California/Texas Exodus

There have been a lot of articles like this one recently. All this emphasis put on business growth while ignoring everything else.

We are importing workers with our jobs, therefore existing citizens don't necessarily have an advantage. We have been growing gang busters for decades, but our state is still broke. Income inequality gets worse. Air gets worse. Water gets worse. Traffic gets worse. Public schools get worse. The impoverished bear the brunt of growth because they must move further away from their jobs due to sprawl and pay more in gas or bus fare to get where they're going while their wages do not grow and cost of living rises.

Growth is not black and white; I don't see that its really a good thing just as a brute fact. Good growth is good, bad is bad, just as good policy is good and bad policy is bad. Maybe it's too hard to open a Carl's Jr. in Cali, or maybe there are too many Carl's Jr's there. Maybe it's too hard to build, or maybe there are too many buildings there. Maybe environmental policy is too harsh, or maybe the environment has already suffered enough.

If California's economy is weak, then perhaps it is because they have relied too much on constant growth in the past to fuel their economy. Perhaps what we will see developing out of their folly will be a more sustainable model; although considering they're looking at us Texans for ideas, I highly doubt that, since we're just going down the same path that they have already trodden.

Trickle Up Economics

I haven't heard any talk anywhere from anybody on this, but that's not to say its not out there. Certainly we haven't brought it up in this forum, so I will now.

Why not raise minimum wage?

I can hear the shrill cry that this will kill business, but I don't see why that should be, particularly since during this economic hullabaloo, big business has been setting record profits. But this hasn't benefited your average American.

Your minimum wage earners are the folks who are going to spend more money if they have it. They'll buy more goods, they'll be able to potentially buy better goods and services than they do now, meaning, ideally, more locally produced, long lasting goods. They might even gain enough of a level of sustainable reprieve from the stress of constantly living paycheck to paycheck to improve themselves or, who knows, dabble in entrepreneurship.

I think we've largely agreed that there is too much money pooling at the top, and that the trickle down isn't really working. It was just a theory after all; no reason to give it the credence that a fact would have. Over 80% of the cash in this country is tied to the very top tier of income earners (top 2%), so there's plenty of cash to spread around. And politically (to sustain (or recreate) our Republic) and economically, its actually necessary that that capital see movement and dispersal.

And what is more, people never feel quite right about taking 'somebody else's money' and giving it away, because we have this unusual notion that you make what you earn and you earn what you make (in other words, whatever you make is whatever you deserve to make). This is one thing that nobody likes about welfare programs, and something that isn't even good for the people receiving welfare. After all, they will always have that feeling that they are being given something they haven't earned, but which they deserve. Or at least that's the line. So we can get around all the necessity of social welfare programs if we just make sure people are earning enough for the time they spend so they can actually get by in the world. You won't have any complaints about people being given money by our 'communist state' for free, they're just earning what their time is worth and what they need to get by, but they still must 'earn' it. (And yes, I do actually recognize that setting wages is closer to communism than income re-allocation, a fact lost on most Americans, but this is only the 'minimum' wage, not all wages)

If the average household has more money to spend then: more money will be spent in the market place, on better goods, making demand rise, encouraging job growth and the creation of new ways for people to spend their money. (Another aside, I'm not in support of an ever growing economy as it is not sustainable, but that can be treated on later)

Compared to the complications of figuring out who deserves to receive what amount of welfare, how much money you can get back from the government for tax exemptions, medical care, insurance, education cuts, the privatization or publicazation of 'everything', et al., doesn't just raising the minimum wage seem just a little more elegant?

Taxes

Its really looking like if we want to take care of our debt, we need to raise taxes. Our tax burden isn't that bad compared to our taxes historically. One problem is that the super rich are super richer than ever before, but are paying much lower taxes (this is both a tax problem and points to a problem in the market). Another problem, as the first story below points out, is that a lot of people who should be paying taxes don't have to, thanks to a plethora of exemptions and loopholes.

Audio: Tax exemptions and loopholes

A history of tax burden

I sometimes wonder if our problems with taxes have less to do with the loss of money itself, and more to do with A) the stress of filling out paperwork (there are studies on this out there) and/or B) our increasing lack of a feeling of solidarity for the national welfare. After all, we are encouraged by objectivism, very prevalent both in the fore and background today, only to watch out for number one, and for years our presidents have been saying "The business of America is business!" instead of something more idealistic, for instance, "The business of America is Justice" or perhaps even "Think not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Perhaps if we stressed public spiritedness, we'd be more apt to take direct part in our government and wouldn't feel like it was this alien entity robbing us or hindering our "real" business.

Atheism as Religion

It seems we basically have one sort of atheism alive and well today. That secular humanism which is, for all intents and purposes, basically identical to most popular religions with the exceptions of its cosmology. Perhaps theres less crisis regarding homosexuality, but the trope 'i'm okay, you're okay' morality is still there.

But this is not a discussion on ethics, its aabout atheism...with a capital A. At the core of modern popular atheism is that materialistic belief, if I cannot sense it (or scientifically" intereact with it, it does not exist. Now, an atheist need not subscribe to scientific realism, nor even materialism entirely, but certainly they must (or do, rather) believe that to believe in anything which cannot be demonstrated is stupid. Now, we do have a sort of weak religious belief here, because inhrent in all this is the unspoken rule that if God confronted an atheist, the atheist would be forced to acknowledge God's existence (ignoring the fac tthat the atheist may deem himself insane first.

But that is not the atheism that that interests me. I want a truly religious atheism, one that is not merely cosmologically bound, but morally bound, to ignore God's existence, nay, to deny it, even if that God presents himself. If I knew for certain that God exists, I would still adopt my Atheism in pure defiance; and note that this is not a sort of lazy defiance, or absured refusal to acknowledge that I was wrong about God's existence. No, its a moral imperative which states that i will not be encumbered by moral norms set upon me by another power, no matter how infinite or powerful it might be. In this way, it is a sort of reverse humanism; it shockingly denies an objective or obviously human good in favor of the heroic morality of the individual.

More later

There is no Main Street

We've heard it. We have to keep an eye on Wall Street and Main Street. If you have no local economy, and by that I mean locally owned and operated businesses, then you have no Main Street. Your "Main Street" is tied to Wall Street if it consists only of large, national and/or international business; you cannot hope for it to act like Main Street, cannot expect it to act for the best local interests when it is fettered externally. The masters of your local economy--which means your masters--do not live near you.

They do not care about you.

They care about Wall Street.

There is no Main Street.

Not if there is no locally owned and operated business.

The Creature that Tells Stories

Language has made our species strange. So long as you accept as fact that mankind is somehow divinely created (and we all know atheists who think as much), our ability to tell stories doesn't seem so strange. When you think about evolution though; holy cow that's weird. Here we've managed to become capable of creating a complex language; not just body signals or the ability to emote, but a way to convey abstract ideas. Now, why would we really need those? Well, I don't know; you can't exactly explain everything away with evolution, ya know, and who'd want to anyway?

The stories we tell aren't just communications..."I found food over by that river, but watch out for the piranha"...we convey more than just facts, we convey value.

A pack of wolves, a group of chimps, what's important to them? Who's the boss. Who has the power. That's what. Now, if I'm a bottom rung chimp, and I find that I don't get the food that's coming to me, because the head chimp is a bully, hardly a leader at all, maybe I will get so pissed off that I'll go ape shit on him. But probably not; probably I'll just yield because that's the way we're built. He's at the top; he calls the shots.

Really, that's not so different than a lot of people, I think. They seem to relish in giving more and more to people who already have power over them. Don't ask me why, because it seems to fly in the face of story telling, because the root of every good story is an appeal to justice. And don't we spend an inordinate amount of time discussing justice? Everything we talk about has to do with whether I got what is coming to me or whether some undeserving jackass is causing me grief. No matter how banal it might be, that's the story we tell.

How about this. Those chimps and wolves relationships are all about power relations. Well, our stories allow us to lie about power relations...to ourselves. Why be racist? What does that do for us? Its a lie, for power. Even if my life is crap, I can lie to myself; I'm not inferior (even if I am) because I belong to a superior race. Why do you think the Nazis were successful?

Earning

This is as yet an incomplete thought.

I've heard a few times, both in person and on various media outlets, some person, or persons reciting, as a sort of rallying cry, "I earned what I have." This is a sort of response that comes up from the right when confronted with the threat of redistributive taxation, etc.

Earning is a funny word. It has multiple meanings; the meanings can basically be divided into two groups and then a third which would seem (perhaps deceptively) to be in the middle. On the one hand we have the monetary sense, in which earning simply means an increase in money, for instance, an account earns interest. On the other, we have 'earn' as being used as meriting or deserving reward.

Now, when somebody is said to have earned a wage, or to have earned a living, there is some odd juxtaposing between these two broader meanings of the word earned. This came to mind awhile back when a friend of my family vehemently denounced Obama and his redistributive policies, stating that he had earned what he had. So here is a funny thing; on the one hand, there is no denying that he 'earned' it, in the fully monetary sense. He rendered a service and was given compensation for it. On the other hand, he is saying, basically, that what he has received (purportedly, all of it) he deserves.

The frightening conclusion (to my mind) is that the economy, apparently, decides on its own what people deserve. Given the recent rise in 'market fundamentalism' as a general philosophy, it is no more surprising than it is disturbing. Taken to its extreme, it basically says that a free market economy will always decide what people deserve. Given this belief, it is no wonder why all taxation would be decried as an injustice.

Also falling out of this belief of 'earning' is the oddity of what we might call uneven markets. So, for instance, if 'earning/deserving' is based upon how hard you have worked, one might ask why it is that you have more than, say, your ancestors. Do you work so much harder than your forefathers that you deserve all the amenities of modern society while they did not? The truth is, if any earning has been done, then it was done for us, in the past, by our predecessors. God knows that I do not do enough work today to have built this house, with its air conditioning, its television set, a modern oven, indoor plumbing, etc., and I dare to say that no man living today can in good conscience say that he has (though I'd wager that many would say just that).

Here is the third way in which the phrase, "I earned it," is odd to me. It requires others. If you go into the woods, hunt for your own food, build your own shelter, do everything for yourself through the good will of Nature, then there is not really a proper way in which you can say you 'earned' what you have. On the contrary, you did not earn your hovel, or your dinner, or anything else that you have, you created it yourself from whatever the land has provided for you. In this sense, where you did not 'earn' your house, because you actually built your house, we are actually precisely closest to seeing what a person, by his own work, by his own two hands, merits.

And yet since we are social creatures, capable of sharing work, of sharing burdens, we can have a much easier existence than we can have on our own. Thus it is only in a social context, where you actually receive more than you possibly could have created on your own, that we can speak of earning, deserving a certain place in that society based upon how much we have put into it. Considering the chaos of a free market, the fact that much of what we have today is thanks to the hard work of others from the past, and still from others today who work very hard for very little pay, thanks to quirks in our monetary system or simple exploitation of workers, we really cannot say we have 'earned' what we have when others who work as hard, or harder than we do, have much less.

To recap, if somebody says "I earned this," we cannot immediately jump to "I deserve this." If there is to be a social or moral dimension to the word earn, which is implied by the use of the phrase, then social merit, as opposed to cold market science, must be considered, and therefore, redistribution must be considered as a possible correction to the injustice of uneven earnings.