Posted on 01/12/2017 5:34:37 AM PST by Kaslin
What future will America have when so many of her citizens lack the ability to engage in critical thinking, refuse to connect the dots, and fail to use common sense?
This unwillingness to think clearly is no better demonstrated than by the continued support for the minimum wage. After all the studies and the near-unanimous opinion of economists -- and even after the negative real-world effect of the minimum wage -- it still remains popular.
Why?
Sadly, most people are simply unaware of the argument against the minimum wage. They just don't know about the vast body of research that shows the harm.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently called for a "living wage." In a speech to the National Press Club, Weingarten said, "We need to fight for a living wage, for retirement security, for affordable and accessible health care and college, and for universal pre-K, to name a few."
Maybe the problem is that liberals, like Weingarten, simply pay no attention to what conservatives say. So let's use liberals. Two of the most well-known liberal economists have criticized the minimum wage and its twin, the living wage.
Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Massachusetts' Romneycare and co-architect of Obamacare, said in 2011: "Let's say the government rolled in and set a minimum wage. ... Workers want to supply more hours than firms want to hire. ... You end up with excess supply. And we call that excess supply 'unemployment.'" Gruber discussed the pressure that raising minimum wage puts on employers to turn to automation: "We have a downward-sloping demand curve, and why is it downward sloping? Because the higher the wage, the fewer workers the firm wants to hire. It would rather use machines instead."
Gruber once argued against paid leave, as well. Employers, he said, will simply reduce wages so that the overall compensation cost to employers is the same, giving the worker no net benefit. In 1994 Gruber wrote: "I study several state and federal mandates which stipulated that childbirth be covered comprehensively in health insurance plans, raising the relative cost of insuring women of childbearing age. I find substantial shifting of the costs of these mandates to the wages of the targeted group." In other words, if an employer is forced to pay for family leave, the employer will simply reduce the employee's wages to offset the cost.
The New York Times left-wing columnist and economist Paul Krugman also made the case against the minimum wage. In 1998, Krugman reviewed a book that supported the living wage, titled "The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy." Krugman opposed it: "The living wage movement is simply a move to raise minimum wages through local action. So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment."
Krugman even dismissed a widely cited study that purports to show the positive effect of minimum wages: "Indeed, much-cited studies by two well-regarded labor economists, David Card and Alan Krueger, find that where there have been more or less controlled experiments, for example when New Jersey raised minimum wages but Pennsylvania did not, the effects of the increase on employment have been negligible or even positive. Exactly what to make of this result is a source of great dispute. Card and Krueger offered some complex theoretical rationales, but most of their colleagues are unconvinced; the centrist view is probably that minimum wages 'do,' in fact, reduce employment. ..."
"In short, what the living wage is really about is not living standards, or even economics, but morality. Its advocates are basically opposed to the idea that wages are a market price - determined by supply and demand, the same as the price of apples or coal."
Minimum- and living-wage proponents also support equal pay for men and women. By doing so they make inconsistent arguments. On the one hand, employers are so cheap and greedy that they would pay virtually nothing for labor if the government did not force their hand.
On the other hand, the same greedy employers are happily overpaying men who, according to the equal-wage activists, are being paid more than women for doing the exact same work. Why a greedy employer would both underpay and overpay at the same time is never explained.
If $15/hour is good, why not make it $50/hour?
Is there a point where liberals would see that it is, at the very least, not helpful, and probably hurts.
The government does not have the right to set a minimum or maximum hourly rate.
For later
They are right simply because they are smarter than everybody else. Anyone who can't see that self-evident fact is deplorable.
Oh, they have an answer for that, too - it's because he is racist, sexist and homophobic, and rewards his white male frat boy cronies while he won't pay oppressed peoples the living wage they deserve.
Never mind that the Communist government they are trying to usher in will arrange their living wage to be two bowls of barley soup per day in the form of government housing they are pleased to call a labor camp - it's the principle of destroying all these rich, white, male business owners that matters. :)
Everybody gets paid a living wage. However there are an education lack penalty, a laziness penalty, a skill less penalty and a don’t show up penalty.
These are unrelated to a drinking penalty, a druggie penalty and a bad attitude penalty
Governments do not have rights. They have powers.
Some they were given by the People.
Others they took for themselves. (Like this one.)
ML/NJ
It’s a piece of class warfare now so deeply ingrained in our culture that I doubt it can ever be reversed.
Companies who do stupid stuff like go into bankruptcy, lay of a bunch of workers, and then give the CEO a rich golden parachute don’t help matters any.
Glad to see mention not only of getting rid of MW, but getting rid of paid leave days, etc.
Another effect of MW, I think - more illegals.
Get rid of MW, we’ll probably see fewer illegals.
I think this needs to be brought up with every MW and IA discussion.
“When it fails, they think it failed because they were not allowed to do enough of it.”
That goes hand in glove with their belief that every place that has done full communism “just hasn’t done it right”.
Raising the minimum wage simply raises the floor - and price inflation follows.
This is the reason the FedGov likes it. Increased price inflation monetizes the federal debt. Meanwhile, the only people whos lives are actually improved are the very first ones to get this new increased wage, and then only until prices catch up with it.
In 1972 a loaded pizza cost about $4 where I lived in a suburb of Seattle. And the guys that made them (Me, for one) made about $1.90 an hour. And this was in the days of much less federal, state and local taxes, which make up a significant part of the price of a pizza nowadays.
And, for me, the real problem of a minimum or living wage is that it is textbook fascism. The government wedges itself into an agreement between a buyer and seller. That is, from my perspective, immoral.
the only people whos lives are actually improved are the very first ones to get this new increased wage, and then only until prices catch up with it
Thank God nobody is talking about the root cause of our Financial problems, our FIAT CURRENCY. Funny you bring up 1972, that was right at the beginning of the mass devaluation.
Destroy the Family Act 1964
Coinage Act of 1965
abolishing the Gold Standard 1971
The outcome we are living was determined a long time ago.
In places where they jack it up to $15 they phase in the increases over several years instead of impingementing it immediately. They know it’s bad, the sick bastards. But people like it and it buys them votes.
Flipping burgers and such are not jobs that should be associated with a “living wage”. They are entry or fill-in jobs.
However, jobs that were once associated with someone who raised a family and had a job he could pretty much count on were not the same as flipping burgers. They are now.
People once made an OK living working as a mechanic, in a tire store, as a laborer etc. NO longer. These are all minimum wage jobs now.
The number of low skilled jobs that once paid enough to raise a family are gone. The expectation has become for a person to do a grown man’s job with some responsibility for little or nothing.
“If $15/hour is good, why not make it $50/hour?”
Little-known issue:
Entitlements are currently structured such that above (roughly) $12/hr, entitlements rapidly dwindle, crashing rapidly toward $0 when income is just over $15/hr. The sum of income + entitlements peaks at about $12/hr, drops as earned income rises, and doesn’t reach that level again until about $36/hr (at which point entitlements are $0).
Put another way: welfare + earned income peaks at an equivalent of $36/hr. If you earn more than $12/hr, that sum drops, meaning you have to _actually_ earn $36/hr just to keep up with what you used to make at $12/hr plus welfare benefits.
Methinks THAT is why minimum wage proponents never advocate more than $15/hr: that’s as far as they can push it without recipients realizing they’re getting ****ed by the welfare system.
Such things do not occur in a political vacuum.
If those workers give-up on the idea of ever climbing the ladder into a higher-paying job, they’ll organize and plow their energy into extracting more wages and benefits from the one they have now.
It’s human nature.
When you go from an industrial to service economy this is/was to be expected.
The SCOTUS has ruled the minimum wage is Constitutional.
The USA is so far from cost push inflation a $15.00/hr MW is not gong to do a thing to inflation.
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