In many cases they do fire them (or at least some of them). Which is sort of the point we are making.
And this is one of those rare circumstances. We know what the world was like before the minimum wage, we don’t have to engage in conjecture, we know how the market treats human beings.
Wow!!! 
Well then there is not much variation to correlate now is there.
Because wealth is a moral virtue and the absence of wealth is an absence of moral virtue.
rent control doesn’t put a floor on anything, it restricts available supply and drives up prices.
Uh, well, yes. And history tells us that wages tended to increase over time regardless and that minimum wage laws didn’t noticably affect standards of living, even among the poor.
Exactly my point. By arbitrarily limiting existing stock, and increasing the risk of new stock, it vastly raises the required rates required. It may be doing so through a twisted mechanism, but it is putting a higher floor on the rates neccessary for rents to be profitable.
If you’re making $5.50 an hour and suddenly jump to $7.15 an hour, let me tell you, it’s very noticeable. You can start eating a lot better for one thing.
Let’s take 2 hypothetical jobs, one where an unskilled worker produces $8 an hour of net profit after everything but wages is considered, and another job produces $15 an hour profit, under the same conditions. Let’s further say, due to high unemployment that unskilled American workers are willing to do either job for $5 an hour.
The economically optimal solution for commodity goods is the company pays everyone $5 an hour, then lowers prices until its profit margin is what is appropriate for that commodity. It gets fuzzier for non-commodity goods, since Nike isn’t going to pass the savings to the customer, you are just paying a $25 tax on your shoes because you want a Nike instead of a $20 tax. Of course, if people were willing to pay $25 extra for a Nike, Nike would already charge $25 more. Long story short, Nike’s prices will come down, but not as much as with commodity goods.
But say that that distribution leaves us with an undesirably large underclass that can’t sustain itself on those wages. If most of the jobs generate $15 hour for the companies, then raising the minimum wage to $8 will get that underclass more money, possibly enough to live off of. Some of the extra cost will be passed down to the customers, but some will be taken out of the companies profit margin (if the company could have raised prices easily it would have already). Plus, the raised cost of the product is spread over all the customers, so the working poor don’t necessarily bear the brunt of it. In this case, raising the minimum wage successfully routes money from the rich and the middle class to the working poor.
If most of the jobs only generate $8 profit for the company, then obviously raising the minimum wage to $8 an hour will cause a lot of jobs to be eliminated.
How many of each type of job exists is hard to say, especially for jobs that don’t directly pull in money.
Perception does not matter. Measured reality wins every time. If secondary effects damage that earning power, you can hurt everyone. Making your economic piolicy on the basis on what’s good for the very poor (which it hasn’t been shown to do) is a knee-jerk reaction, not wisdom.
Cite: everyone was hurt by the last increase?
Really if you can’t financially abuse the poor everyone gets hurt? Why must the right be so overly dramatic. Besides what would you know about minimum wage living?
Weren’t you whining in the pit about not having a job? That implies someone is supporting you, or you were in a position to build significant savings.
Did you ever have to balanced a monthly a budget on (^)$669.5 (including rent, transportation, food, consumables like hygiene products, etc.)?
If not then I really don’t think you understand what that extra (|)$273 means.
It’s a (#)40.7% increase in pay.
Unless you want to claim it caused 40% more unemployment, 40% reduction in hours, 40% inflation, or some combination thereof then you’re forced to admit it did increase the living the standard of anyone who made below $7.25 in 2007.
(^)5.15 * 40 * .75 * (4 + (1 / 3)) = 669.5, assumes previous $5.15 federal minimum wage, 40 hour work week, and 3/4 take home (what’s left over from taxes and stuff
7.25 * 40 * .75 * (4 + (1 / 3)) = 942.5, same assumptions except current federal minimum wage
(|) 942.5 - 669.5 = 273
(#)273 / 669.5 = 0.40776699
You accuse me of favoring “abusing the poor,” and then accues me of being dramatic. The irony burns. Yes, I know a great deal about earning a small wage. I also recognized how very well off that wage made me compared to the alternative. A small wage can go far if you spend it well.
And you have missed entirely my point that you’re completely ignoring all the secondary effects of increasing the minimum wage. Well, yeah, if you simply drop all the evidence that doesn’t support your theory, it does look like a pretty good deal. But economics also teaches us to beware simple nostrums which promise cheap benefits, because they don’t work.
So let’s get back to basics: before you can claim we should enact a minimum wage law or an increase, you must first show in practice that the minimum wage produces notable improvements in living standards. I would grant you the power to experiment, but of course there’s been long-existing minimum wage laws. You ought to be able to find reasonably clear evidence widely accepted by economists and economic historians. Yet this does not happen, and even economists who I’ve read that do favor minimum wage laws don’t claim they ofer substantial economic benefits.
As a minor factor, I would also point out that you go on a brief mathematical tangent which is quite useless, not because it’s precisely wrong, but because it focuses on money and not value. It’s a common problem in discussing economic policy.
This is completely wrong. The fact is productivity has gone up like crazy. Workers wages have not. They have actually dropped. The result, the highest corporate profits ever. Companies do not just pass the profits along. They keep them. Corporations would be happy to pay American workers like 3rd country workers. They have not offshored because they were not making money, but because they could make even more.
Minimum wage has produced results, in practice, and there’s evidence, supported by economists, basically.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/10/24/professor-explains-how-economic-inequality-harms-societies/
If you want to discuss the social impacts of wage differentials then listen to this TED talk. It checks out many social variables and accumulates the data.Ironically the rich do not escape the implications of stratifying wages and wealth. They suffer from its impact too.
We have the lowest social mobility of any industrialized nation. We lead in mental illness, homicides ,prison population, Nd lots of other terrible categories. We must be doing something dreadfully wrong.
Can you provide actual citations? I already discussed the wikipedia article, which does not particualrly support your position. I’m sure you can find something to support you, but can you find reputable citations to this effect? And not a simple once-off study, but years of analysis which supports you?
http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/reich/reports/pay.htm This argument is not new. There is endless data supporting the minimum wage as not destructive of employment. This one is from an old Labor Department release. People believe sophistical reasoning the the rich offer. It just sounds like it must be correct. But it is not.
Your evidence is a political position paper… dating back to the Clinton administration.
I think a lot depends on what the demand curve look like.
Have the laws of economics changed since the 1990’s? Where are they wrong?