Riddle me this

[jaguar]

What it means is you're screwing yourself.

The rich are that way because they made the pie bigger, not because they penny-ante'd some welfare mom's check from her.

This is the kind of thing that really makes me laugh. Or cry, depending on mood. Look at say, the kafuffle over estate tax, and look at who is affected by that. Or bush's last round of tax cuts that did little for the economy but sure helped some of his mates. Look at the tens of billions of public money effectively siphoned to rich cronies off by untendered contracts over Iraq.

The other thing that halfwits like noodle tend not to take into account is themore recent concept of non metric externalities. People's wellbeing and most forms of environmental damage being the most common two. By exploiting these things you're effectively borrowing against a finite resource you cannot really define or passing the cost silently over to someone else, this doesn't mean there isn't a cost involved. Look at the cost of things like depression on the economy (when they put a vague number or it) or the forecasts for economic damage from the greenhouse effect and it starts to come into focus. There is a vague school involving this called PAE - post autistic economics which has gained some ground but it's effectively fractured and a bit all over the place at the moment, postmodern economics is not very mature yet but needed more than ever in the face of people like noodle.

The minimum wage stops exploitative businesses doing people over even harder than they do at the moment, there is no way to encourage a business to pay more for the same labour, it's not in their interest. People do live on the minimum wage, usually supplemented by a sideline of some sort, take the 'burden' of businesses to pay employees in something other than peanuts fucks over all those people, including particularly vulnerable categories like new immigrants. I suppose environmental law is a 'burden' as well, why not let them dump PCBs into the local ecosystem so they can concentrate on making more environmentally friendly products? Both statements are fucking non sequiturs.

As for your folks social security cheque, this admin is working to stop that as soon as possible.