My applause to BoA. And my condolences to those that bank with them. Increased expense is always passed on to the consumer. And in the case of BoA customers, they can most assuredly count on many new fees all wrapped up in glitzy feel good campaigns…… Bottom line is they will spend more for the honor of banking with BoA. Very warm day today and I thought it would be nice to run the family down to the corner Sonic for an ice cream break from the heat. I looked and looked for the middle aged folks desperately trying to make ends meet at their dead end jobs…. Sadly, all I saw was sixteen year old high school girls on roller skates…… Just sayin’…
I would say that B of A is crying all the way to the bank, but they are a bank. In 2019, the net income of the Bank of America amounted to approximately 27.43 billion U.S. dollars.
Goes both ways Joe . . . liberal's only solution is to heap ever higher taxes on those who happen to be most productive because, generally, the lowest earners refuse to be as productive. Those who are less productive already get something in place of greater earnings . . . less stress, less concentration, more free time, and lower taxes. They are already compensated by their choices. To tax higher producers at a greater rate is essentially double taxation, and inherently unfair. A flat tax with no itemized deductions and no loopholes would be fairest for all, as the sacrifice for the higher income has already been made by the higher producer. If you never see anything but a hammer in my hand, that's only because you have myopia . . .
Yet you still have no hard figures on "Those who are less productive". It is simply another Right-wing boogieman you trot out for argument's sake. I don't buy it. It just comes off as a justification for your own biases. You know, like the Cadillac driving welfare recipient the Right-wing used to trot out to justify their own prejudices. You know as well as I do, the largest corporations pay zero in taxes which costs this country far more than any low-income earner will ever cost this country but you choose to lick their boots because you can ignore them buying your politicians, and believe me, they buy YOUR party's politicians like cheap candy. For some reason, you judge those that have the least while completely ignoring the massive corruption and purveyors of the lion's share of tax cheats because you can't bring yourself to look down on anyone above you, just those below you. Don't feel slighted, you're a typical Republican. You have plenty of company.
You mean like the boogieman who stands behind me in line seemingly every few times I go to the post office or the checkout at Home Depot or the supermarket? There's always some moron going on about how his wife, or her kid, or his brother, or her father can stay home because they can get almost as much money from the combined state / federal government benefits just staying home from work, as they can going in to work. I'm not fabricating Joe . . . this is commonplace! Anyone who has not heard this more than just a few times is a complete shut-in. Yes, there are large corporations that pay no taxes some years, but they aren't all that way, and the ones that do have zero tax years don't get way with that every year. I'm all for eliminating the loopholes that provide for those zero tax years . . . just as I pointed out in my prior post! Get off your high horse and get real. We're not going to get rid of those loopholes unless we make taxes more fair. Liberal politicians are tied into them just as much as are conservatives. Make levied taxes the same percentage for everyone, and those corporations would, in order to simplify how they make business decisions, eagerly eliminate all of the complex loopholes they presently squirm through.
When you are unemployed you have no health insurance, n0 401k contribution and no social security contributions. yeah great deal..
Yeah . . . That’s why, instead of kicking and screaming to shut everything down during COVID, liberals should have supported finding ways to safely maintain commerce at sustainable levels. Excited at the prospect of bringing business owners to their knees, not only were they not supportive . . . They were destructively aggressive in their opposition to businesses staying open, even at minimal operating capacity. Yeah . . . Great deal.
you mean like forcing meat packers into unsafe working conditions like trump did? after all you yutzs would starve without bologna Trump Forced Meat Processing Plants to Stay Open. Now There's Almost 600 Workers With Coronavirus at a North Carolina Plant. Trump Forced Meat Processing Plants to Stay Open. Now There's Almost 600 Workers With Coronavirus at a North Carolina Plant. (vice.com)
That was a stupid response . . . you know better than that. I wrote . . . "safely maintain commerce at sustainable levels.".
stupid people fell for it before, and they are falling for it again Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” Lie Has Been Resurrected n the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan and the GOP settled on a strategy: Building off their “silent majority” dog whistle that signaled a backlash to the civil rights movement, Republicans conjured a racist “welfare queen” myth, pretending that too many lazy, parasitic Americans were getting rich off of unemployment benefits that deterred them from getting a job. That rhetoric was boosted by conservative Democrats, including Joe Biden, who warned of “welfare mothers driving luxury cars.” Republicans have spent decades trying to resuscitate Reaganism, to the point where one Onion parody joked about GOP leaders trying to reanimate the former president and run a zombie version of him for president. Only it’s no laughing matter, because forty years after Reagan first took office, Republican politicians and business lobbyists have resurrected a spectral version of his ideology. They have exhumed the Gipper’s incendiary “welfare queen” language, alleging that employers today are being oppressed by lazy unemployment beneficiaries who are harming America by refusing to get off their ass and get back to work during a historic, deadly pandemic. “It will be a matter of time before showing up for work is a better-paying proposition than remaining on the couch watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island,” said the California state director of the National Federation of Independent Business in a recent press release illustrating the pervasive rhetoric depicting the jobless as lazy loafers. “Throughout my travels across Kansas I hear constantly how employers are struggling to find people for open jobs because folks are staying at home due to the rich unemployment benefits and the stimulus checks that Democrats continue to enhance,” said freshman senator Roger Marshall (R-KS), a multimillionaire who has proposed legislation to cut off federal COVID-19 unemployment benefits. senators, millionaire pundits, and millionaire lobbyists echoing this narrative, the idea of the welfare queen has been reincarnated and willed into an unquestioned notion, to the point that GOP governors are now moving to cut off federal unemployment benefits to hundreds of thousands of Americans in the name of rescuing families, communities, and the American economy. Just as it was forty years ago, the story line is unsubstantiated bullshit. But it’s bullshit tied to a specific corporate agenda that the millionaires on your cable TV news won’t admit. The GOP goal is not to rescue communities or raise standards of living, but to instead use welfare-to-work demagoguery to re-create the Reagan record of skyrocketing business profits, boosted by subpar wages for workers. And this time around, that means Republican politicians forcing people out of their houses and into low-paying, risky jobs in which those same GOP officials have passed laws shielding employers from legal consequences if their cost-cutting business practices expose people to COVID-19. For all their talk of market economics, today’s Republicans don’t want to allow supply and demand to force their business donors to compete for workers by offering higher wages, better benefits, and safer workplaces. On the contrary, as they block a $15 minimum wage, the GOP wants to cut off jobless benefits in order to continue what Politico rightly identified during the pandemic as “America’s hidden economic crisis: widespread wage cuts.” economic experts have been spotlighting the basic facts showing that the economy is functioning normally and private-sector pay has not unsustainably spiked. In fact, average hourly earnings increased from March to April by less than the rise in the consumer price index — which suggests there is less of a worker shortage, and more a shortage of employers willing to increase pay even a little bit. For his part, President Joe Biden has thankfully shed his past Reagan-appeasing habits and has avoided echoing his own old “welfare queen” language. But he remains ever the thumb-in-the-wind pol — and his rhetoric is now starting to subtly shift from calling out GOP bullshit to trying to accommodate it . . . which never ends well.
That should terrify every worker caught between caring for family, struggling to make ends meet, and getting screamed at by right-wing politicians trying to give their corporate donors a never-ending supply of exploitable, disposable, low-wage labor during a lethal pandemic. The Unverified Stat Heard All Around the Media The early 1980s was eerily similar to the current political moment. After his successful presidential campaign depicting jobless welfare recipients as luxury-car-driving moguls, Reagan proposed big cuts to extended unemployment benefits — and deployed a top Labor Department official to justify the policy by complaining that he saw a Help Wanted sign outside a laundromat near his home in Arlington, Virginia. Soon after, the Reagan administration tried to cut off unemployment benefits if jobless people turned down any work, even if it only paid the federal minimum wage. His crusade eventually culminated in giant cuts to the welfare system, an explosion in poverty, and two-thirds of the public telling pollsters that “welfare benefits make poor people dependent and encourage them to stay poor.” A 1981 New York Times headline. Reagan’s reliance on anomalous anecdotes — his favorite being the one about a Chicago welfare recipient — made for good politics at the dawn of the short-attention-span era, when sound bites began substituting for macroeconomic facts. Decades later, America’s attention span is even shorter in the age of the cable news screamfest and the social media post — and so Republicans and their media allies have predicated their grand plans to cut unemployment benefits on tweeted photos of some fast food restaurants complaining they cannot find workers. That, and a study released by the millionaire staff of the US Chamber of Commerce, which purported to show that the additional $300 of pandemic benefits “results in approximately one in four recipients taking home more in unemployment than they earned working.” The data point is a self-own — the nation’s most powerful corporate lobby group is effectively admitting how badly workers are getting paid in the world’s wealthiest country. We’d love to see the Chamber analysis, but they did not respond to our request to review it. read aloud the Chamber press release on the matter to former Obama administration economist Austan Goolsbee last Friday, before asking him to respond. A few days later, CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked Biden’s COVID czar, Jeff Zients, whether “the enhanced unemployment insurance, while obviously well-intentioned, is creating a disincentive for some Americans.” And now, a dozen Republican senators have cosponsored Senator Marshall’s proposed legislation, called the “Get Americans Back to Work Act.” The bill “decreases unemployment benefits to $150 per week at the end of May, and then fully repeals them out at the end of June,” according to a press release from Marshall. “Unemployment Insurance Has Saved Lives and Kept the Economy Afloat” The tall tale about unemployment benefits generating a labor shortage is reminiscent of Republican-driven lies we’ve seen define so many past panics, from the hysteria over Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction to Donald Trump’s “stop the steal” demagoguery. In this new paroxysm of lies and half-truths about the job market, facts seem unable to penetrate the discourse: facts like studies showing that providing more generous unemployment benefits has little effect on overall employment. Or facts like a recent survey showing that 43 percent of small-business owners who say they are having trouble hiring workers admit that it isn’t because workers are languorously living off lavish federal benefits — but because workers are seeking better-paying jobs, fearing COVID, or unable to afford day care. If, as Republicans insist, unemployment benefits had created a nationwide labor shortage, then the laws of supply and demand that the GOP worships would produce a significantly faster wage recovery for workers — especially since the first half of the pandemic period was marked by widespread wage cuts. In fact, there is recent evidence that when employers deign to pay employees better, they can be flooded with eager job applicants. Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” Lie Has Been Resurrected (jacobinmag.com)
The claim that, " . . . Just as it was forty years ago, the story line is unsubstantiated bullshit. But it’s bullshit tied to a specific corporate agenda that the millionaires on your cable TV news won’t admit. . . . ", is complete , utter bullshit. I have personally witnessed multiple individuals recount the stupidity of the government giving away as much in benefits as it is by people whose relative would otherwise still be working. "Bullshit"? . . . in your liberal minds only, and only because that piece doesn't fit neatly into your socialist jigsaw puzzle.
“What we are witnessing with the myth of labor shortages is an attempt to ‘criminalize’ being unemployed, to force people into starvation to create a pro-business labor bargaining position. Reporters repeating this myth are complicit,” tweeted AFL-CIO economist William Spriggs.
The liberals are shamelessly lying to our faces . . . They won’t even make the effort to see just how mistaken they are because they don’t want to know. Even after I’ve recounted the situation at my own company, and stories recounted to me in checkout lines by people who should be embarrassed, but aren’t, they still deny there’s a problem. Sorry, but “stupid” just isn’t sufficient to cover that.
