Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1367-1370

Protests by members of a relatively prosperous caste in India who want to be included in affirmative action programs highlight a major problem: India isn’t creating enough good jobs.
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The Patidar campaign, which is led by a 22-year-old firebrand named Hardik Patel, seeks a bigger slice of the economic pie. But no matter how officials decide to allot government quotas for the underprivileged, the main problem is that there is not enough pie to go around.
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It should come as no surprise that young Indians, especially those in the middle class like the Patels, are frustrated. Many have college degrees but still cannot land the kinds of professional jobs that they want….
India’s Middle-Class Revolt
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
New York Times
SEPT. 7, 2015 
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 Since the early 1970s, median pay has risen by only 8.7 percent, after adjusting for inflation, while productivity has grown by 72 percent. Since 2000, the gap has become even bigger, with pay up only 1.8 percent, despite productivity growth of 22 percent.
You Deserve a Raise Today. Interest Rates Don’t.
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
New York Times
SEPT. 7, 2015
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 Federal regulators said on Tuesday that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles had significantly underreported to regulators the number of death and injury claims linked to possible defects in its cars.
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In January, the Japanese automaker Honda agreed to pay $70 million in fines for failing to properly disclose to the government more than 1,700 deaths and injuries over an 11-year period.

That penalty was the largest ever imposed on an automaker by the safety agency — until Fiat Chrysler agreed to the penalties in July that could ultimately total $105 million.
Fiat Chrysler Concedes Violating Rule on Reporting Death and Injury Claims
By BILL VLASICSEPT. 29, 2015
New York Times

Europe's biggest automaker has admitted cheating in diesel emissions tests in the United States and Germany's transport minister said the company also manipulated them in Europe, where Volkswagen sells about 40 per cent of its vehicles.
Volkswagen to recall 11 million vehicles as emissions scandal expands
CBC News
Sep 29, 2015
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Art is Pointless....

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1364-1366

Q: Will the world ever get to “technological unemployment” because of advanced automation?

A: [Stephen Hawking] If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
Stephen Hawking: ‘Technology seems to drive inequality’
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There’s a whole treasure trove of government handouts that aren’t dispensed through spending, but rather through the tax code. That doesn’t make them any less “free” than a rent voucher or an Electronic Benefit Transfer card.
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Tax credits mainly help the poor, but the rest help the well off: According to the Congressional Budget Office, more than half of the benefits of these expenditures go to the richest 20 percent of American households.
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Poor families might be able to get Section 8 apartment vouchers or spots in public housing, but the mortgage interest deduction overwhelmingly helps people who make more than $100,000 a year buy their homes.
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What the government loses to tax expenditures dwarfs spending on welfare programs. Each year, it spends about $17 billion on assistance to needy families and more than $70 billion on food stamps, compared with more than $900 billion that flows out through the tax code. It expends nearly three times as much on tax subsidies for homeowners as it does for rental assistance for the poor.
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In a 2008 poll, 57 percent of people said they had never availed themselves of a government program, yet 94 percent of those same people had in fact benefited from at least one — mostly through what the Cornell professor Suzanne Mettler has called the “submerged state,” or the huge but often invisible network of money spent through the tax code.
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There are a couple of things in his plan that would benefit low-income Americans, like a boost to the earned-income tax credit. But thanks to proposed changes such as lowering the top income tax rate, ending the estate tax paid by the wealthiest 0.2 percent and even further reducing the rate for investment income, the biggest benefit would be handed to those who are already counted in the richest 1 percent slice of America. And it would come at a cost of at least $1.6 trillion over a decade, according to analysis by the Tax Foundation.
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Ronald Reagan conjured the boogeyman of the welfare queen...Yet he also, of course, proposed and passed huge tax cuts, which mostly lowered the burden on the wealthiest Americans and did little for everyone else. The top income rate dropped from 70 percent to 28 over the course of his presidency and has never gotten back up anywhere near that level since.
We All Get ‘Free Stuff’ From the Government
BRYCE COVERT
New York Times
OCT. 8, 2015
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Tragedies Draw Attention to Wall Street’s Grueling Pace
By WILLIAM D. COHAN
A rash of suicides and seizures has raised concern about jobs known for long hours and heavy workloads and how they affect the junior workers who do them.
New York Times headline
October 3, 2015 
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Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1361-1363

Lack of money is the root of all evil.
George Bernard Shaw

Not Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Astor together could have raised enough money to buy a quarter share in my little dog.
Ernest Thompson Seton

They blame the low income women for ruining the country because they are staying home with their children and not going out to work. They blame the middle income women for ruining the country because they go out to work and do not stay home to take care of their children.
Ann Richards 

thanks to Values of the Wise

 

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1358-1360

The September jobs numbers are easily the worst of 2015 so far.
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 The new numbers are poor on pretty much every level.
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This is usually the point in one of these stories where we would list the silver linings — the countervailing details that suggest it isn’t as bad as all that. This report doesn’t really offer any.
What the Terrible September Jobs Report Means for the Economy
Neil Irwin
New York Times
OCT. 2, 2015
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 There’s a new quinoa restaurant in San Francisco — yes, quinoa restaurants are a thing in San Francisco, so that’s not what’s noteworthy. At this restaurant, customers order, pay and receive their food and never interact with a person.

The restaurant, Eatsa, the first in a chain with national ambitions, is almost fully automated. There are no waiters or even an order taker behind a counter. There is no counter. There are unseen people helping to prepare the food, but there are plans to fully automate that process, too, if it can be done less expensively than employing people.
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Automation is transforming every industry....
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Eatsa is one more example of how rapidly machines have moved beyond routine jobs like clerical and manufacturing work to knowledge jobs and service jobs....
Restaurant of the Future? Service With an Impersonal Touch
Claire Cain Miller
New York Times
SEPT. 8, 2015
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If you consider how much of our world's systems revolve around scarcity — from basic needs like food and shelter to quality-of-life improving desirables — it's no wonder that the resource-abundant world of the Star Trek universe would seem like utopian fantasy. But every day, advances in science and technology take a step closer to a future that in a word can be described as abundant.
Our Star Trek-like Future Awaits on This Week’s Episode of Ask an Expert
By David J. Hill
SingularityHUB
Oct 01, 2015
Community, Video