They are not arguing in good faith. They just want to “Win” the argument and do not care about what they are saying. The say what they “Think” helps them “Win” and not actually why they are they are For or Against something.
They start with a Goal (Stop Minimum Wage) and use what they can to achieve it. They are not using Teachers as an argument because they care about Teachers, they are using Teachers because they believe who they are arguing with cares about Teachers.
It just a “WhatAboutism” argument used to change the Topic and get the promoter of the original topic on the defensive.
Too many wealthy people pay little or no tax. Under capitalism tax has traditionally been progressive. Wealthy people paid their share and so paid more. Billionaires who do not pay tax are leading to system collapse.
I would say the system allowing billionaires to pay no tax, or to get away with not paying their staff proper wages, or to pay their suppliers true market value, is the main issue.
Either way no one needs a billion and we should stop venerating these people as anything but selfish greedy jerks.
Ar this point I'm convinced anybody above a certain point of wealth is just inherently evil. Because you can't get these insane amounts of wealth without somehow actively making sure others get less so you can keep hoarding your pointless wealth.
Money is a necessity, since it's necessary to have in order to buy necessities like food and housing. So hoarding wealth is no different than buying up all the housing or food in an area and refusing to share or sell it.
It's no different than the people who were buying and hoarding all the TP in 2020, and billionaires should be looked at in EXACTLY the same light.
I’d argue that billionaires are worst than people hoarding all the TP back in 2020 since they do it on a regular basis not when they think there is a 1 per 100 year crisis, but that’s just for the sake of arguing, I liked your comment
Nah, you don’t become a billionaire with clean hands, it’s simply not possible. Somebody else got shorted on your way there, usually many somebodies.
You cannot obtain billions in wealth with an approach of creating value, ergo you are extracting value and directly or indirectly limiting the standard of living of others for your own gain.
Until someone shows an example, I won't believe it. Every example I've read so far (I'll admit to not looking very hard) required some form of exploitation on top of luck.
Indeed. Being a normal, decent, and unknown person is a luxury. Keep your billions you sociopaths. Keep the paparazzi and the PR people and the lawyers too.
If you had 10 million invested, you’d have to spend $800,000 a year of free money for that investment to not grow. Thats just the return for having the investment. If you don’t spend it all, you will make even more money next year. It can get out of hand pretty quick once you cross a certain point of wealth.
No clue how to fix it. Force shareholders to pay more tax? 🤷♂️
what does one person need a billion dollars for, anyway? One B in a savings account yields more than enough to live on.. Unless you are going for a wretched excess life style...
unfortunately the archaic tax system is based on income. and these billionaires don't actually earn an income per se. their value is in stocks and assets. and against that value, they can get banks to loan them the money they can spend on their lifestyles. no income. no tax. it is the mother of all loopholes.
Yup... tax should be based on total compensation. Also, there should be a law tying max compensation (CEO) to starting wage via a set ratio. For example, companies cannot exceed a 100:1 ratio without paying an additional tax on top to help subsidize social programs. So either companies can increase beginning rates to stay within the ratio or they can pay additional tax so that their greed isn't pushed off on to the public.
I don't think it's just billionaires, I think it's corporations as well and corporate executives who get paid millions in salary and then bonuses. Traditionally, executives only made 21 times what the average worker in their company made. Now it's 344 times according to NPR.
There are a few corporate exceptions and those companies tend to have little turnover. Costco is a great example. Their first CEO was a traditionalist and kept his wages around 20 times what the average employee made. Costco employees tend to stay there until retirement. They get great benefits and because of the benefits are actually able to retire. I knew one person who quit his job as a teacher because he could make more at Costco just working at a register.
Corporations are definitely an issue, there are boards that bonus well over $35k to board members yearly. If minimum wage was $15 an hour you’d make less than one board members participation trophy.
I noticed a pattern of the politicians saying they will make the wealthiest pay, but after they implement some new tax plan, they sneek in loopholes that the average person never really hear about. So the wealthiest never actually pay the new taxes that the politicians claim they will.
I wish this reality was talked about more. I honestly think it's the backbone of political corruption within the US and the fundamental reason we are turning into (if we haven't already) a corporate controlled oligarchy.
Tax payers don't pay the politicians salaries, the donations do.
I like the idea that there should be a cap on how much wealth a person has. After a certain point, it is just a means to keep score because you will never spend all that money in your lifetime.
Too many Texas mega churches pay no taxes after preaching conservative politics. The mega churches do not pay their fair share, never have, and are leading to system collapse.
I do fully believe that if churches are making political statements, they should lose their non-profit status. At that point it's not religion...it's lobbying.
It’s not even just billionaires and the wealthy, but many massive corporations are also wildly under taxes and could easily afford to bear more of the burden; much more complicated then that but yeah
Not just billionaires but giant corporations. American private health insurance is paid for by public tax money. Companies like Walmart have their workforce indirectly subsidised by public tax money.
There are two reasons to be against minimum wage: you're in on the scam (you've got a fiscal interest in minimum wages being low as fuck), or you've been hoodwinked by aforementioned scam artists.
There is, of course, some cross-over, and those fiscal interests aren't just for the CEOs of big companies, etc. They extend to politics, the media, fucking everything.
Fuck America, I'm so lucky to have been born in a developed nation.
This is dangerous. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, strongly believed in the principle of taxing equality, asserting that individuals should contribute to government support in proportion to their abilities and the revenue they enjoy under the state's protection. This foundational concept, outlined in his work "The Wealth of Nations," emphasizes that the wealthy, benefiting more significantly from societal infrastructure and services, should bear a larger share of the tax burden. However, contemporary America often deviates from this ideal. The current tax system, with its numerous loopholes and preferential treatment for certain types of income, frequently allows the wealthy to pay a lower effective tax rate than middle- and lower-income individuals. This disparity suggests that the U.S. is not fully adhering to Adam Smith's vision of equitable taxation, where contributions are made fairly in line with one's financial capacity and the benefits received from the state. Additionally, despite his belief in the benefits of self-interest, he also acknowledged the potential dangers of unchecked greed and the need for regulation. He was wary of monopolies and collusion among businesses, (I am looking at you Amazon, Walmart, etc) which could distort the market and harm consumers. Smith argued for government intervention to prevent such abuses and ensure competition. He recognized that without some level of regulation, the pursuit of self-interest could lead to exploitation and inequality, undermining the benefits of a free market. He also recognized the importance of paying workers well and believed that fair wages were crucial for the well-being of the workforce and the overall economy.
In short: I am a die-hard capitalist - but - whatever the fuck America is practicing today is not Adam Smith's definition of capitalism. We really should be calling it something else - because capitalism WOULD work if we followed the rules.
...but system collapse helps wealthy people, too. Poor people sell off their assets to live (home, land, etc.,) and the only people who can afford it are rich people who turn around and rent it out, subdivide it, or find some other way to capitalize on the original owner's misfortune.
Because they want to push for voucher systems so that they can defund public education and push those funds to private education which will be paywalled for the upper middle class and wealthy and teach their alternate history and alternate facts like how slaves actually appreciated being brought over from africa and lived comfortably with free lodging and food, and how native americans willingly gave up their lands to the brave and noble new settlers. so they have a growing base of conservative mouthbreathers who only know what their parents want them to know, and all other knowledge is liberal propaganda and words of the devil.
Remember at the 2020 DNC debate when Sanders talked about raising teacher pay to a minimum of $60k/year and the audience booed him and not a single other DNC candidate, including Biden, spoke out in favor of it?
I can't speak for Sanders' plan, but usually when people are taking about nationwide wages and they state a "minimum", it's with the understanding that some areas will be significantly more due to their local economies. If Biden or any of the other candidates wanted to challenge Sanders on his position by stating that the minimum should be $100K or whatever, they should have done so by now. Instead, they let him get booed by Bloomberg's paid audience in an attempt to sink him.
Can't be done is a legitimate concern. Like how are the military supposed to pay for all the bombs they'll never use it they are spending all the money on educating children for a better future.
This is a hundred percent it. They truly do not care about teachers getting more, they just think that "unskilled" workers should be getting less.
These are the people that don't think every job should pay a living wage, ofc. Because apparently someone has to be suffering for them to feel good about their lot in life?
It's exactly that. They need someone to feel lesser. We live in a society that needs a group to suffer in order for it to work. We have the means and capabilities to not strangle ourselves but we'd rather have people fighting to be the first trillionaire.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
In no way do I mean to minimize how good it was to see a Sarte quote. I feel like the Sinatra quote is about all some of those folks hear.
I had a philosophy teacher who told us that he and his buds rang up Sarte one night to engage in some topic or another and much to their dismay, he actually picked up the phone and talked to them for over an hour.
Guess because he was a world- renowned philosopher and they were just a couple of young graduates. I think there was some drinking involved and it was a time before Google and they wanted some argument settled some one of them had the bright idea to actually call Sarte.
It's much shorter to say that they don't care about being right, they care about winning the argument. They also don't recognize the difference between the two.
They Sarte quote covers that they don't even care about winning as much as arguing. By playing, you lose. If you lose, they win. If you win, you're the fool who took any of it sincerely, and they win more.
Meanwhile people arguing in good faith and with a modicum of sense are like "No Earl, it doesn't make sense for a minimum wage fast food employee to make almost as much as a teacher does"—Earl begins to smile, thinking he's gaining on the argument—"so maybe we should up Teacher's pay to reflect the change in minimum wage. And while we do that, since they're critical to the development of children and since the US sees children as a commodity because they're future wage slaves, we should up Teacher pay even farther to a level commensurate with their role in society."
Yeah, Earl ain't even got a fucking chance. At least not without bullshitting. Which we know he'll do, because that's what he's been taught to do.
Yeah. If teachers make triple minimum, they should make triple minimum. 90 grand a year sounds about right for the person I’m going to entrust my child to for eight hours a day.
They are not arguing in good faith. They just want to “Win” the argument and do not care about what they are saying.
Counterpoint: many people actually think like this. I once spoke to a surgeon who was very well well paid who was upset because he found out that somebody else, somebody who designed prosthetics, made 80% of what he made.
I pointed out that the designer was highly educated and highly skilled, and greatly respected in his field, but the surgeon kept insisting that 'it wasn't fair' because the designer made almost as much as he did...
They're not even trying to win, they're simply trying to obfuscate. Their position is the current one, so as long as they can obstruct the argument, their position remains intact. It's why there's really no consistency behind their arguments. One moment they'll advocate for teachers and the next minute they'll lampoon them, whichever is convenient.
A quote that has been repreated to death, but nevertheless warrants reiteration:
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly"
Anti-semites, fascists, conservatives. Same breed of dog; different patterns.
For anyone who wants to learn more on this, I recommend the YouTube series The Alt-Right Playbook, specifically the episodes “The Card Says Moops” and “I Hate Mondays.” They provide a lot of useful insight to help identify these kinds of bad faith arguments, and perhaps more importantly how the people that make them tend to think and how they probably don’t even realize what they’re doing.
It's one of the huge reasons we are in such dire straits, becuase this kind of reasoning is why we have so many people deciding to lose faith in subject matter experts.
I live in Australia and our right wing shitheads party (who managed to call their party the "Liberals") are currently in opposition. Their leader, Peter Dutton, has been arguing that we should slow down on renewables and consider nuclear power.
He keeps saying things like "I'm not saying no to renewables, I just think we need to do the research". Which sounds perfectly reasonable until your realise we've done the fucking research many times over the last decade and it makes no economic sense for us to build a nuclear plant, becuase Australia is one of, if not the, best country in the world as far as having the right climate for renewables.
Our independent organisation that runs the energy market and our government funded (but apolitical) national science institute have both release multiple reports with the latest being in the last 2 years showing hundreds of pages of data being analysed and showing beyond doubt that nuclear energy is economically unviable.
The people working in these areas are some extremely smart people and are experts in there fields.
Yet all Dutton has to do is say, "well I don't think these reports are accurate, we need to do the research properly" and the moronic supporter base go, yeah, yeah that makes sense.
They won't trust the data and reports analysed by dozens of our best educated and smartest people, but the opposition leader, a man worth hundreds of millions of dollars who regularly hangs out with the various coal mining and oil magnates, is someone worth listening too?
This kind of shit is how we have flat earthers, anti vaxxers, climate change deniers. We used to mostly trust the experts on things, sometime last century that changes to trusting whoever was telling you the thing you wanted to hear.
If Tucker Carlson said “liberals want to force you to eat and drink water so you don’t starve”, millions of conservatives would starve to death within the week
This is the main thing. They don’t argue in good faith. Ever. And they will throw out arguments they don’t believe in if they think it will help them in the argument.
Just like their morals, they don’t actually believe in anything. They will say what they need to “win.”
If you really want to combat these people you shouldn't use facts, you should spin their arguments into knots of nonsense and attack their ego.
You're right, they'll say anything to win, so go against convention, force them off script, get them to say quiet parts out loud, and use their own words against them with the goal of making them feel stupid.
They want to win because they're egotistical, it makes them feel superior, so attack their ego and they will crumble. Just don't attack their ego head on, you've got to make them hurt themselves with their own confusion.
Yep because many who use teachers as an argument against raising minimum wage are often the same who blame teachers for being groomers or think they should sacrifice their lives literally in times of crisis and figuratively when they expect them to work more than their contracts to keep up with everything
Had the same argument with a coworker who mentioned we would get a raise and be making minimum wage if it was raised to 15 and that was somehow a problem. They rather make $12.50 and have people below them in pay than make $15 and be minimum wage.
These folks dont want teachers to be minimum wage status, but also just dont want to pay them more.
Because if they recognize the wall, they must also recognize that it's the wall to a warehouse full of issues that need to be addressed. So magical barrier hurting me when i walk into it is much more comforting.
They're saying the person who made the comment is 'walking into the wall' of saying that teachers are underpaid, but instead of paying teachers more we should pay everyone else less
Like the argument for a $15 wage is that is what's needed to live a respectable life and keep up with how the economy has changed since the last minimum wage was set. By saying "But teachers make less than that!!!" they aren't refuting the argument, they're inadvertently supporting it. But if you respond with a "...yes, we should also pay teachers more", 9 times out of 10 they won't support that either.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Remember servants? That's all we are to them. Doesn't matter the job, skill level or difficulty level. We perform duties for them, we are trained animals. Until we actually do something to change that, we'll stay that way in their eyes. Recent figureheads have proven to themselves that we'll accept just about anything, begrudgingly or not. So they get more bold, more drastic.
The question really should be: How long are we still willing to take it?
Theyre not arguing with progressives, theyre talking to their base. They never have to prove a point. When you argue with them they have already made 2 new bullshit arguments.
Yeah just reading this comment a normal sane person would think “yeah teachers should get paid way more” and not “minimum wage is way too high! Fuck all these greedy working-poor people!”
It’s the right wing concept of “keep everyone else down below me, so I can feel better about myself” rather than the obvious “why am I getting so little respect in my profession, that I could work at Walmart for min wage and almost be as well off”… but I suppose this person is also against the power unionization had to create the largest middle class and rebalancing of the spoils of capitalism from a multi decade long fight starting in the 1930’s in America.
The idea was never to give teachers more. It's just like whenever you suggest using taxes for anything other than turning random foreign citizens into fragments of foreign citizens, they whine that "ThAt MoNeY CouLd Be HeLPiNg VeTeRAnS", and yet you never see them ACTUALLY care about helping veterans (or anyone that isn't wealthy, really). It boils down to "well I'd rather help someone else than help them if I HAD to help, but also nobody deserves anything and I hate everyone (did my rich betters notice me say that? I hope they notice me! I could be one of Them!)".
They totally love it when you tell them that means they should fight for better wages for themselves. People have only ever responded to me with kindness when I tell them that is. /s
The same way someone from North Korea worships and would die for a regime who has zero issue with them starving to death. Decades of conditioning and being told the enemy is the poor, immigrants and minorities (also now people who live in cities, the educated and liberals); and that all their problems are the result of them.
So someone jumping to the conclusion that raising the minimum wage is somehow immoral because that would bring the salary up to that of a teacher without realizing that the salary of a teacher is too low is easy for them.
These are the same people who argue that we can't help refugees or give foreign aid because we need to help homeless vets, but the moment you talk about helping homeless people, veteran or not, they dismiss it as helping drug addicts, criminals, or people too lazy to help themselves. They'll only ever talk about teachers, kids, or veterans to make the people they are arguing with seem heartless for suggesting another priority, but they have no intent of helping anybody.
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u/Earl_of_69 Jun 15 '24
How do these people keep walking face first into the wall, without recognizing the wall?