Who does a $15 an hour minimum wage help?

I really don't understand why people think this way.

If you take a thermometer and shift the lines down the barrel does it get hotter out? Money is a thermometer. It is a yard stick. It is a scale we use to measure something. Changing it does not change the value of the thing we are trying to measure.

We get minimum wages because both people above and below what is currently considered 15 dollars an hour worth of value think they are helped by shifting the lines on the ruler. Neither side is. The value remains exactly the same. It's the measuring system that changes.

If water freezes at zero it will still freeze at 15 if you slide the lines down the thermometer. If a minimum wage employee struggles at 7 they will still struggle at 15 or 20 or 30 or 230. It's not the size of the number that determines the value the number represents.

 

I meant that price floors result in a surplus. A surplus of labor means unemployment. That hurts those who are not worth $15 per hour.

 

Cradle to grave mentality, honestly!

 

Agreed. Consider how many young people embrace the guaranteed income/job memes Progressive mouthpieces are throwing out.

I can't grasp the level of indoctrination that would cause anyone to surrender their future well being to some monolithic unseen, uninterested entity.

 

Unfortunately with the drain of high paying jobs in America being replaced by sub par jobs, this is now the norm. There arent enough good paying jobs to go around anymore. Many people will be required to make a living in just this way, and there is very little anyone can do about it.

 

That's just not true. There are construction jobs, oilfield jobs and professions like plumbing. What puts a lot of these jobs out of reach is drug testing programs and plain old laziness. There will and should always be, low paying entry level jobs but business and industry is not responsible for correcting the mistakes you make on a personal level to prepare yourself for the work force.

 

Back to $10/month and 5 year old employees for those hard to reach/fit things? No thanks.

 

Yeah, I know you don't think this way. I'm not attacking you. It's just another issue that I think has to be addressed at the level of value in order to get the point across to liberals. They want to help. They get mad because they think we don't want to.

They don't understand that their solution to the problem is based on a view of the problem that is way too simplistic. They think money IS value, not a token of value. They think that value heirarchies can be redistributed by redistribution of money. While it's true the distribution can change by people making different choices, those choices are never the ones the "value engineers" anticipate.

 

That's now how markets work. It's not someone else's responsibility to create a job for you. The success of our system depends on your ability to create a job for yourself and others. Not the other way around. Labor is a resource, and if it's not being used that's an opportunity for you. There's not little you can do about it. There's an infinite number of things you can do about it. The biggest thing constraining that infinite number of things is the government. A major part of the problem of too few jobs is the government that limits your ability to create a job for yourself and others. And there's something you can do about that too. But of course, people are inclined to do the opposite, because they are scared of the risk and responsibility of doing something about it, and would rather trust that someone else can do something about it in a way that benefits them.

 

Minimum wage is a training wage - teenagers and people who have never been in the workforce or have been out of the work force for a long time or people who can't meet the minimal requirements of a job are the most likely recipients of the minimum wage.

There are people out there who consider themselves above certain tasks or who stand there like dweebs while work is right in front of them - young people are sometimes so busy flirting they don't get the job done. The supervisor has to get involved multiple times to ensure the job is getting done.

Until these people recognize that the job isn't done until it is done will always be on the cusp - the first to get fired or laid off.

What fries my ass is that the high minimum wage drives employers to hire illegal aliens an d get rid of those people who will never properly function without the training they acquire on such jobs.

The free market is the best arbiter of wages.

 

The purpose of a minimum wage is whatever the person who accepts the wage wants to use it for. It can be to supplement a retirement. It can be to buy Robucks in Roblocks. It can be to gamble away at the casino. It can be to support an addict in recovery. It can be to get through an injury. It can be any of an infinite number of reasons that cannot be anticipated by a social engineer trying to solve a specific problem.

The local knowledge problem applies to all individual choices. You can't know what the purpose of something is to everyone.

 

And to the people that complain how technology is stealing all the good jobs I say bologna.

Technology creates new opportunities, and government gets in the way of that too. Look at Uber. Look at fracking. Look at GMO.

 

The problem with your theoretical approach is that in reality countries and eras without a minimum wage experienced abject poverty. Capitalism has proven to need regulation in order to provide adequately for all members of society. Today in most of the US, you cannot live on the minimum wage working 40 hours per week, certainly not support a family. This is why I believe that the minimum wage needs to increase. There will inevitably be businesses whose bottom line is harmed by this, but if your business can not pay employees a wage high enough for them to live on should it exist in it's current form? I would say no. It is being propped up by artificially low wages that impoverished and undereducated workers have no recourse to change. People need jobs and need money. If they can't make it working they will need other means, either through illegal activity or through government services.

Raising the minimum wage would also immediately increase consumer spending and stimulate the economy. Many of the businesses that employ workers at the minimum wage would see significant growth that would act to cover the increased cost of labor.

 

I'm talik

I'm talking about the wage offered by the employer, not the wage that m,ight or might not be accepted by the employee.

 

My approach is not theoretical. It's observational. You, however, have the theory that there is a causal link between minimum wage and poverty. I can disprove that theory easily. Australia's minimum wage is $16.88. 13.3% of their population lives below poverty level. America's percentage below poverty is 14% despite our minimum wage being less than half. There's no causal link

Nonsense. The theoretical minimum wage is 7.25. The effective minimum wage is zero. What's the minimum wage of a farmer that invests 300k on his 60 acre crop when in good years he sells that crop for 400k, and in bad years he sells it for 250k? What's the minimum wage for a hairdresser that rents a chair in a salon that some days cuts 10 clients, and other days cuts zero clients? What's the minimum wage for a landscaper that some winters plows 300 driveways a month, and other winters doesn't plow any? What's the minimum wage of a youtuber that makes a video a week for 200k+ views and continues to get views longer after he stops? What's the minimum wage of a contractor that flips homes? What's the minimum wage of anyone that has ever started their own business? I can tell you, it's zero.

Your statement is completely false. Millions of Americans do just fine earning absolutely no wage. Imposing a change to the monetary system HARMS these people more than it helps them. Doing so harms their ability to generate jobs for other people and THOSE are the people you're concerned about not being able to trade their labor for enough money to survive.

That's the real problem your trying to solve. How do you increase the value of people who only have a little value to trade in the first place. Simply changing the scale of value does not solve this problem. Changing rulers doesn't make short people taller. Changing thermometers doesn't make it hotter out. Changing scales doesn't make people thinner, and changing the minimum wage doesn't add value to poorly valued labor.

 

You're making a judgement about why someone might offer a specific wage when you cannot be inside their head and know all the things they know when making their decision. It doesn't matter what side of the trade you're trying to think for, you can't think what everyone thinks in every situation. The liberals are correct that some employers pay less than reasonable, and some employees accept less than reasonable. They are wrong that ALL trades are this way. The conservatives are correct that some entry level positions build value but they are wrong that all trades are this way. It's this simplistic descriptions of the system that get people thinking they can make tweeks to the system to effect some sort of positive change. The reality is that no one has any clue what they are tweeking because the system cannot be described that simply.

 

You can't compare the US and Australia in that way. It doesn't make sense. The two countries set the poverty line differently. In Australia the poverty line is set at 50% of the median income, about $22,000 annually. In the US the poverty line is determined by looking at the cost of food. It's not a valuable comparison and it tells you next to nothing. Let's also remember that 13% of Australia is only a few million people. Over 40 million in the US live below the poverty line.

Prior to the establishment of the minimum wage in the US poverty was far worse.

If you adjust minimum wage for inflation, which you absolutely should. You see that the minimum wage peeked in 1968 with a relative income of 11.53 in todays dollars. Minimum wage has actually been going down. This is part of the problem.

Yes, if you make money without a wage you don't have a minimum wage. I don't see how that makes a difference, those people are making a choice to work for that income. The people who earn wages are essentially stuck with what they get. Particularly those who have little or no skill and cannot effectively bargain or switch jobs/careers.

The scale is already changing. Like I pointed out, the minimum wage peaked in 1968 at a relative amount of $11.53. Inflation has drastically impacted that number. If the minimum wage increased at the same rate as labor productivity, which directly relates to the increasing value you are claiming doesn't exist, then minimum wage would be over $19 an hour.

Workers deserve to be paid a living wage, if your business can't support that then it's a crappy business and doesn't have any special right to employ workers at artificially low wages, who are then paid by tax payers through social services in order to make ends meet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...poverty/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6fa48ea273e2
https://www.acoss.org.au/poverty/

 

That's hilarious. I can't compare two first world nations, but you can compare first world nations with third world nations with no minimum wage?

Awesome.

You still haven't established a causal link. The first American minimum wage was passed in 1912 in Mass to regulate the textile industry. Prior to the passage there were 45 mill towns in Massachusetts. By 1930 only 2 textile mills were left. Was the minimum wage so successful that people stopped needing fabric?

 

Here's what happened historically.

At the end of the 1800's the North was vigorously turning the south's cotton into textiles. Robust competition in the textile market grew the size & efficiency of factories to the point that they saturated the market and created a textile bubble. This is great for people who consume textiles (everyone) and great for businesses that use textiles to make new products, (most of them) and not great for the people who make textiles (the factory labor). They go on strike for better wages, and the government steps in to force employers to pay them. The problem with the system, however, is not that the employees aren't paid enough. The problem is that textiles are too easily produced. This problem causes the ruin of the majority of the textile factories in the region long before the depression hits. So how did that minimum wage help the employees that no longer have a factory to work at? Now they have no job, and their clothes are more expensive.

 

What I noited are facts.

Labor is valued based on scarcity. The fewer people that can meet standards, the higher the pay. On the other side of the equation is the more people can do the job, the higher the competition and the lower the wage.

Most people can dig a ditch, wash dishes or sweep a floor - high competition, low wage jobs
Fewer people can do accounting, run information systems or manage a multi-million dollar operation - less competition and higher wages.

A minimum wage skews this dynamic, pushing wages up across the board, increasing the price of the product being sold which usaually results in lower sales and resulting layoffs of the people at the biottom of the wage scale - the minimum wage people.

 

You and I know that, but the people we are arguing with attribute the results to different causes. We have to attack the premises that lead them to these false conclusions, even if they are premises that we falsely hold.

 

Get an education in common sense! Oh. That's right. You can't. You either have it or you don't. Oh well.

But economics? You won't find a course that teaches the many ways government, via the taxpayer, subsidizes businesses.

But regarding economics, you say that if there were no immigrants increasing the supply of labor, wages would be higher. That's great to know because that means businesses can afford to pay higher wages but just use the "supply and demand" of the labor market to pay a low wage, keep costs low, and increase profits. And government works for the benefit of business in this case. So then businesses can afford a higher minimum wage!!! Thanks for pointing that out!

 

So you disagree with @Heartburn too. Great. But you might want to lose that scornful contempt of others.

 

Can you show that those conditions have changed in the last 40 years?

 

All of them do. Every one.

The great thing about free markets is that if you can do better than the people who are currently doing, then have at it. An employer than can pay more to labor, does pay more to labor, because that allows them to take the best labor from their completion.

Of course this discussion is not about the best labor. It's about the wage paid to the worst labor. The wage always paid to the worst labor is zero.