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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (340907)	6/21/2007 1:08:19 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572916

No, it's not. If I give you a loaf of bread that costs me $1 or the same loaf of bread that costs me $5 the benefit to you is the same. In the case of health insurance you no longer even get a whole loaf of bread. 1 - It isn't the same slice of bread. People get more and better health care now than in the past. Instead of one slice of wonderbread for $1, the benefit is paying for two slice of gourmet bread for the $5. 2 - You can reasonable adjust all compensation by the overall inflation rate, or if you have enough information (and we probably don't) you can adjust different categories of income by the inflation rate in the area where the income is spent. What is not reasonable is to adjust one category of income, that goes to an area with one of the highest inflation rates (medical care) by that extra high inflation rate, while adjusting all other income by the general rate of inflation, which includes the inflation for that high inflation area. If your going to adjust health benefits down by the high inflation rate for health care, then you should adjust wages (or at least wages not spent on health care) down only by an inflation rate which excludes the higher inflation in health care, otherwise your adjustment for inflation for all income is larger then the actual amount of inflation, and thus you get falsely low date for real compensation or income. The bottom 20% used to have choices that they don't have anymore (mostly because of legal and illegal immigration).. Of course some didn't take the choices and ended up in the bottom 5%. The supply/demand was different... and you could make a good living doing really shitty jobs. Not graduating high school today amounts to making the wrong choice in life, and putting yourself at the bottom. Or if you had a good connection you could get a union job that wasn't that shitty where you made a decent buck. People with good connections now, also tend to do fairly well, or at least avoid being very poor.