8 ms·

one must ask why a waitress at denny's who makes minimum wage and has no healthcare must bail out union workers at gm who make 8x the wages, do less work, have

one must ask why a waitress at denny's who makes minimum wage and has no healthcare must bail out union workers at gm who make 8x the wages, do less work, have ZERO DEDUCTABLE healthcare (do you? i doubt it), and full pensions. or why should a succesful worker at honda in ohio subsidize not only a failed competitor, but in essence have his own taxation used to undermine his own hard work? as for saving jobs and investment...most of the suppliers are already on death's door if they only rely on orders from detroit. investors have already lost 95% of their money on avg...nothing can reverse these losses in the end the govt cannot give the big three their reputations back. lost reputation is why people do not choose these cars even though they are now comparable in quality. barak obama cannot force me to buy a buick

blackguardx 18y ago
This post smacks of jealousy. What is wrong with zero deductible healthcare? I don't fault someone for trying to climb society's ladder. I want everyone in America to be able to earn a living wage. Being in a union doesn't make one lazy or overpaid. How do you over pay someone anyway? Who deems what a job is worth to society? It is very unfortunate that the big three made the agreements they did, but they made them. They should be allowed to fail. All this talk of a bailout just furthers the crisis. When things start to look more desperate, the UAW will renegotiate. If they don't, the organization will cease to exist. What I worry about are all those retirees who depend on the pensions they were promised.
- yummyfajitas 18y ago
  Person A, a waitress at Dennys, making about $8-10/hour with high deductible health care. Person B, an auto worker at GM, making $30-40/hour with zero deductible health care. [edit: see response to this post, auto worker gets $73/hour.] The bailout: tax person A in order to help person B, with 3 large corporations taking a cut of the proceeds. Does this make any sense? Incidentally, the original poster did not describe union workers as either lazy or overpaid. [edit: forgot to mention, it's actually very likely that the waitress does not pay taxes at all. So more realistically, the waitress should be replaced by someone in the $20/hour neighborhood.]
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    The problem is that person A doesn't pay any taxes. You're certainly taxing some people to pay for it, but it's not person A. Also, the idea behind bailouts like this is that they are a loan. Ideally the government is profiting from this sort of thing, especially when you consider the overall economic impact of laying off thousands of GM employees, or allowing thousands of pensions to swirl down the drain. I'm against the bailout, but it's overly simplistic and entirely useless (not to mention just plain incorrect) to say that it's morally wrong because someone at Denny's doesn't have health care.
    - yummyfajitas 18y ago
      Heh, I noticed that (and edited my post to reflect it), apparently while you were writing your post. However, there are plenty of people who make less money than auto workers who do pay taxes. One reason the bailout is morally wrong is that it is a regressive tax. It takes from the (relatively) poor and gives to the (relatively) rich.
      - mattmaroon 18y ago
        Well, a very high % of taxes come from either businesses or people who make more than the average GM worker. Plus a $25 billion dollar loan to GM isn't the same thing, from the taxpayers perspective, as giving them $25 billion. Presumably it will be paid back with interest. Of course, it won't get as much interest as people could earn investing their own money in the private sector, or they'd all be buying GM bonds already, but the actual loss is orders of magnitude less than $25 billion. I don't think there's a lot of moral hazard there in terms of taking from the poor and giving to GM workers. The real issue is whether it's better for everyone involved than just allowing them to restructure in bankruptcy. I can't see how the answer to that could be yes.
        yummyfajitas 18y ago
        Why do you think GM will survive long enough to pay us back?
- mdasen 18y ago
  Interesting question: who deems what a job is worth to society? Many things: First, we all do. As a simplistic example, would you hire me at $50/hour to patrol the front of your house for squirrels? No. No matter how diligent or hard-working I was, that function is not worth $50/hr to you. In fact, it may be worth nothing at all. A little less simplistic: would you keep me on fulltime staff to clean your apartment or house at $100,000 per year? Probably not. If I charged $1,000 per year, you probably would. A clean apartment/home is a good thing (by most people's standards). It has value. How much value? Well, that depends on how much people are willing to part with for it. Maybe you would rather waste your time cleaning. Maybe I would be idle most of the time because your place isn't that big and therefore it doesn't justify fulltime staffing. Second, alternatives. I touched on this already a little with your substituting your labor for mine, but it goes even further. Can the process be mechanized? In the era before computers, there were still things like directories and it must have been a damn tedious process alphabetizing all those names. The person was, no doubt, hardworking, but as computers came along and could do the job quicker and more accurately, well, that person no longer had function. Yes, the value of sorted data didn't change, but the cost to acquire sorted data did change while that person didn't (or maybe they did and became a valuable computer technician or something). Third, output. What is its intrinsic value. A car has intrinsic value, but it also varies by person - a car is worth more to the President than it is to me. He's busier, I can take the subway without fear of assassination, etc. The more expensive a car is, the fewer people will have it. For the most part, producers don't get to price discriminate - if Bill Gates goes to the Mazda dealership he'll get a similar price that I get even if the car is worth a lot more to him. Forth, competition. Are there other people that are willing to do the job for less? I'm guessing beer tasters don't get paid well, but I'd also wager that breweries don't have trouble finding people for the job. Likewise, if competitors are more efficient (either companies or other workers), it makes your labor less valuable. If your company produces 1 car for every 50 hours of labor and another company produces 1 car for every 25 hours of labor, your labor isn't worth as much. If I can automate processes that save time, my labor becomes worth more and yours less. Fifth, other goods. Economics is about allocating scarcity. Many try and argue that we're not an economy of scarcity anymore and that we have enough for everyone and that it's just a corrupt capitalist system that prevents that from happening. Then they create cost of living calculations for a living wage that consider someone without cable to be in dire poverty. Face it, we like things. If we could all live without things (from TVs to medicines), we'd be fine. So, the question is: on a per dollar basis, how has the automobile fared against other things we can spend our money on? For me, on a per dollar spent basis, my computer is much more valuable. Are people moving a certain percent that they used to spend on cars toward CDs or TVs or computers or cranial piercings? I have no idea, but we all allocate our budgets in ways that we hope will increase our happiness. People's tastes change, society's tastes change. Portable radios do positively affect your happiness and are cheap (say, $20), but people seem to have widely pronounced that MP3 players (at 5-10x the cost) positively affect their happiness at a rate greater than that 5-10x increase. Or they're just idiots that don't know what to do with money. I could go on, but I think you get the point. It's a truly fascinating topic. In the GM case, there are some neat applications to see. 1. When GM, Ford, and Chrysler were pretty much the only auto makers, the amount of competition was less which meant that consumers would pay more and fewer units would be shipped. If you want to calculate how this works, look up the cournot/nash equilibrium. As the car companies were selling at higher margins and ignoring the poorer people, labor could demand more money since the car companies were making more money per unit of labor used. 2. Other firms with lower labor costs also became more efficient. Toyota makes cars faster combined with a lower cost per hour. That means GM's labor is worth less money. 3. The value of output might be fluctuating. Here is where I'm spouting complete BS. As gas prices rise, the intrinsic value of a vehicle declines. Americans also seem to be having a shift in their perception of public transit and as their view of it becomes more favorable, the value of a car decreases. However, as most people are suburban, a car can still be a lifeline. It's late. I'm done. Hopefully that was interesting. It wasn't meant to have any view pro or con in it, just more of a view into how prices get set and how we value things.
- wyclif 18y ago
  You mean envy, not jealousy: Ordinary language tends to conflate envy and jealousy. The philosophical consensus is that these are distinct emotions.[2] While it is linguistically acceptable to say that one is jealous upon hearing about another's vacation, say, it has been plausibly argued that one is feeling envy, if either, in such a case. Both envy and jealousy are three-place relations; but this superficial similarity conceals an important difference. Jealousy involves three parties, the subject, the rival, and the beloved; and the jealous person's real locus of concern is the beloved—the person whose affection he is losing or fears losing—not his rival. Whereas envy is a two party relation, with a third relatum that is a good (albeit a good that could be a particular person's affections); and the envious person's locus of concern is the rival. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/envy/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/envy/
  - dhimes 18y ago
    I like that definition, but dictionaries often make a less clear distinction, and put envy as a more powerful emotion. (try dictionary.com, for instance, but my print ones also concur)
Prrometheus 18y ago
Detroit fills Democratic Party campaign coffers. And before anyone says its a non-partisan thing, look at where opposition to this bailout and the previous one came from. That's right: the guys we just voted out for being war-mongers and Big Brother supporters. Ain't democracy grand?
- prospero 18y ago
  40% of Democrats opposed the original bailout package, compared to 66% of Republicans. That's a difference to be sure, but the vote was obviously not down party lines. Furthermore, Bush was a strong supporter of both packages, and was vocal in his disappointment when the first failed to pass. Facts exist independently of your opinion; you don't get to make them up to fit your argument. Please try to remember that.
  - Prrometheus 18y ago
    In a congress that passes bills by majority, a clear majority of one party supported it and a clear majority of the other opposed it. House Republicans are consistently the most conservative caucus in Congress, and deserve praise for when they do the right thing as much as they deserve the opposite when they are wrong.
    - prospero 18y ago
      That doesn't parse. You're treating two different types of majorities as the same thing. It's fairly common that bills will be voted on down party lines, which means all Republicans vote one way, and all Democrats vote another. The standard deviation from this is generally pretty small, which is why the small majority held by the Democrats in both houses is such a big deal. Two-thirds of Republicans repudiated the pressure coming from the Bush administration and voted against the bailout. Democrats were only able to muster a simple majority in support of the bailout. That's as close to non-partisan behavior as you're likely to see in our government.
    - astine 18y ago
      It's true, that Republicans are more likely to uphold free-market principles than Democrats are, and this vote does demonstrate that, but it also demonstrates that that R next your representatives name is no guarantee that he is fiscally conservative. I prefer to vote based on personality and not on party and would prefer that both parties were destroyed and sent back to the abyss where they belong.
evgen 18y ago
FWIW, a large part of this problem has already been solved. You may not have noticed it, but a while back the UAW made a deal with the big three that in exchange for a large cash payout they would take over retiree pension and post-retirement healthcare obligations.
- sethg 18y ago
  ...and, if I understand correctly, because Detroit made that payout, they are now in a poor cash position, which means that the credit crunch is putting a very big strain on them.
mhartl 18y ago
I basically agree with you, but it's worth noting that your hypothetical Denny's waitress would pay no federal income tax (though she would pay the payroll tax), and would probably qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit. It's really the professional wage earners (doctors, lawyers, etc.) pulling in a few hundred grand who get the shaft.
- ewanmcteagle 18y ago
  $8/hour = $16k per year (roughly). Since this is greater than the standard deduction you will not be avoiding federal income tax at this level.
  - adamc 18y ago
    The tax on $16k per year is miniscule, if any.
    - steveplace 18y ago
      Payroll taxes suck, especially at this level. Sure you get them back in a refund, but there's an opportunity cost.
    - Retric 18y ago
      SS works out to ~15.3% add Medicare etc, and they are at ~20% the absolute top tax rate is 35% assuming zero deductions but capital gains is only 15%. With 16k * .2 we get 3,200$ in tax. Earned income tax credit = $428 with no qualifying children wow that helps.
      - vlad 18y ago
        An employee's share of SS tax is 6.4%, not 15.3%. (The full amount is twice that, or 12.4%, so I'm not sure where 15.3% comes from.) Add Medicare tax (1.45%, not 5%, and the employer pays a matching amount). You get 6.4% + 1.45% = 7.85%, not 20%. That's ~$1250. Add a 15% tax rate for a $2,000 federal tax, not 20%. We both arrive at $3,200 but I think my numbers are more accurate. Where you working backwards from a known number?
sethg 18y ago
Because if the Big Three go under, a very large number of workers (folks working for the Big Three and for their suppliers) will suddenly be collecting unemployment insurance instead of paying taxes; given the current state of the economy, they may be collecting it for quite a while. So it would be cheaper for the government to keep those employers afloat. The obvious counterargument to that is that the auto companies could take their $25 billion and still go under. The counter-counterargument is that even if that happens, it would be better for everyone if they went under a few years from now, when hopefully the rest of the economy will be in better shape.
- crabapple 18y ago
  Because if the Big Three go under, a very large number of workers (folks working for the Big Three and for their suppliers) will suddenly be collecting unemployment insurance instead of paying taxes and they will also paid in taxes if bailed. so GM is going to become a giant money laundering operation for the IRS? cut out the middleman and put them on unemployment...then they can actually find PRODUCTIVE work
  - sethg 18y ago
    The unemployment would cost the government more than the bailout. One could argue that it would still be better off in the long term for the government to bite the bullet and pay that unemployment money than to keep the US auto industry afloat; I am partial to that argument myself. But I'm responding to the "why should a waitress at Denny's..." question.
    - yummyfajitas 18y ago
      Unemployment costs $362/week + administrative overhead. The wage of an auto worker costs from $1200/week to $2920/week (depending on whether you believe the $30/hour number or the $73/hour number floating around). http://www.michigan.gov/documents/uia/EUC_Fact_Sheet_120_240939_7.pdf http://www.michigan.gov/documents/uia/EUC_Fact_Sheet_120_240... Additionally, auto workers have an incentive to get off unemployment; it pays less than market rate. They have no incentive to stop working for GM, which pays above market rate.
mchristoff 18y ago
it really disgusts me that this comment has been upmodded so much. it reeks of overgeneralization, ignorance, and hyperbole. it's very easy to sit on your high horse and talk about hypothetical denny's waitresses, but a little harder when this actually effects you and your loved ones. my father worked his ass off for GM for more than 25 years, not to mention driving 100 miles each way for the last 10 so his family didn't have to move. when he retired a few years ago he made $25/hr + the overtime which he always worked so i could go to college. $25/hr an hour is not 8x of your hypothetical denny's waitress, it's what we call a "living wage". maybe your denny's waitress worked harder than my father, but assumption that every UAW worker somehow is swimming in a money bin like in scrooge mcduck while the rest of the country is toiling in the coal mines is false. i'm not defending the auto industry here, nor do have i decided whether it would benefit my country or my family to bail them out. i think management made some terrible decisions (see: suvs + $100/barrel oil), and i think UAW bargained for some deals that were unsustainable. heck, i'm not saying you should buy a buick... i'm sure as hell not. but why do you need to degrade the sacrifice of honest people to make your point?
- ars 18y ago
  You're talking like his job was an entitlement. Companies go bust and people lose jobs, it happens a lot. The reason people are talking UAW workers that way, is not because they begrudge the individual worker like your father - they don't. It's because the car companies were not allowed to fire or lay off people as they wished, which gives a very strong impression of entitlement and job guarantees amongst UAW workers that no one else in america has. If you got rid of that, and allowed car companies to hire and fire and set wages as they desired, people wouldn't be so opposed to the bailout. Personally I would support the bailout only if the company became non-union. So long as they stay unionized they will never survive, and the bailout will be wasted money. As a whole UAW was very destructive to the auto business - not allowing a company to fire people, or change wages, is a great way to destroy a company - and they succeeded. 100 miles each way? That's about 4 hours of driving each day, add in overtime, and there's nothing left to your day. Why not find a closer job?
  - Xichekolas 18y ago
newsycaccount 18y ago
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=11&year=2008&base_name=gm_auto_workers_are_not_paid_7 http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?mo... You are claiming that they are making 10x as much as a Denny's worker, before their benefits? They make $28 an hour before benefits (about 3 or 4x a Denny's waitress after tips). Including benefits they are making $41 an hour. That is still no where near your crazy ass 10x number, especially considering that you can hardly claim their pensions are worth the full $7 as there is a significant chance these companies will go bankrupt and they won't ever see it. If the market could sell employees an annuity in exchange (assuming the bankrupcy risk for itself), it would probably only offer a few cents on the dollar.
Xichekolas 18y ago
I'm wondering where these GM employees with zero deductible healthcare are. My dad is a retiree, and the last time he had zero deductible healthcare was in 1998, when it was much cheaper for the company. Nowdays he pays 100% of his office visits and has some yearly deductible for other things. It's still a good health plan, but it's not exactly gold-plated. GM has done some incredibly stupid things, even my dad thinks the job bank was ridiculous, but they have made a lot of changes in the last 5-8 years, and were probably going to glide into something new and better had the market for cars not fallen apart. Now I'm not saying I support a bailout, I still think Chapter 11 probably makes the most sense, even if it means my dad's pension might get cut. I'm just trying to point out that a lot of these things that people bring up when they talk about GM (job banks, super health insurance, high wages) are issues that are no longer the case. When my dad retired, they already had his plant converted to $14/hr non-union workers.
- mchristoff 18y ago
  This is exactly my father's situation. Zero deductible health care, huh? Maybe 10 years ago, but certainly not now. Demononizing honest people based on stereotypes that people cling onto to support their perceived notions does not solve the real problem.
jmatt 18y ago
one must ask why a waitress at denny's who makes minimum wage and has no healthcare must bail out union workers at gm who make 8x the wages, do less work, have ZERO DEDUCTABLE healthcare (do you? i doubt it), and full pensions. It's not the waitress at denny's - there is a very good chance she pays no federal taxes. No, it's the engineers, management and entrepreneurs of all the successful companies in the US that are going to pay for the bail out(s). I agree let them go bankrupt or even a managed bankruptcy. They need to get those liabilities off the books. barak obama cannot force me to buy a buick This is how much of the world works, subsidize the local car companies and tax and tariff the foreign car companies. Currently the foreign car companies are essentially on the same playing field as foreign car companies in the US. Hopefully it will stay that way.
fakeslimshady 18y ago
There are probably 100s of industries and sectors imploding in this depression (folks hitech is getting there) that don't have lobbying power like the Autos. Instead bailing out Autos or Wall Street, this money needs to bailing out the wave of people that are going to enviably lose there jobs no matter what plan is done. But we should get something for the useful and lasting for the money - build Nuclear Power Plants, build a 100Mbs internet like they have in Japan/Korea, etc.

blackguardx 18y ago

This post smacks of jealousy. What is wrong with zero deductible healthcare? I don't fault someone for trying to climb society's ladder. I want everyone in America to be able to earn a living wage. Being in a union doesn't make one lazy or overpaid. How do you over pay someone anyway? Who deems what a job is worth to society? It is very unfortunate that the big three made the agreements they did, but they made them. They should be allowed to fail. All this talk of a bailout just furthers the crisis. When things start to look more desperate, the UAW will renegotiate. If they don't, the organization will cease to exist. What I worry about are all those retirees who depend on the pensions they were promised.

yummyfajitas 18y ago
Person A, a waitress at Dennys, making about $8-10/hour with high deductible health care. Person B, an auto worker at GM, making $30-40/hour with zero deductible health care. [edit: see response to this post, auto worker gets $73/hour.] The bailout: tax person A in order to help person B, with 3 large corporations taking a cut of the proceeds. Does this make any sense? Incidentally, the original poster did not describe union workers as either lazy or overpaid. [edit: forgot to mention, it's actually very likely that the waitress does not pay taxes at all. So more realistically, the waitress should be replaced by someone in the $20/hour neighborhood.]
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  The problem is that person A doesn't pay any taxes. You're certainly taxing some people to pay for it, but it's not person A. Also, the idea behind bailouts like this is that they are a loan. Ideally the government is profiting from this sort of thing, especially when you consider the overall economic impact of laying off thousands of GM employees, or allowing thousands of pensions to swirl down the drain. I'm against the bailout, but it's overly simplistic and entirely useless (not to mention just plain incorrect) to say that it's morally wrong because someone at Denny's doesn't have health care.
  - yummyfajitas 18y ago
    Heh, I noticed that (and edited my post to reflect it), apparently while you were writing your post. However, there are plenty of people who make less money than auto workers who do pay taxes. One reason the bailout is morally wrong is that it is a regressive tax. It takes from the (relatively) poor and gives to the (relatively) rich.
    - mattmaroon 18y ago
      Well, a very high % of taxes come from either businesses or people who make more than the average GM worker. Plus a $25 billion dollar loan to GM isn't the same thing, from the taxpayers perspective, as giving them $25 billion. Presumably it will be paid back with interest. Of course, it won't get as much interest as people could earn investing their own money in the private sector, or they'd all be buying GM bonds already, but the actual loss is orders of magnitude less than $25 billion. I don't think there's a lot of moral hazard there in terms of taking from the poor and giving to GM workers. The real issue is whether it's better for everyone involved than just allowing them to restructure in bankruptcy. I can't see how the answer to that could be yes.
      - yummyfajitas 18y ago
        Why do you think GM will survive long enough to pay us back?
mdasen 18y ago
Interesting question: who deems what a job is worth to society? Many things: First, we all do. As a simplistic example, would you hire me at $50/hour to patrol the front of your house for squirrels? No. No matter how diligent or hard-working I was, that function is not worth $50/hr to you. In fact, it may be worth nothing at all. A little less simplistic: would you keep me on fulltime staff to clean your apartment or house at $100,000 per year? Probably not. If I charged $1,000 per year, you probably would. A clean apartment/home is a good thing (by most people's standards). It has value. How much value? Well, that depends on how much people are willing to part with for it. Maybe you would rather waste your time cleaning. Maybe I would be idle most of the time because your place isn't that big and therefore it doesn't justify fulltime staffing. Second, alternatives. I touched on this already a little with your substituting your labor for mine, but it goes even further. Can the process be mechanized? In the era before computers, there were still things like directories and it must have been a damn tedious process alphabetizing all those names. The person was, no doubt, hardworking, but as computers came along and could do the job quicker and more accurately, well, that person no longer had function. Yes, the value of sorted data didn't change, but the cost to acquire sorted data did change while that person didn't (or maybe they did and became a valuable computer technician or something). Third, output. What is its intrinsic value. A car has intrinsic value, but it also varies by person - a car is worth more to the President than it is to me. He's busier, I can take the subway without fear of assassination, etc. The more expensive a car is, the fewer people will have it. For the most part, producers don't get to price discriminate - if Bill Gates goes to the Mazda dealership he'll get a similar price that I get even if the car is worth a lot more to him. Forth, competition. Are there other people that are willing to do the job for less? I'm guessing beer tasters don't get paid well, but I'd also wager that breweries don't have trouble finding people for the job. Likewise, if competitors are more efficient (either companies or other workers), it makes your labor less valuable. If your company produces 1 car for every 50 hours of labor and another company produces 1 car for every 25 hours of labor, your labor isn't worth as much. If I can automate processes that save time, my labor becomes worth more and yours less. Fifth, other goods. Economics is about allocating scarcity. Many try and argue that we're not an economy of scarcity anymore and that we have enough for everyone and that it's just a corrupt capitalist system that prevents that from happening. Then they create cost of living calculations for a living wage that consider someone without cable to be in dire poverty. Face it, we like things. If we could all live without things (from TVs to medicines), we'd be fine. So, the question is: on a per dollar basis, how has the automobile fared against other things we can spend our money on? For me, on a per dollar spent basis, my computer is much more valuable. Are people moving a certain percent that they used to spend on cars toward CDs or TVs or computers or cranial piercings? I have no idea, but we all allocate our budgets in ways that we hope will increase our happiness. People's tastes change, society's tastes change. Portable radios do positively affect your happiness and are cheap (say, $20), but people seem to have widely pronounced that MP3 players (at 5-10x the cost) positively affect their happiness at a rate greater than that 5-10x increase. Or they're just idiots that don't know what to do with money. I could go on, but I think you get the point. It's a truly fascinating topic. In the GM case, there are some neat applications to see. 1. When GM, Ford, and Chrysler were pretty much the only auto makers, the amount of competition was less which meant that consumers would pay more and fewer units would be shipped. If you want to calculate how this works, look up the cournot/nash equilibrium. As the car companies were selling at higher margins and ignoring the poorer people, labor could demand more money since the car companies were making more money per unit of labor used. 2. Other firms with lower labor costs also became more efficient. Toyota makes cars faster combined with a lower cost per hour. That means GM's labor is worth less money. 3. The value of output might be fluctuating. Here is where I'm spouting complete BS. As gas prices rise, the intrinsic value of a vehicle declines. Americans also seem to be having a shift in their perception of public transit and as their view of it becomes more favorable, the value of a car decreases. However, as most people are suburban, a car can still be a lifeline. It's late. I'm done. Hopefully that was interesting. It wasn't meant to have any view pro or con in it, just more of a view into how prices get set and how we value things.
wyclif 18y ago
You mean envy, not jealousy: Ordinary language tends to conflate envy and jealousy. The philosophical consensus is that these are distinct emotions.[2] While it is linguistically acceptable to say that one is jealous upon hearing about another's vacation, say, it has been plausibly argued that one is feeling envy, if either, in such a case. Both envy and jealousy are three-place relations; but this superficial similarity conceals an important difference. Jealousy involves three parties, the subject, the rival, and the beloved; and the jealous person's real locus of concern is the beloved—the person whose affection he is losing or fears losing—not his rival. Whereas envy is a two party relation, with a third relatum that is a good (albeit a good that could be a particular person's affections); and the envious person's locus of concern is the rival. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/envy/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/envy/
- dhimes 18y ago
  I like that definition, but dictionaries often make a less clear distinction, and put envy as a more powerful emotion. (try dictionary.com, for instance, but my print ones also concur)

Prrometheus 18y ago

Detroit fills Democratic Party campaign coffers. And before anyone says its a non-partisan thing, look at where opposition to this bailout and the previous one came from. That's right: the guys we just voted out for being war-mongers and Big Brother supporters. Ain't democracy grand?

prospero 18y ago
40% of Democrats opposed the original bailout package, compared to 66% of Republicans. That's a difference to be sure, but the vote was obviously not down party lines. Furthermore, Bush was a strong supporter of both packages, and was vocal in his disappointment when the first failed to pass. Facts exist independently of your opinion; you don't get to make them up to fit your argument. Please try to remember that.
- Prrometheus 18y ago
  In a congress that passes bills by majority, a clear majority of one party supported it and a clear majority of the other opposed it. House Republicans are consistently the most conservative caucus in Congress, and deserve praise for when they do the right thing as much as they deserve the opposite when they are wrong.
  - prospero 18y ago
    That doesn't parse. You're treating two different types of majorities as the same thing. It's fairly common that bills will be voted on down party lines, which means all Republicans vote one way, and all Democrats vote another. The standard deviation from this is generally pretty small, which is why the small majority held by the Democrats in both houses is such a big deal. Two-thirds of Republicans repudiated the pressure coming from the Bush administration and voted against the bailout. Democrats were only able to muster a simple majority in support of the bailout. That's as close to non-partisan behavior as you're likely to see in our government.
  - astine 18y ago
    It's true, that Republicans are more likely to uphold free-market principles than Democrats are, and this vote does demonstrate that, but it also demonstrates that that R next your representatives name is no guarantee that he is fiscally conservative. I prefer to vote based on personality and not on party and would prefer that both parties were destroyed and sent back to the abyss where they belong.

evgen 18y ago

FWIW, a large part of this problem has already been solved. You may not have noticed it, but a while back the UAW made a deal with the big three that in exchange for a large cash payout they would take over retiree pension and post-retirement healthcare obligations.

sethg 18y ago
...and, if I understand correctly, because Detroit made that payout, they are now in a poor cash position, which means that the credit crunch is putting a very big strain on them.

mhartl 18y ago

I basically agree with you, but it's worth noting that your hypothetical Denny's waitress would pay no federal income tax (though she would pay the payroll tax), and would probably qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit. It's really the professional wage earners (doctors, lawyers, etc.) pulling in a few hundred grand who get the shaft.

ewanmcteagle 18y ago
$8/hour = $16k per year (roughly). Since this is greater than the standard deduction you will not be avoiding federal income tax at this level.
- adamc 18y ago
  The tax on $16k per year is miniscule, if any.
  - steveplace 18y ago
    Payroll taxes suck, especially at this level. Sure you get them back in a refund, but there's an opportunity cost.
  - Retric 18y ago
    SS works out to ~15.3% add Medicare etc, and they are at ~20% the absolute top tax rate is 35% assuming zero deductions but capital gains is only 15%. With 16k * .2 we get 3,200$ in tax. Earned income tax credit = $428 with no qualifying children wow that helps.
    - vlad 18y ago
      An employee's share of SS tax is 6.4%, not 15.3%. (The full amount is twice that, or 12.4%, so I'm not sure where 15.3% comes from.) Add Medicare tax (1.45%, not 5%, and the employer pays a matching amount). You get 6.4% + 1.45% = 7.85%, not 20%. That's ~$1250. Add a 15% tax rate for a $2,000 federal tax, not 20%. We both arrive at $3,200 but I think my numbers are more accurate. Where you working backwards from a known number?

sethg 18y ago

Because if the Big Three go under, a very large number of workers (folks working for the Big Three and for their suppliers) will suddenly be collecting unemployment insurance instead of paying taxes; given the current state of the economy, they may be collecting it for quite a while. So it would be cheaper for the government to keep those employers afloat. The obvious counterargument to that is that the auto companies could take their $25 billion and still go under. The counter-counterargument is that even if that happens, it would be better for everyone if they went under a few years from now, when hopefully the rest of the economy will be in better shape.

crabapple 18y ago
Because if the Big Three go under, a very large number of workers (folks working for the Big Three and for their suppliers) will suddenly be collecting unemployment insurance instead of paying taxes and they will also paid in taxes if bailed. so GM is going to become a giant money laundering operation for the IRS? cut out the middleman and put them on unemployment...then they can actually find PRODUCTIVE work
- sethg 18y ago
  The unemployment would cost the government more than the bailout. One could argue that it would still be better off in the long term for the government to bite the bullet and pay that unemployment money than to keep the US auto industry afloat; I am partial to that argument myself. But I'm responding to the "why should a waitress at Denny's..." question.
  - yummyfajitas 18y ago
    Unemployment costs $362/week + administrative overhead. The wage of an auto worker costs from $1200/week to $2920/week (depending on whether you believe the $30/hour number or the $73/hour number floating around). http://www.michigan.gov/documents/uia/EUC_Fact_Sheet_120_240939_7.pdf http://www.michigan.gov/documents/uia/EUC_Fact_Sheet_120_240... Additionally, auto workers have an incentive to get off unemployment; it pays less than market rate. They have no incentive to stop working for GM, which pays above market rate.

mchristoff 18y ago

it really disgusts me that this comment has been upmodded so much. it reeks of overgeneralization, ignorance, and hyperbole. it's very easy to sit on your high horse and talk about hypothetical denny's waitresses, but a little harder when this actually effects you and your loved ones. my father worked his ass off for GM for more than 25 years, not to mention driving 100 miles each way for the last 10 so his family didn't have to move. when he retired a few years ago he made $25/hr + the overtime which he always worked so i could go to college. $25/hr an hour is not 8x of your hypothetical denny's waitress, it's what we call a "living wage". maybe your denny's waitress worked harder than my father, but assumption that every UAW worker somehow is swimming in a money bin like in scrooge mcduck while the rest of the country is toiling in the coal mines is false. i'm not defending the auto industry here, nor do have i decided whether it would benefit my country or my family to bail them out. i think management made some terrible decisions (see: suvs + $100/barrel oil), and i think UAW bargained for some deals that were unsustainable. heck, i'm not saying you should buy a buick... i'm sure as hell not. but why do you need to degrade the sacrifice of honest people to make your point?

ars 18y ago
You're talking like his job was an entitlement. Companies go bust and people lose jobs, it happens a lot. The reason people are talking UAW workers that way, is not because they begrudge the individual worker like your father - they don't. It's because the car companies were not allowed to fire or lay off people as they wished, which gives a very strong impression of entitlement and job guarantees amongst UAW workers that no one else in america has. If you got rid of that, and allowed car companies to hire and fire and set wages as they desired, people wouldn't be so opposed to the bailout. Personally I would support the bailout only if the company became non-union. So long as they stay unionized they will never survive, and the bailout will be wasted money. As a whole UAW was very destructive to the auto business - not allowing a company to fire people, or change wages, is a great way to destroy a company - and they succeeded. 100 miles each way? That's about 4 hours of driving each day, add in overtime, and there's nothing left to your day. Why not find a closer job?
- Xichekolas 18y ago

newsycaccount 18y ago

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=11&year=2008&base_name=gm_auto_workers_are_not_paid_7 http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?mo... You are claiming that they are making 10x as much as a Denny's worker, before their benefits? They make $28 an hour before benefits (about 3 or 4x a Denny's waitress after tips). Including benefits they are making $41 an hour. That is still no where near your crazy ass 10x number, especially considering that you can hardly claim their pensions are worth the full $7 as there is a significant chance these companies will go bankrupt and they won't ever see it. If the market could sell employees an annuity in exchange (assuming the bankrupcy risk for itself), it would probably only offer a few cents on the dollar.

Xichekolas 18y ago

I'm wondering where these GM employees with zero deductible healthcare are. My dad is a retiree, and the last time he had zero deductible healthcare was in 1998, when it was much cheaper for the company. Nowdays he pays 100% of his office visits and has some yearly deductible for other things. It's still a good health plan, but it's not exactly gold-plated. GM has done some incredibly stupid things, even my dad thinks the job bank was ridiculous, but they have made a lot of changes in the last 5-8 years, and were probably going to glide into something new and better had the market for cars not fallen apart. Now I'm not saying I support a bailout, I still think Chapter 11 probably makes the most sense, even if it means my dad's pension might get cut. I'm just trying to point out that a lot of these things that people bring up when they talk about GM (job banks, super health insurance, high wages) are issues that are no longer the case. When my dad retired, they already had his plant converted to $14/hr non-union workers.

mchristoff 18y ago
This is exactly my father's situation. Zero deductible health care, huh? Maybe 10 years ago, but certainly not now. Demononizing honest people based on stereotypes that people cling onto to support their perceived notions does not solve the real problem.

jmatt 18y ago

one must ask why a waitress at denny's who makes minimum wage and has no healthcare must bail out union workers at gm who make 8x the wages, do less work, have ZERO DEDUCTABLE healthcare (do you? i doubt it), and full pensions. It's not the waitress at denny's - there is a very good chance she pays no federal taxes. No, it's the engineers, management and entrepreneurs of all the successful companies in the US that are going to pay for the bail out(s). I agree let them go bankrupt or even a managed bankruptcy. They need to get those liabilities off the books. barak obama cannot force me to buy a buick This is how much of the world works, subsidize the local car companies and tax and tariff the foreign car companies. Currently the foreign car companies are essentially on the same playing field as foreign car companies in the US. Hopefully it will stay that way.

fakeslimshady 18y ago

There are probably 100s of industries and sectors imploding in this depression (folks hitech is getting there) that don't have lobbying power like the Autos. Instead bailing out Autos or Wall Street, this money needs to bailing out the wave of people that are going to enviably lose there jobs no matter what plan is done. But we should get something for the useful and lasting for the money - build Nuclear Power Plants, build a 100Mbs internet like they have in Japan/Korea, etc.