Posted on 10/22/2014 10:13:27 AM PDT by Phillyred
Should we raise the minimum wage? In my opinion, yes.
Presently, profits, productivity and the stock market are at or near record levels. But for some reason the great American capitalists can’t afford to pay their employees more than $7.25 per hour. That’s a hard story to swallow.
Meanwhile the average salary of a CEO is close to 400 times what his or her employee earns. If anything, it’s the CEOs we can’t afford, not the workers.
And did we not have to bail out these same unregulated Wall Street capitalists as they crashed the economy, destroying millions of jobs as a result? Some job creators they are!
So yes, we should absolutely raise the minimum wage immediately, adjust it annually for inflation and show hard-working Americans that capitalism can also benefit them. Better yet, adjust wages annually as a percentage of CEO salaries, and let capitalism work for all, not just the privileged.
Glenn Gawinowicz
Oreland
Command and Control policies are NOT Capitalism.
The Fed fuels the accumulation of capital at the top because they are closest to the spigot.
bump
I like Mr. Gawinowicz’s argument concerning disproportionate CEO salaries, at least in principle. As mentioned in related threads, the major constitutional problem with national minimum wages is the following imo.
With the exception of the federal entities indicated in the Constitution’s Clauses 16 & 17 of Section 8 of Article I as examples, entities under the exclusive legislative control of Congress, the states have never delegated to the feds, expressly via the Constitution, the specific power to decide policy for intrastate wages, intrastate wages uniquely a 10th Amendment-protected state power issue.
The reason that the federal government has been getting away with regulating minimum wage for decades is the following imo. Sadly, as a consequence of parents not making sure that their children are being taught the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers, corrupt federal politicians use the constitutionally indefensible promise of higher and higher federal minimum wage to win votes from low-information voters.
Note that if the states want a national minimum wage then there is nothing stopping them from amending the Constitution to grant the feds the specific power to regulate minimum wage.
OK, let’s socialize corporate gains and profits by sharing with the employees. To be fair, that also means we have to socialize losses. Profits go, wages go up; profits go down wages go down. Corporation operates at a loss, you don’t get paid. How many of these self-proclaimed ‘economic justice’ advocates will stand up for that?
Why are you so stingy? $1000/hr? Really, is that the best we can do? Why not raise it to $10 trillion per hour, tax everyone at 10%, and then we can pay off that nasty national debt with a bunch of extra surplus money to spare!
< do I really need it? /sarcasm>
Other losers would be young people. These people need the entry level job experience that minimum wage jobs provide in order to move up to better jobs down the road. Depriving them of potential job experience, IMO, is one of the worst aspects of a minimum wage increase.
Or even better ... business takes a loss, you have to write a check to your employer to help cover it. That’s the tradeoff you accept when you accept employment vs. starting your own company; you accept a lower, but more secure income stream. An entrepreneur must be compensated at a greater level or he/she would not take the risk involved.
The trouble is that the federal govt. already has its tentacles so far embedded into state affairs that it can pretty much do what it wants even if it’s denied the power by the constitution. Consider the DUI laws and speed limits, both of which are most certainly state affairs and none of the feds business. The federal behemoth managed to regulate both of those, however, by setting “voluntary” standards for the states and then cutting off federal highway funding to any state that failed to meet the standards. I suspect that even were the federal minimum wage to be eliminated completely, they would set a similar “voluntary” standard for the states to meet WRT minimum wage and find some stick to beat the states with if they did not comply.
Can you think of one factory worker who’s paid minimum wage?
I’ll admit with the puny recovery, many jobs (that persons in their prime earning years are finding, if they’re even in the work force) aren’t exactly paying 5-star wages.
If it’s the flood of low skilled labor driving down wages, how is voluntarily paying more in wages going to put the American worker at an advantage? I think the EEOC would have a problem if companies set wages based on ethnicity.
Raising the minimum wage simply keeps all low-skilled labor out of the workforce, including Americans with low skills.
Changed my mind I want 53 weeks vacation that way I can retire early and take one weeks vacation pay with me for every year I worked. ;-)
Food processing factory workers are paid minimum wage — or less. That type of work used to pay more — but job gang wranglers now supply all the foreign labor the factories need for less. And those workers are competing against Americans illegally — or used to be, when we had a border.
Why are we insisting that only certain Americans — the lowest skilled among us — have to work for what laborers in central Mexico are paid?
If we still had a border, I would be one percent against the minimum wage, because I believe that a free labor market sets wages exactly where they should be.
But that’s hypothetical. There’s no free labor market, because there’s no border. There’s a flood of foreign labor, unleashed on the lowest skilled American workers by their own government. They deserve help from the rest of us, whose jobs aren’t threatened by foreigners.
And to your point about the EEOC — the minimum wage doesn’t put the American at an advantage for hiring purposes. But if there is a minimum wage, an American worker is more likely to take that job. He won’t as long as it pays as if this were central Mexico. And he shouldn’t have to take that wage and shut up about it in his own country.
Typo: one hundred percent against
Don't limit it to unskilled jobs.
I used to teach Personnel Management. Part of the course was on writing want ads. I'd always go through the paper before that class session and get some samples to illustrate the points I wanted to make.
I could always find one something like the following: Wanted: engineer with masters degree and five years experience. Salary $25,000. I would tell my students that when they saw an ad like that, the employer had already lined up a foreigner who was willing to work for sub-par wages just to get a visa. The employer was just going through the motions to prove that there were no Americans available for the job, so a foreigner had to be hired.
The really terrible part was that the foreigner was going to be trapped into working for that same employer, at that same sub-par wage, indefinitely. If he tried to change jobs, his visa would be terminated. If instead the foreigner had a green card, he could change jobs, and if he was any good, employers would be competing to hire him.
As one of Polish heritage, let me say that the author of this letter is one dumb Polack.
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