I reckon a very small minority of people below the poverty line are happy with their status.

Most are not happy with their status...they just want it to be given to them. Success takes hard work! Failure is relatively easy.

John, you seem like you think of yourself as an educated man and an economist. So I'm going to give it to you straight. Yes, I did mention child labor regulations. Read more carefully. The problems of outsourcing to other countries, or substituting mechanization for labor are indeed interesting and relevant, and this is a much bigger problem that people understand. but they eventually will understand because it will get painful. In the meantime, I guess the right thing to do is to completely ignore all domestic policy issues and pursue wars in various Middle Eastern countries. I guess, since that is our current march. In the meantime, the supply and demand curves for labor are not elastic in the short run. So, the argument (which we heard in the early decades of last century from the republicans, and which we still hear regularly from them when minimum wage hikes are considered) that the sky will fall if we raise wages, just doesn't wash. It doesn't wash when I hear it from you, and it does not wash when I hear it from all the other conservatives who have swallowed the lure, the line and the sinker. Here's a hot news flash taht's worthy of your consideration, but won't comport with your existing assumptions: What's good for business is not necessarily good for its workers, and my fellow Americans. It seems like such an obvious and easy concept, but some folks have been led completely away from logic and the simple truth. Take a look at the complex, and proven false, cause-effect relationships that have to fall into place neatly in order to "buy into" this lie that what's good for business is also good for workers. Bush the First figured this one out, and labeled it "Voodoo Economics." but it still works as a theory because business likes you to believe it, and you do.

And when you say "...you now claim that WE would have opposed such regulations. Uhh, I don't remember saying that, do you guys?...", I assume you are suggesting that the conservatives support labor laws. Again, I would suggest you pay more attention. The conservative party is relentless in its war against labor regulations. I have personally given a fair amount of testimony at legislative hearings, and have followed the republican party's various attacks on my state's labor laws for the past fourteen years and I can assure you with complete confidence that one party supports protections for working men and women, and the other party very definitely does not. Most recently, Dubya has enacted new USDOL rules removing overtime entitlement from several million working citizens.

Oh, and it is illuminating that your heroes are Smith and Rand. Goofy. Mul gets his ideas from Limbaugh. You two have something in common. You're both being led down an entertaining but twisted path.

Welcome, everyone, back to 1989. Im suprised Mull or Flintsone haven't started shouting about crack-heads and welfare-moms yet. Its like deja-vu around here. Just what we need, another society of "every man for himself". Don't get me wrong, its makes for some damn-good music and art, but it pretty much ruins everything else as far as Im concerned. Any way you look at it, this is bad news, period.