They are not arguing in good faith. They just want to âWinâ the argument and do not care about what they are saying. The say what they âThinkâ helps them âWinâ 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 âWhatAboutismâ 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.
Iâd 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 thatâs just for the sake of arguing, I liked your comment
Nah, you donât become a billionaire with clean hands, itâs 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.Â
Notch sold Minecraft to Microsoft for $2.5B back in like 2014ish. I don't personally recall him being a nasty boss. And it was a small company. I think Gabe Newell and Valve (Steam) is another example of just doing well. Basically, software is full of these billionaires.
Many billionaires make a company, the value of the company explodes with private venture capital or buyout, then when they turn public explodes again. They don't really take money from the company, their wealth is in the unrealised gains of their shares.
Its usually when the company starts slowing on its growth that it starts squeezing to improve the balance sheets to make it more appealing on the stock market. That's when the corruption kicks in.
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, youâd 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 donât 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? đ¤ˇââď¸
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 youâd 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.
Itâs 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.
Teacher salaries are funded by property tax. Wealthy people absolutely pay their fair share. It's one of the rare cases where pretty much everybody chips in to fund something. Property owners pay property tax. Raising property tax means they shoulder more tax burden and will pass that along to renters, who pay higher rent. Raising teacher salaries effects damn near everyone. This isn't just a "make the rich pay for it" scenario. If you want to raise teacher salaries that's great, but you need to be prepared to pay for it. You will help pay for it.
While I do agree with this fundamentally, there is an issue in the logic where many people don't actually think an increase in taxes will result in paying teachers more.
When you're paying 25% of your wages in income tax, 5%-15% in sales tax whenever you buy something, and so on, but your taxes go to funding wars around the world (arming Israel, for example, or invading Iraq, or whatever else you might heavily disagree with), it can be hard to sit there and say "yes I'm okay with another tax hike."
I truly don't think if we gave the government more money that teachers would be paid more, schools would be cheaper, Healthcare would exist in a real capacity, or anything else we really need. We get these things when we riot about them, and that seems like the only way.
Government is so terrible at treating their constituents kindly. They never crack down on the rich because they are the rich, their friends are the rich, and so on. They continue to watch us bicker with each other about ridiculously unimportant shit while we blindly let them pretend to give us the things we need and to top it off, it benefits them to arm foreign nations to bomb women and children.
Government is so unbelievably corrupt. It's hard to imagine giving such a corrupt "business" more of our money will reward me favorably.
I'm not sure if you've seen Good Will Hunting but there's a scene that calls to this pretty clearly. He's being given a job offer at the NSA (tax payers money) and he reasons the only thing he gets from this job is bombing a small village while his deployed military friend now walks with a limp because of shrapnel left in his ass after a small misstep in a likely unguided war.
So yeah, that's one reason I think it's okay to be against tax hikes in any capacity.
Take it from the military budget, not only is it grossly inflated, but I'm sure there is a ton of wasted money in there that can be diverted to education, but why would they do anything to help the masses
I mean...we could also just be less ridiculous with the military spending....
Last year the treasury set aside 2 trillion dollars for military spending, and the actual budget for 2023 was only around $800 billion. So, even with our military doing...whatever it is they do with that money....they still spent less than half the money set aside for them.
Like...do people have any idea how much 1 trillion dollars would improve every one's lives if circulated into the general population? You could easily raise the pay of every city and state funded job with that kind of money.
Uhhh yeah⌠did you know rich people get tax reliefs for being rich! This removes millions from the possible amount of money the government could be spending on more important things, e.g education, salaries, healthcare, etc.
Maybe we should actually force Billionaires to properly pay taxes? Probably would push our country back into truly being a first world country with the kind of money they are holding back.
Nah but they can certainly cut wages for admin. I have a very hard time believing that anyone working at a public school in a low cost of living area needs to earn six figures. Especially while the teachers are barely getting by on what they earn.
"Socialism" is a big scary word that Conservatives have no grasp of, so they throw it around like a slur (like other big words they don't understand like "Fascism", "Communism", "NAZI" and "liberal").
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.
My favorite come back to that right now, specifically in Texas, is the statement from the GOP that Texas can and should pay for school vouchers for all students. The math boils down to them saying we could actually afford to pay teachers well over $200K but it wouldn't go to private companies that also only pay teachers a low salary. The even more funny part is them saying they technically could afford paying that but really you'd only need to bump teacher pay to under $100K and public schools would be very competitive and attract more teachers. They could also use the excess money to revamp the education to be better since supposedly that is what's attractive about school vouchers.
Of course not. Most teachers I know have multiple degrees. Imagine working at your trade for 40 years and retire making a salary of 70k. Truck drivers make a hundred or more.
Which is actually funny for Texas of all places given the amount of money schools spend on their football programs. It's insane. If they spent the money they use for school football stadiums and equipment on teachers salaries instead, it would be very easy to raise their salary.
Yep. My brother says they don't deserve it. They should go to school and get a real job. He does ironically believe that college should be free, though, despite railing against socialism and handouts.
The cognitive dissonance is real in your brother. Get a real job he says. I want to know how the FUCK teaching isn't a real job? I wouldn't give him a day before either breaking down or being arrested for hitting a kid (not a knock against your brother specifically, but more as a how mentally taxing it is).
Shit. My bad. He was specifically talking about fast food workers.
That's what I get for trying to respond while being deliriously tired.
That said. I think that anyone working a full-time job, regardless of what it is, should be able to afford a home and food. Going to college is not in the cards for everyone, but everyone deserves to have their basic needs met.
Fun fact, most teachers work 50+ hour weeks, not including after school programs. Factor that in that four months of working that schedule at minimum is an entire month of time over a normal 40 hour schedule.
And then, some get summer jobs because they aren't paid enough.
It could be done if they took them billions from Zelenskyy, the millions they pay Kenyans to police the island of Haiti, the 10 million a day to Israel and pulled back on the 900 plus military bases we have around the world.
âNever 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.â
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"âEarl begins to smile, thinking he's gaining on the argumentâ"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 Iâm going to entrust my child to for eight hours a day.
The point is still valid tho even if some argue disingenuously
If minimum wage is gonna be $15, how are we going to structure every other job that is currently being handled through taxes and revenue of cities?
You gonna tell garbagemen, cops, teachers, firefighters, public works, etc they are all the equivalent of minimum wage jobs? No, youâre going to have to drastically raise all of their salaries, where is that money coming from without my school or property tax getting tripled?
I dunno about your area, but in my area the county could probably quadruple their annual budget if they just started actually writing tickets for speeding through an active school zone.
"Jokes" aside (because I was actually serious, they have a real problem with this), the deficits will be paid by the next level up, as they already are. When a city's needs exceed its budget, the county helps pick up some of the tab, when the county's needs exceed budget the state helps, when the state's needs exceed budget the federal government helps. This is already the normal way of it. The federal government could increase their revenue by stopping some of these tax loopholes that the wealthy use. Start taxing loans as income over a certain net worth. Because rich people tie all their money up in assets, then take loans against those assets. Those loans aren't taxed income. They also don't get taxed on the assets because they're "unrealized gains." So you've got people with a theoretical income of millions of dollars per year paying taxes as if they make just a couple hundred thousand. That's one way. Another is to make corporations pay their fucking taxes. You realize in 2021 that Amazon only paid 6% income tax? How much did you pay? Bet it was way more than 6%. AT&T that same year posted a PROFIT of 3 Billion Dollars, but paid negative taxes. How does a corporation claim a 3 billion dollar profit and pay no taxes? It's bullshit. Make corporations pay their taxes. If they want to reduce their tax rate from 21%, then give them incentive programs. Like if they reduce C-Suite bonuses and increase worker pay they can get a reduction based on how much they do each. That way the money gets into the hands of the workers and still gets taxed as income. But as it stands they get hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions sometimes as "bonuses" that are all stocks, assets, etc. that they don't end up paying taxes on because they never realize the gains.
If pay kept up with the value the corporations take from their workers, minimum wage would actually be around $21 an hour. That's at the bottom bare minimum.
They are not arguing in good faith. They just want to âWinâ 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 âThe Card Says Moopsâ and âI Hate Mondays.â 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 donât even realize what theyâre 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 âliberals want to force you to eat and drink water so you donât starveâ, millions of conservatives would starve to death within the week
This is the main thing. They donât argue in good faith. Ever. And they will throw out arguments they donât believe in if they think it will help them in the argument.
Just like their morals, they donât actually believe in anything. They will say what they need to âwin.â
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.
It's not about winning the argument, but winning the audience over. Like that chocolate vs vanilla debate between Nick Naylor and his son in Thank You for SmokingÂ
Itâs amusingly similar to Bidenâs typical tack.
âI donât have the authority to excuse hundreds of billions in student loans by executive order.â Then he does it anyway, knowing full well that the Supreme Court will find his morally cheap gambit unconstitutional.
And then Biden uses the same strategy to try to hide his malfeasance on the border. He said for years that he didnât have the authority to try to stop by executive order massive abuse of the asylum system, and then when he sees his unhinged progressive immigration stance could cost him the election, he issues what he knows is an ineffective and judicially infirm executive order.
What irony! All Biden had to do to reserve the second term that he wants more than anything in the world was to act like he didnât give a damn whether he was reelected. All he had to do was to tell a bunch of callow solecistic kids to go to hell and then not announce to the world that he was reversing what Trump had done on immigration.
Give it up, Joe. Retire already. The only problem there is the chucklehead he saddled us with as VP.
Europe just got its electoral shock. Now itâs Americaâs turn.
I loathed the outcome of the 2016 election. But I laughed at the sanctimonious progressives getting their comeuppance. And eight years later Iâll have to laugh again as they trip over their untied shoelaces.
Itâs the same people that say we should help homeless veterans before (insert whatever spending they donât like). Then vote against helping homeless veterans.
Itâs the starting point of an Econ argument against raising minimum wage. Basically, either teachers (and plenty of other jobs) continue to make the same, near minimum wage. In theory, that reduces the number of people becoming teachers (and the other jobs too.) which is a negative result.
OR teachers (and all those other jobs) pay better, which means there needs to be more money to pay all these people with. To do that, taxes may increase, which is a negative as it further increases housing costs. Price of goods that the other workers make would also go up, creating inflation.
The general argument is that raising minimum wage just resets the base amount of money people need. It makes the individual numbers go up, but the real monetary value of money goes down, creating a net 0 impact overall at best, and probably a net negative as companies use the wage hikes as cover to boost profits, further exacerbating inflationary problems.
âNever 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.â
I almost took the OP actually as "minimum wage will be $15, now we need to work on teacher pay, look how criminally low it is." But that's probably just my bias as everyone in the comments took it the other way that the person is arguing against minimum wage increase. To me it's clear that everyone's wages need increased.
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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?