Posted on 05/25/2015 6:50:29 AM PDT by Kaslin
If you love In-N-Out burgers and care about the workers who flip your burgers, then you should support a minimum wage of $0.
Deep down, I know you’re tired of seeing actors jump up and down for TV cameras while waving professional signs that read: “McGreedy! McStingy! McPoverty!” or “McShame. McDonald’s. Raise That Wage.”
You weren’t born yesterday. You doubt that these protestors come up with these slogans on their own or fashion them into makeshift signs with their own cardboard, sticks and markers. You suspect they were given signs and paid to wave them. Indeed, in recent protests, 84% of McDonald's "protesters" were not real McDonald's employees but paid and trained professional rioters.
Professional rioters pout and shout in public for a one-time cash payment—not a cause. Since rioters are not entrepreneurs, they do not empathize with the challenges of competing in the restaurant business where profit margins hover at 4%. Nor do they understand the feat of turning a profit while relying on a staff of over-paid and inexperienced high school students.
Greed clouds the intellect of many professional wage protesters. For, reason as well as the Fourth Amendment tell us that every American business owner has a natural right to spend their private property (or cash) on employee wages as they see fit.
Los Angeles’ current minimum wage is above the Federal minimum of $7.25. Last week, the Los Angeles city council voted to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour. Los Angeles is a city of nearly 19 million. According to TIME, a maximum of 800,000 people—or about four percent of the city’s population—will benefit.
Besides “benefiting” up to 800,000 people, the wage hike will eventually hurt an untold number of people. Prepare to see (and smell) more wrinkly clothing and shaggy hair when Los Angelenos delay trips to the dry cleaners and barber.
Joking aside, we have recent a case study of what happens when we jack up the minimum wage. After the city of Seattle, Washington raised its minimum wage to $15, Forbes reported: “Restaurants are closing at higher than normal rates.”
On the national level, six years after the “end” of the Great Recession, wages are still anemic. In April, hourly wages rose 0.1 percent, prompting the New York Times to run a story in May about how “the growth in jobs failed to translate, once again, into any significant improvement in pay.” So, even if you believe the government’s data on job increases, there is no way to avoid the reality that wages are stagnant. Across America, employers are keeping wages low in order to eek out a profit.
So far, no one has solved this riddle: how do you create MORE jobs while forcing employers to raise wages by 107%, from $7.25 to $15?
Seattle tried, without luck. Now Los Angeles is trying. But Bank of America just surveyed their small business owners and found that only 21 percent have experienced full economic recovery over the past six years. Retailers in particular are fighting for the pecuniary crumbs of price-conscious American consumers. Indeed, my Millennial peers are so frugal that Whole Foods is rolling out a cheaper version of its grocery brand in a frantic attempt to get us to even walk through their doors.
Our overall economy is floundering and no amount of arbitrary lawmaking will spur wage growth. We need organic growth, which comes from small businesses generating profits that are sizable enough to justify expanding, hiring and increasing benefits.
Entrepreneurs have and will respond to mandatory wage minimums by moving their companies; raising prices; reducing staff; deferring expansion plans; or by reducing the quantity and quality of their services.
You are left with two choices. You can enjoy tapping your foot in line at your favorite burger joint as you wait for that cheeseburger, soda and fries that used to take three minutes and now takes 15 due to staff reductions. You can accept mediocrity as the new reality of American retail service. Or, you can speak up in defense of a $0 minimum wage and an America where bureaucrats do not force entrepreneurs to over-pay burger flippers. It’s a juicy choice to ponder as you grill out on Memorial Day.
There is no overseas competition for hamburger flippers. No matter how high or low our tariffs, they can't protect purely domestic operations.
“there is no unfair overseas competition, competition only there is”
those that whine about unfair are doomed and not really capable of being part of the great game that is business
When faced with an availabilty issue (shoes are a good example) I go to ebay and secure new old stock... or change the parameters of what I am looking for. Compromising my integrity as a consumer is not something I want on my conscience.
I guess that is my point... that principled consumers will seek out and do business with principled goods/services providers, or they will do it themselves... or do without.
With the tariff suggestion, I was referring to manufacturing jobs. If there were no economic advantage to shipping jobs overseas, more of those jobs would stay in the US.
You have the perfect attitude to make a great commissar. Now if we just had a totalitarian state for you to run.
What will end up happening is those businesses will setup shop right near the city border of LA.
Care to point out where I said I was in favor of forcing anybody to do anything?
When did an attempt to analyze an issue become communistic? I thought the commies were the ones who insisted nobody analyze things independently.
If my analysis is inaccurate, feel free to show me where it’s wrong. FTM, I make no claim to any expertise in this area.
Two things will happen...
Fast food will automate quickly...and more low wage workers will be unemployed...
People who can afford higher end restaurants can absorb higher menu prices...and those restaurants will
Prosper...
The have and have nots divide will grow just like the progressive want...
The problem is fifty years of exporting our industry so we can be a "post industrial" society, another great social engineering wet dream that was doomed from the start. Well, the "free trade, invisible hand" crowd have exactly what they wanted, industry moved to wherever the lowest cost labor on earth is without tariffs on what they ship to the US.
How's that "giant sucking sound" working out?
Your statements indicate you believe you have sufficient knowledge and skill to manage at least the entire restaurant segment of the economy. At least that’s what I hear. So far, no collectivist has been able to pull that sort if thing off. East Germany got close, but they had the Stasi.
And how, without using force, even if just the force of law, could you expect to compel businesses to do something they think is bad for them in their specific situation? The force of law, of course, includes either armed agents or confiscatory and bankrupting fines. Or both. Think Stasi here.
Sorry if you do not intend to be a collectivist totalitarian. But the things you say suggest otherwise to me.
Plus, you still have not accounted for the price elasticity of demand.
Don’t know how you can come to that conclusion. All I did was run an extremely simple calculation of how much a business would need to increase its prices to pay for a 12.5% increase in costs.
As I very clearly stated, it’s based on the assumption that all else remains the same, and I also said all else never does remain the same.
Probably unlike you, I’ve actually worked for a company driven out of business by a not dissimilar situation.
Most of the commenters here seem to think there’s something illegitimate about trying to estimate the severity of the impact of such a change. Instead we’re supposed to just assume it will be catastrophic. Meanwhile, the other side assumes it will be no big deal.
What exactly is wrong about trying to estimate the effects of a policy in advance? Seems to me this is an indisputably conservative approach.
“For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish.”
We don’t need a minimum wage, period.
Bjorn Lomborg made a big name for himself 10 years ago or so by looking at the doomsday prophecies of the greenies quantitatively. IOW, while agreeing that in many ways the environment was deteriorating, he tried to answer those rather critical questions: How much? How fast?
IOW, quantification, not just claims of BAD THINGS.
Irritated the hell out of enviros, largely because the actual data showed their claims to be wildly exaggerated and in many cases the opposite of the facts. Many aspects of the environment are getting better. So they attacked him personally.
That's pretty much what happened on this thread. I made a feeble attempt to quantify the impact of a proposed policy and was denounced as a Stalinist.
As has been known for centuries, if you don't put numbers to an issue, you aren't really interested in understanding it.
And here's an issue very well suited indeed for quantitative analysis.
Rant off.
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