Posted on 02/25/2015 10:26:11 AM PST by shove_it
I had a neighbor who worked his way up through the ranks at Walmart, from stockboy to regional manager, from minimum wage to mid six figures.
Mike Rowe Bump
I’ve enjoy his writing the more I find them.
Rather than try to define what "average" may or may not be, let's just say that we are trapped in an economic quandary because of health care COSTS ... not the care itself
I'm no business wizard, but I can chew gum and walk at the same time ... and if the insurance companies have a history of getting $45 for a bandaid ... maybe THAT'S (A) point to start looking
But back to the living wage controversy .... As I analyze the costs of housing and food, mobilization and a few et cetera's ... it seems $20 an hour is a barely break even amount and NO ONE is going to pay a kid 20 bucks an hour to flip burgers
I thionk the problem is in how We as a nation are THINKING about what we NEED to live
I'm not so naive to suggest we go back to some stone age lifestyle ... but I AM suggesting we look at what the government has been doing to us ... analyze the low (if any) profit margin most small businesses have (with a myriad of headaches .. and even punishments) ... and SEE that "they" have actually reduced us TO that quasi stone age life style while we struggle to keep up the pace
America needs psychotherapy, not more money
Our problem(s) devolve from poor thinking habits
We USED TO BE the greatest on the Earth ... obumbles is only putting the icing on a flat cake
I can say it in one sentence: A minimum wage is a textbook example of the economic facet of fascism.
In a world with free markets, there is no such thing as a government mandated minimum wage.
But the reason the government wants to increase the minimum wage is to continue to monetize the debt. QE only increased stock prices. Raise wages and you will incrase all consumer good prices, effectively creating more price inflation, thereby “growing” the economy and reducing the debt.
Apparently he is a contributor to the blog I posted. I just received the essay in an email from a friend. Every successful person I know followed a route to success like this one.
In the Bush era, fast food was ridiculed by Democrats as McJobs.
In the era of Baraq, fast food is expected to be the middle class aspirational career with a govt imposed salary level.
The current CEO and president of Walmart started in the warehouse
The same as it does now; the Golden Arches will automate nearly every aspect of the business, and fire all those whose work is not worth twenty 2015-inflation-level dollars.
I’m not buying it. Minimum wage had nothing to do with automation. They automation was going to happen anyway, the minimum wage had nothing to do with it. But I repeat myself. Adjusted for inflation Mike was making more than $7.25/hr, he was making 9.31/hr.
Mike Rowe writes just the way he speaks. As I was reading this, I could hear him saying it.
Labor costs around 35% so the $1.40 / mac.
Now we are hypothetically raising minimum wage to $20.00/hr this is give or take around a 3 fold increase.
So labor 3 x $1.40 = $4.20 / mac + other costs $2.60 = $6.80 / mac.
Answer: $6.80(about).
Most people are in favor of a high minimum wage....as long as they are the ones benefitting from it instead of the ones paying the consequences. People on fixed incomes are going to get destroyed,sooner or later.
That then-and-now price comparison of “everything” is apples vs oranges.
That $45 bandaid comes with its fair share of costs delivering it, a combination of: emergency transport, urgent/ER admission process, crazy expensive per sq ft facility, nurse, PA/doctor’s time, enumeration of possible causes & consequences, insurance processing, etc. No fair comparing that to a $0.45 bandaid you applied yourself after getting reamed out by your mother for doing something stupid. YET...everyone expects the full-premium-service at DIY cost.
A phone costs somewhere around $100/mo ($40, $160, whatever), times number of tween-and-up family members, and includes instant access to the near-totality of human knowledge. No fair comparing that the wired single-function single-family poor-quality phone that you used in emergencies by walking a mile at night in a blizzard and banging on a stranger’s door to ask to use because your car was in the ditch (golly, where’d that example come from?).
TV can easily exceed $100/mo, displayed on a 55+” HDTV costing >$1000, with 200 channels, pristine clarity, and even a “pause live stream” DVR. No fair comparing that to a grainy SD box receiving 3 channels.
Dinner costs somewhere around $5-10/plate, including on-demand preparation or ready-to-nuke. No fair comparing that to laboriously turning $2 of staple ingredients into a meal feeding four.
Housing costs ... well, let’s say that I was watching the movie _Winter’s_Bone_ about a poor family heating & cooking with a wood stove and making do with used goods, when I was startled upon realizing that the “poor” accommodations portrayed closely approximated my “upper middle class” lifestyle.
And so on.
Our “norm” is a sea of luxuries normalized to a baseline which the well-off of the past would have despaired aspiring to.
Advertising has convinced us we “need” all this, and prosperity has made it easy to get it with little effort. Now people are bitching that they can’t afford a luxurious lifestyle, and are entitled to the surplus of others to achieve it just because they breathe.
like I said ... psychotherapy
“From the business owners I’ve talked to, it seems clear that companies are responding to rising labor costs by embracing automation faster than ever.”
I wouldn’t put it past the government to pass laws either forbidding businesses from using automation without an “essential need”, or requiring a certain amount of human employees.
"The federal minimum wage is $7.25 and hour."
FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument
Regardless what FDR’s activist justices wanted everybody to believe about the scope of Congress’s Commerce Clause powers, note that the states have never delegated to the feds, expressly via the Constitution, the specific power to regulate minimum wage. This is evidenced by the following Supreme Court clarification that the states have never delegated to the feds, expressly via the Constitution, the specific power to regulate intrastate commerce.
”State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress [emphases added].” —Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
So-called federal minimum wage is an example how corrupt federal politicians are exploiting low-information voters imo, promising such voters national higher minumum wage in order to get elected or keep their jobs as lawmakers, regardless that the feds actually have no constitutional authority to regulate minimum wage.
“Minimum wage had nothing to do with automation. They automation was going to happen anyway, the minimum wage had nothing to do with it.”
At the very least, minimum wage increases are a motivation to automate sooner or automate more jobs. Automation is not free; there are costs to purchase the equipment, install it, and maintain it. Most businesses don’t want to pay those costs until it becomes more profitable to do that than the alternatives.
The Mexican minimum wage is something like 70 cents, right?
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