As crass as that sounds, it is absolutely true. I know people who only want to work a few hours, or who work for unreported cash, so they can keep their various welfare benefits coming in. It may not provide for a luxurious lifestyle, but it is the lifestyle they choose. You can be as snarky as you wish, but the statements are true.
To be fair to all sides, I also know a woman who faced the welfare cliff, which isn’t a term I’m familiar with, but I can figure it out. She was up for a new job that paid more, but was told if she took it, all her welfare aid would be removed, putting her in a worse overall condition. She wanted to work and progress to better positions, but faced a real dilemma, having two kids and being recently divorced.
In the whole situation, monkeying with minumum wage laws seems to be a very inefficient, ineffective and counterproductive tactic.
There really isn’t a good “answer” to poverty. The best approach has to be multi-layered, and include child care and education (and that includes skilled labor) for single parents, a softening the welfare cliff, and tying subsidies to employment stats for that area.
I think it’s ill judgment to cut off benefits for SOME people. For instance, my former neighbors had to make less than some ridiculously low number or their severely handicapped daughter would be booted off of Medicaid. That is a stupid, and heartless, policy.
I’m not a proponent of raising the minimum wage across the board because I think that just as the cream will always rise to the top, the bottom will always sink to the floor. IOW, if you raise the minimum wage, then everything else, including food and housing, will go up, and the end result of a net sum of zero. So in the end, it’s an exercise in futility, and it ends up actually harming more people than it helps.
:smack:
I suppose — ignoring any mandated minimum wage — purely as a thought experiment, it would be theoretically possible for an employer to pay a wage that obviates any need for additional welfare on the grounds that the labourer is worthy of his hire.
If that put up prices, well, people anyway pay more to eat in more expensive restaurants; and we are assured by libertarians that no man has any right to the forced labour of others even if it is cheaper.
That’s not a problem with the minimum wage, though. That woman would be in the same situation is the minimum wage stayed where it was but she was able to find a new job that gave her a raise.
For Social Security Disability, the cut-off (2006) was a whopping $900/month.
Make 901 and you lose the Disability payment.
If your benefit (same as if you retired) is above 900, trying to work is contra-indicated.
No gradation. Either all or nothing.
If you really want people to work, make the benefit cut by 1 for every 2.
Split the earned/unearned. Work and get twice what you are receiving. Maybe put a cap of 1.5x benefit amount for cut-off…
But don’t penalize what you want people to do. Duh.
The fact that means-tested benefits with sharp cutoffs introduce severe distortions at those boundaries has always been evident to everyone with a modicum of aptitude for economics except for the idiots who actually draft laws.
To use this as a strawman in a “liberal -vs- conservative” debate is ignorant.
Predictable.
Unfortunate for the economic illiterate dems, libs and progressives the laws of economics cannot be repealed.
Changing the minimum wage does not change anyone’s bargaining power relative to the rest of the players in the economy.
Those who could only get minimum wage, will still only be able to get minimum wage.
Those who could get more, will still be able to get more, and they will still be able to out-bid the minimum wage workers for goods and services.
There is nothing magical about the dollar. If you deliberately reduce its value in the labor market, you cannot expect it to hold its value in the food market, or the housing market, or the healthcare market. You simply set off a round of inflation, at the end of which, the poor will be exactly where they were before.
Well, SSDI is supposed to be for people who are unable to work. It’s always been a bit of a scam that you can collect SSDI and work, since you have to show that there is no work available for you in the economy in order to qualify in the first place.
Golly, I’m confused. Employees want to work fewer hours and employers want to cut jobs. Seems like a win-win to me.
As for the Daily Caller cite, meh.
Sorry, I don’t think your link says what you think it does.
That link says clearly that although the minimun wage law has not yet taken effect, Wendy’s is already looking at ways to save labor costs through automation in the kitchen and automation at the counter (ie. customer self-serve order kiosks.)
“They’ve not even passed a law yet to raise the minimum wage. Yet business is already planning how to deal with such a law if it is passed. . Because, amazingly, businesses do actually plan for the future”.
Translation: get ready suckers—we’re going to fire as many people as we can–as soon as the technology is ready. It doesn’t matter if you make $6 or $15 an hour–your job is going to disappear, just like the airlines and car-rental companies have already cut similar jobs and switched to self-serve kiosks.
So don’t blame the $15 minimum wage law for the job cuts–the cuts are already planned. But for those lucky few who will still have jobs—let’s pay them a living wage, okay?
Times have changed…people have families to support, and want to put in an honest day’s work to do so. The fast food industry is no longer run by teenagers who just want a little pocket money.
It seems like every time there’s talk of a hike in the minimum wage, conservatives warn us that the economy will come crashing down. It hasn’t happened yet.
The current federal minimum wage is less than it was (in 2014 dollars) in 1968. Since it was last raised, in 2009, the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour has lost 8.1% of its purchasing power. [Pew Research Center.] According to The Economist, ‘Given the pattern across the rest of the OECD, a group of mostly rich countries, one would expect America, where GDP per person is $53,000, to pay a minimum wage around $12 an hour.’ Add in that we’re the only industrialised nation that does not have a universal healthcare system, the minimum wage should be higher than that. Say… $15/hour.
It looks like the biggest chunk of that is subsidized child care (the yellow lines). 1) That wouldn’t apply to anyone who didn’t have children and 2) does it take into account the tax write-off for child care? I’m guessing it doesn’t.
It’s been awhile since I had to worry about child care. Let’s see - - maximum credit of $3,000 for one child or $6,000 for more than one. Up to 35% of child care costs.
I’m guessing that for most people the cliff isn’t quite as sheer as depicted. That’s maximum possible sheer.
Wow, what a distorted view of business and the economy. As Wendy’s is doing, businesses plan ahead, and automating is a normal and expected reaction to higher expected labor costs. If a $15 MW is a good thing, why not $50 an hour. Whatever adjustments you can imagine businesses of all types would make, the result would inevitably be fewer jobs.
That chart highlights a very serious problem in society. It acts as a wall to prevent upward movement in employment. I don’t blame the single mom who makes $29k per year from refusing promotions or advancing her education. Society should encourage advancement instead of restricting it in this way.
So? How many? Get back to us when you find out.
As crass as it sounds, I know people who live right on the Mexican border and think Mexicans are the worst scourge of the planet, even when they’re running businesses geared toward catering to their needs and taking their money. And I know people who employ thousands of people with Central- and South-American ancestry who consider them the worst form of criminals in the Western hemisphere. And I know people who are lauded as intelligent and broadly educated and yet they invest their time, energy, and money in fostering greed, violence, and destruction so they and their friends can gain more money and power – in spite of their knowledge that the value systems of every culture on the planet equates such selfish ambition with Evil – and they consider themselves righteous and good.
But those are anecdotes, and newsworthy ones at that#. And while I wouldn’t elect such people to any public office, I also don’t believe they represent the typical attitudes of every Conservative throughout the nation.
One of the first studies I read in college was about Welfare recipients in the United States. Conservatives see that the number of people receiving welfare each year doesn’t change much. Then they see anecdotes about people who game the system by working for unreported cash or limiting their income to remain below the poverty level, or talk about having more children so they can continue receiving Child benefits after the eldest is too old to count as a qualifying child. And then the conservatives hastily generalize (a major fallacy in debate and logic) that all or a majority of the people in those barely-varying populations of welfare recipients are the same people just gaming the system year after year after year after year.
And they are wrong.
They are wrong because the deeper, more detailed studies show time after time after time* that the names and faces of the majority of people filling the ranks of the unemployed are CHANGING from year to year. Some people are getting jobs, and some people are losing jobs and when real estate or junk-bond fads break down and the economy turns worse, there’s more competition in the labor pool and it takes longer for everyone to find a job to fit their qualifications.
And a far-right rag like The Daily Caller will highlight stories that show the problematic responses to raising the minimum wage. And a far-left rag like Salon will highlight stories that show an asshole corporation’s response to raising the minimum wage. And they’re both giving their readers the kind of confirmation bias that they want. But those stories are not necessarily representative of the whole nation either.
–G
#And they should make the news; they shouldn’t just get away, unnoticed, with that crap, not least because it confirms the skewed view on the conservative side. :smack:
*The studies I was learning about were from 1980 data; a replication of studies done in 1975 on 1970 data. I had started college in 1985.
Wasn’t the minimum wage CREATED in order to be a living wage?
When and why did that change? Why SHOULD it change?