Do you support a Flat Tax a Fair Tax or a Progressive Tax ?

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It's not shifting the blame, it sucks that these companies ship jobs overseas or whatever other tricks they do but it's life. Profit is all the matters. High minimum wage drives jobs overseas and raises unemployment amongst folks that need jobs the most. A lot of people, particularly young people, are locked out of the job market right now and are risking becoming permanently unemployable. Employment is more important than a living wage since if you don't got a job it don't matter anyways. There's no working your way up when you can't even get a job.

Well to me profit is not all that matters.....I hate that we have a system based on that, it disgusts me and angers me. Also how is employment more important than a living wage. If I don't have enough to live on how the hell am I supposed to keep a job when I am not able to shower, dress appropriatly ect. because I'm homeless? right now I live at my moms house but that may last a year or two at best if I can't find a job that provides enough to live on or if college grants/loans do not provide enough then where do think I am going to be? Not sure I can get a job anyways.....I have quite a few limits there.

Well, I'm kind of in the same boat so I know how bad the job market is right now. Basically what I am saying is that a sucky low paying job is better than no job and the longer you go without working, the harder it is to get a job. Even crappy minimum wage jobs aren't really entry level anymore, people with no experience or long gaps in their employment history are at a huge disadvantage. I think you would rather be living at home while working for say $5 an hour for the next couple years acquiring the apparently necessary experience to get a higher paying job than being locked out of the job market entirely for the next few years.

Yep I have not worked for quite a while, I have multiple mental disorders and illnesses..so me finding a job is not going to be very easy and keeping one would be even harder. Right now I am going to college while living at home and I plan to save some of the money left over from the grants and loans.....I can't handle a job on top of that at this point. Its kind of either college or a job.

What you don't get is that NOT ALL JOBS are intended to be the kind of job that supports you.

Do you realize most kids living with mom and dad get their first jobs in industries that hire them to work after school? Should they be earning a "living wage?" Do you realize they typically are given simple and mundane tasks where their only responsibility is to show up when scheduled to work?

Someone did a review of how many people actually earn only the "minimum wage." The number was insanely low of all people working...often people who DID NOT need a full-time income to support themselves. Most all employers start out significantly above the old minimum wage or quickly hand out raises for those who started at the old minimum wage.

There are a lot of tasks that simply don't deserve a wage of say $10/hour. There are a lot of opportunities where you don't want to offer $10/hour until you know the person you hire is hard working and responsible. It is insulting to give one man $10/hour who is lazy and hard to get to do his job and another man works hard and gets the same $10/hour. The higher the minimum wage, the fewer people an employer can afford to hire (the labor budget does not magically increase to meet the change in government mandate), and the harder it is to financially reward the good workers and give nothing to the substandard workers.

I used to believe that there was a problem in that the minimum wage never kept pace with the rate of inflation, and I do agree that there is an element to address in that, but it's also true that most all people working ARE NOT being paid ONLY the minimum wage. Most employers are more generous than that, and the ones that are not...they go through people quickly and often have poor quality workers.

I think there is merit in what you say, zer0netgain, but unfortunately most jobs that should be second incomes for families turn out to be their primary sources of income (and I say sources in the plural, because many people need to hold down more than one to make ends meet).

A person who works 40 hours a week has a legitimate expectation of being able to be self-supporting on the income from that work. In this day and age, that amount of labour should be sufficient to provide you with food, clothing and shelter. Not necessarily luxury--maybe you need to have roommates, but you should be able to make ends meet on the income from 2000 hours of work a year.

When that level of work puts people below the poverty line, though, there is a significant disconnect, and that is where there is a role for public policy to come in an make changes to the employment law framework.

Minimum wage is a blunt instrument, but it's one of the few that are in the government's toolchest. Guaranteed Annual Income is another, but its introduction would be so complicated that it would likely get completely bogged down.

If the U.S. government cannot deliver mail efficiently how can it possibly fix the economy?

ruveyn

People who reinvest their income in a manner that results in greater revenue for the state should be rewarded accordingly, not for the sake of "fairness" or "justice" but because it hopefully entices people to reinvest in ways that result in greater revenue. The more money the state has coming in, the more money the government will have to spend on remedying peripheral ills such as homelessness, hunger, crime, disease etc.. If the middle class are wasting their disposable income on useless rubbish they don't need, they don't warrant any tax breaks. If they are spending their disposable income on investments or college funds for their offspring (thereby reducing the burden on the grant/subsidy system) or superior medical care, they should be given encouragement for doing so.

Taxes are an ugly part of our existence, and trying to dress them up to make them look pretty makes everyone involved look stupid.

I know there are some jobs that are not meant to be providing enough income to live on....part time jobs for instance, but the trouble is there are hardly any jobs that do provide a living wage availible, I mean there are college graduates trying to get crappy jobs at Mcdonalds and places like that because there are no jobs for them to use their degrees for and of course they are overqualified for those jobs. I mean if college graduates cannot find jobs how are people without college educations, or people with mental problems and such supposed to get jobs? The whole system is flawed.....If there was not so much outsourcing that might not be as big of a problem.

It sucks that humanity is enslaved to something so useless.

I support progressive tax, since I assume this thread is talking only about the income tax. If the income tax was the only tax we paid, I might favor a different system, but as it is, it is not and, therefore, the progressive rates actually serve to even things out, given how many regressive taxes we have in our system (many are things we like to pretend are not "taxes," per se, like social security, but lets get real: they ARE taxes, and they ARE highly regressive).

The flat tax plans I've studied all have loopholes large enough to drive a truck through and will never work. I say that as a CPA: I get PAID to see the loopholes, and we'd have a field day. The so called "fair" tax isn't that much different. These plans simply do not adequately address all the things that happen or can happen in the real life world of arranging and accounting for transactions.

Finally, as time has shown us, it doesn't really matter how "simple" the tax code is when we start: congress can't resist tweaking it, doing so makes our representatives look responsive to their constituents, and it is far too tempting to use such a potential powerful tool when the country needs "change." So "simple" is pretty much guaranteed not to stay "simple," and while it is good to run through and clean it all up periodically, and "simplify," the idea that we can actually have a "simple" yet fair tax code is a pipe dream.

I'm not in the least bit worried about my ability to stay employed as a tax specialist. We CPA's can sit quietly in the corner and let everyone else create the work for us. No lobbying required. Politics is really good at that.

I'd propose the solution is that perhaps the "minimum wage" should be tiered so that people obtaining full-time employment (36-40+ hours/week) are entitled to a minimum wage of X. People who are employed in part-time employment of 35 hours or less but regular employment should be entitled to a minimum wage of Y. People who are employed part-time for 20 or fewer hours for temp/entry-level/low-skill duties would be entitled to a minimum wage of Z.

This would have the benefit of letting employers hire young kids starting out for menial light duties without having to pay them the same as someone they hire full time or even part time who carry more significant responsibilities. Probably all moot since, as I pointed out, most employer DO NOT only offer minimum wage to their new hires.

Might be a handy way to ID what kinds of jobs are in the marketplace and get a better picture of what they comprise of the landscape of employment.




I have the same misgivings about "national health care."




You are totally correct about that, but first, what is a "livable wage?" You'd be surprised how cheap you can live if your are frugal. Many people think certain things are necessities when they are wants only. Having lived on my own and dealt with this issue, I can be sympathetic. Odds of me finding a reliable roommate/housemate to share the costs with are slim. Hence, I must live on my own. Rent, utilities, etc. add up real fast and are hard to meet on just one income.

Coming out of graduate school, if I got a job paying only $25K/year, I could have managed to get by and pay on my student loans. I was lucky to be making about $16K/year (thanks to 9/11's impact on the economy). I'm now in the $25K/year range, but by now my student loans (with capitalized interest) have ballooned and now I need to be making $35-40K/year to pay them down and have other things I could use....like health insurance coverage. I can't criticize my boss for not paying me more. I handle his books. I see how we are just getting by. He's not living large while I suffer. Trying to run my own small business on the side, I appreciate the complexity of this. Even if I could use a spare pair of hands, I'd need a lot of money coming it to justify hiring even just one person because of how much that one person will cost to have on staff.

If government mandates higher pay, then it upsets the economy. Prices for everything will go up and I don't know if we'd ever hit this "happy medium" where it balances out. If market alone drives the price of labor, then things like the global economy screws over the worker because American workers must compete against their 3rd world counterparts. This we were often warned about before NAFTA and GATT were passed. Americans can't have the pay scales and quality of life known in the 1980's and 1990's if we must compete against Pakistan and China in labor costs.

Much of the problem today is not just offshored and outsourced jobs...it's the lie of college education. Overpriced schooling for degrees in a market FLOODED with dislocated college-educated workers. I was warning young people about this shortly after 9/11 when I got a scoop of how fast college tuition was going up and that people like me...right out of graduate school...were LUCKY to get ANY employment at all. I could only imagine what future graduates would face, and it is only now (2011) that we see students choosing NOT to go beyond community college or trade schools (shorter time and much cheaper) for job skill training.

I have no doubt that for the most part, an entire generation of college educated people (say 1995 to 2015) will be underemployed most all their life and never get back out of their training what they are obligated to pay for it.

Yeah this is what I am worried about.....when I got out of highschool I did not have a car and there where no jobs in walking distance or that my mom could drive me to adequetly and I wanted to get away so I went to college. Had a work study job and ended up dropping out the beginging of the second year.......then I had a temporary job out in minnesota a family member hooked me up with and got 'fired for being too slow and weird basically. So then I came back to Colorado and tried finding a job which did not happen.......so I am now going to community college and really not sure what to do. I have little chance of finding a job I can keep and I don't know if I can handle college and a job at the same time. I am afraid to quit college because I am worried about keeping a job long enough to make anything....and I am afraid to stay in college because I don't want the IRS coming after me when I have no way of paying loans back if I do not find employment. Either way I am screwed and so are many other U.S citizens.

Most of what you said is true, but if it is.....what are people supposed to do exactly?

There is mounting pressure on parents to be more realistic about whether or not college is the right choice for their kids, and high schools now have more tech programs focused on what employers are saying they want. Education is a good thing, but it has to be the right education, and that is a rapidly moving target. I recently read that the "common" factory worker must be able to do trig, they use it on the job every day. Interesting, isn't?

I'm trying to figure out why you are worried about the IRS on your loans, however. That shouldn't happen. I can think of several ways to mitigate any such issues; your fear I think is out of proportion to what actually happens, when all the laws are applied right.

Well what does happen then?

But yeah the trouble is I don't know any jobs I would be good at and I have yet to hear of a technical program that is intresting.....and I cannot motivate myself to stick to or do very well at something I have no intrest in I wish I could. But yeah I guess I cannot be a factory worker because I cannot even do long division let alone anything beyond that.

I sincerely wish I knew the answer.

When 9/11 happened, I got into survivialism. It educated me a great deal. I've been doing what I can to become more independent in how I look at life, how I choose to handle things, etc. If you wonder why I'm so anti-government cheese, it's because I know to become dependent on someone else means they can control you.

Granted, few can really be 100% independent, but I look at "support structures" (particularly government ones) with a totally different perspective now.

Many years ago, a man would just load a cart with apples and sell them on the street corner. Most people were small business owners...even if they sold door to door. Being an "employee" of someone else wasn't all that common. I suspect when all is said and done, most people will have to go back to that. Expecting someone to hire you and give you a good paycheck for doing a set of tasks is becoming more and more rare as more jobs can be sent overseas. The only way to earn a buck for some people is to start working for themselves....doing stuff for others for pay.

I am being serious here. Even for those with AS, if you can clean a house, detail a car, weed a garden, mow a lawn, etc., you might make some nice cash doing it for people who will hire you to do these chores for them. When I had a place of my own with a lawn that needed to be mowed, it was easier for me to pay my neighbor to do my yard as well when I considered the time it took to go to my parents house to borrow and return the lawn mower and the fact that mowing grass sets off my allergies. Yeah, I could have kept my $30/month, but it was just easier overall to pay him to do the work for me.

I got into trying to start my own small business (isn't going anywhere right now), because before I knew about AS I asked a guy I know why I couldn't get a shot in a good job. He didn't know about AS but he knew me a fair bit and said that I was brilliant, but I don't fit in with the crowd. HR directors for corporations and governments are not concerned with attracting top-notch talent, they are concerned about IF you might make them look bad. Those capable of being the most creative normally come with baggage that could pose problems later. Only when they want that creativity bad enough to RISK the problems from the associated baggage do they hire the odd creative/brilliant types. This guy told me flat out that if I kept waiting for someone to offer me opportunity, it would never happen. I would be better off starting my own business and set my own course. He was correct. I don't fit in with the corporate culture. I don't have the political clout to get my foot in the door of a government job. So, I decided to take a chance. What's the worst that can happen? That I fail? I'm kinda already at that point so why not take a chance and try?

Now, for someone severely afflicted with AS symptoms, this might not be an easier path, but if you sit there waiting for someone else to hire you, you might be waiting a long time. Perhaps you should identify a need in your community you can meet. If it starts bringing in some money, at least you are working, and it might open doors to better things for you.