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Originally Posted by silveroak
30 years ago conservative commentators would have pointed out that raising the minimum wage would also increase the cost of production, and there would be no real net benefit. They would have pointed out that while McDonalds may have made $5 billion in profits, individual stores are owned by franchisees, and they cannot necessarilly affoard the hgher wages. They would have pointed out that anyone for whom minimum wage is insufficient is free to look for work elsewhere, and that the problem is the economy instead of the minimum wage, that those jobs are not more available.
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They are free to look elsewhere, but they're not likely to get any better wages without getting the education they need to succeed. Some, perhaps, have frittered away earlier opportunities to do that for various reasons, but a lot of them were facing a much more uphill battle than you or I to begin with, and they are now trapped in the bottom echelon of the labor market.
McDonalds and their franchises will pass higher wages on to the customer, which might result in a decrease in sales and could ultimately lead to some loss of business and of jobs.
However, higher wages for low paid workers generally go straight back into the economy. A lot faster and more directly than the McDonald's high-ups fat bonuses (already written off before that $5B profit) will, since they have immediate needs to satisfy and will spend the money, creating more jobs for other people, whereas the corporate high-ups have many ways to hide money where it won't be taxed or used to create jobs, at least in the U.S.
McDonald's workers were getting screwed and few had opportunities to work elsewhere when the economy was good, too, so I don't think it is accurate to blame their low wages on the economy. Although it
is better than blaming the workers for failing to take advantage of opportunities most of them have not had.
Quote:
Originally Posted by silveroak
Instead Fox News insulted the McDonald's workers, said that low wages are supposed to be bad as an incentive to move up, and criticized McDonald's workers who were protesting and in tehir late 20's for the fact they had famillies to feed. They have gone from a party of intelligence and principle to being the mean popular kids at highschool. How can we get the old Republican party back?
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Been doing a little reading for a US history class I'll be teaching this fall. The short story is this: the old Republican Party was a coalition of hard-line conservatives whose views aren't so different from the contemporary Fox News/Teaparty crowd (guys like Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater) with moderate conservatives (guys like Nelson Rockefeller and Dwight Eisenhower) who were willing to work within the framework of the New Deal welfare state in order to rein in what they saw as its worst tendencies. This coalition was destabilized by the aforementioned Southern Strategy between the late sixties and the early eighties, in tandem with the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and what we often call the Culture Wars. The end result was a larger, more powerful Republican constituency, which became dominant in US politics starting in the Reagan era, but because it was a larger, less cohesive coalition, and because the hard-line conservatives gained enough strength in the process to think they could get more of what they wanted if they pushed moderates (think Bob Dole, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snow) out of power, an intra-party struggle developed, and the hard-liners won. This basically started with Gingrich's "Contract with America" in 1994, and the process was completed about the end of Bush's first term, when Colin Powell resigned. The result of that, in turn, was a slimmer, more cohesive Republican Party, that could control Congress based on the way things are districted, but not strong enough to keep a Democrat out of the White House in a nationwide election--hence Obama's victory, but difficulty getting things done. Hence a national health care plan that was basically what Dole proposed, but is now labeled as "socialist" by the current Republican Party.
How can you get the old Republican Party back? You probably can't, but you could transform it into something new if a bunch of moderate conservatives with resources made a concerted effort to beat back Fox and the Tea Party and come up with sensible, moderately legislation. Or, alternatively, you could make the "new" Republican Party irrelevant by forming a new political movement that embraced popular, sensible reforms like Obamacare and some kind of reasonable immigration plan, while working to keep government from growing too much and taxes at a reasonable level. The problem with that strategy is that the Dems have basically occupied that ground for the last half a decade. You could, though, join them, drag the Democratic Party to the right, and watch the liberal wing of the Democrats split off to form a left wing party.
In other words, your old Republican Party's values are essentially represented by a segment of the Democratic Party these days. That's why I voted for Reagan in 1984, but have voted a straight Democratic ticket since 1992.
For those of you who don't like coalitions: How do you propose to make democracy work without them? Successful U.S. political parties have always been coalitions.