LOL $15 Min wage!!!

Chiral said:

The argument for welfare is that without it, babies would starve. Think of the children.

Before the welfare state, people would go to their families for support. If they had no family (the vast minority) they would appeal to the church. "Regular" people didn't become "beggars". There were no upper middle classers who met unexpected expenses and got buried by them.

The problem with discussion about modern social ills is that they do not exist in a vacuum. This is ALL part and partial a symptom of the destruction of the family unit and the appeal to governance to fill the void left by the absence. History is replete with examples of why the government is and always has been terrible at doing this, and it's the stuff dystopian novels are written about.

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And back then society was markedly less civilised for many too.

Why do you think the US is so socially disfunctional? People are trapped in poverty and hopelessness. Lack of social investment creates ghettos, undereducation, and economic inefficiencies.

dibblebill said:

And the Wal-Marts, as mentioned above, would then, after six months, raise prices and wouldn't even question it. You'd see sales and clearances vanish, too- see San Francisco and the Subway $5 footlong.

Its a horrible economic idea, and Romney would not have done any better than Obama, for those that implied he would've.

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Companies set prices on what the market will bare, so higher wages just redistribute income between factors of production, i.e. owners to workers. Very little effect on prices as this is set by the demand function.

I'm having a long look at this (again, did portions of something like this years ago for a union I was involved with):

U.S. Minimum Wage History

Frisco said:

I'm having a long look at this (again, did portions of something like this years ago for a union I was involved with):

U.S. Minimum Wage History

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I've worked a few jobs and talked to many who work entry-level jobs in this area. There are only a few people who hire at minimum wage around here. I've only ever worked for one.

dibblebill said:

I've worked a few jobs and talked to many who work entry-level jobs in this area. There are only a few people who hire at minimum wage around here. I've only ever worked for one.

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It's "entry level" money, which used to mean kids fresh out of jr high or high school graduated or not (I'm old ).

When I was offered 3 bux at a machine shop I felt rich, the minimum then being $1.85.

But, that was back when the guy worked, the gal had babies, men were men and women were glad, etc.

Thought of this page when I saw this.....

Except productivity hasn't gone up nearly as much as many proclaim for a multitude of reasons, however, inflation has. And neither minimum wages nor other wages have really increased to compensate for that.

California is trying to raise their minimum wage to $10 from $8.

California Legislature approves raising minimum wage to $10 - latimes.com

A bill that would boost California's minimum wage to $10
an hour by 2016 won approval by the state Legislature on Thursday and
was sent to Gov. Jerry Brown, who said he would sign it.
The measure would raise the current $8 minimum wage to $9 an hour
next July 1 and to $10 on Jan. 1, 2016.
The 25% increase would be the first minimum-wage hike in California in
five years and would put extra money in the pockets of an estimated 2.4
million Californians.

and cause the loss of probably twice that number of jobs

if they really care about these people why not raise minimum wage to something like $100 an hour? if we are just going to pull arbitrary numbers out of the air ...... get them firmly in the middle class.... or are you trying to force them to stay poor?

Minimum-Wage Rates - Ludwig von Mises - Mises Daily


Some worthwhile reading. I'm still trying to wrap my head around some of the assumptions Marx, Kant, and Keynes make in their work since I got my hands on some of them. Mostly the third one in that list, though.

dibblebill said:

Minimum-Wage Rates - Ludwig von Mises - Mises Daily

Some worthwhile reading. I'm still trying to wrap my head around some of the assumptions Marx, Kant, and Keynes make in their work since I got my hands on some of them. Mostly the third one in that list, though.

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Interesting article though it seems about 20 years out of date in that it makes the vast, all too common and utterly false assumption that we operate within a perfect market.

We don't. We never have. We never will.

Recent economic thinking is finally beginning to take that fact on board.

SiempreTuna said:

Interesting article though it seems about 20 years out of date in that it makes the vast, all too common and utterly false assumption that we operate within a perfect market.

We don't. We never have. We never will.

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A fact I'm perfectly willing to accept is that our markets are not perfect, but we hardly have anything near a free market, and almost never had. On the other hand, even Bono's admitted that the freer the market, the better the economy, even in third-world countries.

Recent economic thinking is finally beginning to take that fact on board.

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Really? I haven't seen evidence of this. I keep seeing claims of "this is where capitalism brought us", we haven't had that in this country (we came close but never did, always had cronyism) in a long time, if ever. I also keep seeing modern economists make claims and presumptions based on their version of the perfect market, which is just DIFFERENT from the Austrian version of the perfect market.

dibblebill said:

On the other hand, even Bono's admitted that the freer the market, the better the economy, even in third-world countries

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Again, there's never been an entirely free market so this is all speculation, however educated. Further, in the third world, the evidence of the past 50 years would appear to directly contradict that particular assertion: the most successful countries, while embracing some elements of market freedom, have actually been pretty tightly controlled, e.g. China, India, Brazil, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia - in fact, pretty much every former third world country that has moved into the first world.

Russia on the other hand, briefly embraced extraordinarly free markets and the result was a near total disaster: a former superpower with a barely functioning economy and the lowest life expectancy in the first world.

I think it would be true to say that allowing relative freedom for markets generally helps economies but - like most things in life - it's not wise to blindly follow any conjecture, economic or otherwise. Real economies are way too complex for any single economic theory to encompass every set of economic, cultural and historic circumstances.

dibblebill said:

Really? I haven't seen evidence of this

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If you listen to the Freakonomics podcasts, this comes up relatively frequently. Basically, not only do people not have the perfect market information that traditional economic theory assumes, they don't always act in the simplistic, self interested ways economists have also assumed in the past. It's no coincidence that economists are generally seen - indeed, pride themselves - on being rather strange fish: regular people are often altruistic or vindictive

It's way too complex to explain in a brief post, but as I say, the Freakonomics guys have covered it in the past. That wasn't the first I'd heard about it - maybe there was an iTunes U lecture, TED talk or RadioLab show about it.

SiempreTuna said:

Again, there's never been an entirely free market so this is all speculation, however educated. Further, in the third world, the evidence of the past 50 years would appear to directly contradict that particular assertion: the most successful countries, while embracing some elements of market freedom, have actually been pretty tightly controlled, e.g. China, India, Brazil, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia - in fact, pretty much every former third world country that has moved into the first world.

Russia on the other hand, briefly embraced extraordinarly free markets and the result was a near total disaster: a former superpower with a barely functioning economy and the lowest life expectancy in the first world.

I think it would be true to say that allowing relative freedom for markets generally helps economies but - like most things in life - it's not wise to blindly follow any conjecture, economic or otherwise. Real economies are way too complex for any single economic theory to encompass every set of economic, cultural and historic circumstances.

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Russia went straight from one of the most controlled economies to one of the most free with no preparation or forwarning, and that's why it imploded. It'd implode if you did the opposite, too, and went from free to controlled instantly. That being said... On to the subject of China. China, for the longest time (I don't know if they still do) instituted a number of laws regarding maximum wages, freedom of speech, etc. and tightly controlled its economy, making it VERY attractive to those looking for a cheap environment to set up a workplace. This brought plenty of money into the country, but plenty of money is not going to the people in most cases. If I ran a town where I suppressed the upper income levels, didn't have any checks or balances, and an easily corruptible government (which, so far as I'm concerned, applies to MOST places on Earth at this point), you can be assured I would be able to attract businesses there since it'd be super cheap to operate. Oh yeah, and my best buddies in those industries get all sorts of breaks. China also has another significant advantage, and that's a big part of why all electronics are moving there. Rare earths. I suppose we COULD argue that wage and worker suppression are good for big business and the government and that drives economies up, which isn't untrue in our current global mindset, though.

As for the other countries listed, I"ll confess, I'm not up to scratch on their specific circumstances.

If you listen to the Freakonomics podcasts, this comes up relatively frequently. Basically, not only do people not have the perfect market information that traditional economic theory assumes, they don't always act in the simplistic, self interested ways economists have also assumed in the past. It's no coincidence that economists are generally seen - indeed, pride themselves - on being rather strange fish: regular people are often altruistic or vindictive

It's way too complex to explain in a brief post, but as I say, the Freakonomics guys have covered it in the past. That wasn't the first I'd heard about it - maybe there was an iTunes U lecture, TED talk or RadioLab show about it.

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The freakonomics guy, while to me comes off as a jerk, I'd forgotten about. I don't like him as a person (his writing methodology strikes me as insulting), but I do agree with MOST of what he says- it just makes sense. I'd forgotten about his existance. He does take into account normal human behavior, but so did Mises- Mises didn't assume people would act on perfect information, he assumed they'd act in their self interests, whether that was selfishness, vindictiveness, or altruistic. He just argued the point that people shouldn't be forced to act in any of the above ways. As far as perfect knowledge goes, I'll quote Mr. Tom G. Palmer in his paper on 20 myths regarding economics.

5. Markets Only Work When an Infinite Number of People With Perfect Information
Trade Undifferentiated Commodities

Market efficiency, in which output is maximized and profits are minimized, requires that no one is a price setter, that is, that no buyer or seller, by entering or exiting the market, will affect the price. In a perfectly competitive market, no individual buyer or seller can have any impact on prices. Products are all homogenous and information about products and prices is costless. But real markets are not perfectly competitive, which is why government isrequired to step in and correct things.


Abstract models of economic interaction can be useful, but when normatively
loaded terms such as

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Interesting point a few have made about raising minimum wage being unfair to those who earn just on the other side of it.

Me, I'd tie employee wages to executive wages and make all employees shareholders.

Makes employees responsible for their own success, and owners and shareholders responsible to their employees reasonable wages.

Whether or not you believe the Government should have some role in correcting it, it's a fact that wealth consolidation is happening at an unsustainable pace. People complain about "redistribution of wealth" in criticism of liberal policies, but the real 'redistribution' is the consolidation of the national wealth at the top.

Look at the full debt clock, for example. We all point at the per-capita debt as an indicator of the kind of trouble we're in... take a look at the per-capita portion of the national wealth. You got that in your bank account? If not, someone else does. And it ain't the folks down at the bottom.

Those complaining about the transfer of money from workers to non-workers have been sold a line. The line is true, but the transfer is opposite of what you think it is.

LTek1 said:

Me, I'd tie employee wages to executive wages and make all employees shareholders.

Makes employees responsible for their own success, and owners and shareholders responsible to their employees reasonable wages

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So basically, an extension of how things have worked for the last 65 years in the most consistently successful western economy of the last 65 years, Germany?

Sounds like a pretty good idea to me ..

Finally, months late: some actual evidence about this from Bloomberg (so hardly the liberal press):

- if minimum wage was raised to $15, they calculate this might increase the price of a burger by as much as $1 - so way less than the price doubling touted above.

- two studies have shown that employers paying minimum wage cost the tax payer around $7 billion per year, with MacDonalds alone costing the tax payer $1.2 billion per year. These costs break down as follows:

Overall, 52 percent of families of fast-food workers are enrolled in one or more public assistance programs, compared with 25 percent of the workforce as a whole. Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program accounted for nearly $4 billion of the $7 billion figure. The Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program accounted for the rest. ”Public benefits receipt is the rule, rather than the exception, for this workforce,”

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(my italics)

If I recall what was written above, that would mean this right wing bastion is pretty much confirming the majority of the points made by those on the left of the argument.

Bloomberg did agree with one point made by those of a more conservative bent:

.. higher wages could lead to higher prices, which few so far seem willing to pay

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(my italics)

I would point out that this - rather weak - assertion is, however just about the only point in the article that is unsupported by any actual evidence.

So, once again: game, set and match to the left I guess

Last year, McDonald’s reported nearly $5.5 billion in profit. The parent company of several other large-scale chains, including Pizza Hut, KFC and Taco Bell, saw its profits grow by nearly 75 percent, to $458 million.

When a parent is forced to work two jobs and still cannot support his or her family, it is clear that there is something very wrong. It is time that corporations address the problems facing fast-food workers.

“It is a common myth that low-wage workers who would see a raise if the minimum wage were increased—are mostly teenagers,” write David Cooper and Dan Essrow, authors of a new briefing paper and researchers with the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.

“The reality is that raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would primarily benefit older workers. Eighty-eight percent of workers who would be affected by raising the minimum wage are at least 20 years old, and a third of them are at least 40 years old.”

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And guess who end up receiving most from the tax payer support of the under paid? The companies that pay least - Walmart rake in the majority of food stamp spending.

And these are the same hypocrites who have the nerve to deamonise the poor - the very people they're exploiting!

So here you go, conservative cut-taxes-at-all-costs folks: the people who are REALLY screwing you are .. the big corporations.

Just like the left has been telling you for years - quelle surprise.

Except I don't qualify under your comment because I am not on the "right", and I've been talking about how corporations, hand-in-hand with government, have been screwing us for years. We don't just need tax cuts, we need a hell of a lot of other reforms along with them.

dibblebill said:

Except I don't qualify under your comment because I am not on the "right"

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The comment wasn't specifically directed at you

dibblebill said:

We don't just need tax cuts

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I would respectfully suggest that the one thing you definitely do NOT need is tax cuts: if you know your history, you will know that the entire deficit and debt problem was caused by Bush's tax cuts: when Clinton left office, the US was running the biggest surplus in history and it was calculated that the entire national debt could have been paid off in around 5 to 10 years.

Of course, GOP supporters didn't like that as Wall Street makes a fortune from government debt, so, instead of paying down debt as any sensible person would, the self same right wing numbnuts (not referring to you there ) who are currently screaming about the deficits and debts chose instead to give a massive, trillion dollar tax cut to the rich (so basically, tax cuts that have been proven over 30 years NOT to help the economy). And guess what happened? Exactly what you'd expect: they - the GOP note, not the Democrats - ran up the biggest deficit and the biggest debt in history.

Over the last 6 years, while these self-same dimwits (y'know: the ones who are currently trying to cause a default that is increasing the deficit as we speak) have hyper-ventilated over the deficit, their actions demonstrate perfectly clearly that they do NOT actually care a jot about it as they have not only refused to contemplate any tax increases, they have fought tooth and nail to indefinitely extend the very tax cuts that caused the problem.

Which is why I said its one of many parts of a solution. I may not like Bill Clinton much on other topics, but you're right- he DID balance the books. And I respect that.

I think its absurd that ANYBODY makes silly amounts of money off of government debt, and you're right, the GOP and other parties with interest in keeping this situation will never alleviate that issue. Tax cuts without spending cuts just exacerbate the issue- you are 100% correctly on that. And this whole fight over the budget doesn't solve anything, either, as it is simply people arguing over which kitten to kill out of the litter instead of finding ways to not kill any.

First of all, people with family earning minimum wage are arguing against their own self interest when they say they don't want it raised.

McDonald's isn't going to go out of business from paying a living wage. It made $19 billion in revenue last year and $5.5 billion in net profit. That is a huge profit margin. They can afford to share the wealth with the people out there actually generating the revenue.

Why aren't you arguing for McDonalds to cut the pay of its executives who earn multi millions in direct compensation and stock options? Are those executives really worth 440X what the average employee is paid? By comparison, this multiple is around 15 in European countries.

Most of your tax dollars by FAR go to subsidizing billion dollar corporations not welfare. And it's not like people on welfare are living the high life. They are by and large single mothers and the elderly who just barely get by. I cannot believe the unmitigated cruelty put forth by many posters on this forum board. I'm embarrassed for you.

Corporations these days are screwing people 6 ways from Sunday. First they are not paying for increased productivity gains over the last 10 years. Second, due to increased productivity (fewer workers accomplishing the same work), there are more workers than jobs, so they can pay even lower salaries. Third, corporations don't fund defined benefit retirement programs anymore, which in the past put the burden of investing and paying out on the corporation. Now corporations contribute minimally or not at all and put the burden of investing on the employee. Fourth, the health care burden has been shifted primarily to the employee, who now not only pays for premiums but also has huge deductibles and copays. Is it any wonder people are getting desperate?