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The True Minimum Wage Is $0 Per Hour
Submitted by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,
The minimum wage is not what is commonly referred, as is being proven again as parts of the US experiment directly with this boundary. In New York, fast food workers have been given a $15 per hour minimum wage which is being celebrated by the same fast food workers who will bear the brunt of the experimentation. Some of them will be happy with the results, but there will be clear losers – the full wrath of redistribution is usually unseen which is why it persists.
Twitter had been having fun on the other side of the country with a similar minimum wage diktat, as the University of California system mandates also a $15 per hour rate. Professors, who overwhelmingly lean in a favorable direction, are being shown this mathematical reductionism up close. One physics professor who in one tweet reiterated his support took the next to realize the logic of it.
Napolitano raises University of California minimum hourly wage to $15. It's a good thing but I cannot pay $15 to my undergrad researchers!
— Asantha Cooray (@acooray) July 22, 2015
I now pay six undergrads/year starting at $9-$10/hour with raises maxing out around $13 as seniors. At $15 it'll be 3-4 students.
— Asantha Cooray (@acooray) July 22, 2015
He currently pays $9-$10 per hour for six undergrad assistants now, but in order to conform to the new “minimum wage” command he will only be able to afford four, maybe three. In other words, the true minimum wage is $0 per hour.
To think it is any different for a fastfood restaurant is naïve. Business owners paying their workers more by arbitrary government setting will not bring in offsetting revenue (a very close microcosm of all that belies “aggregate demand”). The cost of the law will be felt by fewer hours being worked, leading to rationing of the business operations (checkouts and those cooking in the back, meaning longer wait times and worse service) and, where possible, rising prices. None of this is surprising or especially insightful.
And yet in 2015, six years into recovery, there is still a huge and heavy undercurrent of discontent that breaks out into this kind of nonsensical “solution.” There has been a resurgent trend toward Marxism already (dating back to Occupy Wall Street that survived in sentiment beyond that pitiful outbreak) that flares up here and there with the next great Marx replica (Picketty being the last, global vestige). In a real recovery, none of this counterproductive meandering would stand a chance. If the labor market were growing as it should, in sharp contrast to how it has been presented over the past year, minimum wage laws would be the furthest from the mainstream.
The same goes with the sudden outbreak of robot envy/fear. In the case of fastfood workers, they may find themselves actually staring into that reality as beyond the short-term automated technology may be more cost-effective, and productive, than unskilled at $15. But by and large, in the overall economy, this raging tinge of disgruntlement about technology and jobs is of the same deficient impulse. In a truly functioning economy robots are quite welcome. Instead, what we have now, and have had for a decade and a half or more, gives way to this:
The bleakest news involves manufacturing and service jobs. He reports that Foxconn, the primary maker of Apple products, plans to deploy up to 1 million robots in its factories. A chief Nike executive, meanwhile, thinks the solution to rising wages in Indonesia is “engineering the labor out of the product.” This would not only be more affordable, it might also silence criticism about horrendous working conditions in international factories that make beloved American products. Self-checkout aisles at the grocery store, Redbox movie rental kiosks, and touchscreen ordering at restaurants are all examples of the same trend.
For those who claim that these changes simply move jobs from one sector of the economy to another, Ford points to statistics. Blockbuster once employed roughly 60,000 employees nationally. Redbox, in the entire Chicago area, has a staff of seven. A comparison between Google and General Motors is another instructive example. After adjusting for inflation, General Motors earned a profit of around $11 billion in 1979, when it employed 840,000 workers. Google, in 2012, earned almost $14 billion and employed fewer than 38,000 people. He offers many other examples suggesting that not every job lost in one area is gained in another.
The relevant comparison is not GM to Google but rather GM to first Japan and then China, with all of Google, Silicon Valley and the like added to Wall Street and its legions of mathematicians, accountants, lawyers and offshoot day traders and house flippers (along with the burger flippers, bartenders and hospitality workers “serving” asset inflation) to pick up the “slack.” Monetary redistribution is entirely the problem, not shipping off low wage jobs overseas (and getting lower price products in return) and having the government artificially price the entirety of the bottom rungs.
Innovation is the spur to all of it, so long as it doesn’t become entangled in exactly these kinds of socialist misdirections. In other words, the fear of robots is somewhat justified right now but only because innovation has run aground in the decades since financialism re-charted the overall economic course. The last time machines were “taking jobs” in such huge numbers it worked out very well not just for Americans but the rest of the world. There was once background fear of tractors as farming industrialized and reconstituted the entire workforce.
In 1820, out of the estimated 2.88 million American workers, 2.07 million (72%) were farm workers. By 1880, non-farm workers outnumbered those in agriculture; in 1910, the number of farm workers in the US peaked in absolute numbers, amounting to then just less than a third of all labor; today, very few are employed in agriculture. Innovation through industrialization absorbed labor into new and once “impossible” endeavors, industry and products that were prior scarcely believed realistic and certainly beyond the reach of all but the richest. True economic growth, labor specialization as its core, should be welcomed even though it is highly messy and dynamic. The general upheaval is, over time, unquestionably received in higher living standards for everyone.
The fear today should not be ATM’s removing tellers from bank branches, just as there are no more elevator operators working in moving cages amongst the nation’s taller buildings. The anxiety now is instead really about the serious lack of innovation that suddenly appeared right around the time hard money, and thus financial restraint, was banished so that various control elements could endeavor upon their utopian ideals of redistribution.
In other words, across now more than a century of monetary recalculations, the object remains the same – to become what Marx called that “third party”, to be the wielder of a mathematical code that will break the conventions of the past and lead to a more or even most perfect economic existence. The problem, universally, is that value is not just some convention to be deciphered, it is essential and immutable. Monetarists have believed that money was that object, pliable and a perfect substitute across ages, but money is just the expression of a much deeper ethos, a physical stand-in for the dimension of value. Political socialism is to transform individuals into a cohesive singular entity; monetary socialism is to do the same, centered always on redefining value. We live today not with free market capitalism, or even a functioning eurodollar standard anymore, but what looks very much like the inevitable end of the third age of socialist monetary experimentation. Value, beaten, battered and bastardized, so far survives.
Each of these ages of socialist economic direction has pressed further and further into the economic foundation. Where once an entire system of economy was redistributed by market forces into global modernism, we now live in communal fear of every form of job being “taken” toward even the slightest difference (what would have been slight hyperbole just a few years ago isn’t so much now). Perhaps the greatest rebuttal of these socialist ages is that now workers cling to mostly stasis of every kind (fastfood jobs are now as careers?), as job and labor opportunities are almost ancient concepts applied only to past remembrances of what it all used to be like (especially among the millennials; how must the economy look to all those stuck in school, endeavoring as college-educated baristas and living at home with mom and dad until after 30). There is no economic confidence because there has been no reason for it; the more that this is planned out by these kinds of intrusions into economic inner-workings the farther away from the utopian agenda (but not the totalitarian offshoot) we “progress.”
The economy has shrunk and with it the means to be hopeful about what should be natural – opportunity. Robots are not the problem, per se, and the minimum wage will always be zero; it is this “secular stagnation” of serial asset bubbles that have robbed the economy of its organic and natural vitality and spreadable vigor. Fix the obvious incongruity, monetarism most especially, of redistribution by government directive and economic growth will engulf and subsume what is really unnatural economic angst expressed in all these various and quickening counterproductive “solutions.”
Some disquiet about the uneven progress of market beneficence has always been present, but what is unique about especially the past six to eight years is its pervasiveness and persistence. In other words, there will always be some that fear dynamism because, again, the widespread benefits aren’t readily apparent right away; but when so many are convinced in the opposite something is very, very wrong. The first step is to stop making the economy shrink and let opportunity, real opportunity not linked to asset market gambling and the fake recovery efforts, again take hold.
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widespread benefits aren’t readily apparent right away...
egad what tripe.
The solution is basic income for all citizens.
Why cant people PAY to apprentice? The minimum wage could easily be negative. Dont stop at zero.
Here is the form that QE-4 will take; next stage--helicoptors. We don't need no stinkin' minimum wage!
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-jersey-man-drives-off-141000-in-cash-lef...
....and this QE-4 strategy. http://www.wyff4.com/news/drivers-report-money-flying-around-on-intersta...
I actually would not mind that one in New Jersey as well (like your prior post mention that stolen bag of cash) as long as they tell truckers that the only shipping routes are through those interstates. It would also help if they used lots and lots of fog machines.
Can you tell how much I hate people in my state?
Yeah, and do it at night, so the laser show can play on the fog, and have huge speakers blasting a hypno-tech beat.
Las Vegas feels effects of Barry's rekovery:
Revenues on the strip fell 16% to $446 million in June. That overall decline was led by a 57% decline in baccarat volumes from the same period last year.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/macaus-troubles-hit-las-vegas-174424860.html
Awesome!
Is it the bad economy or just that all the gamblers have moved on up to wall street?
The Orientals like Baccarat - and things are not so well there.
Not to mention in California either, where a lot of the drive traffic to Vegas comes from.
The system of lies built on fiat unhinged from Gold and debt ponzi serfdom while rewarding corrupt banks/corporations/insurers and their lackey politicians is the root of it. No political solution, just a lot of dead people - unfortunately.
Hey, this fucking recovery is awesome, isn't it?
Revenues will drop to zero and stocks will soar to the goddamn moon.
Why can't people see through this fraud that is called a 'recovery'?
I rather do nothing than work for free.
Why cant people PAY to apprentice?
Of course they can and actually should In accordance with Natural Law, a clearly written contract would be required along with with aurthorized arbitors. The contractor may want insurance in case the employer renege's on his contract.
For a description for how it is morally handled without lawyers and judges see "The Market for Liberty" - PDF file This can be managed even without interference from the draconian government.
They can, it's called "college", but it's much worse than an apprenticeship because you don't learn any valuable skills.
13th and 14th Amendments.
Why cant people PAY to apprentice? The minimum wage could easily be negative. Dont stop at zero
It's already the case for airline pilots that "pay-to-fly"
FEAR
The person that creates actual value will be compensated for their actual worth.
Barter is the best medium of exchange.
Currency created from thin air is worth as much as thin air.
I only skimmed the article. Can anyone say in a sentence how the people who are receiviing the mandated minimum wage of $15 are truly receiving $0?
It is the people who were making $8.00 per hour that no longer will have a position that will be making $0.00 per hour.
Read the tweets from the physics prof at the beggining of the article.
No law says you have to employ anyone, so if they aren't worth $15/hour they will receive exactly $0 from their former employer.
I very much doubt you even understand that, and I'm gonna guess that you probably never will.
Not yet. The longer that they antagonize citizens, the lower amount of voluntarism will exist in a job market. That, and you forget how worth is a subjectively-determined variable.
The sooner you try to get on the citizens' good side and hiring them in good arrangements (read: not involving contract work or any third parties between you and them), the higher chance that the market can retain any bit of voluntary nature. Persistence in giving employers the lopsided advantages that exist today is at one's own peril.
"No law says you have to employ anyone"........ Yet.
I only skimmed your post. Can you say in one word what is 'receiviing?'
And once you do the math on a viable basic income, you'll find it's about 1/10th of what the socialists want and well below the current poverty line.
What a hilarious joke!
Be joking. Please.
I think you forgot your /sarc flag.
Couldt it be argued that if there is a minimum wage of $15/hr there should be an interest rate on capital that is grater than 0%? If capital is a store of ones worth I would expect interest rates to reflect that. So I guess Auntie yellen is telling us that we are not worth anything.
I guess ZERO is the lowest minimum wage and in some instances it is NEGATIVE....
The 0% rates/free $ is for Wall St., not the cake eating masses. God forbid the masses who actually work should get paid more than a little crap for it...
I know I read some studies that disproved this minimum wage kills nonsense.
Think it may have been here at ZH.
Orlly? Just like the minimum interest rate is 0%?
Minimum wage theory stems from minimum intelligence (usually of the Ivy League sort)
Only if you're the ones advocating for ending it.
Not to mention that college graduates and higher skilled laborers will take those jobs from poor people. They've just increased the number of people who will take those jobs tenfold.
In the end, math always wins.
Fraud always wins...
I feel SO BAD for the next generations. They not only have to pay for their debt, but ours also. And then theres the 350K tons of spent nuclear fuel rods sitting in over loaded swimming pools that will have to sit there for 100 thousand years. Ha! Nothing can go wrong, right?
All so we could light up shit holes like NY city 24/7/365.
Their future is SO FUCKING BLEEK and they think everything is just fucking GRAND because mom and dad are telling them, "Just keep doing everything the way we did and everything will be JUST GREAT!
It worked for us, it'll work for you.
"...they think everything is just fucking GRAND"
This isn't true. I'm a mid-20 something, and whenever I bring up the subject nearly everyone my age is in agrement that we are fucked. Every person my age that I know has fallen into a degree of despair. Despair is our normality, so it just seems like we are OK because we have adjusted. Don't let that fool you.
Yes, $0 hourly wage for the White House intern who happened to deliver a sensational blowjob.
This is excellent news if you're a pointless government employee or useless twat hired to fill some 'diversity quota' or other.
The true number of illegal aliens in the US is 50+ million and they have taken at least 25 million jobs from the citizens of the USA. Imagine what the wages would be if there was 25 million jobs which needed to be filled - supply & demand.
Sshhhhhhhsh!! The Chamber of Commerce will hear you!!
Wow! So there are 25 million Americans who aspire to wash dishes, clean bathrooms, pick fruit and cut lawns for a living?!
I'm sorry but I find it hard to believe that there are that many unmotivated, unskilled and uneducated Americans.
But then again, reading comments on zh would lead you to wonder...
Hey asshole.
There was a time, not long ago, where a fellow could support his family working construction. It was hard, dirty work, but a lot of guys did it. And the pay, while not spectacular, was not bad.
Then came the Mexicans. Three or four could be put on the same job as one Native. And it's not long before its do or die, for the owners.
Now you can't find a white or black painter, drywall hanger or finisher, concrete worker, landscaper ( not grass cutter, ass), roofer.and I could go through the whole list. And most are not legal. And work "off the books" . They don't file or pay taxes. How can a native born, who's " on the radar" compete.
I could. Just take the state comptroller, IRS, bank, insurance companies off my ass. Give me immunity from the law. ( they have it, don't kid yourself).
And I'll do just fine.
All I want, and most others whose lives have been upset by these illeagal little fuckers and our corrupt government is a fair fight. But it's not fair. I know, I know... I'm 52.. Life's not fair. So the moral hazard is out the window. Fuck everyone, especially the Government. Fuck politicians, especially the ones who cry for immigrants rights. They are Not immigrants. They are FUCKING illeagal aliens who broke our laws and crossed the border illeagally. With the blessing of MY government. Who I thought was supposed to have MY back.
So now I know the score. I see your new rules. And fuck em all.
There would be if you cut off welfare benefits. People would have to do these jobs if they wanted to eat.
Dear PermaFeces,
In 1964, minimum wage was $1.25 and was equal to todays $18.50 per hour if paid in 5 silver quarters. A waitress like my mother in law could make a fair living.
Not anymore.
The cost of taking care of one illegal alien kid age 18 or young at an ICE center costs $66,000 a year. Yet, seniors on medicare can't even see a dentist for basic care.
The guys that mow the yards in my neighborhood, are illegal. They make $25 a yard and can do a yard in 15 minutes. They have no insurance on their truck (the sticker reads 2013), they don't pay FED taxes, and they don't pay Texas sales taxes. The yard business that are legal, can't compete with that.
Illegals harvest about 3% of the food in the USA. Machines do it all now, just about.
When your grand daughter dies in route to another hospital after a car crash because the closer hospital was on drive by status, plugged up with illegals with ear infections and their kids with colds, I will heartily laugh and smile at your heartache and pain.
If you think that is the only jobs they take you are one stupid sob. BTW 6 years ago, the illegals were demanding and getting $2 over miniimum wage to work as cooks in chain restaurants where I live.
Said the democrat union member...
If you take 1,35 from early 1960s and adjust for inflation, I'm guessing it should be 16 per hour.
Now the only reason it's been 9-10 is because jobs are going over seas, robotics and the influx of imagrents are giving the employer an advantage.
Now you can paddle this ball back and forth all day long and the final outcome is still a collapse.
There is no way to fix this except by a crash and than by destroying LARGE banks and corporations giving the little guy the advantage.
AT&T doesn't need to buy Dish, it need to be reduced to 1 of 10,000 possible suppliers of telecomunacations.
If you have a better solution I'd like to hear it.
Back in 1985, I was making $14.56/hr as a grocery store cashier/stocker. The reason they paid that rate was to keep the union out, so whenever the rate went up at the unionized competitor, so did ours by $0.25/hr more. That 16hr/wk part time pay was sufficient to put me through college with just a student loan to cover the tuition and books.
Fast forward 30 years and that same job is now only paying $10/hr. And at 16 hours/wk part time, that won't even cover rent, let alone food, utilities, transportation, etc. My old job did not go overseas, it's still there but paying 1/3 as much after adjusting for inflation.
Slavery!!!
...which is the most apt description of most labor markets with a $0 MW base.
Heres everything you need to know. Fiat is created out of thin air. Its just a medium for paying for something tangible. Slow down the flow of it (stock buybacks and the accumulation by smaller and smaller pools of people) and things get FUBAR. Making money by leveraging it 10x1 is bad enough (fractional reserve lending), leverage it up 30x1 and things can go horribly wrong really fast.
In actually there isn't enough paper money in all the world to take care of all the promises that have been made. Only two things can really happen in the near future (10-20 years). Massive debt jubilee or hyperinflation.
The real minimum wage set by government is not $7.50 or $15/hr. It is the sum of all entitlements that compete against market wages. The "market" is far broken and reveals nothing but the depth of our delusions and corruption. No society can survive if a majority of its people are not productive. By pursuing the lowest denominator by subsidizing our economy through debt and the importation of goods and laborer have reduced ourselves to competing against nothing.....ZERO, or what the cheapest slave or robot will provide.
Oldwood ..hurrah.You give hope not all is lost when somewhere common sense exists.
Not to mention that if there were no government handouts, there would be no workers making under a living wage at full time jobs. You see if you do not pay people a living wage then they can't live.
We would have been forced to deal with this as it was happening instead of papering over it with debt and entitlements until everything was lost. I see no way back from this. The cycle will have to reach the bottom for people will not give up their debt and entitlements until they no longer can exist. The end of productivity is the end of the cycle.
I would say the collapse of this propped up, dogshit, economy will be the end of the cycle. Other than that I completely agree.
The minimum wage should not be 0. Why not go full banktard and make it NMWR (negative minimum wage rates) a la NIRP.
Now you're talking.
Only a dumbass works for less than they are worth. Why I'm going to start saying "It is 2015, why do we pay people a minumum wage? We should be more advanced. People should be able to negotiate how much they are worth." The truth about minimum wage is it is just to make sure the government can get their hands on more earned money. It certainly isn't there to help anyone.
Minimum wage is there to help the oligarchs. The policy crowds out and crushes smaller business.
The least stable, lowest-paying, fewest benefits, and least dependable line of work? It would be doing us a service for the Fukushima sector of work to disappear.
Why in the world did someone give you a down arrow? That is exactly the reason this policy is mandated. It's about the destruction of small enterprises.
Fixed that you to reflect that worth is highly subjective and that someone in a monopsony can end up working for lower than what one is actually worth in a freer market.
Well, things are already more advanced - in favor of the employer, not the worker. When an employer has largely unchecked power against a person and their government, like today (and since 2007/2008), a voluntary market simply does not exist; what does exist is something based on "least pain".
The distribution of income is unhinged when the CEO makes as much as the bottom 30,000 employees. Blankfein become a Billionaire. The rest are lucky to make 50k on the lower rungs.
How do you reward performance and how should you reward non performance?
I have people reporting to me who make slightly less than I do but I carry all the responsibility. Is that fair? Should I be payed 10 times more? Would that be fair?
In this example the professor says that his pool of money is x and if he pays out more then he has to reduce the number of employees. Now what if he added his income to the pool and it turns out he makes $140 an hour would he be fairly compensated at $120 an hour. That way he could pay all $15.
It all depends on how you allocate the pool of money.
The guys at the top are insatiable. That $50K will eventually be $15/Hr., then the elites will say that's too high.
When will robots enable the average worker to only work 20 hours per week? I'd like to have a little more reading time and vacation time to travel.
Me too. We could always wish in one hand and shit in the other to see which fills up first.
As long as you demand more than your neighbor is willing or able to pay, the illegal or robot will get your job. People fail to understand that this is OUR economy. We decide how much will be paid by deciding what we are willing to buy. If we refuse to buy high cost domestic goods and labor and instead choose the cheaper import or illegal immigrant, how is it possible that we can be surprised that we lose our jobs? Really?? Are we that dumb? As much as we claim to hate the manipulative elites, we sure don't look in the mirror much.
Willingness is not a binary construct. At the very least, it depends highly on the ability to make a choice that is more desirable than others - as opposed to being a choice that is the "least evil".
x
Retared thinking isn't it.... I guess BMW should be out of business due to high wages in Germany...
labour is an input just like cost of burger pattie.... the burger just costs more...
However it is a clever way by Government to transfer the burden of assistance to the private sector ... food stamps. etc.... but in time the cycle will repeat.. another form of inflation..
Oh the Germany argument. Little country smaller than Texas. Got a fresh start, clean slate and a helping hand fron Uncle Sugar a few years back. ( after Sug bombed the shit out of him) .
Well let's see it in a couple more years, when all the "dark" immigrants set up shop.
Of course, their German's. They might get a little fed up.
Point being. It's a relatively small country. With a relatively homogeneous society. Homogeneous societies work together.
It not what we have. We where close, with the "Melting Pot", wher we assimilated new arrivals. Now, the USA is the bar scene from Star Wars.
Germany and much of northern Europe adopted technology much sooner than America and as such have a significant advantage. Also Germany's unions are much more cooperative with management and have been accepting of technology, while American unions have resisted anything that actually improved quality and efficiency.
Everything is NOT equal.
Citation needed, since a certain German manufacturer was intimidated out of setting up a German-style workers council by Southern political interests.
"Nice tax breaks you have there, it'd be a shame if we took them away if the vote goes the wrong way"
Jeffrey Snider has some good points, but overall he is a douche.
"And yet in 2015, six years into recovery, there is still a huge and heavy undercurrent of discontent that breaks out into this kind of nonsensical “solution.” There has been a resurgent trend toward Marxism already (dating back to Occupy Wall Street that survived in sentiment beyond that pitiful outbreak) that flares up here and there with the next great Marx replica (Picketty being the last, global vestige)."
Yeah, like bailing out the major banks and not allowing capitalism to liquidate ill invested capital. This douche would not have a job without the Corporate, Marxist, Facism that took place when TARP was signed into law preventing the market from reaching its natural level. Since that did not happen, I will call it ZERO (see how easy that was)?
"The relevant comparison is not GM to Google but rather GM to first Japan and then China, with all of Google, Silicon Valley and the like added to Wall Street and its legions of mathematicians, accountants, lawyers and offshoot day traders and house flippers (along with the burger flippers, bartenders and hospitality workers “serving” asset inflation) to pick up the “slack.” Monetary redistribution is entirely the problem, not shipping off low wage jobs overseas (and getting lower price products in return) and having the government artificially price the entirety of the bottom rungs."
Fuckface actually has a point here, but never mentions that a large portion of malinvestment and what could easily be argued as a source of lack of innovation otherwise known as the Federal Reserve. Does Fuckface realize how many businesses become intellectually lazy due to the fact that they could open a banking arm of their business and have cheap access to credit? What about the Federal Reserve keeping borrowing rates near zero so that corporations could load up on cheap debt to buy each other out.
Not to mention the real reason people are asking for a $15/hr minimum raise: inflation caused by the Federal Reserve.
You see fuckface is from Wall St and would rather blame the plebs. I could imagine this douche looking down his nose at the rest of us.
Retared thinking isn't it.... I guess BMW should be out of business due to high wages in Germany...
labour is an input just like cost of burger pattie.... the burger just costs more...
However it is a clever way by Government to transfer the burden of assistance to the private sector ... food stamps. etc.... but in time the cycle will repeat.. another form of inflation..
I upvoted your repost since I am experiencing some problems responding to posts.
Communism has penetrated much of the USA.
See, this is what the USSA's institutional Austrian economic policy and unbridled capitalism will get you.
That is funny.
"General Motors earned a profit of around $11 billion in 1979, when it employed 840,000 workers. Google, in 2012, earned almost $14 billion and employed fewer than 38,000 people".
And they said back in the 70's that this was not supposed to happen. Costs saving were to be passed down to the consumer....and the FUCK IT HAS!
We should be able to buy any new car or any consumer item for far less than we're paying today if the author of this piece could find his ass in the dark with a flashlight...but I think he can't.
We were also told in the 60s that we would end poverty. And that Medicare would make healthcare more affordable. In the 70s, we were told that putting a fovernment guarantee on every student loan would make college more affordable. Then in the 90s we were told that a massive regulatory trade treaty wouldn't ship manufacturing overseas. Funny how things work out.
That was when globalization was "trouble ahead".
That was when globalization was cranked up to 11, since US citizens "had it too good" in the job market.
The true minimum wage is what a dozen eggs or a loaf of bread is worth before COLA .gov adjustments.
Here's some fun reading material.
RPI vs CPI? What's the best measure of inflation
The minimum wage must actually be less than $0 per hour given that people seem to be falling further and further behind year by year.
Since negotiating wages based on market forces and the skills you possess and the demand for those skills is just utter and complete nonsense, I don't see why $15 is such a magic number.
Wouldn't $100/hr be a much better number and a nice round one too? I mean, since the economy is all a planned zero sum gain scenario, just make the minimum wage $100.
That'll really drive all small businesses under, which is the true goal of the minimum wage, and the fascist incestuous relationship between BIG business and BIG government, their paid-for enablers, will be complete.
Since the "market" is tilted heavily in favor of employers, some things have to exist (although not necessarily $15). They have the ability to use business-favored market distortions, jurisdictional arbitrage, and unfavorable work arrangements against regular citizens, with no thought to end those.
On the other hand, your compounding of absurdity with more absurdity doesn't help your case to abandon the MW. Never mind that the $0 countries are not terribly good towards workers.
And why is the market tilted heavily in the favor of businesses.......in our planned economy........
The problem is not with capitalism per se - hell we haven't had that almost never in the US. The FED is just our 3rd or 4th central bank/planned economy experiment, the problem lies with intrusive and too-powerful government that is owned and directed by businesses. Of course 'workers' are going to get shafted. And this doesn't happen in your workers paradises around the globe?
A fast food job is not career. It's temporary employment for 17 year old kids and retired people not a friggin full time occupation. If you're 35 and flipping burgers you're a failure at life.
Or guest worker fraud is so rampant that it'd take actual force to hire a citizen for anything more.
Saying that 2400$ a month gross is too much requires a special type of m0r0n. The problem obviously exists here as outlined below. But lets take a look at the time of Luddites and how that went down. What happened, the Napoleonic wars for one. But much more importantly an increase in energy consumption since 1812 to today. Coal, oil, electricity. Laborers were able to wield much more energy on new land, new innovative energy consuming machines. This also required an increase in bureaucracy and engineering leading to huge new industries. However with the rise of computers, engineers are not required in as high numbers nor is bureaucracy. We can simply do so much more with so much less. All the owner of capital needs are consumers, not employees any more, they can be cut. So based on the past, the road forward is much more cheap energy. With 47$/bbl we might be on to something :D
So why don't consumers become owners? People act like cattle. People are treated like cattle. They spend their earning on crap, on toys, on bullshit to tickle their fancy rather than investing in their future. They feel that they are entitled to a good job, a good life without struggle, like that has ever existed before in history.
So you think it's OK for businesses to be entitled to ask for everything and be criticized for nothing?
If we are going to have a go at people and liken them to cattle because they spend their earnings on crap and bullshit then we have to be even handed and also condemn the other end of the spectrum for also spending their money on crap. Or perhaps you didn't see that English Lord who was spending his dough on prostitutes and drugs in the news during the last few days.
These problems all started in... 17 September 2000. One year before that, the predictor seattle battle,
You don't need bread, eat cake! If the cake is not enough then $0 for you!
@ Bobportlandor (timestamp 20:40) -
FWIW ...
Using your $1.35 and say 1965 proxy for the 60s
http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
I get approx $10 /hour.
funny no one ever mentions why someone needs $15hr to live today.....
I would hazard a guess and say that that figure was arrived at by subtracting $8 from $15 and then multiplying that by 35 hours per week which gives you about $245. In other words perhaps the government has had enough of paying food stamps so that businesses at the top end can get away with paying lower wages at places like Walmart and MacDonalds.
The problem though remains that small businesses are finding it hard to compete against the giant corporations and also workers cannot compete with the likes of MacDonalds who now instal computers to take orders rather than employing real people.
It's a big problem and requires at the end of the day a decent return to capital, a decent living wage to a productive employee and close to full employment.
anyone ever hear of chores
.
moms pay employees in love
This is why I don't understand America's sudden hard-on for Bernie Sanders. He just introduced a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15... Quite bold, when you consider the minimum wage is always only raised to levels that affect almost nobody, and have a negligible effect in the overall economy... Yet he pays his interns $12 (which, to his credit, is $12 more than Nancy pays hers). Despite having a majority at the beginning of Obama's first term that wouldn't have voted down a minimum wage increases, he waited until he has no shot. Must have real confidence in his bill, eh?
It is a function of the repeal of Glass Steagal and the resultant money printing by the Fed when the neo Bolsheviks fuck up.
It's really simple.
Yep, now minimum wage is the equivalent to a bowl of gruel handed to a slave pulling the oars on a galley. Thats why they subsidize the corporation's minimum wage galley slaves with free shit. Can't let those middle income workers who pay for everything get too uppity and get out of debt and stop feeding the pigs. After all who pays for the free shit, it ain't the upper crust or the bottom crust, it's the filling.
Only if you want to incentivize slave labor.
key fact: money flow from have-nots to capital owners
key problem: capital distribution is such that all the money end up in the hands of the 0.1%. consumer credit can not fix that for long
That's why we have taxes, that's why they like globalism, that's why we like sovereignty, that's why they want ISDS.
"The minimum wage is not what is commonly referred, as is being proven again as parts of the US experiment directly with this boundary." Does this sentence make any sense to anyone or is it just me?
"In a truly functioning economy robots are quite welcome."
There are natural resource limits to consumption but not to productivity per worker, I welcome increasing automation but it will be the death of trickle down economics. It will require ever more redistribution to maintain high employment (mostly in service jobs).
The challenge is if you're paid $15 (or even $9) you need to do $15 (or $9) per hour of value-add productivity to justify your employment.
This is a major point missing from most salary discussions.
for $15/hour, can they remember to put the cheese on my burger?