I'm also going to be among those that choose not to read all of this thread. I do, however, want to comment that Texas Governor Rick Perry is right in asserting that we shouldn't be focusing on the minimum wage, we need to focus on maximizing wages as much as we possibly can. What does this mean for the government? It definitely doesn't mean that we should mandate that everyone get a 20% wage. No, it means that we should take steps to make the business environment friendly for entrepreneurs so that people can look at their current employment and decide to go into business for themselves as a substitution. These people are then out of the job market and fewer people are available to prospective employers. Decreasing redundant and unnecessary regulations is a must to allow more people to work for themselves and as a nice bonus it would also convince businesses to spend some of their stockpiled money on a expanding. Now we have less supply and more demand. People will then act in their best interests and demand higher pay/better benefits. Businesses will act in their best interests by offering people more compensation (pay, vacation, insurance, etc.). Stop talking about the minimum wage and start talking about maximizing people's wages.

I'm very liberal and don't treat economics through the prism of what utopia would be. I'm just realistic in thinking that the private sector will not keep wages in line with inflation and instead will make the poor get poorer and creating further disparity between the haves and have nots.

I read the right leaning posts by Americans in this threads and it makes me feel like as a society you are OK with the idea that someone can work -- and work hard -- and not be rewarded with a livable income. A wage floor that is indexed to inflation or some kind of index of reasonable goods would be reasonable. National minimum wage doesn't make sense in places like Canada or the USA IMO, but we need to do more to create the conditions for people (or their kids) to get out of being in a that sort of life where you are only qualified for the lowest paying jobs.

Ugh, did you seriously quote Rick Perry and then sort of agree with me???

TL:DR

I recall that raising minimum wage causes inflation to also increase.

OK, let's raise min wage....where do you suppose that money will come from???, businesses are struggling as it is, especially small ones, there's no option but to increase the price of your goods, you do that across the board and hello inflation!, cost of living up again..... Its a vicious cycle and recorded throughout time, the solution is not raising the min wage, we need to flood the country with job creation.

You create massive jobs and unemployment drops making businesses compete for worker thus offering higher wages!

Its called Capitalism its called free markets :-)

Hey, give the man his due, when he makes a fair point, he makes a fair point.



The funny thing about the private sector is that they are governed not just by the government but also by the interaction between private people and private businesses. If a company does not give a person the opportunities for advancement and earned higher income, then they will lose those employees in a robust and free market; that company will change its tune or they will go out of business. However, these days we have a substantially socialized economy in the US through unnecessary and in many cases tyrannical regulations (the most glaring examples of which are state and local laws that require companies to establish that there is a need for their services before they can get business licenses). Federal, state, and local regulations have established huge barriers to entry for new businesses.

I think that the US minimum wage needs to be set to the least among the states. The areas with the lowest costs of living and even in those places, it should not be a living wage. It should be for students in college to get experience. It should be for people who don't have college education to start their careers. If countries are going to have a minimum wage, it needs to be a starting point where companies are willing to hire the vast majority of people from. These should be positions that companies say they'll start you at minimum wage, but if you meet certain standards, then you get a raise after 3 months training, then another 3 months later and then another 6 months later.

The conditions best suited for creating good jobs are markets that are nearly completely free. One of these conditions is the government recognizing that it is a drag on the economy whatever it does to interfere in the economy and making sure that the cost of their intervention is met by the value of that intervention. Medicines should be sent through a review process to decrease the likelihood that a pharmaceutical will bring a drug to market that harms people and could possibly drive them out of business by lawsuits. The people gain by not being harmed and by maintaining continual research on medications that will improve lives.

Another condition is that companies should not have to prove that their services are needed for a particular market. Two movies theaters in a one movie theater town are going to compete and innovate until one of them drives the other out of business or they both draw enough business to the town for both to thrive...if they are allowed to both be opened in the first place.

So on and so forth. If you are arguing for the conditions that best create good jobs, then you are arguing for a substantially reduced government presence (at all levels)

I'm not going to play quote pyramid (KoH) but your points don't really make any sense. You can't just state obvious facts (like more jobs created = unemployment drops and wages go up due to more scarcity of labour) and then claim that your wider argument about something completely different is true as well.

My wider point was that in issues of salary negotiation those who would be given the lowest wages would be the ones less likely to be able to secure a livable wage. Thus, there needs to be some kind of wage floor mechanism built into the economy so that everyone can earn a livable wage -- even those who will perpetually be in the kind of jobs that will be at that floor. Wage bargaining is the best reason for a minimum wage, IMO, as it also reduces the need for unionization in a lot of places which will remove an unnecessary upward pressure on prices in many industries. Tying such a mechanism to a known and predictable index just makes it something that business can predict and that's good for them, right?

Meant to edit a typo.

Angel1: I do want a substantially lowered government presence at all levels. My ideal government is to the business sector as a referee is to a hockey game. They just facilitate the rules and flow (and provide the infrastructure, I guess) for business to operate within. Government's job isn't to pick winners and losers, it's to protect us in ways that which we cannot adequately or knowledgeably protect ourselves. Same reason we have beef inspectors and customs -- services and safeguards to protect the citizens of the nation. Setting some kind of livable floor for people to make for working seems to be in this same vein, especially when you look at places where cheap labour is exploited.

Pang: I do not feel that have a starting point wage below a "livable" wage is exploiting workers, provided that government has set the conditions for these workers to get on-the-job training and then a higher wage and then more on-the-job training and then still higher wages. If we look to set a livable wage as the minimum then we are ultimately asking businesses to hire people to a wage that many of them are not worth. Set it at a level below this, so that very few people are left with only the option of gaining unpaid training and skills so that they are worth the minimum wage. If a company is paying someone a wage and providing them with training, that training is un-monetized compensation and companies need to get credit for providing that extra compensation.

Again, you're focusing on people like you and me who could get all these fancy jobs with on the job training, benefits, stock options, etc. The minimum wage hasn't been an issue for me since I was 15 (I quite my minimum wage job for a higher paying one at a different place after 3 weeks of working at the craphole) but just because all jobs aren't created equal it doesn't mean a wage floor is a bad thing. You did note (and pretty much belittle and completely disregard) the crux of my post by saying that some people "aren't worth" what the minimum wage is before going on to fringe examples of needing credits for training...
Would you also like some tax exemptions with your credit handouts? :p

Anyway... you're a conservative but you want the government to mandate on the job training to below minimum wage workers to get up to minimum wage? That's pretty invasive for businesses.... it'll add costs for sure.

The kind of people I think of when I think of who benefits from a minimum wage are people like restaurant workers, retail employees, etc. The kind of jobs where training starts at 8AM on Monday and finishes at 9AM the same morning. This is not skilled stuff, this is not a place where they are going to grow to become manager or work nights while they put themselves through school. These are people that just want to do the work to support their families and don't aspire (or have the skills/language) to break out of that tier of labour.

BUT one more point for increasing the minimum wage that no one has made: Why is it a good thing for these people to have more money in their pockets? Well, I'll tell you my friends! Because they will spend every cent they make. Close to 100% of what goes into their pocket will go back into the economy. I just watched qz's video about walmart on that other thread and it actually dovetails nicely with this thought. Give the lowest paid the ability to pull themselves up and they can stop requiring government as much and reduce that bloat.

No Pang, government doesn't need to mandate on-the-job training, businesses will provide that training if we set a minimum wage low enough that they have an incentive to hire people even though they are going to have to train those people on-the-job. I'm saying that in considering where a minimum wage should be set at, businesses should get credit for the fact that they do provide training to workers. Retail workers can absolutely move up and advance careers. However, if you set a minimum wage too high, then retailers are not going to hire the people who could most benefit from training in a retail environment. The higher the minimum wage, the fewer opportunities there are to get on the ladder to then be able to move up.

Why haven't people mentioned more money being put into the economy, because more money will be taken out due to inflation. If there is any benefit to a higher minimum wage, it is minimal because the minimum wage is a cannibalizing idea.

As for the people who don't aspire to a greater position or at least to one that pays them a wage that they're comfortable with, why are we even talking about these people? I see no reason to reward someone if they just want to be a cashier all their lives. Hey, if you can live your life the way you want to just being a cashier, then good for you, but if you need to make more money to live the life you want to live, then you need to decide to be something more than just a cashier.

If someone is disabled, then we're talking a completely different story than minimum wage. Frankly, some "disabled" people are beginning to be actively recruited not for what they lack, for the way their "disability" causes their mind to work. Autistic adults are being recruited by major technology companies for repetitive tasks that take advantage of the autistic mind's ability to concentrate. This isn't exploitation either, autistic employees learn to interact better with people from the simple fact that they have a regular job to go to. They get paid a fair wage or salary and they're becoming more valuable employees for simple fact that they're gaining experience. SAP for instance has looked at this situation and realized that there was a lot of untapped potential in a group of people marginalized in the jobs marketplace. I grant you that not all disabilities can have such happy results, but I am saying that a higher minimum wage is not a consideration for the best interests of these people, instead companies need to have some form of added value to disabled people. http://www.marketplace.org/...-value-autistic-employees

no

what about lowering the cost of living instead? times have changed, but years ago 2 people at minimum wage could afford a place together, now, with utilities, 2 minimum wage incomes in 1 place wont afford it. also companys now do not hire for 40 hrs a week, they hire for less so they dont have to offer insurance. here in NJ which if im wrong is in the top10 of poorest states, yet have a very high cost of living, on average i wanna say somewhere between $850 and $1,000 for 1 bedroom apartments. why u ask? simple with welfare system in place, homeowners who rent out rooms/apartments/houses charge outrageous prices cause they can get it from the government as guranteed money. so that raised the cost of renting. plus alot of smaller business on a bigger scale, like the nursing home business for example, have out of state owners.. a vast majority of nursing homes down here in south jersey are now owned by new yorkers and they pay bottom dollar to their employees. so u make less then u should with everything around u costing more then it should.... honestly the entire system is screwed up.. the days where 1 income in a house could buy and maintain that house are over.

Cost of living goes up with inflation; so should the minimum wage, but it has not.


But yes, you could lower the cost of living of such things if real estate wasn't so high - and you could lower that by doing three things:

1) Eliminate the personal write-off of mortgage interest (encourages getting big mortgages).
2) Eliminate the exemption for capital gains tax of personal residences (encourages speculation and flipping houses).
3) Make Capital Gains simply count as income on top of actual income (so that it's not taxed at a ridiculously low rate, but at the top bracket of your income).

I hate to break it to you, but the majority of disabled people are not autistic; and on the scale of disabilities, from "completely debilitating" to "able to work", they're much closer to the latter than most mental disabilities.

The whole idea that a worker is "worth" a certain amount is completely misleading.

What is a worker worth? There is no inherent value. It's supply and demand.

Because of free trade with poor countries, jobs are easily transferable off shore, and there seems to be nearly infinite supply of people in the third world -- thus the wage should be driven down as close to $0/hr as is possible.


The same is true of professions, just that their supply is limited *by the government*.

For example, if you're an Engineer (I'm an engineer so I'll talk about that) in a country outside Canada, you can't *just come here* and practise engineering; you have to pass our tests and jump through some hoops to be able to practice. Same is true of just about any other profession - notably doctors.

If we "removed the influence of government", engineers pay would drop to the floor, and anybody could call themselves an engineer, or a doctor. It's only because the government allows certain bodies to set standards that we even *have* professional groups of that nature.

And the only reason we have safe working places is because the government enforces minimum safety standards; if we didn't do so, they wouldn't exist, as you can note in many other countries where some of our goods are manufactured. The market doesn't *demand* better conditions in 99.99% of cases, some of Apples products being the extreme exception - and that's only because things are - occasionally - brought to light. The less people make, the less people are able to care about other people, or even safety standards, as they're just worrying about getting by.


If you really want to remove the influence of government, I'd eliminate so much of the militarized policing that prevents peaceful protests like Occupy Wall Street from continuing/happening. If there were any visible pro-corporate anti-social forces out there it'd be that sort of thing. Imagine if those protest had gone on another few months, perhaps some collective bargaining would, perhaps, have happened?

The government needs to set minimum standards for things, otherwise we all become subject to various forms of the tragedy of the commons, and we lose the benefits of a society that functions fairly and properly.

Are some of you people really saying that people don't deserve to earn at least a living wage??

To your point about government being the only thing keeping engineers' pay from going "to the floor"... I honestly don't know about whether that could be true in Canada, but it definitely is not in the US. Here the factors limiting supply of engineers are desire and work ethic.

We don't need the government to do everything. And this is one of the reasons why I rail constantly against any new or expanding government program that violates personal liberty. Because as soon as these programs become involved, then the argument becomes, "We can't lose this... it's the only thing keeping conditions from degrading." Conditions weren't degrading before the govt program started, but once the program starts everybody thinks we'll "go back to feudalism" if we try to restore everyone's liberty even a tiny little bit.

"The only reason we have safe work places is the government".. Again, maybe true in Canada. Not here. Look up the stats on US workplace safety before and after OSHA came into being. OSHA will take credit for a drop in workplace injuries, but they were already dropping precipitously *before* OSHA was ever dreamed up. Because INDIVIDUALS were unwilling to work for businesses that did not provide a safe environment. The market fixed itself. The Feds then created a department and swooped in to claim credit. And now we have to deal with a stupid bureaucracy constantly creating regulations, most of which have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with justifying OSHA's budget.

I'd go look up that graph on year by year workplace injuries and post a link here, but I learned a new term yesterday: Fisking. I guess that's when you use facts and data to support your argument, and I guess that's now considered a bad thing (?)

Right, and increasing the costs of the businessmen who still hire locals will stimulate them not moving offshore. That's brilliant logic.

WRONG! https://en.wikipedia.org/...engineering#United_States

You have to maintain licensure in the states you want to work in.



They were actually; that's what half of the 19th century was about, horrible horrible standards; it was the progressive era that turned that around, WITH GOVERNMENT INVOLVEMENT.




I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) Fisking is doing what I'm doing right now, responding point by point to various parts of an argument ;)

First off, it already is a living wage.. it just comes with trade-offs. If you choose an occupation which requires you to acquire no skills, no schooling, no previous commitment whatsoever, than you're going to have to give up some of the things others take for granted. I know because I've done it.

Maybe you have to give up some free time. Maybe you spend an extra 10 hours per week working. It's not that terrible. Especially if you actually like your job.

Maybe you go in on renting a house with some coworkers rather than taking up an apartment all by yourself. You might have to deal with arguments about who unloads the dishwasher today.. but having roommates isn't so terrible.

I've posted the other examples of things I did to save money when I had to... no need to do it again. But you know what? I was just as happy then as I am now as a small business owner. My life wasn't terrible when I was poor. Sure, I wanted more, but I wasn't miserable and hopeless. I worked on improving my life while staying in an occupation that I truly enjoyed. It took time, it took dedication, but if you want something you can achieve it without the government forcing anybody to give it to you.

Personal service industry jobs can't be moved offshore; but high unemployment will keep wages close to zero.

Increasing wages of those who *have* jobs will stimulate the economy to hire people who *don't* have jobs. More money being spent by more people is a good thing for the economy.

I never said you didn't have to obtain licenses. I said that's not what keeps engineers' pay from going "to the floor". If licenses didn't exist, the skills an engineer gains with years of schooling and experience still have value. A lot of it.

I think I'm going to have to stop visiting these threads for a while. As a libertarian, it is truly depressing to realize just how many people want the government to rule virtually every aspect of human interaction. It's even more depressing that it never.. ever.. stops. No matter how much liberty is stolen from the people, some will clamor for more to be taken. Not trying to be sarcastic here at all. Yesterday I actually realized as I was reading one of these threads that I was starting to feel noticeably less good.. time for a break.

Sam, a large chunk of these idiots are not even from USA.

I just have to say, for a shining example of the results liberal policy over the last 60 years. Look at Detroit.

And as a shining example of libertarian government non-involvment, look at Somalia or Sierra Leone.

Yes, but then you would have many more engineers, and people calling themselves engineers; and it would become murky as to who had actual qualifications. This would devalue the title "engineer", and with the additional people calling themselves engineers, it would increase supply, and push wages down. It would also let people with degrees from around the world to compete directly.

Same with doctors.

One way or another, the government has to be involved for some things. Always picking the most pro-corporate ways to be involved (or not) is not a healthy way to decide what things should and shouldn't be governed.

Also, I would recommend this article for a capitalist businessman's view of the idea: http://www.bloombergview.com/...ase-for-a-15-minimum-wage

It's a fair point, just look at software developers.

Except for the facts, this is a pretty good theory. Unfortunately those pesky facts get in the way. Take a grocery store, when the minimum wage is low, they're able to employ more people to go retrieve carts from the parking lot. When you increase the minimum wage, they're budgeting considerations are still the same for cart pushers, they just can't afford as many cart pusher hours, so they cut hours or they let someone go. You've either cost several people some pay or one (or more) person all their pay.


Are some of you people really saying that some people don't deserve to have jobs that start them climbing the ladder to good pay? Are some of you people really saying that businesses shouldn't be able to offer the very lowest entry level jobs to people so that those businesses can train their new hires to skilled labor positions (and the increased pay that goes along with it)?

Because being below the poverty line is a great way to start climbing that social ladder! Also, because most businesses really give a fluff about their employees, right?

I think you guys are over-estimating the generosity of corporate America. Just because you are decent people who run small businesses doesn't mean the big companies act like you do...we've seen time and time again that when given free reign, corporations love to rape their employees and keep the profits for themselves. Absolute free markets will correct themselves, but it is an incredibly painful process...

Still, none of the people opposing a raise in the minimum wage (in the name of freedom?) have answered the question:

Should we have a minimum wage AT ALL?

Start with that. Yes or No. If you feel there should be one, then we are simply debating where it should be.

I worked for 5 years below the poverty line, very recently in fact. Yes, it is an excellent way to begin. Sure, I 'struggled,' but I still had a car, repairs to said car, a large screen television, cable, internet, water, electricity, a place where I paid rent to live, health insurance, car insurance, food, a gaming system, drinking money, spare cash to go out some nights, etc. I had plenty of coworkers who also had children and they made their way as well.

When a prospective employer sees that you've been with the same company for years, that is very good to have on a resume regardless of what the job was. In addition, you will pick up some skills whether that's just customer service or something else, however small. I learned how to talk with customers, how to take inventory, how to prepare and safely store food, how to accurately count money, as well as how to wash and dry dishes just to name a few. You can easily discount these things, but really these are excellent entry level skills to learn, and a solid base from which to move up from.

Further, if you are in the customer service business, you can end up chatting with people who upon seeing excellent service, and maybe even hearing about some of your other skills, could offer you a job. I got many offers over the years, from odd jobs, to job offers elsewhere in the customer service industry, even to programming jobs which is actually how I got my current job where I now get much higher pay and benefits.



I think plenty of businesses care about their employees. The majority of all jobs are in small businesses where the boss often has to interact with most if not all of their employees face to face, meaning they are forced, even if they don't want to, to see these people as humans just like them who have to support themselves. Further, having an employee who thinks you give a fluff about them and has a high morale leads to them being more productive for you. It's really in their best interest to treat you like a human being and pay you what they can afford , which is one of the reasons why these businesses run on such thin margins as it is.



Fortunately, every single employee in the USA is completely free to leave that job for another one if they think they are not getting a fair wage. Let me say that again: If an employee thinks they are not getting a fair wage, they can get another job where they will. If they can't, frankly they are probably overvaluing themselves.

Further, I think you are underestimating their generosity. The vast majority of businesses run on extremely small margins. Walmart for example, runs on ~3% margins. At one of the companys where I worked, the margins were around 10% and about $80k in profit for a business that cost $700k to purchase.

So this was a business making $80k in profits with 42 man hours needed a day. Going to $15/hr, would have been an average of a $5/hr wage increase. The store was closed Thanksgiving and Christmas, so that's 363 days a year. Rounding down, this would mean a $76k/year increase on a business that only was making a profit of $80k a year! You will say he should raise his prices, but this would be just as likely to just scare off customers to the bigger businesses which could absorb at least part of the losses. In fact, he played with the prices at one point and that is exactly what happened. He ended up making less money.

Raising the minimum wage would force small businesses to fire a lot of people, or go bankrupt. This would only give the big Corporashunzz even more wage pricing power, and would raise the barriers to entry for people who wanted to start a business. Frankly, I agree that handing these huge corporations even more employees, who can sometimes treat their employees like fluff, would be a bad thing. At the same time, what you're advocating for would lead to the precise conditions which would allow that to happen.

I think your hearts are truly in the right places, but the unintended consequences of these actions would be monumental.

Wow, that ended up being quite an essay. For those with an aversion to reading something totally opposite their views for half an hour, here is what I think is the key paragraph:



The fact is that raising the minimum wage would lead to many businesses cutting their employees' hours, and others that would be forced to close their doors entirely. We're talking about a trade-off which would lead to some employees gaining a 'living wage,' and others losing a significant portion of their wage, possibly in its' entirety.

What kind of job did you have and how much did they pay for an entry level position?

Ps: not once have I said raise the minimum wage to $15/hour. I believe minimum wage should be indexed to cost of living for a given area.

For the example I provided, I worked at a sandwich shop. My boss had an average of 7 employees on the payroll throughout the years for that store. I started at $8.15/hr when I was in high school, and when I left a couple years later I was at $11/hr. As I mentioned, the average for the business was right at $10/hr.

As far as the $15/hr thing, I was drawing off the topic of the thread. If you never said that specifically, I apologize for the straw man. Several others in this thread have argued such however.

8.15/hour was minimum wage?

Yes.

Then you are lucky to live in a state with a decent minimum wage. As others have pointed out, many states have much much lower minimums. Could you have done as well and lived as comfortably on 6/hour? 5/hour?

Those numbers are all relative. For instance, Arkansas has a minimum wage of only $6.15, but it also has a much lower cost of living, in the top 3 as per my Google-fu. In fact, looking at some of these numbers I probably would have been better off starting at $6.15/hr there, than I was at $8.15/hr where I lived at the time.

This is a first!, a lib agreeing that 60 years of their policies have bankrupted what was once an industrial powerhouse!

I'm impressed!!!!, kudos mdevol for your swift slap in the face to liberalism!! :-)

I would rather go through that painfull process and have the system work than to rig the system to reward people that frankly are not working jobs that deserve that pay, and I have worked some of those jobs in my life, I know how much those jobs should pay and how easy it is to rise up the ladder from those jobs, even BK or McDonalds, they almost all provide tuition assistance if you qualify and work there long enough. They also promote almost exclusively from within. Walmart as well.

It is unfortunate that the US has by far the highest corporate tax rate of all developed countries, the EU caps at 34% while Canada is at liek 20% and US is at 40%, of course businesses would go off-shore. not only labor is cheaper but the taxes are a lot less burdensome as well and the rings and hoops that you have to jump through are a lot less strict. It would be nice if everybody would stay here but even the big 3, most of those cars are parted from overseas.

at the end of the day the legislators that jacked up the corporate tax rates to balance the books instead of cutting spending are the ones that got us into this mess. there is frankly verly VERLY little incentive to open business in USA, when you can open it in canada or europe and pay half the income taxes or in china or pakistan and pay very little wages, lower taxes and ship products to USA and Eurpe for less than it would cost to do otherwise. Efficiency is the name of the game, you netters should know this.

As far as corporate america - there is corporate every country, no?

Blid, if you want to buy a yacht GET SOME SKILLS that are worth something more than minimum wage, go to school, get a degree, hell just go to technical school and fix computers for cryin' out loud, just fluffing because somebody else has worked harder than you did to get what they want is a typical libtard response to the "inequality" conundrum.

Corporate America has an interests in having employees that can readily move into the next position above them. For instance, when a shift supervisor where I work indicated that he wanted to move to a location closer to home, I was trained to replace him. That position fell through for him, but the next time a position opened up, he was moved to that location and I was immediately moved up to shift supervisor. Markets that were freer even 10-15 years ago than they are today would correct for companies that do not take better care of their employees. Why? Because even those companies have an interest in training their workers to do more work for them, but then if they were not taking care of their employees those employees were readily able to take those skills to another company that was willing to pay them more and give them further training. In other words, abusive companies would and did face higher turnover rates and human resources costs. It's a lot cheaper for a company to keep their employees happy when those employees can easily leave than it is to keep replacing employees. In this day and age of razor thin margins, turnover costs can be the difference between profit and loss.

lol sorry, but you right-leaning folks are completely clueless on this issue. It's interesting to see how you perceive the world outside of what you are familiar with and/or wish it was, but wow.

also, stop talking about training in every single post, Angel1, it makes you look kind of like an ass who doesn't understand this issue to people like me who actually understand the socio-economic issues behind wages, particularly non-livable wages. you're living in a fantasy world where flow of labour is viscous and every worker/employer goes into the relationship looking for mutual growth on a long term trajectory to begin with.

that's not how it's been framed by anyone who feels minimum wage is helpful to society, but that's how each response seems to be framed.

When did talking about the reality of people acting to their own self interest make anyone an ass? That's what companies do and that's what people do. That's what both companies and people need to be freer to do. People who create barriers to economic advancement in the name of fairness are not being fair to anyone and especially not economically disadvantaged individuals.

+1!

I havent read all of this and may not return to do so, but if min wage is $15 that'd be simular to where I started at for a skilled position, doesnt seem fair to qualify entry lvl the same as skilled.

and as you said, what gets paid is suppose to be determined by supply and demand, having a min wage kinda neglects that

You refer to 'right-leaning folks,' which would presumably include me. You simply call us clueless, but provide no substantive arguments in favor of your own except to dismiss them out of hand without an actual counterargument. You have pulled off an amazing appeal to authority by calling yourself '[a person] like me who understands the socio-economic issue behind wages,' and subsequently defining axioms which you suppose can't be argued.

I am truly disappointed Pang, you're smarter than that. You too, qzjul, for just agreeing with him outright. The fallacious arguments here are simply stunning.



Perhaps you meant to say fluid instead of viscous? I would agree here. People are fired and hired every all the time, [i]especially[/i] in these low-income jobs to which we are referring! Have you never worked at this tier of employment?

I have not supposed that every worker/employer relationship involves mutual growth at all. However, they must teach you some transferable skills for you to be worth paying at all.

I will also note that none of what I posted earlier has been refuted. Selectively choosing the weakest arguments really doesn't make it seem like you actually want serious debate.

There are some very simple economic principals at work here. And all show huge negative results for raising the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage has a huge inflationary pressure across the entire economy.

First: Raising the minimum wage puts upward pressure on ALL wages. Labor is valued relative to other labor available. And when you pay the least skilled more, then you must increase the pay of the more skilled.

Second: When you increase wages then you are increasing the cost of production. This will put a strong upward pressure on the cost of good and services. Even if you have a business that does not directly increase wages, the cost of the materials and services that they use will be increased.

Third: Yes, there is some argument that a company could absorb the increase in wage and cost of materials by reducing profits. Not really an option for small business, since they have the smallest profit margin. Corporations have the profit margin to absorb some increase in cost of production - however they must also compete in the marketplace for investment (also called the stock market). Decreased profits will mean a decrease in the stock price. This does not just mean a decrease in executive stock portfolios, but a decrease in the capital value of the company. That decreases the ability of the company to expand and grow. So company management across the entire industry has a strong motivation to *not* absorb the wage rate increase but indeed to pass on the increase as increased costs of goods and services.

Forth: Increasing the cost of labor makes alternatives to labor more cost-effective. Companies will decrease the labor force by using more automation or other efficiencies. So companies will have a very strong incentive to hire fewer people, and to require more work of the people that they do employ. This will also make exporting production to other countries even more cost effective so more jobs will be shipped overseas.

Fifth: Increases in wages will increase disposable income. When people have more money they are more willing to pay more for goods and services. When people are willing to pay more (ie: there is an increase in demand) the price will rise. That goes for everything from food to rent.

Sixth: Increasing prices and inflation steals the value of everyone's savings, since the only thing that will not rise is the interest rate paid on savings.

So raising the minimum wage will result in:
1. increased prices for all goods and services
2. fewer jobs, esp entry level jobs
3. more jobs shipped overseas
4. inflation that has a disproportionate effect on the elderly by devaluing their savings and retirement.