What does voting for more employers and less employees mean? Instead of opposing mechanization, support it (fewer employees means higher wages and productivity gains will bring in more employers to compensate for the apparent loss in jobs). Mechanized workplaces lead to more employers and relatively fewer employees competing. Counter-intuitive, but employees win big. Instead of voting to shove more employees into your wage bracket, vote against minimum-wage (even if you make $100k per year, minimum wage domino effects your wage). Instead of allowing consolidation of industries, vote against it and tell your congresspeople to vote against it (this very moment, Comcast and Time-Warner are trying to merge in an already monopolistic market). Oppose it. Fewer employers is almost always bad for the employee (and the customer, but that's another topic).
Fact is as productivity has increased, wages have stagnated but profits have skyrocketed. So the world has operated differently than you suggest.
And liberals oppose such mergers. It's the neoliberals and Chamber of Commerce types in both parties who have undermined anti-trust rules.
Liberals work against their own interest in almost every case. They oppose what they should support and support what they should oppose. They screw themselves (along with the rest of us) into low-wages, fewer employers and more employees within the same bracket. They support immigration, which brings more workers competing for the same jobs. They support unions which do nothing to fix the number of employers vs employees issue at the heart of wages and prosperity.
I'm not sure you understand what liberals are for and against. SOME liberals support 'immigration' but then so do nearly all pro-business conservatives. But many liberals also support closing the borders, and treating illegal EMPLOYERS with the same venom as the employees at the very bottom just trying to have a decent life.
And it's hard to square support of unions as working against the interests of working people. The alternative is every worker "negotiates" with a behemoth. In what world does a worker shocking shelves at Walmart exert influence on Walmart? They don't - it's a one way discussion. Work for this, under these conditions, or don't work. It's why Walmart would rather close a store than allow unions an entry - they know the effect is higher wages and benefits. And we can see the trajectory of wages as unions expanded power and as they declined and they're remarkably correlated. Fact is during the union heyday, as productivity increased, wages at ALL LEVELS increased. The poor got richer, AND the rich got richer, and that's as it should be. Now, productivity increases, income increases, wages for the middle and below decline, and profits skyrocket. That's not sustainable.
The problem with unions is now if they go against an employer that CAN just up and move to China, they just might cause that. But that's more a problem with trade rules than giving workers some power in the market.
The Cambridge professor likes Costco - good for her, but that doesn't fix the fundamental supply-demand, number of employers vs employees issue at the heart of you getting ahead.
Costco is just an example that employers competing in the market can compete at wages higher than minimum wage.
But the basic economics problem is pretty simple. Real sustainable demand can only come from wages. For decades, wages as a share of output have been declining, but profits are at an all time high, and then we wonder why demand is low, and sustainable growth is weak. So we have to get wages on a path upward, or our economy will continue to suffer. And no one can tell me that there is some ironclad economics rule that the 1%, and especially the 1/10th of 1%, must capture the current record and increasing share of income and wealth or else we can't have any jobs. And that's the implicit argument when people claim that if wages grow, and profits decline, that the result must be disastrous. Somehow we had a booming economy when the difference between the top and bottom was far lower than it is today.
Agree or not, Warren is recognizing that and proposing some not even half solutions - more than anything, she's just recognizing the issue and dealing with the worst of the fallout of that. What is the conservative answer? Give some more tax cuts probably, since that is their answer to every economic problem for all time. But that just doesn't seem to be working.
The reality is these are incredibly difficult and hard to solve problems, but I don't think we're going to get anywhere by demonizing those who like Warren just stand up and say, THIS is a real problem. Anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty recognizes the problem. I'd just rather the conservatives debated the actual problem she's addressing instead of demonizing her for pointing to the problems.
Obama aides knew about issues on border a year before declaring a crisis ">
