No, Joe, it didn’t help end the Depression. It extended it.
20 thoughts on “The Minimum Wage”
Why does this debate continue? How is it we can’t put a stake in its heart?
Labor cost percentage is one of those monthly numbers managers have to report to their central offices. Once you get it as low as you can it can’t get much lower. Raising wages increases that percentage.
So what’s a manager to do? Cut staff to the bone and not hire.
Fewer jobs. Period. Fewer higher paying jobs as well.
That we can’t keep people that believe otherwise from making legislation is the real problem.
What’s wrong with basic education? This doesn’t require a college degree.
if you slashed the minimum wage, would corporations hire more?
Of course they would.
The data doesn’t show that.
Basic supply and demand. Minimum wage jobs are basically commodity labor. When the price of a commodity increases, employers look to consume less of it, either by making do with less or by implementing automation. Cutting the minimum wage has only happened by inflation. Companies may choose to hire more people to expand their business, but in this weak economy, most are just trying to hang on to what they have.
That’s what the facts show.
if you slashed the minimum wage, would corporations hire more?
Of course. There is a large portion of the US population which simply is not hireable at the current local minimum wage. That’s why inner cities have such a huge unemployment rate and why growing numbers of young adults manage to leave college (with or without a degree) without job experience. It is yet another well intentioned disaster in progress.
There are two things that minimum wage advocates miss. First, the US is no longer in a vacuum, it’s labor has to compete with the rest of the world. And most of those people can work for far less than minimum wage. Second, at the minimum wage level, job experience is a huge boost to the wages one can actually get. Once, you’ve demonstrated that you can hold down a job, then you become a lot more valuable to a prospective employer.
I don’t know . . . if Joe Biden believes it, I’d have to give it some credence. On my own personal scale of Smartest People, I would put Genius Joe right up there with dn-guy.
🙂
My current theory is that the Democrats are making an all-out effort to woo voters on the left side of the IQ bell curve. I figure that people on the right side, with above-average intelligence, are split between Republicans and Democrats. I’ve never seen voter registration broken down by IQ, so I’ll assume that it’s an even split. The Democrats figure that if they can get a decisive majority among the dumber members of the electorate, they will be unbeatable.
When looked at from this perspective, their simplistic slogans, stupid policy prescriptions, and endless name-calling of their opponents make perfect sense. Terms like “racism”, “war on women”, “Koch Brothers”, and “raise the minimum wage” are obviously not used to persuade anybody by reasoned argument. They are merely intended to push the emotional buttons of slow-witted people.
I’m perfectly serious about this. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes.
Rickl, I agree with you but I want to add that most of these “victims of society” are just looking for a handout. I see it every day in Seattle and was exposed to it constantly in college. They say they are victims but it really just an excuse for free stuff.
It’s hard to get Voter Registration by IQ, but it’s not too hard to get Registration by education level.
High School dropouts mostly register as republicans, the better the education, the more they
register as democrats.
I remember seeing some figures after the 2004 election which indicated that both high school dropouts and people with graduate degrees were overwhelmingly Democrats. Republicans tended to be in between.
“Based on the 2008 exit polls of Georgia, Virginia (where Sabato works) and nationally, whites with a college degree supported Barack Obama at a higher rate than whites without a college degree, Kondik said.
Looking at CNN’s 2008 national election poll of almost 18,000 respondents, 44 percent identified as college graduates. Of those college graduates, Obama had an 8 percentage point advantage over then-Republican presidential nominee John McCain.”
or
“The Pew Research Center released data in August 2012 about GOP gains among working-class white voters that found: “Lower-income and less educated whites also have shifted substantially toward the Republican Party since 2008.””
“The more college graduates, the more Democratic (and especially more liberal) the state. The fewer college graduates, the more Republican and (and especially more conservative) the state.”
”
Lower-income and less educated whites also have shifted substantially toward the Republican Party since 2008. The GOP has largely erased the wide lead Democrats had among white voters with family incomes less than $30,000. And middle-income whites ($30,000-$74,999), who were split between the parties four years ago, now favor the GOP by 17 points. By contrast, there has been no shift among higher income whites, who favor the GOP by roughly the same margin today as in 2008.
Similarly, whites without a college degree now tilt decidedly toward the Republican Party – the GOP now holds a 54% to 37% advantage among non-college whites, who were split about evenly four years ago. The partisanship of white college graduates, by contrast, has not changed.”
The Dirty secret of the GOP is it’s mostly a party of Poor Southern Whites and Billionaires and very old people.
Facts have a liberal bias.
What a hilariously moronic statement.
There’s nothing “liberal” about you, you leftist imbecile.
Meaning that the groups at the top and bottom that predominantly suckle at the state teat can be counted on to voting to keep their free gruel coming.
You appear to believe there’s a strong correlation between schooling and intelligence. More likely, schooling makes people believe they should tell others what to do, so they become Democrats.
Then when people in the real world ‘disappoint’ them by not doing what the highly-schooled know is best, they have to build death camps and murder everyone who disagrees with them.
He is confusing education with indoctrination and maleducation.
If it were possible to just magic up economic activity and then hand out wealth life might be a lot easier. But that’s not how economics works, the economy is about trading value. People provide value based on the work they do and they receive value in exchange in the form of goods, services, housing, etc. Wages and money are just an intermediary.
The premise of many leftists is that fat cat businessmen are syphoning off a lot of the value that should return to employees into their own pockets. This is partly true, surely, but isn’t the major reason why real wages are so low these days. The highest paid CEO I’m aware of is Larry Ellison, who gets paid $80 million a year. Oracle has 120k employees so Ellison’s wages come out to something like 30 cents an hour per employee. There’s just not enough money there to boost wages by a lot, even if Ellison worked for free.
The real problems are elsewhere. Taxation is pinching the middle and working class more and more. It’s difficult to overstate how significant this is in terms of propagating inequality. The working class has less discretionary income, so losing that income to taxation is a much greater burden. It means they can’t save as much, it means they can’t invest, can’t accrue equity as quickly in land/housing/businesses/vehicles, don’t have as much flexibility to invest time in acquiring new skills, and the impact of unemployment is greater so they are more likely to avoid the risk of changing jobs, and so on. These are risks and investments that folks of higher incomes can take, and that helps them move up the economic ladder even faster.
Another big problem is education. Our K-12 educational system is shit, especially in terms of acquiring useful job skills. A high school education no longer guarantees literacy or mathematical fluency. As a consequence many companies have turned to college education as a requisite credential even for entry level jobs. Meanwhile, leftist values have denigrated manual labor and the trades as low brow, regressive or “republican” jobs. Right thinking teens are discouraged from going to trade schools or from becoming disgusting “businessmen” or worse “business owners” even though such tracks are far and away the most consistently reliable and return on investments of time and money in education. So instead young adults are herded into liberal arts colleges where they are saddled with monstrous amounts of loan debt and yet often end up with questionably valuable “educations” or drop out because their sub-standard public school education left them ill-prepared for college. And we wonder why there are so many 20-somethings working the drive through windows.
Not to mention how the explosion of regulation and taxation has made it more difficult for ordinary folks to start their own businesses these days.
Many of these things are directly due to leftist policies and values. And yet it will always be the fault of the mean, rich businessmen that the working class has been stuck in a rut for the past several decades.
Why does this debate continue? How is it we can’t put a stake in its heart?
Labor cost percentage is one of those monthly numbers managers have to report to their central offices. Once you get it as low as you can it can’t get much lower. Raising wages increases that percentage.
So what’s a manager to do? Cut staff to the bone and not hire.
Fewer jobs. Period. Fewer higher paying jobs as well.
That we can’t keep people that believe otherwise from making legislation is the real problem.
What’s wrong with basic education? This doesn’t require a college degree.
if you slashed the minimum wage, would corporations hire more?
Of course they would.
The data doesn’t show that.
Basic supply and demand. Minimum wage jobs are basically commodity labor. When the price of a commodity increases, employers look to consume less of it, either by making do with less or by implementing automation. Cutting the minimum wage has only happened by inflation. Companies may choose to hire more people to expand their business, but in this weak economy, most are just trying to hang on to what they have.
That’s what the facts show.
if you slashed the minimum wage, would corporations hire more?
Of course. There is a large portion of the US population which simply is not hireable at the current local minimum wage. That’s why inner cities have such a huge unemployment rate and why growing numbers of young adults manage to leave college (with or without a degree) without job experience. It is yet another well intentioned disaster in progress.
There are two things that minimum wage advocates miss. First, the US is no longer in a vacuum, it’s labor has to compete with the rest of the world. And most of those people can work for far less than minimum wage. Second, at the minimum wage level, job experience is a huge boost to the wages one can actually get. Once, you’ve demonstrated that you can hold down a job, then you become a lot more valuable to a prospective employer.
I don’t know . . . if Joe Biden believes it, I’d have to give it some credence. On my own personal scale of Smartest People, I would put Genius Joe right up there with dn-guy.
🙂
My current theory is that the Democrats are making an all-out effort to woo voters on the left side of the IQ bell curve. I figure that people on the right side, with above-average intelligence, are split between Republicans and Democrats. I’ve never seen voter registration broken down by IQ, so I’ll assume that it’s an even split. The Democrats figure that if they can get a decisive majority among the dumber members of the electorate, they will be unbeatable.
When looked at from this perspective, their simplistic slogans, stupid policy prescriptions, and endless name-calling of their opponents make perfect sense. Terms like “racism”, “war on women”, “Koch Brothers”, and “raise the minimum wage” are obviously not used to persuade anybody by reasoned argument. They are merely intended to push the emotional buttons of slow-witted people.
I’m perfectly serious about this. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes.
Rickl, I agree with you but I want to add that most of these “victims of society” are just looking for a handout. I see it every day in Seattle and was exposed to it constantly in college. They say they are victims but it really just an excuse for free stuff.
It’s hard to get Voter Registration by IQ, but it’s not too hard to get Registration by education level.
High School dropouts mostly register as republicans, the better the education, the more they
register as democrats.
I remember seeing some figures after the 2004 election which indicated that both high school dropouts and people with graduate degrees were overwhelmingly Democrats. Republicans tended to be in between.
Oh, don’t confuse poor Douchenozzle with reality.
Facts have a liberal bias.
http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2012/nov/05/larry-sabato/education-level-tied-voting-tendencies/
“Based on the 2008 exit polls of Georgia, Virginia (where Sabato works) and nationally, whites with a college degree supported Barack Obama at a higher rate than whites without a college degree, Kondik said.
Looking at CNN’s 2008 national election poll of almost 18,000 respondents, 44 percent identified as college graduates. Of those college graduates, Obama had an 8 percentage point advantage over then-Republican presidential nominee John McCain.”
or
“The Pew Research Center released data in August 2012 about GOP gains among working-class white voters that found: “Lower-income and less educated whites also have shifted substantially toward the Republican Party since 2008.””
http://www.businessinsider.com/proof-republicans-really-are-dumber-than-democrats-2012-5
“The more college graduates, the more Democratic (and especially more liberal) the state. The fewer college graduates, the more Republican and (and especially more conservative) the state.”
and
http://www.people-press.org/2012/08/23/a-closer-look-at-the-parties-in-2012/
”
Lower-income and less educated whites also have shifted substantially toward the Republican Party since 2008. The GOP has largely erased the wide lead Democrats had among white voters with family incomes less than $30,000. And middle-income whites ($30,000-$74,999), who were split between the parties four years ago, now favor the GOP by 17 points. By contrast, there has been no shift among higher income whites, who favor the GOP by roughly the same margin today as in 2008.
Similarly, whites without a college degree now tilt decidedly toward the Republican Party – the GOP now holds a 54% to 37% advantage among non-college whites, who were split about evenly four years ago. The partisanship of white college graduates, by contrast, has not changed.”
The Dirty secret of the GOP is it’s mostly a party of Poor Southern Whites and Billionaires and very old people.
Facts have a liberal bias.
What a hilariously moronic statement.
There’s nothing “liberal” about you, you leftist imbecile.
Meaning that the groups at the top and bottom that predominantly suckle at the state teat can be counted on to voting to keep their free gruel coming.
You appear to believe there’s a strong correlation between schooling and intelligence. More likely, schooling makes people believe they should tell others what to do, so they become Democrats.
Then when people in the real world ‘disappoint’ them by not doing what the highly-schooled know is best, they have to build death camps and murder everyone who disagrees with them.
He is confusing education with indoctrination and maleducation.
If it were possible to just magic up economic activity and then hand out wealth life might be a lot easier. But that’s not how economics works, the economy is about trading value. People provide value based on the work they do and they receive value in exchange in the form of goods, services, housing, etc. Wages and money are just an intermediary.
The premise of many leftists is that fat cat businessmen are syphoning off a lot of the value that should return to employees into their own pockets. This is partly true, surely, but isn’t the major reason why real wages are so low these days. The highest paid CEO I’m aware of is Larry Ellison, who gets paid $80 million a year. Oracle has 120k employees so Ellison’s wages come out to something like 30 cents an hour per employee. There’s just not enough money there to boost wages by a lot, even if Ellison worked for free.
The real problems are elsewhere. Taxation is pinching the middle and working class more and more. It’s difficult to overstate how significant this is in terms of propagating inequality. The working class has less discretionary income, so losing that income to taxation is a much greater burden. It means they can’t save as much, it means they can’t invest, can’t accrue equity as quickly in land/housing/businesses/vehicles, don’t have as much flexibility to invest time in acquiring new skills, and the impact of unemployment is greater so they are more likely to avoid the risk of changing jobs, and so on. These are risks and investments that folks of higher incomes can take, and that helps them move up the economic ladder even faster.
Another big problem is education. Our K-12 educational system is shit, especially in terms of acquiring useful job skills. A high school education no longer guarantees literacy or mathematical fluency. As a consequence many companies have turned to college education as a requisite credential even for entry level jobs. Meanwhile, leftist values have denigrated manual labor and the trades as low brow, regressive or “republican” jobs. Right thinking teens are discouraged from going to trade schools or from becoming disgusting “businessmen” or worse “business owners” even though such tracks are far and away the most consistently reliable and return on investments of time and money in education. So instead young adults are herded into liberal arts colleges where they are saddled with monstrous amounts of loan debt and yet often end up with questionably valuable “educations” or drop out because their sub-standard public school education left them ill-prepared for college. And we wonder why there are so many 20-somethings working the drive through windows.
Not to mention how the explosion of regulation and taxation has made it more difficult for ordinary folks to start their own businesses these days.
Many of these things are directly due to leftist policies and values. And yet it will always be the fault of the mean, rich businessmen that the working class has been stuck in a rut for the past several decades.