Ross Perot was right about NAFTA causing a giant sucking sound of jobs leaving the US. We had a chance to change history but voters wanted both Clinton's.
The working class is getting royally screwed.
- Thread starter American Man
- Start date
Matt Dillon
Semolina comes from wheat
I don't think the working class has done better under any Politicians for the last 40 years.
After all, Congress voted themselves the Lords of the US during Reagan's 2nd term. That was a bipartisan effort, btw.
Odd how I could make it with only $150-$200 a week back then with all bills paid and 2 weeks of disposable income to spend.
It can't be done today, even bumping the weekly income to $250-$300.
Housing and food take a larger percentage of peoples' income today, and that's not fair to future Americans.
That needs to be fixed, seriously.
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That's a thorny issue. The problem with student loans is that the "asset" you purchased is intangible and unalienable, so you create a perverse incentive if you let people just wipe out the debt they ran up to get that asset.
Basically, you'd get doctors, lawyers, and MBA's coming out of school with six-figure job offers and a half million in debt (which they could afford to pay down with future earnings) and they'd just away from that debt (with little to lose in bankruptcy at the very start of a career). That cost they walked away from wouldn't go away. It would either hit taxpayers (if the government guaranteed the loans), or lenders. If it hit lenders, they'd hike their rates on those loans to account for the higher risk of default, which would make education more expensive for future students. Either way, you effectively let some of the highest earners push the cost off on the less wealthy, so that the rich can get richer even faster by starting their careers at zero rather than in the hole they used to finance that future earning potential. So, I don't think it makes sense to simply treat student loans the way you treat other bankruptcies. I think some sort of modified system is needed.
Biden's solution is targeted partial loan forgiveness. The solution I've proposed is to allow people to shed $1,000 of student debt for each 0.1-point of permanent tax increase they agree to. That would be a good deal for poor and lower-middle-class people who get in over their heads with student loans and who have wound up staring down decades of debt. They could get relief when they need it most, with modest long-term cost to them. But it wouldn't be something doctors, lawyers, and MBA's would opt for, because their cumulative excess future taxation would far exceed any short-term relief (which they don't really need, anyway).
Matt Dillon
Semolina comes from wheat
I voted for Perot! He was a smart man.
We found out that Perot was dead wrong. He predicted that the period after NAFTA was passed would be terrible for the American worker. It turns out it was the opposite. After a couple decades of pre-NAFTA disaster, things finally started looking up for the American worker after NAFTA passed. Unemployment rates, which had been stubbornly elevated for the better part of 20 years (never even getting below 5%) plunged dramatically, below 4%. Real incomes, which had hardly risen at all in those decades, suddenly started rising at ten times that rate. Poverty rates, which had been up sharply from two decades prior, plunged dramatically after NAFTA became law. And, even as incomes soared, actual working hours slowly declined, so workers were getting paid more to do less. Where the average worker had worked 1,828 hours per year the year before NAFTA, it was down to just 1,767 in the most recent year on record -- 61 fewer hours per year being the equivalent of getting almost eight additional vacation days per year. Not only were there more jobs than ever, but they were BETTER jobs on average.
These measurable FACTS are tough for some people to cope with, since they committed hard to the notion that things would get worse with NAFTA, and so the reality that things got better has been disorienting for them. But the numbers aren't going anywhere, which is why they can't point to any. They have to simply ASSERT that there was a giant sucking sound of jobs leaving the US, rather than cite an actual decline in number or quality of jobs.
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PoliTalker
Diversity Makes Greatness
Hello Mina,
Good points.
I like your idea of coupling debt forgiveness to personal tax increase. But that could also hurt low income people who need tax breaks to get by.
Perhaps another idea might be to allow student loan debt to be deferred for decades, with interest, before being forgiven but the forgiveness would only be granted if the borrower was still low income and possessed no great assets.
That might tempt some tax cheating tricksters to set up personal corporations to 'own' all they have so that their own personal balance sheet makes them appear low income, but the law could be written to look at assets as well as income. Anyone who controls personal corporate assets would have those tallied into their net worth to prevent such weaseling.
Good points.
I like your idea of coupling debt forgiveness to personal tax increase. But that could also hurt low income people who need tax breaks to get by.
Perhaps another idea might be to allow student loan debt to be deferred for decades, with interest, before being forgiven but the forgiveness would only be granted if the borrower was still low income and possessed no great assets.
That might tempt some tax cheating tricksters to set up personal corporations to 'own' all they have so that their own personal balance sheet makes them appear low income, but the law could be written to look at assets as well as income. Anyone who controls personal corporate assets would have those tallied into their net worth to prevent such weaseling.
T. A. Gardner
Thread Killer
Stop sounding like a Marxist Communist. Once upon a time in America, you could afford a house and family without having an education, so? Public education is a concept of the late 19th Century and became a necessity of the Industrial Age. Now we're into the Electronics Age and things are again in turmoil just as they were in the early part of the Industrial Age. You have ZERO grasp of history, but that's normal for Marxist Communists...
Oh, you're wrong on that too--about the cost of labor.
Again, let's talk measurables, rather than just making assertions. 40 years ago was 1982. Is the working class better or worse off now than then?
Well, in 1982, adjusted for inflation, a middle-of-the-road family earned $60,560. Today it's $84,008. So, in terms of earnings, the middle class is about 39% richer. In terms of poverty, in 1982, 14.4% of Americans lived in poverty. The most recent figure is 11.4%. So, considerably less of the country is poor. In 1982, an average of about 10.4% of disposable personal income was being eaten up by household debt service payments. Today it's 9.0%. In 1982, the average unemployment rate was 9.7%. The most recent figure was 3.6%. In addition, the share of Americans covered by health insurance is up, the murder rate is down, the amount of annual free time a typical worker has is up, the home ownership rate is up (as is the median size of homes), life expectancies are way up, and so on.
So, in terms of measurables, life is far better for most Americans now than it was 40 years ago. Whether or not you want to credit any particular politician for that dramatic improvement is a different question, but I think we have to start with the simple reality that things have, in fact, been getting better.
You need to read the other side of the debate than what was told by the NYT. NAFTA hurt all working class families. It provided little to no retraining for displaced workers and caused stagnant wages on both sides of the border.
by Harley Shaiken
An even more significant impact has been pushing down on U.S. manufacturing wages as a result of suppressed wages in Mexico due largely to a lack of independent unions in the export sector. With the threat of shifting production to Mexico a factor, real autoworker wages in the U.S. plummeted 26% from 2002 to 2013 and have stagnated since.
Ultimately, it’s not just manufacturing workers who are affected by the “sucking sound.” Families and entire communities can be devastated when a worker loses a job as a result.
https://theconversation.com/the-giant-sucking-sound-of-nafta-ross-perot-was-ridiculed-as-alarmist-in-1992-but-his-warning-turned-out-to-be-prescient-120258
Yes, your approach would also work to scare off the deadbeats who could pay but want a leg up at the start of their careers.
Regarding my approach and how it would hit low income people, if you do the math you realize it's not a huge deal. Like let's say you go over your head and need to have $30k of debt wiped out, because currently that means a minimum monthly payment of $333, and you just can't handle that. Well, you can wipe it all out for just a 3-point tax increase. Let's say you are making a modest $10/hour, which works out to about $20k per year if you're working full-time. Well, the standard deduction is $12,950. So, you're only paying taxes on $7,050 of your income. 3% of that is $211.50, or $17.63 per month. So you're getting rid of a $333 monthly expense for just $17.63. It's a great deal. Sure, maybe at some point, 30 or 40 years down the road, you will have paid more in extra taxes than that loan forgiveness was worth (effectively paying it forward to someone else), but you will have gotten relief when you needed it most.
But say that, instead, you're a lawyer who has a $180k starting job at a fancy firm lined up. Wiping that debt out will save you $333 per month in exchange for a higher tax equal to $418 per month. It's a terrible deal from day one, and just gets worse and worse over time. So you'll just suck it up and pay what you owe.
I've read plenty of perspectives. What I've noticed, though, is that the pro-NAFTA people have a huge number of hard socioeconomic indicators to point to in order to make their case.... indicators showing that before NAFTA the middle class was stagnating or even losing ground, and after NAFTA, things got dramatically better for them. Meanwhile, the anti-NAFTA people seldom point to any data, or if they do point to data, it's carefully cherry picked -- like pointing only to real autoworker wages, without considering the superior jobs that turned up elsewhere to allow median incomes to grow even as those particular wages shrunk. That would be a bit like arguing that the invention of cars was bad for workers, and pointing to the wages of horse trainers or buggy-whip manufacturers as proof. Yes, with any economic change, there will be areas in the economy that become less lucrative, while others become more so. But if you find that to bash a particular change you have to stay zoomed in that way on just one area, in order to keep people from noticing the broader improvement, it should tell you something.
The other trick the NAFTA bashers try to slip by people is to treat what happened to auto workers since NAFTA as something to be compared against a baseline assumption of auto workers doing just fine if not for NAFTA. They always, always, always leave out the fact that the auto workers were in meltdown for many years BEFORE NAFTA. Like the famous documentary "Roger and Me," detailing the post-apocalyptic state of Flint Michigan in the wake of the implosion of jobs and pay in the auto industry, was filmed in 1989, and NAFTA became law in 1994!
The other thing they do is they blame NAFTA for things that only happened long after NAFTA. Take average hourly earnings for motor vehicle and parts manufacturers:
https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm
Adjusting for inflation, the highest that figure ever got was $35.26/hour, in today's dollars. That was in November of 2002. So, NAFTA had been in force for nearly nine years, and automotive workers were being paid more than before NAFTA. Then, after that, things started sliding for them. Does it make sense to blame NAFTA?
You can spin it anyway you want but moving entire factories to Mexico screwed working class neighborhoods here in the states. All you have to do is drive around any city and count all the boarded up factories. Empirical evidence is a lot more reliable than neolib economists being paid to promote government propaganda. All of us know someone who lost their house to outsourcing. A little common sense goes a long way.
Do you have a particular neighborhood in mind that was better off before NAFTA? Again, people will often point to somewhere like Flint, Michigan, but they leave out the part where it utterly imploded between the late 1970's and early 1990's, which is BEFORE NAFTA.
Which empirical evidence, specifically, are you thinking of?
I don't. However, I'm sure some did, jus as I'm sure others got jobs that wouldn't have been possible without the markets opened by NAFTA. There will always be winners and losers. But, judging by how a pattern of general decline gave way to a pattern of general improvement, around the time NAFTA became law, it appears there were more winners than losers.
Sure, that is a big factor. But, that same time lag would be equally as true under Republican presidents.
This has no connection to my political ideology but my opposition to using questionable statistics to make partisan arguments. I don't care which party came out "ahead" in the argument, I would be questioning whether it actually showed one party better than the other to make a partisan argument.
For example, the actual poverty rate is lower under Republican presidents. Personally, I think that is more likely due to economic conditions unrelated to presidential policies. However, the poster concluded just the opposite by using the percentage of decline in the poverty rate to get his desired results.
They are both reasonable ways to measure the poverty level under different parties, but using the decrease in level could still have a terrible poverty rate while the average percentage in policy does not have such a distorted effect.
For example, if president A has poverty levels of 60,50,40,30% during his four years that is a substantial decrease in poverty. If president B has poverty levels of 15,15,15,15% that is 0% decrease in level. Yet, the lower poverty levels of B during four years are all lower than A and would certainly be the better situation.
Choosing the decline in poverty rather than poverty rate was necessary to get the desired result.
Empire dies by a thousand cuts but NAFTA hemorrhaged the life blood from the working class. Countless (maybe 100,000) factories were closed down after NAFTA. Again, millennials and zoomers lack the opportunities that we had. They are stuck in a gig economy with little possibility of owning a home. You tout booming economy when a dem is potus but scream recession when a con is potus. Make up your mind.
Dems can no longer claim to be the antiwar party. Starting WW3 will remove any image of peace loving hippies. Obama's legacy is a war criminal whose drone war killed more than 90% civilians.
Care to prove me wrong? Or just be a typical liberal and talk out your ass.
Matt Dillon
Semolina comes from wheat
No, it's not. Far more of Americans' income goes to housing and food costs per month than 40 years ago. Shove your statistics...you know..
TVs are cheaper, but so what?
There's less upward mobility now.
No link, little girl. I've lived it.
Know what one of the best songs in 1983 was? This:
https://my.mail.ru/mail/vyacheslavromanenkov/video/_myvideo/499.html
PoliTalker
Diversity Makes Greatness
Hello Mina,
Yes, that plan effectively shuts down the rich gaming the system, but it still attaches a life-long punishment to someone who fell on hard times and was unable to complete the education. For that reason I would be more drawn to a plan that still punishes rich greed, but offers total forgiveness to the hard luck case. Taxing the poor, especially the zero net worth poor, just doesn't sit right. I am convinced there must be another equally creative way to achieve both goals.
What if the government ran the schools, or at least paid a set rate amount for a basic education K-16? If the government controlled the price, the market would be forced to offer the education at the set price. Or the government should simply run the schools, whatever works to keep the cost down. Education costs too much. I don't understand why it has to be so expensive. All that is really happening is knowledge is being shared. People are being given basic training for jobs. The K-16 education doesn't always have to be a traditional 4-year degree, but it can be. Let the government organized education program include trades as well as white collar. The basic ground rule should be that as long as a student is doing the work, acquiring the knowledge and skill sets needed, getting the grades and proficiency, the government keeps paying, up to the equivalent of a 4-year degree.
It wouldn't hurt to force big business to kick in on this education, either. Big corporations get the benefit of well-trained labor in the long run, so have them pay taxes to fund government education. Maybe tax wall street transactions to fund it.
There are state and city-run colleges which offer a free education. Our government needs to take a look at how these programs are funded and cookie-cutter that up to a national program. China and other previously backward nations have been out-educating us for quite a while now, and we are slipping behind in the world. It is time to realize that for-profit education can not be our primary system. Education is an area where socialism is definitely the preferred method.
Yes, that plan effectively shuts down the rich gaming the system, but it still attaches a life-long punishment to someone who fell on hard times and was unable to complete the education. For that reason I would be more drawn to a plan that still punishes rich greed, but offers total forgiveness to the hard luck case. Taxing the poor, especially the zero net worth poor, just doesn't sit right. I am convinced there must be another equally creative way to achieve both goals.
What if the government ran the schools, or at least paid a set rate amount for a basic education K-16? If the government controlled the price, the market would be forced to offer the education at the set price. Or the government should simply run the schools, whatever works to keep the cost down. Education costs too much. I don't understand why it has to be so expensive. All that is really happening is knowledge is being shared. People are being given basic training for jobs. The K-16 education doesn't always have to be a traditional 4-year degree, but it can be. Let the government organized education program include trades as well as white collar. The basic ground rule should be that as long as a student is doing the work, acquiring the knowledge and skill sets needed, getting the grades and proficiency, the government keeps paying, up to the equivalent of a 4-year degree.
It wouldn't hurt to force big business to kick in on this education, either. Big corporations get the benefit of well-trained labor in the long run, so have them pay taxes to fund government education. Maybe tax wall street transactions to fund it.
There are state and city-run colleges which offer a free education. Our government needs to take a look at how these programs are funded and cookie-cutter that up to a national program. China and other previously backward nations have been out-educating us for quite a while now, and we are slipping behind in the world. It is time to realize that for-profit education can not be our primary system. Education is an area where socialism is definitely the preferred method.
PoliTalker
Diversity Makes Greatness
Our primarily for-profit education system does not serve our nation well enough to compete in today's world. The result is that a good education is a luxury that too many cannot afford. We end up with a nation full of under-educated people who can't tell the difference between real news and rumors, who fall for stupid propaganda, and elect greedy power junkies based on emotional wedge issues. That serves the richest Americans very well, creating a desperate labor market, but it hurts America's competitiveness in the world.
For-profit education hurts America's working poor.
For-profit education hurts America's working poor.
PoliTalker
Diversity Makes Greatness
Hello Flash,
I see what you're getting at but still disagree.
Holding the line is no improvement.
Reducing the level is improvement.
I favor improvement.
The ultimate goal is to eliminate poverty, not simply accept a certain level and assume nothing can be done.
I see what you're getting at but still disagree.
Holding the line is no improvement.
Reducing the level is improvement.
I favor improvement.
The ultimate goal is to eliminate poverty, not simply accept a certain level and assume nothing can be done.