. Won't somebody think of the poor corporations making record profits instead of the actual people barely making enough to survive?
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Oct 4, 2012 15:03
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Leon Einstein posted:So your mother would rather more people relied on the government to survive rather than working for a living? Cause that's what would happen if you started paying people 40 cents an hour or whatever bullshit number she pulls out of her rear end. Well our conversation has splintered into multiple things, including her emailing my dad for help. I can tell because he uses a different font in his emails and she has copied it verbatim. here is another path she is venturing down quote:Most people that are smaller business owners are Conservatives and are waiting to see what comes in November. If Obama gets re-elected there will be no growth for sure. Most smaller businesses will close because of the cost of his health care, either the fines for not having it or the price they will have to pay manage it. I was in that line of work and that is coming from experience in it not just facts. Apparently we are all doomed
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Oct 4, 2012 15:14
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So is she saying that nobody can buy anything right now either? Why are conservatives ignoring the fact that the economy is getting better?
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Oct 4, 2012 15:16
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Wardark Grimhams posted:Well our conversation has splintered into multiple things, including her emailing my dad for help. I can tell because he uses a different font in his emails and she has copied it verbatim. Ask her to quote specifics about how PPCPA is going to cost businesses more.
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Oct 4, 2012 15:34
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I just asked, Lets see what comes back.
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Oct 4, 2012 15:36
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Have someone going off on how Ambassador Stevens was dragged through the streets by terrorists and Obama just let it slide. Have been Googling and all I can find is Snopes (liberal lies!) refuting it, and then a bunch of right wing sites about how not only was he dragged through the streets by said terrorists, he was also sodomized. I really remember it coming out that they were trying to get him to a hospital, can anyone help out with that?
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Oct 4, 2012 15:36
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Wardark Grimhams posted:My friend said it best, "She could have just written 'gently caress poor people', it would have been a lot shorter" I'd just reply with pictures of labor from the gilded age, back when America was competitive.
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Oct 4, 2012 15:39
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Wardark Grimhams posted:Thanks for the prompt replies. I had to sanitize some things in my reply to her because she keeps bringing up my uncle who had to fire people despite "selling more pools in the last year." I suspect that is a clever fabrication. Ask her why our goal is to lower wages of auto workers instead of raising wages of nurses, and 'so rich people can make more money' doesn't count as an answer. Also, show her this video of Robert Reich explaining the economy, which includes a section on why wages have stagnated while growth has continued (hint: it's because rich people are stealing all the productivity increases): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTzMqm2TwgE
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Oct 4, 2012 15:48
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Wardark Grimhams posted:
If only there was some way that the government could pay for everyone's health care. That way, our  GLORIOUS JOB CREATORS would have enough money to create jobs. And there's certainly no possibility that your employees having health care keeps them healthier and thus makes them more productive at work. Oh and consumers would have more money to shop at your store since they wouldn't be spending it on health insurance/treatment.But don't you see that government programs make productive members of society into lazy parasites!? No one actually benefits when the government helps people.
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Oct 4, 2012 16:04
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Haxin Jackson posted:
No responses to the new information but that was one of the threads of another email she sent me. I sent her this, which might be inaccurate, I was typing fast. quote:Because wages have not kept up with cost of living, if they had people would be buying things and the economy would be fine. People act like welfare is simply a drain on the economy but at least those people spend that money on goods and services. When we give tax breaks to billionaires they just put some more money in offshore accounts. she sent this back in response to only the welfare part of my email quote:Those people don’t pay a dime in taxes. They just take and have no incentive to ever go to work. We are just creating a lazy society that wants everything handed to them. The days of thinking working for something is a good thing are gone. Generations of people like you will keep it that way.
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Oct 4, 2012 16:14
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quote:Those people don’t pay a dime in taxes. They just take and have no incentive to ever go to work. We are just creating a lazy society that wants everything handed to them. The days of thinking working for something is a good thing are gone. Generations of people like you will keep it that way. First, FICA is not the only tax. Second, that's not how welfare programs work. (The benefits are small, a lot of people on welfare are working, the lifetime limits, etc. Depends on exactly which program you're talking about when you say welfare.)
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Oct 4, 2012 16:21
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vyelkin posted:Ask her why our goal is to lower wages of auto workers instead of raising wages of nurses, and 'so rich people can make more money' doesn't count as an answer. You see: auto workers make more than nurses! (Which is probably not even true now) You think: Pay auto workers less! I think: Pay nurses more! And I'm the person that hates America and wants us to fail? Also if slavery still existed think how much more profitable our benevolent overlords (sorry, "job creators") would be!
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Oct 4, 2012 16:22
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/\/\/\ Job creators could create so many more jobs if they didn't have to pay us anything. Let's get rid of all wages. I'm sure everyone will be lining up around the block to work for the glory of a hard day's sweat, rather than the money that they make.Wardark Grimhams posted:No responses to the new information but that was one of the threads of another email she sent me. I'm pretty sure it's a hopeless cause, but if you really want to keep going with this here's a good place to start on her anti-welfare stuff. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/sunday/taking-responsibility-on-welfare.html?pagewanted=all You probably won't want to link the actual article itself since it's the New York Times and therefore full of liberal lies, and also because it's one story which she can counter with "YEAH WELL ONE TIME A WELFARE QUEEN BLAH BLAH BLAH". However, pulling information out of the article could be very useful. vyelkin fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Oct 4, 2012 |
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Oct 4, 2012 16:24
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vyelkin posted:/\/\/\ Job creators could create so many more jobs if they didn't have to pay us anything. Let's get rid of all wages. I'm sure everyone will be lining up around the block to work for the glory of a hard day's sweat, rather than the money that they make. I am pretty sure she has given up on saving me from becoming a socialist because I don't march lock-step into the abyss with the rest of the GOP. I haven't gotten anything back.
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Oct 4, 2012 16:43
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Just wanted to go back and touch on these points about minimum wage from Wardark's mother:Wardark Grimhams posted:• Minimum Wage law is seen to work against low skilled employees, teenagers, trainees and interns, university students and part time workers because their job opportunities get curtailed due to this law. I gathered data on the minimum wage from the Department of Labor to compare against seasonally adjusted part-time employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; I also included the Real minimum wage by adjusting for inflation with the CPI-U in 2011 dollars.  Part-Time employment doesn't track with real or nominal changes in minimum wage, leading me to conclude that it is unlikely that minimum wage laws significantly impact hiring of part-time workers. Tell your mother that if she wants to do more research, BLS has tons of really awesome information and data she can look at, including allowing her to sort by specific age groups, types of employment, etc. I put in the work at this stage, she can do some work if she wants to actually support her argument as more than opinion against fact. Here's a nifty tool for just such a thing: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/querytool.jsp?survey=ln quote:• Business efficiency suffers in competition to other countries with low wages. This results in off shoring of U.S. jobs and creates unemployment within the country. This one is a difficult one to track because no one resource has a lot of historical data on offshoring / outsourcing; I hate to say this but Joe loving Lieberman put out a paper practically begging for better tracking and data on this issue and I agree that the data simply isn't there that I could find. Still, in the spirit of getting at least close, what I can look at is the claim that it "creates unemployment within the country":  Here we have a comparison I threw together of the annual average unemployment rate and the same minimum wage information above. And here again, the unemployment rate doesn't track with the real or nominal rates: at times the real rate is decreasing and unemployment is increasing, at times the nominal rate is increasing but the unemployment rate decreases. This isn't to say the minimum wage has no impact on unemployment, but rather it doesn't have a particularly marked influence on unemployment. I haven't checked the data, but I would not be surprised if a much better representative series would be the aggregate demand vs. unemployment. quote:• Very small businesses find it difficult to survive in the economy because they cannot afford to pay the minimum wage stipulated by the law. It obstructs their chances of growth and thereby hampers the economic growth in the larger context. I couldn't find any particularly comprehensive data for small business growth; if it exists with historical data it's buried somewhere obscure. I also tried looking for Small Business Chapter 11 filings by year, but that information seems pretty obscured as well; I found a DoJ paper that cited their own internal databases for 3 years of data on the subject, which is hardly enough to provide a consistent basis for this argument. quote:• Large employers suffer not only because of poor cost efficiencies but also because they are subjected to higher taxation. Employers are required to match the social security contributions of employees, which goes up because of the minimum wage. There are additional costs borne by the employer such as the Medicare tax. So market competitiveness is compromised in a global arena against low-cost producing countries. As others have elaborated on, there's no way for a company here to compete with third-world country rates; it also ignores that companies benefit from the expenditure of those tax dollars through a better educated, healthier and productive employment base and infrastructure to enable delivery of their goods and services, etc. I couldn't find any particularly useful data on this point she raised, maybe she can.
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Oct 4, 2012 17:06
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I come back from lunch to a nice screed from my Dadquote:Yes agreed.....
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Oct 4, 2012 18:08
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Wardark Grimhams posted:I come back from lunch to a nice screed from my Dad Holy christ, your parents suck. Nearly everything in there is demonstrably fales. First sentence, federal taxes are at their lowest point since before the great depression. Frankly, given they don't seem to care about reality I'd just forget about it.
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Oct 4, 2012 18:15
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Wardark Grimhams posted:No responses to the new information but that was one of the threads of another email she sent me. The comment about welfare pretty much shows that she's only arguing from a moral standpoint and finding/making up information to go with it. You aren't going to be able to debate or educate someone out of morals, it's something that generally changes slowly over time so the best you can do is show her that you personally are not a leech despite supporting these policies (and maybe point so some of your friends or her friends' kids who are the same). This becomes difficult if you're like me and actually have been unemployed for two years.
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Oct 4, 2012 18:15
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If you really feel the need to continue talking to them, here's some info on US tax rates: http://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-tax-rates?op=1#ixzz28GZzUtxg But it seriously won't do you any good. That recent email from your dad is pretty much entirely false and delusional. I'm sorry.
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Oct 4, 2012 18:17
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Crackbone posted:Holy christ, your parents suck. Yeah I have not bothered to give it much thought, just thought it would be funny to post. I am not going to change the thoughts of someone who grew up brainwashed. Wardark Grimhams fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Oct 4, 2012 |
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Oct 4, 2012 18:19
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Wardark Grimhams' mom posted:The days of thinking working for something is a good thing are gone. Generations of people like you will keep it that way. Did she just imply that you don't value working for a living? This seems surprisingly personal from one of the people that raised you.
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Oct 4, 2012 19:19
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Boxman posted:Did she just imply that you don't value working for a living? This seems surprisingly personal from one of the people that raised you. I guess, she finally responded to my last attempt at presenting facts quote:You are just making me laugh now, I am done. Like I said we will just agree to disagree. I still love you even though you are wrong. She is apparently trying to play the "I'm your mom so what I say is right no matter what" card. Too bad that card expired about 12 years ago. Wardark Grimhams fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Oct 4, 2012 |
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Oct 4, 2012 19:41
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I don't understand, do people that think it's "easier" to live "on the dole" think that the government is handing out thousands of dollars per person per month? Or that you don't have to work to qualify for most of these programs anyway? I just don't get it. But if I would say that tax rates for the rich need to go up, that's class warfare. What the gently caress is the stuff they're spewing then? Class terrorism I guess. Class...kick-you-while-you're-down-then-blame-a-poor-person. That name needs work.
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Oct 4, 2012 19:46
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myron cope posted:I don't understand, do people that think it's "easier" to live "on the dole" think that the government is handing out thousands of dollars per person per month? Or that you don't have to work to qualify for most of these programs anyway? I just don't get it. The saddest thing out of all of this is my Dad has been kicked in the nuts by at least 4 large corporations that he has worked for, but he keeps towing the line.
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Oct 4, 2012 19:51
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myron cope posted:I don't understand, do people that think it's "easier" to live "on the dole" think that the government is handing out thousands of dollars per person per month? Or that you don't have to work to qualify for most of these programs anyway? I just don't get it. That's some of it, but I think Romney actually said it best last night when he said it's a "moral issue." It's the same poo poo you hear with voting fraud - "Any fraud is too much fraud!" People don't care that the programs to fix a non-problem would actually result in significantly fewer people legally voting, they just know that someone broke the law and we can't have that no matter what. These same individuals just know that some amount of poor people are getting some percentage of the American Tax Payer's Dollars, and that simply isn't moral to them, regardless of how much money it is.
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Oct 4, 2012 19:54
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Wardark Grimhams posted:I guess, she finally responded to my last attempt at presenting facts I'm sorry. I think information can make a big difference, but holy poo poo you're dealing with some heavily entrenched bullshit here. If there's any one thing I would recommend either this time or the next time the subject comes up, is to ask your parents what evidence on the subject would convince them to reconsider their positions. If there's nothing they can think of, you can rightly point out that it's pretty arrogant to think you can't be wrong no matter what; if they do come up with something that would convince them to at least think hard about their views, you've given yourself an avenue to further the discussion in a hopefully positive manner.
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Oct 4, 2012 19:54
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myron cope posted:I don't understand, do people that think it's "easier" to live "on the dole" think that the government is handing out thousands of dollars per person per month? Or that you don't have to work to qualify for most of these programs anyway? I just don't get it. Is it really class warfare if one side can't fight back? It's a class invasion, or a class massacre. ...Class Massacre is a good punk band name.
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Oct 4, 2012 19:55
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Wardark Grimhams posted:Just got off the phone with my crazy mom about the debate and she fires off an email to me. She was claiming that the reason wages have stagnated for forever is that the minimum wage exists. These arguments could literally summed up as "there would be no unemployment, if businesses could just use us all as slaves". E: You know who didn't have to worry about unemployment? Serfs. 
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Oct 4, 2012 19:56
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Sarion posted:
Untrue. Its just that for serfs, unemployment is indistinguishable from "immediate starvation and death"
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Oct 4, 2012 20:00
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Boxman posted:Did she just imply that you don't value working for a living? This seems surprisingly personal from one of the people that raised you. Must be nice having parents that don't link economic hardships with having the wrong ideology...
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Oct 4, 2012 20:01
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Dr Christmas posted:Is it really class warfare if one side can't fight back? It's a class invasion, or a class massacre. I like Class Slaughter; I suppose you could go with something like Class Attrition, because that better represents the steady erosion of the working class over time by the capitalists. There's always the option of calling it Class Genocide too. 
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Oct 4, 2012 20:01
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Internet Webguy posted:Must be nice having parents that don't link economic hardships with having the wrong ideology... well this is also the Mom who on the way home from a friend's funeral said (paraphrasing) "Now I don't want you going all liberal on me, Universal Health Care wouldn't have saved him"
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Oct 4, 2012 20:44
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Wardark Grimhams posted:well this is also the Mom who on the way home from a friend's funeral said (paraphrasing) "Now I don't want you going all liberal on me, Universal Health Care wouldn't have saved him" That's when you just double down and go 'and thankfully it won't be around for you' and then never speak to her. Like, drat my mother is a republican, even a leader in some republican women's group, but she never does poo poo like email me rants about what a parasite I am and talk about how my dead friends would have still died with UHC as if that's a priority to say.
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