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The simple fact is that an adult needs X amount of money to be able to live with roommates, eat, drive their car to your job, etc. That amount of money is abou

• robomartin 5y ago
  > The simple fact is that an adult needs X amount of money to be able to live with roommates, eat, drive their car to your job, etc. Sure. Let's pay everyone $50 an hour then? Do you understand how ridiculous it is to base a minimum wage on what an adult needs to live with roommates? It's a need. Of course it is a need. However, forcing a minimum wage isn't the solution at all. If it were, we could "fix it" by paying everyone $20, $30, $50, $500 per hour. Anyone but a complete moron can easily understand what happens if we set a minimum wage of $100 per hour. EVERY JOB THAT CAN BE EXPORTED WILL BE EXPORTED. For everything else, inflation will absolutely explode. Which means that your $100 per hour won't buy you anything except for everything made in China (which will have higher prices because the Chinese are not stupid and will raise their prices to make more money). Home will cost 10x more and cars will double or triple in price. So, the $100 per hour quickly turns into a real $10 per hour. All we've done is play with numbers to create funny money. The ONLY ONES who benefit are the Chinese because they are doing everything they have to do in order to grow their economy and become the dominant economy in the world for the next 200 years. That's the game and the stakes. People are allowing politicians to run us into the ground (or below it). Your "simple economics" isn't real economics. It's wishful thinking. In the real world, with a globally integrated economy, a job and a standard of living can only exist in the context of where goods and services can be delivered more effectively. This isn't even about greed. Anyone who has migrated work to China and other shores understands this very well. Only the ignorant equate this to greed. The truth of the matter is that market forces push pricing down. Since you won't pay more than $99 for a blender, everyone has to make them in China and margins are narrow. Nobody is making 300% margins because they went to China. If they do, those margins will collapse very quickly as competitors move their ops to China and push pricing down. That's economic reality. Like it or not. Try to make something not-trivial in the US or Europe and see what happens. Most people would be horrified by the reality those of us in manufacturing understand all too well. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.
  • mplewis 5y ago
    They’re already exporting jobs.
    • robomartin 5y ago
      Raise costs and they export even more jobs. As many as possible. I see it in what I am doing every day. I truly want to manufacture in the US. I really do. I am angry about this whole situation because of it. Stupid policies prevent me from having the option to manufacture in the US. Policies that are so destructive that you are left with no option but to send the work to China. The only other option is to go out of business. I do not want to do this! Yet my government and the ignorant masses who vote for them and support their ignorant ways effectively forces me to take that path. It does not have to be this way at all. Yet, on the current path, things are not trending towards getting better at all. My partners and I have already discussed moving all manufacturing to China. All of it. Just like Apple, we would design here and manufacture there. I am the only one who is stubbornly holding that decision back. And I know I am going to lose. There's nothing I can do about it. It's like fighting the laws of physics. And then I post here and people who don't have a clue refuse to even think about this and attempt to understand. How have we become so ignorant. It isn't about a single policy. It isn't just about minimum wage. It's death by a thousand cuts. I'll give you another example that won't be popular. What we are doing with the southern border is absolutely criminal. I haven't kept up with numbers. I think the last estimate I read was that over 1.5 million people got in...and that's the ones we know about. BY DEFINITION: Every single one of them is unemployed. Yet, they are not counted in unemployment statistics because, well, they don't exist. Even worse, we are not creating 1.5 million NEW jobs per year for them. If we were, there could be justification for accepting people with the right skill sets. We are not. Which means we are importing unemployment. We might even be importing people who will be abused and work for menial wages in the shadows. No matter how you look at it, this isn't a plan for economic growth and stability at all. We are losing jobs and we are importing unemployment. What's another layer of stupidity? Energy policy. It is beyond belief that we are letting people like AOC even have a word in this conversation. Solar energy is fantastic. I built a 13 kW array. As an engineer, I know everything there is to know about solar and then some. I also know that we need to build nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow. Solar is far from clean. A solar power plant equivalent to a nuclear plant consumes so much land and resources most would be horrified. Not to mention effects on wildlife, etc. If we are going to achieve the dream of converting our ground transportation fleet to electric vehicles we are going to need to DOUBLE our power generation capacity (and power transmission infrastructure). You cannot do this with solar. Solar is unreliable and expensive. You have to do it with nuclear, at least a majority of it. That means duplicating the entire US's power generation capacity. We need twice the power. That means we need an ADDITIONAL 1200 GW. A typical nuclear power plant is rated at 1 GW. Yes, that means we need to build somewhere in the order of 1000 nuclear power plants, or maybe 500 and make-up the rest with solar, natural gas, etc. The other one is the war against oil. This is so ridiculous it hurts to even think about it. Simple concept: We all want clean cars and clean energy. At scale (300 million vehicles) this means undertaking the largest set of infrastructure projects in the history of this nation. Yes, heavy construction and manufacturing throughout the land. What do we need to move materials, dirt, concrete, rebar, solar panels, grade and dig the land, etc.? OIL! With oil at $130 per barrel there is no way in hell we can afford the infrastructure development that would be required to transition a nation like the US to clean energy. We need $20 per barrel oil for 25 years. With a mission. In other words, it can't be about lower the cost of oil so we can have cheaper gasoline and diesel. It has to be: We need cheap gasoline and diesel so we can build thousands of solar, wind and nuclear power plants as well as upgrade our entire power delivery infrastructure over 25 to 50 years so we can transition to more those power sources. Once again, politicians drive the narrative that is most convenient for them in order to secure jobs and remain in power until they retire with nice benefits and pensions. The carnage and long term destruction they create is lost on everyone living for the moment. Sadly, most people don't exercise much in the way of critical and strategic thinking when they vote for and support these charlatans. Anyhow, yeah, I am angry and frustrated because I want to work in my country and create jobs here but my government and the people who support their dumb policies prevents me from doing this. Even trying to educate people about these realities is futile. What happens to a lot of business owners --after getting tired of hitting their heads against the wall-- is to capitulate and take a "if you can't beat them, join them" position where they make good money for themselves and stop caring about not being able to create jobs and build full companies here (or in Europe, same problems).