Perhaps we should accept AC sliding further into the pit of irrelevance. Are those bulldozers I hear in the background? Sad reflection on the Atlantic City leadership and the State of NJ. Shame shame.
From the APP:
Atlantic City rejected by voters on new Monopoly games
Atlantic City is where the Monopoly board game began, but voters in a global contest to pick cities for new editions of the 80-year-old game have turned their attention elsewhere.
Hasbro Inc. let voters choose which cities would appear in the two new versions it is putting out, including one that will feature world cities. According to results released Thursday — the 80th birthday of Monopoly — Atlantic City, whose streets provided the names for the game’s squares when it was created in 1935, did not make the cut.
The winners in the Monopoly Here & Now U.S. edition are Pierre, South Dakota; Minneapolis; New York; Virginia Beach; Los Angeles; Chicago; Indianapolis; Charleston, South Carolina; Detroit; Boston; Milwaukee; Cleveland; Asheville, North Carolina; Denver; Atlanta; Little Rock, Arkansas; Seattle; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Charlotte, North Carolina; Dallas; Waconia, Minnesota; and Chesapeake, Virginia.
…
The Press of Atlantic City, in an editorial published this month when preliminary results showed Atlantic City lagging far behind, had this to say:“Atlantic City made Monopoly. Atlantic City catches people’s attention. People are interested in the city. It’s special. Trust us, a game based on the city of Toledo — or Pawtucket, Rhode Island, for that matter, Hasbro Inc.’s hometown — would not have lasted for 80 years.”
Good Morning New Jersey
I am not a fan of the new bill being floated that allows municipalities to set their own minimum wages. For those who think this is positive, you have your head up your ass.
This mechanism can very easily be used to create a situation of exclusionary zoning against non-resident workers. Imagine a situation where Alpine, under the guise of being altruistic raises the minimum wage to $25. Fantastic! But behind the scenes you didn’t hear the entire point of this was to keep low wage workers, maybe those who require mass transit or busses, to stay the hell out of their town.
Beautiful. Perhaps a small business owner, maybe a Subway or 7-11, looking to set up shop near downtown. Residents object to it, but zoning doesn’t have a good reason to deny. Perhaps they could easily raise minimum wage to $14.00, making it uneconomical for that employer to start in that location.
On the flip side, it’s going to be enjoyable watching Montclair chase out all of the businesses on Bloomfield Ave. It’ll be fun to see ghetto make its way up Bloomfield Ave as businesses go out of business or move. I’m just bubbling with glee thinking about the outrageous numbers that will be floated in Montclair.
I’ll say it again, NJ’s democrats and republicans can not be entrusted with these kinds of decisions, especially on the local level.
Did you hear about the bill that allows towns and cities to force municipal employees to live within city limits? I think Ras Baraka from Newark is pushing for it…..
I think cops should be required to live in the cities they police. At some point they became the military, and forgot about being part of the community. If the current cops don’t want to live there, I’m sure there are plenty of viable candidates in the local community that would embrace the opportunity.
I also think ticket, fine, and seizure revenue should immediately go to the state level, and not to local coffers. This creates a perverse incentive.
Cops should probably have quotas on handshakes and walking their local beats. Instead of 20 speeding tickets, they should be required to introduce themselves and talk with 20 local residents and business people.
So….snowpocalypse today? WTF….I just traded in my Frontier 4×4 too. Thought we were done with this stuff.
Grim, Joyce, and others of the libertarian bent, this article makes some good points.
David Graeber
Ferguson and the Criminalization of American Life
The Department of Justice’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department has scandalized the nation, and justly so. But the department’s institutional racism, while shocking, isn’t the report’s most striking revelation.
More damning is this: in a major American city, the criminal justice system perceives a large part of that city’s population not as citizens to be protected, but as potential targets for what can only be described as a shake-down operation designed to wring money out of the poorest and most vulnerable by any means they could, and that as a result, the overwhelming majority of Ferguson’s citizens had outstanding warrants.
Many will try to write off this pattern of economic exploitation as some kind of strange anomaly. In fact, it’s anything but. What the racism of Ferguson’s criminal justice system produced is simply a nightmarish caricature of something that is beginning to happen on every level of American life; something which is beginning to transform our most basic sense of who we are, and how we—or most of us, anyway—relate to the central institutions of our society, in ways that are genuinely disastrous.
The DOJ’s report has made us all familiar with the details: the constant pressure on police to issue as many citations as possible for minor infractions (such as parking or seat-belt violations) and the equal pressure on the courts to make the fines as high as possible; the arcane court rules apparently designed to be almost impossible to follow (the court’s own web page contained incorrect information); the way citizens who had never been found guilty—indeed, never even been accused—of an actual crime were rounded up, jailed, threatened with “indefinite” incarceration in fetid cells, risking disease and serious injury, until their destitute families could assemble hundreds if not thousands of dollars in fines, fees, and penalties to pay their jailers.
As a result of such practices, over three quarters of the population had warrants out for the arrest at any given time. The entire population was criminalized.
It’s important to remember though that these were not criminal warrants. The inhabitants were not even being accused of actual crimes (that is, felonies or misdemeanors.) Parking tickets, or tickets for unmoved lawns or improperly placed trash receptacles, are not criminal matters, they are violations of administrative codes having the same legal standing as, say, a supermarket’s failure to take a loaf of bread past the due date off their shelves. They were simply being treated as if they were criminals.
Obviously, this picture has almost nothing to do with anything we normally consider “justice.” Still, if the image of police terrorizing and manhandling citizens over parking fines seems bizarre, it’s partly because we tend to forget who and what the police actually are. The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals—indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don’t do exactly what they tell you.
The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force—even, death—into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.
For most of American history, police enforcement of such regulations was not considered a major source of funding for local government. But today, in many municipalities, as much as 40% of the money governments depend on comes from the kinds of predatory policing that has become a fact of life for the citizens of Ferguson.How did this happen? Some of it, of course, has to do with populist anti-tax movements, beginning with California’s Proposition 13. But much of it has happened because in recent decades, local governments have become deeply indebted to large, private financial institutions—many of the same ones that brought of us the crash of 2008. (In Ferguson, for instance, the amount of revenue collected in fines corresponds almost exactly to that shelled out to service municipal debt.) Increasingly, cities find themselves in the business of arresting citizens in order to pay creditors.
But the banks themselves are using very similar methods. Most financial institutions themselves now acquire the majority of their profits from penalizing members of the general public for rule-breaking. According to a 2012 report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, overdraft and insufficient funds fees made up sixty-one percent of bank profits from consumer checking accounts; and in 2009, J. P Morgan Chase, the biggest bank in America, reported 71% of its total profits derived from fees and penalties. Put another way, this means that the profitability of America’s banks is based on knowingly creating rules so complicated that they know a significant portion of their customers won’t to be able to follow them—and then punishing those customers for failing to do so.
And this pattern can be observed down the line. Even our higher education system now operates largely as an engine for trapping students in permanent debt, and much of the profits to be extracted from student debtors comes from penalizing them for missed payments, postponements and defaults.
Almost every institution in America—from our corporations to our schools, hospitals, and civic authorities—now seems to operate largely as an engine for extracting revenue, by imposing ever more complex sets of rules that are designed to be broken. And these rules are almost invariably enforced on a sliding scale: ever-so-gently on the rich and powerful (think of what happens to those banks when they themselves break the law), but with absolute Draconian harshness on the poorest and most vulnerable. As a result, the wealthiest Americans gain their wealth, increasingly, not from making or selling anything, but from coming up with ever-more creative ways to make us feel like criminals.
This is a profound transformation, and one we barely talk about. But it is rapidly altering people’s most basic conceptions of their relations with society at large.
In a very real sense, the “middle class” is not an economic category, it’s a social one. To be middle class is to feel that the fundamental institutional structures of society are, or should be, on your side. If you see a policeman and you feel more safe, rather than less, then you can be pretty sure you’re middle class. Yet for the first time since polling began, most Americans in 2012 indicated they do not, in fact, consider themselves middle class.
The Department of Justice report on the Ferguson Police Department should give us the means to finally begin to understand why. Most Americans no longer feel that the institutions of government are, or even could be, on their side. Because increasingly, in a very basic sense, they’re not.
David Graeber teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, and Direct Action: An Ethnography. His latest book is The Utopia of Rules.
The article points to what I see is the Achille’s heel of our country’s prosperity and survival. Right now is all “I got mine, screw you”. If this keeps up, when we have a real enemy and need to act in a real war, not this past few war profiteering events, no one is going to stick together. To quote the great philosopher Cartman,
https://youtu.be/nZh_dfuqQUo
I remember as a kid in grade school, occasionally a cop was the crossing guard on the main road. Maybe he just stopped in occasionally, or covered for when the usual crossing guard or aide was out sick. I think he knew 100 kids by name, hell he probably knew everyone. This was back in the day when kids would be assigned as “safety patrol”. We got orange belts and straps, and were each assigned a corner to be crossing guard for. We were the last ones to come in before school started, and the cop was always great to us. I still remember that he used to call me “Skip”, and it wasn’t because he didn’t know my name, he did. I even remember when we had a big argument with him about why we called gasoline “gas”, and how it made no sense because it was a liquid. A bunch of 5th graders finally got him to concede on that. Do cops still do this? Or are they too busy planning raids and terrorism drills?
What the f*ck happened? I can’t imagine anything was safer back then, sure as hell didn’t live in la la land. Does this even happen anymore? I have no idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this concept is anything other than heresy today. File this with the loss of metal tonka trucks, using milk crates to make bike ramps, and being out all day from sunrise to when the street lights came on.
I don’t think anything was safer back then, but somehow it all turned out alright.
Maybe that’s the problem with millennials these days, no responsibility, no opportunity to knock out a tooth or break an arm. Bring back the orange belted safety patrol and their whistles.
Please make my day and tell me that the safety patrol is still around
This is not to be confused with “hall monitors” which were largely comprised of tattletale losers.
Maybe that’s the problem with millennials these days, no responsibility, no opportunity to knock out a tooth or break an arm.
Chipping a nail from texting too quickly is their equivalent to breaking an arm.
2, 6,
The proper function of government is to protect individual rights.
As the Declaration of Independence noted:
“…men …are endowed …with certain unalienable Rights, …among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness… to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men”
At present, the vast majority of government action and government spending is directed toward the violation of rights rather than the securing of rights.
Forbidding someone to work for less than some official deems a “fair wage” is a blatant violation of rights, turning “whites only” into “high skilled only”. Similarly, when government decides which intoxicants are legal and which ones get someone put in jail, when government sets up shoddy subpar road infrastructure (its first violation of rights) and then starts predatorily ticketing users, and telling them where they can walk, what they can do in “public spaces”, then they have set themselves up as county commissioner Boss Hogg, or more historically, as the Sherriff of Nottingham, persecuting the common folk for poaching the king’s deer.
Powerful post. After reading this, I’m left with the feeling that something is def wrong. You said it best, “what the f*ck happened”. I think greed changed it all. It’s not about building a great society for everyone. It’s now about building a great society for “me”. Banana republic indeed.
grim says:
March 20, 2015 at 8:38 am
I remember as a kid in grade school, occasionally a cop was the crossing guard on the main road. Maybe he just stopped in occasionally, or covered for when the usual crossing guard or aide was out sick. I think he knew 100 kids by name, hell he probably knew everyone. This was back in the day when kids would be assigned as “safety patrol”. We got orange belts and straps, and were each assigned a corner to be crossing guard for. We were the last ones to come in before school started, and the cop was always great to us. I still remember that he used to call me “Skip”, and it wasn’t because he didn’t know my name, he did. I even remember when we had a big argument with him about why we called gasoline “gas”, and how it made no sense because it was a liquid. A bunch of 5th graders finally got him to concede on that. Do cops still do this? Or are they too busy planning raids and terrorism drills?
What the f*ck happened? I can’t imagine anything was safer back then, sure as hell didn’t live in la la land. Does this even happen anymore? I have no idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this concept is anything other than heresy today. File this with the loss of metal tonka trucks, using milk crates to make bike ramps, and being out all day from sunrise to when the street lights came on.
I don’t think anything was safer back then, but somehow it all turned out alright.
Maybe that’s the problem with millennials these days, no responsibility, no opportunity to knock out a tooth or break an arm. Bring back the orange belted safety patrol and their whistles.
I think as we move forward we see that the various wars on drugs, poverty, terrorism – etc – have all failed. People are tired and cynical in regards to the government’s ability to do anything right.
We still believe and rightly so in the power of the individual.
http://coffeewithacop.com/
They do this a couple of times a year where I live.
Thanks for the sharing that article. Never really thought about this angle. It is def cause for some deep thinking. Think this passage sums it up. If you feel safe around a police officer, you are middle class or higher. Pretty crazy point, if you think about it. They are really going to divide this country based on wealth.
Racism as we know is dead. It no longer involves race, it’s become an all out attack on the poor. Whether through paying them slave wages; yes minimum wage is a slave wage when you can’t survive on it.
It doesn’t matter what the actual wage figure is, what matters is how this wage correlates to the cost of living. Make 50,000 and live in NYC or north jersey, and all you are doing is accruing debt to survive. By nature, debt makes you a slave to someone. So if these individuals are working for a wage that only puts them further into debt, is this not a form of slavery in one way or another?
“In a very real sense, the “middle class” is not an economic category, it’s a social one. To be middle class is to feel that the fundamental institutional structures of society are, or should be, on your side. If you see a policeman and you feel more safe, rather than less, then you can be pretty sure you’re middle class. Yet for the first time since polling began, most Americans in 2012 indicated they do not, in fact, consider themselves middle class.”
So Ferguson is the fault of the Jews running banks in New York…..thank you David Graeber……
6-The author makes some interesting points, but maybe glossed over what could be the main root of the problem: these governments whether local, state or federal become so reckless when it comes to spending money. Dave Ramsey likes to say the borrower is a slave to the lender. For example, how does a relatively small to mid-size town like Montclair end up with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt?
Government represents close to 40% of the economy, mostly via legalized plunder, taking from one group, bestowing benefits on another. While also “managing” via regulations and subsidies much more of the economy than that. Including central planners manipulating interest rates, currencies, steering loans and financing to banks. All of which is rights-violating activity. When government is bloated to this degree and a wanton violator of rights, it’s inevitable that such a rights-violating-machine equipped with guns and prisons will turn into tribal warfare. Thus we see the rise of lobbyists, pay to play, interest-group politics. Because we’ve reached an environment where political pull and power trumps individual merit. Each party has its own favorite tribes to represent.
The solution – a dramatically smaller government devoted to protecting individual rights. A government that neither showers money on bankers nor farmers, nor welfare careerists. A government that doesn’t tell you how much ethanol must go in your gas, nor how many ounces your soda cup must be. A government that protects you from fraud, theft, and other external force, rather than inflicting these on you.
Too Many laws, too many prisoners
http://www.economist.com/node/16636027
THREE pickup trucks pulled up outside George Norris’s home in Spring, Texas. Six armed police in flak jackets jumped out. Thinking they must have come to the wrong place, Mr Norris opened his front door, and was startled to be shoved against a wall and frisked for weapons. He was forced into a chair for four hours while officers ransacked his house. They pulled out drawers, rifled through papers, dumped things on the floor and eventually loaded 37 boxes of Mr Norris’s possessions onto their pickups. They refused to tell him what he had done wrong. “It wasn’t fun, I can tell you that,” he recalls.
Mr Norris was 65 years old at the time, and a collector of orchids. He eventually discovered that he was suspected of smuggling the flowers into America, an offence under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. This came as a shock. He did indeed import flowers and sell them to other orchid-lovers. And it was true that his suppliers in Latin America were sometimes sloppy about their paperwork. In a shipment of many similar-looking plants, it was rare for each permit to match each orchid precisely.
In March 2004, five months after the raid, Mr Norris was indicted, handcuffed and thrown into a cell with a suspected murderer and two suspected drug-dealers. When told why he was there, “they thought it hilarious.” One asked: “What do you do with these things? Smoke ’em?”
Grim (2) – Let’s set the over-under on the Montclair minimum wage now.
There’s been much debate going on the local internets here since keeping the school tax levy increase down to only 4.15% this year is going to require the layoff of about 50+ paraprofessionals and classroom teachers.
Teacher’s contract is up this coming year and off course many of the local testing opt-out crowd are already crying about the “false choices” in the budget. Health insurance premiums for the district are going up about 30%, but to talk about considering changes to the teacher’s health benefits is tantamount to treason….I guess folks would rather have layoffs and class sizes over 25 instead of considering modest increases in co-pays.
Soon there will be no money left in the budget for anything for “the kids”, but I suppose these folks will still be over the moon happy that they won the right to opt out and have their kids read in the library for 2 hours instead of taking the PARCC. Can’t wait to see the opt out crowd go apoplectic when the next NJ Monthly school survey drops Montclair at least 25 spots in the rankings due to their lower standardized test scores.
Beautifully explained. I know we don’t agree on the wage issue, but if you set up govt like this, we would not have to worry about a stupid min wage. With no lobbying, a wage would truly be justified by what value it brings. If the wage was unable to support a living, it would simply not exist under the govt you envision.
Ragnar says:
March 20, 2015 at 9:40 am
Government represents close to 40% of the economy, mostly via legalized plunder, taking from one group, bestowing benefits on another. While also “managing” via regulations and subsidies much more of the economy than that. Including central planners manipulating interest rates, currencies, steering loans and financing to banks. All of which is rights-violating activity. When government is bloated to this degree and a wanton violator of rights, it’s inevitable that such a rights-violating-machine equipped with guns and prisons will turn into tribal warfare. Thus we see the rise of lobbyists, pay to play, interest-group politics. Because we’ve reached an environment where political pull and power trumps individual merit. Each party has its own favorite tribes to represent.
The solution – a dramatically smaller government devoted to protecting individual rights. A government that neither showers money on bankers nor farmers, nor welfare careerists. A government that doesn’t tell you how much ethanol must go in your gas, nor how many ounces your soda cup must be. A government that protects you from fraud, theft, and other external force, rather than inflicting these on you.
17. It’s called personal responsibility. If you make 50k per year and live in NYC or North Jersey you need to ask yourself why you are there. Move someplace with a lower cost of living because you are probably doing a job that can be done elsewhere. Minimum wage is just that it is a minimum, burger flippers, baristas and other workers in the hospitality industry don’t realize that compared to migrant farm workers or construction laborers who make $10 or less an hour their job is super easy and can be replaced by machines. If the wage rises the jobs won’t exist, they only exist because there is a minimal cost. Compared to the Utopian paradise most of our ancestors came to a 130 years ago the poor today have it very easy in some respects. The issue is not the minimum wage, that is all a scam coming from the unions who have contracts predicated on minimum wage, but the issue is not the minimum wage jobs. The issue is the lack of good middle class jobs that pay a good wage, the issue is that the middle class is under attack and the politicians give them no cover. Democrats steal from the wealthy and give to the poor, the net effect is making the middle class poor, republicans with crony capitalism give all kinds of breaks to the rich who then abuse the middle class in the name of greater profits. The middle class gets hit with new Obamacare taxes and taxes of many kinds, have jobs where there is the constant threat of outsourcing and H1B visa workers being brought into replace you and as a result they get no raises, no bonuses and live in fear that they might be given the axe any day. The middle class is being assailed by globalization and our own government, not only are they not helping, they are taxing people to death and hindering the ability of people to create economic activity. The government needs to incentivize domestic job creation, people don’t need handouts, they need opportunity to succeed.
22 – $11.00
24- In a place like nyc, who will perform the minimum wage service jobs in a location where rent is prob 2000 a month min. They can live out of town, but how will they be able to afford the commute in? So what’s the answer? Someone has to do the low paying crappy job, but how do we expect these people to survive in a high cost of living location like NYC. I don’t know the answer, but I do know that we need to come up with one.
24- Also, I agree, enough with the handouts. My problem is, why are there handouts in the first place? Imo, it’s to keep a group of people, who have no chance at surviving due to lack of jobs, happy and content. We take away their handouts and how will all these people survive? So why do we have handouts? Because the govt and leaders of private industry are doing a terrible job of creating meaningful work for the majority of the population. They are taking the easy way out and just providing hand outs to keep the population from acting out. Not sure if I’m right, but this is how I see it. Welfare is a product of terrible job creation. Create good jobs and you get people off the welfare line. Destroy good jobs and you just increase the welfare line.
The unemployment rate is at 5.5% so what’s the problem? Oblama fixed everything, what more do you want?
Grim 25 – I’ll take the over. Does Montclair’s mandated paid sick time for PT workers get calculated into the minimum?
Gator [22];
require the layoff of about 50+ paraprofessionals
Nothing new under the sun. At budget crunch time its always the 50 para-professionals in the classrooms with the kids, never the equivalent salary savings of 10 six-figure administrators. The scare tactic centers on cutting teachers, cops and firefighters, never the mayor’s brother-in-law with the no-bid contract.
Jcer,
But Oblamer just told me his “middle class economics” works.
What a liar he is. The rich buy Obama and his advertisements in return for favors, the lower to lower-middle income people provide his core voting block in return for subsidies, and the middle to upper middle income folks finance everyone, while being lied to about it all being for their own good.
I recall when I was little Cops coming down the street and folks would yell PIGS and throw stuff at them. A cop was just there to take a bribe, get some free food or beers off the store, give you a ticket etc. Cops drove fast as you never know in the bronx when bricks and stuff be coming down off and overpass or a rooftop. Yea and good luck running up five flights of stairs when roofs were connected, kids jumped roof to roof and elevator surfed. Cops knew better than to enter a building without a Partner and calling for back-up.
Cops used to be good up to around the mid 1960s. Pretty much around Kent State time and the Hippie period they started going down hill.
Powerful stuff. This guy is pretty damn intelligent.
“These were followed by a major historical monograph, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Melville House), which appeared in July 2011.[20] Speaking about Debt with the Brooklyn Rail, Graeber remarked:
The IMF (International Monetary Fund) and what they did to countries in the Global South—which is, of course, exactly the same thing bankers are starting to do at home now—is just a modern version of this old story. That is, creditors and governments saying you’re having a financial crisis, you owe money, obviously you must pay your debts. There’s no question of forgiving debts. Therefore, people are going to have to stop eating so much. The money has to be extracted from the most vulnerable members of society. Lives are destroyed; millions of people die. People would never dream of supporting such a policy until you say, “Well, they have to pay their debts.”[21]
He is currently working on an historical work on the origins of social inequality with University College London archaeologist David Wengrow.
His book on the Occupy movement and related issues was released as The Democracy Project in 2013. One of the points he raises in this book is the increase in what he calls bullshit jobs, referring to meaningless employment. He sees such jobs as being “concentrated in professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers”.[22] As he explained also in an article in STRIKE! magazine:
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.[23]
Since January 2013, Graeber has been a contributing editor at The Baffler magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 2011, he has also been editor at large in the free online journal HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory, for which he and Giovanni da Col co-wrote the founding theoretical statement.”
33- He is so on pt with the pointless work. That’s wrong to force someone, who only has one life to live, to live a life performing pointless work for the sake of just working and having a job. There has to be a better way to run society.
Wayne budget packs the lowest tax hike in decades, mayor says
While good news, I found this salary for sergeants interesting:
A bigger rise in taxes was checked by cutting three unfilled positions, including two sergeants in the police department at salaries of around $150,000, Vergano said. The reduction reduced the police force to 114 officers, Vergano said.
http://www.northjersey.com/news/wayne-budget-packs-the-lowest-tax-hike-in-decades-mayor-says-1.1292500
Pumpkin [26];
Not tough at all. There is a market for labor like a market for anything else. Business that buy labor pay as little as they can to get the quantity/quality they desire. If someone takes a low-paying job in a high-COL area, they do the math (expressly or inherently) whether its worth it to them, including QoL, commuting costs and arrangements, etc.
Minimum wage is just a price floor. Standard macroeconomic theory states that artificial price floors cause disruption to equilibrium. There is a surplus of supply, because the artificially elevated price level brings in more sellers, and deters buyers. So the workers get their minimum wage, but they also have no job security, because they can be readily replaced by the next eager applicant. If the surplus of supply were NOT the case, the minimum wage would be irrelevant — wage levels would eclipse the minimum.
I never really got why ‘champion of the downtrodden’ were so hip on giving pay raises to middle- and upper-class teenagers; that’s who mostly works minimum wage jobs.
How is cutting an unfilled position a reduction in force?
1987 Condo says:
March 20, 2015 at 11:35 am
Wayne budget packs the lowest tax hike in decades, mayor says
While good news, I found this salary for sergeants interesting:
A bigger rise in taxes was checked by cutting three unfilled positions, including two sergeants in the police department at salaries of around $150,000, Vergano said. The reduction reduced the police force to 114 officers, Vergano said.
http://www.northjersey.com/news/wayne-budget-packs-the-lowest-tax-hike-in-decades-mayor-says-1.1292500
Pumpkin [34];
Put down the bong, dude. People work to buy food, shelter and clothing. The rest is gravy. Before people had “jobs” as we think of them they foraged in the words for berries and small animals, or scratched out some grain as subsistence tenant farmers. This IS the better way to run a society.
What you say, sounds great in theory, but doesn’t happen in reality. First, screw the min wage talk. I don’t care about min wage and would rather focus on low wage. Those low wages are artificially held down by the welfare state. Those people don’t make enough to survive, so the govt gives them section 8 and foods stamps to survive. How is that fair to me? If you took away min wage and welfare, those low wages would actually rise. No one would take them if you can’t survive on it. That’s a FACT.
The rich guy makes out by paying his workers less than it costs to survive. The poor guy makes out by getting money from the govt to survive on a paycheck that he would not normally be able to survive on at the expense of the middle class tax payer.
Bet you never looked at it like this.
Anon E. Moose says:
March 20, 2015 at 11:36 am
Pumpkin [26];
24- In a place like nyc, who will perform the minimum wage service jobs in a location where rent is prob 2000 a month min. They can live out of town, but how will they be able to afford the commute in? So what’s the answer? Someone has to do the low paying crappy job, but how do we expect these people to survive in a high cost of living location like NYC. I don’t know the answer, but I do know that we need to come up with one.
Not tough at all. There is a market for labor like a market for anything else. Business that buy labor pay as little as they can to get the quantity/quality they desire. If someone takes a low-paying job in a high-COL area, they do the math (expressly or inherently) whether its worth it to them, including QoL, commuting costs and arrangements, etc.
Minimum wage is just a price floor. Standard macroeconomic theory states that artificial price floors cause disruption to equilibrium. There is a surplus of supply, because the artificially elevated price level brings in more sellers, and deters buyers. So the workers get their minimum wage, but they also have no job security, because they can be readily replaced by the next eager applicant. If the surplus of supply were NOT the case, the minimum wage would be irrelevant — wage levels would eclipse the minimum.
I never really got why ‘champion of the downtrodden’ were so hip on giving pay raises to middle- and upper-class teenagers; that’s who mostly works minimum wage jobs.
You put down the bong. That society of hunting and gathering has gone the way of the dinosaur. It’s a new world and new system.
Anon E. Moose says:
March 20, 2015 at 11:39 am
Pumpkin [34];
Put down the bong, dude. People work to buy food, shelter and clothing. The rest is gravy. Before people had “jobs” as we think of them they foraged in the words for berries and small animals, or scratched out some grain as subsistence tenant farmers. This IS the better way to run a society.
distillery ain’t running yet, but fair warning that the labor hired will be screwed
grim says:
March 20, 2015 at 7:52 am
I am not a fan of the new bill being floated that allows municipalities to set their own minimum wages. For those who think this is positive, you have your head up your ass.
Essex #14 – Ben Carson for president?
dinosaurs would still be around if it weren’t for CEOs and hedge fund managers. they have made humanity advance
The Great Pumpkin says:
March 20, 2015 at 12:04 pm
You put down the bong. That society of hunting and gathering has gone the way of the dinosaur. It’s a new world and new system.
Anon E. Moose says:
March 20, 2015 at 11:39 am
Pumpkin [34];
Put down the bong, dude. People work to buy food, shelter and clothing. The rest is gravy. Before people had “jobs” as we think of them they foraged in the words for berries and small animals, or scratched out some grain as subsistence tenant farmers. This IS the better way to run a society.
Cheap housing…affordable to minimum wage earners? Haven’t you heard of 81 bowery?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBl2IHX5efA
Are these the lazy poor everyone talks about? The poor really have it made in this country. Sad, that people must live like this so that a few could live like billionaires.
Toxic Crayons says:
March 20, 2015 at 12:43 pm
Cheap housing…affordable to minimum wage earners? Haven’t you heard of 81 bowery?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBl2IHX5efA
Still waiting for someone to dispute this theory. Eliminate min wage and welfare, and low wages will be higher than they currently are. They are not forms of support, but vehicles for holding down wages.
The Great Pumpkin says:
March 20, 2015 at 12:01 pm
What you say, sounds great in theory, but doesn’t happen in reality. First, screw the min wage talk. I don’t care about min wage and would rather focus on low wage. Those low wages are artificially held down by the welfare state. Those people don’t make enough to survive, so the govt gives them section 8 and foods stamps to survive. How is that fair to me? If you took away min wage and welfare, those low wages would actually rise. No one would take them if you can’t survive on it. That’s a FACT.
The rich guy makes out by paying his workers less than it costs to survive. The poor guy makes out by getting money from the govt to survive on a paycheck that he would not normally be able to survive on at the expense of the middle class tax payer.
Bet you never looked at it like this.
What’s that old saying about giving a man a fish or teaching him to fish?
I think that’s a Chinese proverb actually.
http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/x9mh9f
60 Minutes report on 1976 swine flu
Beautiful. Barely a rise in taxes. 2-3 more years of this, and all those people that left for another state will be regretting it big time. Their taxes will be rising much faster than ours.
“Township taxes are set to rise $22.79 under the budget introduced this week, the lowest increase since the 1990s, made possible by job cuts and retirements that have saved $1 million, the mayor said.
Mayor Chris Vergano said the budget would have been flat had it not been for pension payments that rose to $5.1 million for next year from $4.5 million in the current budget.
“We would be sitting here tonight with zero tax increase,” he said on Wednesday during a meeting with the Township Council, which voted 7-0 to introduce the budget. “
Grim,
Cops still fill in for crossing guards in Glen Ridge and we know many on the force. It’s how when my wallet fell out of my pocket when dropping Gator Jr. off at school that I got a Facebook message, a text message, a voice mail at home and a Facebook message to my wife about 30 minutes after a kid turned it in to the school.
I too was on the Safety Patrol in elementary school. Did you go to Great Adventure on Safety Patrol day? I was a bus stop monitor and I also worked on the school bus. It was great as the Safeties got dibs on the coveted back seat.
As for Montclair, to go along with the minimum wage, they have already passed a local ordinance which forces employers to pay sick time to part timers. If you use a babysitter too often, you could be sued for not paying her if she doesn’t show up. I love progressives. They all think they are as smart as the typical Roman Senator.
Pumpkin [39];
Those low wages are artificially held down by the welfare state. Those people don’t make enough to survive, so the govt gives them section 8 and foods stamps to survive. How is that fair to me? If you took away min wage and welfare, those low wages would actually rise. No one would take them if you can’t survive on it. That’s a FACT.
Be careful. You’re starting to sound like a conservative. Hang out with me and Rags some more and we’ll infect you with some real free market ideas.
It looks like we have new tenants and for $100 more a month than the last ones. And for the first time ever, the wife took the husband’s last name. Guess where they are from (don’t let that last piece of info fool you)?
Pumpkin [46];
Still waiting for someone to dispute this theory. Eliminate min wage and welfare, and low wages will be higher than they currently are. They are not forms of support, but vehicles for holding down wages.
Nothing to dispute. Simple redistribution. Soak the workers; skim some to keep the leftist ruling class in the matter to which they’ve become accustomed, and pay for some patronage jobs to keep the regimes in line; give away the crumbs that are left to the ‘leisure class’, who dutifully vote for their ‘benefactors’ over and over again.
What you’re missing is that the market for labor is simply responding to reality. Funny how that works, huh? Even 235 year later, Adam Smith is STILL RIGHT!
re: #52 – “wife took the husband’s last name.” Utter madness, someone should put a stop to it right now.
Hey, before I started participating on this blog, I was definitely more on the left side. You guys have definitely had some major influence on me; I would rather be dead than be a full on democrat. Five years ago, if a gun was put to my head to choose, I would have went left. Now, I would prob rather take the bullet than pick a side.
Anon E. Moose says:
March 20, 2015 at 1:30 pm
Pumpkin [39];
Those low wages are artificially held down by the welfare state. Those people don’t make enough to survive, so the govt gives them section 8 and foods stamps to survive. How is that fair to me? If you took away min wage and welfare, those low wages would actually rise. No one would take them if you can’t survive on it. That’s a FACT.
Be careful. You’re starting to sound like a conservative. Hang out with me and Rags some more and we’ll infect you with some real free market ideas.
Great time to be a landlord. A couple of months ago, I had my long time tenants leave. Thank goodness. A 200 increase in rent and didn’t even lose a month of rent. Apartment was rented with no problem whatsoever.
Libturd in Union says:
March 20, 2015 at 1:31 pm
It looks like we have new tenants and for $100 more a month than the last ones. And for the first time ever, the wife took the husband’s last name. Guess where they are from (don’t let that last piece of info fool you)?
I said I would reply to this from 2 days ago. I was going to do it that night but I was overtaken by events that took precedence (truthfully, dealing with toe pug would take precedence over responding to ccb but I digress. I really was busy with unexpected work and family matters)
So I had the idea of taking ccb’s post, which was chock full of logical fallacies, and identifying them, much as I would do to his personality with the DSM-V if I were a shrink. But I felt that wasn’t quite enough, and I made you all wait, so I decided to examine what he said as well as how he said it. So, for your reading enjoyment . . .
ccb223 says:
March 18, 2015 at 5:32 pm
Com/Statler — you guys are kind of dense huh? [ad hominem and personal incredulity right off the bat][tu quoque to follow]
Touting your gallup poll guy like he’s some kind of hero because he pulls some silly new test out of his arse. [argumtum ad igorantiam/cherrypicking/tu quoque. Also a red herring and straw man in one sentence] If you want to compare apples to apples (so we can figure out where we are from a historical perspective) you have to use the same metrics we have used historically [appeal to tradition, continuation of the red herring/straw man] Sure he is free to come up with a new test that can skew things (probably to profit by selling it or running ads against it or whatever [ad hominem, assumption of facts not in evidence, attribution of motive]) but baffled that you don’t see the flaws with this new test. [Classic personal incredulity. Also ad hominem/appeal to ignorance/continuation of the red herring/cherry pick]
Comparing it to the percentage of the adult population makes no sense [omniscience. Also argumentum ad ignorantiam/appeal to ignorance]…clearly there are more and more people in the U.S. as we live longer and technology improves (look up a US population growth chart) thus your denominator keeps getting bigger thereby making the percentage smaller. Plus there are lots of retired folks who don’t want to work and other rich folks, stay at home moms, etc. who also choose not to work.
It’s a silly test created so he can profit [ad hominem/straw man/deflection. Assumes facts not in evidence]….happens to suit your agenda so you tout it without giving it any deep thought [Personal incredulity. Also a form of genetic fallacy. Also ad hominem and confirmation bias]. Wasted too much of my time explaining this to you, won’t do it again. [confirmation bias and projection] But you should be embarrassed. [personal incredulity. Also ad hominem/appeal to ignorance/confirmation bias]”
Note that ccb never restates what the premise of my original post was. Either he didn’t get it or he is deflecting in order to make his point, using a ton of logical fallacies to do it. He starts with a personal attack, shifts into a tu quoque deflection, then continues a red herring drill down into a criticism of the new Gallup test discussed in the article, which wasn’t the central premise of the posted article or my post. Admittedly, it was a minor premise that was touted to support the major premise so let’s keep playing. He starts his attack on the minor premise with an appeal to tradition and subtle appeal to authority (which also displays a confirmation bias) but doesn’t support the [government] premise he is purporting to defend. He continues with an omniscient statement then provides the sole logical criticism to the Gallup P2P metric (which was never the main point of the article or the post).
By trying to take out the P2P metric as flawed, CCB is attempting to show the CEO as biased and wrong, and, by extension, anyone reposting the article as biased and wrong. This he states clearly. But in his one attempt at logical argument, he makes what I consider to be a pretty big error himself.
To restate CCB’s only point in which he isn’t being insulting, he states “clearly there are more and more people in the U.S. as we live longer and technology improves (look up a US population growth chart) thus your denominator keeps getting bigger thereby making the percentage smaller. Plus there are lots of retired folks who don’t want to work and other rich folks, stay at home moms, etc. who also choose not to work.”
Yes, the denominator is getting bigger in real terms. But he makes no mention of the numerator or purport to explain that its stasis. At best, he attempts to explain the numerator’s stasis by pointing out the existence of the retired, SAHMs and the idle rich. Futher, by this argument, which he supports by pointing out longevity, he ignores organic population growth (births) and immigration. The population isn’t just living longer (which would reflect stasis), it is growing, and it isn’t growing with retirees and idle rich. For CCB’s denominator increase to be attributable to nonbirth factors, we’d have to be importing stay at home moms and wealthy Chinese. I submit that we aren’t. Rather, I submit that our population is growing organically, but jobs aren’t keeping pace; this would explain the drop in P2P percentage (btw, does P2P sound a lot like the participation rate?)
So, at the end of the day, ccb attempts to bring down the central point of the article, that small businesses are dying (fewer created than are shuttered) by attempting to undermine the credibility of a metric used in tangential support of the premise. This is also a rhetological fallacy, BTW—find something objectionable in an argument, be it a fact or minor premise, to attempt to disprove the whole. He doesn’t prove that the central premise relied on the minor premise, nor did he even disprove the minor premise as demonstrated above. Finally, he gets his main point wrong by not explaining why the numerator doesn’t have to change when the denominator does.
Now, how do I get these 15 minutes back?
52 Lib in the PRM…..Brooklyn?
[52] libturd,
“And for the first time ever, the wife took the husband’s last name. ”
Isn’t that illegal in Montklair?
Inflated housing valuations? The appraisers say they are increasingly being pressured to inflate home valuations? False Home Equity?
What year is this 2005 or 2015?
http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2015/03/20/report-says-false-equity-is-on-the-rise-in-housing-market/?mod=WSJBlog&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Fdevelopments%2Ffeed+%28WSJ.com%3A+Developments+Blog%29
[57] redux
Upon re-reading, I wasn’t that clear in my takedown of ccb’s attempted takedown of Gallup. If you have any questions, post them. Not that I am going to be here much, what with work, a busy weekend and the tournament.
And it’s snowing here so I have that.
Cheers and enjoy the weekend anon gave you.
I want this place.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102523273?trknav=homestack:topnews:7
Pumpkin the world may finally be ending, we agree on something. Govt aid makes low wages possible. I know for a fact that Laquisha the barista at starbucks in times square can only survive on $12 bucks an hour because she lives in public housing. In Zurich a barista makes $35 an hour and they have no minimum wage there, how can that be, well without government aid the barista needs to make enough money to survive. Supply and demand, if it was not physically possible to live close enough to a job and survive on what is paid, the pay correspondingly needs to increase. Now in all likelyhood what would really wind up happening with the aid, Laquisha would be able to afford NYC, she’d move someplace cheaper and starbucks replaces Laquisha with a robot.
Inflated housing valuations? The appraisers say they are increasingly being pressured to inflate home valuations? False Home Equity?
What a sh1t show. Are any of you surprised?
Images by Tyrone Greene …
Dark and lonely on the summer night.
Kill my landlord, kill my landlord.
Watchdog barking – Do he bite?
Kill my landlord, kill my landlord.
Slip in his window,
Break his neck!
Then his house
I start to wreck!
Got no reason —
What the heck!
Kill my landlord, kill my landlord.
C-I-L-L …
My land – lord …
Def!
Ragnar,
I’ll take “Obamanation” for $500, Alex.
Rags,
I think that was Eddie’s first appearance on SNL. It was disappointing to see him so joyless and arrogant during the reunion. Man, those old bits were great. I still love Mr. White.
Anon 30 – it’s about 36 paraprofessionals and 15 teachers. They might be able to reduce that number a little bit based on retirements and how much below a 32% increase the health insurance premiums come in at.
They are cutting about 400k in positions in Central Office, 4 elementary school “deans” and possibly 3 elementary school student assistance counselors….they have a FT student assistance counselor at each elementary school in town.
The paraprofessional number in Montclair seems really high. I believe the number floated out in one of the last meetings was at about 225.
Those staff cuts will come along with the 4.15% levy increase.
Meanwhile in GR, they crafted a budget that came in below the 2% cap, cut no staff or programs and even managed to add to the capital reserve fund.
Re: [41];
What a prick. I suppose if you shared anything more that witless twitterings we could discuss your livelihood and business ethics.
Bystander,
I wasn’t sure what was wrong with Eddie Murphy, but joyless was right. I suspect something more sinister than arrogance.
We were approved by the Feds this week.
Fast,
I found, regardless of quality, sellers think their houses are worthy of selling to the haves when they should be targeting the have somes..and in many cases the have nots.
#72..congrats!
Bystander,
There was a time when you had to earn it. That message became lost. I’m not going to compete against assh0les and wannabes. F.uck ’em all, let them fight each other to see who’s the biggest financial m0ron.
#75..I estimate that Gary, by not buying a new house, just saved himself $100,000 in extra real estate tax payments, $200,000 in principal/interest and reno costs and another $50,000 in closing and moving costs for a total of $350,000…thus assuring his children of a nice college education or other options of his choosing..congrats!
Condo,
You are correct. After stepping back and looking at through a different lens, I couldn’t figure out the plus side. Why was I willing to put all this money into a dead asset and double my monthly expenses? I said this about a year ago and I think clot agreed; the cost of living and property taxes will become so bad that houses will be free provided that a party has the means to pay the expenses.
Yes…they are from Brooklyn JCer.
I forgot to mention that one of the major causes of the healthcare increase for the Montklair teachers is that they refuse to take generics. I heard this when listening in on one of the board meetings.
If this isn’t a joke, it’s right on cue…
http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2015/03/how_an_expensive_nj_community_might_handle_town-by.html
78. The pharmaceutical industry thanks them. True patriots all.
If I was a mayor, I would do everything in my power to convince the electorate not to vote to increase their towns minimum wage. This would really incentivize small business owners from neighboring towns with higher minimum wages to setup shop in my locale. Oh, the unintended consequences with this if passed is great. Watch as taxes in Montclair go up to make up the lost revenue from shuttered commercial ratables. When will people get that less government is better government? Baa.
Stay away from the west side of the U.S. Screw taxes, these individuals will be paying an arm and a leg for water very shortly.
Check out this article from USA TODAY:
Is it time for a national water policy?
http://usat.ly/1HdMUCY
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