121–130 of 381 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We inflation-adjust social security benefits annually, we could also do the same for minimum wage.
Would that defeat the point of inflation?
> Cities like New York, Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco have raised local minimum wages > Laws in New York, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey will eventually increase minimum wages to $15 per hour. I don't find this reasoning very convincing. The places that have raised minimum wages are some of the most expensive places in the country already. It may well be that the marke…
> Cities like New York, Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco have raised local minimum wages > Laws in New York, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey will eventually increase minimum wages to $15 per hour. I don't find this reasoning very convincing. The places that have raised minimum wages are some of the most expensive places in the country already. It may well be that the marke…
> "> Cities like New York, Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco have raised local minimum wages" > "> Laws in New York, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey will eventually increase minimum wages to $15 per hour." > "I don't find this reasoning very convincing." those are fact statements--what's to argue? > "That's the basic problem with a federal minimum wage." whether a federal m…
It also obviously factual that the prevailing lowest livable wage in NYC is higher than that of Des Moines; NYC's statutory minimum should be higher than Des Moines, not the same. It actually doesn't make all that much sense to push the ball forward on a living wage at a federal level.
Perhaps if they made the minimum wage a function of inflation, these shock changes wouldn't even be a blip on any company's collective minds? Set and forget.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
is it difficult for your wifes business to make money, and pay your employees at $15 (or more)? Serious question.
If it is difficult, then it's not a very good business. Serious question: Why would you want to run a business that can only survive by paying people poverty wages?
But there are many cases where it make more sense to pay 4 low skilled workers to do a job instead of paying the costs of automation plus the cost of the higher skilled worker to use the automated solution. It's why so many jobs in India are still entirely manual labor -- it is simply more cost effective than a more technical, automated solution.
My wife works in international developmental economics, and providing jobs to the wide swaths of unskilled labor of the world to incrementally lift them out of poverty is an essential part of economic development. Sure, it would be nice if those people could just leapfrog in their education and consequently their levels of development, but that just isn't realistic.
Your comment indicates you are only looking at a very small subsector of the labor market and economy. Not everyone can be software engineers and highly skilled labor in the present.
Axios cherry picked the Bureau of Labor Statistics data for the 12 states that confirm the writer's bias. They should have analyzed all states with low minimum wages vs high minimum wages for the overall picture. Reports are out there showing while many of the minimum wage earners who have not lost jobs from the hourly increase are reporting weekly scheduled hours being cut back across the board.
When I see Axios articles I automatically think, "Well, it's probably pushing some sort of liberal agenda or policy." Just being completely honest.
"The bottom line: Opposition to higher minimum wage laws is increasingly based in ideology and orthodoxy rather than real-world evidence, economists say."
I also see little acknowledgement of the fact that this sort of analysis is extremely complex, that there are many variables in play, in ways that are not terribly obvious or easy to measure.
Whenever I see people characterizing people who are increasingly suspicious of experts as ~stupid, I feel the urge to ask them if they believe this style of narratives-presented-as-facts plays no role in the phenomenon, and whether they've ever considered the idea prior to my question.
Minimum wage isn't just flat for a decade, it's not being adjusted for inflation. This means minimum wage workers have been getting a pay cut over time. The debate isn't just whether we should raise minimum wage, it's whether we should be cutting it. By allowing it to remain stagnant we're making the default decision to cut.
I'm old enough to remember this conversation happening three times, and wise enough to know that this conversation happens every ten years or so probably since the first wage was paid in currency instead of goods. A certain pay rate creates supply. Conditions make it hard to switch jobs. And every year you ever so slowly reduce the effective pay to those employees and they slowly give up little luxuries to make ends…
We've had the term "working poor" for a while. I suspect that we'll have "working homeless" in the decades to come.
Axios cherry picked the Bureau of Labor Statistics data for the 12 states that confirm the writer's bias. They should have analyzed all states with low minimum wages vs high minimum wages for the overall picture. Reports are out there showing while many of the minimum wage earners who have not lost jobs from the hourly increase are reporting weekly scheduled hours being cut back across the board.
I've read reports of Target, and similar companies, cutting back hours of many employees. I take such reports as anecdotal, but I didn't catch them talking about this in the article at all.
They haven't, though, and they won't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why this isn't a red herring. Minimum wage may be remaining stagnant but total employee compensation has been rising steadily, it's just that most of that compensation is in the form of spending on employee benefits like insurance. If people quit expecting employers to provide them with anything except for cold hard cash then you'd likely see wages increasing with time. To expand a bit more on this…
>This creates a scenario where a dollar into the insurance budget yields more than a dollar worth of value Using this same logic, a better use of that dollar would be spending it on taxes as the even larger government can negotiate even better rates with healthcare providers, providing even more value to the employee. Instead, the company fights to keep that dollar so they can spend it as they see fit, and the employ…
Yes. Up to a point. It's true that in general, the government currently pays less than private insurers.
What's not clear is what happens if/when the government is the only one paying hospitals to keep their doors open. At the reduced rate, hospitals will have hard choices to make. Only about 20% of hospitals are for-profit. For the other 80%, less money coming in the door will result in changes of some kind. I can't imagine how hospitals can do that, and make things better for patients at the same time. Something's got to give.
One reason could be because almost nobody makes minimum wage. In 2017 just over 2% of workers made the minimum wage. When you only look at full time employees, it's less than 1%. When you include only people over 25 it's even less. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2017/home.htm It's interesting how few people know this. When you ask people to guess what percent of people make the minimum wage, you'll lik…