Posted on 02/11/2021 12:34:59 PM PST by Brian Griffin
The scheme would most importantly take local housing costs and employer & employee status into account.
The basic housing cost factor would be the square root of the pre-Covid 2019 HUD fair market rent of a one-bedroom apartment in the zip code area of the employee's most common work site divided by 10, rounded.
Typical HUD fair market rents might be around $1,200/month in much of America, $2,000/month in some big cities and $3,000/month in prime SF Bay areas.
The basic housing cost factors for those amounts would be $10.95, $14.14 and $17.32, respectively.
To compute the base minimum wage, the basic housing cost factors would be adjusted for CPI inflation since January 2019 and then rounded up to the next dollar.
People would have to work somewhat more hours to cover their big city rent. The big city rents are higher for many reasons, such as better lifestyle attractions, commute time value and long-term income growth opportunities.
Some smart aleck might say four weeks of 40-hour $18/hour work won't cover $3,000/month SF rent. I would first say share a place or take the BART to & from Richmond, CA. I would then say high SF & NYC rents have fallen.
With 160 work hours a month, people might gross $1,760 in a small town and $2,400 in a big city, or about $560 and $400 a month above typical rents, at a minimum. That may not seem much, but most people start their first job while living with family and then develop skills and experience that command a premium above the minimum wage.
In 2024, after say 10% inflation, the base minimum wages would be $13/hour, $16/hour and $20/hour, respectively.
The employer status factors might be:
A. $1/hour off for unincorporated/Chapter S unaffiliated[i.e. not a franchise] businesses and persons,
B. $1/hour off if such businesses/persons operate from just one location(excluding equipment/supply storage),
C. $1/hour off if such businesses/persons had no other direct employees except the substantive owner(s) during the same employer standardized hired employee pay period.
The employee status factors might be:
A. $1/hour off if the employee claimed to be unemployed on his/her written job application,
B. $1/hour off if the employee claimed to be under age 18 on his/her written job application,
C. $1/hour off if the employee claimed to have a criminal/drug court record on his/her written job application.
These factors allow for a quite appropriate amount of targeted wage flexibility in the labor market.
The maximum reduction for any employee would be $3/hour.
A small business in a modest housing cost locale might be able to get help for $10/hour($13/hour less three $1/hour discounts).
I'm sure many of you would say this is too complicated. However, one basic rule coupled with an inflation adjustment and six employer optional exceptions is actually quite a simple system. It has been my lifelong experience that employers will readily go through a great amount of effort to pay most employees as little as possible.
In practice the federal Department of Labor would compute the base minimum wages annually by zip code and small employers would check the DoL website annually for their most expensive zip code place of business (or listen to their fellow employers kvetch). Status factor application would be an employer option.
There are many of you that object to a federal minimum wage. However, federal minimum wages are necessary when the federal government subsidizes rents to below $300/month for many millions of people. Refugees are entitled to full welfare benefits by treaty.
If there was no federal minimum wage, many employers would simply collect job applications until they find a federally subsidized person (or some older mortgage-free homeowner) who could afford to work for say $6/hour. The federal welfare system, which is not going away in my lifetime, badly corrupts the job market.
Many of you might say having a federal minimum wage costs jobs. It does, but not as much as supposed since the services provided by low wage workers, such as fast food preparation and shelf stocking, are often highly desirable and avoid the need for impossibly high capital investment. Moreover, if a college student misses out on a $6/hour job, he can borrow tuition money and pay the borrowed money back when he gets a $50,000/year job after graduation. The student who misses out on a job will have more time to study and may even have his educational debt wiped clean by vote-buying politicians.
It should be understood that a federal minimum wage also increases the ready availability of quality labor by making jobs more financially attractive to workers and by greatly reducing the number of job applications a person has to fill out to get a job since employer fishing for $6/hour labor is outlawed.
I suspect that the federal government should set federal minimum wages with the goal of minimizing federal welfare costs.
Bear in mind, President Joe Biden would gladly sign a 'historic' nationwide federal $15/hour minimum wage bill into law. The average federal employee salary in Washington, DC was about $108,000/year a few years ago. To Nancy, Chuck and Joe, $15/hour is chump change.
I would suggest that a revised federal minimum wage law not go into effect until January 1, 2022 because the small businesses that remain need to recover from Covid restrictions and massive amounts of Covid financial "relief" are still being handed out to individuals.
“Well I’m calling the white house to suggest unemployment benefits must also match the $15/he criteria. Who’s with me?”
Our beloved President Trump signed a bill into law in 2020 that did that for 12 weeks.
Call them “interns” and pay them whatever you like.
There’s business and government.
The federal government is now run by people who buy votes.
These people generally wish to buy votes as cheaply as possible.
These people will set the rules.
Does business wish to participate in setting those rules in a most socially beneficial fashion?
Under the Biden Minimum Wage Scheme
Flat rate for everybody $12.00 per hour
Tax Rate how much did you earn send it in
The government has no business interfering in wages...also, why is it that you want to put teenagers and people who want to work for lower pay out of business? What did they do to you?
The reason the Democrats are always in favor of a minimum wage increase? Union contracts are indexed to minimum wage—typically a specified multiple of minimum wage. Increase the minimum wage, and all the union sh*theads get raises too.
“What if the value of your labor is worth $9.50?”
Exceptionally good management may be needed to add $.50/hour.
The value of any person’s labor normally varies by employer.
I probably can’t afford to pay you even $5/hour, but I suspect you haven’t worked for less than $20/hour for many years.
only works under absolute pricing control.
Things are priced based on local wages. That is, if a single person is averaging $2K a month, the rent market for a studio apt may average of $1500 a month. Raise local wages to $3K a month, rents go up to $2000 a month. 4K, $3500 a month. Multibedrooms are even more because it’s expected in this day and age that both adult occupants will be working.
And it’s not just landlords. Restaurants increase their prices (the $6 burger for $3 is now $8), grocers increase their prices, even doctors and dentists increase their prices. A tooth pulled in NYC costs more than a tooth pulled in Sweetwater, TX. And, the state and local tax authorities get involved. A landlord may hold his price at $1200, but the city doubles the property taxes based on wages and expected rent. The water company raises rates, garbage rates go up, and the electric company gets their share, too.
So it’s not just rent-control you’ll have to do, it’s price control everywhere - you can only charge this much for cereal, or rent, or electric, or a new car, based on current wage. A cadillac for me is $10,000 and for you is $100,000. My ‘wage card’ is brown, your ‘wage card’ is silver.
Local conditions have always been the best governor of wages. When govt gets involved in mandating wages it throws a natural balance off and ends up costing the individual more.
Its' been to SCOTUS three times and stood up. he Mon wage should be adjusted every yer for inflation and take the politics out of it.
“The government has no business interfering in wages”
A government nearly $30 trillion in debt has a lot of “business” in seeing that wages go higher.
Seriously stupid.
The government, with help of Chamber Of Commerce Republican’ts, flood the USA with LEGAL immigrants and suppress wage. They have no right to do that either.
$15.00/hr pretty much takes a married couple, BOTH earning that ($30.00/hr), off of any public assistance.
Your proposal is complicated, and completely glosses over fundamental economics: the result of minimum wage, and minimum wage increases, is unemployment—100% of the time. Your tinkering with the parameters only slightly changes the number of people thrown out of jobs.
Actually, they do. Legal immigration is, well, legal.
Ok, we have too much legal immigration and we need a higher minimum wage.
How many millions of people do you want thrown out of work? I can tell you’ve never been an employer, if you don’t understand how a minimum wage creates unemployment.
“ends up costing the individual more”
Just because Lazy Larry won’t justify getting paid $10/hour doesn’t mean leaving the fate of 10 million people to the mindset of businesspeople who all get the idea from a leading business journal to pay low-skilled labor no more than $5/hour.
It’s not your beliefs that matter, it’s not your business’s cash flow that matters, it’s not Lazy Larry’s lifestyle that matters, it is the mathematics of federal cash flow that matters.
On Biden’s ballfield, every game will have to be played by his rules. Would you like to help set those rules?
Raising the min. wage increases inflation marginally it has had no affect on employment in the past if you look at historical data.
So how many millions do you want throw out of work importing million of foreigners ever year? Hmm????
These same mini “captains of industry” that lament any increase in the federal minimum wage have no problem with the 1.5 million LEGAL immigrants that flood the US job market every year....
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