dalem

So, overall, do you consider the state of urban inner cities to be better or worse than 50 years ago? Education? Unions?

-dale

gunnut

That's because we have a ton of regulations already. If we have no regulations, then yes, sue until the cows come home. We have all these regulations to stifle businesses already. Don't need more things to scare potential innovations from the market.

You don't know that.

What we do know is MS has provided a standard, open platform for developers to freely write apps for it. Game developers can write a single code for the entire market. There's no need to spend extra resources to port Windows code to Linux, Mac, Amiga, Commodore, and whatever else people might use. That is a significant savings passed on to the customers.

Well, government should stop funding researches then. Let the market do its thing.

Record profit is from high volumes of sale. The margin hasn't changed. We're buying more. What is your idea of a "fair" profit for the oil companies?

__________________
"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

dalem

I'm tired of hearing about "record profits" as if it's a bad thing. This is a capitalist society - we should all be wondering how we can get a part of "big oil" for ourselves and be more like them, not whining and suspicious.

Tired of it.

-dale

Shek

And my position wasn't that min wage increases will cause folks to go out of business, but that it can cause them to go out of business. They will pass on costs and drop employees as their first line of defense.

Here's a specific case study where the "corporate HQ" doesn't go out of business, but minimum wage increases will force satellite operations to go out of business.

Coyote Blog: Case Studies on the Minimum Wage

This study is a red herring. They don't control for squat and it is written at a freshman year of college level in terms of the economic tools used.

__________________
"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

Shek

Bonehead,

Astralis is on the money here. I'll try to follow up with an actual post addressing your post specifically in the next 1-2 days, but I don't have the time tonight or tomorrow during the day to develop it to where I'd want the post.

I'll address these issues in the post to lay out the empirical challenges that you need to address when trying to separate out the impact of something specific in a complex economic system:

correlation vs. causation - correlation means that two (or more) things move together, but just because they move together doesn't necessarily mean that one causes the other; if this is the case, then you have what is known as spurious correlation

reverse causality - it's possible to find correlation where there is a causal relationship, but that relationship is expressed in the wrong direction; an example of this is diet soda and obesity - I see lots of overweight folks drinking diet soda, therefore diet soda causes obesity (there is a complication here in that studies show that artificial sweetners can boost an appetite, and so there is actually some causality that runs in both directions; however, there are techniques to deal with determining this simultaneity, and I think the stronger argument is diet soda doesn't cause obesity, but that being obese causes folks to look for ways to reduce caloric intake, one case being the consumption of diet sodas)

I can't remember if you're a sports fan or not, but here are two posts that get at some of what I'll talk about and may provide a more user friendly example to discuss the technical concepts. I've attached a PPT presentation that looks at the information in these two posts - the slides are geared to show how to read results and relate them to what you see graphically, but they provide a feel for how the empirical analysis is interpreted and then put to the test in terms of methodology.

Sabernomics » Blog Archive » Payroll and Wins
Why we really, really believe that money cannot buy love in baseball « The Wages of Wins Journal

Attached Files

Reading Regressions.ppt (107.5 KB, 1 views)

ba1025

FACTS taste great and Pablum free...try um some time!


All people All families
________________________________ ________________________________
Below poverty level Below poverty level
______________________ ______________________
Year Total Number Percent Total Number Percent
__________________________________________________ __________________________
ALL RACES

2005...... 293,135 36,950 12.6 242,389 26,068 10.8

2000 .. 278,944 31,581 11.3 231,909 22,347 9.6


1990...... 248,644 33,585 13.5 210,967 25,232 12.0

1985 ..... 236,594 33,064 14.0 203,963 25,729 12.6

1980...... 225,027 29,272 13.0 196,963 22,601 11.5

1975...... 210,864 25,877 12.3 190,630 20,789 10.9

1970...... 202,183 25,420 12.6 186,692 20,330 10.9

1965...... 191,413 33,185 17.3 179,281 28,358 15.8




Great Society programs started were implemented in 65' coincidentally when the largest drop in the poverty rate occurred. it dropped 5% and stayed there! Where is your drop in the poverty rate the last 20 years???


Following the outbreak of the Great Depression, poverty among the elderly grew dramatically. The best estimates are that in 1934 over half of the elderly in America lacked sufficient income to be self-supporting. So you really think social security didn't help them?????? Charity sure wasn't prior to Social Security

BenRoethig

Therein lies the problem with minimum wage. The pockets the money is taken from sure isn't going to be the owners. What the minimum wage effectively does is redistribute wealth among the wage owners. It looks good in a speech though.

__________________
F/A-18E/F Super Hornet: The Honda Accord of fighters.

ba1025

My only issue what changed in our society during the last expansion. It's the first one since the Depression where real wages were stagnant while profits soared. I think a company making money is great. I think it's workers wges remaining stagnant isn't great for our country and only good for the shareholders in the short term....after all who will want more goods and services if only 10% of the population sees real wages increase. i don't think that's a Republican or Democratic thing it's a long term health of our economy thing. In a consumer economy consumers need $ to fuel it. They wont be able to fuel it with refinanced mortgages anymore.

gunnut

So a socialistic program was implemented in 1965. Before that the poverty rate was dropping. After that it stopped. What does that tell you about government meddling?

Another thing, you keep talking about poverty rate, poverty line, poverty blah blah blah. What does "poverty" mean? Can you give me your definition of what poverty is?

ba1025

The same people who bely regulation clamor for torte reform. You can't have it both ways

In an unregulated economy we would new Standard Oils and Swift meats. Read up on how they operated in an unregulated market. Do you hate Pig farmers and convenience/gas station store owners? Capitalism only has a soul when we add it...through regulation.
Do you wish to get rid of ummm OSHA and have more Mine cave ins? We got one over greed last year or do you think it was an "earthquake" Which OSHA Mine safety regulation do you oppose? Which OSHA one do you oppose?

Are you pro pollution if it increases profit? You want to live next to smoke stacks? Don't citizens have some rights or is it a govt of business for business in your constitution?

Do you wish to get rid of the EPA and return to a time when rivers were fish less and stank? A river in Cleveland caught on fire in the 60s it was so contaminated....you want that????

Which of the FDAs rules don't you like? Do you wish meat to be uninspected? Do you oppose requiring the pasteurization of milk? Do you take issue with preventing cattle unable to stand from ending up in school lunches? Which regulation don't you like?

Really which pesky regulation is it you don't like?

ba1025

???????????? There was a HUGE drop over the 5 years fro 65-70 then it leveled off. It had been flat previously

Would you argue with the example?

* Poverty thresholds were originally derived in 1963-1964, using:

o U.S. Department of Agriculture food budgets designed for families under economic stress

o Data about what portion of their income families spent on food



Computation:

* If total family income is less than the threshold appropriate for that family,

o the family is in poverty

o all family members have the same poverty status

o for individuals who do not live with family members,their own income is compared with the appropriate threshold

* If total family income equals or is greater than the threshold,the family (or unrelated individual) is not in poverty



Example:

* Family A has five members: two children, their mother, father, and great-aunt.

o Their threshold was $24,662 dollars in 2006.

Shek

You're using the wrong metrics again. Focusing on wages is myopic, as people make employment decisions based on compensation packages, of which wages are one part, albeit a big one. Thus, people look at the health/dental insurance that is offered, the vacation policy, the overtime policy, flexible work schedule policies, worker comp, etc.

So, the proper metric to use is to look at total compensation, not just wages/salary. When we do this, we see that labor's share of compensation has remained quite steady and is actually slightly above the longer-term historical average.

ba1025

There are very few arguments made here that bother to use statistics or facts. Now myself, if you can't show me real proof from a .gov or .edu or accredited newspaper not some wingnuts book or website or the pablum both sides spew on cable then your full of... dung. Newsmax, the Huffington report, conservapedia and the Daily Kos are not somewhere you should seek answers. They are places to seek questions...Look for the answers somewhere that isn't 90% pablum and 10% twisted facts. I see the same discredited statements made oveer and over here. Saying something 100 times doenst make it so. I am open minded but only to the facts not spewed pablum from the left or right. Our founding fathers would be disgusted to see so many let others do their thinking for them...well maybe not Hamilton

ba1025

Total compensation plummeted in the last recovery according to that graph? 2001-2007. Am I missing something? it looks like we are at the lowest level in 40 years? it also looks like it took it's worst hit in the Reagan years???? So maybe it's a trend? is that a chart showing policy bias toward business over labor and it's results? i know it isn't but I am sure the Wingnutian left would seize upon it

Shek

It's share decreased from the max level towards a level that appears to be slightly higher than the historical average. That's not "plummet[ing]".

Are you looking at the same graph I am? Start at the horizontal line that indicates the 70% and then work your way from right to left. Count the local minimums in the total compensation rate and you should find 6 of them below 70% by the time you reach the last data point, which is above 70%.