Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Income Inequality, Revisited... Again...

So it was suggested to me in passing by a person that I work with that it isn’t necessarily hypocrisy or hunger for power that is causing the previously mentioned congresscritter to go on about the wealth gap while being super rich, herself. 

She may not be the useful idiot standing in front of the country shouting “Eat the rich!!!” to the masses, while she is, herself, rich. 

Pictured: Possibly not asking to be eaten.
She may also not be the tyrant wanna-be, using class warfare and the politics of envy to maneuver herself into a position of power. 

Pictured: Possibly not evil incarnate

She may just be a complete idiot.  

Pictured: Possible drooling fucking moron

This isn’t what my co-worker told me.  She was actually much nicer about it, suggesting that maybe instead of “eat the rich!” Congresscritter Elitebag saying “help the poor!” 

My co-worker apparently doesn’t understand, like Congresscritter UltraMoron likewise seems to be missing, that wealth is not created out of whole cloth.  There is a limited amount of wealth, and to give more wealth to one person, you must take it from another.  

This is why I feel so strongly that men must be free; it is because nothing else in life can be! 

So the suggestion is made that this congresscritter just doesn’t understand the truth behind the wealth dynamic.  It is supposed that she is not talking about taking from someone before she can give it to someone else.  So what is her suggestion? How does she plan to accomplish such a thing?

Raising of wages?  As if the average American is an infantile idiot who cannot negotiate his own fair wage without the government stepping in to do it for him?

"Uh, durrr, whassa "negosheashun?" Durrrr... "
Average American, according to Congresscritter Buttnugget

Well, there is a problem there, because to do that, you have to lower the wages of those higher ups, or else you'll end up raising the prices of everything.  This will lead to a situation where people have more money in their bank accounts, but their actual purchasing power is exactly the same.  So once again, you're taking from someone and giving to someone else, if you want to accomplish anything at all.  I’m not talking about just CEOs with their million dollar golden parachutes, here; I’m talking about middle management, too.  You know, that "middle class" of people we're always talking about getting royally butt-screwed by both sides, every time they turn around?

Remember us?  Yeah, we're kind of getting tired of it.  

You’d have to lower their wages, too, in order to keep purchasing power on par and actually accomplish something. 

That doesn’t seem to palatable now, does it, because suddenly you're taking from the deserving in order to fund others now?  

So strike that.

There is, of course, the other problem of heartless bastards like me, who look at those higher wages, and in turn, expect my crews to earn their money.  Some of the men in my employ are not skilled.  Some of them aren’t even that bright.  Some of them aren’t the hardest workers on Earth.  The only reason that I keep them on is because I have negotiated a wage with them that makes them “worth it.”  If you were to pass laws saying that I have to pay these men more, or even worse, pay them the same as my skilled, intelligent, highly paid workers, I would lay them all off immediately, no questions asked.  This congresscritter forgets that I cannot pay a person more than the value that they contribute to the company, or else I will no longer be in business, and ALL of my workers will be out of jobs.

Read that again.  This has nothing to do with greed, folks.  It has everything to do with me choosing the lesser of two evils, when faced with laying some employees off, or having to lay them ALL off when my business goes in the tank.  

What will end up happening is that I will have to lay most of my low-paid guys off, burden my higher-paid guys with the low-pay work, in addition to the work they already have, and then pay them a higher wage to make up for the additional hours. 

With that being said, does anyone else recognize the flaw in this plan?  That it is going to INCREASE the wealth gap, as opposed to shrinking it, as men that are working now will be laid off, and men that don’t get laid off will be paid higher wages? 



I do not think that the wealth gap is something that can be fixed.  I do not think that the wealth gap is something that we should try to "fix" at all.  

There is one huge reason for this, and I will make that point, and then hopefully sign off on this issue once and for all.

The point is this:  Let’s say you get your way, Congresswoman Fuckhead.  Let’s say that you get your hands on a trillion dollars of other people’s wealth, and redistribute it to every man, woman, and child in America equally.  (of course, I’m confident that YOUR personal wealth will make up exactly zero percent of the trillion that you get, but that’s just a perk of the job, isn't it, you absolute shit-sandwich?)  Let’s forget that doing this would tank our economy forever.  Let’s forget that there probably isn’t anywhere close to this much in free cash to take, and you’d be liquidating tangible assets to free it up.  Let’s just pretend that we could somehow find a trillion dollars in liquid cash-equivalent assets in the hands of the rich in America (a preposterous premise, but bear with me). 

Take 1 trillion, divide by 350 million (the number of people in the US of A), and what do you get?  

Drumroll, please!

About $2,900 per person.  What can you do with $2,900?  

Pay a couple months’  rent?  Maybe?  Are the American people going to be that much better off with this massive wealth re-alignment?  Hell no, they aren’t, and that's only if you forget about the massive negative economic impact of doing such a thing.  Even if you take ten times that (an absolutely ludicrous number) and it works out to $29,000 per person, what can you do with $29,000?  Buy a car?  Pay off a third of your mortgage balance?  Really, in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t going to make a huge difference in the well-being of poor Americans, beyond maybe a short period.  When you consider that even the poorest of Americans will make three-quarters of a million dollars over their career, on average, $29,000 is a paltry drop in the bucket. 

But if left in the hands of the rich who have it now, what could that trillion dollars do?  Say one man has a million dollars of it, and Congresscritter Asswipe here “allows” him to keep it.  He invests that in a startup, which hires people to work for the next 30 years.  Maybe that million dollars creates 20 jobs.  Say the jobs pay $15 an hour.  Over 30 years, that job is worth $936,000 to that employee.  Over 20 jobs, that's nearly $20 million in economic benefit just in wages alone, created by that initial million dollar investment.  

What fool would take $29,000 now?  What absolute fool would take $29,000 now, so that IF they didn’t touch a penny of it, and they were able to invest it at 6% over that 30 year period, they could get $174,000, and still have to work at a job they may not be ale to find now (see above), when the sacrifice is a job that will pay you fucking near a million dollars over the same timeframe, that you get to spend as you go along? 

$29,000 in the hands of one man doesn't start a business.  One million dollars in the hands of one man DOES. 


Congresscritter Asshat would give you $29,000 instead of giving you a job.  She would implement policies that would make everyone more poor in this country, and call that “fairness”.  Even if you don’t believe that she bears the much more likely evil motivations that I discussed in my previous rant, she still falls short of being a person that I would encourage anyone to vote for, because she is an idiot.  

Derp, durr-hurrr

2 comments:

  1. There's a bit there in the middle that needs repeated again- if you were required to pay lazy dumbshits (who are, lets face it, a very real and valuable part of construction) the same rate as skilled carpenters, THERE WOULD BE NO LAZY DUMBSHITS WITH JOBS. If I have to pay $25/hr, I'm not giving it to a 19 year old kid who I have to teach to hold a hammer. Its going to a guy who has the necessary skills. Congrats, bureaucrats, you've just hosed a huge number of entry level jobs that would have gone to the people you are trying to 'help'. Well done.

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    1. A million times, YES! This is why I think that the urge to raise the minimum wage is always a bad idea. To be honest, I think a minimum wage is a terrible idea, period. Germany doesn't have one, and their unemployment rate for teens and lazy dipshits is way lower.

      I've never once worked at a job that didn't present opportunity for advancement. I'm not even sure that there is such a thing. Work hard. Show up earlier and stay later than your co-workers, and you'll stand out. You'll become valuable, and you'll be compensated for your value. Period.

      They say you can't support a family on a minimum wage job, and my response is that YOU AREN'T SUPPOSED TO. No breadwinner should be working for minimum wage, and in fact, the stats show that very, very few are. If you filled a football stadium with minimum wage workers in ratios representative of the mimimum wage workers in America, you'd find it 90 plus percent filled with teenagers living at home wiht their parents, learning job skills at a job that pays them in both wages AND experience. Only on half of one section would be filled with primary breadwinners. About 50 people in a 50,000 person stadium.

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