Does the GOP Want the States to Default?

Not unless I can move my whole house. Hmm, I wonder how many balloons it would take...

Meh, just tell Berlusconi some girls are stuck in that house, and the whole might of Italian Army will come to help you move your house!

Then, ask the lone soldier to go wait in line for you at Fed Ex while you read your newspaper.

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

Who wants to explain to me why it is that the people who work for me at my civilian job make less than I would if I got fired and went on unemployment? They make about 1200 a month, where as if I went on unemployment I'd be making 1600 a month without having to pay for gas and use my time going to work.

That is a fucking travesty.

I wouldn't, but I'd like to ask where you live and why there isn't more of an outcry against it.

Theres no outcry against it because people consider working for a living honorable, and being on unemployment being a failure of a human being who needs to get off their lazy ass and get a job.

^^

In California the standard of living is higher, but so is the minimum wage. Minimum wage is... I 8.50 I think.. But my employees start at 10.00 an hour and get maybe a 15 cent raise every year on average. Every employee is full time, but after taxes they make around 550-570 a check for the newer folks iirc.

Working is honorable, and if you're on unemployment you do need to get off your ass and get a job post-haste if it is at all possible. However, I can see why there is such a lack of motivation with the pay being the way it is, at least here.

edited 28th Jun '11 1:29:28 AM by Barkey

How is it possible to have a wage lower than minimum wage for a fulltime job? The only possible way you would get that over here is if you were given a "big old bag of money" after each job, and then you probably wouldn't have to pay too much tax on it.

Minimum wage is 8.50 $ an hour, and full time is 40 hours a week. My boys make 10.00 an hour for their first year, with 40 hours a week. I make a flat 18.00 an hour.

It's not that the full time jobs are lower than minimum wage, just that minimum wage is piss poor for making any form of living. I remember before I joined the Guard working for 50 cents above minimum wage in fast food. I was lucky enough to where my parents hooked me up with a car, but lots of people I knew who were adults with a run of bad luck working there had to bike or bus because on minimum wage, good luck paying rent or making a car payment. You're pretty much fucked.

edited 28th Jun '11 1:36:46 AM by Barkey

Is the bus system underdevelopped in the U.S.? It's just that I don't know if taking the bus there is really a pain in the *** or if it's rather a choice for those living in cities.

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

@Barkey: the problem is theres a difference between "get off your ass you lazy bum" and "Oh shit, theres absolutely no jobs for me yet I'll still be discriminated against for being on unemployment, but if I take a minimum wage burger flipping job that pays less than unemployment making it even harder to feed my kids suddenly I'm an honorable hard worker!"

Its a no win situation for a lot of folks. Theyre either treated like trash for not working, or take unfavorably paying jobs that make it even harder on them, which is the exact opposite of why unemployment benefits exist. They exist specifically to make people mpore picky about jobs.

@Rufus: problem is twofold. Some cities have great public transportation. However the rest, and pretty much all non-urban places, have NO public transportation worth a damn. You either have a car or you better hope theres jobs within walking/biking distance.

edited 28th Jun '11 1:43:37 AM by Midgetsnowman

Well, some really large cities have a pretty decent bus system. Los Angeles has a pretty good one, the problem is that the urban sprawl that could be considered "Greater Los Angeles" is one of the hugest in the world, it's just too damn big.

Also, California tends to have some problems with this sort of thing because we build horizontally, not vertically. Most Cali cities, especially in my area, don't have tall buildings because of all our quakes. This means our towns and cities tend to take up lots of space, and thus your bus is probably going to drop you off pretty far from where you need to go unless you get lucky. Most people have cars, down here by the beach we have lots of cyclists and motorcycle/scooter riders, but I rarely ever see those in LA proper.

^

Which is why I said it's a travesty, and why I'm stunned that someone hasn't talked about it, especially the Democrats. Maybe they need to look at upping minimum wage, rather than increasing our welfare spending.

Then again this might be a state issue for me. We have the second highest standard of living in the US, by state, iirc. The only one higher is Alaska, and that's only on groceries and other shit that has to get shipped in, not apartments and vehicles and land.

edited 28th Jun '11 1:45:28 AM by Barkey

&OK, thanks for the info. I should have remembered our middle school geography lessons on the different kind of cities (Europe, Asia, North America), yours are much wider, so it's hard to get an efficient public transportation (and people seem to live much further from the center, which, in Europe, is more for housing than for business).

Yep, while we have medium- and high-wage housing in the center, low-income housing (suburbs, or "banlieues" in French, has a whole different meaning on our side of the Atlantic, for the lifestyle) in the outer circle, and then, after that, industrial plants. Business are both in the center of the cities, among housings, and in some recent high-wage suburbs (La Défense, for example, near Paris).

edited 28th Jun '11 2:04:03 AM by RufusShinra

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

Yeah, we kind of build in the opposite direction. "Downtown" is usually the center of the city, which is the business center of a town or city is. Then housing is usually built outwards, with lower income housing being nearby, suburbs being outside connected to the freeway/highway, and industrial stuff built around it.

The way my city is structured, we have a pretty big downtown area in the middle, and then residential starts a few miles out from it. Then we have clumps of industrial buildings that get put together with eachother for things like manufacturing and other stuff of that stripe.

So it's the same as most British cities (commercial centres in the... city centre) with a layer of res, and them comm, then ind. and then the suburbs?

But the exact opposite to the ones on the continent, where you have the famed 'Parisian doughnut', with the better buildings and comm. and then rings of systematically worse and and worse housing, until you get to the edge and find effectively, government built shanty towns.

What's the average 'living' wage in the US? Not min. wage, the living wage? Because here, the living wage outside of the M25 island (i.e ye olde Londonium) is about £7.20/hr.

edited 28th Jun '11 3:37:11 AM by Inhopelessguy

Also, buses are really slow because you have to wait for a particular schedule and then wait for it to make tons of individual stops.

When I go downtown, it often takes an hour to get there by bus and subway, and almost two hours to get back. It only takes half an hour to drive there. (Total distance a bit over 10 miles)

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

I don't think they are, this whole thing looks like a ruse. If they really wanted a default, they could've gotten one earlier by refusing to put our current budget on Obama's desk, which they intentionally did in spite of its not including a debt limit increase while exceeding the current one. Moreover, remember the Ryan budget proposal? A version of it was passed in as a largely symbolic measure by house Republicans, and guess what it included… A $2 trillion debt limit increase, the biggest in history, plus it still would've failed to balance the budget in spite of enormous cuts.

The Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated they have no desire whatsoever to balance the budget, nor to axe the debt limit, they're just attempting to put the global economy over a barrel to push legislation that couldn't pass through the normal political process by other means.

Defaulting isn't their goal, reducing the budget also isn't, all they want is to pass their little agenda, and I'm sure that if Obama stops acquiescing to them and calls their bluff, they'll shut up rather than putting up.

Eric,

To chime in to the minimum wage thing briefly, commissions from independent contractors don't have any minimum wage limit at all, and I've noticed an upturn in companies classifying de-facto employees as contractors for exactly that reason (plus ducking under all other employee-related expenses). It's incredibly dominant in any job that can go by telecommuting, particularly since the contractors are competing with chaps over in India and other countries who'll work for morbidly low wages. But I've also seen it being exploited more and more with 'real' come in and sit in the office jobs, too, especially with smaller companies.

One could simply write off such jobs as being for college students and the like and therefore not 'worth' having 'real' pay. But if the abuse of that loophole continues to grow, something's gonna have to be done about it sooner or later, or else minimum wage will stop existing in practice.

Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.

But that's illegal! At least here it is. EVERYONE needs to be on min. wage - contractors, office workers, even people who have job even though they are media studies graduates.

Minimum wage here is $10.25. Interesting.

@Major Tom: Who is the CBO?

And they oppose something that saves money? Why?

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

Also, there's a variety of special sub-minimum wages for jobs like tipped labor, students, part-timers, and agricultural work, some of which dip as low as 60¢/hour (that's before getting into salaried workers without overtime…).

Eric,

$10.25? That's peanuts! That's the same money you can get on benefits! I don't think you need move your min wage any lower.

Also, 60c? How do companies get away with this? You make the Office of Fair Trading look like Super-Regulator.

Maybe because it doesn't send the money where they want (i.e. to the nice people paying them hundreds of thousands $).

Less than 30$/week? Wow, that's impressive, especially for a country with prices as those in there. Please tell me these jobs are only for illegal immigrants!

Shh, don't say that to some people here, they're going to think you're doubting that the free-for-all free-market system isn't as awesome as they keep repeating.

edited 28th Jun '11 7:22:01 AM by RufusShinra

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.

@Inhopeless: That's Ontario's minimum wage, and it's pretty generous considering stuff is cheaper over here.

And lol@ whoever said wages in the US are high.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

Er… Dropped a digit, that should've been $1.60/hour, the Massachusetts agricultural rate.

^^ Illegal immigrants don't have minimum wages, since they're, y'know, criminals. That's the whole point in hiring them, which is why there exists a small slavery problem near the border and even across it in maquiladora.

Eric,

edited 28th Jun '11 7:30:23 AM by EricDVH

Even then, with 50 hours/week, it's still 320$ a month. Pretty hard to live with that. Shouldn't government subsidies for farming help raise those wages?

As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.