US Gov't budget problem

Not all industries with unions have only union only companies.

could you clarify trhat if you don't mind? I don't know how unions work. I just know that I like the idea of voluntary unions beign able to negotiate with businesses to come to agreements on working conditions and such.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union#Shop_types

ah I get it sorry for my misunderstanding i'm hzlf asleep right now I can't even pay attention to some videosi'mw atching on Anarchey.

@ Budget Investments

I would say that cuts to education, student loans and the like is less favourable than say, cutting the F-35. If you don't have F-35s and just have F-18s, you'll be fine. You cut student loans or education and the like, you get a generation of Americans incapable of competing in the global economy.

@ Eric

Minimum Wage

I think for our discussion, almost all the jobs we're talking about are not minimum wage ones. Some states don't even have a minimum wage law and most of them seem to content to let workers wallow at crappy jobs. For minimum wage issues, I think the government should concentrate on expanding the 40k salary range jobs for low skilled people, at the same time as reducing the number of min-wage jobs to be more for high school kids that want a few extra bucks (thereby lowering exploitation because nobody's livelihood depends on the salary).

H1-B Visa Program

Actually, I should clarify my point here. I'm saying that the top successful companies pay a lot of money for H1-B visa workers, 75k and up, or like Google pay on average 94k/year. That's way more than the median American salary of 30k/year (which I think is dismally low as is). So for the vast majority of the H1-B visa program's problem, I have one word; corruption. The concept of visa workers isn't a large issue but if the economy depends so heavily on it, I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the economic setup.

I would say we'd look at several things:

• I do feel that corporations underpay workers for the fruits of their labour. Most profitable tech companies don't pay their workers much more then 60-70k a year, and the better ones pay 100-150k (but only the key top ones like Microsoft and Google). Their profits are in the billions. Small businesses have the vast majority of their costs locked in salary, whereas for large corporations, they pay pennies on the dollar for the work of their employees. Hence, I would prefer an arrangement in which 1% of the people does not receive 99% of the profits. That's a problem of corporate-capitalism.

• An American with a university degree does not necessarily mean they are automatically qualified. Open trade laws allow the best to get the job. That's how it should be. Preferably, I'd like people in North America to travel freely, at least between Canada/USA, but for now I don't think it is practical.

• Exploitation is an issue where workers are locked with companies. If you receive an H1-B visa or NAFTA, presumably you wish to stay in America to work, it is up to the company to uphold your visa. So if they want to cut your pay, illegally reduce your holidays, or just perform outright abuse, you have no protection of the law. That's a broken visa system. Visas should be given to people, by the government, when it is felt that they can perform a job... which is proven by first getting a job in the country. However, the visa should not be tied to the job thereafter. If he wants to find other work, then he does so. In any case, if at the end of the visa term, he doesn't have a stable employment, then it is the boot.

• Actually, people truly qualified to beat Americans have substantially difficulty in getting into America and always get in through visas at the start. You know the backlog on giving green cards is now at 8.5 years and rising to 9 year delay (for bachelor degree holders). That's just to get your Green card (here it is known as PR status). You know what the problem is? All those people truly qualified are from India/China/Canada. Same countries that these companies abuse. So it ends up being some bureaucratic nightmare trying to sort through everything. I think largely from what I've seen in this discussion you have some better options: cut the visa programs and fix immigration OR restrict salaries on visa-holders to something high, like 60k or more a year (like say, American median income + 20k, no exceptions).

• Americans with a graduate degree do not a qualified candidate make. However, I think it is fairly easy to be more than 4x better than those outsource chumpbags (don't get me started on actually working with them). The issue here is that someone gets a university degree and then feels entitled to receive a job that the degree is for. America, being so capitalist, it most certainly does not work that way. The university might have a bad reputation or the person might be poorly qualified. I think the key here is either to improve the productivity of an American worker AND increase the range of options available in the economy to reduce worker reliance on a single industry for their income. One thing you should note is the vast number of American companies that moved their development beds to Canada because they felt America couldn't provide them the qualified labour. For one thing it is cheaper to hire Canadians, another thing is that there is very high productivity. You could call these people peasants if you wanted but median family income for these people is 100k+ (Waterloo, Toronto, Vancouver tech hubs), so nobody cares.

edited 16th Mar '11 7:55:52 AM by breadloaf

I can tell you from experience, there's a lot of college students who really don't belong there. They're basically doing it because it's expected of them or they are forced, not because they chose to do so.

Those who choose to go to college are the ones most likely to succeed at completing their degree and then moving on to success.

The notion that everybody should go to college is a folly. Only those who choose to go and want to go should be allowed.

Also it's been firmly established in the last 10 years that funding is not the problem in American education. We're throwing more and more money over the last 5 years in education than the previous 20 yet we've had worse and worse results.

So the real cause of abuse is too much protectionism, not too little. If our immigration system weren't completely dysfunctional, immigrants wouldn't be treated as virtual slaves.

Pretty much. If we canp revent the government from exploting the labors of the people under the guise of protecting them then they must become happy.

@ Storyyeller/tnu

Yep, that's my point. Too much protectionism.

You know Canada also has the "Mexican" (for Canada, it is Carribeans) that work on the farms. They earn on average, $11/hour, pay taxes and then go home afterward (coming back for harvest season when there is work again). People complain all the time they should hire Canadians but the fact of the matter is that no Canadian wants to work those jobs. At $11/hour, that's a premium price! Nobody illegal.

@ Tom

Yeah but cutting education funding isn't really the solution at all. The frustration is with implementation, as is the problem with anything else.

• I... have to say that I don't like generalising but I get the feeling from American graduates that the universities aren't very good. Outside of the top 15, everything else seems bad. Some are truly despicable. The curriculum at many American universities seems piss poor and designed solely to push through large numbers of students to get more money in some kind of weird profit-scheme. Academic institutions are not businesses, it doesn't make sense to run them like that. How to fix that? I'm not sure. But the countries with superior education are Sweden, Finland, Hong Kong, Canada. So from this I see there is both a socialist approach (public academic institutions with strict regulations on ensuring high performance, ban on private degrees) and the capitalist approach (I'm not sure what Finland does).

• Student loans can be simplified, saddling people with high interest bank loans when they aren't going to be guaranteed a job is just making a generation of indebted Americans beholden to the banking institutions. That isn't a healthy economic situation.

• Actually, I mentioned this before, and it would help with government expenditure when it comes to education. Per capita spending on university in Sweden (including public/private) is half what it is compared to Canada, which is already substantially lower than America. Why so low? Because their private part is zero, the out-of-pocket fees for tuition there is zero since university is free. Their education system typically ranks very high in OECD ratings. However, seeing as how that is a socialist approach, Americans might not like it.

edited 16th Mar '11 8:51:48 AM by breadloaf

Meh public schools are crap I should know, I went to one. I'm in support of providing school vouchers and letting parents pick the school that their ch8ild goes to. Honestly i have a prefrence for Montessori schools and democratic schools myself.

Actually, student loans have in fact just been massively simplified, with all government loans now working through Department of Education instead of a private bank. Still, the loans everyone can qualify for is generally only $5,500 to $7,500 per year, which often isn't enough.

The problem with public schools is that they're all funded by property tax revenue, so in your nice wealthy districts you've got schools that can afford huge Mac labs and shiny everything, and on the other hand the poverty-ridden districts are lucky if they can afford textbooks. I grew up in a moderately wealthy suburb, and our school was pretty decent until the current principal took over (nice person, horrible administrator).

edited 16th Mar '11 8:53:47 AM by Linhasxoc

ah yes the Department of Education I have my doubts as to whether they should even exist.

^ Why's that? I do note that, America structures it's education funding in a rather haphazard manner. Why is the responsibility split between Federal and State government like that? It should really be one or the other.

I say state government the reason I say that is that the fedral government does not have the constitutional authority to form such an orginization.

Well, if you take out the DoE, then you need to move the student aid programs elsewhere, because there aren't nearly enough private scholarships to go around and private lenders have no incentive to provide low or no interest student loans. EDIT: OK, so you move it to the states, but I'm not sure the states have that kind of budget.

edited 16th Mar '11 8:56:37 AM by Linhasxoc

I say vouchers for all! the ones who really suffer from the current education system are the poor who can't afford to get in to a good school.

Yeah cuz the poor suffering isn't an issue at all in a country where 40% make less than 40k a year.

I would prefer the funding moved state-side but you might have to shift tax income around for that to work.

Colleges are legitimate businesses. Public schools are not. It makes sense to run public schools at least in part like a business because it gets rid of the incompetent and inefficient and those who's real only desire is to do the bare minimum and collect your checks.

Problem is, the unions prevent those sorts of practices meaning the incompetent, lazy and inefficient stick around.

Student loans have just been simplified. I'm among the last people in this country to have student loans that actually belong to someone other than the Dept. of Education. (unless this simplification experiment turns out horribly and reverts)

And yet the best colleges in the world are private ones in America. The Ivy League shit that costs a king's ransom.

Why else would thousands of students from foreign lands go there?

^It's not so much that it's a better education, it's that it's a more prestigious education. I actually agree with you that there's probably too many people going to college (or at least too many people going for four+ year degrees), but the reason for that is because our society treats a degree (and it often doesn't matter what it's in) as a class indicator. It's just that the Ivy League schools indicate an even higher class indicator, so they're more desired.

I'm of the belief that there's a strong possibility that eventually the financial class is going to realize that they're paying an unneeded premium for degree holding workers in positions where a couple of weeks of specialized training will do the job just fine. One way where I disagree with pretty much all economic models is that I think that to really understand the economy you need to examine it on the individual transaction level then extrapolate that out (instead of the opposite, where you look at the macro economic level then extrapolate it in).

There's absolutely no point in talking about people who 'shouldn't' be in college until you provide sufficient numbers of jobs at livable wages with long term prospects for people who aren't college-educated. College isn't a privilege, it's not something special or extra. It's the bare minimum you need to get respectable employment 99.99% of the time in today's environment. When the general and professional opinion is 'Go to college or you'll be working at Mc Donalds, lulz,' there are no practical options except for college, even if you don't have any clear career goals yet.

You have to fix the worker-demand end before you fix the worker-supply end, or you're just going to have even more unemployment and more people struggling to make ends meet with deadend jobs.

Tom picked up on something major: America has the best goddamned schools and the best goddamned Hospitals in the world!

And none of them are accessible to Americans. America retains its superpower status, but that status comes at the cost of Americans. It is not Americans who excel, but America. Capitalism does drive innovation, and has a very powerful economy. But the notion that a healthy economy makes for a healthy society is an oversimplification that, as has been proven in recent years, is demonstrably false.

It is not merely the greatest of facilities that are important. The fact that America has the greatest facilities does not mean that our average-or accessible-facilities are anything other than crap. You reach for the sun, you get burned. It really is that simple.

On the flip side, yeah: College is basically just signaling to employers "Oh hai guyz, i can goez to clazzez." Fairly inefficient way of signaling that you're going to show up on time and be reliable, IMO.

edited 16th Mar '11 10:14:31 AM by TheyCallMeTomu

Tomu I reccomend you look in to the country of Liechtenstein and see how well their free market system works.

I don't think you can compare a country of 35,000 to the United States effectively. There are economies of scale at work.

Still, I suppose it does warrant a closer look.

Well you could also look at Hong Kong and Singapore.

Hong Kong is rife with intellectual property law violations.

That's sort of a Red Herring, but I thought I'd just throw that out there. The point is, you can't hold any one nation to be totally independent. The existence of America's economy affects other economies. Lichtenstein's existence siphers corporations away from America. And sure, we could try competing on corporate tax rates, but you remember what happens when firms engage in direct competition: Market Price falls to Marginal Cost, meaning that profits equal zero.

In a normal economy, this is a good thing, because that means yay, the consumers get the social utility from the transactions. But here, the consumers are corporations. Now, the capitalists will say "Well, corporations are people too" but the fact is, they're not. They're groups of people who are given the rights of people with virtually none of the responsibility, and a vast surplus of net power.

Besides, the topic is the budget. You can't get money into the budget if you're literally getting zero revenue because you have to engage in direct competition.