Tax breaks meant to make jobs? New report finds that they're destroyed

That's the issue. It's great to be in business when unemployment is high. You can squeeze workers dry without repercussion. If they complain, you fire them and hire someone else.

Marx predicted the idea of the Reserve Army of the Unemployed as causing exactly what we see today.

@midgetsnowman: Interesting, because I know several students at my school who are working at Wal-Mart and using that to put them through school.

@Fighteer: Job reclamation from overseas is highly unlikely, because whether we need to outsource our shoemaking to China, the fact is that China is far cheaper and that the market has already been established. Low-skill manufacturing is not done in America anymore. By the by, that was also the case in the '90s, where we had essentially no inflation, no deficit and no unemployment. Back then, Wal-Mart used similar labor practices but nobody really bitched about it.

We're better off focusing on building up the industries America is strong in than trying to compete with the Chinese labor market; let them make our shoes, we can make their cars. The other, obvious, answer is a tariff; while the unions love those, that won't help with the Chinese shoe factory. We tariff their shoes, they tariff our cars, nobody wins.

And I'd say that my goal in this is full employment and a higher standard of living, with a slightly greater emphasis on the latter. If we have to carry people on Social Security for a time to maintain decent standards of living for everyone, fine. Essentially, if Wal-Mart sets the rules of the game, then I see nothing wrong with making sure that its employees have the option to pick up their ball and go home.

@Ratix: Excellent idea. Small business subsidies, while supply-side, do strengthen the job market fairly directly.

Well, there has been arguments that the small-business problem is supply-side while established corporations have demand problems, so I figure why not combat it directly?

Well see the whole idea was that as people got richer, they could pay workers more to produce higher quality good... and/or that less workers produce more goods due to productivity gains so that cost of living decreases, leaving more money to spend on other stuff.

So the situation would be that everybody bought a few pairs of hand-made tailored clothing, alongside some mass-produced goods and then went to work producing either a large quantity of cheap goods, or a small quantity of high quality goods, they'd be paid a high wage for this labour. Then this increase in material allows people to further become more productive and so on, so that everybody enjoys more material wealth, have more money and spend this money on goods so that the producers of those goods get better wages and so on in a positive feedback loop.

Instead, what's happened is that we've large corporations who pay workers squat to mass produce via their high productivity a large number of cheap goods. There's virtually no high-quality labour/goods market and so everyone is stuck being paid shit to buy shit and then we give tax breaks to the owners of this system. Then because these people have no resources, public education in America is garbage, post-secondary education costs more in a semester than it does for your entire degree as a visa student in Canada, moving is usually not an option when you are poor... people who are poor are stuck being poor and people who are rich maintain their wealth once they have it.

The only real option left is to raise taxes on the rich, pour it into infrastructure/education/training to bring up labour value, and pour it into small business grants for those mom and pop stores that actually reward employees for hard work.

Good idea. I have a question, though. What about the big businesses that reward employees for hard work?

Also, considering how the taxes will go into industries that reward them and training/education, I think that maybe everyone will be willing to pay those takes.

@Ramidel: maybe they got lucky, then? Most college students I know who work for big businesses complain constantly how their work hours generally conflict with sleep and study time.

If you work as a cashier at a grocery store, you are going to find it difficult to have enough time or money to go to school. If you can get a white collar job, however, many if not most employers will subsidize your education if it's job related in some way.

Edit: WTF is up with my grammar these days? Multitasking ftl

edited 12th Oct '11 12:56:52 PM by Fighteer

@Small businesses pay better,

Yup. Dehumanization factor. A well-studied part of sociology (although originally it was Max Weber's theories on bureaucracy, it still well applies to big business).

My parents, as small business owners, know and interact with all their employees on a personal level, are, to varying extents, friends with them, and have experience enough with the market to know that minimum wage is not enough, and thus pay more then minimum wage.

A CEO and the upper echelons of a large business, more likely than not, would not. Such is why you'll often see small businesses expand into large businesses, and while the founder(s) is(/are) still alive and has power they'll be very respectable still.

Then the founder(s) die(s) and the new people come in, and dehumanization ensues. Hell, I think that's what happened to Wal-Mart.

Prtety much. The living members of the walton Family have nowhere near the level of interaction with day to day employees the company once did.