Occupy movement... Fall out for supporters?

[Lord Darkstorm]

How many kids go to college now? If you don't go, people assume you are ignorant and would have to work in a factory. A bit generalized, but working in a factory isn't thought of as a 'good' job anymore. So, if more of the people are going to college to avoid working in a job that requires some form of manual labor, where do you find people to do it? There used to be vocational schools that tried to teach trade skills to kids that didn't really have the ambition to go an academic route. Television and movies rarely show people without a college education in a good light. How many of the kids who went to college would take a job at a factory? Or in construction?

Another thing to think about. What did people 50 years ago have? Home, car, tv, clothes, ect. No smart phones, or cell phones, long distance cost enough there were fewer multihour conversations, no internet, computers, cable tv, and all the other things we take for granted. All these toys have a cost, and how many of you really consider them something you could give up?

Society changes, and as we add more cost to our lives, we need more money to afford them all. So we want the tv at a price we can afford, and if they were made in America, they would cost three to four times more than they do now. Most people would be complaining at the high cost of tv's, or phones, or whatever they are used to getting for cheap now. If most of the population is trained to do some form of intellectual job...who does that leave to do the work?

How do you go back and undo the years of bias we allow others to place on us? Children are taught more by the tv than parents (yes, there are exceptions, but how many hours of tv do most kids watch today?). What do they learn? What is someone on the other end of the tv teaching them? "Buy the latest gadget, it's cool, you want it. You have to have it!"

Protest get some attention, but then it's over. Do the politicians care? Not really. The problem starts with who we choose to put in the government. The media tells us who would be best for us, or we pick the one who is the smoothest talker (which anyone who has talked to a used car salesman should know not to believe), or some other superficial thing that has nothing to do with what kind of person they are electing. What do we end up with? The best liers in the country. They control the education system, which if you think about it, despite the money being pumped into it, fails more often than it works. If it weren't the case, why do all the politicians send their kids to private schools?

Change has to start with people actually looking at the people they are voting for based on what they are, not on what they say. What they have done in their life will tell you what they will most likely do. If we started there, then there might be a chance at fixing it.

 

[The Blue Lotus]

I worked in a factory, before I graduated HS, I was 18 and allowed to hold a job, so I worked midnights and went to school during the day time. I had left home when I was 16 for reasons that we need not get into here... I rented a room from a friends parents,before then I worked babysitting and mowing lawns to make the rent and pay for my school supplies, etc.

I ended up losing my job after four years because they started importing people from Japan to do it as part of a "Work Training" program ( which the USA pays for). These guys would come over work 2 years then go back.

My Grandfather Retired from GM, Both my parents work for a subsid of Ford (non-union)
My Mom makes less than I do. How the heck does that happen? She has been there 19 years!

I don't have issues with outsorucing some of the work, I have problems when you take the jobs away jack up the prices of your goods and then scream for a bailout because your bleeding moolah, simply because people can't afford your products.

Too big to fail or Too small to care about-

We the people should be the ones who are too big to fail, not morans who can't ballance their own check books.

If we do not have jobs here ... then we the people can not afford to buy anything. This leads to higher welfare recipients, crime etc. There is some really old dude robbing banks now, like seriously hes like 80 years old, how despreate must he have been before he started doing that?

This is not our country any more and that breaks my heart.
But the OT was if anyone else has heard of or seen something happen to someone as a direct result of being a supporter.

 

[Lord Darkstorm]

I've heard that some people on tv that have vocally disagreed with the president have been audited more often than others. I don't know that it has, but I wouldn't really doubt it. Really, the IRS wants money, as much as it can get, so if it thinks there is a chance someone is cheating them, they go make sure it isn't happening. The majority of audits are started because a computer decided you might be cheating the IRS.

 

[Shadoe]

While I agree with the main idea of the movement, Fnord is right about the jobs. Yes, it would be great if we could bring them home, but companies cannot afford to pay for American workers.

Sorry, but that is total BS. The idea that a company making a product that sells for, say, $50 cannot pay $5 to have it made is preposterous. They can certainly "afford" American workers, they just don't want to. They want to pay foreign workers $.50 to make that product so they can pocket the extra $4.50 themselves.

Their little house of cards is going to fall down, however, when the number of Americans able to purchase their $50 product disappears. They're not going to be able to sell that product to the guy making $.50 because he actually won't be able to afford it.

Trust me, American companies can certainly afford to pay American workers. They just don't want to.

 

[The Blue Lotus]

I agree Shadoe.

 

[mythique890]

Sorry, but that is total BS. The idea that a company making a product that sells for, say, $50 cannot pay $5 to have it made is preposterous

Trust me, American companies can certainly afford to pay American workers. They just don't want to.

If we force companies to bring jobs back here, prices would go up because the company would now have to pay workers $8 per hour and would still pocket that $4.50. And minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25, not $5.

You are making generalizations, and not accurate ones.

 

[The Blue Lotus]

Min wages were raised because a dollar is not worth a dollar it was bumped up to try (Read epic fail) to keep up with inflation.

As prices rise, wages stay the same, while taxes go up. Its become impossiable for people working these types of jobs to live a decent life.

 

[Fnord]

A few points to address:

--The average wage in the United States is higher than any other country in the world.
--The output of the U.S. manufacturing sector is 120% higher than it was 40 years ago.
--The U.S. is the most productive country in the world.

The dollar *is* indeed only worth around $0.04 compared to its value when it was removed from the gold standard. Now, one can debate the virtues or problems with being on a gold standard to a pure fiat currency but that's probably a bit beyond the scope of this particular conversation. That being said, we've certainly inflated away a lot of the value of our currency. But that doesn't *really* have much to do with minimum wage itself. But I will give you an example of the problem with a minimum wage in the general.

Let's look at the last change in minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour. Now, one thing that is important to realize is that relatively few people actually make minimum wage--the vast share are comprised of teenagers and part-time workers. Now consider when the minimum wage was $5.15 an hour--most of the jobs are in retail and food service industries. When a company is forced to pay a higher wage in those industries it usually results in one of two things (or both): they pass the increase in cost off on consumers (especially if their product is not subject to price sensitivity) or they lay off workers and force the remaining workers to work at a level commensurate with their new wage level anyway. This usually weeds out the workers who were only doing $5.15-an-hour worth of work and allows a firm to draw from the sudden glut of low-skilled workers from the pool who were just let go because of the wage increase.

But say you were one of those workers who was actually making above minimum wage, because those people are far more numerous. If you were working for a grocery store as a cashier for $7.30 an hour (a pretty low wage we'd all agree), the change in minimum wage actually hurts you because while the people who were making $5.15 an hour who stayed employed got a $2.10 raise, you got absolutely no raise at all. And since this change in wage affected the prices in industries that the working poor are more sensitive too (retail, food service, etc), your $7.30-an-hour salary suddenly buys you a lot less.

So in effect a raise in the minimum wage, which sounds good on paper or coming from the mouth of a politician has A) given teenagers and part-time workers a short-lived raise, B) put a lot of low-skilled people out of work, or locked them out of the labor force and C) has made the price of goods and services that make up a larger portion of their income expenditure go up. As you can see, when broken down, this hasn't made anyone any better off and for the poorest people it has made them worse off.

So then, what about companies who outsource labor operations overseas? Well, when wages are high in a given country, the only way developing countries in the world market can compete is through labor costs. The average wage in a given country is directly correlated with the productivity and skill of its workforce. Chinese workers are a lot cheaper because they have a low amount of skill and productivity but are willing to do menial and repetitive tasks in factories because the wages in those factories are better than the alternatives available. So the types of jobs that companies outsource tend to be menial and low-skilled but require a lot of labor, such as assembling consumer goods or sewing apparel.

But the outsourcing of jobs is not a net loss of jobs in the home country. We can see this empirically and we can piece it together from the trade models. During the largest surges of global trade unemployment rates actually went down. To illustrate this on the micro-level I'll use a personal anecdote:

A few years back before the recession I did work for a large manufacturing company that had been purchased by a publicly-traded corporation and the corporation hired a bunch of us to help transition the company into one that both complied with SEC requirements and to help streamline their systems. I spent my time on the latter.

The company made heavy equipment: concrete delivery systems, plants, and things of that nature that were very high quality and subject to full customization, which meant they treated their manufacturing process as a make-to-order process, which is exceptionally costly, especially since there were so many bottlenecks in the finishing process. After we completely re-engineered their inventory and supply chain systems we moved onto process controls. The company employed some 150 workers from materials handlers, to materials processors, to fab techs, to painters, and all the intermediate processes in between all the way up to transport and delivery. In order to be able to grab a larger share of the market, the firm needed to expand its operations and its output. So through process re-engineering, we found things that were basic to all of its products that could be fabricated in an assembly-line style process. Therefore we built a small facility in Mexico and shifted 50 job-process jobs at the U.S. facility down to 15 line-process jobs in the facility in Mexico. This represented a huge cost-cut, especially since an inventory of "skeletons" built in Mexico could be maintained in Mexico and shipped to the U.S. facility when needed. This cost cut allowed the firm to loosen up cash flow to expand operations domestically. We opened three more facilities in two states that were put up near key suppliers and each facility specialized in a particular process or product. This required that we hired about 100 other workers total in those locations. The process improved so much this way that they had a turnaround time for a fully customized product in under two weeks and grabbed some significant market share.

So the firm took a more labor-intensive process and made it into a more capital-intensive process. It resulted in a net creation of 65 new manufacturing jobs, 50 of those jobs in the United States in addition to the creation of some high-paying management and supervisory positions. What do the papers report though? "50 workers in small town laid off as jobs are shipped to Mexico."

The jobs that were gotten rid of were largely low-skilled/low-paying jobs--forklift drivers, some uncertified welders, and warehouse workers as well as some redundant middle-management positions. The jobs that were created were fabrication techs, supervisors, material handlers, and other better-paying, higher-skilled positions.

This is just one example of the complexity of the global economy. When people say that jobs are "shipped overseas", they are really only looking at one tiny piece of the overall picture. A single iPod, for example, is actually built from 451 parts built in several countries--only the final assembly takes place in Asia. The $73 hard drive is made by Toshiba of Japan, the $8 video/multimedia processor chip and the $5 controller chip are made by Broadcom and PortalPlayer, which are American companies, and so on down the line. Only $4 of the value-added--the assembly of the final product--is done in China. But we look at the back of the iPod, see "Assembled in China" and simply assume it's all Chinese work that goes into it.

So this is what I mean about all these things being far more complicated than our media or policymakers make them out to be. And in a lot of cases, I think a lot of them know this too, but bad news is what sells stories and hyperbole is what buys votes.

 

[Fnord]

By the way, this really hammers home the need to address our education system as the low-skilled and uneducated are the ones that suffer most from economic shifts and shocks. I worked for the Dept. of Education for a short time and saw that we have been increasing the amount of money spent on education at a very steady rate since 1970 with absolutely no increase in student achievement or educational attainment. Since teacher salaries have stayed steady with inflation but the amount of money spent has increased well ahead of inflation, one can easily see that the money is being chewed up in administration and bureaucracy. That really needs to be addressed in this country probably more than anything else.

 

[Shadoe]

If we force companies to bring jobs back here, prices would go up because the company would now have to pay workers $8 per hour and would still pocket that $4.50. And minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25, not $5.

Sweetie, it doesn't actually take an entire hour to make most products. I'm aware of the amount of minimum wage.

I'm not thinking we should force companies to bring jobs back here. I'm thinking we should put a hefty tarriff on any products made outside the country. Companies relying on foreign labor will either bring manufacturing back here or will attempt to sell their product outside the US. If they go out of business, all the better, because then some actual US companies can take their place.

You are making generalizations, and not accurate ones.

No, I'm making accurate, informed statements based on actual events. You're welcome to do a little investigation to find out the truth of those statements. Manufacturing in America works just fine - it simply doesn't bring As Much profit as some business owners would like. Just the opposite, as a matter of fact, and I can tell you a personal experience story to back that up.

I used to work for a company that made appliances. You've heard of them, and you could ID their spokesman in a lineup - a BIG company. Their products were top of the line for a hundred years. At one point in the early 90s, they decided to outsource labor to China, Mexico, and a few other non-US places. At first, it worked great. The company profits jumped and everyone who held stock was singing, "We're In the Money." The company profits were so great, they started buying up other appliance companies. There was even talk of buying our closest competitor - the one who always tried to catch up to us but never quite made it. Then the complaints started. Our line of appliances sold for a bit more than the others because we were known as The Best. Our whole advertising campaign that had gone on for decades was based on our products' reliability. But with the cheap foreign labor, the production values dropped. I even got a couple of the company's products for free and went and bought others - who wants a vacuum cleaner that only works once? Very soon - amazingly soon - profits were down. People stopped buying our brand because it was getting a reputation of being cheap, shoddy, foreign-made crap. We went from top of the line to "crap" in about ten years thanks to moving the manufacturing to other countries. They started selling off all those brands they'd spent the last decade acquiring. People I knew, who'd gobbled up stock using payroll deduction lost everything. Did the company learn? Hell no. Instead of bringing the manufacturing back to the US, they decided to outsource even more. They put costumer service in another country. What with all the complaints, you can guess how well that went over. About two years after I left the company, it went bankrupt and was sold. To our closest competitor. They bought nothing more than the name. They make their own product - in the US - and slap our name on it. They're making a fortune. And the company I worked for? A wholly-owned subsidiary of the people who used to eat our dust.

Nothing inaccurate about that.

 

[mythique890]

I enjoy debate, but let's not use pet names, it's condescending.

It sounds like your company cut other corners in addition to cheap labor. Less costly labor does not necessarily mean lower quality products. I would love to do some investigating if you would cite your sources. And the story was really beside the point, which is that American labor is expensive and not as cost-effective for companies as outsourcing, which is why they do it. But hey, what do I know? I think Fnord argues the point much better than I do. Start a dialogue with him about it, because he seems to know what he's talking about more than anyone else here.

You and I will have to agree to disagree, Shadoe. You're not going to change my mind, and I won't be changing yours.

 

[The Blue Lotus]

"bad news is what sells stories and hyperbole is what buys votes."

Pfft no kidding...

Myth,
I can only speak for myself here, but I tend to call everyone Doll, Sweetie, love etc, It's a southern thing I guess. That being said If I happen to slip and I try not to please don't take offence. hugz.

 

[Fnord]

Sweetie, it doesn't actually take an entire hour to make most products. I'm aware of the amount of minimum wage.

I'm not thinking we should force companies to bring jobs back here. I'm thinking we should put a hefty tarriff on any products made outside the country. Companies relying on foreign labor will either bring manufacturing back here or will attempt to sell their product outside the US. If they go out of business, all the better, because then some actual US companies can take their place.


No, I'm making accurate, informed statements based on actual events. You're welcome to do a little investigation to find out the truth of those statements. Manufacturing in America works just fine - it simply doesn't bring As Much profit as some business owners would like. Just the opposite, as a matter of fact, and I can tell you a personal experience story to back that up.

I used to work for a company that made appliances. You've heard of them, and you could ID their spokesman in a lineup - a BIG company. Their products were top of the line for a hundred years. At one point in the early 90s, they decided to outsource labor to China, Mexico, and a few other non-US places. At first, it worked great. The company profits jumped and everyone who held stock was singing, "We're In the Money." The company profits were so great, they started buying up other appliance companies. There was even talk of buying our closest competitor - the one who always tried to catch up to us but never quite made it. Then the complaints started. Our line of appliances sold for a bit more than the others because we were known as The Best. Our whole advertising campaign that had gone on for decades was based on our products' reliability. But with the cheap foreign labor, the production values dropped. I even got a couple of the company's products for free and went and bought others - who wants a vacuum cleaner that only works once? Very soon - amazingly soon - profits were down. People stopped buying our brand because it was getting a reputation of being cheap, shoddy, foreign-made crap. We went from top of the line to "crap" in about ten years thanks to moving the manufacturing to other countries. They started selling off all those brands they'd spent the last decade acquiring. People I knew, who'd gobbled up stock using payroll deduction lost everything. Did the company learn? Hell no. Instead of bringing the manufacturing back to the US, they decided to outsource even more. They put costumer service in another country. What with all the complaints, you can guess how well that went over. About two years after I left the company, it went bankrupt and was sold. To our closest competitor. They bought nothing more than the name. They make their own product - in the US - and slap our name on it. They're making a fortune. And the company I worked for? A wholly-owned subsidiary of the people who used to eat our dust.

Nothing inaccurate about that.

It sounds to me that your company made bad decisions regarding its operations and suffered for it. Outsourcing labor isn't a panacea for inherent structural problems that are hemorrhaging money.

But putting massive tariffs on imports won't solve any problems either. That was exactly the thinking that went into the ill-advised Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930. In 1929 the tariff was making its way through congress and alarmed trading partners started preparing their own retaliatory policies to punish us. The Crash of '29 came the stock market plummeted, but so did the commodities market as a result of trade policy uncertainty. For the next several months, unemployment started falling and the market had gained about 80% of its pre-crash value. Then the Smoot-Hawley Act came across President Hoover's desk and despite a petition signed by 1,000 economists stating this was the worst possible idea ever, the president signed it into law. The market plunged again and stayed plunged for a long, long time.

The idea that you can "tariff" your way to prosperity harkens back to the mercantilist days where trade between nations was considered zero-sum and that the end goal was to export as much as possible and import as little as possible. It doesn't take too much thinking to realize why that doesn't work. Throwing up trade barriers, especially if you're a large economy, is a beggar-thy-neighbor policy that hurts the economy, hurts domestic consumers, hurts domestic workers, and sours relations with trading partners. And it does absolutely nothing to help "bring jobs" back to the economy. American companies won't suddenly pop up to start producing what used to be imported because they won't be competitive in the world market (especially since other countries will respond to our import tariffs with tariffs and quotas of their own), instead we'll simply produce less and pay more for the things we want.

Case in point: In 1981, the Reagan administration pressured Japan into reducing its exports of automobiles to the United States. What this did was raise the price of Japanese cars by about $1,000 and raised the price of domestic cars by about $400. Without the competition from abroad, domestic automakers could raise the price on their own cars. The total cost to the American consumer of this policy was between $4 billion and $14 billion. This policy saved around 26,000 jobs in the United States to the tune of $150,000 to $550,000 per job--that's way more than any of those individual workers make in wages. Therefore, on the whole, Reagan's policy actually damaged the economy more than it helped it because it caused the U.S. to be collectively poorer as a result. The only people in the country that weren't made poorer were a relative few who didn't have to go and look for a new job.


And that's only in regards to finished goods. Intermediate goods make up a MUCH larger share of our trade with other countries, and that's not reflected in the current account balance. One of George W. Bush's policies illustrates with tariffs on steel imports. Ostensibly such a policy is supposed to help prop up domestic steel production but what actually ended up happening is that the steel industry got a $240 million-dollar boost and saved about 5,000 jobs while all the rest of the manufacturing industries that use steel as a raw material ended up losing $600 million and causing an overall job loss for roughly 26,000 workers.

When you put the numbers together, as opposed to simply appealing to lobbyists, special interests, and political propaganda, one can see that protectionism always results in a deadweight loss (which is why that term was coined in the first place). Politicians just overlook that fact by only extolling the benefits of these policies (which are easy to see) and ignoring the costs (which aren't so easy to see).

 

[ShortHair]

The one thing I see in almost every discussion over economics is this. Speaker 1 has a predisposition to Position 1. Speaker 2 has a predisposition to Position 2. Speaker 1 quotes facts and figures that support Position 1, and meanwhile ignores or tries to explain away facts and figures that support Position 2. Speaker 2 does the same thing, only from the opposite side. Both speakers supply anecdotes that support their positions.

In more than 35 years of studying and following news about economics, I know only one thing for certain. Anything economists say is mostly poop. The theories may be 100% correct, but after they pass through the hands of moronic politicians on their way to becoming policy, they've become worthless. Statistics and macroeconomic realignment don't feed children after a parent gets laid off.

 

[mythique890]

Blue Lotus, I know, my dad's parents are from the South. My kids have been kind of crazy lately, which has been putting me in a bad mood. Sorry.

Statistics and macroeconomic realignment don't feed children after a parent gets laid off.

True. Though we don't all agree on the solution, I think we can all agree that things are messed up. I wouldn't mind so much if it were only me, but yeah, I've got my kids to worry about.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

If you want a generalization that works, try this:

There is enough wealth produced in the United States to guarantee every single person living here housing, food and water, basic clothing, and basic medical care, without doing much more than reducing the number of yachts owned by the super-rich.

Our society has the capability to provide a certain basic comfort to everyone, and a responsibility to do so. It's natural to worry that we'll all drown under freeloaders, but most people want to find something to do with their time. There's plenty of wealth in the system left over to reward people for hard work, above and beyond the basic necessities of survival.

 

[The Blue Lotus]

"Outsourcing labor isn't a panacea for inherent structural problems"
I say this with a lot of love, but come on... Everything China spits out is crap. Name one thing that is not laced with lead, or something equaly dangerous? Name something that does not break down almost as soon as you touch it.
You get what you pay for...

China is a place of rich culture, history, wonderful people,food; but even their baby formula kills... And don't get me started on other parts of the world, they are just as bad in other ways.

"I know only one thing for certain. Anything economists say is mostly poop. The theories may be 100% correct, but after they pass through the hands of moronic politicians on their way to becoming policy, they've become worthless. Statistics and macroeconomic realignment don't feed children after a parent gets laid off." Here here, and LOL... poop; well said! No offence to the economists out there, but by the time the politicians get done with it it is indeed gold plated 'turd' nuggets.

Myth, Hope things calm down for ya. I know how that goes. I have 4 Kids myself : 1 ten yr old. 1 31 yr old (hubby) and 1 57yr old (dad) and 1 29yr old(brother) all of them have a bloddy fit if they feel like they are not the center of the world. Ugh.

 

[Lord Darkstorm]

If you want a generalization that works, try this:
Our society has the capability to provide a certain basic comfort to everyone, and a responsibility to do so. It's natural to worry that we'll all drown under freeloaders, but most people want to find something to do with their time. There's plenty of wealth in the system left over to reward people for hard work, above and beyond the basic necessities of survival.

While this might be true, there is a word for this type of system, and it's called socialism. The countries that practice this, are all pretty much bankrupt...kind of like the US. Sadly, when you tell someone that they can have a house, a car, food, nice tv, cell phones, and all the things most of us work hard for, all for free...it's begs the question, why work?

If the only thing you have to look forward to is a 'little bit more' than everyone else by working hard, then at what point do those working hard decide that instead of working long hours, or spending evenings improving themselves, they work the minimum hours and never worry about keeping up to date unless it is on the clock? Another system that implies we all work hard and equally share in it all and everyone will be happy, that one is called communism, and it's failed time and time again too. China who is communist in govt, has been moving towards and industrialized system more like America used to have, and they loan money to the rest of the world.

Reality is, if there is no incentive to improving yourself and working hard for more, why do it? Why invent new things, or come up with better ways of doing things, when it won't benefit the person who creates it. If the drug companies can't make any profit off the new drug to cure some medical problem, then who will create the new cures?

It isn't that it can't happen, it's just highly unlikely.

 

[The Blue Lotus]

I don't think anyone is saying share the wealth equaly (no one I would take seriously at least), we are screaming equalize the freaking system.

How is that a self employed person ends up paying something in the area of 39% taxes yet the ultra rich pay something like 10% if that... guesstimating here but you can see the imbalance.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

If the only thing you have to look forward to is a 'little bit more' than everyone else by working hard,

*flicks lighter* That's a nice straw man you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it. ;-)

Joking aside, the implication is that the baseline is just enough to survive. No, you don't get a TV, or a car, or a house. You get inexpensive, standard housing (which likely means an apartment), and you can use public transit to get around, and you can afford basic groceries to cook at home; you're not eating out at restaurants. You want more than that shitty, boring life, you go work for it. You want nice electronics? To go to the movies? To see live sporting events? To have nice clothes? To have really tasty food? To be able to afford to eat out at restaurants, go on vacations, travel the world? You're going to have to work for it.

The alternative is that we let people get into situations where even if they do work hard, bad luck or bad influences can make them lose their homes and not be able to afford basic preventive medical care. Hey, that's what we have right now!

Reality is, if there is no incentive to improving yourself and working hard for more, why do it? Why invent new things, or come up with better ways of doing things, when it won't benefit the person who creates it. If the drug companies can't make any profit off the new drug to cure some medical problem, then who will create the new cures?

But most people do want to do things with their time, even if they don't have to -- self-fulfillment is one of the basic human aspirations. There's plenty of rich folks who don't sit around idly doing nothing. They keep working, even though they have enough money to never work again. Rupert Murdoch, scumbag though he is, could never be accused of idleness.

Again, I'm not talking about giving everyone the good life; I'm talking about giving everyone a basic level of guaranteed survival. There's far more than enough wealth in our society to ensure that nobody has to sleep under a bridge, nobody has to go hungry. It's absurd to claim that we have to allow some people to go hungry and homeless in order to cause most people to do productive work.