I think I get it now.

[forgotmylogin]

I didn't celebrate the end of 2016, didn't go out, went to bed early.

I had set my clock radio on a low setting because I didn't want to sleep too late. When it gently lulled me awake on a rare Sunday, nstead of my normal "all classic rock all the time," I got a chat show from a local college. A well-spoken man was laying it all on the table how Business wants to do things.

(Please forgive that this post is basically me discovering what many already know, but I'd never understood how all the parts fit together so well for them.)

The guest presented several theses, including:

A-The government encourages the unemployed not to work by providing lucrative aid programs.
B-The minimum wage prevents companies from hiring poor and unskilled people.
C-People with a minimum wage job don't need more than minimum wage, because most of them are not the sole earners in their household.

So with A, he believes that people need an incentive to find work, so the way to do that is to pretty much starve them. If someone gets fired, you'd better hurry up get a job before you run out of money to put gas in your car to find work and money to pay your rent to take showers and look nice for that interview and food in the fridge. Since women are not allowed to do any family planning and they follow the Rs ideal stay-at-home-mom with husband winning the bread, the husband casts them off for a newer model following the example set by our Prez-Elec, and they need to find work and leave the children (who they will likely get custody of so the husband can enjoy his mid-life crisis) and get a damn job. Or starve.

With B, it sounds like companies would be delighted to eliminate minimum wage and replace $2-$3 undocumented immigrants with poor US citizens (who didn't have money to go to college to get a skill to warrant a slightly-higher paying "decent" job) who are working (hoo-rah Trumph for creating all these jobs!) but now also have no aid programs nor health insurance (because businesses are disinclined to hire people for whom they have to pay for Health Care for) to supplement their meager wages. They're working, but they're still poor and the company thrives in Dickensian manner because they can hire a hundred cheap workers to increase productivity for the price of 10 properly-paid ones.

C makes it impossible for adult children to leave their families and move out on their own because with only a high school education, they're only going to get one of those unskilled jobs that don't pay enough to subsist.

In short, their ideal situation is to bring manufacturing back so there are plenty of jobs, but at lower wages. The people who elected Trump to bring their lucrative manufacturing and factory and mining jobs back (hoo-rah Trump for bringing industry back to the states!) will find the companies don't have to pay them the $20/hr they're used to being compensated due to hazardous conditions, because now any strong poor worker can do their job for $5/hr and all safety regulations and healthcare have been eliminated. The company can salary-cap workers at will (currently my actual existing situation) or just not even bother with raises, because what incentive do they have to pay workers when there are thousands of applicants who are eager to make a couple dollars so they can buy a doughnut to eat when they get home to their park bench.

They literally want Dickensian sweatshops packed with cheap, underpaid, disposable workers (hoo-rah! Trump doesn't like paying people either!) who have to work or starve and die since they can't afford health care.

You can't feasibly have all the things they want at the same time and expect the common standard of living the US is used to. The reason America is Great is because we decided early in the last century that we're better than that. If the minimum wage goes away, people will still need government assistance to live unless they become indentured servants who live in company dorms and are fed company food so they don't die. We will become Mumbai or China.

Ironically, the only way out of this situation at its low point would theoretically be a Revolution-style revolt situation to overthrow businesses and the government where the populace will need to join together and rely on the 2nd Amendmenters who have stockpiled and been itching for this situation since the beginning. It will be bloody, and the best possible outcome would require us to completely start over, building back to what it took the entire 20th Century to accomplish. We will have forgotten what the Founding Fathers went through and fixed for us and be doomed to repeat history.

Thanks, Donald.

Happy 2017.

[longship]

1. Well done. R&K nt

[DemocratSinceBirth]

2. Freaking China is outsourcing their manufacturing to African nations

Freking China is outsourcing their manufacturing to African nations because an average Chinese factory worker makes $400.00 a month an African manufacturing worker makes $40.00 a month. Obviously, if China can't compete with them we can't.

[Va Lefty]

3. George Carlin predicts the future

[smirkymonkey]

5. Has there ever been anyone to speak the truth as plainly and directly as

George Carlin? My concern is that there will never be anyone like him again. And even if there was, too many of these Trump-voting idiots will be too stupid and brainwashed to believe him.

[SammyWinstonJack]

4. Lucrative aid programs?.......Ha! Those Lucky Duckies

[forgotmylogin]

9. "Lucrative" in heavy sarcasm quotes - that's apparently what this guy thinks.

[CrispyQ]

6. Every time I suggest a guaranteed annual income on FB, this is the response I get:

[SharonAnn]

7. What today's corporations and capitalists want is free labor. IOW, slavery.

It's that simple.

[Stonepounder]

8. Ever since St Ronnie, American Capitalism (and Capitalism in general) has lost sight

of a basic tenet of our economy. We are a consumer economy. The business of business is to manufacture stuff to sell to consumers. You do not create jobs by cutting taxes, you create jobs by raising wages.

Henry Ford was an evil bastard in many ways, but he understood the above statement. He figured that if he paid his workers enough so that they could afford to buy the cars why built, they he would have a built-in market. And it worked and Ford became wealthy. If he had tried to make even more money by cutting the wages of his workers, then there wouldn't have been as many people who could afford to buy his cars.

Every basic economic course shows that the way to stimulate an economy is to put money in at the bottom, not at the top. Put money in at the top, and it just goes into the pockets of those at the top. Put it in at the bottom, it gets spent. At the grocery, who then has to hire more checkers, who can then spend their paychecks, and the places they spend have to hire more, who spend more, so hire more. And on and on. But somehow the GOP and business in general never seems to get this very basic point. Instead we get rid of the bag boys. Bag your own groceries. Get rid of the checkers, scan your own stuff.

Somehow there is this idea that we could be prosperous again if only we could drive the cost of goods down low enough by automating, eliminating jobs, depressing wages, and so on. And no one stops to realize that when the folks flipping burgers at the local McDonald's or Wendy's can no longer afford to buy the burgers they flip, then you will end up selling fewer burgers instead of more.

Why is this such a hard concept for corpcrats and plutocrats to understand?

[forgotmylogin]

10. Right!

Isn't one of the standard business tenets that you allocate resources where they are needed and best utilized?

Rich businesspeople don't need more money.

Giving it to people who need to buy things just lets it make a small detour on the way back to them anyway!!

[treestar]

11. I usually challenge right wingers that

they are revealing more about themselves than other people. Aren't they saying they need the threat of homelessness and starvation to get off their asses and work?

And if not, then why not go on aid yourself? You wouldn't have to work then. You're saying that aid makes people unwilling to work. So why are you still willing then?

It's just a way they can crow and gloat over people less fortunate than they, a need they apparently psychologically have.