32 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2023
    1. Based on yesterday's discussion at Dan Allosso's Book Club, we don't include defense spending into the consumer price index for calculating inflation or other market indicators. What other things (communal goods) aren't included into these measures, but which potentially should be to take into account the balance of governmental spending versus individual spending. It seems unfair that individual sectors, particularly those like defense contracting which are capitalistic in nature, but which are living on governmental rent extraction, should be free from the vagaries of inflation?

      Throwing them into the basket may create broader stability for the broader system and act as a brake via feedback mechanisms which would push those corporations to work for the broader economic good, particularly when they're taking such a large piece of the overall pie.

      Similarly how might we adjust corporate tax rates with respect to the level of inflation to prevent corporate price gouging during times of inflation which seems to be seen in the current 2023 economic climate. Workers have seen some small gains in salary since the pandemic, but inflationary pressures have dramatically eaten into these taking the gains and then some back into corporate coffers. The FED can increase interest rates to effect some change, but this doesn't change corporate price gouging in any way, tax or other policies will be necessary to do this.

  2. Dec 2022
    1. research finds that minimum wage increases are associatedwith significant reductions in poverty.

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  3. May 2021
  4. Mar 2021
  5. Jan 2021
  6. Oct 2020
    1. Will the CRA allow qualifying employers to amend choices and elections? The CRA confirmed that it is considering whether to allow qualifying employers to revise their CEWS-related choices (or elections) if it later turns out that another choice would have been more beneficial. These choices include whether to use the general year-over-year approach or the alternative approach, and whether to use the accrual or cash method for recognizing revenue.
  7. Sep 2020
  8. Aug 2020
    1. Cajner, T., Crane, L. D., Decker, R. A., Grigsby, J., Hamins-Puertolas, A., Hurst, E., Kurz, C., & Yildirmaz, A. (2020). The U.S. Labor Market during the Beginning of the Pandemic Recession (Working Paper No. 27159; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27159

  9. Jun 2020
  10. Feb 2020
  11. Jan 2020
    1. prevails

      In the original German, 'prevails' is rendered "herrscht." Herrscht shares a common root with the ordinary German word Herr (Mister, or, more evocatively, Master). 'Lordship' (as, in the chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, on 'Lordship and Bondage' is rendered Herrschaft.)

      My own reading of Capital tends to center upon the question of domination in capitalist societies, and throughout chapter 1 (in particular, in The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof) Marx is especially attuned to the distinguishing how the forms of domination that are prevalent in capitalist societies are distinct from the relations of "personal dependence" that characterize pre-capitalist modes of production.

      It seems prudent, therefore, to take note of the way that the seemingly innocuous notion of 'prevalence' is, for Marx, in his original formulation, already evocative of the language of mastery, domination, perhaps even something like 'hegemony'.

      Furthermore, the capitalist mode of production prevails--it predominates. Yet, as Louis Althusser observes in his discussion of the concept of the 'mode of production' in On the Reproduction of Capitalism, every concrete social formation can be classified according to the mode of production that is dominant (that prevails--herrscht). In order to dominate, something must implicitly be dominated, or subordinate. "In every social formation," Althusser writes, "there exists more than one mode of production: at least two and often many more." Althusser cites Lenin, who in his analysis of the late 19th c. Russian social formation, observes that four modes of production can be distinguished (Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso 2014, p. 19.)

      In our analysis of social formations, the concrete specificity of each can be articulated by carefully examining the multiplicity of modes of production that coincide within it, and examine the way in which capitalism tends to dominate a multiplicity of subordinate modes of production that, on the one hand, survive from past modes of production but which may also, on the other, be emerging in the present (i.e. communism). Thus even if capitalism tends towards the formation of a contiguous world-system dominated by its particular imperatives, this does not mean that this process is homogenous or unfolds in the same way in each instance.

      For some commentators, capitalism is defined by the prevalence of wage labor and the specific dynamics that obtain therefrom. Yet this has often led to confusion over, whether, in analyzing the North American social formation prior to 1865, in which slavery coexists with wage-labor, the mode of production based on slave-labor is pre-capitalist. Yet as we find here in ch. 1, what determines the commodity as a commodity is not that it is the product of wage labor, rather that it is produced for exchange. As Marx writes on p. 131, "He who satisfies his own need with the product of his own labor admittedly creates use-values, but not commodities. Insofar as the slave-system in North America produced commodities (cotton, tobacco, etc.) for exchange on the world market, the fact that these commodities were produced under direct conditions of domination does not have any bearing on whether or not we identify this system of production as 'capitalist'. Wage-labor is therefore not likely the determinative factor; the determinative factor is the production of commodities for exchange. It is only insofar as commodities confront one another as exchange-values that the various modes of useful labor appear as expressions of a homogenous common substance, labor in the abstract

      It is in this sense that we can observe one of the ways that the capitalist mode of production prevails over other modes of production, as it subordinates these modes of production to production for exchange, and thus the law of value, regardless of whether wage-labor represents the dominant form of this relation. Moreover, it provides a clue to how we can examine, for example, the persistence of unwaged work within the family, which has important consequences for Social Reproduction Theory.

      Nonetheless, we can say that insofar as commodities confront each other on the market in a scene of exchange that they implicitly contain some 'third thing' which enables us to compare them as bearers of a magnitude of value. This 'third thing', as Marx's demonstration shows, is 'socially necessary labour time', which anticipates the way that wage-labor will become a dominant feature of capitalist society.

  12. Nov 2018
    1. All of this also has to be weighed against the additional money Walmart will get from the tax cuts. According to what a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy told the New York Times, Walmart could easily save $2.2 billion a year from the tax cuts. The company says that the wage increases and bonuses would run $700 million.

      2200000000 - 700000000 = 1500000000 tax bonus after wage increases and bonuses

  13. May 2018
    1. In asituation where an employment already has a notified minimum wage fixed and the workers feel that the employer has the resourcesto pay a better wage and succeed in their claim throughadjudication/ collective bargaining, the higher wage procured istermed a “fair wage”

      Difference between Fair Wage and Minimum

  14. Apr 2018
    1. you’ve got to explain to me why these putative ability differences aren’t handicapping women

      You've got to explain to me why this putative racism doesn't handicap women.

    2. Racism

      I do not see a causal analysis. No doubt there is racism, but attributing everything to racism is dishonest. Racism contributes by how much exactly?

    3. No such income gap exists between black and white women raised in similar households.

      It is obvious from the graph that black women earn more.

  15. Sep 2014
    1. minimum wages that destroy jobs

      I'm sure this is just being brought in here as an example of something rather split-brained that voters do, but I believe it's not well established that higher minimum wages "destroy jobs".