Your correct with the second sentence, but wrong with the first. The laws of supply and demand, the underpinnings of the Free Market, are amoral. It is simply an economic engine that runs on greed, guaranteeing an endless supply of fuel, one of its greatest strengths.
The free market will operate just fine with hundreds of thousands of Americans (or 19th century Irish) starving to death in the streets, it is incapable of bringing a value judgement to their deaths, incapable of realizing the inherent wrongness of such things.
It takes human beings who have morality, empathy, and compassion for their fellow humans to put a moral or virtuous framework around the impact of supply and demand. To understand, and fight, the human toll exacted by market forces.
If you compute the price of the burger as a percentage of minimum wage, the DC burger is cheaper. Which means it is more likely that MW workers will buy one, and demand will go up, not down. As you said, the price difference is more or less invisible to middle class and above workers.
If high prices killed demand, Starbucks would be out of business.
And the crisis today for a lot of businesses is exactly rising commodity and parts prices, which is only slightly affected by Nahployment. Detroit is shutting down car lines because of lack of semiconductors. I used to work with TSMC - you can be pretty sure that there aren’t a lot of MW workers in fabs, and they are in Taiwan anyway.
It seems Trump’s tariffs are at least a partial cause of this problem, btw.
Sure. I work with a lot of clients that make things out of steel, and steel prices and availability are very tough right now. One way or another you’re all going to feel that in subtle ways yolu won’t even notice. It’s part of business though.
Businesses working with steel are dealing with labor shortages too, and these are NOT minimum wage employees. But they just deal with it.
The auto-industry is partially self-inflicted. They’re use to having massive control over their suppliers. When they stopped taking shipments from the semi-conductor makers last year though, it put them in a weird situation when demand picked back up.
The semi-conductor makers don’t consider the auto-industry their big customer, so they prioritized meeting demand for Computer and Phone manufacturers and left the auto-industry pretty much where they deserved to be.
‘I won’t accept an increase in prices for no reason’ he said, munching on the $1.89 Popeye’s two-piece Tuesday special which was $1.29 in 2018 for the same two pieces. ‘Just won’t take that shit at all! I’ll go eat somewhere else.’
Have zero idea where to put this, but apparently MSNBC writer/editor Hayes Brown was a Doper:
So, guys, you know, we got company here. High class company, Hayes was one of us and he went out and got his bona fides and everything. Can we at least wear pants while he’s here?
Right. The solution isn’t to counterproductively distort labor markets in a globalized economy solely to appeal to emotion and gain votes. The solution is means tested aid to those who need it.
At the risk of exposing myself as someone that really enjoys fast food, it seems to me that with the current pricing and marketing model, it would be fairly easy for the chains to increase the overall cost to the customer without raising the menu prices.
My favorite fast food sandwich has a menu price of $5, but I hardly ever pay that. They have 2 for 1 specials all the time, and if they don’t I can usually rustle through the stack of assorted fast food coupons that hit my mailbox every month and find a dollar off coupon.
And some of the big chains are really two tier operations, with a second menu of really cheap sandwiches and sides for those who can’t afford $5 fast food sandwiches. If we are feeling particularly broke, sometimes we just grab a big bag of dollar menu items.
So if the fast food places decide to pass the costs onto the customer, they don’t have to raise the price of a Big Mac to $6.
They can just offer the specials less often, or make them less “special” - maybe instead of a 2 for 1 deal on a 5 dollar sandwiches, make them 2 for 6. They could change the dollar off coupons to fifty cents off. They could drop a couple of items from the dollar menu or see if it’s humanly possible to make that tiny slice of cheese even smaller without it becoming a joke.
They’ll figure it out — and remember fast food restaurants are competitive in regards to each other — if restaurant 1 raises prices, restaurant 2 may decide they can keep their prices the same and make it up in volume, the volume being customers that defect from restaurant 1 because of the price increase.
I’m also going to reiterate my opinion that the reasons behind the labor shortage may not be all economic. Fast food and restaurant workers having been taking a lot of abuse over mask policies and frequently get harassed for wearing masks. There may be people that would take the job for minimum wage if it didn’t involve dealing with terrorists that try to pull off their mask and spit in their face. A lot of fast food workers are older with health issues, and they may still not want to risk exposure. And frankly, wearing a mask for 8-12 hours straight is uncomfortable and I wouldn’t do it for minimum wage.
If the increase in that database value keeps pace with, or exceeds, the decrease in its value caused by the inflation, then yes, those folks are going to wind up with more value in the database than they had before.
Your phrasing sounds like a deliberately obfuscatory way to claim that better pay doesn’t improve workers’ lives, which is a highly implausible assertion.
Yeah me. Because that’s what it is. Politicians, in a democracy, survive by pandering to voters. Increasing minimum wage and giving out stimulus are relatively popular. Need based targeted aid is less popular. Why? I got no clue.
But in a discussion about unemployment and why people would rather sit around and collect government money instead of working for less discussing the incentives for all parties is relevant. None of the variables being discussed exist in a vacuum or on a single abstract axis. It’s a multi-dimensional problem and one dimension is political popularity of an idea.
This is not that discussion. Just reminding you. The people the OP is referring to are those who (a) never collected government benefits (like his daughter and her friends) or (b) had their unemployment benefits run out.
I asked Jasmine in another thread what mechanisms exist in the US which allows able-bodied people to never find work and, as you say, ‘sit around and collect government money instead of working for less’. She never responded.
Because I am unaware of this American social safety net, one which ‘the government’ literally pays random citizens to not work. Having been working in one form or another since the age of 4, I might want to look into that myself, Octo. Kinda tired now. So, please: educate. I want to learn.
And that’s to the conservative mindset. They don’t want the government to be perceived as a good. That’s a threat to the electability of people who claim the worst thing you can hear is “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.
Now to be fair, I kinda see what he means, in that not all people that earn minimum wage need the help. Many minimum wage jobs might be taken by children whose parents make plenty of money, and giving those kids more money does not help with the problem of actual poor people.
But it sounds incredibly tone deaf to say that, in general, raising the minimum wage does not help only the poor.
No. That’s not the conservative mindset. And nowadays the simplistic labels of liberal and conservative don’t really convey any information. Concerning folks choosing not to take a job, your OP’s main thesis is on that subject. Folks aren’t choosing to return to work because they don’t have an economic incentive to do so.
@ glowacks
Because it isn’t. It’s simply a wage floor. Where does the inflation in the US come from that the MW never seems to solve? You can dictate any number but dictates don’t create goods or services to buy with that dictated number.
Right, and that’s why I crusade against the minimum wage and advocate for need based aid. It’s properly targeted and doesn’t have the negative effects such as driving manufacturing overseas or to Mexico. People should put in a proper amount of time doing a job, any job, they qualify for at a market rate. Shortcomings in actual need based on that individual’s personal circumstances can be made up for with targeted government assistance.
That system is nothing but back door corporate welfare, in my opinion.
If an employer doesn’t want to deal with the unprofessional personal appearance and decreased productivity of low wage employees that haven’t eaten in 24 hours and live in their cars, they need to pay them enough to cover food and shelter. It shouldn’t be the responsibility of the government to subsidize the private workforce.
It is illegal for a physician to charge more than a set amount (115% of the Medicare rate) for patients that have Medicare, regardless of whether said physician agrees to participate in Medicare. The patient would not be liable, the physician would be required to provide a refund of excess charges, and the secretary of HHS would have the discretion to impose civil monetary penalties of up to $20,000 per line item and up to three times the amount actually charged (in lieu of damages sustained by Medicare).
