The Gaming Den

Pseudo Stupidity wrote: All evidence suggests that if you gave every single poor person, legal or not, a thousand bucks a month the economy would be significantly better. And people would be happier, crime would drop, education would improve, hospital visits would drop, and everything would be all-around better.

There is no reason to dislike giving money to the poor except "fuck them I've got mine," and, if you're a minimum wage giver, "I love poverty wages!"

You've missed, probably the biggest reason.

A lot of people get really upset when other people get shit for free. That, and reality is just nonintuitive enough that they will reject the findings as some type of liberal commie pinko propaganda.

I've seen a lot of "fuck the government. they can't take my hard earned cash by force and give it to someone else" lately. WTF is up with the "by force" bit? If you don't pay your taxes, they don't arrest you.

Maj wrote:I've seen a lot of "fuck the government. they can't take my hard earned cash by force and give it to someone else" lately. WTF is up with the "by force" bit? If you don't pay your taxes, they don't arrest you.

Eventually they will escalate to taking your stuff/garnishing wages, right?

I dunno. I pay my taxes.

That's what I thought. I know they garnish wages, but I don't think they take you to jail unless they have adequate reason to suspect fraud. Hell, even when the government came for Cliven Bundy, it wasn't to arrest him. It was to repossess property. And they have obvious evidence that he deliberately didn't pay them!

Wesley Snipes, (1st season survivor winner) Richard Hatch and former Pittsburgh Police Chief Nate Harper have all served jail time for tax charges.

Wesley Snipes position of "I don't owe you people anything, taxation is unconstitutional, I'm not a citizen, have some monopoly money instead. Wait, you're just making an example out of me, you don't have a real case." was probably deserving of incarceration - that's at least mentally unsound if not outright sedition.

Richard Hatch's case is rather more sympathetic. He claimed that as a performer on Survivor he was an employee of CBS, and therefore the network was responsible for all withholdding. CBS had lawyers enough to designate him an "independant contractor", making him responsible for his own taxes - which he refused to pay since he thought they were the network's responsibility. However, my (and the jury's sympathy) run into the obstacle that Hatch also failed to pay any taxes on hundreds of thousands of dollars of other income from rent and a radio show.

Chief Harper just failed to file tax returns for years, but as a Police Chief in a major city, it's highly probable he knew exactly what he was doing and was risking the lesser sentence of failure to file instead of filing fraudulent returns that failed to disclose at least his raiding of the Credit Union if not outright bribes and kickbacks. So here the tax case was kind of a substitute for corruption charges.

RobbyPants wrote:

Pseudo Stupidity wrote: All evidence suggests that if you gave every single poor person, legal or not, a thousand bucks a month the economy would be significantly better. And people would be happier, crime would drop, education would improve, hospital visits would drop, and everything would be all-around better.

There is no reason to dislike giving money to the poor except "fuck them I've got mine," and, if you're a minimum wage giver, "I love poverty wages!"

You've missed, probably the biggest reason.

A lot of people get really upset when other people get shit for free. That, and reality is just nonintuitive enough that they will reject the findings as some type of liberal commie pinko propaganda.

Actually I would say you both missed the actual main reason.

If there's a pool of poor people, then that means there's a (smaller but still significant) desesperate pool of people who'll do anything to earn a little money/food.

Not so long ago, in multiple parts of the world it was possible to get your personal housemaid just by giving her a place to sleep and food to eat. Because they were girls from poor families who literally couldn't afford to feed their children and there was little/no government support.

A decent minimum wage means it becomes harder for rich people to get virtual slaves that'll do annoying/dangerous/humiliating work basically for free. And as history has showed seen, in the USA a significant segment of the population really enjoyed having their personal slaves, to the point they started a civil war for the "right" to keep their slaves.

Slavery may've been technically abolished, but in practise it still exists in many places where people barely earn enough to feed themselves.

I think the rich are also afraid that "if" minimum wage is raised that it'll also make them have to raise wages on closer to but not minimum wage jobs to keep from losing people. Honestly I simply as not worried about losing my job at Walmart when I worked there because I worked for shitty minimum wage. I imagine that if the working poor made 15 an hour they would be less willing to get pushed around with not only the ability to get another job working for that much but with the new found ability to actually SAVE money.

Yes, minimum wage hikes trickle up. Developing an advanced skillset has opportunity costs. College is four years and tens of thousands of dollars gone, and if that degree doesn't earn you anything relative to burger flipping for minimum wage people won't do it.

Except they will, because people aren't perfectly rational and cultural norms encourage college at all costs and universities/student creditors have become downright predatory. But other than that, you would expect wages for jobs requiring advanced skillsets to increase along with the minimum wage, because their actual value is measured from [whatever the minimum wage] + [cost of building that advanced skillset].

maglag wrote: Actually I would say you both missed the actual main reason.

If there's a pool of poor people, then that means there's a (smaller but still significant) desesperate pool of people who'll do anything to earn a little money/food.

I think this falls under "I love poverty wages!" Poverty wages create cheap labor and desperate people (whom you pay poverty wages to do your shitty garbage work). Also, we are one of those places.

Our federal minimum wage seriously does not push somebody with a kid past the poverty line, and that is unacceptable. Not that I understand how a person with a kid could live at the poverty line ($15,930, or as most people anywhere near a city call it, rent), but our poverty line is really fucking low considering cost of living and probably comes from a flyover state that actually uses the federal minimum wage.

maglag wrote:Actually I would say you both missed the actual main reason.

If there's a pool of poor people, then that means there's a (smaller but still significant) desesperate pool of people who'll do anything to earn a little money/food.

Not so long ago, in multiple parts of the world it was possible to get your personal housemaid just by giving her a place to sleep and food to eat. Because they were girls from poor families who literally couldn't afford to feed their children and there was little/no government support.

This is 100% true and was something that happened in Brazil until the start of the goddamned XXI century. Actual rich people will always have their butlers and maids, but keep inequality high enough and suddenly middle class households can also enjoy the benefits of slavery: never doing menial work again and all the sadistic kicks you can get from ordering powerless people around.

Never give one inch to the Right's speech. What they actually desire is to own people again.

Maj wrote:I think they'd give money according to household. And there are 117,538,000 of those (the US population is 318.9 million, 23.3% of that are under 18).

Still 1.4 trillion dollars.

Occluded Sun wrote:

Maj wrote:I think they'd give money according to household. And there are 117,538,000 of those (the US population is 318.9 million, 23.3% of that are under 18).

Still 1.4 trillion dollars.

And now tell me why pumping 1,4Trillion Dollars into the economy is a bad thing to do . . go on, i'll wait for you to try and pull something out of your ass . .
And don't try to tell us that this money will be money lost and not going into the economy either. Because that is bullshit. Poor people can't buy stuff because they don't have money to do so. Give them money and they will buy stuff. So it is the most direct way to pump money into the economy.
If you give it to the corporations, THEN it is lost. Because then all it does is get added to bank accounts.

Stahlseele wrote:

Occluded Sun wrote:

Maj wrote:I think they'd give money according to household. And there are 117,538,000 of those (the US population is 318.9 million, 23.3% of that are under 18).

Still 1.4 trillion dollars.

And now tell me why pumping 1,4Trillion Dollars into the economy is a bad thing to do . . go on, i'll wait for you to try and pull something out of your ass . .
And don't try to tell us that this money will be money lost and not going into the economy either. Because that is bullshit. Poor people can't buy stuff because they don't have money to do so. Give them money and they will buy stuff. So it is the most direct way to pump money into the economy.
If you give it to the corporations, THEN it is lost. Because then all it does is get added to bank accounts.

I figure he's going to go with some national debt or inflation concern.

nockermensch wrote:Never give one inch to the Right's speech. What they actually desire is to own people again.

But OC has basically stated that owning people is the road to freedom.

Koumei wrote:

nockermensch wrote:Never give one inch to the Right's speech. What they actually desire is to own people again.

But OC has basically stated that owning people is the road to freedom.

I think that was "Being owned is the road to freedom"

If all you grasshoppers insist on discussing ways to live off the ants, I'm going to have to start posting pictures of Ayn Rand everywhere.

Is that really what you want?

Occluded Sun wrote:If all you grasshoppers insist on discussing ways to live off the ants, I'm going to have to start posting pictures of Ayn Rand everywhere.

Is that really what you want?

Why you think we would be threatened by your dangerous threat to post pictures of stupid people is beyond me. We already had a 30 page thread about these issues, if you think people are going to start advocating your shitty economic ideals and calling you out on your pro slavery position (white plantaion owners are apparently the "ants" doing all the hard work while slaves are lazy grasshoppers in your analogy) because you threaten to image macro spam until you get banned you are going to be surprised.

Ayn Rand wasn't an entomologist... Which explains why so many of her followers confuse grasshoppers and ants.

Occluded Sun wrote:If all you grasshoppers insist on discussing ways to live off the ants, I'm going to have to start posting pictures of Ayn Rand everywhere.

Is that really what you want?

Ahh I was wrong. He just avoided replying. Should've guessed that one.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"

Kaelik wrote:because you threaten to image macro spam until you get banned you are going to be surprised.

Yeah, I think we're all prepared to deal with a few days of annoyance if the end result is you getting banned and never bothering us again.

Grasshopper? I work, pay rent, pay bills, and maintain a 401(k) and a savings, both of which get a chunk of my paycheck.

I'm 28 and barring accident or unpredictable heart attacks, fully expect to be set for retirement by the time I'm old enough.

Try again, OC.

Maxus wrote:Grasshopper? I work, pay rent, pay bills, and maintain a 401(k) and a savings, both of which get a chunk of my paycheck.

I'm 28 and barring accident or unpredictable heart attacks, fully expect to be set for retirement by the time I'm old enough.

Try again, OC.

HOW DARE YOU ASSUME OC IS INTERESTED IN FACTS!!!!!

Occluded Sun wrote:If all you grasshoppers insist on discussing ways to live off the ants, I'm going to have to start posting pictures of Ayn Rand everywhere.

Is that really what you want?

Occluded Sun wrote:If all you grasshoppers insist on discussing ways to live off the ants, I'm going to have to start posting pictures of Ayn Rand everywhere.

Is that really what you want?