Discussion for article #229067
I’d personally favor abolishing the minimum wage in exchange for repealing Taft-Hartley, passing the EFCA and empowering unions to fight it out on approximate parity with management.
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It’d certainly be fair to ask what Japan does right, to achieve so much higher % thriving with roughly the same minimum wage as ours. Also, WTF is wrong with Slovenia? I strongly suspect that Republicans are trying to be more like Slovenia.
Remember, the study is examining perceived well-being, which contains a large cultural/psychological element. Japanese culture values stoicism so they may be less prone to rate their circumstances as lacking. France shows much less contentment than would be predicted from their minimum wage-having lived there for several years, I can say the French are world-champion complainers (every French person I know admits that). I don’t know enough about Slovenia to comment.
I question that a higher minimum wage results in fewer jobs. Studies on states that have higher minimum wages than the federal one do not show reduced jobs or higher unemployment than adjacent states with similar economies.
Employers hire people based on customer demand. A higher minimum wage will not affect that. The extra money paid out to workers doesn’t disappear-they spend it creating additional demand in other businesses. The argument is made that if wages get high enough, employers will automate. But $10/hour wages isn’t going to justify the enormous expense of having robots flip burgers or clean hotel rooms. In fact, the experience of Denmark suggests even $20/hour won’t do that.
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Who could have foreseen that increasing the minimum wage resulted in a net increase in financial well-being?
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Let’s see, my first job, I was paid $1.50/ hr. Now that was higher than most of my friends because that was a union supported job. If you use the “conservative” multiplier of 10 for today’s wage, well, can you see how in one way how the rich are getting richer?
McDonald’s just reported some terrible numbers for the last quarter. The business model of paying lousy wages and offering lousy products and awful service at a cheap price seems not to be working.
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It’s not clear that under current economic conditions (with a slack labor market and a much larger share of national income going to profits) a rise in the minimum wage would have any job-loss effect. Employers for the most part aren’t being constrained by their wage bills, they’re being constrained by no one having money to buy their stuff.
A plausible model suggests that in the US right now a rise in the minimum wage would have a stimulative effect comparable to the effect estimated for unemployment insurance, i.e. roughly $1.50 in increased GDP for every additional dollar paid to (and immediately spent by) low-income workers. But wait, it gets better (serious back of the envelope here, so don’t trust these numbers exactly): if you figure that of that $1.50 the government takes its standard 20% share of GPD in taxes, you have $1.20 for the private sector. Shared equally between personal and corporate income (yeah, right, as if that’s happened in the past 15 years) that would be 60 cents each. But since the wage bill is deductible for business at its marginal rate, each dollar in additional wages is only costing businesses – in aggregate – 65 cents. Net result: raising wages costs business owners pennies on the dollar as it boosts standard of living and general economic activity.
The minimum wage is an abomination designed by the devil to thwart gawd’s plan to spread manorial capitalism across the globe, beginning with the chosen ones in America.
“What Are We Really Buying With A Minimum Wage Hike?”
I shall now channel my inner Teatroll…
Answer: Minority and poor votes.
Tah dah.
Living wage versus minimum wage . . .
Go have some fun with this Living Wage Calculator from MIT…
An analysis of the living wage using updated data from 2013 and compiling geographically specific expenditure data for food, childcare, health care, housing, transportation, and other basic necessities, finds that:The minimum wage does not provide a living wage for most American families. A typical family of four (two working adults, two children) needs to work more than 3 full-time minimum-wage jobs (a 68-hour work week per working adult) to earn a living wage. Across all family sizes, the living wage exceeds the poverty threshold, often used to identify need. This means that families earning between the poverty threshold ($23,283 for two working adults, two children) and the median living wage ($51,224 for two working adults, two children per year before taxes), may fall short of the income and assistance they require to meet their basic needs.Simply plug in your state and then your county and check out the results.
~OGD~
Why does anyone think big business worked so hard to get rid of our Unions? Money in their pocket, not ours. The street for us. We need a strong labor, Union movement here in America to take back all that has been stolen by the top.
Ya the French have their “ennui” for that special flavor of boredom that comes from already having everything worthwhile.