Simple decency requires that the minimum wage be a living wage. It’s not all teenagers living at home working those jobs.
Why weren’t there even any bills in congress then? It is like the EFCA. The dems talked a big talk but when they had the power to do something they backed down.
And Nancy Pelosi (god love that woman) got the minimum wage passed back around 2007 when Bush was president by tacking it onto an Iraq war funding bill. What stopped the dems from doing that, tacking it onto a different bill?
Also if Harry Reid were competent/honest, he would’ve reformed the filibuster on January 21st 2009. Anyone could’ve seen the GOP was going to be obstructionists. He (and the dems in general) are either inept or complicit. Can you imagine the legislation the dems could’ve passed had they done that?
If the fear was due to the bad economy, why not create a smaller, longer term increase and tie it to GDP growth and/or unemployment or something like that? Say 'if GDP grows by 1-2% a year, the min wage goes up by $0.25-0.50 an hour until it reaches $9.50. If it grows by 3% a year it increases by $0.75 an hour until $9.50.
That would be too easy. 
Seriously, though, the thing to do would be to tie it to the unemployment rate, but then it would have to have dipped below where it is today for folks to agree to an increase. Net-net, same effect or worse.
So, if the minimum wage were raised to $100/hr, under this theory you’ve espoused, you would predict no change in employment. Is that correct?
First of all, raising the minimum wage to $9 an hour isn’t really going to make much of a difference in terms of becoming a living wage. It’s still only going to be a wage that is designed for entry level jobs - not a wage people can live on.
All increasing the minimum wage will do, which may be quite noticeable, is make all the products you buy more expensive because employers will need to make more money in order to compensate for the increased minimum wage. Therefore, pretty much everything you buy will become more expensive because employers aren’t just going to pay their employees more money, but they will make more money by raising prices on their goods.
You would have to increase the minimum wage quite a bit for it to be a “living wage”, and that would be a terrible mistake, because the products’ prices would skyrocket incredibly.
And really, even the employees that are working for minimum wage aren’t really at benefit either. If all the products increase in price due to the increase in the minimum wage, then people will have to spend more money - even the ones who are working on minimum wage will have to spend more money. So some or maybe even much of the extra money minimum wage employees will earn will probably be lost in spending extra money due to the price increase on all the goods and products.
And again, minimum wage jobs are designed as entry level jobs for beginning employees to get some work experience - not designed so you can make a living out of it. And as explained above, for the minimum wage to be a living wage, it would have to be much higher than $7 or even $9 an hour which would just inflate the prices of goods enormously - a huge mistake.
Similarly, if tomorrow milk were to cost $100 a gallon, you’d just go right on buying the same amount of milk you currently buy, right? Or are you buying more than you need today out of the goodness of your heart?
The point is that you cant ignore price when talking about the quantity of something demanded. All else being g equal, raising the price reduces the quantity demanded except in rare circumstances.
Can you flesh that out? What level will the MW need to be to make it a LW? How much will that contribute to inflation and to the unemployment rate?
I’d need to know these things before I signed on to that program.
'Cause, you know, simple decency requires that we understand what the full effects of policies are before we implement then. No?
When you have a headache, do you take ten thousand Tylenol tablets?
When you drive your kid to school, do you travel at 160 mph? I mean, you drive at 25mph, and those are exactly the same, right?
If not, can you extrapolate the knowledge that sometimes one amount of something can be useful, and a wildly different amount can be detrimental, to other situations?
The Dems are complicit. No one is THAT inept. One economic issues, they are the Washington Generals of politics, paid by Wall Street bankers to lose, but careful always to blame the Republicans.
No, it really needs to be more like $11 an hour. And whether it’s DESIGNED to be lived on or not, people DO have to live on it.
I do not believe you. I think the increase would be tiny to the point of unnoticeable if it is implemented strictly on the basis of increased cost.
Once again, not buying it. Literally.
Minimum wage jobs are not “so employees can get some work experience.” As has been said, the only reason employers hire people is because they need them to do work. Employers will pay absolutely as little as they can to get that work done … why do you think the enormously, fabulously successful WalMart Corp. Somehow can’t afford to pay its workers enough to keep them off food stamps?
So you are OK withWalMart soaking the government for food stamp largesse by paying their employees a less than minimum wage and keeping them on food stamps?
Why aren’t you doing your taxes while you walk your dog? Because sometimes you can’t do two things at once. Anything controversial would have undercut the efforts going on at the time.
It’s not like they were sitting on their hands:
Because some of the “Blue Dog Dems” might have been against it, and they needed all 60 votes (for the very short time they had them) to overcome a completely unprecedented standing Republican filibuster on everything.
Reforming the filibuster is a huge step. You don’t know that he had the votes. Show me 50 senators who’d sign on, and I’ll decry Reid with you.
Because at the time people were screaming about cuts, and rising unemployment. There was no political will until now.
Substitute $11.00 for his $100. $15.00, $18.00, $20.00. The point stands.
Doing the decent thing can be hard. It can be a struggle to do it. But generally you figure decent people will go to a certain amount of trouble to do the decent thing. What always strikes me as so interesting in the realm of politics, MOST ESPECIALLY on the topic of our current slide toward oligarchy, is the fierce vigor of the resistance that so many have to doing the decent thing.
It’s particularly difficult when you take into account what different people may consider to be the “decent thing”.
Now this is a productive argument!
The idea should be that we discuss what the number should be. Not some economically illiterate bleat like, “How about a billion dollars an hour, Obama!”
I would say that a person should be able to live at 150% of the poverty level if he works full time. That works out to around $9 an hour. I think a working person should have the dignity of not living in poverty.
If you think that a single parent should be able to raise a child and live above the poverty level then it should be a bit higher.
That is a good metaphor, the washington generals.
True progressive legislation steps on the toes of the rich, powerful and well connected. A truly progressive government would be hated by wall street, pharma companies, health insurance companies, various energy industries, service sector industries as well as some (but not all) rich people.
So the dems don’t want to do that, they just want to pretend to be progressives. And by keeping the filibuster they can pretend the GOP is why they aren’t passing more progressive legislation.
The real question is in this day and age of decentralized politics and netroots growth, what happens to all the liberals & labor who sincerely want progressive politics but know the dems won’t do it? Push for a 3rd party? Push for more primaries? I don’t know. I admire the tea party in some ways. They aren’t too smart or farsighted, and I don’t agree with their worldview. But they reformed the GOP from the inside out within a few years.
Ah, the old bait and switch. You were talking about making MW = LW. I asked for details. If you don’t have any, at least admit it.
As to your switcher-oo question, I would first ask you to quote the part of your cite that claims WalMart pays less than MW. I did a search for “minimum” on that article and got zero hits.
But assuming that was an honest mistake on your part, and you meant “paying MW”, well yes, I am OK with that. It is my position that if we, as a society, want to provide a social safety net to workers (and non-workers), then we, as a society, should do that by taxing ourselves and making payments to those people from the general fund. Just because I, as an employer, have a job that I wish to hire someone to do, that does not make me responsible for all the material needs of whomever I hire.
It’s not a “subsidy” to an employer, it’s a payment for something we, as a society, desire to achieve. As a society. We shouldn’t push that responsibility onto someone else.
I grudgingly accept the MW because that is a "fact on the ground’, and isn’t going to change. If we were starting from scratch, I would firmly oppose it.
Let’s calculate your suggested minimum wage - $11/hour. You are basically making $132/day, $792/week, approximately $3,432/month, and approximately $39,600/year, instead of the current minimum wage: $7/hour, $84/day, $504/week, approximately $2,184/month, and approximately $25,200/year.
Employers will have to make an extra $4/hour, $48/day, $288/week, approximately $1,248/month, and approximately $14,400 for each employee on minimum wage. Also, eventually this won’t only affect employees working on minimum wage. People will start getting raises. Right now if a person is going from $7/hour to $9/hour as a raise, then with the minimum wage at $11/hour, people will be going to $13/hour in that same situation. Thus, eventually every employee will be making more money than what they would be making with the current minimum wage.
They will have to pay their minimum wage employees approximately 57% more. That’s a huge difference. I don’t know how you can say it would be unnoticeable. Sure, this doesn’t mean you would have to make up for that 57% by only inflating prices; you could also use the aid of unemployment and hire less employees. But you can’t really knock out too many employees. Price inflation will definitely be noticeable.
Even if it isn’t, the unemployment will be incredibly noticeable. The unemployment rate is already high and it doesn’t need to go any higher. We should be looking to increase job opportunities as unemployment is a pretty serious issue, and you’re talking about raising the minimum wage which will just make the issue worse.
Employers will probably have to find a healthy balance between price inflation and unemployment when compensating for the extra money lost due to increased wages. But that doesn’t do any good. Not only do you have increased prices on goods, but now you have less jobs; and do you really think $39,600/year is a living wage (it might be; this is not rhetorical)? Keep in mind, some of that extra money is going to be lost in extra spending due to price inflation.
As for Obama, let’s calculate his proposed minimum wage - $9 an hour. You are basically making $108/day, $648/week, approximately $2,808/month, and approximately $32,400/year.
Analysis: employers will have to make an extra $24/day, $144/week, approximately $624/month, and approximately $7,200/year for each employee and eventually every employee will be making extra due to reasons explained above. This is approximately 28% more money. In this case, price inflation and unemployment will probably not be too bad, at least not as bad as your suggested minimum wage. But you already admitted that $9/hour is not a living wage. So really there’s no point and all this will mount to is price inflation and unemployment. And of that 28% extra money that employers need, let’s say employers decide to fire a few employees and inflate prices by say 15%. That’s quite noticeable. A $5.00 item will now cost $5.75, and a $10.00 item will now cost $11.50. Even if employers only decide to inflate prices by 10%, then you have a $5.00 item costing $5.50 and a $10.00 item costing $11.00. I don’t know, but it seems rather noticeable to me. Not to mention, as cost increases, how many items actually get sold will decrease. Employers may have to end up terminating more jobs if they’re not able to make enough money due to slower selling, or they may even further inflate the price.
Why don’t we just leave the minimum wage alone and make no changes?
Yes, they’re entry level jobs. Remember, these are jobs that anyone with half a brain can do and require little to no skill.
Why are you assuming 11 hour workdays and 6 day workweeks?
Her’s a simple rule of thumb: If you make $Y/hour you make Y x 2,000 per year. $9/hour ~ $18k/year.