…someone mentioned (a few posts ago) that if the wages for
'teens (or adult w/NO dependants) were less, than the wages
for a single-mother (for example) could be raised.
(Have patience w/me you-all—I am new here!)
My oldest daughter (just turned 18) recently got her first after-school job as a ‘dietary aide’ in a nursing home. Her starting pay
is 7.75/hr. This is her first job, and yet, she works w/women there who have children and earn maybe .50/.75 more per hour!
It seems to me that, since most teens have literally no bills
(living/eating at home), and a worker w/dependants has MANY
bills/responsibilities—why can’t the wages paid reflect those
circumstances?
I know–I know—“If so-and-so can do the work, the pay should
be the same…”
Too bad there isn’t some way to change this.
A teen who has very little bills should NOT earn the same as
an adult who has to pay ALL the bills.
Maybe a certain new category for teens only in the wages scale?
I have no real solution, it just seems OBVIOUS that a 16-yr.-old
needs less money than a head-of-household. It should be
between the employer/employee what wages the pay/recieve.
Anyway—glad I found this site and am spending a lot of time
reading thru the older threads…
That is a false assumption. Just because you lower raises for one group of people does not necessarily increase wages for another. it is more likely that employers would tend to hire more teens instead of single mothers.
The way it works is you receive the paycheck, then the bills are based on how much you earn. It would be nice if we could all decide how much to make AFTER we buy the big house, Porsche and brand new wardrobe, but thats not how it works.
Why would anyone want to? You get paid for the job. Not the special little circumstances in your life. It shouldn’t matter if a person is 17, 37, black, white or purple.
To take your argument to a logical extreme: should a 28 year old lawyer earn as much or more than a 40 year old factory worker?
Its obvious that a 16 yr old with no dependents and no responsibilities does not need as much money. By the same token, someone who is 10 or 20 years older has 10 or 20 years to identify and develop skills and training that would allow them to work in a higher paying profession.
Ula, would you penalize someone who has decided not to have children? Aren’t there people who would have children then, not because they wanted children, but simply so they would get more money?
Wages should be enough to live on, but it shouldn’t matter what the worker’s personal circumstances are. Your daughter is being paid for the work she does, the same as her co-workers.
Okay, msmith537, let’s look at how people can raise themselves out of poverty.
In a word, education.
I’m getting an education right now. I’m living off of government money (I still can’t understand why people don’t consider government grants welfare) and it is a poverty-level existance (no car, no tv, no radio, stolen telephone, thrift store clothes, borrowed computer, and a big giant hole in my tooth and a nasty sinus infection that makes me constantly spit up brown mucus that can’t be fixed until I get my fininacial aid check and school health insurance kicks in). And I’m the lucky one.
My high school had it’s share of brilliant people. It had a full compliment of valedictorians, 4.00 students and the like. But my school was in the ghetto. Even the valedictorians in my school could not get into good schools. We’ve had one person accepted in to Stanford in the past ten years. If you go to Cordova high school, you basically cannot get into Stanford, no matter how hard you work, no matter how much you succeed. You can consider yourself lucky to get into a second rate school.
That assumes that you can go to school at all. Paying for school is always an issue, but there is some degree of financial aid (which is usually loans that damn you into poverty after college- I’m looking at $15,000 debt myself, and that is for a public in-state school). Other circumstance get in the way, too. My best friend didn’t go to college because her mom got thrown in jail, and at the age of nineteen she had to start taking care of her high-school aged siblings. My other friend got rejected because he took one semester of English-as-a-second language, and did not have the required four years of English classes required to get into a four-year college, despite the fact that he managed to become fluent enough in English to earn straight A’s in high school within a year of moving to America. I have a friend who’s high school teachers and counselors never thought to tell him that there are scholarships and financial aid availible to students who do things like score 5’s on their AP calculus tests. He just figured that he had no way of ever paying for college, despite the fact that he was a genius. I’ve got friends who have never owned a book, whos parents could not help them with their homework, who had to work forty hours a week after school to help pay their family’s rent.
I’ve got a million sob stories. It’s hard to comprehend that I’m in college while other equally smart, equally hard-working, equally worthy people do not have this chance simply due to where they grew up. There are some situations where no matter how good of a person you are, you do not have the oppertunity to better your lot in life. To say that everyone has that option is to deny reality.
—In other words, so far, no one is trying to take anything away from anyone.—
If we want to do something about poverty, it’s going to cost money: someone’s money. And if you are talking about the government being the one to do something, and the government continues to be funded with tax dollars, then yes, it is undeniable that we are going to have to take things away from people to pay for it.
In reading these posts I see a lot of what I consider basic misapprehension so I would like to challenge the conventional paradigm:
Economics has little of importance to do with money. Money is a figment of the imagination, a medium of exchange it is as a butchers scale is to the meat on it, what matters is goods and services.
The value of a thing versus other things can find it’s level in a market or by having it assigned or by some combination (which is always the way it turns out in real life) of the two. The closer you get to the market end of the spectrum the more problems you have with abuse of the weak by the strong the closer you get to the assigned end the more you have abuse of everybody by those wielding political power and the more inefficiency
In a market economy the value of a good or service is what people will voluntarily give for it. If they would give nothing for it if they had a choice (they are forced to buy it as in a government mandated service) then it has no value. To the degree it is subsidized or it’s price is assigned then the difference between it’s price and market value is a transfer of wealth for nothing, a gift if voluntary a theft if not.
Money is like a stock-share in the whole economy, the world and everything of value in it. When you assign money to someone who doesn’t do valuable work (work people would voluntarily pay for) or subsidize the production of a good or service you dilute the value of all the money in the world by reducing the amount of useful work contributed. When you do enough of this you start to get poorer. What is important to remember is EVERYBODY PAYS. You cannot rob Peter to pay Paul because when Paul stops working and contributing, his money is not worth as much, eventually Peter and Paul are fighting over scraps.
Money being concentrated in the hands of a few is not much of an economic problem. It can be a social problem if they abuse the power given them by their money but unless they spend it all on luxuries for their own consumption it has a beneficial effect by allowing capital to concentrate easily and efficiently.
To get to the nub of the question of why the poor will always be with us (at least in a market economy, in a directed economy they wouldn’t be with US because we’d all be poor) it’s because some people just can’t do anything very useful to others and so have little of value to exchange. You can reduce these people to a minimum number by training but there will always be some and trying to fit them in can be counter productive. Everyone has worked with someone who it would have been better to pay to stay home.
Alleviating poverty certainly makes the economy less efficient but efficiency is not he be-all and end-all of human existence. Few of us would like to be ants. However, it is important to understand that after a point, the more you do to eliminate poverty the more you reduce overall wealth and the more people slip in to poverty. It becomes self-defeating…
What is wrong with spending money on luxury items? Somebody has to produce those too. A Mercedes is a luxury item, but I would be willing to wager that the employees who assemble them are glad that someone buys them. Just my $0.02
Well there’s nothing terribly wrong with it, it’s just not as good as if the money were kept as capital. If someone, let’s call him Bill G. spends a billion dollars on a mansion and the builders who get the money spend it on toasters six months later a fraction (the net profit) goes to the toaster manufacturer’s capital for him to save up for newer better toaster making equipment. I Bill G. invests that money in the toaster company (assuming he doesn’t just want to run them out of business in a fit of megalomania) they can buy the new equipment right now. Toasters become cheaper and everyone is richer because they can now afford a toaster which is the real wealth and value. It would happen in the course of time anyway as the money circulated (provided not everyone with excess cash spent it on luxuries as soon as they accumulated it) but it’s faster this way. It’s possible to have too much capital available of course in which case it’s better to spend it but only if the economy is really boiling over.
Partially right. Macroeconomics actually has everything to do with money. Every macro class I’ve ever taken discusses the relationship between inflation, money, interest rates and production. Long story-short simply creating more money usually does not translate into anything other than inflation.
No, it everyone does not start off with the same options and that’s a shame. But just as pumping money into the economy dilutes wealth, increasing education of everyone dilutes the value of a collage degree. So if everyone has a degree, the competition for jobs gets a little more competitive. Grades or academic reputation of the school become a little more important. What educating does do is give everyone the OPPORTUNITY to succeed. And this benefits the overall economy because you have fewer potential doctors, engineers and physicists who never utilize their full potential.
I think merit based scholarships or government loans are perfectly fine. Think of them as an investment (loans, after all, must be repaid). I don’t think they are “socialist” or a redistribution of wealth any more than government funded schools or roads. (I don’t think MY tax dollars should go to paying for the interstate in Texas when I live in New York).
What is a waste is spending education dollars on people who never utilize their education (applies to both rich and poor, but since rich people use their own money, they can spend it however they please). So if a persondoesn’t have money for collage and doesn’t perform well academicly, its hard to justify giving them a loan.
Agreed, but what I am trying to do is get people to stop focusing on money as a synonym for wealth. Wealth is goods and services money’s economic ramifications can be disregarded to get the point across that we all pay when people are overpaid or paid for no work and that measures to fight poverty can be self defeating. These measures are popular because people are ignorant and politicians benefit from promoting and enacting them. I believe if people who are concerned about the poor understood economics properly they would repudiate big government and subsidies of all kinds. Can you imagine how much more wealth there would be in the US today if FDR had never been president and a third of the Federal Government didn’t exist and all those people had contributed productively to the economy.
—Well there’s nothing terribly wrong with it, it’s just not as good as if the money were kept as capital.—
Um, what? Your story about toasters only makes sense on the surface because you entirely ignore what happens to the other fractions. When Bill G invests in toasters, that’s money that would have otherwise been spent or invested elsewhere.
One good example of money vs. wealth: If Bill G. simply converted all his money into cash, and then spent none of it, this would be a great boon to everyone else in the economy: much much better than if he spent it all (in which case it would mean less of whatever he bought to go around for everyone else, reflected in slightly higher prices). In fact, if he held a huge bonfire with all his cash, aside from getting arrested, he would increase the value of the cash in everyone’s pockets.
Of course, if EVERYONE became a miser, that would be very bad.