Yeah, sorry. I should have mentioned that after the blurb it turns to another sort of stupid.
Quotes/formatting fucking up this post, so quotes will now be attributed in blue and the body italicized for ease of reading.
Tim the Worst points to Seattle’s rising minimum wage, rising employment rates for everyone, not just minimum wage earners, and triple-the-national-average growth rate, and declares victory.
Victory? :dubious:
That’s called being proven entirely wrong on every point. After all, his prediction that someone might lose their employment came true. Didn’t it? Or what did he actually say? Let’s see where the goal posts are today. He agrees that the economy didn’t collapse, :rolleyes: (what we’ve been saying) and that everyone from the minimum wage earner on up the entire chain to the top is much happier with Seattle’s system :rolleyes: (no shit, what we’ve been saying) Now, he’s never ever ever ever claimed that… well, here’s Tim, he can explain his delicate positioning on this issue.
Tim Worstall: “The claim is not that, and the claim never has been that, raising Seattle’s minimum wage will cause the economy to become some howling wasteland of huddled masses desperately looking for a job. Only that with a higher minimum wage there will be less low skill employment than without a raise in that minimum wage. Further, yes, of course, the effects of a minimum wage are going to be marginal when laid against all the other things that can happen to a labour market. But then it is at the margins that all economics happens.”
Look at that very specifically worded phrase in bold red.
It would seem simpler to just say “Only that with a higher minimum wage there will be less low skill employment”. If the premise is, that higher wages leads to lower employment. After all, the apple is too expensive, no one will buy it. Right, fucktard Tim? But that’s not the case. In Seattle, “low skill employment” went up. Not down, up.
So when we see that more “low skill” employment has occurred even with the higher wage, he needs to perform one more trick to declare victory: Sure, there are more people employed at the lowest wage (or at any wage) in Seattle, but we have to ignore all this good news and focus on a what-if scenario… what if the minimum wage hadn’t changed? Then, of course, Seattle would be even better off. They’ve even got theoretical models that show this. Meanwhile, people earning the minimum wage, or indeed, any wage, in or around Seattle, are much happier with the even better than a model model, which is that thing called reality.
**
Tim the Worst:“I have no problem with any of that. Sure, employment is up, unemployment is down. But those other factors entirely swamp the effects of a minimum wage change. OK, and?”
So he quotes:
Seattle Times article: “Pay for low-wage workers climbed more in real Seattle than in synthetic Seattle, while their employment rate and hours climbed slightly less.”
Notice how he’s using the phrase “climbed slightly less” as his magnificent victory. When compared to the booming tech sector and the construction sector, the minimum wage jobs increased by a less enormous number.
That’s still up, genius. And it’s irrelevant. This is his form of being ‘correct’:
**
UW report: "In a region where all low-wage workers, including those in Seattle, have enjoyed access to more jobs and more hours*, Seattle’s low-wage workers show some preliminary signs of lagging behind similar workers in comparison regions. The minimum wage appears to have slightly reduced the employment rate of low-wage workers by about one percentage point."*
So what is the benchmark for victory here is that the* REPORT SAYS* that employment for all, including low-wage workers in Seattle, is that compared to other regions, the rate of growth in employment for that class of worker is lower. Lower rise is not the same as lower employment. But, because it is a slightly smaller climb, that’s considered a victory for Tim the Worst. He even slips this in:
Tim the Worst: "Which is absolutely fascinating, isn’t it? And do note that the reduction in employment growth accords very well with David Neumark’s estimations of the elasticity of labour demand here. The actual wage rise (so far) was about 10%. [SIZE=2]The employment drop was about 1%"[/SIZE]
Drop. Employment drop. He called a rise a drop.
If you weren’t paying attention, you just got snowed. But hey, if you wanted your assumptions rewarded by a pundit agreeing with the assumptions in defiance of the facts, then you weren’t paying close attention to this debate in the fucking first place, which is why you’re getting destroyed when it comes time to actually debate it. If all you wanted was validation, you looked for it, found it here, and stopped thinking or caring, didn’t even notice it wasn’t real validation or a real victory.
You’re the only person who could possibly think that this is what the benchmark for victory is- the person who knows he’s correct despite what anyone or the facts say. That line was written specifically for your dead mind. And the way Tim phrases his entire argument means he’s aware he has to phrase it that way, or else this is nothing but absolutely getting demolished. So he knows he’s arguing a lost position. He’s got to get very specific and creative with the wording to even continue the charade.
The report says the employment for even the minimum wage workers went up.
The employment **rise **in Seattle was lower than the **rise **elsewhere for that wage group. That’s a difference in a rate of increase, not a drop. If I’m accelerating in my car faster than you are, that does not mean you’re going backwards, or not very fast, or that your acceleration is low. No, that’s a very specific, and very irrelevant, difference. And my gosh, you’d have to be a moron to have difficulty keeping up with that very simple idea.
It does not equate to jobs lost. But Tim the Worst has phrased it as a loss of employment that he “predicted”.
But fuck Seattle. Let’s not base our entire debate on only one data point or all the data points, since data doesn’t fucking matter to your side anyway.
Let’s talk theory and only theory, since that’s the only place you even have a shot. Let’s talk the hypothetical situation where the outcome was different, so we don’t have to move any goalposts later.
**Even if you were correct, and some minimum wage jobs were cut, AND fewer new jobs opened up to replace them, if 95% of the remaining people still employed could pay their bills, then it’s a legitimate position to hold to think that this is still better. **
So let’s not cherry pick here or there, even though this will predictably be the case everywhere the wage rises, and it is what history shows happens when wages rise. I happily suggest that if wages were to rise, there’s some level of employment drop (actual drop, not theoretical) which is acceptable.
That’s **still **a victory for most of us, which is why people are fighting for higher wages. Depends on how many people lose their job. But the data shows (in every link that has pertained to this matter I’ve posted so far, or that anyone has posted so far) that if and where employment actually drops, the drop is a very small fraction of the workers, and the “rise in wages” of the region significantly overshadows the loss. Meaning, way, way more people have more total money added to their pockets than the amount of money lost by those who lost their jobs. Which is possible as well, some jobs are vulnerable at any given time, like a bagger or greeter. And they can and will lose their jobs for little or no reason based on the whim of the employer or the creation of a better system, independent of wage rising, as I’ve already demonstrated repeatedly.
If the data suggested that a really large percentage of near-wage-floor workers (let’s set it as low as ten percent, and call that significant) lost their jobs, I’d call that validation of my opponent’s theory. Even though 9 out of 10 workers experienced better conditions. That would be a victory for my side by the numbers, but we’re concerned with people here, so people matter, and a small number of people is still people and they matter. For stagnant wage advocates to actually win this argument outright, wages would have to rise in such a way that so many people lost their jobs that the jobs lost represent more dollars in income lost to the working class than was gained back by the rise in wages to those still working. That’s not the rule, and it’s not even a frequent minority case. If it ever happened I’d be legitimately surprised, and so would my opponents, but boy oh boy they’d cite it for years. All it would take is one severe example and it would overshadow the thousands of contrary examples. It’s what they like to scare workers into thinking will happen, even though we have things like google to find out if it has ever happened before, and many decades of history and examples of the wage rising to see what happens.
Low-income earners are willing to take that chance, and don’t take my word for it. People who can’t be bothered to turn out to vote since no candidate represents their interest still staged protests and went on strikes and employed work stoppages. They’re willing to risk their own jobs to fight for a wage they can live on. And many of them have lost their jobs as a result. Thing is, those jobs need to be filled, and only the class of people who are asking for a wage increase are even interested in doing the work, or in a position bad enough in life to be forced to accept such work.
When the alternative is to experience higher prices, and stagnant wages, there’s really little choice. If you were to ask the group of minimum or near minimum wage employed persons whether they’d take a one in 20 gamble on their job just so everyone got enough to live on, I doubt it would be the minority position that they’d say yes. And since it is their lives and their bills at stake here and the rest of the economy isn’t even negatively effected by it, maybe their position on it should matter more than your theory that someone, somewhere might lose a job over a slight increase in the lowest possible wage. Maybe that’s far, far more important than your concern trolling on their behalf, Tim the Worst. Just maybe, you should find a new topic to write about. Because you clearly suck at this.
It might have something to do with the fact that you’re more concerned about defending a generic economic idea that if things cost more people buy less of it, than the reality that employers can cut* a *job, but they can’t do without an army of workers doing all the jobs. They’re actually extremely valuable and the only thing that is devaluing their work is the fact that the negotiating table doesn’t really exist because of the power, political or otherwise, of one side. In a reality where the workers have a say in what their wages are, and can make it happen, businesses have the capitalistic choice to either pay those wages or close up shop or reduce staff. They’ve elected to simply pay the higher wage. It’s similar to the choice where the worker has to accept a job or not eat, and the worker elected to accept the job. Not a lot of “negotiating” happening when your options are limited.
Well, the employers’ options aren’t as limited. They could cut staff. That’s their option, they could run all the cash registers with just the manager on duty. I’m sure that will be more profitable. They could decide it’s not profitable to be a business anymore. I’m sure closing the store would be very profitable. Yet, when faced with the option of keeping everyone on staff or reducing staff levels, they look at how much money they’d lose if their golden gooses were laid off, and realize- nope, we’d actually earn more money if we paid them slightly more and kept all the cash registers fully manned and the store fully stocked. Because that’s our fucking business model. See? Freedom. It works when both sides have it, and capitalism works better when both sides have real power at the bargaining table. If unions won’t be allowed, if talking about unionizing will lead to bullshit disciplinary action and “plumbing problems”, so there’s no real negotiation involved between workers and management, then they’ll simply use the vote, and that will work, and the debate will be over, and the poorest workers will pay their bills, and fewer of them will qualify for government assistance. That’s good for everyone.
Bottom line is the higher minimum wage advocates win the debate: Not only does it help the worker, contrary to the arguments we’ve heard that it might cost them their jobs, the vast majority of the workers benefit, and if the situation is that even more people become employed because the economy is the opposite of shitty, then even more literal, actual people will benefit from higher standards. But it’s not just the lowest wage earner (also known as the people who will work the hardest while also ripping you off the least out of anyone else in our society, aka the golden gooses) who benefits. The lowest wage earner and people close to it represent a huge share of our economy, and when they spend more money, the economy benefits.
More from the report:
UW researchers: “Many employers said they’d be raising prices. But an analysis of grocery stores, restaurants and other stores by the UW team found little to no evidence of that.”
Employers petulantly say they’ll cut hours or raise prices exorbitantly all the time, every time something is done for the working class. When the Affordable Care Act rolled around, they said “everyone’s hours would be cut to 20 or less. We’ve got no choice. Damned government!” Yeah, except that didn’t happen. Probably had something to do with the fact that if they did do that, they’d have to immediately double their staff levels to fill in the missing hours, or they’d lose a shit-ton of business, and they had a hard enough time filling positions as it was, for pay that little. Even in a down economy with high unemployment, it was tough finding people who were able to both competently do the job, but also afford to live on such a shitty amount of money.
When unemployment is up, and no-skill or no-experience positions are available, and you still can’t fill those job positions, maybe the problem is the wage floor is too low for people to actually live in that area, the commute from an affordable apartment is too many hours away. But business derps can’t wrap their minds around it, because they’re too focused on general economic principles involving the price of a piece of fruit that you can easily decline to buy because it is an unnecessary expense, and they’re fucking dumb enough to apply that principle to labor, which is something that you buy which makes you more fucking money than it costs, which makes it stupid not to buy, or to threaten to stop purchasing. The apple doesn’t cost 40 cents per hour, and in turn, earn the buyer 10 bucks per hour. Maybe that’s why the comparison is fucking IDIOTIC. :smack:
How RETARDED do you have to be to compare buying an apple to purchasing a service of labor which returns MORE than you invested? And *who *would be dumb enough to listen to your economic ideas?!?!? We shouldn’t listen to anyone discussing this idea who is working class, because all his ideas are invalid despite his experience in the field we’re actually fucking discussing. It’s probably a law or something. It has to do with minimum wage work, so, obviously anyone involved is a moron, at least that’s what I keep being told. And any fucktard in this debate who doesn’t earn the minimum wage is obviously a goddamned expert on it. Just listen to them have an even less informed opinion and no economic credentials, but we’re stupid to listen to someone knowledgeable. The reasoning is pretty simple: It’s a law of physics that once you get higher wages, you become smarter and more skilled, or that smart or skilled people find work, and that if you’re earning a low wage, you’re also lazy.
**But *this *guy? This guy is your paid article-writer? Tim “the apple comparison” Worstall? HOLY FUCK. Tim the Worst, you’re a moron for ever making that comparison. And literally every single person who thinks the way you do is also an uninformed moron who thinks he knows more than he does. And it is usually a he, btw. Condescending to the rest of us, talking out your asshole, because that’s all you can do when you’re a giant elitist asshole who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and that the reason he’s gotten ahead in life is because wealth equals brains or skill, and the poor just don’t have the right stuff. You’re such a fucking idiot that you equate wages with skill or intellect, like lots of the morons in this fucking thread who have condescended to low wage earners and suggested the reason why they’re earning low wages is because they’re stupid, lazy, or unskilled. I could run any business with any random sampling of the people that I worked with. Most of them had none of those qualities. If you have a stereotype in your head, where everyone working at Burger King or Pizza Hut or Wal-Mart is a doofus, that is a you-envisioning-yourself-as-an-elite problem. Success is built on hard work (often enough to be generally true) but it also involves good networking and opportunities. Not everyone is in the same position of opportunity, or has the resources to re-position themselves into better opportunities. See: families, sick relatives, or debt from college, illness, injury, etc. Or how about simply growing up in the ghetto where unemployment was high and your family wasn’t personally wealthy? Your options are minimum wage or college, and you can’t afford the latter without taking on excessive debt. So you take the minimum wage job and work through college, only to find there are more applicants for work afterward than positions available, or that your employer has already filled his staff with enough black persons to not be accused of being racist, or has a few females on staff already, and thinks very little of female workers (like my previous employer). So now you’re a college educated black female in deep debt, working a minimum wage job. How about having married someone who cheated on you, and now you have a child to raise on your own. Does any of that have to do with being stupid, lazy, or unskilled? What’s the inherent character flaw there that justifies diminishing this person that way?
Fuck each person (certain dumbasses in this thread who have said such things) who writes off someone as lazy, stupid, or unskilled based on their job position in life. You are nothing but sniveling bigoted shits. You’re not *just *stupid assholes, you’re dumbing down the entire country and holding back human progress altogether. You are cancer. And look who is actually guilty of all three things: Tim the Worst and his anti-wage buddies are apparently stupid (if they believe a side by side comparison of *rising *employment is the same as employment dropping), they don’t have very good article-writing skills if they’re going to include such obviously wrong premises, and their debate methods are particularly lazy since they’re so disingenuous. Can’t fight the facts with facts, so we have to use misleading phrasing. So it appears they are everything that they accuse the poor of being… yet they have money. It appears you can be dumb, lazy, and unskilled and it has *nothing *to do with holding you back in a system that rewards the wealthy person’s in-house butler bitch boy and punishes the working class gardener who has some self-respect.
Tim won’t lose his job writing these shitty articles anytime soon. It might be because there’s money in convincing the public to accept stagnant wages in addition to rising prices.
Someone very rich stands to benefit from that idea, they think. Turns out rich people actually earn more money when the lowest classes have more to spend, but they’re so egotistical and uneducated about economics that they weren’t aware of that, and take steps to suppress or ignore that knowledge when it is theorized by their own internal staff.
Mainly, being proven wrong stings a little and hurts their fragile little egos, and they have to maintain their delusion of superiority by purchasing more expensive yachts to compensate.
Here’s a few more, because there’s no shortage of employment in conservative publications for people to peer pressure the public.
Remember, none of these people, none, none, none, are actually experts or economists. Literally all of them have the exact same authority in this debate as everyone else in this thread. So, again, this isn’t economists trying to educate the public about something they’ve woefully been misinformed on. (If and when they actually cite an economist, they gloss over the dozens and dozens of positive data points, which should be relevant if we’re being fair minded, and then they draw conclusions not reached by those same economists.)
And let’s always assume that we can be wrong. In such a case, why is the failure of each and every single one of these writers to actually make a persuasive case so utter and complete?
If they were correct, it would be as simple as using their professional writing skills and the immense bank of data at their disposal to simply explain it to us. And they wouldn’t continually rely on bad logic, the same discredited talking points, and they’d address the history of the wage increase and put things into proper context.
I want to go into detail on each one, but since it’s three articles here, a summary of their points is necessary.
Washington Post, a publication which has liberal roots, but now features a wide assortment of conservative thought. It’s kind of 50/50 in the opinion sections.
Written by Max Ehrenfreund-
The summary
1) Things going great for workers in Seattle, more hours, more money. Businesses are opening more than they’re closing. Etc, all good news. Hell, even mothers and babies do better.
**2) Using the same data from UW cited in the other publication in the above posts, they also come to jarringly dire conclusions from data which shows the opposite of dire results.
See this quote:
“For instance, another major study recently concluded that increasing the minimum wage also increases newborns’ birth weights — evidence that young women are healthier and better off overall in states with a higher minimum. [A simple but controversial law that can make babies healthier] There can be negative effects. Increasing the minimum wage increases the costs of hiring workers. As a result, employers must accept reduced margins or customers must pay steeper prices. If employers cannot stay in business while paying their staff more, they will either hire fewer people or give their workers fewer hours. As a result, even if wages per hour increase, workers’ total earnings could decline.”
After talking at length about all the benefits cited in the study, noting that actual worker’s hours are up, actual worker’s pay is up, businesses are not closing, and there being no mention of skyrocketing prices offsetting the benefits, they continue to cite the idea that without the minimum wage increase, it’s **theoretically possible **that workers would have had more hours or more total jobs.
Which is textbook ignorance of the data in order to repeat a line of conservative orthodoxy. Yeah, but, even though everything turned out fine, things would have been *even better *if nothing had changed! Okay, so let’s look at all the states where the minimum wage didn’t change, and look at the massive growth that happened. Or wait, no, that never happens in these articles. No one makes that argument because it is absurd. Because a decade of very poor growth and stagnant wages is your citation that stagnant wages don’t suddenly cause massive growth, and it’s really fucking retarded to believe it would, by the way.
3) They say that in spite of employees working more hours at higher pay, workers might actually be earning 5 dollars a week less money. They never really establish how that’s possible, with more hours, more dollars per hour, and no change in prices to offset the labor costs. Here’s their main point of their argument, which is that a worker will be harmed by earning less total money, somehow. In spite of the data which shows this to be not the typical case at all.
**4) Employees are earning more hours, but it’s harder for them to make up for missing hours if they were to lose them.
**How is this is a sensible argument?
Quote:
“Workers employed by thriving businesses who did not lose any hours could have enjoyed welcome gains. On the other hand, workers who had a hard time finding a second job to make up for their lost hours might have been earning much less.”
So, when we agree that employees actually ended up gaining **more **hours than they lost, we’re still using the cudgel of the “you might lose hours” scare tactic. So, when the outcome is more hours, and more money per hour, the scare tactic should be less effective. Yet this is still their main thesis. You might lose hours at any time with no wage changes. Given that with the wage changes, people have been gaining more hours than they’ve lost, this argument should be invalid. But here it is, being made again in defiance of the history of the wage, and of the facts in Seattle, and the study they’re even citing, and the results even they admit are real.
That’s everything of substance from this article.
Another WaPo article, by Dylan Matthews-
The summary
1) A lot of people are arguing for higher wages and enacting such legislation.
Yep.
**2) There’s a rich guy even arguing for the higher wages, and he’s a venture capitalist. His name is Nick Hanhauer. Says $15 per hour is a good minimum. **
It would about match what’s going on in Norway, so it’s sound economics to me, especially since it’s proven to work and yet employment is high and businesses exist and run just fine.
3) Is it a good idea? Probably not.
Okay, I’m listening. Here’s your moment to shine. Go! Teach it to me.
4) The guy’s arguments are not very rigorous.
Okay. Tell me how.
5) He correctly cited papers which showed that a wage hike was followed by modest increases in employment.
Okay. So there’s gotta be a point where he did something wrong, then. Continue.
6) But the conclusion by the researchers was that there was no ill effect to job creation or retention, whereas Nick Hanhauer is arguing that it would be good for the economy.
Okay. Well he’s at least correctly citing that it isn’t bad for the economy, which is the opposite of what his opponents are incorrectly arguing. He’s using the real, positive data to draw a positive conclusion, as opposed to an always negative or inconclusive conclusion despite positive results, which is what conservative writers do for this issue. Seems like the outcome is always the same: Good news is actually bad news, or we need more data.
7) Citation is now given that “a solid majority of studies” finds that minimum wage increases reduces employment.
So, it links to a 2007 meta-analysis of minimum wage studies.
The problem is that some of these studies are particularly old even in the meta-analysis itself, and this meta-analysis is itself nine years old on top of that. Some of the studies included cover a period that ended in 1989.
A very large number of the studies, about half, looked at by this meta-analysis include criticisms which these researcher feel are strong enough as to render the results of the individual studies as being not very credible. The tables begin on page 139 of the PDF. Reading through the tables, you can see that about half of the studies have serious problems with control groups, methods, or broadness. And many are very old. If I were to dig up only the very old studies about the effects of tobacco, and simply *counted *up the results of the studies, would I eventually find that there are no ill effects of tobacco on the human body, if I dig deeply and unscrupulously enough?
That’s the problem with tallying the results of studies and suggesting they’re all equal and all equally useful, or that the end result of the aggregation of results of these questionable studies is useful knowledge, or that the data point “more studies say” is useful. That’s a very unscientific way to approach this.
If we were talking climate change, and cited a study about previous studies on climate science, which looked at many different studies, some very old, debunked, or proven to have faulty methodology, and said “more studies say climate change isn’t real”, and relayed that information to the general public, we may be factually correct about the fact that yes, more studies said that, but we’re still perpetuating the misinformation contained within the studies, aren’t we?
In this meta-analysis of previous studies, not only are the results **mixed **from statistically insignificant, to mildly positive, to mildly negative, a ton of these studies have serious issues. This meta-analysis was not meant to ignore that, but to delve into it, and indeed, actually criticize these old studies’ methodologies and point out how inconclusive they are, and to suggest changes and future research. That’s what they talked about throughout the entire analysis.
**That was the entire point of the meta-analysis.
To then **cite **the meta-analysis and **say **the majority of studies said X, is to miss the entire point of the study. That would be like citing old studies on tobacco by the tobacco industry, criticizing those studies, and then someone else coming along, citing them, and saying "more studies show tobacco doesn’t cause cancer, and here’s my cite… this meta-analysis of the studies which talks about how problematic those studies were. But I’m not gonna tell you that, because you’re never going to actually click the link and read all 156 pages.
You want a summary, and you can obviously trust this Dylan Matthews guy to summarize it entirely as, these studies are all great, and most of them suggest the effects are negative.
Here’s a direct link, this is what they’re citing. It’s 156 pages and if my posts are too long for you to read, you’re not going to read this either. But if you cared to:
ftp://ftp.iza.org/RePEc/Discussionpaper/dp2570.pdf
Now, scroll to the very end.
I don’t expect you to read the whole PDF. Skim any part of it you like, read it entirely. Scroll to the very end. look at the tables. This was a study of studies, and it was criticizing the methods, and it’s all listed at the very end of the PDF, after the citations, in the tables. So look and see. Was the point of the study indicated in Dylan’s article, or did he simply cite that one thing, and not actually talk about how the analysis delved into whether these studies were garbage or not?
Did Dylan talk about that, in his article, yes or no?
NO.
Thus, either he willfully ignored the entire point of the study, because he was able to cite the majority and that’s all he was concerned with due to his own lack of rigor, or he’s trying to deliberately mislead you. Either way, that’s a terrible citation.
So what we’re doing here is taking bad, poorly designed, old studies, counting them up, and saying more of them say there’s a slight “statistically significant” negative effect on employment. And, that’s *all *it states, it does not compare the hours lost with the amount of money gained back by the wage increase itself. Studies on that front show no examples that I can find which have the wage in the area rising, and the average take-home pay of workers actually lessening due to the jobs lost as a result of a wage increase.
That’s a massively important data point. If you look at the data, accept it all as viable, and draw the conclusion that there is a mild negative effect on employment, the next step is to ask whether or not that negative effect even outweighs the positive effect of the wage increase.
That would seem to be a very necessary next step.
Did Dylan do that?
NO.
8) Dylan then goes on to argue that there’s typically no effect, or the effects are negligible, and that many of these studies contradict each other.
Correct.
9) We should be suspicious of the idea that minimum wage workers would stimulate the economy by spending their higher wage earnings.
Really? Then things much more subtle, like Bush’s tax refunds, which amounted to very little for low-wage workers, we should be even *more *skeptical about. Yet, these stimulus attempts were seen by the Republican establishment as being effective and the proper role of our government- to borrow more money to pay for essential services, while handing people a tiny stimulus check, in order to centrally stimulate the economy through borrowing rather than through a worker’s earned wages.
I’d be suspicious of the idea that workers would simply sit on all that money and not spend it, or that the spending would have zero or negative effect on either the economy or employment. Hand-waving away the positive effects of this is particularly ridiculous coming from the conservative mindset that the economy is driven by spending and that people should be able to keep more of their own money so they can spend it themselves, rather than having the government confiscate it. They talked spending spending spending, and making consumers buy again, to fix the entire economy when it collapsed several times under Bush.
So, an entire class of workers having more money to spend would have no effect?
It’s like claiming that the unbaptized go to hell or limbo, claiming that for a great many years, then reversing that entirely and saying oh, by the way, there’s no limbo.
At least get your fundamentalism straight if you’re going to teach the religion to others as sound economic theory. If consumers have more money to spend, that’s good, or did you forget your own argument and party platforms? That’s the stuff we agree on, don’t back off of it now that it’s politically expedient to do so.
“Maybe the slightest effect if minimum wage workers spend a little more of their income than those who pay the minimum wage. But it’s not clear, especially if low income consumers buy the output of minimum wage workers.”
Yeah, you won’t find a group of workers who spend a higher percentage of their income. It’s unquestionable that low-income earners spend more and circulate more money in the economy than those who earn money and then keep most of it. The rich don’t spend all the money they have each month. Duh.
“Economically speaking I think we have more targeted ways of providing stimulus - like give money to the unemployed.”
…???
Yeah, that *would *provide a lot of stimulus too, but now you’re suddenly to the left of ME. You don’t simply give money to the unemployed for the purpose of generating stimulus. I’m talking about people earning a living here. Don’t they deserve the money that they’ve earned for themselves? This isn’t a form of welfare, it’s a JOB.
And that *entirely *undermines your thought that workers earning more money and then spending it wouldn’t provide stimulus, since you’re now arguing giving money to the unemployed would provide stimulus.
**10) Dylan’s sudden conclusion: If you want to help workers, raise taxes.
**
“If he wants to help poor workers and not subsidize corporations, then he should advocate expanding the EITC and funding it with a new tax on corporations. It could be a carbon tax or a payroll tax or a cash flow tax or a profits tax or a tax on capital income - whatever. That’s the efficient way to accomplish his goals.”
And this is a very sloppy system where people who qualify for the benefits often do not receive it, and it imposes new taxes, and funds people’s earnings through the government rather than through the business itself simply paying a living wage.
This is just a band-aid, like giving food stamps to the fully employed. Pay them more and the government wouldn’t need to be involved. Stop subsidizing corporate greed, stop subsidizing the underpaid work force.
Pay them enough to afford a doctor or an education, like everyone else is expected to pay for out of their OWN pocket. Stop making the government pay for it, and then putting that system in the hands of politicians who want to de-fund it or de-regulate it. It’s a far simpler system to simply have workers earn a wage per hour without any additional levels of bureaucracy that can be exploited by fraudulent businesses and politicians.
New York Post article, written by member of a conservative think tank (the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research), Nicole Gelinas.
Summary:
1) Rather than the oft-repeated argument that no one earns the minimum wage except kids of wealthy parents who don’t even need a job, Gelinas argues the opposite, that too many people earn it. The retail industry is struggling and therefore can’t afford a wage increase.
Okay, then we can discuss the fact that adults earn this wage, and so, we can stop arguing these jobs are just for kids. Forever. Unconditionally. Finally.
2) “This is an industry that has always relied on cheap, unskilled, transient labor. If cheap labor doesn’t exist anymore — pretty much the definition of the government hiking your front-line wage costs by half in one move — the industry will have to change.”
Where are you going to find cheaper labor than the absolute minimum?
They’re still going to employ people at the minimum wage.
3) “People have also turned to the Internet. They now do nearly 8 percent of their shopping online — more than double the figure in 2008.”
K, but that has nothing to do with wages. Wages have been stagnant. And the package delivery people that would be employed by ordering online will earn more than the minimum wage, and may even have a union protecting them.
That’s a kind of labor shift I prefer. Bring on the delivery jobs, less cashiers, everyone is happy, fewer cars on the road, less traffic, less waste.
4) “And retail-store managers and owners are stuck with high rent costs, theft costs, tax costs and other bills that come with having a storefront even as they compete against Amazon.”
And right there you see that labor, as a percentage of the overall cost of doing business, is a much smaller percentage than people seem to think. That leads them to believe that if wages were to double, the cost of a burger at McDonald’s would then double as well, as if the price point of a product is exactly equal to labor, and thus, all wage increases must therefore come with the same level of price rise. The rise in price is always a tiny fraction of the wage increase. If it’s based on labor. Labor isn’t half of the cost.
If businesses are currently profitable businesses with all of those costs mentioned there, then the current price structure includes those costs comfortably.
What’s essentially being argued is that it costs money to do business, and businesses simply can’t bear to pay that money. Except they do, that’s why we’re the strongest and biggest economy in the world. They figure it out by charging more than it costs. So this is a red herring.
5) Remember, if you’re paying a supervisor $18, you can’t hike the wages you pay your lower-level staff from $10 to $15, and then expect your supervisors not to demand a big hike, too.
Good. The supervisors can use a raise as well. If the worker is earning 8 bucks and the manager is earning 12 bucks, then guess what? The manager getting a raise is the next and most predictable side effect. That’s why the middle class or the non-minimum wage class should celebrate rising wages- you now have ammo to argue to your bosses that you also deserve a raise.
That’s why when I calculate rising wage costs, I include everyone who could reasonably expect to see a raise- the minimum wage worker, and indeed their managers and supervisors, all the way up to the middle class. I leave the rich upper management out of this equation. That’s why the cost of labor is crew plus management, and I assume similar increases for management.
So when the COL for the crew is at 14 percent, I don’t calculate for a 14% increase in cost of labor, I talk about the full 24%, factor that into the calculation, and still demonstrate that the price of the product only goes up 5% even accounting for that. Since these are the actual numbers from an actual business, and they’re quite reasonable, they shouldn’t scare people. Show me the scary numbers. Make your counter-argument.
6) “Predicting things is always dangerous, but one can predict this with near certainty: The result of impossible labor costs will be more automation.”
Already covered this. I’d be interested to see you automate the retail sector more than you already have done. Wal-Mart has heard of computers and has already tried to automate as much as possible.
And PS- a 5% price hike is not “impossible labor cost”. Stop exaggerating.
7) “What’s needed here is a truly small-c conservative approach. That is: hike the minimum wage by $1 or so, and see what happens for a few years. If nothing bad happens, try it again.”
No, we don’t need to be so timid about what bad things might happen: we already *have *a history of minimum wage increases since the very beginning showing no economic catastrophe associated with even a single one of these wage increases. The wage has been stagnant for a long time, and prices for important things like education and medical care have quadrupled in my lifetime, while the wage has not.
Making the change happen too slowly is how we got here in the first place. It needs to keep up with the cost increases, not lag behind. So we already have the data. Nothing bad is going to happen.
And they ALREADY stagger the wage increase by a dollar here and there. It’s going to end up at 15, it didn’t jump from 7 to 15 directly. So your suggestion ignores the reality that your suggestion *is *what is being implemented.
Bottom line, the retailers will do what they always do when rent increases, or taxes increase, or the cost of fuel changes what it costs to ship their products. They will change the prices so that they are still profitable. If the government mandates that employers cover health care costs, they pass the price onto the consumer. They price their product in such a way that they remain profitable.
The consumer then doesn’t purchase the product if the price is too high relative to their spending money, but since we’re talking about wage increases, consumers will have more money to spend.
This is not the same as simply raising taxes, where no worker gets more money to pay the taxes with.
If we were to phrase the cost of labor as a tax, it would mean a slight increase in taxes and a major rise in wages. That is good for the consumer, not bad.
It’s the difference between prices of things in the United States versus Norway. Taxes and prices are slightly higher here, compared to what they would be in a dollar for 8 kroner direct comparison. But then you also have to factor in the fact that incomes especially for lower wage earners are much higher than those price differences. Thus, the wages are not starvation wages. People get paid what they need to live and thensome.
If you increase the price of goods and services by the exact factor of the cost of labor increase, you’ll often see a price increase of about a quarter for every additional dollar earned in increased wages. Those earnings then get spent by the consumer. As such, you’d have a situation where wages were higher, prices were slightly higher, and spending increased and the economy expanded faster. The alternative is the illusion of always low prices, but with wages that lag behind the inevitable rise in the cost of things, that means that real prices are increasing. Things get markedly more expensive as each individual cost becomes a bigger and bigger percentage of your take home pay.
This is just math. Numbers work the same way regardless of what country you live in. If others can do the math, you can too.
Buried in all the red herrings and rhetoric, there’s a simple fact that the number of dollars you earn is meaningless by itself. The only thing that matters is the purchasing power of those dollars.
If a change is made to an economic system which increases wages faster than prices increase, that always helps the wage-earner. Period. The only thing that could possibly trump that fact would be a number of suddenly and permanently unemployed which amounted to anything similar to the difference between the wage increase and the price increase, cancelling the positive effect.
Workers could get ahead on stagnant wages if the prices of things were to drop. Meaning that on average, the things they spend money on became less expensive. All the major indicators I talked about, such as the cost of groceries, utilities, transportation, education, insurance, medication, rent, etc, are all increasing much faster than wages.
Stagnant wages are literally unsustainable under such a model. No article, no economist, and no one in this thread or anywhere else has ever been able to challenge that very simple mathematical fact.
That trumps everything else that is being discussed. If the minimum costs for rent, food, utilities, transportation, and necessities rise to a level that exceeds the minimum wage, and in many areas, it has, that inevitably produces a result of jobs going unfilled even when there are tons of qualified candidates in the area willing to work, that’s how you get these stores with exceedingly high turnover rate in an area with tons of willing workers and a high unemployment rate. If you need to work 60 hours a week to make ends meet, you’re not likely to find an employer willing to pay you 20 hours a week worth of overtime. So you end up working overtime hours in two different jobs, thus avoiding overtime pay, and that’s if you can get the additional hours at all. Scheduling conflicts make such dual employment situations unsustainable in the long term, unless you’ve found an exceedingly rare compatible pair of jobs that never conflict.
When the situation is that people need to work in order to get a car or move out of their parent’s house, and they’re willing to work, and have the proper worth ethic and work history, and you have a sufficient pool of those workers, what does it tell you about wages when the workers who need those wages the most do not retain those jobs, and often quit them soon after being hired? They didn’t suddenly win the lottery. If they can’t get to work, or can’t afford an apartment, they try to make it work anyway and then eventually can’t afford it anymore. It’s called being evicted.
People need to work to pay their bills, so they do, and they try to even work multiple jobs. But when they still fall behind, and end up with second and third notices, eviction notices, and so forth, that represents their best effort to make living work on such a tiny wage. The math doesn’t work, so they stop working. That’s how you end up with so many people in their 20s still living at home, after getting an education, moving out, and holding down jobs. When the math doesn’t work anymore, and the option is the street, or momma’s house, guess where those people end up who are fortunate enough to have a momma’s house to go to?
Again and again the argument is made in all these publications that it’s possible that a change to the system will cause hours to lessen or for prices to rise. But prices rise on their own anyway.
The only question that needs to be answered is whether those rising prices or slight decrease in hours compares favorably or unfavorably to the rise in wages. Is it worth it?
What is the cost/benefit?
Until such a cost/benefit is analyzed, there is no context for any of these numbers being thrown at you. Stripped of all context, the specter of higher prices or employees working fewer hours sounds really frightening. If the situation is, instead, that the higher prices are affordable, more affordable than current prices are, because the wage increase outpaces the price increase…
[as it *always *does, always, because labor is always well below 100% of the price point and is literally never more than 100% of the price point because that’s impossible. The absolute worst case scenario would be that there is no effect and everyone breaks even, which never happens, certainly not immediately. Only after wages remain stagnant enough over a long enough period of years that inflation eventually erases the benefit, which would have happened anyway unless deflation was the rule instead of inflation. Only then is that a thing.]
…If those prices are more affordable due to higher wages, and people end up voluntarily not working 60 hours a week to make ends meet, because they can make do with 40, then that means that more hours per week become available on the schedule for more workers to get involved in the economy. If, in theory, workers could meet all their bills on 30 hours a week for example, instead of 40, and elected to only work the 30 hours, that means there’s 25% more jobs available, if the employer needs to fill those hours with an employee on their schedule. Suddenly, there’s 25% more “jobs” available and there was literally the same amount of hours available on the schedule. So forcing fewer people to take on a second job would IMMEDIATELY raise employment rates. Or at least, make the job market less saturated and able to take on more workers.
If you ignore whether wage earnings outpace cost increases, which is how you figure out whether an economy is struggling or succeeding, and whether people therefore struggle or succeed, or if you ignore whether jobs lost are a result of voluntary lessening on hours, you could easily take the good news of what happens when wages rise and paint a terrifying picture and frighten less well informed working class people.
But they know better when you don’t withhold such information. If they know their wages will rise 20%, they also know that they’re breaking even or doing better unless prices that they pay rise more than 20%. They’ll know that without even having to do the math, because their bills do the math for them. If they end up with more money left over once the bills are paid, even if they are completely unable to do math, they’ll notice they suddenly have unspent money, and then they’ll go spend it.
And more spending (and especially, sustainable spending which doesn’t involve borrowing!) is good for the economy, supply-siders and demand-siders both agree on this. This is basically the first law of economics. The economy does better when the money circulates around, and more money will never, ever, ever circulate around until consumers (almost all people who are earning a wage somewhere) have more money to spend.
So the economy doesn’t improve until consumers spend more money, and they don’t spend more money unless they have more money to spend.
Where else is the money going to come from? Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t trickle down from a vague god figure in the heavens who magically created all jobs, who somehow gives back more money to the community than you donated to his church.
The money comes from wages. So, for the economy to improve, wages need to improve. Did the economy do well when robber barons did things their way? Or was there a Great Depression? Did the economy do well when socialists and union-makers made working conditions safer, ensured job security, improved wages, and created a “middle class”?
The economy did much better when there were unions and a middle class. The economy did worse when workers got paid less and had fewer job protections.
These are facts. This is history. This is math. It’s not about religious belief. Economics can be confusing, but to those who are confused, remember that economics is ultimately about people, and when people do better, the economy does better. When people do worse, the economy does worse.
It’s not even that hard a concept. But, if you’re still skeptical, then watch what happens when wages rise in New York, California, Washington, DC, and elsewhere. If unemployment rises, hours drop, and real wages drop after the increase, then one side will have made their point. If unemployment rates don’t rise significantly, if the number of employed persons increases, if the population of the state continues to increase, if prices do not increase faster than the rise in wages, the other side will have made their point.
This is not like religion; the debate can actually be settled. And we have 50 states to look at. Some of them can do things the conservative way, and some states can do things the liberal way. When the richest and most populated states with the most employees do things the liberal way and they thrive, then guess whose policies stimulate the economy more?
Hint: The more populated states with bigger economies, growing economies, and more workers and higher wages and standards of living are, by rule, better. If liberal economic policies didn’t work, populations of those states would vanish, and people would move to the conservative paradises where starvation wages stimulated massive growth and job opportunities. Somehow, California still has more people in it than Kansas. More employers, more employed, higher wages, wages rising faster than prices. Whereas in Kansas, there will be fewer employers, fewer employed, lower wages, and stagnant wages, and that means wages are not rising faster than prices, unless prices are actually decreasing, and they’re not. Unless you’re talking about your housing market collapsing and homes are going unsold. But those aren’t the kinds of price drops that indicate a healthy economy, are they?
Tim the Worst describes the delicate science behind his ideas:
This one’s easy, since it is basically a philosophy lesson.
His point for the entire article is simple: Employers know how much a job is worth and then they pay it, and they won’t pay more than it’s worth. There’s no debate, discussion, or negotiation involved.
This is contrary to his other points about how the price is negotiated between the workers and the job position.
On some theoretical level, he’s correct. But you have to go to absurd lengths to see it, and it has absolutely nothing to do with what’s happening right now. What I mean by this:
Take a job like the Wal-Mart cashier job I talked about. If that particular job were in theory unionized, and the workers in Wal-Mart and in similar jobs across the nation were all unionized, and it was impossible to hire anyone for a wage that Wal-Mart was able to pay, then Wal-Mart wouldn’t hire anyone, because it would cost more than Wal-Mart can make in profit to hire these people, without extremely radical pricing, the likes of which being extraordinary in the current marketplace.
What would that look like, exactly?
Well let’s pretend Wal-Mart’s cost of labor were quite high, let’s pretend it was 30 percent of the price of the average product sold, currently. They can afford to pay 10 bucks an hour for these laborers right now and make an extraordinary profit.
So let’s jack up the pay to very absurd levels and see what it does to the price of the products. Some products will have a higher profit margin than others, and they aren’t sold equally, so it stands to reason that the cost of labor is actually an embedded cost that is unequal for each item, so a percentage price increase per product won’t necessarily be the same, but it will have to work out that way on average in order to meet the new sales cost.
alright, so if pay were absurdly 30 percent of the price of the product (We’re going to pretend this is a Wal-Mart that employs a ton of workers and does poorly in sales, which would be a Wal-Mart that is struggling and would be the most effected by a wage increase) that means if you were to double the worker’s pay to a ridiculously absurd 20 dollars an hour, you would then add a very large (30%) price hike to all products. Now that frozen pizza being sold for 6 dollars is now costing you 7.80 cents.
And hey, if these Wal-Mart union workers and all the low-wage workers in the United States never shopped at Wal-Mart, and for some reason the average worker got paid significantly less than the average Wal-Mart worker (let’s say they got paid the current minimum wage of under 8 dollars an hour!) then the average consumer would not be able to afford such a price hike. An extra 30% cost on such a large portion of their budget would break many low wage workers, so they wouldn’t be able to shop at Wal-Mart anymore, with their 100 dollar a week grocery budget suddenly costing 130 dollars a week.
Yes, this is true. That’s why if the government, by fiat, or more realistically, an unscrupulous and greedier kind of union, perhaps the worst example of a greedy union, were to demand wages more than double the current minimum wage for low-wage work, the prices of the product wouldn’t be able to make up the difference, because it would affect sales.
Oh, but there’s a problem with this idea.
Firstly, we’re assuming that the unionized low wage workers of Wal-Mart getting these raises never shop at Wal-Mart, which is patently untrue.
Second, we’re assuming that Wal-Mart and only Wal-Mart were required to absorb a cost of labor increase that high, unique in the marketplace, and their competitors would not, and the wage at Wal-Mart was actually substantially higher than the minimum wage, so therefore, the prices at Wal-Mart would be generally unaffordable to everyone.
Both of those assumptions have nothing to do with the reality of the minimum wage.
In reality, if you were to make it a law that the minimum wage were to literally double, and the side effect of that is that most incomes near being affected by that wage increase were to ask for a similar wage increase, what will happen is that soon enough, everyone’s wages will double or experience a significant increase. It might take a while, and a sudden, massive increase on the wage floor may cause economic growing pains, which is why wage floor advocates are careful not to ask for wages to literally double by tomorrow, and instead advocate for a staggered increase which takes place over time, but faster than inflation, so they can get caught up with the costs of the current times.
So assume that 20 dollars an hour is actually the minimum anyone anywhere earns. Let’s say they’re taking home something like 17 dollars out of that wage due to taxes. Let’s say they’re only working 35 hours a week. Now, 130 dollars for groceries is insignificant, because they’re earning $2380 a month, and they used to be earning $1440 a month at 40 hours a week. Hey, I’m even predicting a loss of hours here just to be on the safe side.
Okay, so rather than costing 1/14th of their total take home pay, groceries now cost the lowest-paid worker in America about 1/20th of their total take home pay. If the average consumer were to want to buy even more and more expensive items at that Wal-Mart, they could afford to do so. It’s probable that the Wal-Mart won’t even have to raise prices by 30 percent, considering the extra sales they’re all but guaranteed to get.
However, let’s assume the business is a business and simply pockets the extra money.
So wages have doubled, starting at the bottom, and a wave of wage increases hits the middle class as well. Even the super-rich are profiting off of the increased sales. Remember, they’ve adjusted the price of the product so that they’re not losing any money. Hell, they even cut hours by 1/8 because they freaked out and panicked. Later, they ended up adding more hours to handle the extra business, because now their cashiers are under-staffed and can’t handle the extra volume. So now more people can become employed at Wal-Mart than before.
Why is this bound to happen? Because the dollar amount you assign is meaningless compared to how much it costs to live. If you’re not comparing wages with prices, then you’re providing no context.
If you are being paid twice as much as it costs to live, you’ve got half your income as discretionary spending money. You can save it, gamble it away, invest it, or spend it as you please.
If you are being paid 105% of what it costs to live, you have a very small portion of your income as discretionary spending money. You can’t afford to part with it. There’s not much a business can do in order to get extra sales from you as a customer. There’s little you can do in the event of a catastrophic medical emergency, there’s little you can do to afford college in order to improve your life situation and thus increase your “job skills” other than working your way up from entry level positions, and under no circumstance are you going to be spending significantly more than that anemic difference between your pay and your cost of living expenses.
If a lot of workers are just like you, tens of millions of workers are consumers that are not spending significantly beyond the basic minimum expenses. That’s tens of millions of potential consumers who aren’t consuming products.
If a lot of workers are just like you, and have higher cost of living expenses that include a loan for an education, for example, and they’re only earning 5-10 dollars above the minimum wage as well, they’re not in that different a fiscal boat. They’re spending maybe 80-90 percent of their income on the basics. They don’t have that much discretionary money to blow on things like ordering a pizza or seeing a movie.
As such, there’s only so much the economy can grow. A person with 50 bucks to spend a month on things they like, is probably not going to see more than one movie at the theater, if any. They’re not going to order pizza more than once or twice a month. They’re certainly not likely to tip the delivery guy. Basically, the economy is shit, when workers spend everything on the essentials. It doesn’t grow. There’s a ton of sales that would otherwise be happening that are not happening.
They want to buy a new car, they want to order pizza, they want to see a movie, they want to go to college, they want to pay their medical expenses, they want HBO, they want a new cell phone, they want a nicer apartment. All of those things are not being purchased by this market of potential buyers, because they lack the wages to do so.
So if their wages are 200 percent of what they were, and the prices of things are 130 percent of where they were, are there going to be more sales?
This shouldn’t even be a hard question.
If your average billionaire suddenly earned twice as much as he used to earn, is he going to spend twice as much as he already does? No. As a matter of fact, he’s probably spending 10 thousand dollars a month on expensive food for himself as it is. He’s already sparing no expense and eating a diet of caviar and filet mignon and wasting a ton of food that he doesn’t even eat. So doubling his income has absolutely no effect on food sales.
Compare that to the tens of millions of low-income earners immediately affected by wage increases, and compare it to the 50 million or 100 million or so middle-income earners whose wages are likely to experience significant increases as well.
Now you have 100 million+ people who were potential consumers of more products, but were being held back by their wages. So 1/3 of the people in the entire country are spending buckets of money.
Businesses who already handled the price of the product increase and thus, are easily affording the new labor cost of double what it previously was, are selling more items at a profit, or selling more services at a profit.
More profit means the rich get back even more money. And the labor cost is already budgeted, so each sale over the previous norm represents profit, and lots of it.
This is why I pointed out that the rich believe, erroneously, that lower wages benefit them more than higher wages. How exactly is the CEO of an expensive car brand going to sell his product to millions more customers if they can’t afford it in the first place? They could be twice as wealthy as they currently are, or close to it.
The reason they’re so enormously wealthy, even more so than they were historically, is because businesses have been getting more and more efficient for decades. They were already wealthy back then. Getting even more productive in a nation that is generally wealthy and prosperous can only lead to even greater riches.
The wall they’re running into separating them from more markets isn’t the enormous price of labor which has lagged behind all other prices for decades, but the amount of money the consumer has to spend. If 100 million more people had money to spend, they’d sell more units and services. And the economy would be booming.
Just like it has boomed every single time in our nation’s history that the average wage has risen, and the middle class has expanded.
Instead you have the anemic growth associated with people who are fortunate enough to get a college education and make it to the middle class, from the bottom. That isn’t a lot of people, and we’re doing everything in our power to make sure that as few people as possible can make that journey, with rising medical costs, education costs, rent, living expenses, and stagnant wages.
If you want to suppress growth, this is the way to do it: make sure consumers have no cash to spend, and the wealthy control all of it.
If you do as Donald Trump suggests and we eliminate the federal minimum wage, let’s say that employers across the country decide to lower the wage by fiat, as they did in 2004 or thereabouts for the pizza delivery drivers who had been earning a minimum wage, but legislators made it possible to pay them less.
So now those 8 dollar an hour people are earning 4 dollars an hour.
How has the economy benefited from this change?
Well, the employer has saved a small bit of their labor cost. The labor which used to cost 15 percent for the lowest paid worker now costs 7 percent, representing a small decrease in prices.
So wages are now 50% of what they were, and if businesses are magnanimous, and lower prices, now prices are about 95% of what they were.
Sales will be booming, I’m sure Tim Worstall and Donald Trump would both wager. That’s just simple supply-side economics.
Double the wage, or half the wage. Which is better? For the business, for the worker, for the nation, for the people not even directly impacted by the cost change?
In every case, the answer is pretty clear. But, supply side economic theory dictates that we must ensure as many people as possible get the lowest possible wage.
In reality, they can try to lower wages to five dollars an hour, but you’d need to expand government subsidies for food and rent and medicine for this to even be plausible. So now, you’ll be working the same wage you always have been, but more of your paycheck will be spent at pizza hut, even though you didn’t order any pizza, and more of your paycheck will be spent at mcDonalds, even though you don’t like their food, and more will be spent at Wal-Mart, even though you never shopped there.
Congrats, supply-siders, you’ve expanded the evil government that you say would be better off being smaller.
And you’ve slowed growth or made it negative. Go pro-growth policies of lowest possible wages! Hoooooray!!!
Business owner here. Agree with most of what you had to say, even though I have to admit, I did not read all of it.
Just wanted to say that every time I give my employees a raise, they become more productive. I try to keep my labor at around 50% (service industry), so every time they become more productive, I make more money, then I have to give them ANOTHER raise!
Vicious cycle it is.
Well, we pretty much covered that pages ago.
The right wing/libertarian response is that we can choose not to let the government pay those subsidies and welfare. Which is a clinical way of saying “Fuck the poor, let them suffer, I’m not paying for it!”
So in the world where the supply-siders actually provide a rebuttal, here’s how it would go:
Ah, but Pizzaguy, not only are your walls of text too long, but you’re overlooking something: Now that labor is 7 percent instead of 15, your business could in theory hire twice as many workers!
Huh, how about that? That’s right, demand-sider. You have no rebuttal.
Ah, but I do.
Remember, this is the one area where I actually have an example of what you’re talking about. I was there, as the worker, and then, as the manager, in the business that cut wages in half for its workers.
**I saw it, first hand.
Not in theory.
*
Not in a model.
*
Not in a philosophical debate.
So guess what, for the next several paragraphs, I’m the expert. Not Tim Worstall, who can only theorize about what happens and predicts great things.
So let me tell you what actually happened.
Did the number of workers or drivers for Pizza Hut double? Or even increase?
No.
Listen, this is not difficult: If 50 customers ordered pizza this hour, and each driver could take 5 deliveries per hour for simplicity’s sake (really more like 3-4) then I need 10 drivers.
Remember that these drivers cost about 5 dollars an hour in wages. Remember the delivery fee costs 3 bucks a pop, so they’re earning between 9 and 15 dollars per hour for the company in delivery fees.
These workers are not even an expense. They represent something that should be a fairy tale: Negative labor. But managers still do not need more than 10 drivers to deliver the pizzas. We could hire as many workers as we wanted, because the cost of labor is less than zero for a delivery driver. So there should obviously be tons more delivery drivers, right?
Nope.
There are not more drivers because they’re so cheap. There are exactly as many as demand dictates.
Paying someone 4 dollars an hour to do nothing because there’s no demand is not profitable. So even when they end up costing us nothing, or because they’re not delivering since we’re staffed up, they cost us much less than the minimum wage, the low cost of their labor still represents an investment on our part that brings ZERO as a return.
You could use them to hang door hanger advertisements, and try to boost sales that way. But here’s a news flash: People have heard of pizza.
Shocking, I know.
They’re generally aware there’s a Pizza Hut within driving distance.
Yes, they know.
Did you know that they actually enjoy pizza? Hell, even in a down economy, sales on Pizza for pizza hut and papa johns and dominos went up. Pizza is comfort food, it’s one of the few items that even the poor will splurge on if they have the money.
The problem is they don’t have the money.
Hanging door hangers doesn’t cause a customer that loves pizza and wants pizza to order pizza when they don’t have the fifteen dollars to spend on one meal, because that represents 1/4 of his wages that entire work day.
Let that sink in, supply-siders.
You work there, you get a 20% discount on the pizza. Like at Wal-Mart, you work there, you get a discount.
You know what happens when the people who work there get hungry? They get their food from there. Because they’re working an 11 hour shift or a 12 hour shift and they get a small break and not everyone wants to pack a PB+J sandwich everyday. You know who would love to buy the products at their own workplace? The workers.
And the workers spend a significant portion of their income at their own place of business because it’s convenient and the prices are generally low. But when the 10 dollar pizza is 8 dollars and change after the discount and taxes, and you pay the worker 5 dollars an hour, guess what? If they’re working almost 2 hours to eat one meal, they’re more often than not going to have to decline to buy.
They’re already there. They already get a discount. They literally can’t stop working and shop elsewhere. And they’re hungry.
What’s stopping them from buying?
Their wages.
Multiply this situation 100 million times, and you’ll start to understand why the economy recovers very slowly after you put supply-siders in the legislature. You’ll understand why these “small-government” conservatives complain and complain about the ever-expanding size of government, yet they’re just fine with the subsidies going to workers of Wal-mart and McDonald’s. Or they’ll talk about it but do nothing about it.
But wait, surely someone is benefiting from lower wages or stagnant wages, and isn’t their prosperity going to trickle-down? Well, not really. But there is a group of earners who does well rain or shine, and in down economies in particular when compared to up economies, and that’s the ownership class, the stockholders (not the middle-class stockholders, I’m talking the billionaires). They’ll do just fine assuming growth isn’t actually negative. It could be anemic, they’ll still make money, profiting heavily and keeping wages down.
But, is that person ordering even 1 extra pizza per pizza delivery location in the country per day, with his extra wealth?
No.
What if the bottom 100 million wage-earners had more money? Do you think the pizza shop would be hiring more drivers, or less?
(Remember, these guys are predicting that fewer people will have work. Or, specifically, that fewer theoretical hours of employment will occur under a wage increase even when the number of hours goes up. It’s what was possible that we’re missing out on with stagnant wages that is what was lost, not any real losses. Just theoretical losses of a few work hours, compared with higher pay, where the worker is doing better anyway. Scary stuff.) 
The pizza shop is **always hiring **more drivers, even when sales are stagnant. Reason is, no one can reasonably live on 5 dollars an hour for a significant period of time. Eventually their car breaks down, they incur an injury, they get sick, or their rent goes up, and then they have to find other employment. Getting a job there is literally as simple as not being a rapist and having an insured vehicle with not a terrible driving record. You can have no experience and almost no hours available, they’ll find a place for you on their schedule.
Well, guess what. If 100 million people started ordering more pizza, then and ONLY then will Pizza Hut pay for more delivery drivers.
Remember that these drivers cost the company nothing.
Only **demand **can create and sustain employment.
What creates demand? Well, the demand is out there or it’s not. If no one wants to buy pizza with urine mixed in with the sauce, price of labor isn’t the problem. It’s the piss sauce. But if it’s a real, tasty pizza, then demand exists anytime someone is hungry for pizza. So what stops them from buying it? The fact that it’s 10 dollars, or the fact that 10 dollars represents more than one hour’s worth of their labor? Hint hint hint: 10 dollars isn’t that much when you earn a lot more money. Neither is 13 dollars, if your wages just doubled.
Only increased wages can create demand, where it would otherwise exist.
…Unless you win the lottery.
So, if you believe in supply side economics, the economy will expand every time someone wins the lottery. Which is frequent, but only affects very few people.
Or if they win the lottery of birth: In spite of growing up in the ghetto with high crime and bad schools, in spite of all the advantages afforded to the middle-class or the rich, in spite of only getting in to a public no-name college, through hard work and proven experience, will someone worthy eke through from the lower class and actually reach the upper class. When someone wins the advantages of birth lottery and starts with no advantages and actually succeeds compared to someone whose family went to Harvard and gave them the best education in the world and also gave them an internship in their own family-owned business and promoted that person to upper management through nepotism as opposed to merit, yet a lower class worker somehow managed to break through that bias and outclass them at every turn, only then does the economy improve. The other 99 applicants that came from poor backgrounds, despite their hard work and dedication and education, can go back to flipping burgers because they’re stupid, lazy, and unskilled.
And those 99 people will create a lot of demand considering they’re deep in debt to a school and still earning the bottom wage. And maybe a few out of those remaining 99 can get into management at the pizza place and earn a whole 12 dollars an hour, even though they have the skills and intellect and drive to do so much more. I’m sure the economy is better off having skilled, intelligent people remaining at the bottom and in the wrong jobs, and advancement in society largely based on which rich person personally knows you and is willing to give you a cushy job that any idiot could do, because not everyone with a job that pays extraordinarily well is either skilled, qualified, experienced, or doing a job that’s difficult. But hey, if we’re going to reward our friends, and use the labor market rather than merit-based equal-footing negotiation to determine wages for our entry level positions, this is what happens.
By the way, Tim the Worst just admitted in the article in the previous post that employers don’t pay you what your skills and experience are worth, they simply look at what the lowest wages are in the marketplace for your position and offer you that low wage or something close to it. That means there’s not much competition for your labor. Businesses in similar fields compare prices with each other and fix the prices together, so that they can avoid competing with one another for labor. That keeps prices down at both businesses.
Tim “the Apple Comparison” Worstall, listen up, here’s an actually relevant apple example:
If it were the price of an apple, and all apple-producers were agreeing to raise the price of the apple, and all other fruits, together, that kind of behavior would be illegal, even in our current system.
Anti-trust lawsuits are filed over that kind of behavior.
Ah, but when it’s **wages **and it’s conspiring to lower **wages **(like Pizza Hut and Papa John’s and Dominos all lowering wages for their employees from 7 dollars to 4 dolla simultaneously as soon as the legislation allowed it) it’s not illegal.
Notice how there’s a different set of rules for the rich- they can do all that illegal stuff as long as it’s tacit, not explicit.
Or I suppose you think that workers at those places were flocking to whichever company paid them the least? Is that how you think competition and a free market works?
For all the condescension and lecturing from supply siders about how the free-market economy would do better if liberals would just stop interfering with it, we have these major problems:
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They’ve made it so that there are no repercussions for union-busting, or temporarily shutting down stores to make unionizing workers unemployed This should be very illegal.
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They’ve made it legal to collaborate to fix labor prices and keep them low, and agree not to compete for labor even when they need workers. They’ll let the position go unfilled and lose some profit rather than create a trend which would raise the wages of the entire industry by offering more money. This should be very illegal.
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They’ve made it so that when the price of labor is literally too low to compensate workers enough to eat and pay rent, that the government will step in and subsidize those workers. What happened to smaller government and letting the market decide how little you can pay these workers?
In each case, they interfere with normal capitalism. They use their political power and anti-competitive policies and collusion between business and government and businesses and other businesses to artificially depress wages.
If artificially inflating prices of things by price-fixing is illegal, because it’s bad for both capitalism and our society, then these champions of capitalism should be on the front lines decrying the horrors of wage-fixing. Like the kind that happened in the pizza industry in 2004, where so-called competitors agreed to reduce labor prices together, and workers could accept the new wage or leave. Workers did leave, but many had little choice. And in theory, they could depress wages even further, by offering the homeless a bottle of booze and a hot dog for 12 hours of labor, and that will be worth it to someone who has literally nothing.
Is that good for the economy? If you could technically employ someone for starvation levels of food and no other benefits?
If you command all the levers of the economy and make such a situation legal, would that be free-market principles driving the price of wages down to where they should be, down to what they’re worth?
If you COULD employ a slave, if it were legal, does that mean the actual value of a farm worker is literally zero?
That’s what supply siders are arguing constitutes a free market.
People like me argue that the market constitutes consumers and laborers, not just the owners, and that a free market protects both parties.
But that’s just liberal nonsense, right? I have no idea what I’m talking about. I didn’t see first-hand the application of both theories:
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The supply-siders avoiding the minimum wage entirely by new legislation reducing its value, where the market was before that action, and whether this action improved the economy, the number of employed workers, or even made the businesses a ton more profit. The answer is they stole half the worker’s pay and it represented a very small amount of money compared to what would happen if sales increased.
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Demand-siders with Unions who enjoy higher levels of employment, at higher wages, with a stronger economy and a stronger and fully-funded government.
I’ve seen both theories played out in real life, first-hand. I also see the history of the minimum wage, and in no circumstance did the wage increase not benefit either the worker, or the economy at large.
I’ve also seen what happens in conservative strongholds like Kansas, where Republicans can do whatever they want, bankrupting the state, driving away teachers, under-staffing schools, and generating anemic growth that compares unfavorably to the rest of the country, before you even feel the truly devastating impact that those policies will have in the long term.
I’ve seen what happens in liberal states with strong economies, with high levels of unemployed, uneducated workers, and high levels of population. The wages make people flock there in the first place. The benefits paid out to those who need them make the state more attractive. The education available helps those at the bottom work their way up and creates upward mobility. The wage rising with the costs of living allow those at the bottom to pay their bills and not get deeper into debt. The states also generally pay out more money to the Federal Government than they take in, as opposed to red states which are the biggest welfare queens in history.
If states are laboratories for democracy, if economics is actually a science that plays out in the real world every day, then it stands to reason that one side of this debate is actually empirically correct.
So you decide:
Is Tim Worstall correct about how the economy really works, and we’re all just dumb and in need of his enlightened viewpoint from the top, in England?
Or are wage advocates who have worked both labor and management at the bottom in America more in touch with what happens?
Does history say that Tim is correct, or does it say I am?
Only one of us is correct. Only one of us gets paid for writing these articles. And only one of us is telling you the truth.
So, in the marketplace of ideas, you, the consumer, get to decide who won this debate.
It’s okay.
Recently there have been a shit-ton of articles from Forbes. There are so many different kinds of misconceptions and misinformation present in these articles that there’s no way to debunk them all in 140 characters or less. Yet the Donald believes he’s making a positive impact with his Twitter feed.
I saw a comment in the most recent Tim Worstall article that said “Why not write about something besides the minimum wage for a change? Otherwise you sound like a corporate shill.” He’s not wrong.
And despite my passion for this subject matter, for moral and patriotic reasons, I’d love to be able to shut up about it forever.
About your business:
May I ask you a question- What is your yearly turnover?
At the place I worked it was about 300% yearly. With a staff of 20-30, we’d go through 100 people hired and terminated (mostly voluntary terminations, mind you… they weren’t fired for not doing the job, we couldn’t retain them because we pay too little).
What’s your turnover percentage? If you hire X many employees a year, how many do you retain for at least a year?
I haven’t been able to keep up with this thread - has anyone addressed the effect on those people who don’t get raises in pay? Those on fixed incomes, or at the top of their pay grade, etc? It seems that all of the focus is on the people who for some reason are raising kids on minimum wage jobs, and not on the effect it is going to have on the very beleaguered middle class and retirees.
This one is just amusing, in a sad way.
It’s hard to get people to support what should be obvious and necessary, like raising the minimum wage after a decade of stagnation while medical expenses and education costs and other essentials are on the rise.
Here’s part of the reason why: Everyone is a self-appointed expert on the matter of other people’s wages.
The article is about a waitress who filed a lawsuit against a restaurant chain for violation of the minimum wage laws.
For the tipped wage of $2.13 cents (which covers taxes and little else, so it’s not usable money to the server, and it may not even cover taxes) you are allowed to spend up to 20 percent of your time doing non-tipped side work. This can be bussing tables, cleaning tables, washing dishes, cleaning glasses, food prep work, helping in the kitchen, cleaning the bathroom, rolling silverware and napkins, opening the store, closing the store, etc.
However, what many unscrupulous business owners do is they assigned non-tipped work to servers during the slow times (or even when it is busy, because someone else didn’t show up) and they’re legally required to pay this person the full minimum wage when they’re not actually serving a customer. However, they’ll simply disobey the law and not pay them the extra 5 dollars and change an hour that they would be legally obligated to be earning.
They’ll counter: But if they earn X number of dollars in tips, then they shouldn’t be complaining.
So, if you work a table and get a nice tip of 10 dollars, you should work the rest of your 4 hour shift doing sidework and then end up making less than the minimum wage, uncompensated, because one hour you made more than the minimum? Is that how this works? Any hour (or minute) you’re on the clock doing non-tipped sidework, you are legally obligated to get the minimum wage. They set the maximum amount of time you can be working on sidework at 20% of the time as the industry standard. It doesn’t matter how much you earn in tips, once you’re spending more than 1/5th of your time on work that is supposed to earn the minimum wage, that’s what you’re supposed to be doing, earning the minimum wage.
It’s like the delivery drivers- inside the store they answer phones, take orders, cut pizzas, make pizzas, wash dishes, do prep work, open and close the store. They earn a tip for none of that work, and any time they’re inside the store, they’re not serving a customer and should not be working for the tipped wage, they should be working for the minimum wage. It doesn’t matter if they earned a 5 dollar tip in the previous hour putting them up to 10 that hour, their 5 dollar wage per hour vanishes due to insurance, maintaining the vehicle, fuel costs, and depreciation/car loan. It takes a lot of uncompensated expenses to run a vehicle for business purposes and costs a lot more than the 12 to 15 cents a mile that the driver is given.
Employers would like to argue that, because the five dollars in wages actually exists in the driver’s hand for about five seconds before it vanishes again due to the cost of actually operating the vehicle which is not an ordinary living expense, but a business expense, that five dollars should be counted toward the wages they earn per hour in addition to tips. So, if you made 40 dollars in tips on an 8 hour shift, combine that with the 40 dollars in wages, and you’re making the minimum wage of 8 dollars an hour, right? Except, no, it costs 500 to 600 dollars a month to run a vehicle for business purposes, unless you own it outright, it has already lost all its value to depreciation, and you don’t claim you drive it for business purposes so your insurance doesn’t cover you in an accident at all, but it saves you 100 dollars a month in insurance. Then it only costs you 300 to 400 a month. That’s 1/2 to 1/3 of your wages gone before you even touch rent or food or utilities.
Like with a server, they would like to argue that if a server makes a decent tip at a table, the server should be able to be required to do side tasks for the next hour for only 2 dollars in wages, so they don’t have to hire actual cooks, actual dishwashers, actual prep workers, or restaurant cleaning services, and that they shouldn’t have to pay the difference if the server didn’t make enough tips to bring it up to the minimum wage. Not only do they want workers who earn 2 dollars an hour for non-tipped work, they want to avoid the legal requirement to get a guaranteed minimum when the tips are slow.
The law is very clear on this point- **neither **of these things is legal. It’s a slam dunk, you always lose, kind of thing. It is wage theft. It is a pay violation. It’s a CRIME.
But people need their jobs so badly that they’re afraid to speak up about these abuses. The employer will not inform or they will intimidate the worker into silence, terminate them, and the former employee can’t spend the next 2 to 10 years of their life suing the business. Typically they have bills to pay. So the business knows that the lawsuit actually costs them less in the long term than frequent wage violations.
All that is meaningless to armchair lawyers and concern trolls.
Look at the comments section of that article:
“A good waitress will earn well over minimum wage and yes cleaning and stocking are a part of the job. As long as your total wages add up to minimum wage for your total hours than you are not being cheated.****”
Wrong on the legality of the issue, but seems reasonable enough. It’s someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about commenting on things they don’t understand.
People are allowed to be wrong.
**"**Do you have any idea how much money a good server makes? When I managed restaurants, most of my servers walked with between $150-200 per night in tips, plus their $2.13 per hour. One of my bartenders made $50,000 per year, working four days per week. And this was twenty years ago. If you start paying servers full minimum wage, the expected tip amount goes down. In Canada, where servers get minimum wage, the standard tip is about 7% “tip the tax”. In most cases servers make less money under the higher minimum wage idea."
The false argument that if you’re being cheated out of your legally protected right to the minimum wage, you must be a bad server.
The false premise that because you know a guy who makes good money, everyone does.
Neither is a reasonable position. But that’s what you get when you’re an armchair wage lawyer. You’re ill-informed, you spread misconceptions, and you advocate for the side of the argument which would lose in court because it’s a crime to under-pay workers and steal their wages. It’s one of the biggest and most devastating crimes facing the working class. On top of their stagnant wages, they’re losing what little money they were entitled to, with employers changing the tipped worker’s numbers in the computer behind their back, just before they close out payroll for the week, which is why the numbers are different on your paycheck than what you saw when you checked them on Friday. A wage violation which certain big name lawyers who claim to fight for the people wasn’t interested in taking to court, because it was only a small amount of dollars per week being stolen from dozens of workers. They want the big payday, so small violations aren’t worth their time. Some workers are getting stolen from by petty amounts. The petty amounts being what they earn after several hours worth of work, so it’s not petty to them.
“She quit, than years later sues? Sounds fishy to me.”
That’s because you’re an ignoramus.
Two immediate responses, one of which says it in detail:
“If she took the complaint to the state labor board and then waited for an investigation before being issued a right to sue notice then a year is about the appropriate time frame. This tends to happen in he said she said style cases.”
^
Because when you don’t know anything about this issue except that you once knew a rich bartender, you’re not qualified to offer an intelligent opinion.
But opinions are like assholes, and there are plenty of assholes in this thread and in every thread and in comments sections and in politics, arguing out of their asshole about how workers should shut up and accept illegal theft of their hard earned wages.
If they won’t even back you when you’re not getting the wages that you’re entitled to, they’re not likely to back you when you’re fighting for a long overdue wage floor increase.
**
The fault is always the worker, for being ungrateful, lazy, and stupid, even when the employer is breaking the law.
Why don’t you just get a better job, stupid?
You get paid so little because you’re a worthless human being, and your employer is a saint for even offering a pathetic person like you a job.**
That’s the *actual *position held by my opponents in this thread.
Scroll up and read it.
This is my reasonable opposition in this debate. The armchair experts who have met someone who earned the minimum wage before, or used to earn it in the 1970s when it was worth something, and didn’t hear about any issues.
So obviously anything said on these issues is invalid. I should know, Sean Hannity told me, and he never lies. I know a ton of conservative pundits who are experts on everything they talk about, even if they have no actual experience or qualifications, telling scientists, economists, and wage advocates how dumb they are.
I work hard for my money, so if you don’t earn what I earn, it must be a character flaw on your part.
That’s the debate we’re having.
How about this eyewitness who was there and can explain it to you how it really happened:
**"**I see a lot of whining about the wage on here. Having spent years running a restraunt in Knoxville, I know for a fact that servers report only a few of their cash tips. The only true solution is to have all transactions be conducted with either a credit card, or debit card. Then we know exactly how much an hour they are averaging over the course of their shift, not to mention they pay ALL of their taxes. The cooks make far less than the servers usually,but do we hear them whining? Many servers make far more than the managers also, especially with their regulars who give them large tips in cash knowing that they won’t be reported. And that my whining friends is just the real world of the restraunt business. This girl just wanted more for less, and is now looking for a free handout because she was never part of the team, but she was selfish. The other servers had to pick up her slack, and I bet they did not like her for it, neither did the cooks, or expeditors, or the bartenders."
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Complaining about illegal activity like wage theft is “whining”. So is telling a doctor you got stabbed by someone. Complaining about crimes is for pussies.
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Guy says he knows for a fact that servers under-report their tips, and he did nothing about it. So they’re the real cheats. They’re tax cheats. They’re all guilty of tax evasion, so we shouldn’t help them. We should allow the employers to cheat them even more, as a matter of fact. That makes sense.
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Do we hear the cooks whining about their pay? No, you probably don’t, because they know if they complain about their pay to you, their employer, you’ll retaliate, because your position is that they’re all crooks and lucky to have a job. But the people willing to spend days of their lives marching in the cold to ask the government to intervene, they’re happy with their pay.
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The servers make more than my managers! Sounds like you’re not paying your managers enough. Sometimes a driver will earn more than the shift manager on duty at the pizza place, but most days they don’t, and they also have 500-600 dollars a month in business expenses that the manager does not, and the manager is guaranteed to get paid even if the customers don’t tip. Also, bragging that the person you pay 2 dollars an hour makes more than the people you trust with your business is laughable. It just proves you’re shit at paying people.
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Customers will give servers large tips in cash because they know it’s the only way that a server could get ahead, considering how shitty your compensation structure is. Customers are willing to go out of their way to help the person they see working hard and getting paid next to nothing by you, and that person is obviously a privileged prick. Not you, though. You’re awesome.
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The woman bringing this lawsuit was probably a huge detriment to her team, working 40% of her hours for 2 dollars an hour and helping the other servers clean and clear their tables. She was a lazy person. She is selfish. And she’s a criminal who doesn’t pay her taxes.
Fuck this person I don’t know and have never met and am assigning all sorts of evil qualities to based on no evidence!
Very interesting analysis, and thank you for your firsthand eyewitness report. :smack:
I’m so glad we have folks like you out there educating the public and telling it like it is.
We shouldn’t care about minimum wage workers, even if they get stolen from, because they’re all lazy, unskilled, stupid criminals.
The employer is never at fault, the employer is always a saint, and the employer has the best perspective on this, because they know that their cooks are super happy with their jobs and all the servers earning a whole 2 dollars from the employer are spoiled privileged brats.
It’s very interesting to me that in a country where someone can make two dollars an hour cleaning a restaurant and not doing tipped work, with their employer violating wage laws in order to make that happen, and someone else can make 2 million dollars a year managing several restaurants, that the “entitled, lazy, privileged” and ignorant (“stupid”) fuckwad “criminal” is the **server **earning the 2 dollars, and not the employer.
Those assholes earning 2 dollars an hour, screwing the rest of us over! We really should do something about it. They earn more than the managers! Hell, the managers should all quit and become servers.
I know this much: The middle class of this country is just begging a job opening in serving to become available. They’d love to ditch their 30K a year guaranteed salary job in favor of earning 2 dollars an hour plus tips maybe, and the awesomeness of being able to work for a fuckhole who says that the 2 dollars they’re getting paid is too good for them since the labor market dictates that they should be getting paid even less, the only reason they get paid so much is because the evil government is artificially inflating the wages.
It’s a negotiation, you see. The same negotiation that takes place between the worker and the boss when the boss is violating the health code, and the worker is tired of cleaning up the backflow of the stagnant mold water every time the dishwasher is run, and simply wants someone professional to pump the water out of the cracks in the floor, dry the floor tiles, and properly seal the crack, so the restaurant doesn’t smell like a decomposing corpse, and tells his boss that this needs to be fixed because it’s going to cost him and everyone else in the store their jobs, not to mention make everyone sick, and the employer told him that if you report it, I will terminate you, because you’re a worthless piece of shit and I can replace you easily.
That’s necessary, because the hundred or two hundred dollars it would take to clean up the mess and fix it professionally isn’t worth risking the store shutting down and employees and customers getting sick.
Nope, it’s important to remind the worker how worthless he is to the employer, and how little respect is given to another human being, in a situation where the employee is being up front and not reporting the health code violation to the state anonymously, and giving the business manager a chance to fix it before he gets fined. It’s really important to threaten that worker. Because obviously that worker was a piece of shit for reporting something that’s both unsafe and illegal, discreetly, to his boss. That’s the kind of employer I had before I started college.
My anecdote isn’t as snappy as “all the servers are rich and entitled criminals, I should know, I once knew a guy who earned a lot!” but if we’re sharing anecdotes. Just thought I’d contribute.
A comment that is supportive:
“This happened to me on a number of occasions when I was working as a server. On some shifts I didn’t get a single table because we were slow. On those days I was required to clean the bathrooms (right down to scrubbing the toilets), vacuum the restaurant, and wash walls for the princely sum of $2.13 an hour. This was work that should have been done by a janitor, but the restaurant owner was too cheap to hire one and relied on servers for that labor.****”
Someone who actually worked that job personally, rather than hearing about it, or knowing a guy.
This person’s experiences are all invalid, because this person is obviously an entitled piece of shit criminal. Also she’s probably lazy, whiny, and stupid, and she probably has a shrill voice, since she’s female. I also bet she probably wants the government to pay for her reproductive healthcare, that miserable slutwhore. Women be crazy, we all know this. Am I right, male working for 10 times her pay? She’s so spoiled and whiny. Hey, when you ask for a raise, or to be compensated extra a-special for working on saturday or sunday, it’s not because you’re entitled, you earned those perks. And you’re in a position to judge and demean her, and you *totally *knew a guy who made, like, a shitton of money doing her job, so she must suck at it.
This is the debate we’re having. It’s really enlightened.
**"**WELL WE CAN FIXTHISPOST SIGNS NO CADH TIPPING AND NO TING AT THE TABLES TIP CASHEIR. THE PAY THOSE PEOPLE 7.50 AN HOUR LIKE THEY WANT N LISTEN TO THEM HOWWWWWWEL"
That’s an actual comment.
Let me run this through the fuckwad translator.
“Well, we can fix this: Post signs that say no cash tipping and no tipping at the tables, tip the cashier only. Then pay those people the minimum wage like they want and listen to them howl.”
I speak with assholes all the time, so I’m fluent in their primitive all-caps language.
So the solution to those servers working for particularly shitty employers in bad areas is to fuck over the servers working for decent employers in nicer areas?
This is your *genuine *solution to this problem.
Let me just stop there.
That’s the entire problem here. Workers everywhere are so used to getting fucked over by their employer, than when someone complains about an egregious example of illegal activity happening by an employer, the fellow hard-working wage earner (I’m giving my opponents a **lot **of credit they don’t really deserve) turns around and his attitude is: “Hey, I suffer through a lot of shit, and my problems are at least as bad as yours if not worse, so you’re not a victim of a crime, you’re a fundamentally bad human being, and I will shit on you with every comment I make. Support your right to a legal wage? Fuck you! I worked hard to get all the way up to 12 bucks an hour, I don’t want some simpleton dishwasher earning that, because when other people make money, I’m somehow damaged by that. My pride, mostly. You’re saying that dishwasher is as valuable a human being as I am? Fuck no, I’m smart and ethical and he’s dumb and lazy and probably a criminal.”
That’s a really reasonable position to have. And that’s a person working for a living shitting on someone only slightly less well-off than them.
It’s no wonder this debate has been so enlightening.
We’re obviously not going to win over the class of people that thinks it’s okay to have wage and health and safety violations, and that reporting them discreetly to one’s boss using the chain of command is whining and an offense that should be met with termination.
There’s no helping that guy. He’s just an unrepentant asshole.
But, half of the folks working the same shitty conditions as us, or close to it, have the attitude that this is a zero sum game, and if someone else earns more money, it’s bad for them.
Even if they work in an industry where other people having more money would result in higher sales, more tips, and possible salary increases for management having to deal with the expansion of business.
The attitude that other people earning more money fucks you over is the attitude that allows these employers to pit us against one another.
That’s the attitude that divides us and prevents us from unionizing or passing new minimum wage laws.
That’s the attitude that keeps that same bigoted asshole poorer than he would have been if the economy wasn’t shitty.
Hey, let’s base our economic and political ideas on spite, personal attacks, and bigotry.
That sounds like a *great *idea. That will probably work out just fine. Let’s give them the keys to the car and let them drive the economy again, worked out great last time. I hear there’s even a presidential candidate who has made that the basis his entire nonexistent political platform for 2016, and he is supported by one of the two major parties in this country most capable of retaining political power.
*Stick it to The Man! The Man working for 2 dollars an hour and getting his wages stolen by his employer, that is. He’s a stupid lazy criminal with no skills, and if he’s not rich, it’s because he sucks. If he complains about criminal behavior or unworkable conditions, he’s a complainer. He’s got no reason to be so angry. Meanwhile, I’m very angry about something. Very very angry. And I’m pretty sure it’s because of brown people immigrating to my country. My anger is patriotic and shows my strength of character not to take something like having to share space with people different from me lying down.
Your anger is whining. Your complaints are invalid. I knew a guy.*
I opened just about 4 years ago with myself, my sister, and a long time friend as my only employee.
I’ve hired 14 people since then, and promoted my friend to management. I have lost 3 of those people, none of which were actually related to working conditions or employment.
To your next post about wage theft, I agree, but want to add that money theft goes on as well.
Working for a particular fast food restaurant back in 2010, I had a manager that stole from his employees. He would count down their drawer at the end of the shift, tell them that they were $5-$10 short, and tell them they could avoid a write-up if they paid it.
He tried this on me once, and I knew my drawer was right. I had spent a number of years working other drive-thru’s, and my drawer was always over the exact amount of change that was waved off by clients, and I knew exactly how much this was. When my manager would come to count my drawer, I would say, “It should be over by 17 cents.” (for example), and that’s what it would be, every time.
In this case, I had double counted my drawer before giving it to him, just to be sure, and ended up being $8 short after he counted. He wanted me to give him the money, I told him to follow the proper procedure and write me up instead. He got flustered about that, and didn’t put me on the register again.
Grrr, fucking employers…, don’t even get me started on managers shorting hours…
Tim Worstall trying to outpost me again.
Well, bollocks. I’m tired.
Seriously, this guy writes an article about the minimum wage every day. I just wrote several, dude, I need a break.
The first thing he does is quote arguments from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. He even steals the title of his article from Mark Perry and all his talking points from Mark Perry.
What’s the matter Tim, the Adam Smith Institute and the UKIP party not doing a good enough job supplying you with things for you to parrot, so you have to steal Mark Perry’s arguments from the American Enterprise Institute and even plagiarize the title?
Those damned conservative think tanks won’t even recognize each other’s intellectual property rights. Oh maybe he got permission. Matter of fact, I’m sure of that. Conservative echo chambers don’t work unless they all cite each other as sources. I cite this post I’m writing right now as evidence of that. Cite. (xkcd is good for any situation.)
The difference being, this isn’t wikipedia, but conservative publications.
Hi, I’m from a conservative think tank. My very impartial research says workers get paid too much. I am not an economist, nor have I had any first-hand experience as a working class laborer, nor have I actually run a business for minimum wage workers. Hi, I’m from a different conservative think tank. I’m going to cite your very scientific research. Hi, I’m from a conservative news outlet like Forbes magazine or the Wall Street Journal or the New York Post or PJ Media or Fox News or Clear Channel Communications (Now known as iHeartMedia), and I am going to cite your citation in my opinion blog. Hi, I’m from a different conservative news outlet, and I’m going to cite your news-like opinion piece when the minimum wage is in the news and suggest that your endless circle of conservatives citing other conservative’s opinions represents some kind of impartial expert analysis of the situation. Workers fighting hard for a minimum wage increase, meanwhile, our experts say they’re just going to cost themselves their jobs. 2 dollars an hour is too good for them and the fragile service industry will implode if the wage rises. Conservative viewer sitting at home nods his head, listening to this sage wisdom from the folks who know better. These are the **good **guys. They wouldn’t lie to him, he’s a listener or a viewer or a reader! They have his best interests at heart, they’re not concern trolls when they warn you that you might lose your job. Not at all.
I could do this ad infinitum, but let’s get to the real juicy part.
Tim Worstall: “And the empirics tell us that it does actually cost jobs. Black youth unemployment rates of 30% sure come from somewhere, after all.”
Yes, you really did just read that.
The high unemployment rate for black youth is related to the minimum wage being too high.
What is it about being black that makes 7 dollars an hour too much to pay? Or five, for pizza delivery, or two for waiting tables?
Why I keep calling Tim Worstall a concern troll: He’s presenting himself as the caring, heartfelt, benevolent caretaker looking after those poor, troubled, black youth that are victims of liberals trying to make sure they can get paid enough to eat.
Their massive real unemployment rate has to do with wages?
Somehow, the wage didn’t stop the pizza hut I worked at from hiring 90% black workers. I was one of the very few white people there. Some of those people were earning $9.80 just for making pizzas. The color of their skin didn’t have much to do with their wages or their work ethic. Seems like they could do the job just fine, and I would have been absolutely fucked if these hard working people didn’t come to work that day. I was grateful every single day for my workers, because they were the only thing standing between me and a truly shitty day.
So there isn’t something fundamentally wrong with black people that prevents them from holding down a job or doing it well or even earning a wage higher than the minimum. I recommended my top cook for a raise before any manager got an additional raise, because she was way faster than any manager at her job, and we would have been utterly screwed if she didn’t show up to work.
When I write about the minimum wage, I’m writing it for people like her. I’m no longer suffering in that situation. I got out of it.
So when Tim the concern troll Worstall talks about how rising wages could hurt the employment of someone like her, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The rising wage only helps her. She is not going to get fired if wages go up. Her hours aren’t going to be cut. We can’t run the business without her. That’s why she has that job. She’s the very best out of literally a thousand people we have hired over the past 10 years to try to do her job, who have failed to do it better than her, and have failed to stay with us for longer than a year or two, because the pay is crap. Very few of those people actually got fired for being bad at their job. It was quitting without notice, which, to be frank, is what the business deserved.
What will happen, if anything, is the price of pizza will fluctuate between 8 dollars a pie and 12, as opposed to 7 dollars a pie and 11, depending on which day of the week it is. If the business looks at a wage increase that would cost them 25 cents a pie and chooses to charge an extra 75 cents, which they will, so they can profit off of the minimum wage struggle itself, like the truly shitty human beings they are.
They won’t lose their job.
In the article Tim argues that a 10 percent rise in wages will cost people maybe 1 or 2 percent of their total hours (which he phrases as “employment rates”).
Anyone else here want to do the math and find out if the worker is worse off?
Math is boring. And the calculator function on my computer is like, in a folder in the start menu, and that takes effort to go find.
Another snippet which is cute:
"That assertion links to something at the EPI and Komlos seems not to actually understand it. What is being looked at is the educational qualifications of the 20% lowest wage earners. Which have indeed gone up."
What’s that, Tim the Worst? People working at the bottom wage are more educated than ever before?
Hold the phone, I thought people working for the bottom wage were all clinically retarded people who may or may not have finished high school.
What’s this about college educated professionals working for the minimum wage?
What’s that all about?
See, I don’t need to find liberal publications to counter conservative claptrap and bigotry like the kind you’ll see in this thread from the Straight Dope conservative economic experts. All I need to do is actually read what conservatives write and get paid to write, and here and there, they accidentally tell you the truth.
My cite for conservatives being wrong and telling lies are paid professional wage hack conservatives contradicting themselves in their own publications where they hide the liberal comments and you have to click to see them because it’s embarrassing to be called out on your home turf.
So much for dumb and unskilled and uneducated, and jobs for children. Seems like these are educated professionals being forced to work for the minimum wage because that’s what’s available. I didn’t realize you needed a degree in business and mathematics to run a broiler.
Next he says raising the wage will put Wal-mart out of business again, because that’s exactly what Wal-Mart will do when the average worker’s wages go from 10 dollars to 12 or 15. They will pack up and go home.
Interesting John Galt fantasy (I’m lying, it’s not that interesting) but the real world never works that way. The wage has risen before. No business has ever gone out of business because the minimum wage was too high. Any business that has gone out of business did so because the demand for that business was nonexistent.
Blaming the worker is blaming the incompetence of management and the inability to offer customers something they want on someone with a lower pay grade than yourself.
I’m sure that’s very comforting, but your business got destroyed and it wasn’t because the Fry Cook is too rich. It’s because you suck as a business leech. You can’t even do unethical right. That’s how bad you suck at math.
Tim repeats himself:
“Indeed so. And minimum wage employment is down in Seattle compared to where it would have been without the wage rise.”
Minimum wage, and indeed, all other employment in Seattle, is up. But it’s down compared to a fictional Seattle where the wage stayed the same.
That’s a really interesting John Galt fantasy… ah, fuck it.
No one wants to live in your fictional Seattle where the wages are stagnant. Know how I know? Because no one is flocking to Kansas, where the wages are stagnant, and supply-siders get their way. But I repeat myself.
Sorry for repeating myself so much. But the reason why I sound like a broken record is because this is all Tim the Worst can say in defense of a stagnant wage.
His arguments are on a loop, like the most pathetic iTunes playlist in human history. And it’s nothing but “Started from the Bottom” by Drake. An epic, if annoyingly repetitive tale about how you started from nothing on the mean streets of Toronto Canada, from a family of professional musicians with connections, and moved to Forest hill, the city’s affluent neighborhood. From these humble and harsh beginnings did he make himself 40 million dollars writing lyrics like those. Must have been tough.
This could be Tim Worstall’s soundtrack. He started from the bottom, just like Drake, except on the mean streets of England rather than Toronto, Canada, where the healthcare system is paid for by the state. His struggles are palpable, and I’m sure he could tell us about them if he currently had any, or ever did. Like Donald Trump, his sacrifices are many. His tired refrains playing over and over aren’t monotonous and repetitive at all. It’s inspiring how many ways he can argue that the minimum wage is bad, and he never has to recycle material over and over in order to get paid way more money than you.
Drake:
“Boys tell stories about The Man
Say I never struggled, wasn’t hungry, yeah, I doubt it, n-
I could turn your boy into the Man
There ain’t really much I hear that’s poppin’ off without us, n-
We just want the credit where it’s due
** I’mma worry about me, give a fuck about you”**
That sounds about right.
Tim Worstall and his soul mate Drake, ladies and gentlemen.
Tim is very concerned about black youth unemployment. Something about either being black, or the minimum wage, is keeping these people from holding down jobs. On that, Tim Worstall and I are in total agreement.
Only one small difference. It’s probably pretty minor and irrelevant. I’ve said too much.
ok, dude, dial back the Walls o’ Text.
Think of it as a trolley. Always running, goes in circles, and you can just hop on and off wherever you want.
Tim finally writes about a subject other than the minimum wage.
HAH! Almost, right? So close to having anything else to say.
Ultimately it is Tim’s attempt to re-frame the argument about the minimum wage, which hasn’t even kept up with the prices of rent, insurance, education, medication, fuel, electricity (etc), and make this an argument about what if we were an almost entirely centrally planned and mismanaged economy. Centrally planned around consumers and workers, demand-siders, not owners, investors, and employers (supply siders). Which is *totally *what the United States is on the brink of being.
Here’s an analogy: Tim Worstall is warning us about the dangers of environmental effects that would lead to a Snowball Earth.
For more:
Basically, Tim is telling us the economic equivalent of a scary story, one where the CO2 levels plummet to dangerously low levels, and the opposite of a greenhouse effect occurs, so that too much heat is radiated off of the planet into space.
A large reason why that would happen would be atmospheric CO2 becomes part of the ground, trapped in ice, or the carbon becomes part of other, non-atmospheric chemicals, thus, trapping less heat.
A secondary effect, and largely why it “snowballs”, would be that as the world gets colder, the ice sheets get bigger, and ice has a very different albedo than water.
https://www.esr.org/outreach/glossary/albedo.gif
So ice actually reflects more of the sun’s light back into space, as opposed to the planet absorbing it, as it would if the surface were covered with water and dirt.
The more heat gets radiated off into space due to the expanding ice sheets, and the less heat gets trapped by CO2, the more each effect becomes pronounced. More and more CO2 gets trapped in the ice, more and more ice forms, more and more light radiates away from the planet, and soon, the inverse of a greenhouse effect happens.
And, best of all, this is a thing that we’re sure absolutely happened before, several times with many ice ages, and at one point even covering the entire planet with ice.
But while such a cautionary tale is wise to listen to, it also has nothing to do with what’s happening under our current conditions. CO2 is on the rise, the ice caps are melting, and we keep breaking records for the hottest year on record, almost every year.
Why I use this analogy: Because Tim is telling scary stories about what might happen if we did something that we’re not doing or even close to doing.
Right now we’re in the middle of suffering from the effects of the complete opposite of what Tim is talking about. In 2008 and 2009, and for many years afterward, we suffered the effects of what happens when there is a lack of regulation, and the kinds of things happening in the market were unprecedented in human history, and people were inventing new kinds of trades which were fundamentally unsustainable. It was like when in the 1920s people were able to buy stocks in a way we now understand to be fundamentally risky, too speculative, and too dangerous if the market were to go pear-shaped.
There is another side of the story, and that side of the story is what happens when you under-regulate, or go too far in the supply-side direction.
**That **is the story of what’s happening in the United States.
You have a class of people whose wages are so low that the government has to step in and help pay for their food, medicine, and rent, because instead of allowing the market to be a balance between labor and employer, you tilt the table too far to the employer’s side, and the employers have the reins of power in government, so what happens when the market says “Hey, there’s actually no way to survive on the amount of money you’re paying these people, and people can’t afford to live in the apartments in the cities where the employment is happening”?
Answer: It causes…
the labor* supply…
*
to fail to meet demand…
causing a *rise…
*
in prices…
for labor.
So, ordinarily, the employer would raise prices slightly and pay the workers more, so they can ensure they have plenty of labor to meet demand, and the only way they have laborers is that the workers have enough money from their jobs to buy rent and food, etc.
But what happens when you centrally plan the economy toward the supply side, as opposed to the demand side?
I know, crazy concept right? I thought only liberals did socialism.
Turns out capitalists have their version of socialism as well, it’s called corporate welfare, dumbass Tim Worstall.
When the only way for McDonald’s to pay its workers enough to live is to have the Federal government step in and pay their wages for them, that’s centrally planning the economy around the rich ownership class and private profit motive, as opposed to artificially raising worker’s wages to outrageous levels.
In other words, the complete opposite of your scary bedtime story about Venezuela.
Also, another part of capitalist economics that is missing from your story is the idea of competition, which must exist for there to be a free market. What happens when 90% of the employers in town are all owned by the same 4 corporations, and they all agree to not compete with one another for the price of labor?
Whoops.
Sounds like you need a refresher course on economics 101, Tim.
What’s happening in Venezuela is tragic, and it also has absolutely nothing to do with minimum wage advocacy, or the conditions in the United States which have led to the need for it.
When you tell a scary story about the snowball earth, but what’s actually happening is the greenhouse effect, you’re teaching an important lesson about something that isn’t really relevant to the conditions we’re experiencing.
Why not talk about the dangers of over-focus on the supply side? Oh right, because there is no such thing as an extreme in *your *philosophy.
You’re in the exact middle, and everyone is to the left of you. See, not extreme. You’re less a part of a line, and more a ray that starts from the exact center of economics, and everything simply exists to the left. There’s no such thing as to the right. The earth can only get colder, you say. Never warmer.
That’s why when scientists talk about how it’s getting warmer, and people report it on the news, and NASA releases photos showing the ice caps vanishing, and greenland becoming more and more green, and deserts expanding, and lakes vanishing, and sea levels rising, the only thing you can do is go… hold on guys, let’s go back to Geology 101, and talk about the snowball earth. You guys are panicking over nothing. The earth only ever gets colder. It’s kind of like my beloved Trey Parker and his climate change skepticism, where he inserts his views into South Park and has the Only Sane Man in town be Stan Marsh who says “uh, my dad’s a Geologist, and he says there’s actually no evidence for global warming.” See, Trey knows a Geologist, and this guy is a climate change skeptic. Meanwhile,
There’s that.
Tim Worstall is the economic equivalent of a climate change denier. There is only one direction that the earth can go in, and that’s colder. There’s only one direction the economy can go in, and that is to restore power to the employers, and deregulate the markets, and lower or eliminate the minimum wage, and lower taxes.
There’s only down, there’s never up. It’s the only prescription for what ails you. If you’re suffering from malnutrition, eat a candy bar. If you’re suffering from a compulsive eating disorder and diabetes, again, eat a candy bar.
Tim’s right that if you take socialism and central planning too far, bad things happen.
Tim’s wrong that this is even close to resembling what’s wrong with OUR economy.
A free market would have more competition, and less price fixing from the supply-side, employers would actually compete with one another to attract workers. A free market would allow workers to negotiate together, the same way employers get together and set the wages together across all their stores, so the wage is basically the same from one Pizza Hut to another, and the KFCs that are owned by the same company, and so on and so on. Then there would be equal footing. A free market wouldn’t allow the government to get involved in paying employee’s wages for them, and demand that employers do that. So when the wages are too low for the workers to live anywhere near there, the employers have no choice but to raise wages or suffer the consequences of not having labor. A free market wouldn’t necessarily bail out the banks when they commit fraud and damage themselves, so they can go on and do it again.
This isn’t binary. It isn’t “free market” and “demand market”. There’s supply-side market, free market, and demand market. Venezuela went too far into la-la land with centrally planning their economy around the demand side, the worker’s side, and the consumer’s side. The United States doesn’t have such a problem. The United States centrally plans its economy around the ownership class and the suppliers, and supports them in every possible way, with regressive taxation on the poor and tax exemptions on the employer, different tax rates for investments, and so forth. The government exists to bail out the business owner, and fix the market in such a way that it’s possible for prices everywhere to rise, except for the wage floor.
Tim Worstall is the economic equivalent of a central air conditioning unit that responds to every command with the same action: It’s not cold enough, better make it colder. What, you feel cold? Actually, you’re experiencing the effects of overheating, and you’re delirious, and you only think you’re too cold. Don’t worry, I’m the expert on coldness, so I’ll save you by making it colder. You’re welcome.
When wages are stagnant for a decade, and corporate welfare is needed to make sure the poor can actually live on the tiny sums of money afforded to them, while prosperity in all other sectors of the economy has caused prices on everything else to rise, the problem is actually that wages are too high. You think they’re too low? Well, you only think they’re too low. What liberals don’t understand is that there’s no such thing as too low. Wages are what the market sets them to be, and that level is always correct.
But what about other countries where the living wage and the standards of living are higher, and unemployment is lower, and the economy is growing more than ours? What about when unions negotiate higher wages? Is that an example of the market setting wages where they need to be?
…
Tim’s response to that: Wages are too high. You only think they’re too low. 2 dollars an hour is too much money to pay someone to do a task. They’re all lazy and unskilled and uneducated. The only reason it’s even that high is because the government forces employers to pay that much.
Tim the broken air conditioning unit, ladies and gentlemen. He’s got one prescription for whatever ails you, and that is to tell you how bad it is for the economy that we pay people a minimum.
I love his line about **usury laws **leading to no legal forms of credit.
Oh myyyyyy.