Posted on 01/18/2016 5:41:11 AM PST by Rockitz
Los Angeles residents of impoverished Chinatown were shocked to learn on January 17 that the Walmart they pleaded for years to get would be shut down at 7 p.m. Sunday evening due to the city’s new $15 minimum wage ordinance, and union harassment.
(Update: The closure was described by the company as one of 154 closures “that took into account a number of factors, including financial performance as well as strategic alignment with long-term plans.â€)
Immigrant Hispanic and Asian residents of central Los Angeles campaigned for years for a “big box†retailer to locate in their economically depressed neighborhood to compete against liquor stores that sold a limited number of food items at very high prices. In September 2013, Walmart finally opened a 33,000-square-foot grocery and drug store in the Chinatown area.
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Liberals piously called this negative impact a “reasonable tradeoff worth embracing,†whereas conservatives and business owners called it proof that risky government interference would destroy jobs and put more people on welfare. But there are no independent studies of what a 50 percent, let alone 100 percent increase would do.
Furthermore, Walmart’s closure in Los Angeles means that shoppers will still be able to go to neighboring cities to shop at Walmart, taking sales tax payments away from LA.
Breitbart News reported in late July that local union bosses want their locals exempted from the law, since businesses were already making plans to cut employee head count.
The same month, McDonald’s opened its first robotic restaurant in Phoenix, and hotels in L.A. announced they were planning to reduce guests’ daily room cleaning, or charging extra for doing so.
Private sector union membership has plummeted from almost 40 percent of the workforce in the 1960s to a new low of 6.6 percent in 2015.
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(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Unfortunately economic theory doesn’t work at the Long Beach Shipyards. Dockworkers are making huge 6 figure salaries with incredible benefits including the right to pass their job on to their kids.
snopes says that the robot McDonalds is false:
http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/robotmcdonalds.asp
Seal the borders and deport 11 million illegals and I will agree with you. But for now the min wage is the only thing keeping us from becoming Brazil.
This is Trump's appeal....
See here.
http://www.breitbart.com/california/2015/02/06/longshoremans-union-to-strike-29-west-coast-ports/
See post 44.
When I say, “DO NOT PAY TAXES.”, I mean that their salaries, which come from the city, county, state and federal treasuries, and are taken from the non-governmental citizen workers’ taxes. The ‘taxes’ that the government employees ‘pay’ are simply not removed from the treasuries, and therefore are not ‘increasing’ the treasury amount, but simply not depleting it. Every dollar they ‘pay’ in taxes is not a dollar that increases the treasury.
Imagine, if you would, if every person worked for the government. Who, then, would be left to pay into the treasury any taxes to sustain it?
So, in effect, the government worker PAYS NO TAXES.....................
Walmart carefully tracks shrinkage. Any empty packaging is placed in a bin.
Walmart does collect from vendors for damaged stock which includes things like canned goods shipped out without labels and containers damaged before being placed in the case for shipping.
If there’s a way, Walmart is on it.
Walmart execs are democrats... democrats voted for this pay raise.
The UK has had automated ordering for years.
When Comrade Bernie gets elected, we’ll see a bunch of government-run “Bernie-Marts” open up in inner cities.
That study was BS. Do you believe everything you read on the internet? Come on, have an ounce of common sense when you read stuff.
You can do the math your self, all the data is available. Net income, number of employees, profits and expenses for Wal Mart information is out there. If I recall the increase in min wage to 15.00/hr would add 2 Billion USD to their net annual operating expenses. If you divided that by their net income from sales it came out to a penny I think.
I remember visiting Europe back in the late 1980s and the automatic flush toilets were already in many places in “West” Germany. It took over another decade before I saw anything like that here in the states.
No business actually pays taxes. All business income is from sales. If governments take part of the income from sales then the price of sales increases. If a company does not make profit it closes.
Governments in this country take over half of our earned income. We have Federal, State and local income taxes, we have sales taxes we have excise tax, property taxes and government fees out the wazoo. Even though governments get more of our money than we do it is not enough, governments spend more than they collect even though they collect record amounts each year.
When I was born in the 40’s the defense department was 75% of the federal budget. Today payments to individuals is nearly 75% of the federal budget and similar percentages are starting to happen in all the state budgets. But still it isn't enough, the governments borrow against our future earnings which guarantee an increase in future taxes to pay it off, it also guarantees an increase in the inflation rate. 40% of every dollar spent by the federal government is borrowed, or perhaps “printed” from thin air would be a better description. A day of reckoning will have to come, it will not be pretty.
Where in our Federal or state constitutions does it allow the government to make slaves of us to support people who don't earn a living but get one anyway? Before LBJ this was not the case, this is called “vote buying” and I for one am sick of it.
A Wayback Burgers opened in it's place a few months ago. Most expensive burger place I've ever been to and not that good. Probably only had a third of the employees as the previous business.
Well said!
Well, I wouldn’t say that economic theory does not work. Yes, unions can drive up their wages, no conflict there.
Oftentimes in the real world, there are many things going on at once. That makes prediction challenging (highly speculative), whether one is doing physics or economics. No one says physics doesn’t work when a physicist can not predict the weather, or a pitch in a baseball game. It still works, as does economics.
Just off the top of my head, I would expect increased trade with Asia to drive up wages and employment for dock workers. Unions can drive wages higher still, but this will somewhat counter-act the employment growth due to increased trade. I would expect more automation of docks, which I think has happened and will continue to happen.
The bay area has great natural harbors. To some degree, they can stick it to the rest of us on the cost of imports and exports. Other natural harbors may want to get in on the act, but I don’t know how much competition they can provide.
All in all, I don’t see any conflict between fact and theory. What I see is that there are a lot of variables. I’ve recognized a few. With more research I might recognize more relevant considerations.
With economics, as with physics, one should gain understanding of basic principles that always work. That doesn’t mean one can predict something more complicated, such as the result of a pitch in baseball, or the future price of a stock.
Thanks for the information.
When I was born, Detroit was America’s richest city. That is far from the case today. Meanwhile, every few years a new auto plant opens in right-to-work Alabama.
Old habits die hard. I still think of Hyundai, Honda, Mercedes, Kia, and others as “foreign cars,” even though they are all built in the US.
Let’s imagine that the UAW had always had modest and reasonable goals for worker safety and review of firings - no wage goals. The big three had a percentage of the world auto market in 1953. If that percentage had been maintained, what would UAW membership be today? Perhaps Detroit would have never given up its position as America’s richest city.
“Those liquor stores are all owned by Asians (mostly Koreans it seems) so the Asians of C-Town are being taken advantage of by their own brethren.”
If I’ve learned anything at all about Koreans from watching K-Dramas, it’s that they LOVE their alcohol.
Getting falling down, passed out drunk seems to hold no social stigma at all.
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