Okay, suppose the govenment sets the minimum wage to $8, like you suggest. That means that the crappiest workers get paid $8 per hour. Now, say you own a business and want a worker who has skills and can do things. Would you offer $8 per hour for a skilled worker, when the unskilled workers get paid that? No, because all your competition is offering $10 per hour for those same skilled workers, because there aren't that many skilled workers, so in order to hire them away from someone else, they have to pay more. Now, of course, the managers have to be paid more, since they will not work for the wages of a skilled worker(why should they, since they manage a group of skilled workers?), so you have to pay them $25 per hour. Now, what about all the middle executives? The CEO? See what happens? Since you set the minimum wage to $8 per hour, the CEO is now getting paid 40% more than the top managers of the company, according to your own data. Raising the minimum wage has a ripple effect that raises the salary of CEO's by large amounts.
Require you to pay the poor enough to eat and put a roof over the head and here you come with your so-called "answer", ala...:"Well why not pay them enough to have a summer home in Vermont? Why not give them all new Rolls Royces? And while you're at it, raise it high enough to eat caviar every morning for brunch..."
The truth is that now everyone is making more than the unskilled laborer who makes $8 per hour, so by definition, the $8 per hour workers are now the "poor", and we've all just made our existing money worth less--inflation. Now everything costs more, but the relative position of the rich/poor have not changed at all. In a few years, people will be crying "$8 isn't enough to live on!", and the cycle will continue. On top of that, somtimes a company, instead of hiring 2 unskilled $8 per hour workers, will start to hire 1 $16 doller per hour skilled workers, since he/she can do the job of at least 2 unskilled workers. At some point, unskilled workers just aren't profitable to hire and you get even more poor, unemployed people. Then people wonder how this could possibly have happened. Gee, if they'd taken econ 101, they'd probably know.
Things get worse. Unskilled laborors who do have jobs won't be able to save much money, since the prices of things will go up(inflationary spiral created by artificial floor on wages paid to workers), and banks won't be able to loan out this money for other people to start businesses, so there will be less jobs, and more unsilled workers will become unemployed.
So just for kicks, why do you all do that? Can't you understand reasonable limits for things? Does the word "reasonable" not exist in your vocabs? I can just imagine you being one of the ones back about a century ago raising heck against child labor laws? "What, we can't put 12 year olds to work in the mines, anymore? And the textile factories? Well I guess we can't even make them clean their rooms anymore, now."
Well, how this economic argument turned into a child labor law debate is beyond me.( uh, straw man?)
Why should there be a "100% estate tax for most rich folks," and what do you mean by "most?" IMHO, I am beginning to think it better to not create a class of rich, spoilt entitled great grandkids. If Bob has enough get up and go to make millions, good for hi, Good for his kids. But somewhere along the line, I think Bob's influence needs to end. He's dead. Buried and turned to worms. There's a whole new group of people on the planet and they don't need Bob's dead hands controlling and having an influence on things. (I am still trying to develop this theory of mine.) parsy.
Well, the only good thing is that this would have put an end to the Kennedy dynasty before it began. Or, would it? Wouldn't Joe Kennedy have found a way to avoid estate taxes though a charitable trust, offshore accounts, or some other means? Like moving the whold family to another country--or buying an island in the carribean and declaring it an independant country? If the rich person leaves that country to avoid estate taxes, how are you going to collect? I don't really think you have thought this through, since the logical result of this would be the flight of capital out of the country, making the US banking system collapse. Why would anyone with assets keep them in the US if they wanted to give them to a specific cause(children, charity, balloon animals for the needy, etc.) and they knew they were going to lose those assets if they died? Especially since they can get their money to their children tax free by taking it out of the US?
Thank you for saying this! You hit the nail on the head. Now re-read what you wrote. Notice that the "new" wages don't reflect "economic recompense for productivity"--It is based instead on keeping people in their proper social class. I have been saying thru several threads that wages are not the 100% result of the laws of economics, but partly due to intangible factors like greed and class consciousness. Thank you for admitting it for the other Randite freepers. parsy. (grinning. grinning.)