Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

businessinsider.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 248 posts

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#101

Post by Tade0 »

souprock wrote: post #62
chrissnell wrote: post #2

Yes, but the minimum wage is the minimum wage. This isn't designed to be something that you start at and stay at your whole life.

No, the true minimum is -infinity, and $0 is quite common. The legal minimum wage just excludes a particular range. Jobs that would naturally be in that range get pushed to one side or the other, with working conditions adjusting to compensate. Some jobs go to 0, called "volunteer work" or "unpaid internship", and they get friendly conditions. There might be very flexible hours, a nice break room with delicious snack…

Especially the last one is simply not true, because firing a minimum wage worker is more a problem for the employer than the employee, who can find another such job within a week.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#102

Post by legitster »

I don't think anyone will deny the presence of inequality, but cherry picking the highest possible number to compare against doesn't really help anything.

Because the math is so easy, I calculated a couple other minimum wages (1985 vs 2020):

- $21, if it kept up with software engineers.

- $17.40 an hour, if it kept up with teachers. (Interestingly, only $16 if it kept up with superintendents).

- Doctors are the real losers. Minimum wage would only have gone up to $9.72.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#103

Post by speedplane »

rStar wrote: post #86
Guthur wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? Gaps are not even remotely what we should be focussed on and are purely based on jealous or indirect aggression. Concentrate on living standards and opportunity that will help far more people than trying pull down a vanishingly small number of people.

billionaires are criminal by definition, and their existence proves the absence of a (econ 101 style) market in whatever industry they came from. we can only fix this problem through efficient regulation of monopolies.

> Billionaires are criminal by definition

Sadly, billionaires aren’t criminal by definition (no such laws), but the existence of billionaires sure does cut against the idea of a perfect market (in a “perfect” market there cannot be profits).

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#104

Post by CameronNemo »

BoysenberryPi wrote: post #12

So what? I am fully in support of increasing minimum wage but I've been seeing articles like this for weeks and it is frankly garbage ragebait that I hesitate to call journalism.

I agree with you, but I think your comment could be improved by pointing out the specific issues with the article, e.g. wall street bonuses bring a cherry picked metric that is easy to manipulate.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#105

Post by glitchcrab »

aaron-santos wrote: post #57
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should Wall Street bonuses grow this much and minimum wage not?

Shouldn't c-suite compensation tend toward the minimum it takes to keep c-suite folk alive?

This is a nice ideal, but it only works if every single business is onboard - otherwise they'll just jump ship to somewhere which pays them more.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#106

Post by Dracophoenix »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #31
xupybd wrote: post #14

NZ just raised our min wage to $20 an hour. I work at least 50 hours a week. A teenager at MacDonalds now earns a good fraction of my income if they work the same hours. Despite my 4 year degree, near decade of experience and the responsibility's that I hold.

This sort of thinking is corrosive to society at large. It’s not a zero-sum game. But, if you must, take heart in the fact that the teenager will never make more than $minimum in that job, where presumably your income will continue to rise commensurate with experience.

That's not corrosive at all. If anything, it's the kind of thinking that leads to recognizing one's worth. No person should stay in a job in which he is of the view the he is not commensurately compensated. Nor should he wait for some vague future in which that might the case "eventually". This was the point of raising the minimum wage in the first place. Why would you think it just stops there?

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#107

Post by CameronNemo »

pathseeker wrote: post #6

So? It would be even higher if it grew at the same rate as a typical Google SWE's comp did from 2010 to 2020. Some industries are doing really well.

Wall Street hedge fund managers are often considered to be corrupt middle men. That is just the connotation. They are an easy and popular target.

Not saying it is a good reason, but that is why the article isn't targeting engineers.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#108

Post by downandout »

onetimemanytime wrote: post #90
downandout wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxpayers not only recovered everything from the 2008 bailouts, they actually earned a $15.3 billion profit. How is that “socializing their biggest failures”? From [1]: Early estimates for the total cost of the bailout to the government were as much as $700 billion, however TARP recovered funds totalling $441.7 billion from $426.4 billion invested, earning a $15.3 billion profit or an annualized rate of return of 0.6…

>>Taxpayers not only recouped everything from the 2008 bailouts, they actually earned a $15.3 billion profit. How is that “socializing their biggest failures”? Taxpayers should have behaved like hedge funds behave with one another...merciless. Want cash cause no one else loans to you? Sure, hand 95% of the business. The difference between what I said and $15.3 Billion is the gift.

The government is not a hedge fund. It has no expertise in running businesses. Had they done what your are suggesting, the markets wouldn’t have reacted the way they did, the companies would have gone bankrupt under government mismanagement, the economy would have continued to crater, and not $1 of the money would have been recovered.

It turns out that the architects of this bailout were very smart about the way they did it. Also, relative to the recent stimulus packages that have no hope of ever being recovered, the numbers from 2008 are quaint and the conditions under which it was given were extremely fiscally responsible.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#109

Post by anonytrary »

bawolff wrote: post #100
anonytrary wrote: post #81

In the extreme case, what if the minimum wage was $500000000 dollars. That would not work, and it would create a society where everything is done under the table. Now, keep halving that value and ask at what point do people no longer feel required to do things under the table in order to make a basic living (sans criminals). It's not obvious what the right number is. On the other extreme, if the minimum wage was $0,…

I'm not sure what your point is? There's very little in human society where we know the precise right value objectively. We still make choices in the absence of perfect information.

> We still make choices in the absence of perfect information.

The point is that imperfect choices are likely to be made with imperfect information. So, it's perfectly reasonable for people to be "for" and "against" the minimum wage being $44. Most people do not know the answer, so there's some consensus happening. Maybe every person should be part of direct consensus instead of a few people who are designated decision makers.

Humans appoint a few individuals to make decisions on problems that are not known at the time of being appointed, so it seems like imperfect consensus. Would people have voted differently in 2016 if they knew there would be a pandemic in 2020? Maybe. Maybe not. Systems should have ways of course-correcting on a much smaller scale than 4 years.

Guessing whether or not we should double minimum wage every few years doesn't work well. Numbers that don't take into account cost of living don't work. Why is the IRA income cut-off the same for someone who lives in Manhattan as it is for someone who lives in Omaha? The whole system seems off. Guessing a number for minimum wage and then mandating that until the next president updates it seems like the wrong approach.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#110

Post by gretch »

rStar wrote: post #86
Guthur wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? Gaps are not even remotely what we should be focussed on and are purely based on jealous or indirect aggression. Concentrate on living standards and opportunity that will help far more people than trying pull down a vanishingly small number of people.

billionaires are criminal by definition, and their existence proves the absence of a (econ 101 style) market in whatever industry they came from. we can only fix this problem through efficient regulation of monopolies.

Your hyperbole is going completely off the far deep end

"billionaires are criminal by definition"

What definitions are you using?

When you talk like this, you're hardly helping your cause. Ppl just dismiss you as intellectually dishonest

Post reply on HN