5 ms·

This is why I appreciate the $15 an hour minimum wage movement. Paying people more is better then taxing the rich more. The super-rich own congress but at the

by gscott 9y ago

This is why I appreciate the $15 an hour minimum wage movement. Paying people more is better then taxing the rich more. The super-rich own congress but at the city and State level there is depending upon the state some room to grow wages. Higher wages equals fewer people on public subsidies which is good for cities and states.

aoeuasdf1 9y ago
Why not an earned income tax credit instead of an arbitrary cutoff at which point labor becomes worthless and illegal to sell?
sokoloff 9y ago
Higher minimum wages means fewer employed people on public subsidies. It's less clear to me that it makes for fewer people overall on subsidies. If the economic value of someone's labor is only $10/hr, they are less likely to be employed with a $15 minimum wage than a $9 minimum wage.
- WaxProlix 9y ago
  What labor has value below the required amount to exist as a human? I think the reasoning is - if it's worth being done, it's worth paying someone a meager living wage to have it done.
  - nopriorarrests 9y ago
    All labor which could be done by people in, say, Vietnam or Laos, has value below the required amount to exist as a human in USA. So, more and more of it.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    That's the point: there is almost certainly work being done now for $10/hr that is not economically worth being done if the lower limit by statute is $15/hr. If someone is capable of holding down that $10/hr job but not capable of landing a $15/hr job, they are harmed by an increase in minimum wage in two ways: 1. The direct loss of job, income, status. 2. They are now shopping in an economy where the goods/services they purchase are likely to be marginally more expensive.
    - lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
      >If someone is not capable That mindset continues to be disgusting to me. Humans are some of the most impressive creatures on Earth; baring actual disability, you can teach them to do all sorts of things. I'm going to love watching the tech scene's existential panic over the next 2 decades as the population increasingly realizes that making CRUD apps and junk SAS is a job many Americans are more than capable of doing.
      - closeparen 9y ago
        "Capable" isn't a binary, lifelong condition. The remedy for incapability is generally considered to be education.
        lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
        The dirty secret is that there's a whole class of jobs, mostly decently paying white collar jobs, that have most of the training on the job. Hell most of the jobs that only require an undergraduate degree involve extensive on the job training; college is used as a weak signal for aptitude, interest, and class not really capability (this is the entire business model around coding boot-camps).
        closeparen 9y ago
        I got about 3 days of on-the-job training, pitched at showing generally skilled programmers the company's specific tools, practices, and environment. The rest was just being thrown into the normal day-to-day work, with the expectation that I'd ask more questions and make slower progress at first. You can't just throw a laid-off factory worker into that position, though I agree, you can probable prepare him to handle it more efficiently than a 4-year BS degree program, which is what bootcamps are looking to capitalize on. It matters a great deal to the employee to have been put in a situation like that before (homework & hobby projects) and developed a decent intuition & familiarity. It matters a great deal to the employer to know that that the candidate has done something like this before and will be substantially likely to succeed. There's a little more going on here than class signaling.
  - mdorazio 9y ago
    While I agree in principle, the counter-argument is that you're just going to end up with that job going overseas or getting automated. Basically, if you need something done and it's only worth $10/hour to you to have it done, but no one near you will do it for less than $15/hour, either 1) it won't get done and that $10/hour economic input is lost, or 2) you'll find a way to get it done for $10/hour or less via means other than employing a local human.
    - sooheon 9y ago
      And when outsourcing happens, you tax the fuck out of that business transaction, and with the proceeds pay your unemployed laborers a livable minimum income. You think Chinese labor is cheap for no reason? There are tons of gov't subsidies, from straight up handouts to nonexistant labor laws (which are a form of subsidy to big business at the expense of workers, a reverse tax). The same should apply to automation. The inordinate inequality of wealth which is bound to happen with automation should be alleviated through heavy taxation. Or if tax is too dirty a word, ownership of such dual capital/labor should be partly socialized--i.e. newly created AI/robot companies must put up a % of their shares to the public who receive equal amounts.
    - taneq 9y ago
      Actually you get 3) the cost of the output of that process goes up, leading to a small price rise to the end user.
      - sooheon 9y ago
        Unless that cost was "digestible" by the system, but had simply been previously going to C-level and board members' salaries. Then companies which continue to pay execs exorbitantly, and companies which give their execs a 0.001% pay cut or otherwise reduce inefficiencies to absorb the cost increase will compete.
      - mdorazio 9y ago
        I think this is only true in a closed system. In an open, globalized world like we have today, the price of the output doesn't have to go up if another place with cheaper labor can produce the same output for cheaper. Thus is many cases you end up with a situation where you can't raise the price of your output because your customers will just buy the foreign-produced version.
gehwartzen 9y ago
We need to just peg the minimum wage to inflation so we don't have to do this every decade or two.
- helthanatos 9y ago
  Minimum wage++ == Inflation++
  - jaggederest 9y ago
    Except that they've tracked that, and it doesn't. There was a nice recent natural experiment in Seattle, and the effect was negligible. Do you have any empirical evidence otherwise?
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
  Ugh yeah. I'm glad I'm not the only one that hates this generalized fight for a number that's ultimately irrelevant.
ams6110 9y ago
The problem is that if you set a minimum wage that is higher than the real value of the work performed, it means those jobs just simply won't exist anymore.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  The real value of a lot of products and services is more adjustable than your statement would lead someone to believe. Reality is absolutely not an efficient marketplace that immediately culls jobs and workers the moment a certain price of labor threshold is reached.
  - prostoalex 9y ago
    And yet ATMs, self-checkout lines and online shopping are a thing, and so are bank branch closures, retail bankruptcies and mall vacancy rates.
    - chillwaves 9y ago
      That is efficiency. We won't pay people to dig ditches when we have machines to do it. Efficiency is not the enemy, resource distribution is.
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  As far as I'm aware, none of the studies on increasing minimum wage have shown this.
  - johnnyb9 9y ago
    http://www.seattletimes.com/business/uw-study-finds-seattles-minimum-wage-is-costing-jobs/ http://www.seattletimes.com/business/uw-study-finds-seattles...
- yen223 9y ago
  In a world where CEOs can receive massive bonuses for driving a company to the ground, that's not easy to believe at all.
guelo 9y ago
Minimum wage costs are mostly passed on as increased prices paid by the middle class. The profits to the .01% class are barely affected.
- AlexandrB 9y ago
  This is entirely a consequence of economic policy set the by the US government. Not some immutable property of our world. As such it can be changed through, for example, a more progressive tax policy.
derping69 9y ago
Why stop there? Just make it 100$ and hour and everyone will be rich! Oh wait, arbitrary wage increases don't really work out in real life. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/seattles-minimum-wage-hike-may-have-gone-too-far/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/seattles-minimum-wage-h... Seattle's socialist member of the city council fired the Unversity of Washington team after the results came out and hired an anti-capitalist professor from berkeley to ensure the study finds the right results. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/29/seattle-commissions-new-minimum-wage-study-after-dismissing-first-results.html http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/29/seattle-commissio...
- baobrain 9y ago
  Note that your fivethirtyeight article even mentions a caveat to the study: > The paper’s findings are preliminary and have not yet been subjected to peer review. And the authors stressed that even if their results hold up, their research leaves important questions unanswered, particularly about how the minimum wage has affected individual workers and businesses. > Many economists, meanwhile, have acknowledged substantial uncertainty over the likely effects of the recent wage hikes. Most — though by no means all — past research has found that modest increases to the minimum wage have little impact on employment, and that if employers do eliminate jobs or cut back hours, those losses are dwarfed by the income gains enjoyed by the majority of workers who keep their jobs. But those studies were mostly based on minimum wages that were much lower than the ones beginning to take effect now. Even some liberal economists have expressed concern, often privately, that employers might respond differently to a minimum wage of $12 or $15, which would affect a far broader swath of workers than the part-time fast-food and retail employees who typically dominate the ranks of minimum-wage earners. Other economists said there simply wasn’t enough evidence to predict the impact of minimum wages that high. The new laws in Seattle and other cities, then, could provide an ideal testing ground. Additionally, here is a post by Jared Bernstein related to the minimum wage hike[0]. Here is the book mentioned in the aforementioned post [1]. Another analysis[2] finding that "Once this publication selection is corrected, little or no evidence of a negative association between minimum wages and employment remains." While I also do not know for certain the effects of a minimum wage, one of your sources fairly lists caveats and uncertainty for the study it mentions, and the other is fox news. [0] http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/the-minimum-wage-increase-and-the-cbos-job-loss-estimate/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JaredBernstein+%28Jared+Bernstein%29 http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/the-minimum-wage-increase-and-... [1] http://www.upjohn.org/publications/upjohn-institute-press/what-does-minimum-wage-do http://www.upjohn.org/publications/upjohn-institute-press/wh... [2] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009.00723.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009....
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
prostoalex 9y ago
If the minimum wage is a universal solution works for everybody, why are there so many exemptions and carveouts? Family-owned businesses like restaurants are exempt, self-employed individuals are exempt, piecemeal farm labor is exempt, babysitters and other "occasional" labor have their own exemption, tipped workers have a carveout. There's a special rate for minors because apparently nobody thinks high school kids will produce $15 of value per hour yet they still need to learn the ropes of the business and personal responsibility somehow.

by gscott 9y ago

aoeuasdf1 9y ago

Why not an earned income tax credit instead of an arbitrary cutoff at which point labor becomes worthless and illegal to sell?

sokoloff 9y ago

Higher minimum wages means fewer employed people on public subsidies. It's less clear to me that it makes for fewer people overall on subsidies. If the economic value of someone's labor is only $10/hr, they are less likely to be employed with a $15 minimum wage than a $9 minimum wage.

WaxProlix 9y ago
What labor has value below the required amount to exist as a human? I think the reasoning is - if it's worth being done, it's worth paying someone a meager living wage to have it done.
- nopriorarrests 9y ago
  All labor which could be done by people in, say, Vietnam or Laos, has value below the required amount to exist as a human in USA. So, more and more of it.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  That's the point: there is almost certainly work being done now for $10/hr that is not economically worth being done if the lower limit by statute is $15/hr. If someone is capable of holding down that $10/hr job but not capable of landing a $15/hr job, they are harmed by an increase in minimum wage in two ways: 1. The direct loss of job, income, status. 2. They are now shopping in an economy where the goods/services they purchase are likely to be marginally more expensive.
  - lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
    >If someone is not capable That mindset continues to be disgusting to me. Humans are some of the most impressive creatures on Earth; baring actual disability, you can teach them to do all sorts of things. I'm going to love watching the tech scene's existential panic over the next 2 decades as the population increasingly realizes that making CRUD apps and junk SAS is a job many Americans are more than capable of doing.
    - closeparen 9y ago
      "Capable" isn't a binary, lifelong condition. The remedy for incapability is generally considered to be education.
      - lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
        The dirty secret is that there's a whole class of jobs, mostly decently paying white collar jobs, that have most of the training on the job. Hell most of the jobs that only require an undergraduate degree involve extensive on the job training; college is used as a weak signal for aptitude, interest, and class not really capability (this is the entire business model around coding boot-camps).
        closeparen 9y ago
        I got about 3 days of on-the-job training, pitched at showing generally skilled programmers the company's specific tools, practices, and environment. The rest was just being thrown into the normal day-to-day work, with the expectation that I'd ask more questions and make slower progress at first. You can't just throw a laid-off factory worker into that position, though I agree, you can probable prepare him to handle it more efficiently than a 4-year BS degree program, which is what bootcamps are looking to capitalize on. It matters a great deal to the employee to have been put in a situation like that before (homework & hobby projects) and developed a decent intuition & familiarity. It matters a great deal to the employer to know that that the candidate has done something like this before and will be substantially likely to succeed. There's a little more going on here than class signaling.
- mdorazio 9y ago
  While I agree in principle, the counter-argument is that you're just going to end up with that job going overseas or getting automated. Basically, if you need something done and it's only worth $10/hour to you to have it done, but no one near you will do it for less than $15/hour, either 1) it won't get done and that $10/hour economic input is lost, or 2) you'll find a way to get it done for $10/hour or less via means other than employing a local human.
  - sooheon 9y ago
    And when outsourcing happens, you tax the fuck out of that business transaction, and with the proceeds pay your unemployed laborers a livable minimum income. You think Chinese labor is cheap for no reason? There are tons of gov't subsidies, from straight up handouts to nonexistant labor laws (which are a form of subsidy to big business at the expense of workers, a reverse tax). The same should apply to automation. The inordinate inequality of wealth which is bound to happen with automation should be alleviated through heavy taxation. Or if tax is too dirty a word, ownership of such dual capital/labor should be partly socialized--i.e. newly created AI/robot companies must put up a % of their shares to the public who receive equal amounts.
  - taneq 9y ago
    Actually you get 3) the cost of the output of that process goes up, leading to a small price rise to the end user.
    - sooheon 9y ago
      Unless that cost was "digestible" by the system, but had simply been previously going to C-level and board members' salaries. Then companies which continue to pay execs exorbitantly, and companies which give their execs a 0.001% pay cut or otherwise reduce inefficiencies to absorb the cost increase will compete.
    - mdorazio 9y ago
      I think this is only true in a closed system. In an open, globalized world like we have today, the price of the output doesn't have to go up if another place with cheaper labor can produce the same output for cheaper. Thus is many cases you end up with a situation where you can't raise the price of your output because your customers will just buy the foreign-produced version.

gehwartzen 9y ago

We need to just peg the minimum wage to inflation so we don't have to do this every decade or two.

helthanatos 9y ago
Minimum wage++ == Inflation++
- jaggederest 9y ago
  Except that they've tracked that, and it doesn't. There was a nice recent natural experiment in Seattle, and the effect was negligible. Do you have any empirical evidence otherwise?
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
Ugh yeah. I'm glad I'm not the only one that hates this generalized fight for a number that's ultimately irrelevant.

ams6110 9y ago

The problem is that if you set a minimum wage that is higher than the real value of the work performed, it means those jobs just simply won't exist anymore.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
The real value of a lot of products and services is more adjustable than your statement would lead someone to believe. Reality is absolutely not an efficient marketplace that immediately culls jobs and workers the moment a certain price of labor threshold is reached.
- prostoalex 9y ago
  And yet ATMs, self-checkout lines and online shopping are a thing, and so are bank branch closures, retail bankruptcies and mall vacancy rates.
  - chillwaves 9y ago
    That is efficiency. We won't pay people to dig ditches when we have machines to do it. Efficiency is not the enemy, resource distribution is.
enraged_camel 9y ago
As far as I'm aware, none of the studies on increasing minimum wage have shown this.
- johnnyb9 9y ago
  http://www.seattletimes.com/business/uw-study-finds-seattles-minimum-wage-is-costing-jobs/ http://www.seattletimes.com/business/uw-study-finds-seattles...
yen223 9y ago
In a world where CEOs can receive massive bonuses for driving a company to the ground, that's not easy to believe at all.

guelo 9y ago

Minimum wage costs are mostly passed on as increased prices paid by the middle class. The profits to the .01% class are barely affected.

AlexandrB 9y ago
This is entirely a consequence of economic policy set the by the US government. Not some immutable property of our world. As such it can be changed through, for example, a more progressive tax policy.

derping69 9y ago

Why stop there? Just make it 100$ and hour and everyone will be rich! Oh wait, arbitrary wage increases don't really work out in real life. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/seattles-minimum-wage-hike-may-have-gone-too-far/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/seattles-minimum-wage-h... Seattle's socialist member of the city council fired the Unversity of Washington team after the results came out and hired an anti-capitalist professor from berkeley to ensure the study finds the right results. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/29/seattle-commissions-new-minimum-wage-study-after-dismissing-first-results.html http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/29/seattle-commissio...

baobrain 9y ago
Note that your fivethirtyeight article even mentions a caveat to the study: > The paper’s findings are preliminary and have not yet been subjected to peer review. And the authors stressed that even if their results hold up, their research leaves important questions unanswered, particularly about how the minimum wage has affected individual workers and businesses. > Many economists, meanwhile, have acknowledged substantial uncertainty over the likely effects of the recent wage hikes. Most — though by no means all — past research has found that modest increases to the minimum wage have little impact on employment, and that if employers do eliminate jobs or cut back hours, those losses are dwarfed by the income gains enjoyed by the majority of workers who keep their jobs. But those studies were mostly based on minimum wages that were much lower than the ones beginning to take effect now. Even some liberal economists have expressed concern, often privately, that employers might respond differently to a minimum wage of $12 or $15, which would affect a far broader swath of workers than the part-time fast-food and retail employees who typically dominate the ranks of minimum-wage earners. Other economists said there simply wasn’t enough evidence to predict the impact of minimum wages that high. The new laws in Seattle and other cities, then, could provide an ideal testing ground. Additionally, here is a post by Jared Bernstein related to the minimum wage hike[0]. Here is the book mentioned in the aforementioned post [1]. Another analysis[2] finding that "Once this publication selection is corrected, little or no evidence of a negative association between minimum wages and employment remains." While I also do not know for certain the effects of a minimum wage, one of your sources fairly lists caveats and uncertainty for the study it mentions, and the other is fox news. [0] http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/the-minimum-wage-increase-and-the-cbos-job-loss-estimate/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JaredBernstein+%28Jared+Bernstein%29 http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/the-minimum-wage-increase-and-... [1] http://www.upjohn.org/publications/upjohn-institute-press/what-does-minimum-wage-do http://www.upjohn.org/publications/upjohn-institute-press/wh... [2] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009.00723.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009....

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

prostoalex 9y ago

If the minimum wage is a universal solution works for everybody, why are there so many exemptions and carveouts? Family-owned businesses like restaurants are exempt, self-employed individuals are exempt, piecemeal farm labor is exempt, babysitters and other "occasional" labor have their own exemption, tipped workers have a carveout. There's a special rate for minors because apparently nobody thinks high school kids will produce $15 of value per hour yet they still need to learn the ropes of the business and personal responsibility somehow.