Raising the minimum wage is good for the economy.

You asked "So a business should be forced to pay someone based upon the their lifestyle?"

I took that to mean So a business should determine each employee's cost for maintaining their lifestyle and then make sure everyone get a wage that would, at a minimum, support their lifestyle."

But as to how the MW should be set, just increase it according to inflation since 1968 when it was increased to $1.60/hr.
That would make it a bit over $10/hr. and that's where most advocates of raising the MW want it.

 

What I see is "fight for 15" $10 is reasonable, but will cost jobs and create a much larger population on mw.

 

If you were informed on this you would know that $15 is the goal some years down the road, usually 2020. Proposals advocate $9.32/hr, $9.50, $10.20, and $10.50 (etc.).

Maybe you should actually take time to look into it instead of relying on right wing talking heads. There's more detail to it than you knew.

 

If you were informed of my thinking you would know that I knew the idea was to raise it in stages. I just didn't see the point in stating any of the many proposed increases along the way and just stated the end point.

 

Nice attempt to cover for your embarrassing faux pas. You said "What I see is "fight for 15" $10 is reasonable". Your words make it very clear that you thought $15 was the immediate goal. You didn't have any idea of any incremental increases. You're fooling no one. Why can't you just say "oh, I didn't know that. Thanks."

 

There aren't any proposals for specific increases along the way. There's the starting point, but mainly the most advertised is the end point of $15. So your claim of "I knew the idea was to raise it in stages" and "I just didn't see the point in stating any of the many proposed increases along the way" is false cover based on more lack of information as you claim to know what doesn't even exist!

 

According to the study just commissioned by Seattle, it has UNQUESTIONABLY hurt the low wage workers in Seattle.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/26/news/seattle-minimum-wage-15/index.html

FWIW.....its not MY study. Its the study that was commissioned by the city of Seattle in order to research the increase in minimum wage that the city of Seattle instituted. I am sorry if that upsets you. The liberal town of Seattle commissioned a study to look at the liberal policy that the city itself both proposed and implemented, and they did not get the result they were expecting. Don't argue with me. Argue with the city of Seattle.

 

Interesting. I recently had a righty argue with me on this forum claiming that automation by robots doesn't and won't produce unemployment because the robots are added to the business rather than being used to replace workers. I guess some righties disagree with righties and both assert with great certainty that they are right.

 

I would rather address the root cause of low wages. Some of it is low skills, bad attitudes, lack of motivation, etc. Illiteracy and no understanding of business and commerce is epidemic. If we are going to allow the government to set wages, however, it has to be done across the board. The only way it will work is to control everyone's wages, where the business owner or CEO has a salary that is tied proportionately to the workers and staffers under them, and the burger-flipper doesn't make the same living as an accountant. Once upon a time, when people had a sense of decency, that happened voluntarily. We also had a fairly nice economy.

But be careful what you wish for: government works on a total wage control system. There are many smart people there, but there are also some pretty complacent workers, and they are impossible to get rid of. The dynamics, and the competitively intelligent atmosphere is smothered.

 

The highest paid executive at the Mondragon Corporation is paid 8.5 times what the lowest paid worker is paid.

 

Good for them and if that were the case all over we wouldn't be having this discussion.

 

So?

 

One person, working full time- 40 hours a week, should be able to support themselves- rent, food, energy, transportation, clothing, health care- on minimum wage. Not live in luxury, but afford to live independently without government supplementation.

 

So, if you have capital investment, all you want, and you have no customers, how much will you sell? Business without customers won't last long, no matter how much capital investment you have.

There is no doubt that underemployment is the problem we are facing. People have jobs, but too many jobs don't pay enough to live on, much less provide some disposable income.

People have to have at least some disposable income to drive demand. If all their money goes to subsistence, and you're not their landlord, grocer, or bus driver, you're not seeing any of their money.

This is not hard to understand. Business needs customers and workers. Workers and customers need business. One is not more important than the other. It takes all of them to make the economy work.

 

I agree with almost all of this. I would love to see worker compensation and CEO compensation tied proportionally. In 1965, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. in 2016, the average CEO made 296 times what the average worker made. Surely some adjustment is due the worker that became much more productive over that time.

 

Why? What do you wish for? Do you wish for government to control everyone's wages? Do you wish for government to proportionately tie the compensation of the business owner or CEO to that of their underlings? Do you wish for the burger-flipper to make the same as the accountant? Because in each case there is a man you've erected of straw that you then proceed to school or stab. I understand women just wanting to stab men in general, but this is not that. Logic, not gender, lol. Why, once upon a time, back in the good ole days of yore, I tells ya folks had a sense of decency! And a Great Depression! Let's learn nothing, pretend to know everything, and dad gummit, do it again!

 

Whoever you were speaking to is wrong but it's okay. We righties can disagree and be okay.

 

The only time a high minimum wage is brought up is by "conservatives" that use it as an absurd argument against a living wage that not a high minimum wage. The absurd argument goes "Why not just mandate a $50/hr minimum wage" or something to that effect where they're just pulling an unnecessary number out of their rectal cavity and trying to imply it's a meaningful argument.

That's not what advocates for a living wage are talking about. A "living minimum wage" is a rational and pragmatic argument based upon statistical analysis of how much, at a minimum, it costs for the person to provide their labor to the employer. It's about capitalism where the price for goods/services must be equal to or greater than the costs to provide the goods/services because if it isn't capitalism will ultimately fail.

"Conservatives" don't seem to understand this rule of capitalism so I'm going to repeat it one move time.

The price paid for goods/services must be equal to or greater than the costs to provide the goods/services.

If price is less than cost then capitalism fails. We mitigate the under-pricing for labor by providing welfare assistance to prevent capitalism from failing but the welfare assistance doesn't fully cover the difference between price and cost so we're not preventing failure, just delaying the failure.

Conservatives keep repeating the mantra the person can just pay less by finding a substitute and in fact Republicans in Congress are proposing a change to the cost of living adjustments for Social Security based upon that principle. The problem is that there's a pragmatic limitation to doing that that can be demonstrated by using a boat as an example.

A boat floats because the volume of the hull displaces more water weight than the weight of the boat and it's contents. The Republicans are proposing that you can just make the boat smaller and smaller and smaller but pragmatically you can do that to a limited degree. Eventually you reach a point where the hull isn't large enough to displace enough water and it sinks. Even before the boat sinks it becomes highly unstable and water will spill over the railing, into the boat, and the boat sinks. You have to keep the size of the hull (compensation) large enough to prevent the boat from becoming unstable and sinking.

Our welfare programs are fundamentally the government bailing out the boat because the hull is so small (inadequate compensation from the employer) that waters coming over the railing and the boat will sink without the government intervention to bail out the boat.

The "living minimum wage" is about the enterprise providing enough compensation so that the boat won't sink. It removes the necessity for the government to mitigate the under-payment for labor by the employer (price less than cost).

The choice is either the enterprise pay a price greater than the cost or the government mitigates the difference with welfare assistance. There are only two choice so check the box of which one you want.

1. The employer pays a living wage (price for labor equal to or above the cost to provide the labor).
2. Welfare assistance (a subsidy to cover the costs that exceed the price paid for the labor)

Living wage or government welfare? That's the two choices so make your pick.

 

Absolutely not, because this doesn't represent a solution to them... it represents a big damn problem. They need for people to be poor and hurting, the poorer the better. That is the reason they are pushing MW increases.

 

This is based upon the myth that more manufacturing results in more manufacturing jobs but history disputes that fact.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us...utput-has-doubled-in-three-decades-2016-03-28

The peak of US manufacturing jobs was 18 million prior to 2000 and it's been going down since while manufacturing has tripled since 1980. Increasing the amount of manufactured goods does not increase the number of manufacturing jobs and hasn't increased the number of manufacturing jobs for decades.

Increased manufacturing productivity results in fewer manufacturing jobs because the increased productivity is accomplished by automation.

We seen a recent example of how government subsidizing manufacturing results in fewer manufacturing jobs at Carrier that Trump, with the assistance of Mike Pense, bragged about. Ignoring the entire story United Technologies agreed to not move all of the manufacturing from it's Carrier plant in Indiana that initially retained 800 jobs in exchange for a $7 million state tax subsidy. Immediately after the "deal was struck" the CEO of United Technologies openly stated that UT was going to use the $7 million plus $9 million of it's own money to fully automate the Carrier plant. Carrier is currently laying of the workers at the Indiana plant because the government helped subsidize the automation to eliminate their jobs.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with manufacturing in the United States that's very healthy and growing constantly. The growth in manufacturing has been exceptionally good but it's being done with fewer and fewer workers and that's going to continue.

Anyone that believes that more manufacturing is going to result in more good paying jobs is basing their belief on a myth. The opposite is actually true. Increased manufacturing literally relies on eliminating good paying jobs.

 

As with most these days

Labor most certainly does influences the cost of housing, energy, food, transportation and most every other product and service globally, well unless you are just visiting from an alternate dimension where automation builds houses, food, supplies energy and provides transports land sea and air!

Another interesting point you seem to be clouded on is the use of "Government"! You use the term as if they are entrepreneurial and in some odd way actually make money, when in reality "ALL" of your funding and subsidizing is in fact a provision made available from "LABOR" in the form of taxation. All Gubmint does is take and redistribute money taken from large scale commerce, labor and products, and when they do choose to employ, they are simply saddling the current labor force with the burden of supplying them a wage.

The only logical point of action is to bolster opportunity, raising wages for menial labor will simply force increase compensation across a swath of service sector jobs given primarily to unexperienced worker and never meant to be living wage positions for those displaced by Oberrynomics.

The real problem is/has been ignored! Oberry's recovery and job creation was just a bunch of menial and seasonal service sector jobs and no real skilled labor like factory and manufacturing that have historically provided higher wages and benefits. The left in this country seem to think working at McDonalds, Starbucks or Walmart should provide them with the income to buy a home, raise a family, insure them, send them off to college and all the other perks that come with higher educated, skilled and specialized labor force that trained/studied to qualify for those higher wages!

Don't get me wrong I do appreciate the comedic value of a huge group of people that stomp their feet demanding a "Living wage" while manning the fry station, really I do! Maybe the better approach would be to demand JOBS that supply living wage pay and leave the menial crowd to do what they choose to do. Rewarding them for menial work will simply disincentivize them further and they will forever expect more for doing less!

 

In an environment where there are more job openings than there are people to fill them, then every job becomes a good paying job, because employers are competing for workers instead of workers competing for jobs.

But, it doesn't have to be manufacturing. I used that as my example, but any industry that employs people will do. The idea is that if we were to make the USA the most attractive place in the world to set up and do business, ANY BUSINESS, then businesses would flock here and put our people to work. And, because of everything we have to offer; security, infrastructure, energy, proximity to market, land grants, 0% tax rates, etc... we don't have to compete with third world wages, or sacrifice the environment, to do it. This is the best solution for the next few generations, while we are still expecting people to work a job.

 

Prepare for revolution then, because it is surely coming. We continue to ignore the lessons of history and keep repeating the same mistakes.

 

Apparently

 

It's absurd only because you characterize it as such to avoid addressing it substantively. It is offered in response to the claim made by the OP: "raising minimum wage is good for the economy". Oh? If $15/hr is, why isn't $50?

You haven't answered it either. You'd think that - if liberals were fiscally responsible lol - they'd at least have an opinion when a wage increase would go from helpful to harmful to the economy.

Your characterizations are not anyone's concern. You liberals don't, in fact, actually give one flying monkey poo about such considerations, because you don't ever acknowledge the percentage of MW workers who are students or retirees looking to supplement their lives with additional cash, or perhaps gain an entry position to learn and build a resume.

People who will be deprived of such positions as a result of your despotic effort to force an employer to pay what YOU want paid.

Which is why you didn't consider such things here.

I see no evidence at all that 'conservatives don't understand' such a basic fact.

We don't mitigate under-pricing for labor with welfare. We mitigate laziness, illness and dysfunction with welfare.

If someone cannot command anything more than a meager hourly wage, it's because they do not have any skills to command more - and that's no one's fault but their own.

A couple of weeks ago, Trump visited a local technical college: WCTC. That was intentional. WCTC is regularly barraged by businesses seeking skilled tradesmen, and WCTC doesn't have them.

They don't have enough students enrolling to learn skilled trades.

Stop whining about raising - arbitrarily - the pay for positions which do not require any skill. It's not up to you, and the entire issue is a canard. Wisconsin, for instance, has a 3.1% unemployment rate. There are jobs available everywhere.

Your deluded analogy aside, no one is proposing what you claim; you made that up.

False dichotomy. You leftists have made it a culture to prevent self-starting. We need welders in this country, all over the country. It pays over 100K/year for many of these positions, yet they're going unfilled.

Why?