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

To: tejek who wrote (528548)	11/13/2009 1:33:53 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1575207

It has been pointed out to you repeatedly that wage growth was extremely slow under the Bush expansion. Wages do not equal total compensation, again you distort the issue by just considering wages. Its gotten much worse under this recession. You would expect wage growth to do well during a recession?? Why have profits and salaries of upper mgmt. grown significantly over the past ten years while wages for workers have not? They are two different markets, no reason to expect them to track each other except perhaps over the very long run (like a century) and maybe not even then. Also, while its not really either president's responsibility or very under their control, inequality increased more under Clinton than under Bush. Then why are they not providing their employees with health care insurance Many, probably most, of them have. Not that it should really be their responsibility. We get health insurance primarily from employers because a series of government interventions favoring that idea. For those who don't, again its not really their responsibility, and its because either their employees don't produce enough to get compensation equal to the minimum wage plus the insurance costs (that are pushed higher by government regulation, esp. coverage requirements by the states), or because the employees prefer to have the additional wages or other benefits or percs rather than the insurance, when paying for the insurance would make their other wages and benefits relatively low. while fighting health care reform? I wish more of them where. The ideas on the table for "reform", are mostly negative. I thought you said companies want their employees to be healthy. If that were true, they would insist on providing health care insurance. Health insurance and health are related, but its far from a direct correlation of 1. Also employers can't provide their unskilled, low productivity employees insurance if the state drives up the cost, while also mandating a minimum wage. If the costs for all of this get too high, then they have to drop some of it, or just drop the employee. "If that where true they would insist on providing health care insurance" is just nonsense. Just as if they care about providing their unskilled low-productivity employees transportation to work, they still aren't going to provide them with a car. No one is asking companies to cover employees who are not good workers. 1 - You are. You want employers to cover employees. Some of them are going to be "not good workers". 2 - Until that last sentence I didn't say you where asking companies to cover employees who where not good workers. "Unproductive" was relative to other workers in general, not just in their field. Even a good fast food worker, or 7/11 cashier is unproductive compared to a decent doctor or computer programmer or a skilled manufacturing worker. Skilled, high-productivity employees tend to get employee provided insurance (and those who don't tend to get enough compensation that they could buy it themselves if they want it). Unskilled low productivity workers, might make enough to support the employer providing a low cost health insurance plan, but they might at the margin prefer extra wages, or be required to be given those wages through various minimum wage or "living wage" laws, or the state (like New York State) may add so many requirements to and other regulations on health insurance that its very expensive and the employer's return from the worker isn't high enough to support the insurance costs.

To: tejek who wrote (528548)	11/13/2009 3:56:09 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575207

Employer-Provided Medicine Is Completely Illogical Two simple observations are key to explaining both the high level of spending on medical care and the dissatisfaction with that spending. The first is that most payments to physicians or hospitals or other caregivers for medical care are made not by the patient but by a third party—an insurance company or employer or governmental body. The second is that nobody spends somebody else’s money as wisely or as frugally as he spends his own. No third party is involved when we shop at a supermarket. We pay the supermarket clerk directly: the same for gasoline for our car, clothes for our back, and so on down the line. Why, by contrast, are most medical payments made by third parties? The answer for the United States begins with the fact that medical care expenditures are exempt from the income tax if, and only if, medical care is provided by the employer. If an employee pays directly for medical care, the expenditure comes out of the employee’s after-tax income. If the employer pays for the employee’s medical care, the expenditure is treated as a tax-deductible expense for the employer and is not included as part of the employee’s income subject to income tax. That strong incentive explains why most consumers get their medical care through their employers or their spouses’ or their parents’ employer. In the next place, the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 made the government a third-party payer for persons and medical care covered by those measures. We have become so accustomed to employer-provided medical care that we regard it as part of the natural order. Yet it is thoroughly illogical. Why single out medical care? Food is more essential to life than medical care. Why not exempt the cost of food from taxes if provided by the employer? Why not return to the much-reviled company store when workers were in effect paid in kind rather than in cash? The revival of the company store for medicine has less to do with logic than pure chance. It is a wonderful example of how one bad government policy leads to another. During World War II, the government financed much wartime spending by printing money while, at the same time, imposing wage and price controls. The resulting repressed inflation produced shortages of many goods and services, including labor. Firms competing to acquire labor at government-controlled wages started to offer medical care as a fringe benefit. That benefit proved particularly attractive to workers and spread rapidly. ~Milton Friedman in his 2001 article "How To Cure Health Care." mjperry.blogspot.com