Yeah, you should have reviewed your cite before you posted it; your own quotes say that you’re wrong. **YOU **posted the following:
Do you know what statistically insignificant means? It means that you should have done a better job of cherry-picking your cites.
Having actually read the papers, and not just the wiki page (or book abstracts), I’m much more impressed by the quality of the studies that have found no impact of minimum wage increases on unemployment. Also, the wiki page doesn’t mention it, but the studies you quoted in “support” of your position were conducted by economists with controversial ties to lobbyist groups that were opposed to the minimum wage. And they conducted their studies in a controversial manner (it’s late, but tomorrow I’ll find detail of this).
But yeah, the data is tricky to analyze, and that leads to controversy. Basically the impact is so small that that after 25 years of detailed studies, no one is precisely sure what the correct answer is…and that should probably cause all honest people to conclude that increasing the minimum wage to $10 probably isn’t going to destroy the economy.
What bothers me here is no attempt at completing the business cycle of these two competitive islands, producing the same product, but with vastly different overhead labor and payroll tax cost structures. Those differences carry through to the finished product pricing. If both islands produce equal quality goods, but one is charging substantially higher prices for their goods, then gasp, all the orders are placed for the cheaper, but equally good products.
The $10 union rate may have been grand, although short lived because that island is now out of business.
I’ll agree that’s essentially what it comes down too, but it’s not just what we pay employees, it’s also me spending hours on the phone keeping my insurance rates down, getting my credit card processing rates reduced, negotiating deals with vendors, turning off the lights when we shut down for the day, learning how to fix the walk in coolers and freezers so we don’t have to pay the HVAC company to do it for us. Does that make us selfish business people too?
The minimum wage thing, like most political stuff is a balance, some fight to raise it, some fight to keep it where it is and they meet in the middle somewhere. Don’t forget (as was alluded to earlier) without people pushing for wage laws we’d still have 12 year olds getting pulled out of school working for almost nothing and 30 year old that don’t know better working for a few dollars a day. I really don’t have a problem with minimum wage laws.
Also, let’s not forget, there’s nothing stopping people from opening their own business. My father finished high school, bought some property and opened his store. Worked 80 hours a week for the first 10 years or so, dumped a lot of his own money, time, sweat and life (until I was 9 or 10 I only saw him once a week when he made a point of coming home for dinner, then it was right back to work) into it and got lucky that the place didn’t go under. Now it’s doing ok, hardly rags to riches, but he’s not struggling to eat either. Anyways, as the owner, he should have every right to make money and yes, part of saving/making money gets into payroll. I should mention that I think we pay our employees very fairly and what employees get paid is sort of self competitive since an employee (especially at a grocery store type place) can, at any time, just walk out and go find another job that pays more if they can get it. If you hear that the store down the block pays $0.50 more then you’re getting paid, take it. If we start losing employees to that store and can’t find help, we’ll start people at that wage also.
But just to get back to the quoted thing for a second, how is saying “AS A BUSINESS MAN, I DON’T WANT WORKERS MAKING MORE MONEY, SO I CAN HAVE MORE FRUITS OF THEIR LABOR.” any different from saying, for example “as a business man, I don’t want to pay for your lawn mowing service anymore, I the business owner, am going to do it myself from now on” Would that make the business owner a terrible person. He’s trying to save money by taking care of his own landscaping around the store to keep some money in the store (and keep prices down for the consumer) but at the same time he just made life harder for the landscaping company. Do the same thing for anything else the business owner tries to save money on. Fixing their own HVAC equipment? We do that, but it means the HVAC company is paying an employee to sit around the shop doing nothing. We turn off the lights at night, but the electric company still has spinning generators and a maintenance staff to pay for, we call our credit card/insurance/[misc other] company to get our rates reduced but they still provide the same service to us and still have the same overhead. We do these things to save YOU the consumer money. Yes, it saves us money and fattens the bottom line as well, but keeping prices down really and truly is the first priority for us…(lower prices will increase volume and bring in customers blah blah blah). Do these things make us horrible people? Should we just continue to pay high prices for everything in the name of being nice guys because that’s just not how it works. Keep in mind, all these services…they all have employees that have to get paid as well.
If it’s an exploitative situation then you really shouldn’t ever step foot in a business again because the customer and their money is the driving force behind everything that a business does.
What you want is a business that does everything normally, but pays their employees more, right? But how much more, how much is fair? Who decides that? Is ‘fair’ more then the other employers? Is ‘fair’ more then minimum wage? Is ‘fair’ more then they’re worth as an employee? How can an employer do this and stay in business? Where will this extra money come from and how will it work, in order to pay them more I’ll really have to scale back on other things or raise my prices a ton. If I raise my prices people won’t shop at my store, if I scale back on other things, other people in other industries will have lay off their workers and then you’ll be mad at me.
After COGS, payroll is far and away our biggest expense. It’s the single biggest thing (again, after COGS) that we can take active control over to make a dent in our bottom line. This is the case for most businesses and why hiking minimum wage is such a big deal.
Yes, I do, Do you? I’m not cherry picking any cites. I’m just quoting the parts of your cites that you accidentally left out.
Just wait a cotton pichin minute here. You are the one who cited Card as a definitive study. If you want to retract that, then go ahead. But don’t pretend that now you’ve suddenly had some qualms about whether that study is definitive or not.
No, I don’t have cites that companies believe paying higher wages increases their profits. The reason is that for individual companies, it’s not true. When consumers in general have more money, demand is stimulated and employment increases. This requires either a cooperative effort by all employers of minimum-wage workers, or government intervention. I’m sure you can see why one is more likely than the other. If just one company raises their wages, it does not give consumers in general more money, just a few individuals.
I mentioned supply side economics to contrast with the above reasoning, as it’s pretty much coming from the opposite school of thought. Supply siders think giving business owners more money stimulates job growth, but the amount of money a business owner has has nothing to do with whether he’s hiring or not. Smart business owners will not hire unless there is unmet demand for their product or service. Giving business owners money does not create demand, but giving consumers money does.
This is going right back to page 1, but sorry I got here late…
I doubt that many people would do this.
The reason that cleaning jobs and the like pay less isn’t because they are perceived as easier (or desirable). It is because there is a reasonable proportion of people out there with no qualifications and/or a criminal record that have difficulty finding any other kind of job.
Most people would prefer the higher-status job even if it paid the same as the cleaner.
Yeah, I also accidently forgot about 10,000 other words from the wiki page that also supported my argument. Luckily, it’s right there for anyone who wants to read it.
You mean, the Card study that found no statistical increase in unemployment from increases in minimum wage? Yeah, that’s my position; here’s my quote:
and what I said about the Card study:
Seems to me that the debate I thought we were having was me saying that increasing the minimum wage wouldn’t increase unemployment, and you saying the opposite. If you are if fact agreeing that increasing the minimum wage will result in:
Then we have reached a consesus, and no further debate is necessary.
If an increase in the minimum wage were to lead directly to some businesses having to close up shop, I would be sympathetic, but it would not necessarily mean I think such an increase would be the wrong thing to do. I believe a minimum wage is a good thing and of course there is no constitutional right to a successful business in this country. As for incremental changes in the MW, I could go along with that, assuming the current rate isn’t so low that people are being greatly exploited. I suspect however that they are.