I salute you, Sir.
I’m glad I’m not having Spaghetti Bolognese for dinner, though…
From Forbes.
Should we bother counting up all the really bad assumptions made here, or just point out the example economy he conjures up resembles no actual economy on Earth? Should we talk about how worker productivity in the real world has been going up and up and up, highlighting how workers with low “output” aren’t the problem here? Do we even want to get into the quagmire of determining the arbitrary productivity numbers of a specific individual in an actual business setting where people are part of a team and are specialized and their contribution to the company isn’t necessarily comparable between departments?
Take for example, a software company large enough to require having a human resources department, a marketing department, and so forth. Are the HR people as valuable to the company’s success as the engineer? But let’s not kid ourselves, we’re not talking about software companies. Let’s talk McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Wal-Mart.
If you take it down to minimum wage level, the specialized positions in a fast food restaurant aren’t even comparable to one another. The person who specializes in making the pizzas really fast doesn’t trade jobs with the phone person, and excel at that position while the phone person excels at making pizzas, especially in a crew with high turnover. As a manager there was a measure of productivity I used: Whether or not you were doing a task competently that I was unable to personally do myself, and whether that task was so vital that it would impact business if you weren’t there. If you met those criteria, then you were productive enough, since you were getting paid fucking peanuts anyway and couldn’t even afford to eat the pizzas we made.
Anecdotal evidence versus what the data says, but let’s go with it, because we know we can manipulate data. So, tell me what the personal experience of your Some Puerto Rican Guy friend is. Let’s hear how higher wages made things worse for him.
No? No details, no data? Not EVEN an anecdotal story?
…k :dubious:
Can there be some evidence of this, showing Puerto Rico had no economic issues before a wage increase? Any data at all? How bout dem anecdotes, at least?
Ah, true. Of course, that’s also true of every state, prosperous or not, and without any facts and figures, is a meaningless sentence.
Yes, please. This should be good. Like I’m five.
Let’s not even talk about how or why the data is misleading, since we have examined no data thus far anyway. But go ahead, hit me with your “very simple” model economy.
Yeah, workers with low output get shit-canned even when the minimum wage is peanuts. I should know, when driver A takes 45 minutes to deliver a pizza that should be there in 10 minutes, he does that a couple more times, he doesn’t have a job. That’s independent of wages. It’s not even that he’s costing us money, really, since our workers get paid so very little, and even the one $50 order he delivered that hour paid for him and thensome. The problem is, he’s on the team, and his performance is so unsatisfactory that we might lose customers that he serves. That is the case regardless of how much we pay him. When the performance doesn’t meet expectations, because of his “output”, he’s shit canned already, before we even talk about wage increases. So this has absolutely fuck all to do with wages. Worker A was let go before we even talked about wage increases.
And let’s compare Worker A in the 1970s to 2016, and note that worker A in the 1970’s wages went further than Worker A’s wages does today, because of how worthless the currency is and how high the prices are and how little those wages have increased in the interim. Also note that productivity has been rising steadily since then. So, if Worker A in the 1970’s earned the equivalent of 10 dollars an hour and was half as productive, obviously, he could be earning twice as much, ballpark. So it’s not Worker A’s output that is the problem, mister economy modeler, because if worker A’s output was that close to being a detriment to the company, he’s already got fewer hours or none.
But let me accept your premise, even though it’s wrong. Let’s see where you go with this fantasy economy.
Also, LOL @: “is offered a competitive wage”, right. These businesses are just FALLING OVER one another to offer the highest possible wages like Ford envisioned. :smack:
An economy where everyone is working? That’s a fascinating premise. Do go on. Children, the elderly, the handicapped, the disabled, the unemployed, none of these people exist in your economy or are working already. Neat.
Also, I’m *loving *your economy where the minimum wage is anywhere NEAR the median wage or the average wage. This is *quite *a fictional economy we’re constructing here. I also love the idea that wages have anything the fuck to do with worker output, because if that were the case, we’re all in dire need of some badly overdue wage increases, wouldn’t you say? You want to talk about scaling our wages to what our *productivity *is, I’ll talk about that all day. That’s not your position, though. You want to keep wages exactly where they are, all day, every day, all year, every year, regardless of the cost of living or worker productivity or things like GDP per capita.
You really want to open that door? Your argument gets blown right out like the hot air it is. I wouldn’t open that door if I were you. Be my fucking guest, though, that would be a barrel of laughs.
LOL
Yeah, worker productivity is *that *low, that it is anywhere near their wage level. However did the economy survive and thrive in decades past with workers who obviously got paid more than their “output”? It must have been the case, since businesses are more efficient and spend less on labor and individual workers are both more productive AND cheaper than they used to be.
Let’s gloss over any idea of raising prices even a little to offset costs, like what happens when the cost of fuel or cheese goes up. Pizza restaurants just go out of business when shit like that happens, they have no idea how to balance their budgets.
Yeah this *definitely *happened when minimum wage increased in the past. Funny, I worked at these companies since when the wage was under five bucks an hour. A lot of people working today can remember when wages were lower than that. A lot of businesses came and went in the interim, I can’t recall too many who had an issue keeping up with the increased cost of doing business. If they did, they were failing businesses to begin with.
I like how these workers are so unproductive that the company is basically a fucking charity to give them a job in the first place. Why do these businesses hire employees at all, if their motive is profit, considering how unproductive workers apparently are, and how they aren’t worth it?
If you lowered wages to 50 cents an hour, and I’m expecting 20 deliveries this hour, I still don’t need to add more workers if I have enough workers. Nothing is added to my business model, by employing workers for the cost of a couple of gumballs per hour. I could have them run around and distribute door hangers, but I should have been doing that already if I cared about market share. Otherwise they’re not needed. The company does not fill positions by maxing out the budget and finding jobs for one person to do just competently enough to break even. The company is not a charity. That’s not how capitalism works, and why the myth of the “job creator” has always been bullshit. If you remove all wage constraints, I’m still not going to employ people when there is no demand. Period. They’re in the way and now they’re just talking to each other instead of working, getting in the way. I tell employees who are off the clock and costing me NOTHING to go home, because they are a detriment to my business model even when they’re not costing me a dime. If you’re not working, I don’t want you there.
Anyone on the clock in a minimum wage business is there because the company truly believes that if that person wasn’t there, the business would lose money, be vulnerable to a lawsuit, or would generate unhappy customers or bad service. And because the company anticipates enough demand to pay for them *and *turn a profit.
No worker is on the clock getting paid a wage close to what their productivity is. If that’s your model, you **already **went out of business. Why didn’t you FIRE worker A and replace him with an average worker off the street who does the job apparently three times as well? Unskilled, untrained, inexperienced workers who do the job three times as productively as worker A, in an economy full of unemployed workers looking for jobs? How the blue fuck are you a profit-seeking company who is still employing worker A?
This model economy has absolutely nothing the fuck to do with the reality of either real world business or even internally consistent within its own logic.
*Why the fuck *isn’t the manager of your fictional economy shit-canned? How could you possibly run an economy where half the workers couldn’t perform at a level you’d find in an unskilled, untrained, unemployed person off the street, and your business model is such that these workers generate so little productivity in the first place that a minor bump in wages couldn’t be matched by a slight increase in prices?
The model is not Worker A generates 15 dollars an hour for the company and we pay him close to that anyway, so a wage increase would make it unprofitable to employ him. That model doesn’t exist, anywhere. EVER.
Look at your typical Wal-Mart cashier. How much product do they handle in an hour? Hell let’s simplify it and say all the workers are basically cashiers no matter what their actual job title is. Have you run into a Wal-Mart where there are 15 checkout counters open and one customer in each checkout counter, purchasing a $20 item once per hour? Is that how you think this works?
No, the cashier at the checkout is ringing up thousands and thousands of dollars an hour worth of merchandise. Hell, you’d run that up in 15 minutes. The cashier is earning 10 bucks an hour. Now compare that to the staff of Wal-Mart. Add up every employee in the store. It’s possible during peak business hours, that JUST ONE of those cash registers is ringing up enough merchandise to pay for every low-wage employee that works that *day *in a single hour. That way the business is still profitable even during non-peak hours where not a single customer might trapse through that particular checkout. Wow, seems like they thought ahead and aren’t fucking morons.
The business model is **not **“Cashiers get paid $10 an hour, but are so unproductive and contribute so little to the business that if we paid them $15, we’d go out of business.”
That’s not the business model. Those lanes exist for Christmas shoppers. Otherwise, they’re paying one person to be productive enough in a single cash register to pay for all the other employees and thensome. And if DEMAND requires it, add more employees for peak business.
That’s closer to a realistic economy- where productivity of a single worker generates enough business to make it really, really fucking profitable to employ them. Otherwise your shitty business would have been bought out and run properly by now, you unwashed taint.
Again, raising the cost of the worker just means the thousands of items being run through the checkout each get a minor, minor increase in price. Just like when fuel costs rose for all those delivery trucks to bring the goods to the store. If property taxes increased, because an evil Democrat became mayor and had to balance a broken budget, the Wal-Mart didn’t curl up its toes and lay inert afterward. Somehow, the business model absorbs minor cost increases or adapts, by changing prices. Up and down, up and down, to give the impression prices are somehow always falling. The prices that are always low, for certain, are wages.
If a Wal-Mart doubles or triples its business, no one’s wages get increased by triple. Well, certainly not the worker’s wage.
Long story short, wages have little or nothing to do with worker output or productivity. If a worker is producing so little that they do not make the company a fuckload of money every single day, they aren’t employed. Their business model is such that someone else takes their place and is trained to do the job well enough to earn the company the billions of dollars that the owners and shareholders enjoy.
This comparison is so daft, it is like suggesting that increasing the tax on gasoline by 0.5 cents per gallon will cause the economy to grind to a halt and lay off 2/5ths of the workforce.
The economy doesn’t work that way, model or not. You gibbering twit.
So, the data says one thing, data we aren’t citing or examining or debating but accepting as fact. But we’re also going to ignore the data.
Instead, we’re going to make two claims:
Fewer citizens are working!
No one who is working is getting a raise!
(ignore the fact that the minimum wage workers got one)
Okay, let’s talk about those claims. I’ll be open minded. Source? Cite? Reasoning? History of wage increases and their ill effects… do go on, please.
You’ve made your premise known, you have the floor, you have all of our collective attentions. Why can’t you drive your point home? Nail that slam dunk! Please, show us all the folly of our silly ways.
Or how about we talk about all the economic prosperity and rising wages and ever-increasing middle class that results when the wage floor is stagnant. Please cite evidence of that. Compare it side by side, on a state or national level, apples to apples. Show me how the minimum wage, something that apparently no one even gets paid, just kids who don’t even need to work, or workers who don’t produce enough for the company to make an appreciable profit. It’s those magical six thousand dollars all vanishing because of**[COLOR=MediumTurquoise] [COLOR=Blue]Big Minimum Wage[/COLOR] **[/COLOR]putting poor little Wal-Mart out of business again.
Won’t progressives ever learn? How many times must fat cat wage-floor earners put the impoverished Waltons out on the streets because they realize that government regulations and higher wages just don’t work anywhere! Certainly not in other countries, for comparison’s sake!
*Really? *This is the first I’ve heard of this. I remember when I was unemployed, I got payments of just enough money to eat, for nine months or so. Keeping in mind I’ve been working since I was 15. And then those payments stopped entirely, because everyone suddenly got jobs overnight. And I know I paid for all of that AND THENSOME with my own contribution to unemployment over the years, coming out of my paycheck. Unemployed people barely cost the government a thing, especially compared to the rest of the bloated budget. **Unemployment is rarely permanent even in the most extreme cases, and those who are permanently unemployed or unemployable are so regardless of what the wage floor is. **These things have absolutely fuck all to do with one another.
Fuck all.
And Fuck You, Paul Kupiec.
Those taxes have been before, still are, and will be paid in the future by workers C, D, and E already. And have been paid by workers A and B already, and when A and B find another job at a less impoverished multi-national conglomerate earning billions per year, they’ll pay into the system again too.
Or is capitalism that fucking fragile that an increase in wages for the BOTTOM EARNERS going from 8 dollars an hour to 10 dollars an hour will cause 40% unemployment?
God damn, you’re an ignorant fuckwit.
You’ve never earned a low wage before in your fucking life, have you?
These people typically spend half their paycheck paying the fucking babysitter that they needed to hire because both she and her husband have to work in order to pay for rent in even the shittiest and most crime-infested and drug-ridden parts of the city, where they live in tenements, and the hallways smell like mold.
Wage-floor earners don’t work less because they “feel like” enjoying more “leisure” time, you ignoramus. Some very few take a job just to get out of the house, sometimes. That’s a very rare example. Most workers have less than 400 dollars to their name, are in debt, and live paycheck to paycheck. They cannot afford to “work a little less” because their “taxes increased”.
*That *reality exists in the world of the $100,000 per year earner who probably gets a salary, not an hourly wage, where it may be possible that you don’t need the money and have the leverage to tell your boss that you have to work less in the future and you’ll know you’ll probably still keep your job. In my world, you impose restrictions on your schedule, you might not get any hours at all.
The 60% of the population supporting the 40% who are literally unemployable anywhere because wages increased slightly, now must pay* so much in taxes *that they now earn less than they did before the wage increase.
Wow.
That is a ballsy fucking lie, Paul Kupiec.
I don’t think you’ve ever been *near *any actual numbers associated with *any *for-profit organization. The only numbers you’ve ever seen at all are in your personal salary, and I’m not sure how close you’re paying attention to those numbers either, given how badly you’re fucking the duck when it comes to understanding how unemployment works or how much you pay in taxes to support it.
*What *data puzzle? The one where real world data utterly contradicts your fictional economy by orders of magnitude?
And for that matter, what DATA are we using? The only numbers you’ve ever talked about are ass-pulled numbers in a fantasy economy that bears striking resemblance to nothing that has ever existed on planet Earth.
Yes, when wages go up, wages go up. We know that, you’re trying to prove the inverse, remember?
Well, I think this bit speaks for itself.
I know I’m sold. Are you, fans of living wages?
Let’s recap.
Paul Kupiec says: (And let me know if I’m even being *unfair *to Paul here!)
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Data that Paul will not cite or even reference in any way except vaguely suggests that when the minimum wage increases, it helps not only the wage floor earner, but increases the median wage as well, utterly destroying Paul’s ENTIRE FUCKING PREMISE before he even begins. So Paul can’t talk about that. Let’s talk about something else.
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Paul *totally *knows Some Puerto Rican Guy, and Some Puerto Rican Guy definitely kidnapped Butters from South Park and killed Nicole Brown Simpson. Whoops, I mean, Some Puerto Rican Guy’s wages increased and it was a real bummer, dude. He was of average Puerto Rican height, and had average Puerto Rican complexion, and had average Puerto Rican colored hair. His life is truly a story worth telling, it is compelling information. Sadly, all details about Some Puerto Rican guy’s tragic life had to be cut for time. We had an entire 5-man fictional economy to discuss in great depth, after all.
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40% of all workers would be unemployable if wages rose from $8 to $10, using absolutely no numbers to establish this premise, except those I’m pulling directly out of my ass in a fictional economy using numbers resembling nothing you’d find in a real business model.
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This new underclass of suddenly unemployable people will *also *put the other 60% of workers out on the streets, or, perhaps their taxes will get so high that they won’t even bother to work, they’ll just chillax at one of their vacation homes and fire the maid. In my economic model, of course, not in real life.
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“Curiously, [ACTUAL] wages statistics paint an entirely different picture.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ -
…I’ll pause so you can stop laughing. What’s so goddamned funny? By the way, Median and average wages for all workers are rising. Curiously. This is no cause for celebration though.
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This is TERRIBLE for the economy and no one is working.
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The End.
Here, this image may come in handy. It’s literally an infinite amount of facepalms, which is precisely the correct amount needed in response to this slam dunk case.
I wish I could convey to you the look on my wife’s face and how she started laughing once she saw the title of the above article. Just the title alone. I think any Norwegian you run into would laugh their tits off at the premise. Most people in any developed nation probably would.
They are living every day of their life as the proof of how wrong this guy is, and living it very well indeed.
The comments section on that article is surprisingly almost entirely people laughing at this fool, on Forbes’ own site.
It warms my heart that *no one *but the most ignorant buffoons actually swallows this tripe. So my question is, why is this the Republican economic model?
The minimum wage in the state of Florida (just as an example) is presently 8.05 an hour. What will happen is you’ll end up getting paid something like 8.15 so they can then claim no workers earn the minimum wage, skewing statistics in their favor and suggesting that only kids earn wages at the minimum level. That narrative you’ve heard over and over, that the minimum wage is for people just entering the work force who live at home with rich mommy and daddy.
That narrative essentially makes the assumption that the minimum wage is the wage that should be paid to interns who already have their expenses taken care of, and that “real” wage earners should be earning more than that. This isn’t the case, but sure, let’s buy into that narrative and go yeah, sure, the minimum wage is for kids who have no expenses and work 20 hours a week. So, what should the wage be for adults who need to support themselves?
This is the argument being made by proponents of a stagnant minimum wage. From the comments section of that article in my post a few posts up:
This is one of the reasons this debate has been bullshit from the start. What are the workers asking for? The workers are asking for a higher minimum wage* so that they can support themselves. *
I challenge every single opponent of raising the minimum wage to do this- Answer the following questions: What does it *mean *when the responsibility for supporting the workers is up to the worker, and not the employer? What does that sentence ACTUALLY suggest the model should be?
Does it mean the worker should simply be independently wealthy or an unpaid intern? In such a case, then the worker is supporting him or herself, and doesn’t need to earn a wage. Living at home with mommy and daddy or simply not needing a wage because they’re wealthy. That’s what that would mean. That’s what it means when a worker is supporting him or herself. (And actually, it doesn’t even mean that- it means someone else is supporting them or they don’t need support, which is not why people try to get jobs.)
No? So, if that’s not the case, then what the hell does that sentence actually mean?
Does it mean that it’s up to the worker to get a second job? So when job A only provides 40 hours to the worker, it’s up to the worker to somehow find a job B that is okay with that worker’s schedule being shared with another employer, and work what is unpaid overtime (the worker is working more than 40 hours a week now) in order to make ends meet? Yeah, it’s not technically overtime, since these are different jobs. But this is the reality for a ton of wage earners, particularly at or near the minimum wage. Keep in mind, if you put restrictions on your schedule, or cannot come in on days where you’re not scheduled to come in but your boss needs you anyway, since you’re working a second job, it hurts your advancement and raise opportunities at both jobs. Also keep in mind, such a scenario is not always possible due to raising a child or caring for a family member or lack of transportation, or because employers won’t hire you with your schedule having such limited availability, especially in a job market with the number of unemployed that we have.
Look, if your actual policy position is “tough shit, I don’t care” just save us all the trouble and say that’s your position instead of arguing fantasies and forcing us to correct the constant public misunderstanding of the issue. The worker is always supporting him or herself.
Furthermore, what is the nonsense portion in the above quote about the customer or the tax-payer? It’s not up to them to support the worker. Okay, so what does that mean?
When we say it’s not up to the **customer **to support the worker, does that mean Wal-Mart is supposed to pass off the responsibility of paying the workers enough to eat onto the Federal Government? If you work at Wal-Mart and qualify for SNAP or any other subsistence living assistance programs, that means Wal-Mart is making sure more of the money they earn goes directly into the pockets of their shareholders. The Federal Government cost doesn’t even go back to the corporation who will avoid paying taxes, it goes back on every wage earner in the United States who pays a portion of their income to support the Fed. So when they say it’s not up to the customer to support the worker, what they’re saying is, it’s not up to the customer to support the worker via the price of the product and through wages, it’s up to the customer to support the worker directly out of their own wages, through redistribution and subsidizing of wages.
That subsidy is essentially a Wal-Mart tax. Money is fungible, so when the worker earns so little that they end up getting supported by your tax dollars, is that the worker being lazy? Or is that Wal-Mart being greedy? If they were getting paid enough to eat AND pay rent, they wouldn’t qualify for such public assistance and it wouldn’t come out of YOUR paycheck at all. Then, Wal-Mart would be living up to its responsibility to pay workers a living wage. A living wage, just to remind, is a wage workers can live on. It doesn’t mean they can afford a fancy ass car or HBO or a several thousand dollar entertainment system, speakers, and TV. It means they can buy groceries and feed themselves and pay rent out of their OWN paycheck, not yours.
So when I say money is fungible, what I mean is that when workers get a subsidy from the government to eat, Wal-Mart can delay giving their workers a raise (because it’s often impossible for them to live on the shit wages Wal-Mart offers and must accept additional support). So every dime that full time workers receive for food assistance, or even part time workers, since they’re often working full time hours in multiple jobs, is a dime that Wal-Mart doesn’t have to pay, and is a dime that goes to the wealthy or shareholder class. That’s a great deal, being a profitable mega-sized corporation earning billions and still getting a hand-out from the Federal Government, who seizes wage earner’s wages to fund an entire underclass of workers. The corporation doesn’t pay those taxes, but if you earn more than the minimum wage, you’re paying for these people out of your paycheck.
what proponents of a minimum wage increase are asking for, is the right to live their lives without having to beg like a pauper to the federal government all the time, even as a full time wage earner in the wealthiest nation in human history. Do you have any idea how degrading that is? People often work the two jobs if and when they can because they refuse to accept a hand-out, as if it is their own fault they can’t afford rent in the city where they have their full-time employment and residence. As if it is their own fault their employer is a scumbag, sucking subsidies out of your wallet so they don’t have to pay workers enough to eat.
Taxing the middle class so that the shareholder keeps more money and the wage earner can’t get ahead is a great means of maintaining control over the economy.
With an underclass of workers who can work two jobs and never get ahead of their own daily expenses, that’s low income members of the population who cannot fight against the upper classes when election time rolls around. They can’t volunteer, they can’t rally, they can’t donate. So they don’t get represented in Congress. Their interests aren’t represented by political candidates who have any shot at the Presidency.
When the middle class has to support the underclass out of their own paychecks, and when wages are stagnant and demand is low enough that they can’t ask for a raise either, they too get poorer and poorer due to inflation. They are also now put into a position where they feel like no matter what they do, they can’t get ahead either. And when workers at Taco Bell are demanding 10 and 12 dollars an hour, they’ll oppose it, because they are only earning 15 dollars an hour themselves and they think it’s a farce that their own job doesn’t pay much more than that, and they put themselves through school.
So now, you have the middle class fighting the slave wage class. There’s your class warfare.
Meanwhile, the rich corporation avoids paying taxes altogether, and the wealthy class prefers to get their earnings in a manner that helps them avoid taxes as well, by getting shares of stock in the corporation. The earnings they get through shares of stock are taxed at a much lower rate. That’s where the real money comes from, and best of all, they can sell it. You don’t get to earn money from your paycheck and then get to sell it later, all at a reduced tax rate. So they get a whole different rule book, and they get to profit from federal subsidy.
That’s your class warfare. Pitting the middle class against the underclass, and taxing the middle class and putting that money more or less directly into the wealthy classes’ pocket.
This is exactly the same process that allows restaurants to steal tipped workers earnings. When a wage earner delivery driver got the minimum wage plus tips, a delivery driver could make ends meet, and the tips went to the driver. And there wasn’t a delivery fee. The customer correctly felt like tipping would make an impact on the worker. Then, they changed the entire compensation structure: Workers no longer earned the standard minimum wage, it got cut in half, forcing the worker to rely more directly on tips, and since money is fungible, it *is *stealing their tips, indirectly. But it gets better, because then they charged a 3 dollar delivery fee, and now money that used to go to tipping the driver went to the pizza chain itself. Customers incorrectly assumed the driver was seeing that money, that it was now a mandatory tip. And that is stealing their tips directly, not even indirectly. First their wages, then their tips. I covered all this crap here, **in my gigantic rant about how pizza chains have stolen worker’s wages and tips. **
Instead of paying the worker, they’ve elected to pass the cost of the worker onto the customer directly in a way that also causes the worker to earn less. In the pizza delivery driver example, it was adding a new surcharge and calling it a “delivery” charge, which customers assume goes to the “delivery” driver, while simultaneously changing the per-delivery compensation from a dollar to cents per mile, and lowering the worker’s actual wages from 8 dollars to four and change, now five and change.
How does this relate to the subject at hand? I’m not just going off on a tangent because I like to type words. Here’s how it relates: They’re doing the same thing with worker’s wages everywhere. Not just at the pizza joint. Again, instead of compensating the worker directly, the corporation is passing off the cost to someone else. Only this time, you can’t get around it by simply choosing not to order a pizza or choosing not to shop at Wal-Mart or choosing not to eat at McDonald’s.
Now the delivery fee is coming directly out of your wages, even if you didn’t order a pizza. Now the Wal-Mart worker’s paycheck is coming out of your paycheck, even if you didn’t shop at Wal-Mart. Now the fry cook at Burger King gets some of your money, even if you hate Burger King and correctly view their product as fucking disgusting inedible garbage.
Well, those corporations are now all getting your money. Because money is fungible. Because prices and living costs continue to rise, and because the minimum wage is stagnant, and because it’s not kids and independently wealthy people who need to earn wages in this country.
The solution is to make wages livable, so that someone working 50 hours a week for no overtime at all isn’t entitled to a piece of your paycheck.
That’s what the workers are demanding. Dignity. They want fucking dignity. They don’t want a piece of your paycheck. They want their own paycheck. And by the way, to finally settle this ignorant misconception:
**The workers are self-sufficient. **
They *did *their part by working 50 hours a week and then asking politely for a raise. Then, when it didn’t come, they availed themselves of the government programs available that are meant to help those who don’t earn enough to eat. It’s the EMPLOYER that is stealing your money through subsidies and then blaming the worker. Don’t blame the *worker *for not being self-sufficient. Blame the *employer *for not being self-sufficient, who pays nothing in federal taxes and then gets a federally-subsidized slave-wage work force, just so that Wal-Mart and McDonald’s and Pizza Hut can maintain the illusion that they’re actually saving you money.
Your wages shouldn’t end up lining their pockets when you don’t even fucking go there. That’s never been the worker’s fault, though. The worker isn’t in control of what the government or what the corporations do, but the corporations decide what the government does and end up helping write the laws and the tax code. They’re the ones funding the “think tanks” after all.
And they’ve rigged the game such that the worker will work 50 hours a week for no overtime at two different jobs and they’ve convinced **you **that that worker is lazy because he wants to feed his family and can’t do it and somehow still qualifies for government assistance because his wages are *that *fucking low. It’s disgraceful.
Fix the system with a higher wage floor. Then you might want to do something about closing corporate tax loopholes and force these billion dollar corporations to pay more to the fed than you do personally by yourself, but hey, it’s just a suggestion.
Then if you think it’s so terrible that the wage floor is creeping closer to your own salary, ask for a raise for yourself. But don’t deny the lowest wage earner a chance to get off of government assistance simply because they’ve successfully managed to convince you that you’re worth more than the minimum wage but won’t back it up with actual money.
All workers everywhere earning a paycheck are all in the same boat. Don’t make the mistake of thinking the middle class and the poverty wage class are in opposition to one another’s interests. After all, the “job creators” have convinced Congress it’s the middle classes’ responsibility to pay for the underclass that works for the major corporations in America. That means they’ve declared war on the middle class as well and have successfully convinced some of you that we don’t work as hard as you do and that we’re your enemy. And while you’re fighting us for our deserved wage increase, your employer keeps your wages down as well and makes sure you end up having to pay for their personal army of underpaid slave workers out of your own pocket.
Pretty neat little system they’ve set up. Just like how they’ve pitted customers who are resentful that they have to pay a delivery fee they think goes to the driver, against the delivery driver who is resentful for not earning a tip, while the company enjoys an army of delivery drivers who bring in more in delivery fees per hour than the company pays out in wages or gasoline compensation.
A nice little army of workers for free. Well, free for them. It’s costing you money, though. And now you’re convinced it’s the worker’s fault. That the worker is lazy. That the worker is greedy for wanting to eat something besides a bowl of rice every day. After all, if they’re earning minimum wage, they must be dumber or lazier than you.
It worked. They’ve successfully pitted you against us. Now we get to suffer together, since you won’t help us and you’re still being forced to subsidize our tiny living budget. We want to change that but we can’t do it without your help.
I can explain it to you but I can’t make you give a shit.
You know, I earned those wages and it didn’t suddenly make me dumb or lazy. I have also been to college and earned double what those wages are, and it didn’t make me smarter or harder working.
More educated does not mean smarter. Knowledge isn’t the same as intelligence. Being poor isn’t a character flaw.
Maybe minimum wage workers aren’t pieces of shit that you should just ignore and they’re your fellow citizen and equal to you in every way except wages?
Just a thought.
Some more responses.
First things first- let’s see union participation rates hit a level anywhere near Norways and the average starting wage for an unskilled position get to double what it is currently, and then the FMW won’t be needed. Then we’d be in agreement.
I’d still keep it to protect worker’s rights, but you’d be right, it wouldn’t be needed. It is needed now to prevent wages from sliding downward.
In order for such a thing to become a reality, workers need better legal protections against the companies who can and will terminate you for unionizing or will shutter several Wal-Marts in a region and lay off all the workers that used to work there for bullshit reasons, only to re-open them with a new workforce that isn’t made up of union-makers. But legal protections aren’t enough since most workers can’t fight corporations in court.
Nothing else of substance, so let’s respond to the rest.
Yeah I didn’t manage a business and I didn’t see the budget. So that would be understanding and experience I must be lacking. Rebuttal to my points not found, insult given instead. I didn’t claim to be an expert, in fact it’s pretty fucking sad that I can so easily destroy the positions of my opponents with the education and experience and access to information that I do have, compared with what they should be bringing to the table.
Insult my intelligence if you like, suggest I have no idea what I’m talking about. Rings hollow though. You’ve been given plenty of time to provide a substantive response to anything I’ve said.
Also, when I’ve insulted the idiots in this thread who support your position, there was an argument attached to it. An actual rebuttal. You want to go all frosting and no cake, you may, but it’s pretty obvious you’re stumped on how to proceed.
Don’t want to proceed, that’s fine. Again, I can’t make people give a shit. But pretending like you’re winning this particular debate and that your opponents are idiots isn’t going to convince anyone but yourself, especially when you have no rebuttal and nothing to even back up your ad homs.
I’m not part of that system anymore. I live in Norway. I am not living under the American minimum wage. None of this even affects me at this time. I do want to move back to the US someday and have that country be a fair place for me to raise my family. I am a US citizen, lived in the US for 32 years, and I plan to live in the US again soon. So this stuff matters to me.
If it didn’t matter to you, then that’s your business, but by participating in the discussion you’re telling everyone else in the thread that it actually does matter to you, even though you’d like to pretend otherwise, and you’d like to pretend that anyone who actually does care is a delusional nutbag.
That’s a pretty awful position to have to argue from, and you have my deepest condolences. But you’re the idiot who decided to start typing here without a rhetorical leg to stand on, so some of that’s on you.
Yeah, it *is *good for other countries. Thanks for conceding.
Which means that it might be good for the United States as well, unless the continent is under the spell of an evil goblin king, and math works differently there. LMK if that’s the case.
I do something about it by advocating to each of my fellow workers that they should unionize and how to protect themselves from corporate reprisals when they try. I also vote. There’s little more I can personally do other than make the argument and educate the portion of the populace that is confused, and leave open the other side of the debate to make their case that I’m wrong using something more substantive than “you’re a pizza guy, herp derp, why should I listen to your insane rantings?”
Good job, good effort.
Here, let me google that for you.
The wikipedia article seems to sufficiently address it. I could copy and paste the article here, but I think you know how to click a link. You don’t even have to get past the table of contents, the opening paragraphs explain it to a level that should satisfy you if your post was motivated by real intellectual curiosity and weren’t simply asking rhetorical questions.
Yes, advocating for worker’s rights and a living wage is easy for me to do. It’s not as easy for most of the people I used to work with.
But this thread is mostly a place for me to shit on the proponents of a stagnant minimum wage, who piss me off with idiotic arguments so farcical that someone Shodan believes is intellectually six years old can easily destroy. Keep in mind these are people who argue this matter as part of their profession, and make arguments so indefensible that the people on this message board who agree with them can’t even make sense of what they’re writing, or haven’t bothered.
If they ever decide that any of the articles written by Tim Worstall or any conservative think tank member, or *any *person who supports their position is worth reposting here, worth explaining, and worth defending, this thread will continue to exist. If they’d like to make a professional or amateur attempt at explaining how businesses or the economy can’t afford a higher minimum wage, I can’t stop them from posting it here.
Seemingly because I’ve outclassed my opponents both professional and otherwise.
Or you could provide an actual rebuttal any day now.
If you put out the effort to read it, then as the person who wrote it, you have my thanks.
I’m aware that posts I make which rebut poor arguments made in online publications are wordy. Wordier than the articles themselves. However, certain statements or arguments are so wrong that the reasons why become quite numerous. It takes work to deconstruct them and demonstrate through real world reasoning and example why they’re wrong.
It would be easier to only go “ha ha tards fuck derp” like my scholarly opponents here. I can do that too, it’s just that sometimes I advance an argument after I’m done. The word limit on this board does provide me the space to do both.
The above Is not a rebuttal to my points showing how prices on major items that wage floor earners must spend their income on have risen far more rapidly than 0.1 percent per year.
Or because you have no response to the cited examples of education, healthcare, rent.
And your response on fuel is laughable:
More tax on gasoline, yes. Doesn’t have fuck to do with gasoline prices before Obama became president and how those prices doubled without the government’s involvement.
That’s a howler. Demonstrate what prices on necessities such as rent, food, clothing, education, medication, doctor’s visits, or transportation have been lowering, and not just lowering, but by 4% per year every year, or on average, for the past 10, 15, or 20 years.
Or even take a stab at any kind of argument there. I won’t even put restrictions on what I’m looking for. Go on, back up this ludicrous statement with data. Give me even anecdotal evidence that let’s say the price of fucking milk has been going down by 4 percent a year.
Anything.
This thread is a dearth of any actual reasoning or argument by your side. Be the heroic thread warrior you think you are.
Yes, I brought it up.
Arguments and data beat credentials, in my view, but I’d even be open minded about someone’s expertise on the matter if they had the proper economic credentials.
The point of highlighting their profession is to demonstrate that in an economic argument, in these publications, they are employing paid writers who are not economists and who work for conservative foundations paid for by wealthy corporations to advance their talking points.
I even conceded they might (in fact likely do) and should have more expertise than I do, because they have the inside access that I lack, about the kinds of numbers that only the people at the top of the economic food chain have access to.
But, even armed with all that, and even though it’s their job to advocate for their position, I can show anyone that they’re full of shit.
If they weren’t, then someone would have something substantive to say about it. Stay tuned to this thread for updates on that. Don’t wait up though.
This thread isn’t about me, but to clarify other things-
I never applied for SNAP even though I qualified for it. I had 10K in savings when I was unemployed due to the recession in 09 and I used every dime of it before applying for the unemployment compensation I was entitled for and legally received. A system I paid into since I was 15, which makes it not a hand out, but akin to insurance. I still do not believe in asking for more than what I need and preferred to try to earn it myself. Many people who earn so little as to qualify for SNAP refuse to accept it because they think in the same way that I do. Because this is a debate about dignity and what is equitable compensation for a day’s work, this discussion is not about welfare. Workers do not want a hand out. They want their rightful paycheck.
And I got my raises and promotions because I earned them. Even afterwards, I continued to advocate for the people who worked under me. Long after I stopped being a delivery driver I continued to raise awareness of the issues plaguing the industry I worked for.
Didn’t affect me. I just give a shit.
<spit-take>
Dude, don’t you have anything better to do than write 10,000 word message board posts about minimum wage in a country you don’t even live in?
check tomorrow for my 25,000 word essay on the state of potholes in Monrovia!
The reason you hear that narrative is that it is true. Most people who earn the MW in the US are not supporting themselves, and do not live in poor households.
There is much of your problem - it *is *the case. Somewhere north of 95% of US workers earn more than MW, and most of those who earn MW are not supporting themselves, and do not live in poor households. So what they “should” earn doesn’t enter into it.
It should be whatever they can convince someone else to pay them.
You keep using the word “should”, which is a mistake. But let’s assume it has some validity, and go on from there.
You claim to have managed a pizza restaurant. You also claim that raising the minimum wage is a triviality, and that employers can simply raise prices and compensate for doing the right thing and paying their employees more than MW. My question is, why didn’t you, when you were a manager, simply raise prices and pay all of your employees a living wage? If it is the right thing to do, why didn’t you do it? Why didn’t you organize them into a union and make them go on strike against you, demanding raises that would allow them to live a middle-class lifestyle?
As has been pointed out, no, they aren’t. So you are correct that your debate is bullshit, since it is founded on a wrong premise.
It means that things should work the way they already do, 95+% of the time - people who want to earn more than MW should collect job skills or work history to the point that their labor is worth more than MW. So, if we assume that the responsibility for acquiring sufficient skills to support oneself belongs to the worker, then 95% or more of the time, that is exactly what happens, and most of those who do not earn enough to support themselves are already being supported by someone else who does.
I am not sure what this means. Most of those who earn the MW in the US work even though they are supported by someone else. So they did try to get jobs, even though they did not need to support themselves.
No, it means it’s up to the worker to collect the kind of job skills and work history that make their labor worth more than MW. Which, as has been pointed out, happens more than nine times out of ten.
Good thing that most people who earn MW aren’t raising a child or caring for a family member, or even supporting themselves, then.
I am going to need a cite of the number of full-time workers at Wal-Mart who get subsidies, and/or the number of MW earners who work full time at multiple jobs.
No, we’re not. Most of us have skills that enable us to get raises and earn a living and so forth so that we can support ourselves, and a family.
No, they’re mostly entry-level workers, or teenagers working for gas money or beer money or saving up for college and things like that.
Regards,
Shodan
Seriously. I haven’t read even 10% of what he has posted because I’m just not into walls o’text and I happen to think he’s wrong and his debating style is poor. But to say it isn’t about him? :rolleyes:
I already refuted this in post 192. Here is the quote - you can find the link there.
So over half are working full time. Here is the rest.
I hope Dopers will forgive me for asking serious questions in BBQ Pit. It’s defense against getting BANNED since I can’t resist calling wingnuts “wingnuts” or imbeciles … well, “imbeciles.”
My serious question:
What is the best name for the fallacy that Chronos refers to as the Free Parking Fallacy?
In the child’s game Monopoly, many play that when you land on Free Parking you collect all the money paid as taxes. Others don’t like that rule.
If you don’t like the rule, but your playmates insist on it, is it hypocritical to collect the money when you land on Free Parking? Chronos doesn’t think so, nor do, I think, most hominids with average IQ or better.
Warren Buffet thinks it would be good public policy for the super-rich to pay higher taxes, but he doesn’t pay the higher tax voluntarily. Is he a hypocrite? No, the Free Parking Fallacy applies.
If you’re an AL baseball manager who doesn’t like the DH rule, do you need to make your pitcher bat? No, that would be the Free Parking Fallacy — of course you employ a designated hitter if allowed.
So what is the best name for this fallacy? I’ll call it the Free Parking Fallacy for now, although another name might be the Fallacy That Doesn’t Need a Name Because it’s So Obvious only Imbeciles Could Fall For It.
Speaking of imbeciles:
Oh my. The dunce falls right into the Fallacy That Doesn’t Need a Name Because it’s So Obvious only Imbeciles Could Fall For It. :rolleyes: We knew he wasn’t over-bright, but he couldn’t even figure out that pizza restaurants have competitors just a few blocks away. :smack:
If anyone is working on an AI that needs a large corpus of English-language stupidity for training data, searching this board for “Regards Shodan” posts would be a good start.
The post we already addressed and debunked?