The autonotifier has been erratic for me lately; not sure why.

Yes, I was, and being flippantly dismissive into the bargain, but there is one level, the level on which I was being serious, where the comparison is valid: Flat wages are no more a realistic or practical solution than flat taxes.

But, yes, wages and salaries are determined by all powerful market forces that say multinational executives can only hoard their companies profits up to the point where their Chinese employees have wages high enough to stay alive and working for less than American employees "too good" to work for less than what it takes to keep THEM alive. There are few laws on the matter, and illegal immigration allows many companies to ignore minimum wage laws in the US just as the incestuous relationship between Wall Street and the SEC (whichever party's in office) allows investment banks to defraud their clients with credit default swaps on mortgages they knew were bad, then pass the scant fines for their illegal actions along to the same investors they already defrauded. I'm still rather stunned that the PERSONAL fines for the fiasco that caused the infamous GLOBAL Financial Crisis amounted to a total of $160,000 against two people. "You made billions on knowingly fraudulent 'investment' that destroyed national economies; pay $100,000 and don't do it again! ' />" What a joke, and the most pathetic part is that the "regulators" responsible for that travesty weren't evil corporate Republican stooges, but buddies of NYs two DEMOCRATIC Senators who are every bit as corruptly corporate.

In light of all that it's really hard to believe that the criminals responsible for wrecking the entire planets economy are being unfairly abused by the American legal system. Most of the nations federal debt is owed to them, not China, but the perpetrators of the greatest investment fraud in history still expect the US government to pay a return on THEIR investments--they just won't cough up any of the tax money said government needs to do that.