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Australian minimum wage $16.43 in US dollars
Topic Started: Feb 22 2013, 11:54 PM (1,066 Views)
Brewster
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Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
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Interesting analogy Pat, but you need to know your audience a little better.

I expect you lost Neut after "Again, you miss"
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Mountainrivers
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Pat
Feb 24 2013, 12:40 AM
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Feb 23 2013, 09:28 PM
Spread the wealth you say, someone else said that too.
Again, you miss the concept so let me use another example than Australia. You have a large Oak tree in your yard, thriving in the sun and enjoying the rebirth each spring as it turns last years leaves into nutrient rich food. Now if trees were dumber than the Australians, they would have built into their system a force that blew away all the leaves and dead branches, leaving the ground barren and sterile beneath their towering branches. So when spring rolled around, the tree would begin sucking what nutrients were still in the ground but they would not be being replaced. This is fine for a year or so, but by year three the tree begins showing serious signs of malnutrition and ill health. Bugs start attacking the unhealthy limbs and trunk. Over the course of a few years the tree roots have rotted and one day, a wind storm come through and blows it over, finishing it off in an instant. Absent t a storm, the tree will die anyway. This is what is going on in our economy. For over twenty years fewer and fewer leafs were left to nurture capitalism exchanges. You must have economic activity for an economy to grow and propser which means you need millions of healthy consumers armed with the leaves supplied by the tree-economy. Cheat the process and you have a chain reaction. Everything is short term profits now, see what you can save on and satisfy the hedge funds during earnings. Wages are the leaves of capitalism. It's the physics of nature.
I think that concept goes right over the heads of those who have never taken a course in even basic economics or operated a business with employees. You need those employees to make enough money to buy your products, ala Henry Ford.
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tomdrobin
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I think Pat's analogy is a good one. For decades economic circumstances like the global economy aided by government policy has facilitated a huge transfer off wealth from the many to the few. It was unsustainable. Eventually as jobs disappear and wages fall or flatline, the average person can't even afford the cheap China goods at Walmart.

Attempts to fix this problem which is in everyone's interest rich or poor are met with cries of "class warfare" and "big government takeover", by those too shortsighted to see what has to be done. Government has to tax the wealthy heavily and inject that money back into the economy. Redistribution? Absolutely. The reality is you could take all the money in the country and give everyone an equal share. The wealthy would manage to get most of the money again, that's what they do. Then it's time to reshuffle, just like monopoly.
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