that wouldn't be so bad, if he was directly responding to the info and arguments posted by others and then telling us we're too dumb to understand. But responding that we don't need no stinkin' research, and citing a 15 year old blog post as the last word on the topic is what's really ignorant.
It always turns into the same discussion, no matter what topic was at the start.
And "Democracy Sucks", although I don't recall ever seeing what alternative is proposed.
It does -- and one of my goals for this year is to try to be less of a contributor to that dynamic. And to that end, there's a few questions around the minimum wage I think are interesting:
- Does a single national wage make sense, or does the ideal minimum wage allow for some variations? California, for instance, I believe has two rates, depending on how many employees a business has. Minnesota has two rates, depending on gross revenue (source: https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/payroll/minimum-wage-by-state/)
- The pattern seems to have been the federal rate getting updated at very long intervals. I think it'd be better to have some auto-adjusting mechanism, but what would be the ideal signals to peg any such adjustments to?
- With a uniform national minimum wage, that will have a much greater impact in some areas than others -- eg Alabama, where there is no state level minimum wage, vs San Francisco, where there is a municipal minimum wage higher than the state's. Would this, even to a small degree, counter the economic centralization we've been seeing, where economic power increasingly concentrates in a handful of metros? If workers are able to get good wages in places like Wyoming or Tennessee, does that reduce the economic pressure that increasingly says you have to be in the NY or SF or LA etc labor market to have a chance at a decently paying job?
Would be interesting if there was a similar article from the opposite point of view.
what I've found frustrating here, is that the CBO analysis I quoted DOES include the conclusion that raising the minimum wage will likely result in jobs being lost. And my post reads very similarly to the abstract terp linked to, right down to which demographic groups would bear the brunt of those losses.
Most proponents of a higher minimum wage do acknowledge some jobs will be lost. But as the article you cite makes clear, somewhere above 20 million people will earn more money with a $15 minimum wage. In a macro sense, is that a beneficial trade-off for the country as a whole. I'd say it is, but anyone who says it's not should be willing and able to state why they are against giving a raise to 20 million people to save the low-wage jobs that would be lost. So yes, it would be nice to see an argument against raising the minimum wages that acknowledges the plus side of the ledger for workers, and doesn't just focus on the jobs lost and the cost to businesses.
The article's points about low-wage jobs having a lot of churn, and how it is businesses that are already struggling that would most likely go out of business, stuck out to me. It seems it would be tricky to distinguish jobs or businesses lost due to a wage increase from general turnover or businesses that were likely to fail anyway.
Ml1 and PVW, I appreciate both your insights.And DB.
What happens here is that the State with sectors that have minima than the federal, or better conditions, get to keep theirs under the State Awards scheme and employees able to do so can also negotiate to be included up to those standards or even beyond if they’re part of an Employee Bargaining Agreement. There are some shades to the wider discussions, external to MOL, that alarm me somewhat. Employers who are free to pay low wages are also free to cut corners on safe and equitable conditions; we’ve already seen some of these cases appear in industrial courts. We often find they’re representative of larger corporations, and it’s some kind of HR or payroll ‘error’, then ultimately, years later, there’s a drawn-out compensation or backpay process.
Doesn’t this all remind you of the early decades of equity rights? (Let’s pay women more, let’s pay blacks more etc - no! We’ll go bankrupt!) And (here) let’s float the dollar... (same argument) and then, 25 yrs ago, let’s bring in a Goods and Services Tax...(same arguments). Strangely, downturns in economy seems to run with such ideas too except they’re ‘dips’ and ‘corrections’. People are scared of change. They need to be shown.
It does -- and one of my goals for this year is to try to be less of a contributor to that dynamic. And to that end, there's a few questions around the minimum wage I think are interesting:
- Does a single national wage make sense, or does the ideal minimum wage allow for some variations? California, for instance, I believe has two rates, depending on how many employees a business has. Minnesota has two rates, depending on gross revenue (source: https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/payroll/minimum-wage-by-state/)
- The pattern seems to have been the federal rate getting updated at very long intervals. I think it'd be better to have some auto-adjusting mechanism, but what would be the ideal signals to peg any such adjustments to?
- With a uniform national minimum wage, that will have a much greater impact in some areas than others -- eg Alabama, where there is no state level minimum wage, vs San Francisco, where there is a municipal minimum wage higher than the state's. Would this, even to a small degree, counter the economic centralization we've been seeing, where economic power increasingly concentrates in a handful of metros? If workers are able to get good wages in places like Wyoming or Tennessee, does that reduce the economic pressure that increasingly says you have to be in the NY or SF or LA etc labor market to have a chance at a decently paying job?
Thanks Joanne, always enjoy hearing the perspective from Australia. It sometimes feels like a bit of a strange mirror of the US (does it go both ways -- does the US feel like a strange mirror of Australia?).
The article's points about low-wage jobs having a lot of churn, and how it is businesses that are already struggling that would most likely go out of business, stuck out to me. It seems it would be tricky to distinguish jobs or businesses lost due to a wage increase from general turnover or businesses that were likely to fail anyway.
the other thing I'd like to see go away is tipping. I don't mind tipping, and I try to tip generously. But it's a crappy deal for a lot of workers. If they come in for a shift and it's a slow day, they don't make any money, even though they showed up. Yes, they don't need to work hard on those days, but they also don't make any money, which is why they have a job in the first place.
Dany Meyer ended tipping at his restaurant group a few years ago, and when I've gone to his places, the service seems as good as ever. Sure the prices went up, but then you realize at the end of the night you're not tacking an extra 20 or 25% on to the bill. The $18 cocktail and $11 beer at Porchlight can give you sticker shock at first, but then you realize that's the going price at other upscale NYC spots after you add the tip.
Give restaurant workers a living wage, and don't put them at the mercy of being stiffed by customers.
that wouldn't be so bad, if he was directly responding to the info and arguments posted by others and then telling us we're too dumb to understand. But responding that we don't need no stinkin' research, and citing a 15 year old blog post as the last word on the topic is what's really ignorant.
It always turns into the same discussion, no matter what topic was at the start.
And "Democracy Sucks", although I don't recall ever seeing what alternative is proposed.
He never proposes any real alternatives for anything. Libertarians are like that, they always know why we shouldn't do this, or why there should be no government. That's because there are no successful examples of libertarian societies anywhere. In fact, Libertarian Society is probably an oxymoron.
Good news with terp is that he always goes crazy like this, posting hundreds of messages over the course of a few days, and then it stops and we don't hear from him again for a month or two.
Tipping is so rife to temperamental vagaries - argue with a boss, or have a nasty/unethical supervisor, or sexist crew etc and you lose your living money. On top of which, for other services than dining, just what’s ‘hospitality’? Is s*x/escort duty ‘included’ in some housekeeping?? Lone female passengers in hire cars, or drivers with unsavoury/rough passengers... Paid caregivers working in-home services... all the way to ‘merely’ removing large rubbish and garden waste, or doing repairs etc. People work & save hard for these expenditures, and then on top of the known expenses they’re expected to guess an acceptable % tip in rough times??? Come on! Liveable wages.
And yes, PVW, in many ways, there’s much here that seems to mirror your society especially because our TV, entertainment and social media are so heavily influenced by American culture. A lot is balanced by UK influence, and we have growing Pasifika and NZ influences too. I’m especially proud that indigenous cultural influences are becoming more mainstream, I’m fed up with over 30 years of stalling on that. (That’s another story about liveable wages, too, the stolen wages)
I always laugh when people confuse our civil rights with yours
Tipping is so rife to temperamental vagaries - argue with a boss, or have a nasty/unethical supervisor, or sexist crew etc and you lose your living money. On top of which, for other services than dining, just what’s ‘hospitality’? Is s*x/escort duty ‘included’ in some housekeeping?? Lone female passengers in hire cars, or drivers with unsavoury/rough passengers... Paid caregivers working in-home services... all the way to ‘merely’ removing large rubbish and garden waste, or doing repairs etc. People work & save hard for these expenditures, and then on top of the known expenses they’re expected to guess an acceptable % tip in rough times??? Come on! Liveable wages.
And yes, PVW, in many ways, there’s much here that seems to mirror your society especially because our TV, entertainment and social media are so heavily influenced by American culture. A lot is balanced by UK influence, and we have growing Pasifika and NZ influences too. I’m especially proud that indigenous cultural influences are becoming more mainstream, I’m fed up with over 30 years of stalling on that. (That’s another story about liveable wages, too, the stolen wages)
I always laugh when people confuse our civil rights with yours
Indigenous culture goes back something like 40,000 years, right? That's crazy long. Archaeology keeps pushing back the estimates of first settlement of the Americas, but even the most aggressively early estimates fall short of that.
It's always interesting when people start going off about natural laws and rights and such that the sheer diversity of human cultures over the millennia get so lightly swept aside. Within our present, contemporary context we can talk about things like property rights or capital or whathaveyou, but as soon as we stop talking about them in contingent terms and start talking as if they're some kind of universal, basic truths I think we cut ourselves off from the vastness of human experience. I wish both that I knew more about living and past cultures, and that more had been saved. It's hard enough to learn much about the cultures that were on my continent when the Europeans arrived; staggering to imagine the diversity of beliefs, assumptions, and ways of living that must have occurred in all the eons prior that we've collectively forgotten.
Not to divert the thread, our indigenous peoples have been shown to have lived here in some cases for over 65,000 years. Of course some of that hard evidence has now been destroyed by resources companies...who changed name here to something laughable, and are also trying to destroy some vital First Nations sites in the US and Canada. (Thank you, the previous admin.)
What’s interesting and pertinent to the current discussion is their understanding of community responsibility and sustainability. Your clan isn’t thriving if someone is in need, and everyone related has an obligation to help, however they can. They watch over each other, share with each other, protect each other and nurture the next generation with tough love. Imagine doing that on poor wages, poor access to services and education, and always having to prove your sobriety.
It's MOL's version of "Godwin's Law" - "As a political thread including Terp grows longer, the probability that everyone will be told that they're too uneducated to appreciate the 'Libertarian' point of view approaches 1."
that wouldn't be so bad, if he was directly responding to the info and arguments posted by others and then telling us we're too dumb to understand. But responding that we don't need no stinkin' research, and citing a 15 year old blog post as the last word on the topic is what's really ignorant.
The law of Supply and Deman has been around for some time as have the effects of price floors on those laws. You do a quick internet serch and find a good explanation.
For the record, we've been down this unemployment road before. And people have posted studies in the past. I've read them. You posted a 52 page PDF, and then you're going to jump all over me for not draining that thing? I've read it all before. Most of these studies make leaps of logic and do not account for everything. It is very difficult to.
I would also add that its troubling to me to throw, even with your own numbers, > 1 Million people into unemployment. This does not seem to be a great deal for those people?
Now, you have complained about how old the blog post is. I'm going to link you to an article written by an economist that questions some of these new techniques cited in the CBO study. This article is from 2015, but you should note that the CBO study cites the same researchers and some of the same studies.
In the 1980s, there was a genuine consensus that a 10-percent hike in the minimum wage would reduce teenage employment by 1 to 3 percent. However, in the 1990s, various “case studies” began challenging this orthodox view, and more recent studies have generalized techniques to apparently find negligible employment effects. Many economists have used this new research to assure policymakers and the public to pay no heed to warnings about harmful job losses from even aggressive minimum wage hikes.
However, in reality, the employment effect of the minimum wage is still an open question even for modest hikes. Since the 1990s, scores of articles have found negative effects of minimum wage increases. These include “case studies,” with one serving as the mirror image of the famous Card and Krueger study. Furthermore, critics have challenged the entire premise of the new techniques, which claim to construct better control groups than the traditional approaches.
Finally, even if we take the very best examples of the “new” results at face value, they provide little comfort that large hikes in the minimum wage—such as a doubling to $15 per hour—will have modest impacts. Policymakers and the public should be wary of the glib assurances of some prominent economists when they claim that such large hikes will not cause teenagers to lose their jobs. The odds are very high that they will.
all the talk about what may or may not happen in regards to total employment is really besides the point if you ask me.
It's morally reprehensible that it's legal to employ people where a full time salary leaves them in poverty.
Just raise the minimum wage. There are other tools that can be employed to increase total employment if that becomes a concern.
This.
Any business that can’t survive without paying a living wage probably needs to fold.
Those arguing against should realize that we are just otherwise subsidizing with food stamps, Medicaid, EITC.
Wal Mart and Amazon should not be getting subsidies.
You seem like a reasonable guy. I'm going to challenge this in a number of ways.
First, I will say that I do not think these unskilled jobs(minimum wage) are for people trying to raise a family. These are bottom rung jobs that people who are starting out their work life should use to gain skills. If people are trying to raise a family of 4 with a minimum wage job, then there are deeper problems at play.
Second, the fact that a company uses minimum wage workers does not mean that all of their jobs are of that variety. Should the small business owner, who is not rich go out of business? What of the management that business owner may staff? What about the book keeper? Have you thought through other effects of these businesses going under? What of the landlord? There may be other services that these businesses use that will suffer?
If all that is left is the Walmarts and MacDonalds of the world(these types of big companies will be able to absorb the higher wages better than the little company or the company that hasn't even started yet), is that really good for society? Is that good for people who want to start a business and then offer employment to people? We live in a town that is apprehensive about having these large chains here. Why, because the small business offers a richer more unique offering. And hey, maybe our children can get some work experience while they are in their teen years.
If you accept that these higher costs are barriers to entry for small businesses, do they not act as a subsidy for the big companies like Walmart and Amazon?
As someone who used waiting tables to help me get through about 1.5-2 years of secondary school, I would not dismiss that payment structure. There were definitely some down times, but the fact that if you did a good job, were attentive & friendly, you usually did pretty well.
you complain a lot about being treated poorly here. But you give no indication that you really want an intelligent exchange. You don't read the links, you don't address the info, you don't provide a reasoned argument, you just provide arrogant snideness in response.
Good for you.
I am treated pretty poorly here. You don't see it because I'm not in your tribe. Your tribe is always right. Those outside your tribe are always wrong and are probably a white supremecist and thus probably have whatever treatment they get coming.
Here's an example. I started a thread where some scientists started to question the orthodoy of locking down. This isn't that dissimilar to the economists questioning how the orthodoxy used to view the effects of the minimum wage. The big difference is that now the orthodoxy wants to increase the minimum wage quite a bit. So, the 2 things are treated differently.
So, in this thread I posted what these scientist and everybody goes crazy attacking the scientists being political, lacking substance, calling them a death cult. I was censored on that thread and had the thread title changed for me. Finally, the thread was sunk.
Now, if you go click on that thread you will see that I have added to it. And there are studies that question the lockdown policies. There is even a study in the American Medical Journal that says that Hydrochloroquine should be used to treat Covid, and the Lancet study saying it had no efficacy has been retracted. But, in his infinite wisdom the admin decided to "sink"the thread. He says because it wasn't about science. It seems much more likely that I was guilty of questioning a simple man's religion.
I am treated pretty poorly here. You don't see it because I'm not in your tribe. Your tribe is always right. Those outside your tribe are always wrong and are probably a white supremecist and thus probably have whatever treatment they get coming.
Here's an example. I started a thread where some scientists started to question the orthodoy of locking down. This isn't that dissimilar to the economists questioning how the orthodoxy used to view the effects of the minimum wage. The big difference is that now the orthodoxy wants to increase the minimum wage quite a bit. So, the 2 things are treated differently.
So, in this thread I posted what these scientist and everybody goes crazy attacking the scientists being political, lacking substance, calling them a death cult. I was censored on that thread and had the thread title changed for me. Finally, the thread was sunk.
Now, if you go click on that thread you will see that I have added to it. And there are studies that question the lockdown policies. There is even a study in the American Medical Journal that says that Hydrochloroquine should be used to treat Covid, and the Lancet study saying it had no efficacy has been retracted. But, in his infinite wisdom the admin decided to "sink"the thread. He says because it wasn't about science. It is really because I questioning an obviously simple man's religion.
poor you.
I'm not responsible for any of that. So why not respond to me without regard for how badly you think others are treating you?
It's MOL's version of "Godwin's Law" - "As a political thread including Terp grows longer, the probability that everyone will be told that they're too uneducated to appreciate the 'Libertarian' point of view approaches 1."
that wouldn't be so bad, if he was directly responding to the info and arguments posted by others and then telling us we're too dumb to understand. But responding that we don't need no stinkin' research, and citing a 15 year old blog post as the last word on the topic is what's really ignorant.
The law of Supply and Deman has been around for some time as have the effects of price floors on those laws. You do a quick internet serch and find a good explanation.
For the record, we've been down this unemployment road before. And people have posted studies in the past. I've read them. You posted a 52 page PDF, and then you're going to jump all over me for not draining that thing? I've read it all before. Most of these studies make leaps of logic and do not account for everything. It is very difficult to.
I would also add that its troubling to me to throw, even with your own numbers, > 1 Million people into unemployment. This does not seem to be a great deal for those people?
Now, you have complained about how old the blog post is. I'm going to link you to an article written by an economist that questions some of these new techniques cited in the CBO study. This article is from 2015, but you should note that the CBO study cites the same researchers and some of the same studies.
In the 1980s, there was a genuine consensus that a 10-percent hike in the minimum wage would reduce teenage employment by 1 to 3 percent. However, in the 1990s, various “case studies” began challenging this orthodox view, and more recent studies have generalized techniques to apparently find negligible employment effects. Many economists have used this new research to assure policymakers and the public to pay no heed to warnings about harmful job losses from even aggressive minimum wage hikes.
However, in reality, the employment effect of the minimum wage is still an open question even for modest hikes. Since the 1990s, scores of articles have found negative effects of minimum wage increases. These include “case studies,” with one serving as the mirror image of the famous Card and Krueger study. Furthermore, critics have challenged the entire premise of the new techniques, which claim to construct better control groups than the traditional approaches.
Finally, even if we take the very best examples of the “new” results at face value, they provide little comfort that large hikes in the minimum wage—such as a doubling to $15 per hour—will have modest impacts. Policymakers and the public should be wary of the glib assurances of some prominent economists when they claim that such large hikes will not cause teenagers to lose their jobs. The odds are very high that they will.
I don't think you're actually reading what I wrote or linked to. I wrote almost the same thing as was contained in the abstract you linked to earlier. I think you often reflexively object to my comments.
On the question of who has minimum wage jobs, and which types of companies employ minimum wage laborers, I think it's worth noting that the job landscape looks quite a bit different than it did when those of us posting were younger (quite different from the 1980s for instance). Minimum wage jobs as a short term stepping stone into the world of work isn't the reality. I don't know that there are so many folks trying "raise a family of four," but there's a lot more folks who are getting stuck and not raising families (or paying for school, or starting their own business, or other personal life goals -- not everyone is looking to start a family) at all because they can't earn enough to advance in life economically.
Given that decreased economic mobility is a reality, it will certainly help a lot of people to ensure those who are stuck can earn a decent living. And though it won't of itself solve the problem of decreased mobility, it can be part of the solution -- a higher minimum wage makes it easier to pay for school (something that's really gotten far more expensive), to build up savings, etc.
On the mix of businesses we have now -- eg the "do you just want to see Amazon and Walmart" question, it's a good question but not, I don't think, really that tied to the question of minimum wage. After all, companies like Amazon and Walmart built their dominance by ruthlessly holding down costs, very much including labor costs. The idea that the way to combat them is to keep labor costs down is, well let's cal it an unintuitive argument that needs more work to be convincing.
More to the point, though, the changed business landscape I think has a lot more to do with other factors. Personally, I really like the kinds of communities that are walkable and have lots of independent businesses -- places like downtown Maplewood or many neighborhoods in New York, for instance. But those kinds of businesses are very tied to high foot traffic for their success -- seems to me that for those kinds of businesses to succeed, policies that get people out of their cars and into the neighborhoods are far more relevant than whether the Able Baker will need to charge a few cents more for their muffins.
That's just one example -- much as I love nerding out on transportation policy, my goal here isn't to distract into a discussion of why we need more mass transit and less cars, but just to point out that there are a lot of factors besides labor costs involved in our changing business landscape, and many of those factors arguably have far greater impact that any raise in the minimum wage.
you complain a lot about being treated poorly here. But you give no indication that you really want an intelligent exchange. You don't read the links, you don't address the info, you don't provide a reasoned argument, you just provide arrogant snideness in response.
Good for you.
I am treated pretty poorly here. You don't see it because I'm not in your tribe. Your tribe is always right. Those outside your tribe are always wrong and are probably a white supremecist and thus probably have whatever treatment they get coming.
But, in his infinite wisdom the admin decided to "sink"the thread. He says because it wasn't about science. It seems much more likely that I was guilty of questioning a simple man's religion.
you complain a lot about being treated poorly here. But you give no indication that you really want an intelligent exchange. You don't read the links, you don't address the info, you don't provide a reasoned argument, you just provide arrogant snideness in response.
Good for you.
I am treated pretty poorly here. You don't see it because I'm not in your tribe. Your tribe is always right. Those outside your tribe are always wrong and are probably a white supremecist and thus probably have whatever treatment they get coming.
But, in his infinite wisdom the admin decided to "sink"the thread. He says because it wasn't about science. It seems much more likely that I was guilty of questioning a simple man's religion.
Well, for example, something like that.
by "religion" are we referring to deep and abiding belief in theoretical concepts that haven't been proven by empirical observation?
As someone who used waiting tables to help me get through about 1.5-2 years of secondary school, I would not dismiss that payment structure. There were definitely some down times, but the fact that if you did a good job, were attentive & friendly, you usually did pretty well.
We have a few posters here who grew up in, or live in, places that don't have the American tipping culture. If they're reading, would be nice to hear some thoughts on how early and pre-career work shakes out differently than in America. Do students tend to work while studying, for instance, and what are service jobs like?
I had plenty of crappy, menial minimum wage jobs in my younger years, so I'm not too privileged to know what it's like to work hard for a meager paycheck. But any system that requires results in workers "usually" being paid well isn't optimal IMHO. If a person works hard and does a good job they should always do pretty well from a pay standpoint.
It does -- and one of my goals for this year is to try to be less of a contributor to that dynamic. And to that end, there's a few questions around the minimum wage I think are interesting:
- Does a single national wage make sense, or does the ideal minimum wage allow for some variations? California, for instance, I believe has two rates, depending on how many employees a business has. Minnesota has two rates, depending on gross revenue
(source: https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/payroll/minimum-wage-by-state/)
- The pattern seems to have been the federal rate getting updated at very long intervals. I think it'd be better to have some auto-adjusting mechanism, but what would be the ideal signals to peg any such adjustments to?
- With a uniform national minimum wage, that will have a much greater impact in some areas than others -- eg Alabama, where there is no state level minimum wage, vs San Francisco, where there is a municipal minimum wage higher than the state's. Would this, even to a small degree, counter the economic centralization we've been seeing, where economic power increasingly concentrates in a handful of metros? If workers are able to get good wages in places like Wyoming or Tennessee, does that reduce the economic pressure that increasingly says you have to be in the NY or SF or LA etc labor market to have a chance at a decently paying job?