An imaginary conversation with my family doctor

by person who reads Denis (lots of links)Me: $1.2 million is the average income for top 1 percentile households (2006 figure). You must have made at smallest amount a couple of million last year, right? I mean you are a consultant â€" and you are with Columbia Presbyterian hospital.Doctor Levine: “[Laughs].”Me: You mean that the 15% of GDP that slipped out of the pockets of bottom 90 percentile earners and into the buckets of top 1 percentile earners over the past a small number of decades slipped right past you doctors?Doctor Levine: “[Smiles ruefully].”Me: Still, with the US having 135% of the for each capita GDP of similar modern economies we have to negative trouble devoting 15% of GDP [.15 X 1.35 = .2025] to health care, right (note parallel with 15% of income shifted to pockets of folks who earn lots additional than doctors)? Unless we have too intensely gutted much of our workforce’s pay â€" with something like 30% of families living below the poverty line.A plausible poverty line for a family of three (on the "minimum needs" table on p.44 of the 2001 book Raise the Floor) is $33,345 in 2008 dollars -- if health care is otherwise covered(not the $20,000 administration calculation based on three era the price of an crisis diet â€" premiums alone go beyond $12,000 yr.!). If you look at the Census, average family income is about $62,000. The real minimum needs line would hover somewhere around 37 percentile â€" 37 percentile if we didn't count families with waged health insurance. Knock off 7 points (guesstimate) for families on the top end with waged insurance (not those on the bottom with Medicaid) and we can reckon â€" it turns out very reliably -- about 30% of American families’ incomes are below minimum needs without administration helps like foodstuff stamps.Sounds like a quarter of the country must be earning less than the minimum wage otherwise something equally crazy, right? Nearly a quarter of the workforce is earning less than the minimum wage â€" if we are talking about Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 minimum wage of $10/hr [$1.60/hr adjusted] â€" back when average income was not whole today’s. (FYI, tech improvement, like how much better today’s Timex is, generally not counted in inflation estimates.)Doctor Levine: “How can something like this happen; why can’t we straighten it out?”We can straighten out our labor market any time we wish â€" nothing like this happens anywhere else in the first-world. Simply institute the same labor market structure in place in almost every modern economy (and a lot of not consequently modern like Argentina and Indonesia): sector-wide labor agreements â€" wherein everyone with the same job description within the same setting works under identical collectively bargained terms with all the different firms â€" legislation required. [Note: check out French-Canadian “lite” version.]Medical Doctor (not psychiatrist) Levine: What is holding back our big wig progressives from pushing â€" otherwise at smallest amount mentioning out loud â€" such apparently badly needed and promisingly efficacious labor market changes?Me: Something I call “pack check.” Males instinctively check in with what everyone else is thoughts on any economic otherwise supporting â€" otherwise figurative “hunting pack” -- issue. And as long as they stay fix-focused on what everyone else is thoughts it can appear impossible to them to make headway in an entirely new policy direction: consequently a lot of different people require consequently a lot of different approaches â€" and whom did we ever convert before with our most reasonable (we thought) arguments. Impostavazoo!Sociobiology time â€" my lay opinion anyway: chasing wild pigs (what human males evolved doing) necessary a kind of perfect awareness of what every other hunting pack member was action (pigs, as anyone who owns single can tell you, are not stupid) â€" was an essential continued existence mechanism. Without awareness of the need to break free from this innate focus-on-everybody-else’s-focus, at smallest amount for short breaks, all the economic male geeks in all the world might never initiate any new solution to the uniquely lop-side bargaining power ruining the American labor market â€" nor anything else â€" negative matter how obviously practical, negative matter how desperately (!) needed.Human males are not consequently much swine headed as we are “pig-chase” headed.Doctor Levine: “[Makes excuse; finally escapes].”
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