Question for Minimum Wage supporters

Those who have the least education, least skills, least self-esteem, least communication skills, etc. etc. will ALWAYS function on the bottom rungs of the economy and society! This CANNOT be changed by forcing American business to pay higher and higher wages.

The world already sells stuff into the USA?? Every retail business in the USA is 90% imports. Cars are 30-40% imports. Food is imported...and it goes on and on and on.

Use some common sense; unless all workers are paid the identical amount, we will always have some people earning lower wages than others. You can't change this! Nor should we even try to change this...

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Well...I strongly disagree...

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Again...I strongly disagree...

 

When I started working I had to hitch a ride to work because I could not afford a car...and I lived at home because I could not afford to live on my own. Attending college I worked part-time and still had no car, needed to have several roommates, ate instant macaroni every night, and all of my clothes fit in a one-foot area of the closet. After school when I got a career job based on my education, I began to earn more. I eventually bought a car and slowly had fewer roommates until I lived on my own. With good job performance, and additional responsibilities, I earned more and more and subsequently had some savings and bought a home (first home cost $12,000). More time passes and finally married.

BTW; the above took ten years to achieve. Today everyone wants everything today with little to no personal effort and/or investment...instant gratification!

In my early days the requirement was to work hard, stay out of trouble, spend carefully, save some money, and eventually it will all pay off. Today it's just a sense of entitlement in which no matter how little we have to offer an employer, or the USA, we demand instant gratification. IMO this is quite pathetic...

 

*Shrug*. My first job was as a grocery bagger, earning $3.15 an hour or so. It was fine as a high-school student -- but would have been a lousy job if I had had to live on the earnings.

Raising the minimum wage to $8 or $10 or $12 an hour doesn't mean people are living high on the hog. It doesn't mean you don't still have to sacrifice and save and scrimp. For one thing, you need to GET and KEEP a job before minimum wage means anything. And $18k a year is not a lot, even for a single person. That's what my first job out of college paid -- 26 years ago.

All minimum wage does is ever-so-slightly level the playing field in terms of who gets the benefit of a given person's work. It's also a great poverty-reduction tool, which ends up saving the government a lot of money on benefits and such, and also boosts the economy because low-wage workers now have more money to spend.

 

How does increasing the minimum wage necessarily increase the Consumer Price Index?

In any case the minimum wage should be enough that anyone getting it no longer applies for any form of public assistance. Otherwise your and my taxes are subsidizing businesses to pay their employees less.

 

I would base it on the cost of living increases Congress gets, that way it never falls so far behind again

I would love to see someone come up with a graph of congress cost of living increases dollar wise to the min wage increases dollar wise per hour over the last 50 years

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it is very hard to pursue happiness when people have to live within their means on minimum wage in American poverty, which is better than third world poverty but still unfair.

increased costs to business with tariffs and banning immigrants will help to redistribute happiness from rich to poor more equitably.

 

I believe we should try to simplify government whenever possible.

The general government of the Union should fix Standards for the Union.

The several, United States can fix their own Standards, for their State.

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not enough social morals for free?

 

presently the right wing under Donald Trump is proposing tariffs, so that the US doesn't have to compete with third world cheap labor.

 

Whatever assuages their moral outrage and doesn't force them to actually think about the law of supply and demand.

Good question. It doesn't raise inflation, as inflation is a function of money supply. However, it may raise the CPI since that is a gauge of prices for products/services included in the CPI.

Here's where progressives get into Tooth Fairy thinking. They believe that raising minimum wage creates something from nothing, but that's not possible. In fact, if businesses are spending more labor, then they must spend less on something else. If they raise prices, then consumers must forgo that thing to forgo something else. Inflation, as in continuing increases in the money supply, erodes the effect of minimum wage fairly quickly, unless there's a big jump as the progressives are proposing. Of course, when those businesses face those increases and decide to not hire or turn to automation, the progressives will blame someone else. Because their intentions are good and their feelings are good, they cannot possibly implement bad economic policy.

 

did you know, that willful blindness is also, a "lack of social morals for free"?

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I guess, the right wants the poor to work harder for less, so they can get richer faster.

 

why should the unskilled and uneducated be priced out of jobs and onto welfare?

that appears more like crony capitalism instead of real capitalism which serves the people.

 

it is All about lucre, for the right.

Safety standards for Persons, also increased costs for business.

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how do you do that without a market friendly work visa program in place?

 

we were discussing foreign, unskilled labor.

if you want to change the subject about native US labor, they should be priced out of sweatshop labor jobs and onto unemployment compensation that is one dollar an hour equivalent, less, than the local statutory, minimum wage.

Why should US labor have to "suffer" due to Capitalism's, natural rate of unemployment, with the Best form of Socialism in the Entire World?

 

raising the minimum wage increases the supply of money for the poor, and that increases the demand for products and services from the rich.

a higher minimum wage won't raise the CPI and cost of living for food and transportation, that is just fear mongering to keep people working in poverty.

the rich will still be able to afford to make payments on their fancy cars and mansions, it will just mean they have less spending money since they have to give it to the poor for more spending money through government force.

we're still waiting on the rich to replace the half of Americans who are unskilled and uneducated with robots, right now it is just blackmail.

 

sweat shop labor is noble work as long as it pays a living wage, why send the poor on generous welfare instead of protecting the US economy from outsourcing and cheap labor with tariffs?

 

$23.00/hr

This is generally based upon the average cost of living income requirements as determined by MIT for a family of three (two adults, one child) that is as close to the national median of 2.24 people per household as we can get.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

 

Actually the federal minimum wage doesn't affect enterprises at different locations in the country differently because the business plan accommodates the compensation for labor just like it does the expenditure for rent. What is actually does is level the playing field for all enterprises regardless of location in the country.

 

Many of those that work in NYC live elsewhere and don't pay NYC rent prices. Why should they receive a wage based upon a rent they don't pay?

Remember that the federal minimum wage must apply across the board for all enterprises in the nation. If a specific state or city has unusual requirement they can have a local minimum wage that I higher than the federal minimum wage.

 

The problem with using the federal poverty guideline is that it only represents about 50% of the income required to not live in poverty when compared to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. It doesn't make sense to have a federal minimum wage where the workers still have to receive government welfare assistance to fund their monthly and annual expenditures.

 

Unless the family of 4 all work for an employer, the employer has no interest in or duty to the other 3....

 

Yes but why should they be forced to commute hours each day? pay them what they need to live where they work!!

 

imagine giving people a living wage for being a high school drop out! what a great way to encourage dropping out. And it should be a minimum wage so that a man can support a family of 4 right?? And you do need a car to get to work. That would be included right? And decent clothes- right? A vacation actually clears the mind and makes you a better worker according to the French!!

 

but if you make it illegal to hire folks who are not worth the minimum wage you must give them the minimum wage too for not even working- right ?

 

If you don't protect american workers, expect a revolution. Sooner or later, they will revolt. If you think this is not feasible then you are no student of history.

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I love reading posts like this because it reaffirms my belief that some Americans are truly some of the stupidest coddled arsewipes on the planet.

 

because we don't want to get rid of Capitalism, merely for the sake of right wing, Orwellian fantasy.