JP Hochbaum
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Feb 7, 2012
- Messages
- 4,456
- Reaction score
- 2,549
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Independent
The middle class that is who!
A must-read article by Amazon.com co-founder (and now billionaire) Nick Haneur on solving the wealth disparity, increasing middle-class incomes & why it's good --by showing how increased middle-class incomes increases spending (aka increased spending = increased demand), which is what really powers the economy --unless
you want revolutions as is common throughout history from Arab Spring to French, Russian, Chinese, Indonesian, Korean, Vietnamese, etc Revolutions
The Pitchforks Are Coming
excerpt page 2 (click all 4 short pages at bottom)
"What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let’s do it all over again. We’ve got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too.
"...I wanted to try to change the conversation with ideas—by advancing what my co-author, Eric Liu, and I call “middle-out” economics.
It’s the long-overdue rebuttal to the trickle-down economics worldview that has become economic orthodoxy across party lines—and has so screwed the American middle class and our economy generally.
Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.
Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers.
Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators.
Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it.
The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.
On June 19, 2013, Bloomberg published an article I wrote called “The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage.” Forbes labeled it “Nick Hanauer’s near insane” proposal.
And yet, just weeks after it was published, my friend David Rolf, a Service Employees International Union organizer, roused fast-food workers to go on strike around the country for a $15 living wage.
Nearly a year later, the city of Seattle passed a $15 minimum wage.
And just 350 days after my article was published, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray signed that ordinance into law. How could this happen, you ask?
It happened because we reminded the masses that they are the source of growth and prosperity, not us rich guys.
We reminded them that when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees.
We reminded them that if businesses paid workers a living wage rather than poverty wages, taxpayers wouldn’t have to make up the difference.
And when we got done, 74 percent of likely Seattle voters in a recent poll agreed that a $15 minimum wage was a swell idea.
The standard response in the minimum-wage debate, made by Republicans and their business backers and plenty of Democrats as well, is that raising the minimum wage costs jobs.
Businesses will have to lay off workers. This argument reflects the orthodox economics that most people had in college.
If you took Econ 101, then you literally were taught that if wages go up, employment must go down.
The law of supply and demand and all that. That’s why you’ve got John Boehner and other Republicans in Congress insisting that if you price employment higher, you get less of it. Really?
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor.
Because here’s an odd thing. During the past three decades, compensation for CEOs grew 127 times faster than it did for workers.
Since 1950, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio has increased 1,000 percent, and that is not a typo. CEOs used to earn 30 times the median wage; now they rake in 500 times.
Yet no company I know of has eliminated its senior managers, or outsourced them to China or automated their jobs.
Instead, we now have more CEOs and senior executives than ever before. So, too, for financial services workers and technology workers.
These folks earn multiples of the median wage, yet we somehow have more and more of them.
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor.
So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages.
We’ve had 75 years of complaints from big business—when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created.
Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened.
In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong.
Most of you probably think that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is an insane departure from rational policy that puts our economy at great risk.
But in Seattle, our current minimum wage of $9.32 is already nearly 30 percent higher than the federal minimum wage. And has it ruined our economy yet?
Well, trickle-downers, look at the data here:
The two cities in the nation with the highest rate of job growth by small businesses are San Francisco and Seattle. Guess which cities have the highest minimum wage?
San Francisco and Seattle. The fastest-growing big city in America?
Seattle. Fifteen dollars isn’t a risky untried policy for us.
It’s doubling down on the strategy that’s already allowing our city to kick your city’s ass.
Read more: The Pitchforks Are Coming
A must-read article by Amazon.com co-founder (and now billionaire) Nick Haneur on solving the wealth disparity, increasing middle-class incomes & why it's good --by showing how increased middle-class incomes increases spending (aka increased spending = increased demand), which is what really powers the economy --unless
you want revolutions as is common throughout history from Arab Spring to French, Russian, Chinese, Indonesian, Korean, Vietnamese, etc Revolutions
The Pitchforks Are Coming
excerpt page 2 (click all 4 short pages at bottom)
"What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let’s do it all over again. We’ve got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too.
"...I wanted to try to change the conversation with ideas—by advancing what my co-author, Eric Liu, and I call “middle-out” economics.
It’s the long-overdue rebuttal to the trickle-down economics worldview that has become economic orthodoxy across party lines—and has so screwed the American middle class and our economy generally.
Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.
Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers.
Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators.
Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it.
The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.
On June 19, 2013, Bloomberg published an article I wrote called “The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage.” Forbes labeled it “Nick Hanauer’s near insane” proposal.
And yet, just weeks after it was published, my friend David Rolf, a Service Employees International Union organizer, roused fast-food workers to go on strike around the country for a $15 living wage.
Nearly a year later, the city of Seattle passed a $15 minimum wage.
And just 350 days after my article was published, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray signed that ordinance into law. How could this happen, you ask?
It happened because we reminded the masses that they are the source of growth and prosperity, not us rich guys.
We reminded them that when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees.
We reminded them that if businesses paid workers a living wage rather than poverty wages, taxpayers wouldn’t have to make up the difference.
And when we got done, 74 percent of likely Seattle voters in a recent poll agreed that a $15 minimum wage was a swell idea.
The standard response in the minimum-wage debate, made by Republicans and their business backers and plenty of Democrats as well, is that raising the minimum wage costs jobs.
Businesses will have to lay off workers. This argument reflects the orthodox economics that most people had in college.
If you took Econ 101, then you literally were taught that if wages go up, employment must go down.
The law of supply and demand and all that. That’s why you’ve got John Boehner and other Republicans in Congress insisting that if you price employment higher, you get less of it. Really?
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor.
Because here’s an odd thing. During the past three decades, compensation for CEOs grew 127 times faster than it did for workers.
Since 1950, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio has increased 1,000 percent, and that is not a typo. CEOs used to earn 30 times the median wage; now they rake in 500 times.
Yet no company I know of has eliminated its senior managers, or outsourced them to China or automated their jobs.
Instead, we now have more CEOs and senior executives than ever before. So, too, for financial services workers and technology workers.
These folks earn multiples of the median wage, yet we somehow have more and more of them.
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor.
So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages.
We’ve had 75 years of complaints from big business—when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created.
Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened.
In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong.
Most of you probably think that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is an insane departure from rational policy that puts our economy at great risk.
But in Seattle, our current minimum wage of $9.32 is already nearly 30 percent higher than the federal minimum wage. And has it ruined our economy yet?
Well, trickle-downers, look at the data here:
The two cities in the nation with the highest rate of job growth by small businesses are San Francisco and Seattle. Guess which cities have the highest minimum wage?
San Francisco and Seattle. The fastest-growing big city in America?
Seattle. Fifteen dollars isn’t a risky untried policy for us.
It’s doubling down on the strategy that’s already allowing our city to kick your city’s ass.
Read more: The Pitchforks Are Coming
