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The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

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Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it more about the inelasticity of housing supply? When demand goes up, prices go up?

Just who do you think relentlessly votes, lobbies, and politicks to ensure that housing supply is inelastic? The tooth fairy?

All homeowners, not just landlords?

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#72
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must be missing something because to me that's literally the point - the minimum wage should cause other, more complex work wages to rise?

If all wages rise (and in turn, cost of living rises accordingly, because now people can afford to pay more rent), nothing will have changed.

Until you start capturing that increased rent via meaningful land value taxes, perhaps distributed as a UBI

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#73
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that the company can't absorb the raises.

As an example, average restaurant profit margins are between 2% and 6%. They cannot absorb labor rate increases without raising prices or going bankrupt. Margins tend to be similarly low for many other industries as well. Tech is a massive outlier in its ability to absorb large wage increases.

What's the cost of not being willing to pay employees enough to care about doing a good job and hiring enough people to enable good work? I know plenty of people who've stopped eating out or order less because overworked and underpaid employees keep making mistakes.

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#75
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's shocking how little we pay the people that spend so much time with our kids.

It’s a big problem. When we moved to NC my girlfriend started working at my son’s school (preschool). The $17/hr she gets is considered the top end of the pay range for her job… $17/hr! She’s got a college degree!

There's no free lunch.

Most of school budget comes from the property taxes inside school districts. To pay teachers more money, the voters simply need to go through whatever are the steps to increase the property taxes to accommodate the budget increase. Until that is done, all of this is just talk.

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the most critical consequence: rent. Rent goes up. Landlords get richer, minimum wage earners go back to poverty. Pretty obvious cycle. High paying employer moves somewhere? Rent goes up. Normal employer pays more? Rent goes up.

Could you explain? I would assume that only a part of the increase in wages would go to rent. I live in Norway where the minimum salary is high. Rents are too but the average person has to spent less time working to pay for housing. Do you think the hours a person needs to work to pay for housing would stay the same if the wage increase?

That's just another guy trying to sabotage the working class, ignore the FUD about rents.

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#77
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to a fact you just came up with? Don’t believe it works this way, most money goes to the top earners, raising lower wages should not have that big of an effect as a result.

Please don't be rude for the sake of being rude. Most views hold that increasing the minimum wage increases the cost of goods and services, in particular food, also increasing downstream things like rent, but it's still a debated point and not settled. [1] [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/052815/does-raising...

Wording a polarized opinion worded as a fact is an attempt to force this opinion on a discussion is a dishonest move, to say the least. Am I rude here to point out that it's his opinion that somehow came on top?

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#78

I found this to be many words with little information. It largely boils down to "when Amazon increases wages, other employers follow suit, to varying extents." There was almost nothing about the myriad of other effects, including things like inflation, effects on already higher wage earners, effects on automation, and more. They touched on the increase in unemployment from competitors, but that was it.

Or the most critical consequence: rent. Rent goes up. Landlords get richer, minimum wage earners go back to poverty. Pretty obvious cycle. High paying employer moves somewhere? Rent goes up. Normal employer pays more? Rent goes up.

Yes, but because prices (including rents) are sticky -- it takes a while for them to adjust upwards to soak up the additional effective demand produced by increased wages. So long as wages are what's driving inflation, working people tend to reap the benefit. Workers only fall behind when prices grow faster than inflation, as in, for example, the oil shock back in the 1970s.

Even the small capitalist class benefits from the heated-up economy, because the increase in wages results in money being siphoned up from the pre-existing stockpiles of the wealthy, which is where money tends to fall when left to its own devices. When money gets siphoned out of stockpiles and up to people who have to spend it to live, the rise in effective demand makes it valuable to invest in providing more supply, instead of just sitting on the money and collecting interest.

The one major downside to wage-driven inflation is that it hits people living on fixed incomes in the shorts, since it makes pensions and government-provided supports less valuable. This is not a reason to support a heated-up, wage-driven-inflation-powered economy -- it's a reason to support government measures to increase funding for the elderly and disabled in order to match the new value of money.

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the most critical consequence: rent. Rent goes up. Landlords get richer, minimum wage earners go back to poverty. Pretty obvious cycle. High paying employer moves somewhere? Rent goes up. Normal employer pays more? Rent goes up.

I haven’t raised my tenants rent since 2018 when I bought the rental. I just had him pay what he had been paying. Maybe you should be a landlord and help break the cycle?

If your tenant moved out and a new one moved in, would you charge more?

Macroeconomic shifts seem like they would be biased towards transient transactions, and resisted by steady-state.

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the most critical consequence: rent. Rent goes up. Landlords get richer, minimum wage earners go back to poverty. Pretty obvious cycle. High paying employer moves somewhere? Rent goes up. Normal employer pays more? Rent goes up.

I haven’t raised my tenants rent since 2018 when I bought the rental. I just had him pay what he had been paying. Maybe you should be a landlord and help break the cycle?

this is an example of "price stickiness." People selling goods tend to let the price stay at whatever level it's currently at longer than is strictly rational. Because prices tend to be sticky, wage-driven inflation tends to result in real gains for wage-earners.
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