$15 An Hour

[birdog1960]

You are hitting on the root of the issue. Businesses have moved jobs overseas for cheaper labor. You also have a large number of undocumented workers taking up jobs while working off the books.

thanks. i'd think that the big employers would realize that many of the people buying their products and supporting their businesses are the same folks making minimum wage and slightly more. they need those customers buying power, a point in krugman's article that nearly everyone else here seems to have missed.

[4merper4mer]

Given your devout leftist subservience to the neo-mercantilist state, I just assumed you could properly self identify. Sorry for over estimating you. I promise it will never happen again.

 

If you weren't such a sick of pants for your Eco prof, you would realize that what he or she espouses has a very good analogy:

 

Your prof is to Adam Smith what Stalin was to Marx. His/her ideas, if implemented are equally dangerous, they just take a different road to the same ruinous destination.

 

He or she may not be smart enough to realize it, but most people are. You just seem blinded by the wire rim glasses or the hip coffee or whatever. Instead of telling everyone else that they are stupid, you should do what many sick of pants do....take a picture of your prof and do what you must on Mondays, Wednesdays and twice on Saturday.

 

I realize that the economics of this over your head, but that is ok. If this is really not a strange fascination with a teacher and just a lame attempt to justify stealing music then wow. Go get a job and buy some music.

 

thanks. i'd think that the big employers would realize that many of the people buying their products and supporting their businesses are the same folks making minimum wage and slightly more. they need those customers buying power, a point in krugman's article that nearly everyone else here seems to have missed.

 

Let's pay them extra so they can buy our stuff with the money we just paid them.

 

1. Higher Expenses

2. Same prices

3. ??????????????

4. Profit!!!!!!!!!!

[Azalin]

thanks. i'd think that the big employers would realize that many of the people buying their products and supporting their businesses are the same folks making minimum wage and slightly more. they need those customers buying power, a point in krugman's article that nearly everyone else here seems to have missed.

if the minimum wage-earners are already buying the products and supporting their businesses, why would the big employers change anything? if the businesses want to sell more goods & services, it's up to them to make them more affordable, not to put more money in their existing customers' pockets.

[IDBillzFan]

thanks. i'd think that the big employers would realize that many of the people buying their products and supporting their businesses are the same folks making minimum wage and slightly more. they need those customers buying power, a point in krugman's article that nearly everyone else here seems to have missed.

 

So the plan is for companies to pay more money to minimum wage workers so the workers will have more money to spend on the companies' products?

 

It probably never dawned on Nobel Prize-winning Princeton professors that increasing labor costs force companies to increase the price of their products, so all you'd be doing is giving people more money to buy things that are now overpriced, not only forcing manufacturers to go outside the US for cheaper labor to increase margins on an overpriced product, but also giving progressives the long-term prospect of complaining that $15/hour is no longer a living wage.

 

Here's an alternative that you can digest without either having a Nobel Prize or teaching at Princeton: if you don't like how much money you make an hour, do something to improve your value on the market so you can earn a job that pays more.

 

But no...that would take the effort of the worker, and then all those unpaid volunteer union protesters would be out of a good-paying job.

Edited December 10, 2013 by LABillzFan

[Azalin]

But no...that would take the effort of the worker, and then all those unpaid volunteer union protesters would be out of a good-paying job.

but that would be making the individual strive for self-improvement. apparently the real goal is to make the world a kinder and fairer place for everyone.

[birdog1960]

if the minimum wage-earners are already buying the products and supporting their businesses, why would the big employers change anything? if the businesses want to sell more goods & services, it's up to them to make them more affordable, not to put more money in their existing customers' pockets.

the minimum wage in inflation adjusted dollars is extremely low, therefore their buying power is extremely low. unless wages are 100% of costs for walmart and fast food businesses, there is an inflection point where higher wages for low wage workers would likely increase sales and profits. is it $15. don't know. i'd leave that up to folks like krugm,an to calculate.

[Just Jack]

The UNION sponsored fast food push for 15.00/an hour can be solved with two words.

 

YOU’RE FIRED.

 

This is a teachable moment for America and I sincerely hope that the owners of all the fast food franchises where employees walked out on strike last week take full advantage.

 

Fire them all, every last one of them.

 

There are hundreds of thousands of people in America right now who are desperate to find jobs of any kind.

 

They understand that business have a responsibility to its customers to run a business in a sensible manner.

 

Those who are calling for a doubling of the minimum wage do not, and deserve little sympathy.

http://www.cnycentral.com/news/story.aspx?id=979817

 

None of the demonstrators, however, were actual employees of McDonald's, even though the demonstrations have been promoted as walkouts by many workers. Clark explains the reason why they weren't joined by employees is because "they are afraid of losing their jobs."

 

or maybe they learned from they're much more successful masters: bargain down, not up. seriously, would you list your house at a low price hoping to negotiate more later?

 

Sound likes the lawyers office that did my house closing. For days afterwards, they'd call us with "we forgot this fee of $XXX". After the third call, we told them no more until they provided an itemized bill with everything that had been paid and what remained. A few days later we received a letter saying everything was paid in full. And this wasn't a bus ad firm, it's a firm that has been in business for decades and has large corporate clients.

[DC Tom]

Sound likes the lawyers office that did my house closing. For days afterwards, they'd call us with "we forgot this fee of $XXX". After the third call, we told them no more until they provided an itemized bill with everything that had been paid and what remained. A few days later we received a letter saying everything was paid in full. And this wasn't a bus ad firm, it's a firm that has been in business for decades and has large corporate clients.

 

You could have just called the state and had them shut down. That's illegal in about four different ways that I can think of myself.

[3rdnlng]

the minimum wage in inflation adjusted dollars is extremely low, therefore their buying power is extremely low. unless wages are 100% of costs for walmart and fast food businesses, there is an inflection point where higher wages for low wage workers would likely increase sales and profits. is it $15. don't know. i'd leave that up to folks like krugm,an to calculate.

 

This post and one of your recent prior posts make me regret ever taking you seriously and discussing anything with you. You should voluntarily get embalmed.

[birdog1960]

This post and one of your recent prior posts make me regret ever taking you seriously and discussing anything with you. You should voluntarily get embalmed.

it's difficult to take a personal attack seriously as an argument. you're painting with a wide brush against my argument as it's essentially the same as krugman's but i realizre that his academic credentials are marks against him in your view. let me try again. lets say bananas are 50 cents a pound at walmart. they sell one hundred pounds a day (for simplicity). walmart's labor costs amount to 5 cents of the price. after all costs, that profit is 10 cents a pound. doubling minimum wage doesn't double labor costs overall for the bananas (not all the work product of any minimum wage worker is used on this one product and not only minimum wage workers are included in the 5 cent labor cost attributed to labor). so lets say the price goes up to 52 cents per pound and the profit down to 9 cents a pound after the wage increase. if 10% more bananas are sold because more minimum wage workers can buy more of them, it's a wash. there is some wage increase point where it's no longer a wash and more than a 10% increase in sales results. now extrapolate to other consumer products.

[B-Man]

The Minimum Wage: Not What It Used to Be?

 

One of the problem with advocates of large and larger government interventions is that they don’t often adjust their prescriptions to changes in society and conditions. For instance, when Social Security was implemented in 1935, seniors, as a group, were struggling financially, and life expectancy was much lower. Leaving aside the disincentives created by that kind of program, there was a real justification for Social Security, and the projected costs of the program weren’t as steep as they are today. But things have changed quite dramatically for seniors:

 

{snip}

 

The same seems to be true about the minimum wage. Today professor David Neumark, a professor of economics and director of the Center for Economics and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine, has a great piece explaining how complaints about the decline in the real value of the minimum wage aren’t taking into consideration the fact that federal policy aimed at low-wage work and low-income families has rightly shifted “toward a generous earned-income tax credit, which is better focused on poor families.” That means that relying less on the minimum wage than we did 20 years ago, but doesn’t mean that a lower level of assistance to lower-income Americans. He writes:

 

There has been a significant policy shift, however, in how to guarantee a minimally acceptable income to families with low-wage workers. In particular, the earned-income tax credit was instituted in 1976, and its generosity has since been expanded considerably.

 

Through the tax system, the earned-income tax credit pays benefits to families with low income and employed workers.

 

{snip}

 

The policy shift is obvious. And indexing of the earned-income tax credit ensures that, unlike the minimum wage, it is not eroded by inflation.

 

He has much more in his piece from the virtues of the EITC to the effects, positive and negative, of a mix of higher minimum wages and the EITC. As he explains, as with most government interventions, there will be winners and losers. The piece is a must-read. He concludes:

These factors are some of the reasons the earned-income tax credit has attracted widespread political support, and — as shown above — has to some extent supplanted the minimum wage as a means of helping low-income families.

That the minimum wage has declined in real value is not necessarily an indication that we, as a society, have abandoned our obligations to low-income families. It may be more of an indication that we have found a better way to meet these obligations.

 

The whole thing is here. This morning, Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards, also writes about the minimum wage and talks about another of Neumark’s contribution to the debate, this NBER study by with William Wascher. Edwards ends his piece by a nice Milton Friedman quote:

As with many things, Milton Friedman

said it best

: “

The minimum wage law is most properly described as a law saying employers must discriminate against people who have low skills.”

 

 

 

 

 

.

[Azalin]

the minimum wage in inflation adjusted dollars is extremely low, therefore their buying power is extremely low. unless wages are 100% of costs for walmart and fast food businesses, there is an inflection point where higher wages for low wage workers would likely increase sales and profits. is it $15. don't know. i'd leave that up to folks like krugm,an to calculate.

i understand that, but I don't buy the logic. should not everyone's income then be adjusted yearly according to inflation? why only minimum wage? to be honest, I don't think a minimum wage is a good idea anyway, since it sets an arbitrary amount for no-skilled and low-skilled labor, and pays evenly for people who are good at their job and those that do a terrible job. I understand how it would be good to be able to earn a decent and dependable wage, but a minimum wage....especially one of 15 dollars....will artificially increase the cost of doing business, which is always passed on to the consumer. the cost of employing people is considerably higher than just the wage they are paid when you include the social security costs (the employee only pays half, the employer pays the other half), unemployment insurance, disability, and anything else included, not to mention any benefits the employess may receive. I'm completely in support of people making a decent wage, but I believe it's the employee's responsibility to earn it rather than the employer's responsibility to provide it. a productive employee can always accept a better paying job with someone else if they feel that they're underpaid. the means to do so are out there. if we keep giving people more money (and it's always someone else's money we give away) just to continue to stay in a crappy, dead-end job, then they will always stay in those crappy, dead-end jobs. people need to realize that they can't change the way the world works just to suit their own desires. IMHO, increasing the minimum wage will disinsent them from moving forward.

[Joe Miner]

it's difficult to take a personal attack seriously as an argument. you're painting with a wide brush against my argument as it's essentially the same as krugman's but i realizre that his academic credentials are marks against him in your view. let me try again. lets say bananas are 50 cents a pound at walmart. they sell one hundred pounds a day (for simplicity). walmart's labor costs amount to 5 cents of the price. after all costs, that profit is 10 cents a pound. doubling minimum wage doesn't double labor costs overall for the bananas (not all the work product of any minimum wage worker is used on this one product and not only minimum wage workers are included in the 5 cent labor cost attributed to labor). so lets say the price goes up to 52 cents per pound and the profit down to 9 cents a pound after the wage increase. if 10% more bananas are sold because more minimum wage workers can buy more of them, it's a wash. there is some wage increase point where it's no longer a wash and more than a 10% increase in sales results. now extrapolate to other consumer products.

 

Your understanding of business rivals that of any publicly educated 3rd grader in special ed.

[keepthefaith]

it's difficult to take a personal attack seriously as an argument. you're painting with a wide brush against my argument as it's essentially the same as krugman's but i realizre that his academic credentials are marks against him in your view. let me try again. lets say bananas are 50 cents a pound at walmart. they sell one hundred pounds a day (for simplicity). walmart's labor costs amount to 5 cents of the price. after all costs, that profit is 10 cents a pound. doubling minimum wage doesn't double labor costs overall for the bananas (not all the work product of any minimum wage worker is used on this one product and not only minimum wage workers are included in the 5 cent labor cost attributed to labor). so lets say the price goes up to 52 cents per pound and the profit down to 9 cents a pound after the wage increase. if 10% more bananas are sold because more minimum wage workers can buy more of them, it's a wash. there is some wage increase point where it's no longer a wash and more than a 10% increase in sales results. now extrapolate to other consumer products.

 

Wow, I'm gonna take a close look at this tonight to see if I can figure it out.

[birdog1960]

Wow, I'm gonna take a close look at this tonight to see if I can figure it out.

well if krugamn felt obliged to explain it to nyt readers in terms of burgers, what was i to conclude for ppp posters?

 

i understand that, but I don't buy the logic. should not everyone's income then be adjusted yearly according to inflation? why only minimum wage? to be honest, I don't think a minimum wage is a good idea anyway, since it sets an arbitrary amount for no-skilled and low-skilled labor, and pays evenly for people who are good at their job and those that do a terrible job. I understand how it would be good to be able to earn a decent and dependable wage, but a minimum wage....especially one of 15 dollars....will artificially increase the cost of doing business, which is always passed on to the consumer. the cost of employing people is considerably higher than just the wage they are paid when you include the social security costs (the employee only pays half, the employer pays the other half), unemployment insurance, disability, and anything else included, not to mention any benefits the employess may receive. I'm completely in support of people making a decent wage, but I believe it's the employee's responsibility to earn it rather than the employer's responsibility to provide it. a productive employee can always accept a better paying job with someone else if they feel that they're underpaid. the means to do so are out there. if we keep giving people more money (and it's always someone else's money we give away) just to continue to stay in a crappy, dead-end job, then they will always stay in those crappy, dead-end jobs. people need to realize that they can't change the way the world works just to suit their own desires. IMHO, increasing the minimum wage will disinsent them from moving forward.

it's not reinventing the wheel. there are examples where low wage jobs are paid a living wage and they do pretty well eg switzerland. and yup, dinner out is very expensive as are groceries but it works for them overall. now if they'd only have passed the resolution to limit pay fdifferential between top and bottom, they'd have become progressive icons.

Edited December 10, 2013 by birdog1960

[Azalin]

it's not reinventing the wheel. there are examples where low wage jobs are paid a living wage and they do pretty well eg switzerland. and yup, dinner out is very expensive as are groceries but it works for them overall.

maybe that's why countries like Switzerland aren't economic or industrial powerhouses. besides, I'd like to see americans do better than that, and I think our history as a nation is replete with examples of how we have been able to achieve as much as we have in our relativelty short existence.

[birdog1960]

here's a link to the resolution that unfortunately failed: ballsy even to try it. http://www.cnbc.com/id/101221226

[DC Tom]

it's difficult to take a personal attack seriously as an argument. you're painting with a wide brush against my argument as it's essentially the same as krugman's but i realizre that his academic credentials are marks against him in your view. let me try again. lets say bananas are 50 cents a pound at walmart. they sell one hundred pounds a day (for simplicity). walmart's labor costs amount to 5 cents of the price. after all costs, that profit is 10 cents a pound. doubling minimum wage doesn't double labor costs overall for the bananas (not all the work product of any minimum wage worker is used on this one product and not only minimum wage workers are included in the 5 cent labor cost attributed to labor). so lets say the price goes up to 52 cents per pound and the profit down to 9 cents a pound after the wage increase. if 10% more bananas are sold because more minimum wage workers can buy more of them, it's a wash. there is some wage increase point where it's no longer a wash and more than a 10% increase in sales results. now extrapolate to other consumer products.

 

That's completely facile on every level.

[TPS]

 

it's difficult to take a personal attack seriously as an argument. you're painting with a wide brush against my argument as it's essentially the same as krugman's but i realizre that his academic credentials are marks against him in your view. let me try again. lets say bananas are 50 cents a pound at walmart. they sell one hundred pounds a day (for simplicity). walmart's labor costs amount to 5 cents of the price. after all costs, that profit is 10 cents a pound. doubling minimum wage doesn't double labor costs overall for the bananas (not all the work product of any minimum wage worker is used on this one product and not only minimum wage workers are included in the 5 cent labor cost attributed to labor). so lets say the price goes up to 52 cents per pound and the profit down to 9 cents a pound after the wage increase. if 10% more bananas are sold because more minimum wage workers can buy more of them, it's a wash. there is some wage increase point where it's no longer a wash and more than a 10% increase in sales results. now extrapolate to other consumer products.

your basic idea is sound. Proponents argue that the income effect tends to be slightly greater than the cost/price effect, so there's a net gain in jobs over time. The more important issue is that it will tend to raise all wages since the floor is higher. It's needed because labor has been given the shaft for the past 30 years, as all productivity gains have gone mainly to capital and profits, leading to the rise in inequality. Graphs like those contained in the link below tell the story. Despite the constant efforts on the right to push "supply-side" profit-led growth strategies, the current problem is a lack of demand, not profitability.

If the government pursued a full employment policy, workers would have greater bargaining power, and the forced increase in wages wouldn't be as necessary.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/17/higher-productivity-used-to-mean-higher-wages-has-that-broken-down/

[birdog1960]

your basic idea is sound. Proponents argue that the income effect tends to be slightly greater than the cost/price effect, so there's a net gain in jobs over time. The more important issue is that it will tend to raise all wages since the floor is higher. It's needed because labor has been given the shaft for the past 30 years, as all productivity gains have gone mainly to capital and profits, leading to the rise in inequality. Graphs like those contained in the link below tell the story. Despite the constant efforts on the right to push "supply-side" profit-led growth strategies, the current problem is a lack of demand, not profitability.

If the government pursued a full employment policy, workers would have greater bargaining power, and the forced increase in wages wouldn't be as necessary.

http://www.washingto...at-broken-down/

cool. but the out of tune chorus will likely ignore your input here as well.