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Post by homewrecker on Aug 12, 2019 12:42:29 GMT -5
Raise minimum wage? yea or nay
Here’s my thoughts
If your goal is to get out of high school by graduating or quitting and getting a minimum wage job and planning on retiring from it, aim a little higher.
Minimum wage jobs are meant to be an introduction into the work force. Mostly by high school or college summer help it’s not meant for you to stay there.
Raising minimum wage will not help you in the long run all it will do is be a catalyst for the cost of living to go up.
When it is all said and done minimum wage workers (and current middle income workers) will not have any more money left in their pockets, because you will have spent more for everything you do. The meals eat, the movies you watch, everything you buy or do will go up in price. Prices will not stay where they are, to pay higher salaries they will raise the prices and pass it back along to you.
One thing for 100% sure raising the minimum wage will do is lower the standard of living for the middle class. (anyone currently over min wage)
If you are making anything over $16.00hr all raising min wage does is take money directly out of your pocket to pay for the increase. It will be passed along to you to cover the increased cost without a doubt. Your pay scale will not increase enough to cover the amount of inflation, meaning less in your pocket at the end of the day.
If you are middle class you should not support the increasing of min wage, your standard of living will go down because of the inflation it will create.
Min wage may need adjusting a bit from time to time but bumping it up to near what the middle class worker in a factory is making is crazy.
The workers making that $16.00 up range won’t get a cost of living raise to match that jump in min wage they are asking for. It will be right out of your standard of living.
And if you think it won’t keep businesses from employing more people you are wrong they wont be able to afford it and some cases may go out of business because of it.
Like I said if your goal is to have no ambition to better yourself by moving up the ladder away from the minimum wage job don’t try to penalize me by lower my standard of living to match yours.
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Post by homewrecker on Aug 12, 2019 13:55:06 GMT -5
There will be nowhere for middleclass to go but down.
What incentive will there be for someone to get educated or learn a skilled trade like welding, tool & die, Masonry, etcetera when they can make
near as much flippin burgers. It puts you on the road to move more manufacturing out of the country because there is no motivation for anyone
to do a harder more skilled job for a whopping couple bucks more over min wage. Manufacturing wont be able to raise there pay scale accordingly
to match the min wage increase. They wont to be able to attract the interest of people to stay or go into it. Which means more mfg moving to Mexico.
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Post by Green Falcon on Aug 12, 2019 15:57:42 GMT -5
There will be nowhere for middleclass to go but down.What incentive will there be for someone to get educated or learn a skilled trade like welding, tool & die, Masonry, etcetera when they can make near as much flippin burgers. It puts you on the road to move more manufacturing out of the country because there is no motivation for anyone to do a harder more skilled job for a whopping couple bucks more over min wage. Manufacturing wont be able to raise there pay scale accordingly to match the min wage increase. They wont to be able to attract the interest of people to stay or go into it. Which means more mfg moving to Mexico. We'll be there in time. Don't blink |
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Post by fanofthegame on Aug 12, 2019 17:39:01 GMT -5
Raising the minimum wage is something the Dems say during an election year to try to get votes. It’s an attempt to get poor and lower middle class voters to vote Democrat. Raising the minimum wage doesn’t make life better for anyone. McDonalds isn’t going to eat that increased cost. They’re going to pass it on to the consumer by raising prices. This comes up every election cycle.
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Post by shelbyrr11 on Aug 13, 2019 15:39:39 GMT -5
Minimum wage is a tricky concept. I'll state my hysterical opinions first. The hysterical opinion is pulled from me when someone asks me the question at a bar and I'm caught off-guard and can't remember my stuff. I'll then state my more analytical, thought-out researched opinions.
Hysterical: For an economy with piddling inflation, 10-year market run without recession, and corporate tax cuts that should have made many companies loaded with free cash flow, a higher minimum wage ought to be easy to implement. Many companies already self-imposed minimum wage increases because of the unemployment rate. And for those worried about the labor market pay-scale being flattened, well quite frankly everybody deserves a raise. The inflation-adjusted income for families has basically been flat since 2000. Is the US really a country where we should expect families to not wind up better off over 20 years? Oh, that's right, that's what the rich people are for. If you owned sizeable stocks over the past 20 years, you are doing great. That's where a lot of those corporate tax cuts went. Unless I missed the wave of articles showing how all these companies decided to pay their workers more instead of doing stock buybacks? It ain't like the capital expenditure rate exploded. Maybe for one quarter it did.
Now that I'm done using the podium, here are Wall Street Journal facts about what an ideal minimum wage should hang out around:
There is a key threshold in regards to minimum wage that is cited by economists: A pay floor that is 60% of a given nation's median wage levels. Patterns indicate that pay floors above 60% of that median wage level drive companies towards automation. I don't believe automation is the worst thing considering our society has slowly automated many many facets of work, but it seems the rate of automation once a pay floor is north of 60% of median wage levels tends to be unwieldy and too quick for workers to prepare for.
If the US raises the minimum wage to $15 an hour, we will be looking at a min. wage that is 70% of median wage levels. Historically, the US kept min. wage around 40-50% of median wage levels from the 1960s to 1980 (is this the timeframe when America was great?). The US kept the min. wage around 30-40% of median wages from 1981 to today. For a country facing extreme wealth inequalities, it likely wouldn't hurt to push our minimum wage back up to around 40-50% of median wage levels. $15 may be too high, but $10-$13? Now we're talking.
Here are a list of countries and where their min. wage levels are (respective of their median wage), and the general impact:
- France/Portugal: Just over 60%, both struggle with high levels of youth unemployment (although France also has very strict labor rules for workers of all pay grades that may restrict youth workers from entering the workforce)
- Hungary: Went from 36% to 57% in 2002. One in 10 min wage workers lost their jobs, the remainder saw a 50% wage increase, which appeared to offset the detriment of lost work. Also, those one in 10 jobs that were lost seemed to be replaced by automation (which is good for higher-paying jobs that create that tech)
- UK: They keep their min. wage around 60% of median wages as a policy move (but only for workers 25 and older). They have found great success with it, with lowest-paid workers earning an extra 5,000 pounds a year after inflation AND without damaging jobs. Unemployment rate is at a 45 year low despite Brexit tensions.
- Berlin, Germany: 50% of median wages, set in 2015. Little impacts have been noted on hiring. Unemployment is at 3.2%, but it seems workers have responded by lowering hours.
As far as the US goes...
There are two main studies worth observing. One by the Congressional Budget Office in 2014, and a recent one by labor economists at UMass Amherst.
The CBO's is famous for stating that unemployment would drop by half a million by raising wages to $10.10.
The UMass study says that based on 138 min. wage changes from 1979 to 2016, low-wage workers saw a gain of 7% with little impact on unemployment, so long as the min. wage was under 60% of median wages.
NOTE: None of the facts I listed above showed an impact on inflation. However, seeing as how 10-year T-bills have very low rates now, I'd rather stoke inflation than let us go into the Eurozone/Japan dilemma.
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