CBD wrote:
gbaji wrote:
The conditional was not only irrelevant
I said "you're making this up and passing it off as fact." You replied that if I had only read your post properly, I would have found this mysterious place where you clarified exactly where it was fact! So, no, the conditional was pretty relevant to the point I was making.
No. You declared my statement incorrect because I dismissed a conditional in my response. I pointed out that said dismissed conditional was irrelevant to the point I was making. It was irrelevant when I first dismissed it. It was irrelevant when you made a big stink about it. It is
still irrelevant.
In case you've gotten your head turned around somehow, I dismissed the condition that employers would refuse to hire people "when they really needed them" based on the cost of hiring the employee. It has *nothing* to do with my later statements about people preferring to have jobs without benefits than no job at all.
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No, you clearly and directly stated it as though it was some inherent fact. It's a shame you can't tell the difference between the two.
Lol. How on earth can a statement about cause and effect relationships be anything other than opinion? I was not saying something like "80% of people in the US don't have jobs". That's an assertion of fact. I said two relevant things:
1. Employers will hire fewer employees if the cost to hire them is higher. This is clearly an opinion.
2. People would rather have a job without benefits than no job at all. This is also clearly an opinion.
You sir are delusional...
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Things are rarely simple enough that an increased hiring cost will directly lead to less people being hired.
Is that a fact, or an opinion? ;)
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I'd imagine it costs a lot more to hire someone today than it did in 1900, even adjusted for inflation.
Speculation? Where are your facts!? Lol...
Look. I have no clue if it costs more after inflation to hire people today that it used to. I imagine you're probably correct. Um... But doesn't that mean that people are getting a greater total compensation package for the same equivalent work today than back then? I thought that was a good thing?
In any case, whether it's more or less expensive today is utterly irrelevant in terms of whether or not increasing the cost decreases the rate at which employers will hire people. There are factors of long term real economic growth to consider which go beyond issues of inflation.
In the short term though, I still maintain that an increase in the cost to hire employees across the board will result in an overall reduction in the number of hires. Long term trends can be tricky because there are a host of economic factors to consider. Short term trends (which are incredibly important to someone seeking a job) are going to be most influence by short term relative economic changes. Making it cost X% more to hire someone has a pretty direct effect on hiring practices.
I just think it's absurd that you're even debating this.
Are you saying that if you increase the cost to hire, it *wont* affect how many people will get hired? I'd love to hear a defense of that position...
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gbaji wrote:
Are you saying that if given that choice most people would choose to not have a job at all? Really? Care to support that position?
Nope, never said anything of the sort because that's an issue that can be debated for pages and pages.
Then why argue it? You get that when you say "That's wrong!", it implies that you hold a negative position. Given that my proposal was an either/or situation, if you disagree with my assertion that more people would choose to have a job without benefits than no job at all, you are by default taking the opposite position.
If not, then you're just arguing for the sake of arguing, which is boring as hell and somewhat chickensh
it. Don't attack my position if you're not willing to put up a counter position and defend it.
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It's cute to see you invent nonsense about how drastically much I disagree with you just because I A) have disagreed with you in the past and B) pointed out that you were trying to pass it off as a fact when there's no way in hell you could provide a citation for it.
You're kidding right?
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gbaji wrote:
If I said "Most people would rather live than die", would you argue this same point? Isn't that pointless?
Bad analogy, but still your opinion being stated as a fact. This one would be easily provable though.
In what way? One condition is better than the other, thus it's obvious which one people would pick.
Which is better? A job without benefits, or no job? I think it's equally obvious that a job without benefits is better than no job. Thus, it's equally obvious that with the exception of crazy people everyone would pick the job.
Please tell me you aren't really this dense. Unless you're actually going to argue that having no job is preferable to having a job without benefits?
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My goal would be to get you to stop and think about what you've written before you hit "Post Message." It hasn't worked too well so far, but some day. You rely way too much on your own bizarre interpretation of things to fit what you want them to say, and then you get fustrated because no one else here lives in this fantasy world you've created. It's bizarre.
I do. Demonstrably more than you do apparently. Given that I can at least follow the flow of a post and the context of an argument, I'd say I'm already about 3 steps ahead of you.
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gbaji wrote:
Where do you think the tax dollars will come from? A printing press? Think things through.
Funny enough, I specifically stated "same tax dollars," in reference to the taxes being funneled to Medicare to Medicaid. Are you blind?
I asked where they would come from, not where they would go to.
If your solution to increased costs is to get it from tax dollars, you have to get the extra tax dollars from somewhere. Unless you somehow magically think that you can drastically expand the coverage currently provided by those two programs to cover "everybody" and not increase the costs at all? Really? Sounds like you're still failing to grasp that no matter how creatively you shuffle money from one bucket into another, you don't actually ever increase the total amount of it.
That's a big flaw in a lot of ideas though, so I don't blame you. You're the victim of a massive campaign to convince people that if they take X dollars and hand it to the government, they'll get more money out the other end. It never works, but the assumption is repeated so often by so many people that it's not surprising you might just automatically think it will.
Edited, Sep 21st 2009 10:12pm by gbaji