The difference is the problem I argued. You claim that those people will burden the social system. My argument is that the social system is paid for through taxes, thus paid primarily through the rich, which means that it is a better means of wealth redistribution compared to minimum wage, which redistributes wealth from the middle classes ( ie. the people who actually go to Walmart's and McDonald's and don't have the money to go to the higher-end groceries of the rich) to the poor. A lot of liberals claim that a minimum wage should be enough to provide a minimum living standards, I disagree. I think a low minimum wage + government aid like Medicaid/foodstamps/unemployment insurance should be enough to provide a minimum living standard. And I'm perfectly willing to increase taxes to provide for those things, because there's nothing inherently wrong with subsidizing the poor like both sides tend to think. I know you're not Sweet Lou. However, I'd like to know what you think of his claim that raising the minimum wage would improve the competitive ability. Because if minimum wage does not raise the price of businesses ( a claim I don't believe at all, ie. Australia where everything is absurdly expensive), then why exactly would small businesses better compete with large businesses that wouldn't raise their prices. Doesn't that assume that there is a shortage in labor?
You are not entitled to anything. It's not YOUR company. You get what you are offered, or you do one of two things: 1) ask for more, 2) leave.
They're figuring that out, and in case you haven't noticed, we've had either a surplus of young (overwhelmingly) men willing to kill themselves, or massive revolts over economic oppurtunities and injustice. cue Chinese workers kidnapping their boss etc. That situation is completely untenable, and the more and more people realize that, the better everybody will be.
If we move the minimum wage to say $10. How does that affect people who are making $12 or $13 now? Do they get a raise to $14? Do they stay the same and lose purchasing power?
I think they should eliminate the minimum wage altogether. The net result is that people would refuse to work for $7.5/hr because they'd think that was ridiculously low. The gov't is a matter of fact giving corporations the mandate to only pay minimum wage.
Except that when you actually do an analysis using factual numbers rather than assumptions, raising the minimum wage causes only a minuscule amount of inflation, FAR less than the percentage increase in the minimum wage. While your narrative makes logical sense, it isn't supported by the facts.
Yes, and based on the analysis, you are talking about a tenth of a percent, or $0.10 more for a $100 purchase. That isn't exactly a massive price increase while the 10% increase in the minimum wage (the level which would cause that .1% price increase) has a HUGE impact on the workers' buying power, which increases their spending, which drives the economy. benefits>drawbacks
The whole concept of a job and earning wages are a scam. That's why I keep myself unemployed. Stick it to the man!
Uh, Gladiator, did you bother to actually look at the studies the article cites instead of just reading some article summary? Your study are 7 and 9 years old, and doesn't examine the effects of the minimum wage on a national scale. What it actually discusses are the impact of raising minimum wages in two seperate states. Furthermore, when one of the studies discusses its methodology, it states: I'm wondering if you catch the problem with this. The proposal discusses raising the minimum wage from 5.15 to 6.75. This increase will cost about 312 million - but maybe I'm completely wrong, but than that implies this: 1.6 ( the cost of increase): 312 million = 5.15 ( the current wage rate): X, where X is around what businesses pay for labor costs. X thus is around 1 billion dollars. Consequently, if I'm reading this right, the assumption should be that labor costs are around 1 billion dollars of industries that made around 370 billion dollars ( and note that 370 is total SALES, not total PROFITS). Meaning that labor costs are less than 1% of a general business cost. Sorry, bs meter is going red right around now.
And Australia is my real life example of how the minimum wage raises prices, because things are as much as 80% more expensive there compared to here. It's a large reason why the median Australian income is inferior to America.
And their lives are no doubt more miserable as a consequence. Spoiler http://landsofopportunity.blogspot.com/2012/05/australia-ranks-1-and-usa-3-for-quality.html
Hungry people will work for a sandwich. Corporations will pay as little as possible to increase profits. We organize into governments and make laws to preserve and promote fairness and prevent exploitation. And people forget that Labor Unions are just capitalism for workers: <div style="background-color:#000000;width:520px;"><div style="padding:4px;"><iframe src="http://media.mtvnservices.com/embed/mgid:cms:video:colbertnation.com:428406" width="512" height="288" frameborder="0"></iframe><p style="text-align:left;background-color:#FFFFFF;padding:4px;margin-top:4px;margin-bottom:0px;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px;"><b>The Colbert Report</b> <br/>Get More: <a href='http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/'>Colbert Report Full Episodes</a>,<a href='http://www.colbertnation.com/video'>Video Archive</a></p></div></div>
Irrelevant. Your article itself states: "There is more to life than the cold numbers of GDP and economic statistics – This Index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 topics the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life." The Index after all cites areas which don't really have to do with economics, such as education, environment, civic obligation, and so on. Minimum wage, however, is about economic statistics and purchasing power. And America's policies means that the typical American has better purchasing power compared to his Australian counterpart, which thus belies the idea that minimum wage is some ideal way of helping the poor - like I said, the best way to help the poor through wealth redistribution is through the government programs, not through minimum wage.
six figures says I didn't you *****ing douchebag.. why you offended at my statement? Welfare not getting you anywhere? Brah
Really, upping the minimum wage has to do with getting employers to realize that it's good for all that workers get a fair share of what is being produced. Call it Ford's original insight. and this is even understated, as it takes into account GDP at factor prices (rather than market prices, which takes into account the surplus capital draws on labour),
Yes. So, please provide me with more recent studies which show these to be in any way false... So, you don't trust them because they only studied two states? They did, of course, study ACTUAL DATA in two states, they didn't just make the unsubstantiated claim that raising the minimum wage would necessarily lead to substantial levels of inflation, which is what you are doing. This was handled in an earlier post, but I will repeat that you are making the assumption that every single worker makes minimum wage, which is, of course, not true. Mine too. Of course, mine is based on facts and yours is based on unfounded assertions and inaccurate assumptions.
Right, which is why your attempts to use them pejoratively here fail about as badly as the big Benghazi reveal you promised us "from the inside" last year, koj-ster.
I'm calling it Koj's law. In any discussion on the minimum wage, the probability of Ford being brought reaches 1. Because the $5 thing is a complete myth. Or rather, Ford didn't raise the wages so that his workers could buy cars. Fine. I figured that there was something wrong with my math. But what I believe that those numbers show than is that it is in fact a very small number of people who in fact earn minimum wage. This is further topped off by the fact that not only do a very small number of people earn minimum wage, not very many of those people are poor as well, because the majority of people earning minimum wage are not poor. They are young people/high schoolers working some part-time job at 16 like I and probably you did at some point. That, in fact now that I think about it, is how the results of this study makes the most sense. So, going by the results of those studies, you may be correct that there won't be much harm done by raising the minimum wage ( and of course, the age of the study means that Arizona and Florida were discussing raising their state wages to a point which has already been surpassed by the current federal minimum wage, meaning that we're discussing a further minimum wage raise compared to what the studies studied). But that would be because there are so few workers affected by it at all. Which means that once again my proposal would be more effective, because you could take money in taxes from the rich and use it for all the poor as opposed to those extreme few who make minimum wage. As for your claim of lack of data? I've used Australia several times now, and now I'm mentioning American Samoa, which raised minimum wage to a degree which covered a significant percentage of their workers, only for things to go very, very badly there during the late 2000s.
