Seattle mayoral candidates pushing for $15+/hr min wage

Ha Commodore is an ideological politico. People and the real world have no place in his ideology.

 

You go out of your way to capitalize this statement....while earlier noting Australia as some sort of great place. Which, as Juan pointed out, is fairly similar to Texas in regard to natural resources.

I've stated my position on this in the past, namely that minimum wage is inferior to government welfare. They're both subsidies that the government implements to address class inequality, only the former takes from the wealthy while the latter takes from the poor/middle classes.

 

If they do it I'm moving there. I've told you about my job situation in my thread about my surgery. I've always wanted to live out there..

 

I've been working two weeks for a company based there part time. Its a seasonal job its not Starbucks. Anyway they are already more employee friendly than my past employers aside from one.

 

This is coming regardless. I look forward to it, as I prefer ordering this way as it is. And the smartphone and wireless internet everywhere is just going to make it easy.

$15 is too high (right now). I do like the Australian model in there being separate minimum wages for teens, though I worry how that would affect unemployment for unskilled adults.

 

Teens couldn't be hired for a lot of jobs because of school

 

It would have a huge impact. Doubling min. wage doesn't automatically fix the countries problems. Everything will go up. Those who are already at 15.00-20.00 an hour are now brought down to the first stepping stone of ones job career. Those making 15-30 an hour will be the ones hurt the most.

 

Of course, but there are dropouts, summer, and the evenings.

Let's say here we made minimum wage at $10/Hr for adults (gradual raises over the next 5 years to get there), which is roughly $20K annually at full-time, and did $8/Hr for teens. Would be interesting.

 

when i say this company out of seattle treats its employees better, they sent me a retirement plan package to sign up for benefits in a week. no waiting period. i had to wait a year at one job, my last permanent btw, at a small company here. then they let me go after a year right before time to sign up, they hired a guy with much more experience but didn't tell me. they let me hang on for two weeks, but i had to help train him. that actually wasn't that bad, but still i had to a wait a year for the 401K.

 

I ran a regression between the minimum wage in constant dollars vs Unemployment rate over the past 40 years. As you can see there is small positive relation between unemployment rate and minimum wages. Which means if minimum wage goes up unemployment rate goes up. However if you look at R^2 it tells you a lot more. It is so low because there are many more factors that effect unemployment rate. Minimum wage and UR are just not very correlated at all. There are many other factors that effect UR.

 

For those of you who think this increase will be successful, please take ANY college economics class. An increase of this magnitude is not a good economic idea. Minimum wage is a price floor; its effect on the economy depends on whether or not demand is elastic or inelastic. However, that is assuming a small (

 

25 cent or 50 cent increase. Increasing the minimum wage by the amount proposed will send the labor market into a free-fall. Restaurants in a competitive market will begin to cut employees, since raising their prices will reduce profit and sales. Labor is the highest cost for any business, so increasing input cost will also reduce quantity and increase prices.

 

When the fastfood workers were protesting across the country Lawrence O'Donnell did a study on the impact of a 15 dollar min wage. It wasn't drastic. Labor isn't the only cost for these employers

 

Well it doesn't have to be that way with a return to a more progressive tax system welfare does not come from a tax base that is increasingly not funded by the wealthy.

How heartless to prefer that aid to the even poorer come not from the wealthy but from the poor/middle class. But, hey,folks way above your pay grade appreciate your loyalty.

In addition how cruel to prefer poor folks have to get support by the humiliating procedures of welfare instead of getting the self pride from supporting themselves with higher wages.

 

You need to take advanced labour economics and econometrics---there is dispute about this notion. As a good proxy for the material you really need to start reading to have a fuller view on the topic, I'd start looking at work by Krueger and David Card: Card of course being one of the preeminent labor economists in the world.

 

indeed.com meet seattle wa, let the search begin

 

Typo, whatever. Got it mixed up when writing. Minimum wage takes from middle classes, because it's the middle class/lower classes who go to institutions which pay their workers minimum wage - it's the reason why say, the "Costco pays their workers huge amounts of money and they're fine!" argument that I've seen people make fails is because Costco's clientele is much, much different from Walmart. A revitalized and stronger welfare state, funded by taxation, is a much better alternative.

 

Why do you think that the dishwashers and floor moppers and basic food prep workers make so much at a higher class restaurant? Are you just basing this on the tips others receive?

Have you shopped at Sam's and Costcos? The items are largely identical and the costs are pretty similar as far as I can see. The only difference is that at least in Houston the Costco's are fewer and tend to be in somewhat nicer neighborhoods.

You have failed to make any case at all for not raising the minimum wage with this argument.

If actually concerned with inequality, we should raise the minimum wage and have a stronger welfare state-- you know like other advanced countries and though not sufficient go back to when we were closer in policies to those countries i.e, prior to the Reagan Revolution to the present through the age of Rush Limbaugh.

 

I think this will be interesting to watch. I suspect this may cause some minor inflation but maybe not.