5 ms·

This post smacks of jealousy. What is wrong with zero deductible healthcare? I don't fault someone for trying to climb society's ladder. I want everyone in Amer

This post smacks of jealousy. What is wrong with zero deductible healthcare? I don't fault someone for trying to climb society's ladder. I want everyone in America to be able to earn a living wage. Being in a union doesn't make one lazy or overpaid. How do you over pay someone anyway? Who deems what a job is worth to society? It is very unfortunate that the big three made the agreements they did, but they made them. They should be allowed to fail. All this talk of a bailout just furthers the crisis. When things start to look more desperate, the UAW will renegotiate. If they don't, the organization will cease to exist. What I worry about are all those retirees who depend on the pensions they were promised.

yummyfajitas 18y ago
Person A, a waitress at Dennys, making about $8-10/hour with high deductible health care. Person B, an auto worker at GM, making $30-40/hour with zero deductible health care. [edit: see response to this post, auto worker gets $73/hour.] The bailout: tax person A in order to help person B, with 3 large corporations taking a cut of the proceeds. Does this make any sense? Incidentally, the original poster did not describe union workers as either lazy or overpaid. [edit: forgot to mention, it's actually very likely that the waitress does not pay taxes at all. So more realistically, the waitress should be replaced by someone in the $20/hour neighborhood.]
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  The problem is that person A doesn't pay any taxes. You're certainly taxing some people to pay for it, but it's not person A. Also, the idea behind bailouts like this is that they are a loan. Ideally the government is profiting from this sort of thing, especially when you consider the overall economic impact of laying off thousands of GM employees, or allowing thousands of pensions to swirl down the drain. I'm against the bailout, but it's overly simplistic and entirely useless (not to mention just plain incorrect) to say that it's morally wrong because someone at Denny's doesn't have health care.
  - yummyfajitas 18y ago
    Heh, I noticed that (and edited my post to reflect it), apparently while you were writing your post. However, there are plenty of people who make less money than auto workers who do pay taxes. One reason the bailout is morally wrong is that it is a regressive tax. It takes from the (relatively) poor and gives to the (relatively) rich.
    - mattmaroon 18y ago
      Well, a very high % of taxes come from either businesses or people who make more than the average GM worker. Plus a $25 billion dollar loan to GM isn't the same thing, from the taxpayers perspective, as giving them $25 billion. Presumably it will be paid back with interest. Of course, it won't get as much interest as people could earn investing their own money in the private sector, or they'd all be buying GM bonds already, but the actual loss is orders of magnitude less than $25 billion. I don't think there's a lot of moral hazard there in terms of taking from the poor and giving to GM workers. The real issue is whether it's better for everyone involved than just allowing them to restructure in bankruptcy. I can't see how the answer to that could be yes.
      - yummyfajitas 18y ago
        Why do you think GM will survive long enough to pay us back?
        mattmaroon 18y ago
        I don't unless the loan comes with conditions ensuring that, which is why I'm against it. I'm just pointing out that the issue isn't as simple as its being made to sound.
    - ensignavenger 18y ago
      Are you saying that it is morally wrong to take money from relatively rich people to give to relatively poor, but not the other way around? I think any (Government) wealth redistribution is morally wrong, but that's just my 2 cents!
- ckinnan 18y ago
  Actually the average UAW salary is around $73 an hour. But the executives are far worse and totally undeserving of any taxpayer help: "While Uncle Sam debates a $25 billion rescue for the country's automakers, some 9,000 GM managers continue to enjoy one of the industry's best perks - a new car every six months for $250 a month, with repairs and insurance included. And they can write off gas on their expenses." http://www.nypost.com/seven/11182008/news/politics/gm_honchos_easy_perking_139245.htm http://www.nypost.com/seven/11182008/news/politics/gm_honcho...
  - jmtulloss 18y ago
    Can you site that $73/hour wage? A cursory glance around the internet indicated something around $30/hr as of last year. The only places I saw $73 were other forums, but maybe they all have a common, legit source.
    - rms 18y ago
      I believe that $73/hour number includes all executive pay and obviously is an average chosen to misrepresent information. The average assembly line worker wage (and the median wage) is closer to $30.
      - Prrometheus 18y ago
        I have seen the $73/hr number cited as non-executive compensation. That's total compensation, not just wages, which covers the cost of benefits and the like. edit: This has some links: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/11/should-we-really-bail-out-7320-per-hour.html http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/11/should-we-really-bail-ou...
    - mdasen 18y ago
      I cannot say what the previous person was referencing, but NPR has a great comparison of GM and Toyota at http://www.npr.org/news/specials/gmvstoyota/ http://www.npr.org/news/specials/gmvstoyota/ If you read the list, it looks like you're both (partially) correct. The average hourly salary for non-skilled assembly-line workers is a little over $31. However, GM's labor cost per hour exceeds $73/hour for those workers. So, in terms of GM's costs, it's over $73/hour. I'm guessing the UAW has structured it in a way that benefits the employees, but I can't imagine what benefits would be worth more than my salary. Seems to me like more in salary and less in benefits would appeal to me more.
- crabapple 18y ago
  what about person C - a nonunion honda plant employee. he has beaten the competition fair and square, and now he must subsidize them. perversely, the harder he works, the more money he can potentially contribute to a government underwriting his competition.
- ensignavenger 18y ago
  Person A might very well pay taxes, if they are a single individual with no children. They don't pay a lot of income tax, but they likely do pay some.
- newsycaccount 18y ago
  The education person A's kids get along with the disproportionate share of SS/medicare benefits they get already mean they net gain from the tax system. So it is hardly fair to say: >The bailout: tax person A in order to help person B At least pick a person A who is net-net being taxed.
mdasen 18y ago
Interesting question: who deems what a job is worth to society? Many things: First, we all do. As a simplistic example, would you hire me at $50/hour to patrol the front of your house for squirrels? No. No matter how diligent or hard-working I was, that function is not worth $50/hr to you. In fact, it may be worth nothing at all. A little less simplistic: would you keep me on fulltime staff to clean your apartment or house at $100,000 per year? Probably not. If I charged $1,000 per year, you probably would. A clean apartment/home is a good thing (by most people's standards). It has value. How much value? Well, that depends on how much people are willing to part with for it. Maybe you would rather waste your time cleaning. Maybe I would be idle most of the time because your place isn't that big and therefore it doesn't justify fulltime staffing. Second, alternatives. I touched on this already a little with your substituting your labor for mine, but it goes even further. Can the process be mechanized? In the era before computers, there were still things like directories and it must have been a damn tedious process alphabetizing all those names. The person was, no doubt, hardworking, but as computers came along and could do the job quicker and more accurately, well, that person no longer had function. Yes, the value of sorted data didn't change, but the cost to acquire sorted data did change while that person didn't (or maybe they did and became a valuable computer technician or something). Third, output. What is its intrinsic value. A car has intrinsic value, but it also varies by person - a car is worth more to the President than it is to me. He's busier, I can take the subway without fear of assassination, etc. The more expensive a car is, the fewer people will have it. For the most part, producers don't get to price discriminate - if Bill Gates goes to the Mazda dealership he'll get a similar price that I get even if the car is worth a lot more to him. Forth, competition. Are there other people that are willing to do the job for less? I'm guessing beer tasters don't get paid well, but I'd also wager that breweries don't have trouble finding people for the job. Likewise, if competitors are more efficient (either companies or other workers), it makes your labor less valuable. If your company produces 1 car for every 50 hours of labor and another company produces 1 car for every 25 hours of labor, your labor isn't worth as much. If I can automate processes that save time, my labor becomes worth more and yours less. Fifth, other goods. Economics is about allocating scarcity. Many try and argue that we're not an economy of scarcity anymore and that we have enough for everyone and that it's just a corrupt capitalist system that prevents that from happening. Then they create cost of living calculations for a living wage that consider someone without cable to be in dire poverty. Face it, we like things. If we could all live without things (from TVs to medicines), we'd be fine. So, the question is: on a per dollar basis, how has the automobile fared against other things we can spend our money on? For me, on a per dollar spent basis, my computer is much more valuable. Are people moving a certain percent that they used to spend on cars toward CDs or TVs or computers or cranial piercings? I have no idea, but we all allocate our budgets in ways that we hope will increase our happiness. People's tastes change, society's tastes change. Portable radios do positively affect your happiness and are cheap (say, $20), but people seem to have widely pronounced that MP3 players (at 5-10x the cost) positively affect their happiness at a rate greater than that 5-10x increase. Or they're just idiots that don't know what to do with money. I could go on, but I think you get the point. It's a truly fascinating topic. In the GM case, there are some neat applications to see. 1. When GM, Ford, and Chrysler were pretty much the only auto makers, the amount of competition was less which meant that consumers would pay more and fewer units would be shipped. If you want to calculate how this works, look up the cournot/nash equilibrium. As the car companies were selling at higher margins and ignoring the poorer people, labor could demand more money since the car companies were making more money per unit of labor used. 2. Other firms with lower labor costs also became more efficient. Toyota makes cars faster combined with a lower cost per hour. That means GM's labor is worth less money. 3. The value of output might be fluctuating. Here is where I'm spouting complete BS. As gas prices rise, the intrinsic value of a vehicle declines. Americans also seem to be having a shift in their perception of public transit and as their view of it becomes more favorable, the value of a car decreases. However, as most people are suburban, a car can still be a lifeline. It's late. I'm done. Hopefully that was interesting. It wasn't meant to have any view pro or con in it, just more of a view into how prices get set and how we value things.
wyclif 18y ago
You mean envy, not jealousy: Ordinary language tends to conflate envy and jealousy. The philosophical consensus is that these are distinct emotions.[2] While it is linguistically acceptable to say that one is jealous upon hearing about another's vacation, say, it has been plausibly argued that one is feeling envy, if either, in such a case. Both envy and jealousy are three-place relations; but this superficial similarity conceals an important difference. Jealousy involves three parties, the subject, the rival, and the beloved; and the jealous person's real locus of concern is the beloved—the person whose affection he is losing or fears losing—not his rival. Whereas envy is a two party relation, with a third relatum that is a good (albeit a good that could be a particular person's affections); and the envious person's locus of concern is the rival. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/envy/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/envy/
- dhimes 18y ago
  I like that definition, but dictionaries often make a less clear distinction, and put envy as a more powerful emotion. (try dictionary.com, for instance, but my print ones also concur)

yummyfajitas 18y ago

Person A, a waitress at Dennys, making about $8-10/hour with high deductible health care. Person B, an auto worker at GM, making $30-40/hour with zero deductible health care. [edit: see response to this post, auto worker gets $73/hour.] The bailout: tax person A in order to help person B, with 3 large corporations taking a cut of the proceeds. Does this make any sense? Incidentally, the original poster did not describe union workers as either lazy or overpaid. [edit: forgot to mention, it's actually very likely that the waitress does not pay taxes at all. So more realistically, the waitress should be replaced by someone in the $20/hour neighborhood.]

mattmaroon 18y ago
The problem is that person A doesn't pay any taxes. You're certainly taxing some people to pay for it, but it's not person A. Also, the idea behind bailouts like this is that they are a loan. Ideally the government is profiting from this sort of thing, especially when you consider the overall economic impact of laying off thousands of GM employees, or allowing thousands of pensions to swirl down the drain. I'm against the bailout, but it's overly simplistic and entirely useless (not to mention just plain incorrect) to say that it's morally wrong because someone at Denny's doesn't have health care.
- yummyfajitas 18y ago
  Heh, I noticed that (and edited my post to reflect it), apparently while you were writing your post. However, there are plenty of people who make less money than auto workers who do pay taxes. One reason the bailout is morally wrong is that it is a regressive tax. It takes from the (relatively) poor and gives to the (relatively) rich.
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    Well, a very high % of taxes come from either businesses or people who make more than the average GM worker. Plus a $25 billion dollar loan to GM isn't the same thing, from the taxpayers perspective, as giving them $25 billion. Presumably it will be paid back with interest. Of course, it won't get as much interest as people could earn investing their own money in the private sector, or they'd all be buying GM bonds already, but the actual loss is orders of magnitude less than $25 billion. I don't think there's a lot of moral hazard there in terms of taking from the poor and giving to GM workers. The real issue is whether it's better for everyone involved than just allowing them to restructure in bankruptcy. I can't see how the answer to that could be yes.
    - yummyfajitas 18y ago
      Why do you think GM will survive long enough to pay us back?
      - mattmaroon 18y ago
        I don't unless the loan comes with conditions ensuring that, which is why I'm against it. I'm just pointing out that the issue isn't as simple as its being made to sound.
  - ensignavenger 18y ago
    Are you saying that it is morally wrong to take money from relatively rich people to give to relatively poor, but not the other way around? I think any (Government) wealth redistribution is morally wrong, but that's just my 2 cents!
ckinnan 18y ago
Actually the average UAW salary is around $73 an hour. But the executives are far worse and totally undeserving of any taxpayer help: "While Uncle Sam debates a $25 billion rescue for the country's automakers, some 9,000 GM managers continue to enjoy one of the industry's best perks - a new car every six months for $250 a month, with repairs and insurance included. And they can write off gas on their expenses." http://www.nypost.com/seven/11182008/news/politics/gm_honchos_easy_perking_139245.htm http://www.nypost.com/seven/11182008/news/politics/gm_honcho...
- jmtulloss 18y ago
  Can you site that $73/hour wage? A cursory glance around the internet indicated something around $30/hr as of last year. The only places I saw $73 were other forums, but maybe they all have a common, legit source.
  - rms 18y ago
    I believe that $73/hour number includes all executive pay and obviously is an average chosen to misrepresent information. The average assembly line worker wage (and the median wage) is closer to $30.
    - Prrometheus 18y ago
      I have seen the $73/hr number cited as non-executive compensation. That's total compensation, not just wages, which covers the cost of benefits and the like. edit: This has some links: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/11/should-we-really-bail-out-7320-per-hour.html http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/11/should-we-really-bail-ou...
  - mdasen 18y ago
    I cannot say what the previous person was referencing, but NPR has a great comparison of GM and Toyota at http://www.npr.org/news/specials/gmvstoyota/ http://www.npr.org/news/specials/gmvstoyota/ If you read the list, it looks like you're both (partially) correct. The average hourly salary for non-skilled assembly-line workers is a little over $31. However, GM's labor cost per hour exceeds $73/hour for those workers. So, in terms of GM's costs, it's over $73/hour. I'm guessing the UAW has structured it in a way that benefits the employees, but I can't imagine what benefits would be worth more than my salary. Seems to me like more in salary and less in benefits would appeal to me more.
crabapple 18y ago
what about person C - a nonunion honda plant employee. he has beaten the competition fair and square, and now he must subsidize them. perversely, the harder he works, the more money he can potentially contribute to a government underwriting his competition.
ensignavenger 18y ago
Person A might very well pay taxes, if they are a single individual with no children. They don't pay a lot of income tax, but they likely do pay some.
newsycaccount 18y ago
The education person A's kids get along with the disproportionate share of SS/medicare benefits they get already mean they net gain from the tax system. So it is hardly fair to say: >The bailout: tax person A in order to help person B At least pick a person A who is net-net being taxed.

mdasen 18y ago

Interesting question: who deems what a job is worth to society? Many things: First, we all do. As a simplistic example, would you hire me at $50/hour to patrol the front of your house for squirrels? No. No matter how diligent or hard-working I was, that function is not worth $50/hr to you. In fact, it may be worth nothing at all. A little less simplistic: would you keep me on fulltime staff to clean your apartment or house at $100,000 per year? Probably not. If I charged $1,000 per year, you probably would. A clean apartment/home is a good thing (by most people's standards). It has value. How much value? Well, that depends on how much people are willing to part with for it. Maybe you would rather waste your time cleaning. Maybe I would be idle most of the time because your place isn't that big and therefore it doesn't justify fulltime staffing. Second, alternatives. I touched on this already a little with your substituting your labor for mine, but it goes even further. Can the process be mechanized? In the era before computers, there were still things like directories and it must have been a damn tedious process alphabetizing all those names. The person was, no doubt, hardworking, but as computers came along and could do the job quicker and more accurately, well, that person no longer had function. Yes, the value of sorted data didn't change, but the cost to acquire sorted data did change while that person didn't (or maybe they did and became a valuable computer technician or something). Third, output. What is its intrinsic value. A car has intrinsic value, but it also varies by person - a car is worth more to the President than it is to me. He's busier, I can take the subway without fear of assassination, etc. The more expensive a car is, the fewer people will have it. For the most part, producers don't get to price discriminate - if Bill Gates goes to the Mazda dealership he'll get a similar price that I get even if the car is worth a lot more to him. Forth, competition. Are there other people that are willing to do the job for less? I'm guessing beer tasters don't get paid well, but I'd also wager that breweries don't have trouble finding people for the job. Likewise, if competitors are more efficient (either companies or other workers), it makes your labor less valuable. If your company produces 1 car for every 50 hours of labor and another company produces 1 car for every 25 hours of labor, your labor isn't worth as much. If I can automate processes that save time, my labor becomes worth more and yours less. Fifth, other goods. Economics is about allocating scarcity. Many try and argue that we're not an economy of scarcity anymore and that we have enough for everyone and that it's just a corrupt capitalist system that prevents that from happening. Then they create cost of living calculations for a living wage that consider someone without cable to be in dire poverty. Face it, we like things. If we could all live without things (from TVs to medicines), we'd be fine. So, the question is: on a per dollar basis, how has the automobile fared against other things we can spend our money on? For me, on a per dollar spent basis, my computer is much more valuable. Are people moving a certain percent that they used to spend on cars toward CDs or TVs or computers or cranial piercings? I have no idea, but we all allocate our budgets in ways that we hope will increase our happiness. People's tastes change, society's tastes change. Portable radios do positively affect your happiness and are cheap (say, $20), but people seem to have widely pronounced that MP3 players (at 5-10x the cost) positively affect their happiness at a rate greater than that 5-10x increase. Or they're just idiots that don't know what to do with money. I could go on, but I think you get the point. It's a truly fascinating topic. In the GM case, there are some neat applications to see. 1. When GM, Ford, and Chrysler were pretty much the only auto makers, the amount of competition was less which meant that consumers would pay more and fewer units would be shipped. If you want to calculate how this works, look up the cournot/nash equilibrium. As the car companies were selling at higher margins and ignoring the poorer people, labor could demand more money since the car companies were making more money per unit of labor used. 2. Other firms with lower labor costs also became more efficient. Toyota makes cars faster combined with a lower cost per hour. That means GM's labor is worth less money. 3. The value of output might be fluctuating. Here is where I'm spouting complete BS. As gas prices rise, the intrinsic value of a vehicle declines. Americans also seem to be having a shift in their perception of public transit and as their view of it becomes more favorable, the value of a car decreases. However, as most people are suburban, a car can still be a lifeline. It's late. I'm done. Hopefully that was interesting. It wasn't meant to have any view pro or con in it, just more of a view into how prices get set and how we value things.

wyclif 18y ago

You mean envy, not jealousy: Ordinary language tends to conflate envy and jealousy. The philosophical consensus is that these are distinct emotions.[2] While it is linguistically acceptable to say that one is jealous upon hearing about another's vacation, say, it has been plausibly argued that one is feeling envy, if either, in such a case. Both envy and jealousy are three-place relations; but this superficial similarity conceals an important difference. Jealousy involves three parties, the subject, the rival, and the beloved; and the jealous person's real locus of concern is the beloved—the person whose affection he is losing or fears losing—not his rival. Whereas envy is a two party relation, with a third relatum that is a good (albeit a good that could be a particular person's affections); and the envious person's locus of concern is the rival. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/envy/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/envy/

dhimes 18y ago
I like that definition, but dictionaries often make a less clear distinction, and put envy as a more powerful emotion. (try dictionary.com, for instance, but my print ones also concur)