patrick.net

bgamall4 says

Good, then support the raising of the minimum wage, unless you have a better idea, like buckets of money being dropped into the back yards of Americans.

Already discussed this. Minimum wage isn't the solution to the problem of rising costs and wealth concentration. QE and currency debasement is and the only solution to them is to eliminate them.

PS commenting on the outrage:

"First of all I never said that I wanted to repeal the minimum wage so that the intellectually disabled could work for $2 per hour. The intellectually disabled are already exempt from the minimum wage and many are working for $2 per hour right now. Some earn even less. Samantha Bee asked me to give her an example of someone who would be willing to work for $2 per hour. She came up with that figure on her own. I had not part in suggested it. I told her that very few people would be willing to work for such a low a wage even if the minimum wage were repealed.
But I did give her two examples. 1. Unpaid interns; like the ones the Daily show employes and pay zero dollars per hour. They would gladly work for $2 per hour, as it would amount to a raise. However the minimum wage makes it illegal to pay interns $2 per hour so instead they are paid zero. The other group I mentioned were the intellectually disabled (though I told her I could not remember the politically correct term at that time.) I mentioned that group since I knew they were already exempt from the minimum wage.
My wife's aunt has Down's Syndrome and is currently employed for $2.50 per hour. She loves her job, and does not really need the money as she still lives with her mother. She works for the self-esteem and enjoyment the job brings to her life. If her employer were required to pay her the minimum wage he could not afford to hire her. No one else could either, and her life would be far less meaningful.
The real problem is that you are treating a highly edited comedy skit as actual news. Nothing that you saw was real. The entire conversation was pieced together by the Daily Show to try to make me look bad, entertain and outrage their audience, and advance their political agenda. Unrelated sentences were pieced together, and most of my answers were not even related to the questions being asked.
I spoke for four hours, and they simply re-arranged my words to create a 70 second conversation that never actually took place. The real conversation made a very compelling case for repealing the minimum wage. But since the Daily Show did not want their audience to hear that conversation they took my words out of context to create an alternate conversation. It’s amazing how easily you fell for it."

Sounds reasonable.

marcus says

spydah_hh says

The low cost of living only occurs because of government debasement. The counter argument to that is to increase people's wages, but that doesn't work either.

Actually, when inflation occurs, wages must go up.

IF you want to argue for ways to prevent inflation from occuring, that's a separate discussion. What you seem to be arguing here is in favor of currency debasement. You are saying what ? That by totally fucking over all workers, by not allowing their wages to keep up with inflation, we may finally be able to put an end to inflation ?

Actually the opposite is true as far as I can tell.

It seems you are in favor of the net outcome of inflation being more wealth moving up to the top.

Currently inflation is helping the wealthy in the form of rising house and until recently stock prices cause by "accommodative" monetary policy that makes it easier for the wealthy to take advantage of low interest rates to buy real estate and by driving savers who get no interest on their accounts into the stock market.
Everyone is else is not helped as the job market has not improved, nor have wages and nearly half of the low sales volume housing recovery comes from cash investors.
To top it off because of the excesses of the last bubble and the collapse of the banking system absent QE prices would be falling and at least if people could not buy houses or stocks the price of food energy and shelter might have become more affordable

Mell- peter schiff fell for it. He knew what he was getting into, knew what the daily show was, but couldn't resist some FaceTime on TV
He should stick to live tv, debates and his own show/you tube videos
Indeed so should any one who doesn't wish to have their positions manipulated by editing.

It's the free market and the free market can be disingenuous and profitable because a lot of people love the daily show and he can't make them not watch it
If you don't like circuses, don't offer to dress up like a clown and enter the arena and don't expect if you do for the crowd not to laugh at you

Vicente says

smaulgld says

Schiff inartfully compared the ability of capitalist and socialist economies to provide goods and services by saying-"people don't go hungry in a capitalist economy." They do.

USA USA USA!

Guys like Schiff never want to talk about socialist countries which do a GREAT job of feeding their people. Typical. Still trapped in a Cold War paradigm, socialism=Commie=bread lines. They cannot explain Norway, France, Denmark so they just ignore them. Those aren't "real" countries I suppose.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/scandinavian-miracle-brutal-truth-denmark-norway-sweden

tatupu70 says

How could you make the dollar worth less than one millionth of its current value without stealing purchasing power from people?

Create a new 2014 dollar that is worth exactly one millionth as much as 2013 dollars because there are exactly one million times as many of them. Distribute these dollars as replacement for existing dollars.

For paper currency, let people trade in one 2013 dollar for one million 2014 dollars. For electronic money, the vast majority of money, simply move the decimal place over for all balances (credits and debts). It's trivially easy with electronic money and relatively easy with paper money.

The net effect on exports, however, is zero because instead of paying 100 2013 dollars, the importer would simply pay 100,000,000 2014 dollars. It's the weakening of the dollar, not the weak dollar that promotes exports by having domestic dollar holders subsidize the importers at the expense of the domestic dollar holders.

tatupu70 says

Whether you do it all at once or over a long time period, the effect is the same. It makes doing business in the US cheaper.

This is precisely not true, which why all the so-called "weak dollar advocates" would never ever accept my plan to do an instantaneous one-time weakening of the dollar and then letting it stay at that value.

Monetary units are arbitrary measurements. It doesn't make your dick bigger if you measure it in centimeters, inches, or feet. What matters is that whatever arbitrary measuring stick you use doesn't change with time. Your dick doesn't become bigger because you redefine the inch to be half it's original size.

By the same token, U.S. goods don't become cheaper because the dollar is "weak" compared to some other arbitrary measuring stick. U.S. goods become cheap because the precise mechanism used by banks to "weaken" the dollar forces your grandmother to spend her purchasing power to lower the price that Bob in China gets for our oil. It's a zero-sum game and your grandmother loses.

mell says

PS commenting on the outrage:

OMG IT'S SO UNFAIR. I NEVER watched this show before didn't even occur to me to research it because everyone is always nice to me. ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS PIMP MY MIDDLEMAN SKILLS AND MY BOOKS AND THEY WERE MEAN TO ME!

Poor Schliffler, sand in the vag really hurts.

Vicente says

Poor Schliffler, sand in the vag really hurts.

LOL

Schiff thinks that the 'free-market' BS he spouts is one way, he just learned that it's not. But really, isn't that just the truest form of a free market that he's constantly harping about, but now doesn't like?

Vicente says

mell says

PS commenting on the outrage:

OMG IT'S SO UNFAIR. I NEVER watched this show before didn't even occur to me to research it because everyone is always nice to me. ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS PIMP MY MIDDLEMAN SKILLS AND MY BOOKS AND THEY WERE MEAN TO ME!

Poor Schliffler, sand in the vag really hurts.

Like smaulgld said, he fell for it and I don't doubt that he likes being in the spotlight, be it for promoting his business or - which is more my suspicion - himself. But conducting politics by who you like and dislike instead of using logic and deduction leads to piss poor outcomes and you should admit that his logical and thoughtful comment clarifying his stance pretty much dismantles everything said on this thread against him.

upisdown says

Vicente says

Poor Schliffler, sand in the vag really hurts.

LOL

Schiff thinks that the 'free-market' BS he spouts is one way, he just learned that it's not. But really, isn't that just the truest form of a free market that he's constantly harping about, but now doesn't like?

That's why he is not using the lawyers, because he believes in a free market. Unlike a lot of our resident and "morally superior" patnet quarterbacks who think it's ok to abandon the rule of law and fuck over whoever they don't like as long as someone benefits they do like and turn this country into a banana republic ;)

mell says

That's why he is not using the lawyers, because he believes in a free market.
Unlike a lot of our resident and "morally superior" patnet quarterbacks who
think it's ok to abandon the rule of law and fuck over whoever they don't like
as long as someone benefits they do like and turn this country into a banana
republic ;)

Before you start carving that statue of him, would he and HAS he, displayed the same level of tolerance/restraint that you claim he's showing now, because IF he did actually persue any legal action, it would just compound the stupid and callous crap that he said, wouldn't it?

There's more than one video out there of him lashing out at anybody who crosses him or questions his thoughts/predictions.

upisdown says

Before you start carving that statue of him,

I think he is somewhat vain and possibly shrewd (hard to establish without knowing someone personally), so I'd pass on the statue for now.

upisdown says

would he and HAS he, displyed the same level of tolerance/restraint that you claim he's showing now, because IF he did actually persue any legal action, it would just compound the stupid and callous crap that he said, wouldn't it?

Possible but conjecture.

upisdown says

There's more than one video out there of him lashing out at anybody who crosses him or questions his thought/predictions.

Yes, he comes across as a know-it-all and sometimes stubbornly maintains his stance, but that's also what gets him media attention, and it takes guts, esp. what he did in 2007-2008, going against the entire mainstream media grain. Of course all the uber-rich housing overlords here on patnet knew everything about the housing bubble and would have done the same thing if the media had cared for them and therefor PS is no match for them! I heard one even has a blog about Phoenix.

mell says

Yes, he comes across as a know-it-all and sometimes stubbornly maintains his
stance, but that's also what gets him media attention, and it takes guts, esp.
what he did in 2007-2008, going against the entire mainstream media grain. Of
course all the uber-rich housing overlords here on patnet knew everything about
the housing bubble and would have done the same thing if the media had cared for
them and therefor PS is no match for them! I heard one even has a blog about
Phoenix.

Yea, some pariah. Sorry, but there's quite a few people that thought the same thing that don't have the priveldge or access of a pulpit or public bullhorn on CNBC to say it.
That alone is why I don't put much, if any faith in any of his 'predictions'.

LOL, he wasn't even the ONLY one to say it either. There was a link that someone posted to a site comparing just when he and others made their predictions about the economy, along with other predictions and who was the most accurate too.

Dan8267 says

The net effect on exports, however, is zero because instead of paying 100
2013 dollars, the importer would simply pay 100,000,000 2014 dollars. It's the
weakening of the dollar, not the weak dollar that promotes exports by having
domestic dollar holders subsidize the importers at the expense of the domestic
dollar holders.

OK--I see what you're saying, but I still disagree that time has any relevance. The key point in your system is the way the new dollars are distributed. If you did it in the exact proportion of the current wealth, it wouldn't have any effect on purchasing power.

I was thinking more along the lines of the way it usually happens--where many of the new dollars are used to pay off trade deficits so those dollars leave the country. If you devalued the dollar instantly but sent 75% of them overseas, then doing business would be more favorable in the US. Time isn't important.

Here is an hour of schiff explaining what happened
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9LNP-yXXUc

APOCALYPSEFUCKisShostikovitch says

You know what's really retarded? Getting in front of Samantha Bee and thinking you're not going to be zoo'ed out.

Peter Schiff is probably one of the best know Austrians, me thinks pretty good PR. Do you think Paris Hilton is also stupid? What about Miley Cyrus?

Given the estimated gross tonnage, I believe the universe must be made of stone to support itself.

sbh says

indigenous says

mell says

If you look at the progressive tax rates, a lot of these "socialist" countries tax less than the US, some have flat taxes.

What is your source of information on this?

Be gentle with Indigenous here, Mell, you hold the very fabric of his universe in your hand.

Because Dan doesn't consider income redistribution as stealing.

tatupu70 says

Dan8267 says

A weak dollar, a strong dollar, it doesn't matter. You could make the dollar worth less than one millionth of its current value. It wouldn't help exports one damn bit if you did so instantaneously and without stealing purchasing power from people.

How could you make the dollar worth less than one millionth of its current value without stealing purchasing power from people?

SoftShell says

Because Dan doesn't consider income redistribution as stealing.

Currency debasement is income and wealth distribution from the middle class to the filthy rich who do not work. And yes, it is stealing, no different from breaking into someone's house and robbing them.