New GOP/Conservative Meme On Jobs ---- Be Happy You Get A Paycheck

[TheMastersNemesis]

Businesses won't be happy until workers are paying them to work. It just seems that wages cannot be reduced enough. the new attitude of the business community seems to be endemic. The reduction in hours of retail business is a good sign that employers just don't want to pay for health care, vacations, sick days, etc any more.

The idea that you can cut taxes by cutting worker pay until they cannot pay taxes or afford them is a threat to the country at large. What will we be able to afford in the future with the conservative push to cut and flay everything. It costs money to maintain a society.

So if retail continues to shorten the work week will other businesses begin to cut the work week under the Obama care threshold as well?

[Nuclear Unicorn]

1. So start business and be a hero.

[Zorra]

4. Aww, you must be lost. This is democratic underground, not the Chamber of Commerce.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

6. The "80% of all jobs come from small businesses" stat is bandied about quite often.

I believe even the President has used it on occassion. But even if they were only 8% of the economy it would be easy enough for him to stop grousing -- the only thing he ever does -- and actually do something. He's at perfect liberty to start any business he wants and pay his employees $30/hour to do whatever it is he wants them to do. I'm quite sure prospective employees would (without sarcasm) happily seek-out his jobs and they would do their level best to keep his job.

[Zorra]

8. Are you kidding me? He should pick himself up by his bootstraps instead of

pointing out the rapidly accelerating inequities of the system?

This is post Reagan/Bush America. Bankster America. Elvis has left the building.

We live in a consolidated capitalist/globalist plutarchy in which wealth has been polarized in the extreme. Union/labor power is essentially non-existent. The Military Industrial Complex controls the government. Wages have essentially gone down while the cost of everything has skyrocketed.

You'd have to have just fallen off a turnip truck to believe that this was just a random occurrence. Money makes money, and people with money often do very nasty shit to others in order to make more and more profit.

The chances of starting and maintaining a successful business are very slim unless there is substantial capital to float the business for a long time, or unless the business is based on some marvelous new invention or idea or something like that. Most of my friends who own/owned small businesses can no longer compete with Walmartization and have gotten out or are getting out.

Wealthy private interests are totally in control now, and we need a revolution, not another failed small business that can only afford to pay its workers a less than living wage with no benefits.

The problem is clearly systemic, and we need to fix or change the system before this country goes completely third world Les Miserables.

A hero these days would be someone who engages in non-violent democratic revolution, not in some rigged capitalist matrix fantasy in which austerity and disaster capitalism snowballs all economic wealth and power into the hands of a very few.

It's time to level the playing field.

Telling someone, in the style of Scott Walker, to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and get rich so they can become a philanthropic capitalist in post Reagan/Bush/Bankster Feudal America is like saying

"Let them eat cake".

[LisaLynne]

9. Well said.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

10. I didn't say he should pick himself up by his bootstraps

I said he should start a business and pay them $30/hour. He could start small with something like a hotdog cart. Wal-mart doesn't have hotdog carts nor does anyone complain about the Big Hotdog lobby. When was the last time someone outsourced a hotdog cart job? I deon't know about you but I'm not driving to China to buy a hotdog and I'm sure plenty of people would be happy to work a hotdog cart for $30/hour.

[socialist_n_TN]

11. How much does it cost to even start up a hot dog cart?.........

Well I guess it doesn't matter. They can just borrow the startup money from their parents. The Mitt Romney/Ronnie Reagan/Ayn Rand version of America. where everybody starts their own business and 95% of them, literally, starve to death before they wind up with a business that makes them enough to eat. Well at least that would take care of the surplus army of labor.

Or we could try a socialist revolution. At least we could ATTEMPT to put in an economic/political/social system that works for EVERYBODY and not just the ones who are born with it.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

12. 95% "literally, starve to death" -- Wow! Who knew?

Look, it's pretty obvious you just don't want to pay workers a living wage of $30/hour because you keep bringing up all these capital overhead arguments, which we all know, are 1-percenter arguments for refusing to do one's social duty.

A hotdog cart doesn't require rent or utilities or massive supply chains. Just get a cart, some hotdogs and pay the worker $30/hour.

I don't know why people keep citing Reagan or Romney or Rand. There is no Big Hotdog lobby paying senators keep small hotdog cart concerns off the streets of America.

[DogPawsBiscuitsNGrav]

19. The U.S. Small Business Administration has seen lots of small businesses come and,

unfortunately, go. According to the SBA, over 50% of small businesses fail in the first five years.

In the US it's just not as easy as buying a hot dog cart. Most states pick where you're able to put them and most often it isn't a high traffic area. Red tape and regulations make it very difficult for small business in the US.

Here are the basic start up fee's for a simple hot dog cart and this is no guarantee your cart location fee will allow you an area where you'll be seen. The commissary storage fee is because you're required to park your cart over night at a designated commissary. These are often times located 15 or 20 miles from where your designated location is. This means you're hauling this thing around 50 miles a day and gas isn't cheap either. That's a lot of hot dogs to sell from a crappy location just to break even. That's why you don't see these on every corner. Paying someone 30 dollars an hour would be improbable if not impossible.


1 Business License Fee - 1 year $100.00
2 Vendor Cart Location License Fee - 1 year $100.00
3 Health Department Cart Inspection Fee $25.00
4 Health Department Food Handler Training Course Cost $50.00
5 Hot Dog Cart Purchase Cost - New Yorker + Options $3500.00
6 Initial Food Inventory Purchase Cost - 1 month $300.00
7 Initial Cost of Other Cart Supplies $50.00
8 Commissary Storage Fee - 1 month $0 to $50.00
9 Vendor Cart Location Rental Fee - 1 month $0 to $300.00
10 Business Supplies $10.00
11 Business Insurance - 6 months $400.00
12 Other Business Costs (Telephone, Bank) $100.00
Total Start Up Costs $4435.00 to $4785.00

http://willydogs.com/business-guide/start-up-expenses-worksheet.html

[Nuclear Unicorn]

22. No, no. I do believe the statistic was "95% of them, literally, starve to death"

You'll note he went through the trouble of seating the word "literally" between 2 commas for emphasis.

And I'm not talking about start-up fees. That's just a RW talking point about why businesses shouldn't be regulated so the 1-percenters can evade their obligation to pay a living wage. Surely, if you can afford $30/hour then $4800.00 is a mere pittance and living wages is what the OP is essentially speaking to. In fact, 4800 / 30 is only 160 -- less than a month's wages -- so any employee that stays on the job for a year or more will have paid-off the start-up costs twelveold.

If employees are paid a living wage then they will have what they need to free themselves from corporate wage-slavery, right?

[socialist_n_TN]

21. Hey if you can't raise the funds to get a hot dog stand in the Rand Amerika......

and there's no safety net (also a basic premise of a Rand Amerika), then yep, most people who open a hot dog stand will starve. Because most small businesses fail. Survival of the fittest remember?

Now if the government wants to tax the wealthy and businesses, especially those half a billion dollar "small" businesses, to fund a safety net and/or worker owned businesses in competition with the capitalists, then I'd take that as a transition phase to socialism and then communism.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

23. I know what you mean.

Why just this week I remember stepping over the bodies of a family of fruit vendors on my way to buy a latte.

Communism is good for breaking eggs without cooking any omelets; tens of millions of eggs. Why communism can slaughter magnitudes more people with its death camps and purges and pogroms and not be treated with the same disdain as Nazis and skinheads is beyond me. Communists are just as repugnant as the worst SS units Hitler ever fielded. The only difference is Nazis were nationalists while communists are internationalists. Take your Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot and Che and peddle that murderous, hate-mongering tripe somewhere else.

If I may: As I understand it, socialism is a predominantly atheist/secular creed that presumes evolution to be the mechanism by which humanity arose. This being the case, why the prejorative treatment of survival of the fittest?

[greymattermom]

2. totally depends on the economy

This is why they want to tank the economy. When unemployment is low, the best folks will move to better jobs. The difference between staff will make a big difference to businesses too. Customers won't want to go to businesses where the employees feel exploited, and those employees won't save that much in the long run, either.

[Shadowflash]

3. On the local news radio

Yesterday, they said that a full 40% of people here in Michigan do not have any savings and don't make enough to put any into savings.

And the Pukes just passed right-to-work-for-less laws here and that has proven to draw down wages even further.

[TheMastersNemesis]

5. What Gets Me Is That Working Class Republicans Who Don't Have A Pot To Pee In Vote

for legislators who will reduce their wages even further. They have a form of dementia I cannot fathom. When I argue with GOPPERS about CEO's taking all their money they claim the same CEO's have the right or earned it.

[nadinbrzezinski]

13. Ain't propaganda cool?

What you see is the result of racism (there, I said it) and decades long propaganda, if not outright a hundred years. The pull yourself by bootstraps is old.

[Volaris]

14. Yeah.

We should implement national-level minimum HOURS laws to go along with the minimum wage. Also, we should understand, as FDR did, that time OFF work is just as important to productivity as time AT work. I think the Federal Work week should be 32 hours (with a 10$ minimum wage) instead of 40.
Just me.

[LiberalEsto]

7. Peculiar logic

If workers get paid less, they pay less in taxes.

This means less tax revenue for the government.

The rich weasel out of paying taxes; the poor are unable to pay.

If middle class workers as a whole are paying much less in taxes,

what's going to sustain the government, particularly the greedy Defense Department?



Wait, I forgot. They'll get rid of everything else in the government (strangle it in the bathtub), and just keep the Defense Department.

That's the plan, isn't it?

[TheMastersNemesis]

15. That Is The Libertarian Nirvana

[Lydia Leftcoast]

16. Not a new meme at all

I temped during the Reagan recession in the early 1980s, and this was the common response to all complaints from workers.

[TheMastersNemesis]

18. The Trouble Is That The Meme Has Never Gone Away Yet Workers Still Are Anti Labor And Anti Union

If you say union you are called a socialist.

[Brickbat]

17. Many workers say this to each other, and it's infuriating.

[bhikkhu]

20. I'm happy to get a paycheck, even happier that it is a fair wage

and we get by on it well enough.

The main two things I can see doing about the other is - vote for Democrats, who won't bust unions and eliminate the safety net; and then "vote with your wallet", shopping at places that treat their employees well.