[SeaGypsy]

6, Your constant hooey about 1% which you adopted from the NWO inspired occupy mob, whose goal is to tear down borders & trade barriers asap- who if their goal is achieved you can look forward to fast track global wage parity, far below current US minimum wage.

Australia has lost parity as China slips, 30% down, so our 15 minimum is now 10 US, likely closer to 7 by end of year, we also have much higher housing, utilities & food & fuel costs - yet our 12 million odd workforce is ALL part of the top 1% in terms of overall living standard & real income.

[SeaGypsy]

Australians generally know how lucky we are & also that occupy are a smelly bunch of spoilt middle class brats with no comprehension of how bloody lucky they are.

[Sixstrings]

@SG
Interesting:

$17.29
From next month about 1.86m workers must be paid a weekly wage of at least A$656.90 ($501.50), Australia's workplace regulator ruled on Tuesday. On an hourly basis the rate rises to A$17.29 an hour, one of the highest minimum wage levels in the world.Jun 2, 2015

Hm.. I remember at one time they had parity but yeah, now it's .72 US cents to 1 aus dollar. So that makes a $17.29 aus min wage equal to $12.44 usd. (but it sounds like living costs in aus are equivalent to usd, so 17 bucks over there is still 17 bucks)

Historically, I guess Aus has been in boom years since '02 and rose with China and therefore may crash with China.



I guess if the US dollar keeps getting stronger then eventually a steak dinner will cost a dime -- but will folk have a dime?

Rudy Vallee - Brother can you spare a dime (1931)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llhRGUYMcfU

Lyrics:

They used to tell me I was building a dream
And so I followed the mob
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear
I was always there, right on the job

They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad, now it's done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower up to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it's done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee, we looked swell
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell
And I was the kid with the drum

Say, don't you remember? They called me 'Al'
It was 'Al' all the time
Why don't you remember? I'm your pal
Say buddy, can you spare a dime?
Buddy, can you spare a dime?

[SeaGypsy]

https:/ /en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country

Ours has gone up again, 17.25 now, about 11.50.

My point is that the only thing occupy got right is the rentier scam, which is the pervasive model. Their 1% vs 99% sloganeering is not worthy of adult conversation. Looked at precisely your country, mine, a few others, have workers earning in hours what most of the world works days or even weeks for. I therefore find refrain to these adolescent derived oblique obscurances irritating & dishonest. Aside from the subtext, which is about destroying national borders as a matter of 'human rights', when common sense tells us that the rights we have in developed countries were not given to us for being human, but were fought for by our progenitors.

[SeaGypsy]

Was 70 cents an hour ago here lol! Buy sell gap mostly probably.

[Sixstrings]

Ours has gone up again, 17.25 now, about 11.50.

It must be indexed to inflation / cost of living.

Honestly SG, Australia does a lot of things right. That one simple thing, is such a common sense measure. Australia put in a fair minimum wage at some point *and then they indexed it to inflation*, so problem solved forever.

Whereas in the US, they would never index it to inflation. So it's always at the mercy of whether Republicans will raise it or how many years Republicans will wait or whether Republicans will just stop raising it altogether (which is what they did).

If it had just been indexed to inflation from the start, like Australia did, then ours would be $17 an hour too right now.

Life is good in Oz. It's not a land of hyperinflation nor high living costs. SG's cell phone bill for a smartphone -- $30 -- is lower than anybody in America.

Americans make less, and pay more for everything.

We pay more for prescription drugs, everything.

Our corporations screw the working and middle class at all ends -- wages, healthcare, then on top of that they charge us more for things than they do Canadians and Australians and French and Germans. Gasoline is the only thing we get a break on.





US #1 in child poverty, except for Romania:

[ralfy]

Related:

"Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world"

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg ... the-world/

[SeaGypsy]

Ralphy, I'm not dumb & specifics are what should frame such discussions. The 1% vs 99% is bollocks. Given everybody with a job in Norway & Australia is part of the top 1%, we supposedly rule the world- bull. We, like everyone else in the developed world, feed our excess into the RE market- which is totally artificially controlled to prop up & perpetuate the rentier economy- so much the basis of capitalism very few people even notice this 2 headed elephant in the room.

6, you seem to always prefer your rose colored glasses when looking down here- average house prices in the cities where the jobs are- all over half a million, Sydney it's over a million. We only have 2 cities by world standards, perhaps 3- Sydney, Melbourne, then Brisbane. We only have 5 cities of over 1 million, adding Adelaide & Perth. Almost the entire rural area is economically depressed & has been for decades. The mining boom did nothing to fix up local economies towards a long term future- towns went crazy while the money was around, now falling rapidly back to backwater ghost towns.

We don't have the option Americans have- buying a very cheap few acres of fertile land. No such thing exists here- on average I would say 20 times higher prices for entry level small holder agricultural land.

Others- gasoline today average in the cities- close to 3.50 USG, electricity- 20 c kWh, 30% tax on new vehicles. I'm not going to whine about food prices as having travelled in Asia we are paying parity pricing with places like Singapore & Hongkong, (with average half our wages) less than most parts where people are paying more & earning a tiny fraction.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Berkley's in the news, proposing $19 an hour min wage. San Francisco already passed $15 min wage.

So I found that impressive, for a Republican to be saying to be saying all that , but then Santorum just says to raise the min wage by 50 cents over a period of years. All that drama, over 50 cents -- economists are right, if it had kept up with productivity gains then it actually should be be $19:

This city just proposed the highest minimum wage in America

The Berkeley Labor Commission justified going beyond $15 per hour by citing its interest in making the city’s minimum wage a living wage. The wage schedule it recommended would bring Berkeley’s minimum wage to parity with the local cost of living in 2020, while “promoting and protecting the rights and the individual self-reliance of working people in Berkeley,” the proposal says.

The suggestion of $19 per hour will no doubt face fierce opposition from business leaders, but some economists may argue that in terms of what low wage workers deserve, that rate is is spot-on. Last week, David Cooper with the Economic Policy Institute told Fortune that if the federal minimum wage had kept up with American workers’ productivity, it would land in the $18 or $19 per hour territory.
http://fortune.com/2015/09/15/nations-highest-minimum-wage-berkley/

If the basic rate had kept up with inflation, it should be $15.

OTOH, for those who run a real business, they need to make a profit or they won't remain in business long.

Look at the math for a typical McDonalds franchise, per Bloomberg:

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015- ... ranchises/

Two key figures here:

First under "controllable expenses" is crew payroll, at $540,000.

Total operating income is ONLY $153,900.

So, if we do as Berkley and Six say (from their ivory towers built on wishful thinking) and raise the minimum wage to $15 or $19 an hour, then the expenses for the crew wages (and related expenses like payroll taxes (i.e Social Security taxes paid by the employer), go way up. Given the current wages, they roughly double. So try adding nearly $600,000 to the expenses ($540 for roughly doubling the crew wages, and $54,000 for payroll taxes) and suddenly the business is LOSING nearly $450,000 a year.

Now, you could raise all the prices, say 20% to pay for that. But this article was focusing on how franchisees are already in "revolt" mode over all that McDonalds HQ is pushing on them. Losing hordes of customers to competitors over significantly higher prices isn't exactly likely to help. Plus, losing all those customers will once again, put the average franchise significantly in the red (in the real world, McDonalds customers want the food to be cheap).

So it's nice to be a liberal dreamer and claim that wages should be thus and so, but until you actually own/run a busness and employee a lot of minimally skilled people and pay them some arbitrarily high wage because some group deems that "fair" -- you may as well dream of purple unicorns too.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Minimum wage increase drives inflation. That is the elephant standing. The question is: Who benefits from inflation?

Right. The minimum wage rose significantly in the late 70's (when I was a teenager). Unfortunately, the "benefit" I received from the occasional 5%ish mandatory raise was swamped by the annual inflation rate of 5%, 10%, or sometimes more. I always suspected the mandatory significant increase in the minimum wage was fueling the spiraling inflation rates at the time.

Unfortunately, most people making minimum wage weren't 16-ish year olds looking to get some job experience on their record -- they were adults who lacked the arithmetic skills to realize what he clowns on Capitol Hill were doing to them.

[ralfy]

Ralphy, I'm not dumb & specifics are what should frame such discussions. The 1% vs 99% is bollocks. Given everybody with a job in Norway & Australia is part of the top 1%, we supposedly rule the world- bull. We, like everyone else in the developed world, feed our excess into the RE market- which is totally artificially controlled to prop up & perpetuate the rentier economy- so much the basis of capitalism very few people even notice this 2 headed elephant in the room.

6, you seem to always prefer your rose colored glasses when looking down here- average house prices in the cities where the jobs are- all over half a million, Sydney it's over a million. We only have 2 cities by world standards, perhaps 3- Sydney, Melbourne, then Brisbane. We only have 5 cities of over 1 million, adding Adelaide & Perth. Almost the entire rural area is economically depressed & has been for decades. The mining boom did nothing to fix up local economies towards a long term future- towns went crazy while the money was around, now falling rapidly back to backwater ghost towns.

We don't have the option Americans have- buying a very cheap few acres of fertile land. No such thing exists here- on average I would say 20 times higher prices for entry level small holder agricultural land.

Others- gasoline today average in the cities- close to 3.50 USG, electricity- 20 c kWh, 30% tax on new vehicles. I'm not going to whine about food prices as having travelled in Asia we are paying parity pricing with places like Singapore & Hongkong, (with average half our wages) less than most parts where people are paying more & earning a tiny fraction.

Read the article, if not the study, carefully. It does not refer to "everybody with a job" in one country or another.

[SeaGypsy]

I'm just talking about the 1/99 bs.

[ralfy]

It's BS only if the conclusion raised by the study is incorrect.

[hvacman]

In "Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world" I noticed something. In the list of the top 50 "superconnected companies" several are mutual fund companies. Specifically, I noticed Vanguard was #8 - an investment company that is essentially owned by the people who buy their mutual funds - owned by millions of people with IRA's, 403b's, 401k's with Vanguard accounts, including me. How many of those owners are the "1%"? I know I'm not. Probably less than 1% are. I suspect T Rowe Price, Wellington, and other mutual fund companies on the list have similar situations. So when those scream at the "capitalist pigs" running the world, they also are screaming at the government worker with a 403b retirement savings plan, a union auto worker with a union pension fund, the office worker with a 401k, non-profits with endowment funds, or anyone with an IRA invested in a mutual fund. Don't they all deserve a good return for their investment? If you subtract all those less-than-super-rich owners of "superconnected companies" from the "99%", what do you have left?

https://about.vanguard.com/who-we-are/a-remarkable-history/

But I am glad Berkeley is taking on the wage issue. I hope they also adopt a generous wage structure and work condition standard for the many hardworking Berkeley farm workers....What, farms in Berkeley? (google it:)

[ralfy]

In "Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world" I noticed something. In the list of the top 50 "superconnected companies" several are mutual fund companies. Specifically, I noticed Vanguard was #8 - an investment company that is essentially owned by the people who buy their mutual funds - owned by millions of people with IRA's, 403b's, 401k's with Vanguard accounts, including me. How many of those owners are the "1%"? I know I'm not. Probably less than 1% are. I suspect T Rowe Price, Wellington, and other mutual fund companies on the list have similar situations. So when those scream at the "capitalist pigs" running the world, they also are screaming at the government worker with a 403b retirement savings plan, a union auto worker with a union pension fund, the office worker with a 401k, non-profits with endowment funds, or anyone with an IRA invested in a mutual fund. Don't they all deserve a good return for their investment? If you subtract all those less-than-super-rich owners of "superconnected companies" from the "99%", what do you have left?

https://about.vanguard.com/who-we-are/a-remarkable-history/

But I am glad Berkeley is taking on the wage issue. I hope they also adopt a generous wage structure and work condition standard for the many hardworking Berkeley farm workers....What, farms in Berkeley? (google it:)

The point isn't ownership but control.

The article also points out that even with basic regulation multinational corporations will bypass them to invest in each other, resulting in concentration of wealth among a few.

When mistakes are made in financial speculation and several are threatened with collapse, governments (which likely work for the rich) may have to find means to rescue them, and that usually means passing on debt to the public.

After that, it's "business as usual."

[SeaGypsy]

The argument is valid, the 1% is bollocks. The entire middle class is responsible for ownership & control either rests on founding father's & forbears or CEO's appointed by shareholders- no 1% in sight.

[ralfy]

The argument is valid, the 1% is bollocks. The entire middle class is responsible for ownership & control either rests on founding father's & forbears or CEO's appointed by shareholders- no 1% in sight.

That's because the middle class makes up only a fraction of the world's population. Around 20 pct of the global population control more than 90 pct of wealth worldwide. Around 1 pct control almost half:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/1 ... 99798.html

[SeaGypsy]

Forget about nominal control, looking at real personal income, which is much more easily quantified, the 1% is again bollocks. Of the 1% in your 'control' half figure, that's 70 million people. Absolute rubbish, where are these 70 million aristocrats? There are a few thousand filthy rich families in the world, the rest are worker ants & minions. I know a few self made rich people & they work very hard, have very little personal time, struggle to maintain healthy family relationships, are prone to many forms of self abuse, have many people depending in them to keep the ship afloat & paychecks coming in, you count these as people 'in control'- when clearly they are part of something much bigger than them which they may have elemental control over, but the business itself is not wealth until it is liquidated, at which point it becomes another person's burden. The developer gambles their time, credibility, connections on every move. When it pays off, it can pay off big, but a brilliant entrepreneur may only have a handful of big opportunities in their life, each could be make or break, each could be 5 years or more of 90 hour working weeks. I don't see how these guys are controlling much at all.

[ralfy]

Forget about nominal control, looking at real personal income, which is much more easily quantified, the 1% is again bollocks. Of the 1% in your 'control' half figure, that's 70 million people. Absolute rubbish, where are these 70 million aristocrats? There are a few thousand filthy rich families in the world, the rest are worker ants & minions. I know a few self made rich people & they work very hard, have very little personal time, struggle to maintain healthy family relationships, are prone to many forms of self abuse, have many people depending in them to keep the ship afloat & paychecks coming in, you count these as people 'in control'- when clearly they are part of something much bigger than them which they may have elemental control over, but the business itself is not wealth until it is liquidated, at which point it becomes another person's burden. The developer gambles their time, credibility, connections on every move. When it pays off, it can pay off big, but a brilliant entrepreneur may only have a handful of big opportunities in their life, each could be make or break, each could be 5 years or more of 90 hour working weeks. I don't see how these guys are controlling much at all.

Nominal? Highly unlikely, unless you have evidence proving that corporate decisions are based on what the majority of the global population want.

Real personal income? Most money supply is not made up of that.

Control? A sampling was not used.

Where are they? The link is given in the article.

Control is countered by dependence? Go back to my first point: do you have any proof of that? So far, you have given none in your posts. In fact, you've given very little in many of your posts to me. That includes the rest of the sentences in your recent post.

[SeaGypsy]

Because I find your debating position kind of autistic, monotonous & not engaging. Your assertion of 70 million controller humans is bullshit. Whoever said it first.