A provocative critique from the Left on the dysfunctionality of the US political and economic systems... and a vision for a sane, more humane, America. You can contact me at cryptomorph @ msn dot com
Friday, May 02, 2014
Mimimum Wage Workers Subsidize Our Economy
The value of the federal minimum wage in 1968 was $1.60 according to
http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/chart.htm
and using the inflation calculator at
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1.60&year1=1968&year2=2012
gives us a value of $10.50 in 2012 but the actual minimum wage is only $7.25. This is a loss of $3.25 per hour or $6,760 a year for a full time MW worker.
According to http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2012tbls.htm some 3.55 million wage workers got this minimum wage or below in 2012
3,550,000
6,760 ×
--------------------------
$23.998 BILLION = lost wages
This number only includes those at the minimum wage or below... NOT those between the minimum wage and the $10.50 per hour range.
So who's benefited from this $24 billion a year subsidy the economy got in 2012? And remember these are just rough numbers for one year.
This raises other issues of increased safety net expenditures AND lost tax revenue. But then we can always kick the can down the road by borrowing for those safety net programs so future taxpayers will be subsidizing our irresponsibility today.
ulTRAX
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Do Those 27 Amendments "Prove" We Can Really Reform Constitution?
Whenever I bring up in political forums the anti-democratic and virtual reform-proof nature of the Constitution someone will invariably protest that we already have 27 Amendments... and this somehow "proves" the Constitution CAN be meaningfully reformed.
With 27 amendments over 223 years that's about one every 8 years. It sounds like there's plenty of flexibility. Maybe they have a point... or not. To which I counter NONE of these amendments reforms dealt with any of the core defects of the Constitution centering on the anti-democratic principle of state suffrage... the bizarre notion that the 600k in Wyoming deserve the same political power as the 40 million in California.
Our
system is not just anti-democratic, the formula for amendments is now so insane that even Scalia, yes the far right hack Justice SCALIA admitted this was the case. He that it might never truly be reformed. He says so at 1:06:30 into this CSpan video https://www.c-span.org/video/?318884-1/justices-scalia-ginsburg-amendment-freedom Scalia says states with just 4% of the US population can block any needed reform, but it might just represent 2%, a bare majority in those states. What Scalia didn't mention is states with just 40% can ratify any horrible amendment... and using Scalia's logic, that can mean just 20%.
Here's a breakdown of amendments by category... feel free to break them down in other ways:
INDIVIDUAL & STATES RIGHTS: 1-10 plus 13th, 14th
FINE TUNING THE CONSTITUTION: 11th, 12th, 16th, 20th, 22ed, 25th, 27th
PROHIBITION & REPEAL: 18th, 21st
EXPANDING VOTING RIGHTS: 15th, 19th, 24th, 26th
MAKING THE CONSTITUTION LESS ANTI- DEMOCRATIC: 17th, 23ed
The first ten amendments, aka The Bill Of Rights, were suggested by
the states as the price of ratification. That leaves 17 amendments
over 223 years or one amendment every 13 years.
If we take away the 7 that I've put into the "FINE TUNING" category
that leaves 10 amendments over 223 years or one, on average, every 22.3 years. These amendments cover things like presidential terms etc.
Take away Prohibition and its repeal... that leaves 8 amendments over 223 years giving us one amendment averaging about every 28 years.
That leaves 6 amendments that in some way make the Constitution less anti-democratic... that gives us one amendment every 36 years. These
amendments fall into two categories.
The first category is expanding the vote to groups who arguably should NEVER have been denied the right: Slaves (15th), Women (19th), Those who can't afford a poll tax (24th) and 18 year olds (26th).
The second category deals with some aspect of the anti-democratic
structure of the Constitution itself. Here we have but TWO amendments...
giving us ONE reform amendment, on average, every 111 years. Those reforms were
allowing direct popular vote for the Senate... and giving EC votes to those in
Washington DC. All of these amendments are mere tweaks.
The sad reality is NONE of those 27 amendments to date have
reformed ANY of the core anti-democratic features of the Constitution connected with the anti-democratic concept of state suffrage... the EC, the Senate, the
exclusive powers of the Senate to ratify judicial nominees or treaties,
the amendment process, etc.
That's ZERO serious reform amendments in 223 years!
Which brings us back to my original question... is our system so
anti-democratic that it can never truly be reformed? And if so... what
are we who value democratic principles to do as demographic trends make the
Constitution even more anti-democratic and more reform-proof?
ulTRAX
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
How Would Romney's State-Based "FEMAs" Deal With Superstorm Sandy?
There are reasons to move away from state-based solutions. If left to themselves poorer states are incapable of funding anything from quality education, to health care, or their own highways.
By turning over these FEMA function to the states... these state-based "FEMAs", are not going to benefit from the deep pockets of the federal government. How will poorer states deal with disasters? How will tiny Rhode Island deal with a dead on hurricane strike? What if it's hit twice in a year? Who covers disasters that span state lines like superstorm Sandy? How would states coordinate such efforts? Without federal funds does Romney envision nationwide disaster bake-sales to raise the money?
If federal money does go to states... how will it be allocated? The East coast state has more hurricanes. Northern states might have more blizzards. The southeast more drought. So will money be weighted to states with more potential disasters or given out by population? The questions Romney's proposal raises are endless.
While Obama needs to be careful about playing politics with Sandy, it IS a legitimate for his campaign to ask what would Romney's disaster relief plan look like if he were president now having only the resources he's proposed.
This is an area that calls into question Romney's judgment and fitness for office. Here's Romney on June 13, 2011 during a primary debate speaking with CNN's John King:
KING: What else, Governor Romney? You’ve been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I’ve been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it’s the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?
ROMNEY: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.
Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut—we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do? And those things we’ve got to stop doing, because we’re borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we’re taking in. We cannot…
KING: Including disaster relief, though?
ROMNEY: We cannot—we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.
Source:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/29/1152002/-Romney-in-primary-Federal-disaster-relief-immoral
ulTRAX
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Democrats MUST Target Norquist's No New Taxes Pledge
If a congressperson took a "No New Weapons System" pledge to a third party... would that interfere with their constitutional responsibility to defend the nation? I think we'd all agree it would.
"...brings in, say, two dollars for every dollar of tax relief, we'll have more money in the treasury – and thus safeguard programs like Social Security! The idea behind tax cuts is to get the economy to grow. The economy is not static. The pie is not one size forever, with no new slices. The object is to grow so we have more people working and paying taxes. Presidents Kennedy and Reagan proved this with their tax cuts. The Democratic Congress spent every new dollar and more that Reagan brought in, but the fact is that the revenue coming into the treasury nearly doubled over his two terms."
Actually Reagan revenues in constant dollars only rose about 13.5% and that includes his tax HIKES. Individual income tax revenues only rose 8%. There simply was NO revenue boom the Democrats spent. No sensible person should expect the truth from Limbaugh.
If we ever get to a surplus how will the GOP then educate the voters they spent 30 years encouraging to be fiscally irresponsible? The debt numbers are staggering. Even if NO interest accruing, it would take 32 years to pay down the debt with a true $500 billion on-budget surplus. Problem is the Clinton on-budget Surplus only totaled about 90 billion over two years before the GOP sabotaged it. The idea that we can ever pay down the debt without huge spending cuts AND a large tax increase… and run that sort of surplus, is laughable.
It goes after what enables the Right's Starve The Beast strategy.
It goes after the dysfunctional and dangerous ideological cohesion the Norquist Pledge brings to the GOP.
It exposes the grotesque fiscal irrationality the Pledge has brought to the GOP… they refuse to even recognize the simple reality that in constant dollars revenues have plummeted since Clinton's last year... and even with 16 trillion in debt they are proposing more irresponsible tax cuts.
It goes after Norquist, the chief enforcer of the Pledge and someone who's been immune to attack for too long.
It gives GOPers who want out of the pledge a good excuse to finally break ranks with Norquist.
It can be used against any GOPer who was foolish enough to sign the pledge. Let voters decide whether those who took the Pledge are undermining the Constitution itself and the fiscal health of government's ability to deal with emergencies.
ulTRAX
revised: 10-14-12
Monday, September 17, 2012
Where Oh Where Is Bush's Revenue Boom?
If we're to go on a Snipe Hunt looking for such revenue booms we need to look at the specific tax being cut and then look for growth in that area. Since most of the Right's favorite tax cuts are cuts in the federal income tax, it would be unfair to look for revenue in other areas like FICA or corporate taxes. We should at income tax revenues. But since we're looking at revenue effects over time, there are two variables at work here... inflation which is easy to correct for, and % of GDP, that is the size of the economy these revenues represent. That's a topic for another time.
Here's a look at Bush individual income tax revenues compared to Clinton's last year (FY00) correcting for inflation. Numbers are from Table 2.1—RECEIPTS BY SOURCE of the US Historical Budget Tables.
Since this source does NOT correct for inflation in this chart, I used the inflation calculator at http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm to convert to constant 2005 dollars in billions. Using constant 2005 dollars means revenue from years before the target year will inflate in value, those after will deflate. Column one is the fiscal year. Column 2 is income tax revenue in CURRENT dollars collected that year. Column 3 is revenue in billions of 2005 CONSTANT dollars. It could be argued that FY01 is Clinton's last year since the fiscal year began when Clinton was still in office. But Bush's 2001 EGGTRA tax cut was retroactive to Jan 1, 2001.
2000 1004.462 = 1139.206 Clinton's last year.
2001 994.339 = 1096.524
2002 858.345 = 931.822
2003 793.699 = 842.442
2004 808.959 = 836.370
2005 927.222 = 927.222
2006 1043.908 = 1011.285
2007 1163.472 = 1095.899
2008 1145.747 = 1039.299
If my math is correct, what we see is that even after eight years, at the end of Bush's term income tax rates were cut so irresponsibly those income tax revenues NEVER AGAIN EXCEEDED CLINTON'S LAST YEAR. I'm sure some readers will see 8 years of declining income tax revenues as "proof" tax cuts create revenue booms.
But then some people will believe anything.
ulTRAX
revised 10-13-12