Hope that school district has a lot of money

re: albion

Yeah, there's really not much you can do about it, is there? It's the whole reason why convention didn't work with Trump. We fight so many things with the threat of shame. But if you're shameless? Well, turns out you're pretty untouchable.

How do you electorally attack a group that doesn't care what awful things you do and even cheers them on? You have to build a crazy high (nearly unobtainable) consensus among the non-crazies

SI

I wonder if Ben's essential movie list would be considered Critical Race Theory.

This is exactly how the extremism stakes raising game is played. One action begets another and the spiral tightens.

The movie US is must see


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Lack of shame along with quickly ratcheting up violence. Now, it is screaming at School Boards. Then it is threats, and then actual attacks. Our country is unraveling quickly.

It's weird - for so many years, I've heard about decay and morals from these same folks. Hell, even now, all I get whenever 1/6 is brought up is the George Floyd protests last year and how those were so much worse. And there's no way to wrench these people back to "one was about killing unarmed people while the other was about an election that wasn't stolen".

SI

Great story and shows some foresight. But overall last 6 weeks of the withdrawal and clusterfrak is a F.

Hundreds of U.S. citizens, Afghan commandos successfully evacuated through secret CIA base - POLITICO

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/01/us/te...aws/index.html

So we don't really need these gun rights advocacy groups anymore, do we?

Well, I guess we do need them to advocate for the people under 21 to be able to carry without a license or training.

We finally got the official refusal by the Supreme Court to stop the Texas abortion law. It was 5-4 with Roberts joining the dissenters. It looks about like expected. No ruling on the constitutionality, just that sense the state government isn't enforcing the law they have to have someone actually trying to enforce the law to make a judgement. Still doesn't sound promising overall for them to overturn it. If Texas does get away with this, more states are going to make "private deputies" laws like this for more than just abortion.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...m_npd_nn_tw_ma

A very blue state needs to pass a law that allows people to "sue" gun owners because their guns make them unsafe.

They'll block that law on the Shadow docket without explanation. This only works in one direction

I don't think the 2022 election is going to be about Afghanistan.

Why would anyone continue to vote Democrat? Shit, Republicans get stuff done in the minority. At least their voters have something to vote for.

I'm excited to be able to vote in the last two free elections in my lifetime!

I remember when I used to have arguments on this board with liberals who rooted for the far-right Republicans to win elections and gain power because they'd be easier to defeat in elections.

jeesus dude, you're in a constant state aren't you? Did we go through all this last year on election night?

I don't know if I ever used to openly argue for that. But I was quietly rooting for the far right people to win GOP primaries.

I was very very wrong.

I'd give a lot for a Jeb Bush type to be leading the GOP right now while all the MAGAs are sidelined.

What is the argument for caring? Democrats will complain a lot and fundraise off this stuff but will refuse to do anything about voting rights and reproductive rights.

I'm not saying don't vote, but at some point, don't the Democrats have to give you a reason to vote besides just complaining about the other side?

I guess what I'm saying is I know why Republicans will vote for their candidates. Those elected officials will do whatever they can for their base.

What's the opposing motivation besides "the same stuff will happen but we will put out angry press releases"?

I think the problem is not Democrats OR Republicans. The problem is Democrats AND Republicans. Power in the USA is not in the hands of the people, it is in the hands of the Oligarchy that is the two political parties. Career politicians are the problem, and there's really only one solution... to vote out all career politicians and get people into office that care about their constituency, NOT their political party.

All these career politicians are indebted to their party, and so will do what the party wants, not what is best for the people that actually voted for them. This is why BOTH parties say they are going to do things that they'll never do. That's why almost every vote in Congress and the Senate are along party lines. That's why there are so many issues that are not getting fixed in our country. Because the Oligarchs are fighting for power. Their pawns are us, the American people. They get their lemmings to get extremely emotional about something, and then there are riots and civil unrest.

The only difference I see is one side is active and one side is reactive. But their number one goal is the same... to take and keep power. And, to them, the ends justify the means. Think about that.

Some Dem resources with deep pockets should immediately flood the Texas legal system with several abortion claims against every GOP politician in the state. See how the practice works out.

The sued party cannot recoup legal fees either, so it is win-win for any dem who wants to sue.

Lots of GOPer voters complain that their candidates never fulfill the promises they've made.

Honestly, that's been true with abortion up until now and it's why there are crickets from the national GOP regarding this victory. Winning is really unpopular, but claiming to want to end abortion while doing little was electoral and fundraising gold.

Isn't that the Dem position on just about everything?

I think the difference is plenty of Dems say they aren't going to do things. The party itself is split to a much greater degree than the GOP.

I suspect the US is supporting this anti-Taliban group but can't be too overt because we still have citizens in the country. I can see a time when we try to use them as a proxy in the country (if they survive that long).

Looking at a map, Panjshir is north east of Kabul, well within Afghanistan. Landlocked, no airports, and closest border is Pakistan. With Taliban momentum, morale boost, more weapons etc. I'm thinking the odds are significantly against them. But who knows.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/02/asia/...hnk/index.html

One difference between Dem and GOP voters/supporters that I have noticed is how they react to good news/winning.

When the Supreme Court decided Lawrence and Obergefell, I remember liberals celebrating and making a huge deal out of it. They reveled in the victory. Literal dancing in the streets.

A couple of days ago, the Supreme Court issued the most anti-abortion ruling since Roe. It isn't a full overturn, but it was a huge signal that an overturn is likely. And it makes abortion effectively illegal (at least for a while) in an U.S. State for the first time since Roe. And, I mean, we are talking about abortion. This has been the motivating issue for a lot of the cultural right since I was born.

And I am seeing much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Left. But relative crickets on the Right. From what I can tell, it is still outrage about vaccine passports and Afghanistan on the Fox News beat.

The outrage machine does not seem to have a place for winning. You want to own the libs. But when you do, you can't enjoy it. You just have to find the next lib to own. Seems exhausting.

shitty jobs report. Not unexpected with Delta. But more bad news for a White House that really didn't need more bad news at this point.

The way it was done and the lack of celebration, to me, show that the party higher ups realize how incredibly unpopular it is to make abortion illegal.

I am /shocked/ that when you give the nutter wing of your party too much power and let it grow too strong, nutter things happen

SI

Agreed. Abortion was always the carrot dangling on the stick.

Abortion is also a strange issue because it's not really about abortion. It's more about control over others (women in general). The pro-life movement has never supported systems that would reduce abortions. So do they really care about this?

I'm not sure I truly understand exactly what it is that Texas did. So a few questions:

1. Is abortion after 6 weeks now criminally illegal?

2. I understand that anyone can now sue someone civilly if they believe that person to have assisted in an abortion - don't you have to break the law or a contract in order to be sued civilly? How does that person have standing?

3. I have heard people on both sides say this could be used to subvert the Constitution and law to make legal things (gun ownership, etc) de-facto illegal. Is that the case, and couldn't courts just overturn these laws?

The courts could overturn from what I see, but the big issue is that the supreme court did not issue an injunction stopping it while the constitutionality was debated. Essentially they said it is ok to have the law and it needs to go through the courts and make its way to the top court (usually they stop the law from going in to effect). Roberts and others seemed to believe it was blatantly unconstitutional enough to stop.

Abortion is not criminally illegal, but you can be sued for answering the phone at a clinic, driving somebody there, etc. It's very odd that the law was even written, let alone passed, because it really makes no sense.

There isn't much legal consistency with the Supreme Court these days. So technically you could make laws like that, but they would shoot it down if it was against things they like.

The idea behind it is to chill speech. And I think it'll be a more common tactic in the future. So lets say you get sued for a donation you made to Planned Parenthood. The courts may side with you on constitutionality grounds later on, but does the average person have a few million sitting around to fight it?

While the law goes after abortion successfully, its other intent is to make sure no one is allowed to hold an oppossing view.

I think someone has to go to court first though


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I'd just add that you can be sued for the intent to help even if you don't end up providing any assistance. It's a horrible law designed to terrorize women and enrich a bunch of trial lawyers.

GoDaddy's going to discontinue the Texas abortion snitching website in the next 24 hours.

GoDaddy is cutting off Texas Right to Life’s abortion ‘whistleblowing’ website - The Verge

Biden's approval has taken a shell-lacking.

Currently at 45.9% from a Jul high of 52.7% according to 538's consolidated polling. Market has been doing well but economy/unemployment is still sluggish, delta uncertainties looming, and there's the Afghanistan exit fiasco.

Biden needs a big win. Get the $1.2T approved, it'll help juice the economy and that'll go a long way in repairing his approval rating. But that's seems stuck with the larger $3T bill.

He's got time until 2022 elections but I think he needs to right the ship by end of this year.

Long overdue releasing the 9/11 materials.

US is in a relatively pretty good position with SA. Our oil dependency is reduced, Iran can squash them like a bug without US presence, OPEC is not as unified etc. Nevertheless, SA is still important to the US but yeah, let's call them out and see if we can effect some more change.

Also, not alot of movement on the Abraham accords since Trump left. Seems all that momentum now is gone (well, TBF the world has had to deal with covid). SA signing on would be a game changer but obviously lots of internal reprucussions.

Biden signs executive order calling for declassification review of 9/11 documents - POLITICO

Read reports that Panjshir has fallen to the Taliban and an another article that the head guy wants to negotiate. Either way, think these guys are toast.

There's not been news or articles on what Biden is doing for those citizens left behind. I assume there are negotiations behind the scenes. There isn't any news of any citizens being round up, doing the "perp walk", and tossed in jail so that is reassuring.

re: Pope encouraging other countries to take in refugees. How about a nice symbolic gesture and take some in yourself. I've been to Vatican city, there's space to take in, oh lets say, 50 families.

Especially young vulnerable kids

Too soon?


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I don't think I'll ever understand why they did two bills when it's effectively one bill. Just a complete waste of time and a good way to confuse people who aren't political junkies. Either way though, I think Biden's approval comes back some on it's own without the constant bad Afghanistan news. Ultimately he gets judged mainly on the path of the pandemic, as unfair as that is.

The Biden Presidency - 2020
 

@rainmaker

This is why strict capitalists in our country are simply gas lighting MFers. This shit goes on and on for the richest of the rich that game the system to F everyone else and then when the little people or plebes try to fight back, the well heeled scream ‘communist!’ F off jerkwads

The game is so rigged and they just play everyone for the fool


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Many Dems wanted a bipartisan bill and many GOPers believed a smaller bill could be used to kill the bigger bill.

On the economic side, I haven't seen any hard data on the macro level but all indications I can see in my area are that the labor shortages are growing. I.e., they've gone beyond the retail level and the supply level is now being hit, resulting in the return of product shortages in retail to a degree. Some suppliers are reducing the amount of products they produce to focus on the most popular ones etc. just as happened (to a much greater degree ofc) last year. I'm curious what breaks here first.

We went looking for furniture a few weeks ago and it's 4-6 months to get anything except for what little is on hand, usually only in one color and if you don't want it, you're waiting. We bought a new sofa/love seat and we're looking at February at earliest for delivery.

Your theory on it being unemployment benefits goes down in flames again.

States That Cut Unemployment Benefits Saw Limited Impact on Job Growth - WSJ

Going to side with labor shortage having a direct correlation to shit pay.

Do you really think this large of a sector of the economy is all paying shit? Esp. when in many cases they are paying more than they were a couple years ago?
And if so, where are the people not working getting their money from? How do they pay the bills? None of that makes any sense at all. Note that I can't properly comment on your link because paywall.

The way I saw it cynically put: A lot of people always suspected that their employers didn't care if they lived or died. The pandemic gave them proof. They have had trouble going back to work every since they got that knowledge.

That's fair, so let's assume that's true. It still doesn't explain how they are making end meet without working if they aren't getting enough for their needs from public assistance. And if they *are* getting enough their needs from public assistance, then that means that assistance is high enough they don't need to work. The evictions moratorium just recently ended (in a lot of states, some still have it in place). That's one pressure valve that we don't have enough data on yet.

Yes, we have data to show that workers produce more and are being paid less for it. We have data that shows the massive disparity in executive salaries and workers.

The Productivity–Pay Gap | Economic Policy Institute

There can be a lot of reasons for it, but with the data we have, we now know unemployment benefits was not one of them.

This is from a year ago, but there's probably some correlation here:

52% of young adults in US are living with their parents amid COVID-19 | Pew Research Center

We ordered a sofa and love seat back around January. It took a LONG time to finally show up.

That's literally not what that link shows. It says pay hasn't risen nearly as fast as productivity, not that workers are being paid less. Furthermore, the way they define productivity means that included in that is the effect of automation, which has been considerable. There's no definition there of how much of it is actually do to workers being more productive, and how much is due to work that workers don't have to even do anymore.

The Wall Street Journal article literally talks about the states that cut off unemployment benefits months ago and how they have seen no impact on labor shortages.

I suspect a lot of people significantly altered consumer choices over the last 18 months, too. There's the obvious like hardly anyone was taking vacations, car sales are way down because of supply (so you just nurse along the one you have), and eating out is way down. But if you were among those who lost some income, you started re-examining all your expenses: how many times eating out, how many things you ordered on Amazon you didn't really need, tv and streaming services, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if, for some segment of the population, you had permanently altered consumer spending habits, like the generation that grew up during the Great Depression.

Unfortunately, housing is biting people and I don't think it's going to let go for a while.

SI

I think those issues are definitely important. But they also don't answer the question here. Either a significant section of the potential labor pool has enough income from other sources to avoid working indefinitely or they don't. I.e. if you don't have enough money, you don't have the luxury of deciding not to work because you don't like the offered conditions. That's something that only enters the calculus when you have enough money that you don't need to work.

As I said, I can't read that because paywall. But let's take that as being true, which would mean that what I personally observed with my own eyes was somehow just localized to my area and not a widespread phenomenon. That's quite possible. It still begs the question of where people are getting the money to live on from. It has to come from somewhere.

This is a good point. It would definitely explain people who are upper-middle-class and above working less. It doesn't explain why people who aren't that well off, which are most of the relevant workers in this context, not going back to work. There's only so much you can reduce what you spend, at a certain point you still need necessities and you have be able to fund that somehow.

Large pools of official data would trump your anecdotal evidence.

As for where they are getting money from, we don't know. It could be cutting costs by moving in with parents or eliminating expenses. Perhaps dual-income homes have decided they'd rather be single-income homes where one parent stays with the kids. Or a mix of a bunch of factors.

What we do know is that the jobs available and the pay is not enticing enough for the public.

I should add that there are not articles about labor shortages in the 6-figure executive field. Odd how the high paying jobs are easy to fill. Maybe there is a correlation between pay and working.

And we have the highest rate of young adults living with their parents since the Great Depression. We're also seeing a massive drop in college enrollments, which reduces the need for jobs among young adults.

I lived like this back in 2019 when I was in between careers. Didn’t have much saved up (maybe $6k).

1. Three weeks of unemployment benefits paid my mortgage.
2. Cashed in a life insurance policy that I no longer needed which got me another $6k.
3. Ran up credit cards.

#3 is what kept me afloat. Of course those chickens all came home to roost eventually.

Another theory is that for decades, companies have been on a cutting spree even during good economic times. So if you're running at barebones while being wildly profitable, where do you go when things take a turn for the worse? We're finding out.

The idea that tens of millions of people will immediately jump at the chance to come back to work when you snap your fingers seems implausible.

So I think poorly run companies play a large role. And the reason that is exacerbated is because the government bails out poorly run companies (as they did during the pandemic). If we're socializing losses, theirs no risk to companies.

Of course there is. But it's also self-evidently not viable to pay entry-level workers six figures. So we have a couple of options here.

** Most businesses in America are incompetent to the point of not taking reasonable steps to address the labor shortage and allow their businesses to produce products at the level of consumer demand. If so we are simply going to have product shortages indefinitely, because the people running these companies are too dumb to even try to address the situation. This will also drive inflation, which hurts everyone.

** If that's not the case, and frankly even if it is, there's an upper-limit on what some jobs can pay without drastically increases prices. Eventually something's going to give. Either businesses will increase prices and wages significantly, which will hurt the poor the worst in terms of affording necessities but will ripple out to everyone, or people will eventually start coming back to work out of necessity. My guess is that the latter will happen, but the longer it takes the more it hurts everyone. The average American was already leveraged up in debt far too much before the pandemic; there's only so much more you can borrow etc. and a limit will eventually be reached.


None of that adequately explains our current situation, particularly for the middle-class-and-below sector of society that generally doesn't have the resources to make the dramatic kinds of cutbacks that would be required. For upper income classes, yes absolutely that can happen.


Except that in most sectors of the economy we haven't seen profit margins going through the roof. So that doesn't seem to be a tenable theory.

You can't discuss the labor market independent of COVID. Whatever may be happening includes a number of people fearful of going back to work in person, especially in people-intensive workplaces.

Oh, I fully agree with that. I do think it's a significant factor. But that still doesn't change the fact that those people have to be able to support themselves somehow. I hope they aren't just maxing out all possible forms of debt like lungs mentioned. The cost of that in the long-term would be catastrophic. Particularly given that COVID isn't going away, we're all going to have to figure out how to live with it, etc.

I think this is a huge one. Tons of families had to have one parent quit work when everything shut down because they literally had nowhere to send their kids while they worked. Lots of these jobs were blue collar that can't work from home. I think these families likely learned to exist on one income in that time, and between the covid risks and the risks of schools shutting down again a lot of these people aren't going back.

Unemployment also isn't static. Many people that are currently unemployed have worked some this year. I expect there's only a small number of people that haven't worked at all since March 2020.

I also think the benefits going away wouldn't fully impact things until the eviction ban went away.

Could lack of legal immigrants contribute to the shortage? I know it declined under Trump but I couldn't find any numbers after 2019?

I'm also going to theorize that part of the work force died of covid and covid also caused some boomers to retire.

Or maybe the FIRE movement is bigger than we all thought.

Companies aren't necessarily incompetent, there is just no incentive for them to be competent and factor in risk. The government has made it clear that if you are a big enough company, you will be bailed out, have your payroll and rent covered, or given an unlimited supply of cash at next to zero percent interest rates. Not to mention labor and criminal law don't really apply to you either.

So if a department requires 8 people to run it, a smart company may hire 10 people to alleviate risk. Because if something bad happens and they are down to 6 people, they lose a lot of money. But if those losses are covered by the government, why care about that downside?


Do companies have no other expenses to cut to keep prices the same? You act like the large companies are in dire straits when in fact they're massively profitable providing enormous returns for investors.

The talk started with the furniture industry so I decided to look up some of the biggest public furniture companies in the country. Bassett, Ethan Allen, Flexsteel, La-Z-Boy, and Leggett have all spent millions in buying shares back in the past year. An act that provides zero benefits to the business and is only done to enrich the share price of investors. A fraction of that sum could be used to fill labor gaps. Even companies like Hooker which haven't bough back shares have dramatically increased dividends.


We don't know how people are doing it. We just know that unemployment benefits were not holding people back from taking jobs. Maybe as more data comes out, we'll learn more.


Markets continuously hitting all-time highs, companies are continuing a rapid pace of stock buybacks. I'd say for those at the top, things are going quite well. What are these failing sectors you're speaking of?

The Biden Presidency - 2020
 

Statisticians
Data analysts
Truth tellers

You know people who cut through the Bullshit


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I keep coming back to the belief that a company is not a viable business if it requires its employees to make less than the cost of living to maintain its existence. If the company's margins are so close that they cannot pay their workers enough to have food, shelter, and transportation, it needs to fail and someone smarter, more creative, and more efficient needs to step up and take its place (or it is not a viable industry).

It would suck for some of my favorite restaurants or services or shops to go out of business, but it is also not practical for them to stay in business if they only exist and the only way to succeed is for full time workers to make lower than the cost of living and rely on the government for food or healthcare or their family for housing.

I didn't say they were failing. I said their profit margins weren't going through the roof, which they would be if your theory that they were making money hand over fist by employing fewer people was accurate.


How viable is a company that isn't attractive to investors? Buybacks don't provide zero benefits to the business. But leaving that aside for the moment ...

Just to use one of those examples, Ethan Allen has spent $100 million on buybacks in the past decade. They employ 4,250 people. So do the math. Let's say they spend *all* of that on increasing wages and don't buyback stock at all, and increase everyone's wages proportionally that works for them. It would come out to about a 6% increase in what they spend on labor. That's not nothing, but it's not going to move the needle much either. And of course, that's counting wages only; it's an even smaller increase if you include the value of benefits.

I'm not saying there are no cuts companies can make. I'm saying those cuts aren't zero-cost either, and they would need to make cuts dramatic changes to move the needle enough to solve the labor issues, changes of a magnitude far beyond their resources while maintaining prices at current levels. We're not talking about minimum-wage jobs. We're mostly not talking about jobs that would be minimum wage if it were jacked up to $15 hour nationwide. A lot of the jobs already pay well.


That's nice, but a lot of Americans don't work for a big enough company. So this isn't really particularly relevant as a matter of scale. Half of workers work for small businesses. A lot more work for larger businesses that aren't big enough to be a megacorp that fits into this category you're talking about.

What benefits do you think buybacks are providing the business?

Ethan Allen has over $100 million in cash on hand. They just gave a special cash dividend of $0.75 per share (on top of their normal dividend). So seems between that and the stock buybacks, they have a few bucks to invest in hiring new people without raising prices. And if not, how much money does a company need to hire more people?

Your stat counts a "small business" as having less than 500 employees. If you're running a business employing hundreds of people, you're likely fairly wealthy and have no problem accessing capital. Only 18% of employees work for companies with less than 20 employees (an actual small business). Regardless, these companies had access to PPP where the government covered their payroll AND rent for a significant period of time.

How does the cash on hand mean anything? You're clearly an intelligent person Rainmaker, which makes this argument confusing to me. I wouldn't suggest that Ethan Allen doesn't have access to enough cash/capitalization, but that isn't the point - it's about sustainability, profitability, etc.

I write this at the risk of dumbing down the conversation, but it seems evident we're misfiring at a fairly core assumption level somewhere in here. If they spent $100 million, or $200 million, or whatever, could they accelerate their manufacturing, hire more workers, etc? Absolutely they could. But as a basic example, if they spend say $100 million on a new labor force, that doesn't do any good if they can't sell the additional product for more than the labor + operational costs + raw materials etc. Just having access to the capital isn't enough; there's an upper limit on the wage that it is useful to hire new labor for. There are also the knock-on effects; if you hire for significantly above your current wage rate, then you either need to raise your current employees to that level (usually higher) or you run into very justified morale issues and productivity ones as well. A stable wage environment is integral to sustained operations, so whatever you boost the hiring rate to it has to be something that still allows a healthy profit for the forseeable future.

I don't know those contraints are exactly, I think one would have to be quite a student of the furniture business to know. The point though is that you can just throw that $100 million or whatever amount at paying new employees whatever it takes, that would be a myopic and foolish approach to running a business.

Your argument has been that these companies cannot afford to hire people at higher wages without raising prices. I'm simply pointing out that it's not the case.

A company like Ethan Allen is so profitable that they are not just putting out special cash dividends, but using their excess cash to juice the stock price at its high point. Two things you don't do if you're concerned about sustainability and profitability (like you said).

It's just debunked propaganda by people making 6 and 7-figure incomes who are upset that people won't work their garbage jobs for garbage pay. Like I said, there's no "labor shortage" in high-end executive positions for a reason.

The Biden Presidency - 2020
 

For the longest time Labor has been squeezed

Now Labor squeezing back (with help from a pandemic) and business is crying foul

It’s horse shit because the pendulum head swing against Labor for about 40 years and now a few years of it swinging the other way and business isn’t making the capitalistic argument that they should.

Pay more and demand for their job goes up

I also don’t want to spend a bunch of time eloquently arguing with Brian because it doesn’t matter… at. All. The goal posts just move so the time invested in arguing and making a long winded post are simply wasted seconds and minutes .

Sorry


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Not really. I'm saying they can't pay a higher enough amount to make a significant difference, not that they can't increase them *at all*. I haven't made an all-or-nothing argument here.


It's neither debunked nor propaganda, and I've been among what you would call the 'working poor' my entire adult life.

How much do you think a company like Ethan Allen should be paying? Do you think six-figures for an average employee is reasonable? It's always easy to say they should pay more. How much more do you think they can afford, based on what, without raising prices? What evidence do we have whatever that amount would be would be enough to bring in the amount of needed employees?

Also, what's your definition of 'garbage jobs for garbage pay'? Anything below six figures?

What we have right now is just 'they should pay more' with no boundaries or reasonable constraints to it. That strikes me as empty rhetoric since as a matter of basic logic, there are limits.

The goalposts are typically moved by others, not by me. As a practitioner of this, you are of course well aware of that.

Any full time job, you should be able to afford an apartment, transportation, food, health care.

It's quite simple. Let's not act like people are asking for six figures when much of that would take far less

I only picked that number because Rainmaker brought it up earlier in the discussion as part of the high-end executive example. There are evident issues with that example which make it not particularly relevant to the discussion underway, but I was using his number, not mine, to narrow down what range of salaries he thinks is reasonable here. I'm still very interested in getting definition of that from him or anyone else.

Pretty sure all that cash on hand, special cash dividend, and buyback money could go toward hiring a few people at market value.

They don't have to pay more. Just stop crying and making excuses about people not wanting your shitty jobs.

And my definition of a shitty job is one that you can't fill.

Exactly. $5 more an hour and I bet all these jobs are filled.

Absurd. There are a lot of jobs have gone unfilled for years, well prior to the pandemic, that pay more than $5 above your typical Ethan Allen employee. There are a lot of jobs that have gone unfilled that are above the median pay in this country. Paying their work force $5 more an hour would also eat up approximately two-thirds of their profit margin, making it dangerously small. That might be sustainable if they were able to cut expenses elsewhere in some way, but it's far from being a sure thing it's sustainable and still allow for a reasonable measure of agility. To circle back to square one, they of course aren't the losers here. The losers are consumers, average people, who find themselves once again enduring shortages that are mystifying to them

In other words, by your definition of a shitty job, there aren't many jobs in America that aren't shitty - or at least, that pay more than jobs which are shitty. My final word is that's a serious lack of perspective.

Adding to the pile of info, I'm not going to debate this just presenting it because I thought it was interesting to add to the pile of facts of the job situation, is historically high levels of people quitting their jobs continues:

https://twitter.com/nick_bunker/stat...462151/photo/1

Delta could explain some of this, but not all of it as it's been sustained for several months. I think I'm at the point of just grabbing some popcorn and seeing how things shake out by the end of the year, but I'm increasingly pessimistic about recovery/stability.

New Harvard Research: In the Middle of the Great Resignation, Employers Are Rejecting Millions of Qualified Workers

It's a fair question from Brian. I don't know that I am qualified to answer it as a solidly middle class government worker. I have as little practical sense of the bottom of the wage scale as I do the top. I feel very "It's one banana, Michael" about it.

But just going from my gut, I'd say that $40,000/yr feels like a "I can have kids on this and not worry about them going hungry, or us missing rent, or getting the power cut off" floor.

I just did the (simple) math, and that works out to $20/hr. Which does seem to be in shouting distance of where wages seem to be going in some places.

(Now I wait for people to flood this with statistics showing how that's either way too high or way too low for a "reasonable" wage :-)).

Depends on where you live.

We have winter rentals here going for $2400/month. Just did a quick search for a 2 bedroom apartment in my area. First hit came back $2000/month. After taxes your 40K a year can't even cover rent.

I don't know anything about who put this together, their methodologies, biases, etc., but this seems like a decent starting place:

Livable Wage By State 2021

I'm surprised to see KY at the bottom. But it also reinforces my decision to sell my Florida house at the absolute apex of the 2006 housing bubble and relocate to Kentucky.

Also, this is not based on a "family of 4" scenario, from what I can tell. It appears to be individual worker-focused.

It's based on the MIT living wage calculator. And going to the MIT site it seems to correlate with the "2 Adults 0 Children" column the best, at least for Ohio.

Where are these high-paying jobs that just can't be filled? Like what industry are we talking about?

The quitting in retail trade makes sense if you've been to a retail store lately. The way people treat employees at stores.......

I went to McDonalds right off the highway near my house a few weeks ago, it was late at night (like 9pm) and I just wanted to get my daughter a milkshake I had promised earlier. After waiting in the drive through line for like 5 minutes and realized it was going nowhere, I parked an went inside. There were 2 people working there (plus a manager) and one person had just started. People were screaming and getting all up in arms, like what do you expect from some 17 year old with no training with nobody to help. The manager said they were not allowed to pay over a certain wage and everyone who starts just quits after a week.

Side note, I should have just gone to CFA but it was one exit away and I had just played an hour of grueling soccer. But yeah, people were being total dicks to a bunch of kids over not getting their shit burgers fast enough.

Again, no matter what Brian says, capitalism is it. Pay more to make it worth their while to work at the job after weighing all of the pros and cons. If the business has to raise pricing (which many don't if they stop with the quarterly earnings charade and the buybacks and the unreal pay scale at the top [for now]) and their product isn't supported by market prices then guess what, capitalism fixes that too. It's amazing to me how fast the wealthy typically republican business owners shirk capitalism when it helps themselves make an argument or cry about things and then use capitalism to justify their 30 years' worth of behavior. YOU CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS (well you can because there are people out there who will bend themselves into pretzels to tow the company or ideological line). Capitalism fixes it all if the government doesn't come to their rescue when capitalism forces them to adjust.

Right now nursing jobs are rather hard to fill...