No, you DID try to tell me what that’s worth, because you can’t tell me what the savings would be if there weren’t two sets of values to compare. I don’t find $20 to be a “very small amount”, and I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell me what a large or small amount is.
Also, I have not made the inflationary argument (others have, but not me), and it’s quite frustrating to have an argument made against a position I have not taken.
And finally, consumer prices DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT enter into it. Some jobs are not worth a certain amount, regardless of what the end price increase to the consumer is. The consumer is not purchasing that labor - the manager/owner/whoever is, and they may not find certain labor worth certain amounts, no matter how much to want to legislate that or convince them that they do.
I didn’t say that $20 was a very small amount. You are not taking into consideration the expenses you have to pay when you do a job yourself, nor the value of your time.
Consumer prices do enter into it, because that’s what the people against a fair minimum wage always point to. They say that if you increase the wage x%, then consumer prices will go up the same x%.
If you say that some jobs are not worth a living wage, then you are saying the people who do them do not deserve to have enough money to live. But that’s OK, because those people can get state and federal assistance. Except the same people who are against a living wage are the same ones who insist that poor people should not get state and federal assistance.
Why does a business owner ‘deserve’ to make a 50% profit instead of a 40% profit, and someone who works just as hard as he does, or arguably harder, all the while facing much more difficult challenges than the business owner, does not ‘deserve’ the minimum income needed to survive?
Well in yellowjacketcoder’s defense, they’re specifically one of those folks who thankfully do think that social assistance is necessary and is there to supplement those with low or no incomes. I’m not sure that’s the most economically efficient way of solving the problem, but is a solution. Of course, people on assistance still have to live with the stigma of many other people thinking poorly of them for it. As I said before, not everyone can be on top. SOMEONE has to work the lowest of the low jobs, and we don’t have enough high schoolers to fill the seats. There will be many grown adults stuck in these jobs for a long time through no fault of their own.
What I’m not sure about is how yellowjacketcoder KNOWS some jobs are not worth more. Is the basis the fact that the workers are not currently being paid more? Strictly a “if the market thought they were worth more they’d be paid more already” mindset? I can’t get behind that because if the market could, the market would have us all working for free. Combined with the fact that big business donates huge amounts to politicians to get what big business wants, I can’t exactly trust that current minimum wage or market values are not skewed heavily in big businesses’ favor. Which creates a nice loop; less for Joe Schmore, more for big business, big business pays to enact laws that allow big business to get even more, and it goes around again.
So pardon me if I can’t believe that the market is a fair-minded determinate of someone’s worth.
Except I specifically have not, so please don’t argue with a strawman.
As Macca26 noted, much to my relief that someone is actually reading my posts, I am not one of those people, so again, please don’t argue with a strawman.
So now we should tell business owners how much they’re allowed to make, in addition to what they should pay their employees? Da, Comrade, this idea will go over great in Politburo!
It’s fairer-minded than any alternative. “the market” is an impersonal force, it doesn’t “decide” anything. The market is just people making decisions about how much they are willing to buy and sell things for.
In general, any job that requires only a couple of days of training is going to pay very little, because almost anyone can do that job. My own job is more mid-level, it takes four weeks of training and although no experience is required, it does take some aptitude with information technology and a sharp mind(although it’s obviously not rocket science). So that job pays more than my early jobs where you could train anyone in two days. Other jobs in my company require years of schooling and a year of training on the job before you become useful. Those jobs pay a lot more than I make. This demonstrates one aspect of markets: the smaller the pool of people who can do a job compared to the demand for a job, the more that job will be worth. Whereas if you have a job that anyone can do, that job isn’t worth anything. Why would you pay a babysitter $100 when you can get on for $20? Why would you pay a plumber $500 when another will do the job for $150, assuming similar quality of work? Are employers of 1000 employees or more morally obligated to do things we wouldn’t do, pay more than necessary for goods and services?
And I’m another conservative who agrees that we need a social safety net. But that safety net is something society provides, and employers help with that by paying their own taxes. I don’t think it makes sense to decide that we’ll say, increase food stamp and Medicaid eligibility, but then turn around and get mad that many more people with jobs now qualify. That’s not employers’ fault, especially since eligibility for these programs is in part based on household size. Pay cannot be based on how many kids you need to feed.
You aren’t getting it. There is no value judgement involved. What he is saying (and I alluded to earlier) is that some jobs will be automated away completely or will accomplished by some other means than paid labor (people will do it themselves or just do without) if it is deemed too expensive to use paid labor. There are many tasks that are deemed a wise use of money at one price point and a frivolous waste at a higher one. The amount of paid work available is not fixed. It expands and contracts as labor becomes cheaper or more expensive.
This isn’t that hard to understand and happens all the time already. Most people like to have their car washed and few like to do it themselves routinely. Let’s say there is a thriving local market for hand car washes that employees dozens of people. It only costs $5 to get your car washed this way so most people do it and business is booming. However, the people washing the cars still don’t make a ‘living wage’ so a law is passed that raises the cost of each car wash to $15. Most people don’t think it is worth that so business drops off greatly. In the mean time, a new owner figured out that the increase in labor costs made it worthwhile to invest in a state of the art automated car wash. It wasn’t worth it before because $7.50 is the break-even point but now it is more than competitive, it can dominate the whole service in the town based on cost alone.
Most of the people previously employed in car washing lose their jobs completely and the town in left with just a couple of people that attend to the previously uneconomical but now dominating and efficient force in the market. The only thing that causes that change was the demand that people paid more and now they are paid nothing unless they can find a new skill that will pay them the new minimum and there is certainly no guarantee for that. The same thing applies to convenience stores, fast food, and all kinds of other businesses that typically employee low-skilled labor.
There is nothing new or unique about any of this. American manufacturing has had this issue for decades if not longer but it applies to all jobs. You can legislate wages but you cannot legislate the economic ramifications of such legislation will enable those jobs they are meant to help will continue to exist at all.
It isn’t (well, not necessarily). But that doesn’t mean that all jobs necessarily have some minimum worth and but therefore be paid that. As a trivial example, a great car salesman that sells 10 cars a day might be worth $100,000, while the guy that vacuums out those new cars probably isn’t worth $100,000. I mean, obviously different jobs are worth different amounts, unless you believe in some money-less communal society.
So, there is some work that is probably worth $1000/hour (say, being a pro quarterback). Some work is probably worth $100/hour (say, being a good criminal defense attorney). Some work is probably worth $10/hour (maybe the cook at a restaurant). Some work is only worth $1/hour (perhaps a guy picking up cigarette butts at the beach).
If you set a minimum wage at a certain level, jobs above that will continue getting done. Jobs below that will stop getting done (or will be done differently, perhaps through automation). We currently have a minimum wage somewhere north of $7/hr, so we don’t hire anyone to pick up the occasional butt off the beach. If we didn’t have minimum wage laws, the local hotel association might hire that guy, but as it is, they’re happy to leave that butt there rather than pay some dude $7 to clean up.
Does that mean everyone currently working minimum wage is immediately going to go out of work if the wage rises? No, but if they don’t, that just means they’re currently underpaid. But if they do get turned out of work, whether through automation or the job just going undone, they aren’t suddenly in a better position.
Sorta. In the fast food industry, the response with minimum wage going up was to go from labor-intensive practices to more efficient practices so that less labor would be used. So the individual worker would make more, but there’d be fewer workers.
I guess an argument could be made that the ones that were left were underpaid, since hopefully the better workers were kept and the worse ones let go. But the job was worth the same as it always was.
Generally, yes. I’ve got a budget for eating out, and if it costs more to eat out, I’m going to do it less often. In aggregate, over a large number of people, if the price goes up, people often buy less. The downward sloping demand curve is a bedrock principle of basic economics. Yeah, there are all sorts of exceptions and special cases, but I bet the principle holds for burgers.
I already have to go to the market every week. It doesn’t take me an hour to add a bit of hamburger and a few extra potatoes to my cart. I can make sandwiches out of the extra buns, or freeze them for later. And most people aren’t buying for just one person (it does actually make more sense for a single person to eat out more. They have more overhead to cook their own food).
What I’m saying is I think we as a society are morally obligated to try and keep a minimum threshold in which at the least, all our citizens are fed, clothed, housed, and mildly financially secure to a reasonable standard. It may sound like an impossible utopia but that is no reason to stop trying for the betterment of everyone.
If not through minimum wage then we need to do it another way.
If we choose social nets as the answer then we as a society need to stop ostracizing those who use these social nets.
Personally I am all for higher taxes if that means better things for everyone such as healthcare and housing. That is OK by me.
The safety net is the only way to do that, since the safety net can provide based on need, whereas pay cannot do that. You don’t get paid more if you have health problems or children or need to pay off student loans.
The ostracism comes in when people are using them and not working, despite being able-bodied.
Taxes are so high now that for many families they represent a major downgrade in lifestyle. For single poor people, they are often the reason why they need Medicaid and food stamps in the first place. The government breaks their legs and then hands them a crutch.
A better way would be to cut income transfers to the wealthy and middle class and increase them for the poor.
Oh, yes, businesses will shut down and/or migrate as the John Galts of the world grow weary of people not making them as wealthy as they wanna be. I’m kind of tired of that old saw, and more importantly, I don’t believe it.
Responses to economic incentives happen at the margins. Businesses almost never just absorb a cost increase with a shrug. The reason the consequences aren’t always noticeable is because there are an infinite number of ways to adjust to a cost increase and businesses are often very creative in adjusting.
As an individual, what would you do if your state kept on adding mandate upon mandate to your life? Would you just absorb the cost with a smile forever as your discretionary income shrank and shrank?
Correct. This type of analysis is part of my job in the high-tech manufacturing sector. We try to eliminate as many of the people-steps as possible and that becomes much easier as the people become more expensive. You can have lots of jobs at a lower minimum wage or fewer of them at a higher wage but you can’t just declare that everyone that is currently employed at or near a minimum wage suddenly gets a huge boost like the one proposed. We are working in a global economy after all and many people in the world are willing to work much more cheaply than current American minimum wages let alone the proposed ‘living wage’ rates.
Many of the minimum-wage workers will just be priced out of the market altogether because of automation or efficient initiatives and the sad part is that they will not have any choice in the matter. They will go from low income to no income rapidly and what remains of the jobs that they previously had will become more competitive. There is no way around that. It is natural and economic law.
Why not increase production, having more automation and employing more people? Or do you expect to keep producing the same quantity of products?
When people have more money, they spend it. They have to spend it on something, so production needs to be greater. More production means more people. Even if you have an automated burger-flipper, you’ll still need the staff to serve it. (I don’t think people are quite ready to go back to automats.)