That's not at all what I said, but still funny nonetheless. Kudos for making light of it.

Again, you people prove my point for me. In the end all of you wind up showing your true colors. You can't even have a civil conversation, it all turns into raw emotion - either tears or anger.

By the way, I don't need your permission, I was born here. I also don't need your help, I have a skillset that has market value. I don't need anyone's help, I just need the rules to stay fair, and I'm good. Can you say the same for your side?

**** off. YOU started this by showing YOUR true colors you miserable ****. You don't get to talk about "getting rid of you people" without getting an emotional response. So it goes like this: you say you want to get rid of us people, I get angry at your complete ignorance, you say I'm not civil. Typical talk from the instigator.

Also in typical right wing nutjob fashion, you are only worried about yourself. No need for you to care about others when you have a skillset.

You just need the rules to stay fair? You. It's all about you. My side actually cares about others, like women, like the LGBT community, like the elderly, like non-whites. I have a masters degree and plenty of money. That doesn't matter a single bit. What does matter is **** sticks like you that don't care about any of those.

You're right, there's no talking to us. There's no convincing us that the political right have anyone's best interest in mind. They don't. It is absolutely obvious to anyone paying a lick of attention. **** you. Again.

I rest my case.

By the way, YOU are the one who said you "wanted to get rid of us." According to you, we need your permission. You are a deplorable piece of ****. It shows every time you post.

Your side doesn't want the rules to stay fair. They want rules to let sick people die, let the elderly lose their social security, medicare, and medicaid, get rid of anyone that isn't white, punish anyone that isn't straight, make the poor suffer needlessly, and further erode the middle class. My side wants an economy that works for all people. **** off with your pretend rhetoric.

I rest my case again. A re-rest, if you will.

Of course you do. You get to say vile things to me and turn me into the bad guy. **** off. You are the bad guy here. I'm not standing for these tactics anymore. YOU threw the insults at me. **** right off.

I rest my case. You are the most despicable person I've ever come across.

You can dish out the insults, but you can't take it when you get called out on it. Don't ****ing insult me and expect silence, I don't care where we are. You fit right in with Trump, McConnell, and company. The worst ****ing humans on earth.

I wish I did fit in with Trump, I wouldn't be wasting my time with people like you.

Yep, once again, people like me. Dirty lefties. People who actually care about others. You just can't stop saying you want to get rid of us. It's just like daddy's tweets, you stick your entire leg in your mouth every time you talk. This isn't going to stop. **** right off.

Wil,

You realize multiple studies have come out recently showing those place with an increased minimum wage are doing BETTER?

Also nice to see you have zero grasp how trade works! Remember when the GOP was the party of free trade? I do.

I suppose you are also in favor of ethanol subsidies like the president talked about last night?

I'm always open to data. Prove it to me.

It doesn't take much to google "minimum wage laws" and start seeing some very interesting articles. Some for, some against. But, as always, and I'll repeat that - AS ALWAYS, you have to be very careful about the data you are looking at and how it's being reported.

For example :

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michael.../#11677868156a

The headlines were ebullient: "Minimum Wage Increase Hasn't Killed Jobs in Seattle." So said a report from a team of researchers affiliated with the University of California-Berkeley, timed for the three-year anniversary of the law.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray conveniently had an infographic designed and ready to go for the study's release. His office excitedly tweeted that the policy had "raised food workers' pay, without negative impact on employment," linking to an uploaded study version on the Mayor's personal .gov website rather than a University domain.

Sounds good, right? Not so fast.

Nuanced conclusions like this one don't lend themselves to celebratory press releases like the one the Mayor's office put out yesterday. Enter the Berkeley team, which always arrives at the same positive conclusion on minimum wage no matter the number: In their view, a higher minimum wage is always a good thing.
In an expose published last year, the Albany Times-Union used emails obtained via public records request to explore the motivations of the Berkeley team:
The Times Union was recently provided hundreds of pages of emails among minimum wage advocates, Jacobs and other Berkeley academics, demonstrating a deep level of coordination between academics and advocates....
The Berkeley Labor Center has done at least six other studies on the minimum wage in California municipalities, all showing that a wage increase would be beneficial. In fact, Jacobs could not name a study conducted by Berkeley that said raising wages would have an overall negative impact. ...

Given this history of identical results, it's not surprising that the Murray administration in Seattle was anxious to have a copy of the predictably-positive Berkeley report to tout on the third anniversary of its minimum wage law.

The wage floor is still rising in Seattle, and there are more chapters to write on the city's minimum wage experiment. But if accuracy if the goal, the Berkeley team is not the right choice to author them.

Here's another:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.d649e40c42e2

It's never a good sign when the argument relies on mischaracterizing evidence. Hanauer's description of the work of Council of Economic Advisers chair Alan Krueger and UC Berkeley economist David Card on the minimum wage is incomplete, to put it generously. Hanauer writes that Card and Krueger show that, "contrary to conventional economic orthodoxy, increases in the minimum wage increase employment." And it's true that in two papers from the 1990s, one on the fast food industry and the other by Card on the state-by-state effect of federal increases in the minimum wage, the team found modest increases in employment follow an hike.

The bigger problem, though, is that there's been a lot of work on the minimum wage since Card and Krueger, much of which contradicts their findings. David Neumark at UC - Irvine and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors concluded in a 2007 review of the literature that a solid majority of studies find that minimum wage increases reduce employment, while very few, if any, provide convincing evidence that it increases employment.

And there are studies from other researchers backing up both Neumark/Wascher and Dube. A recent study from economists at the London School of Economics and the central bank of Turkey found higher minimum wages increased unemployment, while Berkeley’s Laura Giuliano found no effects, as does the Center for Economic and Policy Research's John Schmitt. It's fair to say that this is an empirical question on which labor economists are divided, though Neumark and Wascher's literature review suggests that the bulk of the research on the topic points to negative effects on employment.

As with everything from the left, you have to actually really dig and look into things to see if they are correct. The left cherry-picks data to make it look like what they are doing is correct/moral/beneficial. It is the same with climate science. It is the same with the energy industry (which I happen to know a lot about). Liberal data is suspect, you MUST dig into it to see how it is determined. Minimum wage benefits are the same.

I actually wish a major city in the United States would jack the Minimum Wage to 25 or 50 or 100 dollars an hour so we can really see what happens. I'm totally down for that. I'd hope a city on the West coast would do it.

I'm too tired to look either of these up right now, as I've been up for quite a while. Night shifts are hard. I'll deal with this later.

Clearly your stupidity is our fault. We apologize.

Racists and child violence enthusiasts calling us bad people doesn't hurt out feelings.

So obv this is IQ4ROLLZ right?

The trumpsist platform is essentially 'TRY TO MAKE PEOPLE CRY (about healthcare, food, water, and shelter) FOR FUN!!!'

I guess you've seen your company accounts. Never mind, when the day of reckoning arrives at least you've paved the way to blame it on the left.

I moved the discussion about moderation of posts wishing for people to die or be wiped out and etc. to the mod thread.

Most on the right don't want to abolish a safety net. They want to turn our current system into a safety net.

The right and their instances on forcing companies to provide health care for employees doesn't help wage growth. Yeah it is hard to believe that wages wouldn't grow when the cost of an employee goes up.

I am a strong believer in getting rid of the MW. I think we owe it to the poorest of the poor in this country.

There is no such thing as wealth transfers from the poor and middle class to the poor. I don't even know how would could fathom this being the case.

I am not a fan of the bailouts - especially the ones to the auto industry. However, since the rich pay all the taxes in this country they, along w/ all the middle class shareholders and workers, are just getting some of their money back.

A rare on-content post for this thread: Donald Trump drives his golf cart on the green

Like everything else, he lives his life like a poor person doing what they imagine rich people do

I think you're projecting Mooch-chelle Obama's attitude onto Trump. Good try though, B- minus for effort.

JiggyMac received a 1-day timeout for this post, for objectionable racial content.

Really? Because we have lots of examples of this for Trump (gaudy gold plating on everything, doesn't know how to conduct himself on a golf course, putting his name on everything, everything about his trying-to-be-fancy restaurant). If you think "Mooch-chelle" (what does that mean? I don't get it) Obama is actually who that describes, what examples did you have in mind?

I thought you were in the '1%'. Like you were one of his golf buddies or something. (Not that he actually has any buddies, for fairly obvious reasons of personality.) Oh well.

The only head of state I've met was President Mary Robinson, of Ireland, at a thing in Dublin back in 1995. She was a very fine person, I thought. Why you'd want to 'fit in' with such a crass, touchy, chip-on-shoulder inadequate as Donald Trump I can't imagine.

It's a term of abuse used by American ultra-racists who believe that all black Americans are 'welfare moochers' and therefore that the former First Lady was somehow a 'welfare moocher' in a way that white First Ladies somehow aren't.

North Korean newspaper calls Trump a psychopath who may launch a pre-emptive strike to distract from domestic problems

When you're such a bad president that North Korean state media becomes accurate