:smack: There aren’t enough facepalms in the fucking universe.
Okay, so clarify something for me: what use to society, exactly, is a job that employs someone over 30 hours a week, yet does not pay that person enough to survive, assuming a single with no dependents? What is gained that makes up for that person’s suffering, not to mention any government benefits that person has to collect?
Or is it okay because anyone in that situation obviously had to have done something to make it their fault?
First, you can survive just fine, with health insurance, if you work enough, so your premise is off from the start. Second, most people making minimum wage are part of a middle-class household, thus don’t need to fully support themselves. Finally, if they do quality for benefits, they don’t need as many because $7.25/h leaves them with a lot more than $0/h. That’s value right there. Never mind the goods and services they produced.
If you’re worried about people who don’t have “enough to survive” (my bleeding heart and I are), MW is a blunt instrument that misses the target; recall that most MW earners are not living in poverty, and most people who are living in poverty either do not work or only do so part time.
That doesn’t mean do nothing. I’m happy to discuss ways you can raise my taxes to assist people who don’t have enough to survive. Preferably in a different forum.
Common argument which ignores the fact that technology marches on regardless of what the minimum wage is.
Whether we get paid more now or not, that day will come eventually.
Using it as a cudgel to prevent workers from keeping their wages indexed to the prices of the things they actually use (rent, healthcare, education, insurance, food, fuel, utilities…) would be acceptable, and I’ve proven it can be done.
Argument is a red herring and does not address the facts.
Ignores the fact that rent goes up regardless of whether wage earners can afford it.
Rent goes from $500 to $700 while wages stay the same. Not the wage earner’s fault, nothing to do with the price of labor.
That’s land owners (the wealthy) imposing higher taxes on the poor by virtue of being the ones in charge of the levers of the economy, setting all the prices unilaterally.
Low wage earners get priced out of entire markets without their wages going up at all. Subsidized housing and rent control and food stamps and other such corporate welfare practices allow businesses to make the government pay for their lack of wage increases, while still obtaining a labor force of serfs who cannot get ahead in the world.
Nothing I said about increasing wages harms the shareholders one bit.
Raise the price to offset the cost, the consumer pays for it. Not the shareholders.
The consumer is anyone buying a product or service. They decide whether they can afford the product or service.
**
That’s** a free market.
The wage earner doesn’t get to decide whether or not they can afford to live on the wages earned. They have to earn the wage regardless.
The highly subsidized corporate welfare economy is not a free market. When Pizza Hut and KFC and the dozens of other restaurants are owned by the same company, there is less and less actual competition in the marketplace, and therefore, the same few companies can all agree to keep wages stagnant, and prevent people from asking for a raise, because where else are they going to work?
Moving costs money. Education costs money. Some people cannot move or do an education because they have to support their disabled relatives and care for them personally because they cannot afford to pay for someone else to do it.
Some people are required to stay exactly where they are in life.
Those people need to be able to have a living wage. Period.
There’s no part of this fucking argument I forgot, you insane fucktard.
My god you’re a blathering moron.
Yeah, someone fresh out of college with a bachelor’s degree who can’t find work is fucking unqualified and unskilled.
Get bent.
About 45 minutes, one draft.
This one line counters all the arguments in opposition to rising wages.
@ Supply siders, and opponents of wage increases:
Need another one?
Norway has starting wages which are **double **what they are in the United States. Their Burger Kings and McDonald’s stay in business. Their nation’s budget is just fine. They run at a surplus. Unemployment is **lower **there than here.
Australia is the same. Higher wages than the USA.
Other countries which are first world, capitalist nations, pay their workers more, and nothing disastrous happened.
You get a lot more money in those countries for the same goddamned job.
It’s like gun control. Works in Australia. Why doesn’t it work in the USA?
What makes the USA so fucking special?
Guns work differently in the USA? Does math work differently?
There’s not one difference. And given we’re “number one” (lol) and the world’s biggest economy, and the world’s wealthiest nation, if Norway and Australia can afford it, guess what jackasses, so can the USA.
Can’t figure it out?
Copy and paste their model. STEAL IT!!!
There’s no shame in admitting your economic policies are a total fucking disaster.
Welcome to the Internet, where all options are equally available to every person 100% of the time, and getting a better job is a simple matter of going down to the Job Store and picking one off of the shelf.
Nodding to above. Bottom line highlighted.
Henry Ford not *always *correct, but here’s an instance where he was:
***There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible
***@ Supply side assholes:The third part of that quote is ignored by Wal-Mart, and many other corporations which control labor markets today. Because the US is so anti-worker, they can get away with reaping the immediate reward of shafting the worker. Even though their own internal studies suggest if they paid their employees more, the economic benefits would be such that Wal-mart would get more of that money back in added business. Their own sources determined this.
But concepts like that are too foreign to the bottom-line idea that as long as more money goes directly to the owner, and to the manager who gets bonuses based on reducing costs as much as possible, that even when the idea is found to be sound INSIDE the bubble of avarice, it is still resisted by individuals only concerned with personal greed.
Outside of the greed bubble, outside of the anti-worker culture of the USA, the worker is succeeding.
Our model isn’t working for anyone except the right wing superhero Corporate Greed Man.
John Galt is a fiction. The idea of the businessman as a “Job Creator” is a fiction. Owners do not create jobs, markets and demand create jobs. The Owners simply take advantage of that opportunity for their own benefit.
The market was always there, the demand was always there. Someone would have filled the demand. They were merely the first, or they bought out the competition.
Nothing will happen if a company fails, another company will always take its place. If Wal-Mart refuses to cooperate, then Aldi will, or Walgreens will. Or a whole new company will pop up and fill the space, and lease the same exact fucking building that Wal-Mart used to occupy.
Why? Because it’s the market, and the demand, which creates the jobs. And the business opportunities.
This is not a form of welfare. The businessman isn’t personally supporting the economy on his shoulders. He’s a part of the economy, but he did not create the market. He did not create demand.
And if demand disappears, so does his business. He didn’t create the job. Demand created the job.
If a pizza shop sells 500 pizzas a day, and has enough workers to do this, does the pizza shop have the ability to “create jobs” by simply doubling their workforce, while the demand for pizzas stays the same?
No?
Then they’re **not **the ones creating the jobs, supply-side jackass. The **customers **are.
The customers or potential customers will continue to exist with or without Mister Job Creator, superhero John Galt, Corporate Green Man. He’s so far up his own fucking ass that he thinks his shit no longer stinks, because he’s all the way through his digestive tract and out the other side.
If Wal-Mart can’t compete due to increased wages demanded by the workers, because they refuse to re-price the can of beans by 5 more cents, then they’ll go out of business. And someone else will take their place.
And if no one takes their place, US workers will emigrate to Norway and Australia and beg for jobs there. And like the migrant workers coming to the United States for greater opportunities from hell holes like Central America, that will only increase the wealth and support an even greater wealthy class in those countries they emigrate to.
I know that having migrant workers pick tomatoes for me under the table keeps my prices low, and therefore, makes me slightly wealthier.
Even at *my income level, they’re not taking away a job, they’re adding to the economy. They’re creating demand, because they eat, and rent apartments, and drive vehicles. They pay sales and property taxes and fees and pay into the system without getting a pay out. They’re *not the problem.
The problem is corporations who control enough of the marketplace, enough levels of production, and enough formerly competing businesses that they can ignore Henry Ford’s rule for the industrialist for personal gain.
Other countries where workers have a more equal footing with the industrialist and greater government protections have workers with greater pay and benefits, and the industrialist is still fabulously wealthy.
That’s how healthy capitalism is supposed to work.
Instead, you have recession after recession, national deficits, high unemployment, and greater and greater inequality.
If that’s how capitalism is supposed to work, should Norway and Australia abandon their models and become more like us?
I want to hear someone argue that point.
** Convince an Australian or a Norwegian to me more like the United States. Give up their unions, their benefits, their protections, and watch their wages plummet.**
Make your case, in a free marketplace of ideas, standing on their own merits.
If you can’t make that case, then you’ve lost this argument, supply-side asshole.
ETA:
be more like.
True, that also works logically, and conveys pretty much the same idea, but “what the fuck is your point” can be modified.
What the *fuck *is your point becomes ----> what the *bloody fuck *is your point -----> what the *bloody cunt fuck *is your point.
It’s much like what the shit is this becomes -----> what the fucking shit is this -----> what the bloody fucking shit is this.
I’ve never been much for grammatical structure even if it weren’t correct. I’m not an English major. Often times I use sentence fragments to modify previous sentences or to continue an idea, and I often break up paragraphs for readability, even though grammatically that’s not correct. Yet, it’s readable. And if spoken aloud, would be phrased exactly that way.
One of my favorite comedians, Lewis Black, uses the word “fuck” like a comma. It might not be grammatically correct all the time, but it gets the job done. A lot of great writers broke the rules of grammatical structure in their time, and that led to evolving grammatical structure. I don’t claim to be one of them, but as long as my point is being conveyed in a way you can understand, I’ve done my job.
This ain’t Shakespeare. Just for example, ‘ain’t’ used to be improper English, now it’s a word in the dictionary. Language is fluid. It does what *we *want it to do. As long as communication is achieved, the means doesn’t have to be unassailable in structure and form.
Strange, they do in other countries and capitalism keeps on fucking plugging along.
And they’re not idiots. They’re often college graduates, here in the US, or people who have needed to take a lower-wage job because their middle-class job vanished.
So your premise is faulty, and you can fuck yourself with broken glass.
So there are lots of people who are losing their jobs all the time, yet no one is applying for work.
Very interesting premise, moron.
The workers are providing the same OR GREATER value than their past equivalents. Yet they used to be paid more (adjusted for inflation). And productivity has gone up.
The worker isn’t the one who isn’t providing value, pancake head.
Yeah, sickness, injury, economic downturn, or employer going out of business because they were running a goddamned pyramid scheme with someone else’s money is totally the fault of the worker, all the time.
You are like the Rembrandt of idiots.
Trying to quote TipTapTwo’s post here but the board won’t let me do so, probably because it’s got a quote in it that doesn’t have a link inside it, seems to be the pattern.
Gotta fix something here, SDMB. I don’t think it’s my personal settings causing this.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=19422529&postcount=120
Some other nations, such as Norway, which is my repeated cite, don’t necessarily even have a minimum wage.
What they do have instead are unions, which negotiate prices higher than a minimum wage ever would. And they have laws protecting those unions from union-busters.
As such, a minimum wage isn’t needed.
However, in the absence of unions, and with the presence of employers who will terminate you for using your free speech to advocate for worker’s rights, that necessitates a recourse for the United States other than unions.
At least, until we can get a legislature amenable to repealing the legal protections for businesses who attack on free speech by terminating all advocates for unions, regardless of employee performance.
I find it very fitting that you choose to quote the mentally retarded Waterboy when advocating for your point of view.
Medulla oblongata. Tackling doesn’t change the facts, Waterboy.
Cited proof that this is a myth. Your rebuttal?