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Companies are not comprised of people, if they were those people would share the profits equally. I'm all for that by the way. They are owned by a small percentage of people, a very small percentage, and they employ people. So, companies are not people and as such not represented or protected by the government.

The government does not "take" profits, you can't "take" profits.

When making decisions about what rules are good for the people and which are unfair to the people you take into account how many people a rule helps. Ensuring people are paid a wage they can live on for the time and effort they provide is good for all people, it ensure that no person who works can't pay the bills or a reasonable lifestyle. Allowing companies to pay unlivable wages simply because desperate people will work for them helps the very very very small percentage of people who own companies and extort their workers. The companies who are not extorting their workers aren't effected by fair pay legislation and as such shouldn't be complaining. That means the only people who have a problem with fair wage laws are people who want slaves. Slaves are government hand outs because society has to pay to keep them alive. So companies who have problems with fair wage laws are welfare recipients complaining about having their welfare cut because they make too much money.

Also, I'm Canadian, Obama is too right wing for me :).

Gangrene. Gang green is, I dunno, some Irish mob.

I knew I had that wrong when I was typing it, just didn't have time to look it up. Thanks for the correction.

As a German-American Jets fan, I take offense to that remark.

No they wouldn't because, once again, protecting companies is not in the government's purview. That side of the ledger should not even be considered. If a company cannot exist within the confines of government's, and by extension the public's, requirements it cannot exist and will be replaced by a more efficient or more intelligent company that may charge an increased cost for it's products. This is how commodity/service pricing should work. If a company cannot afford to pay it's people a living wage because it's items are not bringing in enough revenue than it's items are either under priced and should be adjusted or not in high enough demand to justify the companies existence.

Paying people a living wage is a requirement if you don't want to have the public pay the difference between what the company is willing to pay and what is needed for reasonable living expenses and as such companies should be required to pay a wage that provides a modern comfortable life. The money the public, who's taxes pay for this difference, has is coming from other companies. You are advocating having responsible companies subsidize irresponsible companies because the responsible one's have to pay their staff more money to cover the tax burden of supporting the irresponsible companies employees.

This is not the stone age. We are not lacking resources. There is no reason anyone working a reasonable amount of hours shouldn't be able to have a decent home, transportation, communication, some entertainment, and food on the table for their family. Your argument is absurd and you sound like a horrible human being for making it.

1. Able to house, clothe, transport and feed ones' self with a little left over...at a minimum.
2. 40 hours a week

And yet, your very first comment in this thread was about company profits:



Sure seemed like you were dismissing the costs of Obamcare because all it would do is cost health insurers "some of their profits". Suggestion being that they make enough to absorb the cost, so it's ok to stick it to them. I mean, that was what you were implying, right? That they're rich fat cat insurance companies, and thus deserve to have their big fat profits trimmed "for the good of the people". Cause that sure was how I interpreted your post. Now, if you really meant something else, then feel free to clarify yourself.

My point, which certainly seems to be backed up by your own statement, is that too many people justify increased regulation on the assumption that the companies they regulate can afford it, so it's not really a problem. No one's harmed, so why not? My response is that this increased cost *is* a problem, and that by ignoring it, you're making a bad decision. That's what I mean when I say you're only looking at one side of the ledger. You don't believe that extra costs causes any harm, so you ignore it and don't take it into account.

It is harmful though.



And? What is the cost of doing this? If it's a dollar either way, which method is "better"? I think you are failing to take into account the incentive effect ov work and wages. I also think you are creating a massive excluded middle . There's a whole range of economic condition between "impoverished" and "financially comfortable". You don't just bop from one to the other. You gradually move from one to the other, and as you do so, your condition improves. Anything which steepens the difficulty slope in that process can have a massive effect on the overall economic outcome for those involved.

Put another way, while you seem to think that the absence of those things will force people to fail to get treatment until their feet fall off, or chose a life of crime to put food on their table. You're basically taking extremes, but most people live in the middle. And what that middle does is provide an incentive for people to improve the value of their labor, and thus earn a higher wage, so they can reduce the difficulties in their lives. This doesn't happen magically all at once though. It takes time and effort. But most people manage to do this. And yes, things like "I need to go to night school and learn a trade so I can afford health care for my kids", is one of the things that pushes people. Take that way, and what happens?



I disagree. I believe that the cost in lost productivity alone would dwarf any extra costs involved via less efficient means of delivering health care, or food, or whatever. Most people will work a second job before they'll start robbing people, right? Most people will find their way into a health clinic or urgent care long before their foot falls off. While you have a minor point in terms of increased costs, fewer people will incur those costs in the first place.

In the "absorb the costs of uninsured people's emergency care" model, the number of people we're paying for is low, but the cost per person may be high. But in the "pay for all their health care costs ahead of time", the cost per person may be lower on average, but we're paying for a lot more people (everyone). Lots of people manage to stay out of emergency rooms every year using nothing but over the counter medicines that they can afford to pay for out of pocket. A very small number of people get sick anyway, some of whom may or may not have been able to avoid getting sick with preventative care. But the cost for that care for "everyone" includes everyone who wouldn't have gotten sick enough to go to the ER that year. That's a ton of people we're paying for.

I really don't buy the idea that total health care costs are lower when you pay for preventative care like that. IMO, it's far far more efficient to just pay for people who get sick, than to pay for everyone who might get sick. But that's just me.



Huh? How are companies leaving the country a drain on my tax dollars? This explanation I'd love to hear!

And it's strange that you say this, but yet we still constantly hear about all those evil companies offshoring their businesses. Either it's a problem, or it isn't. Which one is it?

Edited, Dec 11th 2015 4:05pm by gbaji

You should be taking offense with yourself for being a Jets fan.

People not responding the way you want them to doesn't mean they don't understand the issue or aren't looking at both sides.

In brief, Bob is pocketing that $1 mil after paying all his expenses everywhere.

Lost in my story was the point, which being: harm.

If Bob is going home at the end of the year with 1/3 of a million instead of a full million and his employees are better off and are less of a burden on the general public, then Bob's loss is far outweighed by the gain.

In gbajiland. this makes Bob a victim somehow.

And, unless I'm unclear, this isn't about Bob being forced to do this. This is about Bob aught to do this because it's the right thing to do. I see it as a matter of patriotism, quite frankly.

If Bob was murdered, butchered and the processed meat was handed out in lieu of food stamps, that'd reduce the welfare dependency of a few people, too. Maybe boil the bones into a nourishing broth? I'm just blue-sky thinking here.

But just because we can murder Bob, butcher his corpse and hand out his meat to the disadvantaged doesn't mean we should murder Bob, butcher his corpse and hand out his meat to the disadvantaged. We have to ask ourselves, is it just to murder Bob, butcher his corpse and hand out his meat to the disadvantaged? And the answer, obviously, is no, it isn't just to murder Bob, butcher his corpse and hand out his meat to the disadvantaged.

I'm not going to say it directly but I'm implicitly drawing a moral equivalence between murdering Bob, butchering his corpse and handing out his meat to the disadvantaged and taxing him. It's wrong to murder Bob, butcher his corpse and hand out his meat to the disadvantaged - even though it's really tempting - and it's wrong to subject people to taxation. The two are identical in every respect.

In conclusion, let me repeat myself whole-cloth. Because it's vital I never summarise my wheedling explanations but rather reword them just as lengthily one or two times. Um. Let's go.

What I'm trying to get across is that taxation is cannibalism; the money in Bob's account, colloquially referred to as bread, is his body, and the thieving masses of plebs are no more than a pack of Iscariots tearing at his divine flesh. Transactions are the lifeblood of capitalism; by forcing Bob to enter into transactions of his choosing, the government is acting like some vampire cabal. I mean, the analogy breaks down here a bit because poor people don't drink wine, but hey, no-one's reading this so I can say whatever the **** I want. Poor people are Judas because they are both figuratively cannibals, but also literally cannibals due to the miracles of transubstantiation and spurious moral equivalences. Jophiel's a catholic, he'll back me up here. Except he can't, as I am playing the role of 'Gbaji', his eternal foe, and thus he is forbidden from agreeing with me.

TL;DR: It's vital I never summarise my wheedling explanations but rather reword them just as lengthily one or two times. Um. Let's go.

Just because we can murder Bob, butcher his corpse and hand out his meat to the disadvantaged doesn't mean we should murder Bob, butcher his corpse and hand out his meat to the disadvantaged. We have to ask ourselves, is it just to murder Bob, butcher his corpse and hand out his meat to the disadvantaged? And the answer, obviously, is no, it isn't just to murder Bob, butcher his corpse and hand out his meat to the disadvantaged.

Taxation is exactly the same as that thing I just said, so we can't do it. It's morally wrong, just like puppet theatre.

Pretty good, but a little short on the signature mixture of smugness and victimization that we've all come to know.

I think Bob's employees should quit and go work for Dave's salt mine.