Big Blitz Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 Let me be clear. There shouldn't be a minimum wage. Period. It's been a net negative for society and its also worthless and outdated. But we know why a certain *cough cough* political party supports it. But why do you see many corporations you good with a $15 federal minimum wage (why not 25 is unclear) is because they know this simple fact. The same reason they don't mind raising taxes to 80 to 90%. They can handle a $15 minimum wage. Potential start ups and competition....just had their costs increase. They get dealt another blow. They also know, the robots, AI, and algorithms all can do what low info dupes #FightingFor15 can do and more efficiently.......we're pretty freaking close to having online modules take the place of teachers but yay cool fight for fifteen! The corporations will also adjust by cutting staff. They can handle it. The little guy cannot. 2021 economics shouldn't be dusting off the 1930s political playbook. It's a joke.
BillStime Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 30 minutes ago, Big Blitz said: Let me be clear. There shouldn't be a minimum wage. Period. It's been a net negative for society and its also worthless and outdated. But we know why a certain *cough cough* political party supports it. But why do you see many corporations you good with a $15 federal minimum wage (why not 25 is unclear) is because they know this simple fact. The same reason they don't mind raising taxes to 80 to 90%. They can handle a $15 minimum wage. Potential start ups and competition....just had their costs increase. They get dealt another blow. They also know, the robots, AI, and algorithms all can do what low info dupes #FightingFor15 can do and more efficiently.......we're pretty freaking close to having online modules take the place of teachers but yay cool fight for fifteen! The corporations will also adjust by cutting staff. They can handle it. The little guy cannot. 2021 economics shouldn't be dusting off the 1930s political playbook. It's a joke. Can you show me where raising the minimum wage has harmed economies anywhere in the world? I'll wait.
Big Blitz Posted February 22, 2021 Author Posted February 22, 2021 Just now, BillStime said: Can you show me where raising the minimum wage has harmed economies anywhere in the world? I'll wait. Show me where it's helped and is an overall net positive. I'll wait.
BillStime Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 Just now, Big Blitz said: Show me where it's helped and is an overall net positive. I'll wait. Australia
gobills404 Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 2 minutes ago, BillStime said: Can you show me where raising the minimum wage has harmed economies anywhere in the world? I'll wait. Can you even find a country that has more than doubled it's minimum wage all at once? I'll wait. 1
BillStime Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 3 minutes ago, gobills404 said: Can you even find a country that has more than doubled it's minimum wage all at once? I'll wait. Easy. The United States of America - 1949. 1
Big Blitz Posted February 22, 2021 Author Posted February 22, 2021 (edited) 5 minutes ago, BillStime said: Easy. The United States of America - 1949. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart Not true. And we raised it at a similar pace in the 60s.....what has this led to (see next post). Edited February 22, 2021 by Big Blitz
BillStime Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 1 minute ago, Big Blitz said: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart Close enough
gobills404 Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 7 minutes ago, BillStime said: Easy. The United States of America - 1949. It went from 40 cents to 75 cents so I'll say close enough. Unemployment also jumped up from 4.0% to to 6.6% that year as a result. Raising it now would only make it harder for people who have lost their jobs during the pandemic to get back into the work force.
Buffarukus Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 (edited) this one im alittle torn over. there is no way the min wage comes close to allowing someone the ability to care for oneself let alone anyone else. i think a jump that high is definatly destructive to small buisness, brings all other wages down and will quickly be nullified by inflation. so anyone cheering this on. youll be talking about low wages but also higher unemployment very shortly. but i also see how companies are using the gov to sublimate their workforce on the taxpayers backs. welfare, food stamps, heap ect ect. there's a unspoken agreement where workers and companies are taking advantage of social services so incentive by both sides to not offer "full" time or simply not enter the workforce is pretty high regardless. so whats a good solution? alot of bootstrapers say get a skill to not work min wage. most of those people have good jobs and many i talk to are from the older generation. a good paying factory job with benefits, pension was waiting with your hs diploma. those are pretty rare today. now higher education isnt the answer unless youd like a house payment..to get a job. so whats left? picking a trade school, join the military or be connected enough to be given a opportunity your not really "qualified" for. thats about it. Edited February 22, 2021 by Buffarukus 1
Big Blitz Posted February 22, 2021 Author Posted February 22, 2021 (edited) The last thing a certain political party *cough cough* needs is more people less dependent on government but that's not what they want to tell you is necessary to fix this dynamic. "But despite the strong labor market, wage growth has lagged economists’ expectations. In fact, despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers." One theory is that rising benefit costs – particularly employer-provided health insurance – may be constraining employers’ ability or willingness to raise cash wages. According to BLS-generated compensation cost indices, total benefit costs for all civilian workers have risen an inflation-adjusted 22.5% since 2001 (when the data series began), versus 5.3% for wage and salary costs..... Other factors that have been suggested include the continuing decline of labor unions; lagging educational attainment relative to other countries; noncompete clauses and other restrictions on job-switching; a large pool of potential workers who are outside the formally defined labor force, neither employed nor seeking work; and broad employment declines in manufacturing and production sectors and a consequent shift toward job growth in low-wage industries. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ Stop importing cheap labor from Mexico. Readjust how we outsource jobs that skilled Americans can do right here---but the labor costs more. The answer to this isn't raising the minimum wage so that more Americans content with 30K a year living with mom and dad can by more useless crap produced by American companies making stuff in India. Our health care "crisis" in 2008 that led to Obamacare wasn't that people didn't have insurance. The crisis was that insurance was getting too expensive and too expensive for employers to offer as an almost necessary incentive. Compare it to the College Loan Debt Bomb we're sitting on. The solution isn't get more kids in college or forgive student debt. The problem is figuring out to lower higher education costs. Unfortunately what we're now being told is privilege, used to be absolutes to succeed in life; just get a degree that will get you a job that pays, develop a skill especially one in demand, and get married and stay married. So long as we're a free country you stick as close as you can to that you'll find success. Which of course is a relative term we will not all be rich and without hardships. And we don't need to have our hands held thru life. Saftey nets are one thing. Creating a fully dependent on government society in ways that discourage investment, risk taking, entrepreneurship (minimum wage is just another regulation that hurts small business)....that is entirely different. But that's the culture we're allowing and well, that's going to be costly and will just bring ruin. That should be the discussion. Not minimum wage. That's a political distraction. And that's why I think it should just be scrapped. Edited February 22, 2021 by Big Blitz 1
Motorin' Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 (edited) Let me be clear. If companies can find people to work for free that should be their right! No one "deserves" a wage for their labor. Furthermore, if you actually work for a living you're probably poor and stupid, and you deserve nothing! Edited February 22, 2021 by Motorin' 2
Big Blitz Posted February 22, 2021 Author Posted February 22, 2021 16 minutes ago, Motorin' said: Let me be clear. If companies can find people to work for free that should be their right! No one "deserves" a wage for their labor. Furthermore, if you actually work for a living you're probably poor and stupid, and you deserve nothing! If this is the age old argument without a minimum wage evil employers in the fast chains or whoever will pay you peanuts and you'll like it. No you'll leave go somewhere else. They need bodies. For now. Putting a federal floor at $15 works for McDonald's or Walmart but they can print their own money. Small business (it's nice we have the occasional weekend to "honor" them), they're put in bind. They had people...good people working at say 8 or 10 dollars an hour and they were able to pay the mortgage and bills and taxes that were out of control and still make a profit. The person making 8 or 10 dollars liked their job. They were 1 of say 7 employees there. Now they have to pay those 7 twice the labor cost. No choice. Someone is getting let go or hours reduced or both. And this makes operating the business more difficult. They needed 7 employees. Wonderful. That's what happens. And the 200 dollars these people may make in a month from the hike is not significant nor is it anything supply and demand won't work out. I know there is this knee jerk "no one is going to do that job for ..." Its just not reality. And you'll get better quality work because the people doing the job need the work and most likely value the experience.
Backintheday544 Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 (edited) 5 hours ago, Big Blitz said: If this is the age old argument without a minimum wage evil employers in the fast chains or whoever will pay you peanuts and you'll like it. No you'll leave go somewhere else. They need bodies. For now. Putting a federal floor at $15 works for McDonald's or Walmart but they can print their own money. Small business (it's nice we have the occasional weekend to "honor" them), they're put in bind. They had people...good people working at say 8 or 10 dollars an hour and they were able to pay the mortgage and bills and taxes that were out of control and still make a profit. The person making 8 or 10 dollars liked their job. They were 1 of say 7 employees there. Now they have to pay those 7 twice the labor cost. No choice. Someone is getting let go or hours reduced or both. And this makes operating the business more difficult. They needed 7 employees. Wonderful. That's what happens. And the 200 dollars these people may make in a month from the hike is not significant nor is it anything supply and demand won't work out. I know there is this knee jerk "no one is going to do that job for ..." Its just not reality. And you'll get better quality work because the people doing the job need the work and most likely value the experience. If you can’t structure your business so that your full time employees can live above the poverty line with what you pay them, the issue isn’t with a Federal minimum wage, it’s with your business structure. Let me put this in right wing speak for you. It’s like going spending $100,000 on college for a art history degree. If you out capital into a business and that capital can’t support the living needs of you and your employees, you picked the wrong major. Edited February 22, 2021 by Backintheday544 1
SoCal Deek Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 Or...how about we simply track minimum wage to inflation and stop this nonsensical argument once and for all? No, that would make way too much sense and would take away yet another manufactured crisis for Congress to drum up disagreement about. Great for fund raising though! 2
oldmanfan Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 56 minutes ago, SoCal Deek said: Or...how about we simply track minimum wage to inflation and stop this nonsensical argument once and for all? No, that would make way too much sense and would take away yet another manufactured crisis for Congress to drum up disagreement about. Great for fund raising though! Here, here.
SoCal Deek Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 42 minutes ago, oldmanfan said: Here, here. Oldman.....we agree on way too much. The future Oldman/Deek Administration is going to be stellar! The really frightening part is that all of these highly paid public 'servants' (yawn) cannot come together to pass legislation that virtually EVERYONE would agree on. I guess there's little interest in passing laws that actually get anything done. Way easier to say you're in there 'making an argument'.
T master Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 11 hours ago, BillStime said: Easy. The United States of America - 1949. WOO HOO it went from $0 .40 a hr to $0.75 a hr so it didn't actually double but they earned & appreciated it more then and still probably had more than one job the average family made $2k a yr. in 1949 . Today they want to make double the money so they don't have to find a second job like most of us did as kids so they can hurry up and get home to play video games now there's some motivation for you !!
TH3 Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 11 hours ago, Big Blitz said: The last thing a certain political party *cough cough* needs is more people less dependent on government but that's not what they want to tell you is necessary to fix this dynamic. "But despite the strong labor market, wage growth has lagged economists’ expectations. In fact, despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers." One theory is that rising benefit costs – particularly employer-provided health insurance – may be constraining employers’ ability or willingness to raise cash wages. According to BLS-generated compensation cost indices, total benefit costs for all civilian workers have risen an inflation-adjusted 22.5% since 2001 (when the data series began), versus 5.3% for wage and salary costs..... Other factors that have been suggested include the continuing decline of labor unions; lagging educational attainment relative to other countries; noncompete clauses and other restrictions on job-switching; a large pool of potential workers who are outside the formally defined labor force, neither employed nor seeking work; and broad employment declines in manufacturing and production sectors and a consequent shift toward job growth in low-wage industries. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ Stop importing cheap labor from Mexico. Readjust how we outsource jobs that skilled Americans can do right here---but the labor costs more. The answer to this isn't raising the minimum wage so that more Americans content with 30K a year living with mom and dad can by more useless crap produced by American companies making stuff in India. Our health care "crisis" in 2008 that led to Obamacare wasn't that people didn't have insurance. The crisis was that insurance was getting too expensive and too expensive for employers to offer as an almost necessary incentive. Compare it to the College Loan Debt Bomb we're sitting on. The solution isn't get more kids in college or forgive student debt. The problem is figuring out to lower higher education costs. Unfortunately what we're now being told is privilege, used to be absolutes to succeed in life; just get a degree that will get you a job that pays, develop a skill especially one in demand, and get married and stay married. So long as we're a free country you stick as close as you can to that you'll find success. Which of course is a relative term we will not all be rich and without hardships. And we don't need to have our hands held thru life. Saftey nets are one thing. Creating a fully dependent on government society in ways that discourage investment, risk taking, entrepreneurship (minimum wage is just another regulation that hurts small business)....that is entirely different. But that's the culture we're allowing and well, that's going to be costly and will just bring ruin. That should be the discussion. Not minimum wage. That's a political distraction. And that's why I think it should just be scrapped. See - Here is the problem. The GOP is bankrupt on ideas on how to solve the issues are acute today. Yes - Our health care costs are through the roof, pinching wage growth, sucking resources that could go elsewhere - GOP solution? - crickets. The whole structure needs to be thrown out and start with a clean sheet of paper. College costs to much? GOP legislative solutions? None. Wage stagnation for the lower class? GOP? So what you get is DEM solutions: Raise the minimum wage, forgive student debt, the ACA. GOP had total control of the government from 2016 to 2018 and did nothing productive on these items. 1
All_Pro_Bills Posted February 22, 2021 Posted February 22, 2021 (edited) 4 hours ago, Backintheday544 said: If you can’t structure your business so that your full time employees can live above the poverty line with what you pay them, the issue isn’t with a Federal minimum wage, it’s with your business structure. Let me put this in right wing speak for you. It’s like going spending $100,000 on college for a art history degree. If you out capital into a business and that capital can’t support the living needs of you and your employees, you picked the wrong major. If it was only that simple as the problem is the dynamic nature of changes in business conditions. And how it impacts the people running and working in these businesses. Its about changes to the "rules", in this case the minimum amount of pay per hour you are required to pay out, and what adjustments are necessary to stay in business. So you need to adapt to the changing rules of the game. Businesses constantly face these issues. Input costs like a restaurants food costs rise and rarely fall for example. But the root of the problem isn't about what the minimum wage should be as I'll get to at the end. Although labor costs are a big component of the "costs" of running a business there are other factors. Other inputs, fixed and variable costs, taxes, regulations. specific costs and attributes of the business, along with specific costs and attributes of the market. The simplest response to raising the labor cost would be to raise prices to compensate the business for the additional costs. Or shrink the product and hold the price like make the Whopper smaller. Absent that you'd need to either increase productivity (measured in the value of output per hour) or cut costs somewhere else. A fundamental question is how do you pay somebody that generates $10 of value per hour a pay rate of $15 per hour? Over the course of a year you'll lose about $10K per employee. The more people you employ the more you lose. Its like being in business to sell a dollar for 90 cents. So the challenge is to get at or above a $15 value generating level per hours per employee. Most likely you'll try to pass on the additional cost by raising prices and if that doesn't work then you'll be left with the undesirable task of letting somebody go. Or given a rise in labor costs entertain the idea of some sort of automation which now becomes more attractive from a cost perspective. IMO the minimum wage debate is an exercise in political misdirection under the guise of helping the unfortunate minimum wage worker. A distraction because it avoids any discussion of a fatal structural problem with the US economy of today. These minimum wage jobs aren't designed to be lifetime jobs for people. But for many that is the current reality. This is entry level work to get people into the labor force to get experience and skills that can be leveraged to move up the ladder. But the rungs above minimum wage in the employment ladder have been removed by outsourcing and eliminating these opportunities through one way or another that are too detailed to go into here. So just by looking at the large number of people stuck at the bottom there's no where to go for most of them. They are stuck here without a lot of viable options. Rather than devolving into a debate about the governments plan to dictate wage levels to small employers maybe they should focus on the things that the government and their corporate master have enacted and done in order for powerful corporations and Wall Street to strip mine US workers of their jobs and dignity along with putting millions of small businesses out of existence while raising their profits and incomes to obscene levels? Edited February 22, 2021 by All_Pro_Bills
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