Here is a map showing minimum wages across the US: http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/america.htm
Wow... the inequity seems to be concentrated in the deep south. Something else is concentrated in the deep south too.
California poised to raise minimum wage to $10
11–20 of 65 posts
Re: California poised to raise minimum wage to $10
#12Interesting thought: say you're a state that's broke and desperately in need of revenue. What happens if you raise the minimum wage so the extra tax the minimum wage workers are paying covers the deficit?
Re: California poised to raise minimum wage to $10
#13I'd really like to see an experiment conducted that can put the whole debate to rest: raise the minimum wage in half of the states, lower it in the other half. Run this experiment for three years and compare the results, and apply the strategy with the best outcome to the rest of the country.
Re: California poised to raise minimum wage to $10
#14Re: California poised to raise minimum wage to $10
#15Now watch teen unemployment jump, and prepare for a future generation of people who couldn't get early work experience, and so become less employable in the long-run.
Major corporations will, by and large, have far less trouble dealing with the extra $2 than workers would dealing with the lack thereof.
Re: California poised to raise minimum wage to $10
#16Now watch teen unemployment jump, and prepare for a future generation of people who couldn't get early work experience, and so become less employable in the long-run.
Teen unemployment is already running around 22-23 percent:
http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm
The question is, how many people are working minimum wage jobs who aren't teenagers.
Re: California poised to raise minimum wage to $10
#17Why stop at $10? Why not $15? You know people can't live with $10 working at McDee.
It's $20 here in Denmark (de-facto, via the union wage-negotiation system) and I have no complaints. It means service-industry things like restaurants are considerably more expensive, but then since everyone makes at least $20/hr, that isn't a huge problem for affordability. It basically makes everyone middle-class.
It sounds like all that's happened is a form of inflation.
Re: California poised to raise minimum wage to $10
#18Now watch teen unemployment jump, and prepare for a future generation of people who couldn't get early work experience, and so become less employable in the long-run.
I don't get this.. Is the theory here that companies have $X in a bucket to pay staff, Employees each make $Y, so X/Y is the number of employees?
Because that's not how it happens at all. Companies don't hire more staff than they require. If McDonalds needs 10 employees per shift to operate, they're going to hire 10 per shift no matter if they cost $8/hr or $16/hr.
The amount of work determines the number of employees, not the other way around.
Re: California poised to raise minimum wage to $10
#19I'd really like to see an experiment conducted that can put the whole debate to rest: raise the minimum wage in half of the states, lower it in the other half. Run this experiment for three years and compare the results, and apply the strategy with the best outcome to the rest of the country.
The result of this experiment would be mostly useless unless the results were stark and causation can be traced back to this policy via other methods. It doesn't control for the millions of other factors that could affect the outcome.
Re: California poised to raise minimum wage to $10
#20I'm going to head off all the armchair economists, including the two* who have already replied as of 15 minutes after the article was posted. http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-re... Here's a real survey of actual economists, who largely agree, weighted by confidence, that "The distortionary costs of raising the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour and indexing it to inflation are sufficiently s…
I came to link the exact study you provided. Here's the executive summary from the CEPR paper:
"The report reviews evidence on eleven possible adjustments to minimum-wage increases that may help to explain why the measured employment effects are so consistently small. The strongest evidence suggests that the most important channels of adjustment are: reductions in labor turnover; improvements in organizational efficiency; reductions in wages of higher earners ("wage compression"); and small price increases. Given the relatively small cost to employers of modest increases in the minimum wage, these adjustment mechanisms appear to be more than sufficient to avoid employment losses, even for employers with a large share of low-wage workers."
Of course, it's worth noting that the first two impacts listed (reductions in labor turnover; improvements in organizational efficiency) could themselves have an impact on new hires and hours worked.