12 ms·

Then let's raise it to $1000 an hour. We'll all be rich. To respond to the above comment, yes, it does lead to higher unemployment for those with lower skills,

by jstalin 14y ago

Then let's raise it to $1000 an hour. We'll all be rich. To respond to the above comment, yes, it does lead to higher unemployment for those with lower skills, particularly in an environment when unemployment is already high. Who would you hire for $12 an hour? A teenager with no experience or someone who was laid off but has 5-10 years of experience? We already see (at least in the United States) that teen unemployment is the highest of all age groups at 23%, when average unemployment amongst all age groups is 7.9%. [1] For comparison, Germany has no statutory minimum wage (except for a few specific employment groups). Not exactly a bastion of poverty and destitution. [2] [1]: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm [2]: http://www.economist.com/node/21536648 http://www.economist.com/node/21536648

MartinCron 14y ago
Then let's raise it to $1000 an hour. We'll all be rich Ridiculous arguments are ridiculous. The rest of your point is more than strong enough to stand on its own without that kind of nonsense.
- jstalin 14y ago
  That's my point. Obviously, increasing the minimum wage to $1000 is ridiculous. But so is the idea that raising the minimum wage by $1 has no consequence, as some claim. The higher cost you impose on employers for low skill jobs, the more likely it will be that employers will attempt to hire fewer of those workers or reject unskilled candidates. It's simple logic. For instance, the hamburger-making machine will replace teenagers who need a job at McDonald's. [1] Why wouldn't an employer just purchase a machine that will reduce costs, create a consistent product, and not call in sick if it can do so at an equivalent or lower cost than an unskilled teen who would be required to earn $10 or $12 an hour? [1]: http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger-machine/25159/ http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger-machine/25159/ EDIT: 5.2% of US workers earn at or below the minimum wage, 50% of those are under 25: http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2011.htm http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2011.htm
  - avar 14y ago
    Why do you think a hamburger making machine is a bad thing? Automation in the long term is good for the economy, if it wasn't for automation those same teenagers would be manually plowing fields instead of flipping burgers. If anything raising the minimum wage a bit should spur a lot of automation industries, and those same teenagers would be more likely to get an entry level job there, instead of at a menial job.
    - cema 14y ago
      I guess the point is that, as the min wage grows, certain considerations that were not viable before become viable now, and as a consequence people who otherwise may have been considered for a job would no more, or would lose the job, or the job itself would disappear.
      - Klinky 14y ago
        ...yet when industry eliminates redundancies and increases automation, resulting in lost jobs, it's viewed as efficiency.
        cema 14y ago
        It does have other consequences, certainly.
    - dennisgorelik 14y ago
      Automation in the long term is a good thing. However forcing automation by legal system is suboptimal for economy. Even in the long term.
    - chaostheory 14y ago
      It's not a bad thing for us. It's a bad for the people that minimum wage is supposedly trying to help. Increase minimum wage, decrease low skilled jobs, and increase mechanization.
      - 14y ago
- Dove 14y ago
  I don't think it's nonsense. The things that are wrong with a $1000 minimum wage are the same things that are wrong with a $10 minimum wage. They're just happening to different people. Setting a $1000 minimum wage would destroy essentially all jobs. There's nothing I or most people could do that's worth that much. Nothing at all. With my job gone, my income is zero and the products and services I contributed to society don't exist. Such a law would make me permanently poor, and would make society incrementally poorer. This is what I think happens to people whose natural output is below the minimum wage. Because their skills and education justify $6/hr but not $9, they aren't allowed to make that $6. They and society are $6/hr poorer for it. I believe firmly that people should be allowed to work if they want to, on whatever terms they find agreeable and can get. If you want to help them beyond that, I'm sure they'll think that's swell. But it shouldn't come in the form of destroying their job.
  - superuser2 14y ago
    You're ignoring the fact that if you made $1000/hr, you could afford (and thus would be charged) higher prices for everything else, and so would everyone. Thus you would be producing $1000/hr, it's just that a thousand then would mean less than it does now. That's inflation. So long as people spend and the economy grows faster than that, we're better off than we were.
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      Hyperinflation would destroy everyone's savings and destroy the ability of anyone to invest. This is a ridiculous line of reasoning anyways.
    - superuser2 14y ago
      It's hyperinflation if you're increasing to $1000/hr, which is why no one is seriously suggesting that. Otherwise it's a little bit of inflation, and one that would be overshadowed by the resulting growth.
    - Dove 14y ago
      Inflation doesn't work that way. You can't legislate it into existence, and you can't legislate it away. If you could, it would be an easy problem to solve. Inflation occurs when you add to the money supply more than you add to the economy. The California gold rush caused inflation. Countries with hyperinflation have governments that are printing money at incredible rates. That's completely orthogonal to minimum wage. If you say I must have a $1000/hr job, it's in current dollars. Even if my employer wanted to pay me more, he can't -- he doesn't have the money to! Even if everyone wanted to switch over to doing that, they couldn't; there isn't enough money in the system! If everyone woke up tomorrow and agreed that a dollar was worth 1000x less, they'd all be 1000x poorer and nobody could afford anything. No, the minimum wage doesn't change the value of a dollar. It just changes who's allowed to earn one.
- WalterBright 14y ago
  If raising the minimum wage to $12 is good for the economy, and raising it to $1000 is bad, then there's an inflection point where it switches from good to bad. Therefore, the theory that raising the minimum wage is good for the economy is incomplete at best.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    No, it's not. This is just straw man reasoning that doesn't belong on HN. Obviously, it's not a smooth linear curve, so a raise to $10/hour is not just a weaker form of a raise to $1000 hour. One is healthy and the other wrecks the economy. There is not an inflection point, only a straw man here.
    - darkarmani 14y ago
      What's the strawman part of it? Raising the minimum wage is a strawman? Who decides which one wrecks the economy?
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    Absolutely. Totally incomplete. My point is not that "higher is better". My point is that some adjustments to some adjustable parameters may be beneficial in some contexts. Generalize further than that at your own risk.
    - dennisgorelik 14y ago
      Do you have an example of when $X/hour person would benefit from setting mandatory minimum wage to $(X+1)/hour?
      - ncallaway 14y ago
        Yes. If the job actually produces more than $(X+1)/hour worth of productivity to the employer. The employer, unable to continue their advantageous position of paying $X/hour (it being illegal), but finding the job still worth retaining (it generating more than $(X+1)/hour) retains the employee. The employee's salary goes from $X/hour to $(X+1)/hour. Or did I totally misunderstand your question?
- aprime 14y ago
  Reductio ad absurdum is a perfectly valid form of argument. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
- tatsuke95 14y ago
  >"Ridiculous arguments are ridiculous." So where is the line where it is no longer ridiculous, then? $999? $500? $10? Labour is an input cost of production; when the input prices rise, so do output prices to compensate. I'd vote for no minimum wage but with a minimum income subsidized by the government.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
Germany also has strong labor unions and statutory codetermination. America decided to basically kill off organized labor and use government instead.
gscott 14y ago
> Who would you hire for $12 an hour? Any business that is econmically viable can afford $12 an hour. McDonalds, car washes, Denny's, etc. If you can't afford $12 an hour then there is something wrong with your business.
- randallsquared 14y ago
  So, in your opinion, people who cannot produce at least $12 an hour of value should not be allowed to produce anything? That seems to be the logical consequence of shutting down all businesses that need to pay less than that...
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    I would guess the point is that those companies are probably very few. If your business can't extract $12 an hour from an employee then perhaps it should fail. The harm done by these job losses is less than the boost to the economy by putting more money in low income consumers pockets. I'm struggling to think of an example of labour that wouldn't produce $12 per hour in value and can't be reasonably cheaply automated.
    - dennisgorelik 14y ago
      If you are going to shut down some businesses, where would more money (to low income workers) come from?
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        Would depend on the effect of the rising costs (of labour) of the firms. Do they make less profit or increase the prices of their goods? Hopefully the extra money comes from an area that has a higher rate of tax than the tax rate of low income earners thus putting more money back into the "market economy". This should be likely in a country with progressive taxation.
        14y ago
diogenescynic 14y ago
This is a logical fallacy, reductio ad absurdum, or a slippery slope argument. If you want to argue your point at least do so without being intellectually dishonest.
drakeandrews 14y ago
Germany is also practically communist when compared with the USA. It has a public healthcare system, invented the modern welfare state and up until recently used its conscription laws to get young adults to staff its nursing homes and ambulances (amongst other things) for about €3/hour.
bayesianhorse 14y ago
The flip side to Germany's model is manifold, but one big difference is that the social security system will pay benefits to those who are full-time employed but don't have enough money to live. Before you say that's a stupid policy, consider that this is the minority of recipients of social benefits, and that often enough it's easier to get into better paying jobs from a low paying job than from being unemployed for a decade.
warfangle 14y ago
Yet, Germany also has very strong labor protection laws. If you have no minimum wage and no labor protection laws, it leads to sweatshop situations. You see some of the same thing in a lot of IT-oriented positions not located in IT epicenters: 24/7 availability, entry level wages, and ultimate responsibility for when the shit hits the fan -- even if you've been warning your boss that it'll hit the fan for the past eight months.
- eru 14y ago
  That's more of a consequence of low wage levels in general. As a counterexample: Singapore doesn't really have much labour protection nor minimum wage laws to speak of.
Gustomaximus 14y ago
This is an extreme example which lacks any depth of insight. It would be like me arguing; why don't governments print loads more money and we will all be rich as my reason they should not print anymore than we have today. To stay on the money analogy; we want governments to print THE RIGHT amount of money. If they print too little the economy will suffer just as much as if they print too much. This is the same as a minimum wage. If it is too low it damages things like consumption and quality of life. Too much and it is damaging competitiveness etc. I would suggest the best answer to this whole debate is in empirical data. Look at countries that have similar economies low AND high minimum wages and see what works best on the majority of case. Also personal views weight this argument. My lean on this is argument is that a country should be run to give the largest amount of people the best quality of life possible. If you have no problem with a large poor/rich gap you could easily argue to keep minimum wage down. Also Germany doesn't have a minimum wage but has legally enforced collective bargaining. Companies don't just pay what they think people are worth. Your example is not really givings the full story by pointing out there is no statutory minimum wage. Their government has employed a different system to ensure wage levels meet workers needs and is nothing like giving companies carte blanche to pay poverty wages.
Spooky23 14y ago
Please... People don't hire teens when the economy is weak because they are less reliable than adults. In the late 90's, fast food places were desperate for anyone -- they would hire folks willing to work as little as 4 hours a week! The sob story about the impact of minimum wage on companies is bogus. I was an asst manager in high school for a bakery/cafe... 20 employees, about 23000 hours of work each year... A minimum wage increase amounts to $25-30k a year, not a big deal. Wal-Mart is another great example... You have like 300 employees at a store, probably 3 million man-hours a year. So a minimum wage increase amounts to $3-4M a year -- peanuts for a company where average revenue per employee is $200k.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Did you just confuse revenue with earnings?
  - Spooky23 14y ago
    You're talking about $3M of additional cost with $60M in revenue. What does that mean in reality? You either take a margin hit, or enhance the margins by raising prices and changing product mix. Also consider that minimum wage folks proportionally spend alot of money where they work. If Wal-Mart adds $3M in payroll, they're getting alot of it back as sales.
- pixl97 14y ago
  I had a saying years ago that went like this... "You can tell the condition of the economy by the quality of fast food employees." > People don't hire teens when the economy is weak because they are less reliable than adults. Incorrect: People don't hire teens when the economy is weak because they can hire a MBA, BS, etc for the same price because they desperately need a job. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21180371 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21180371 Spain unemployment rate hit a record: youth rate at 55%
dagw 14y ago
For comparison, Germany has no statutory minimum wage However they do have various social systems in place where basically the government will make up the difference between what you earn and what you need to live for people working very low wage jobs.
Riesling 14y ago
> For comparison, Germany has no statutory minimum wage This is true, but you cannot use that as an argument, because the German system cannot be compared to the U.S. system. There are two reasons for having no minimum wage in Germany. First: It us up to the individual unions to negotiate a minimum wage. And unions still have a lot of power in Germany. So many jobs actually do have a minimum wage. Second: If someone in Germany has a job that does not produce a living wage, the person automatically qualifies for social security money paid by the state. Besides that, a minimum wage on a state-wide level will be implemented in the next years. I am sure of that. There are more and more non union regulated industries that have started to pay very low wages.
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
> Then let's raise it to $1000 an hour. Like most things, increasing the minimum wage is subject to the law of diminishing returns.
mncolinlee 14y ago
Raising operating system register sizes does not work. If you think it does, then let's extend the minimum register length beyond the limits of virtual memory. We'll all be able to store unlimited data. What would you store in a 64-bit variable anyway? A boolean which only needs one bit of storage? We already see aggregate memory usage on Windows 7 systems (at least in the United States) above 2GB with no programs loaded. [1] For comparison, the classic Atari only requires eight bits (except for certain operations) as the minimum size for memory addresses. Not exactly a bastion of weak and sluggish games. [2] Did you notice what I did?

by jstalin 14y ago

MartinCron 14y ago

Then let's raise it to $1000 an hour. We'll all be rich Ridiculous arguments are ridiculous. The rest of your point is more than strong enough to stand on its own without that kind of nonsense.

jstalin 14y ago
That's my point. Obviously, increasing the minimum wage to $1000 is ridiculous. But so is the idea that raising the minimum wage by $1 has no consequence, as some claim. The higher cost you impose on employers for low skill jobs, the more likely it will be that employers will attempt to hire fewer of those workers or reject unskilled candidates. It's simple logic. For instance, the hamburger-making machine will replace teenagers who need a job at McDonald's. [1] Why wouldn't an employer just purchase a machine that will reduce costs, create a consistent product, and not call in sick if it can do so at an equivalent or lower cost than an unskilled teen who would be required to earn $10 or $12 an hour? [1]: http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger-machine/25159/ http://www.gizmag.com/hamburger-machine/25159/ EDIT: 5.2% of US workers earn at or below the minimum wage, 50% of those are under 25: http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2011.htm http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2011.htm
- avar 14y ago
  Why do you think a hamburger making machine is a bad thing? Automation in the long term is good for the economy, if it wasn't for automation those same teenagers would be manually plowing fields instead of flipping burgers. If anything raising the minimum wage a bit should spur a lot of automation industries, and those same teenagers would be more likely to get an entry level job there, instead of at a menial job.
  - cema 14y ago
    I guess the point is that, as the min wage grows, certain considerations that were not viable before become viable now, and as a consequence people who otherwise may have been considered for a job would no more, or would lose the job, or the job itself would disappear.
    - Klinky 14y ago
      ...yet when industry eliminates redundancies and increases automation, resulting in lost jobs, it's viewed as efficiency.
      - cema 14y ago
        It does have other consequences, certainly.
  - dennisgorelik 14y ago
    Automation in the long term is a good thing. However forcing automation by legal system is suboptimal for economy. Even in the long term.
  - chaostheory 14y ago
    It's not a bad thing for us. It's a bad for the people that minimum wage is supposedly trying to help. Increase minimum wage, decrease low skilled jobs, and increase mechanization.
    - 14y ago
Dove 14y ago
I don't think it's nonsense. The things that are wrong with a $1000 minimum wage are the same things that are wrong with a $10 minimum wage. They're just happening to different people. Setting a $1000 minimum wage would destroy essentially all jobs. There's nothing I or most people could do that's worth that much. Nothing at all. With my job gone, my income is zero and the products and services I contributed to society don't exist. Such a law would make me permanently poor, and would make society incrementally poorer. This is what I think happens to people whose natural output is below the minimum wage. Because their skills and education justify $6/hr but not $9, they aren't allowed to make that $6. They and society are $6/hr poorer for it. I believe firmly that people should be allowed to work if they want to, on whatever terms they find agreeable and can get. If you want to help them beyond that, I'm sure they'll think that's swell. But it shouldn't come in the form of destroying their job.
- superuser2 14y ago
  You're ignoring the fact that if you made $1000/hr, you could afford (and thus would be charged) higher prices for everything else, and so would everyone. Thus you would be producing $1000/hr, it's just that a thousand then would mean less than it does now. That's inflation. So long as people spend and the economy grows faster than that, we're better off than we were.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Hyperinflation would destroy everyone's savings and destroy the ability of anyone to invest. This is a ridiculous line of reasoning anyways.
  - superuser2 14y ago
    It's hyperinflation if you're increasing to $1000/hr, which is why no one is seriously suggesting that. Otherwise it's a little bit of inflation, and one that would be overshadowed by the resulting growth.
  - Dove 14y ago
    Inflation doesn't work that way. You can't legislate it into existence, and you can't legislate it away. If you could, it would be an easy problem to solve. Inflation occurs when you add to the money supply more than you add to the economy. The California gold rush caused inflation. Countries with hyperinflation have governments that are printing money at incredible rates. That's completely orthogonal to minimum wage. If you say I must have a $1000/hr job, it's in current dollars. Even if my employer wanted to pay me more, he can't -- he doesn't have the money to! Even if everyone wanted to switch over to doing that, they couldn't; there isn't enough money in the system! If everyone woke up tomorrow and agreed that a dollar was worth 1000x less, they'd all be 1000x poorer and nobody could afford anything. No, the minimum wage doesn't change the value of a dollar. It just changes who's allowed to earn one.
WalterBright 14y ago
If raising the minimum wage to $12 is good for the economy, and raising it to $1000 is bad, then there's an inflection point where it switches from good to bad. Therefore, the theory that raising the minimum wage is good for the economy is incomplete at best.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  No, it's not. This is just straw man reasoning that doesn't belong on HN. Obviously, it's not a smooth linear curve, so a raise to $10/hour is not just a weaker form of a raise to $1000 hour. One is healthy and the other wrecks the economy. There is not an inflection point, only a straw man here.
  - darkarmani 14y ago
    What's the strawman part of it? Raising the minimum wage is a strawman? Who decides which one wrecks the economy?
- MartinCron 14y ago
  Absolutely. Totally incomplete. My point is not that "higher is better". My point is that some adjustments to some adjustable parameters may be beneficial in some contexts. Generalize further than that at your own risk.
  - dennisgorelik 14y ago
    Do you have an example of when $X/hour person would benefit from setting mandatory minimum wage to $(X+1)/hour?
    - ncallaway 14y ago
      Yes. If the job actually produces more than $(X+1)/hour worth of productivity to the employer. The employer, unable to continue their advantageous position of paying $X/hour (it being illegal), but finding the job still worth retaining (it generating more than $(X+1)/hour) retains the employee. The employee's salary goes from $X/hour to $(X+1)/hour. Or did I totally misunderstand your question?
aprime 14y ago
Reductio ad absurdum is a perfectly valid form of argument. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
tatsuke95 14y ago
>"Ridiculous arguments are ridiculous." So where is the line where it is no longer ridiculous, then? $999? $500? $10? Labour is an input cost of production; when the input prices rise, so do output prices to compensate. I'd vote for no minimum wage but with a minimum income subsidized by the government.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

Germany also has strong labor unions and statutory codetermination. America decided to basically kill off organized labor and use government instead.

gscott 14y ago

> Who would you hire for $12 an hour? Any business that is econmically viable can afford $12 an hour. McDonalds, car washes, Denny's, etc. If you can't afford $12 an hour then there is something wrong with your business.

randallsquared 14y ago
So, in your opinion, people who cannot produce at least $12 an hour of value should not be allowed to produce anything? That seems to be the logical consequence of shutting down all businesses that need to pay less than that...
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I would guess the point is that those companies are probably very few. If your business can't extract $12 an hour from an employee then perhaps it should fail. The harm done by these job losses is less than the boost to the economy by putting more money in low income consumers pockets. I'm struggling to think of an example of labour that wouldn't produce $12 per hour in value and can't be reasonably cheaply automated.
  - dennisgorelik 14y ago
    If you are going to shut down some businesses, where would more money (to low income workers) come from?
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      Would depend on the effect of the rising costs (of labour) of the firms. Do they make less profit or increase the prices of their goods? Hopefully the extra money comes from an area that has a higher rate of tax than the tax rate of low income earners thus putting more money back into the "market economy". This should be likely in a country with progressive taxation.
      - 14y ago

diogenescynic 14y ago

This is a logical fallacy, reductio ad absurdum, or a slippery slope argument. If you want to argue your point at least do so without being intellectually dishonest.

drakeandrews 14y ago

Germany is also practically communist when compared with the USA. It has a public healthcare system, invented the modern welfare state and up until recently used its conscription laws to get young adults to staff its nursing homes and ambulances (amongst other things) for about €3/hour.

bayesianhorse 14y ago

The flip side to Germany's model is manifold, but one big difference is that the social security system will pay benefits to those who are full-time employed but don't have enough money to live. Before you say that's a stupid policy, consider that this is the minority of recipients of social benefits, and that often enough it's easier to get into better paying jobs from a low paying job than from being unemployed for a decade.

warfangle 14y ago

Yet, Germany also has very strong labor protection laws. If you have no minimum wage and no labor protection laws, it leads to sweatshop situations. You see some of the same thing in a lot of IT-oriented positions not located in IT epicenters: 24/7 availability, entry level wages, and ultimate responsibility for when the shit hits the fan -- even if you've been warning your boss that it'll hit the fan for the past eight months.

eru 14y ago
That's more of a consequence of low wage levels in general. As a counterexample: Singapore doesn't really have much labour protection nor minimum wage laws to speak of.

Gustomaximus 14y ago

This is an extreme example which lacks any depth of insight. It would be like me arguing; why don't governments print loads more money and we will all be rich as my reason they should not print anymore than we have today. To stay on the money analogy; we want governments to print THE RIGHT amount of money. If they print too little the economy will suffer just as much as if they print too much. This is the same as a minimum wage. If it is too low it damages things like consumption and quality of life. Too much and it is damaging competitiveness etc. I would suggest the best answer to this whole debate is in empirical data. Look at countries that have similar economies low AND high minimum wages and see what works best on the majority of case. Also personal views weight this argument. My lean on this is argument is that a country should be run to give the largest amount of people the best quality of life possible. If you have no problem with a large poor/rich gap you could easily argue to keep minimum wage down. Also Germany doesn't have a minimum wage but has legally enforced collective bargaining. Companies don't just pay what they think people are worth. Your example is not really givings the full story by pointing out there is no statutory minimum wage. Their government has employed a different system to ensure wage levels meet workers needs and is nothing like giving companies carte blanche to pay poverty wages.

Spooky23 14y ago

Please... People don't hire teens when the economy is weak because they are less reliable than adults. In the late 90's, fast food places were desperate for anyone -- they would hire folks willing to work as little as 4 hours a week! The sob story about the impact of minimum wage on companies is bogus. I was an asst manager in high school for a bakery/cafe... 20 employees, about 23000 hours of work each year... A minimum wage increase amounts to $25-30k a year, not a big deal. Wal-Mart is another great example... You have like 300 employees at a store, probably 3 million man-hours a year. So a minimum wage increase amounts to $3-4M a year -- peanuts for a company where average revenue per employee is $200k.

Evbn 14y ago
Did you just confuse revenue with earnings?
- Spooky23 14y ago
  You're talking about $3M of additional cost with $60M in revenue. What does that mean in reality? You either take a margin hit, or enhance the margins by raising prices and changing product mix. Also consider that minimum wage folks proportionally spend alot of money where they work. If Wal-Mart adds $3M in payroll, they're getting alot of it back as sales.
pixl97 14y ago
I had a saying years ago that went like this... "You can tell the condition of the economy by the quality of fast food employees." > People don't hire teens when the economy is weak because they are less reliable than adults. Incorrect: People don't hire teens when the economy is weak because they can hire a MBA, BS, etc for the same price because they desperately need a job. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21180371 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21180371 Spain unemployment rate hit a record: youth rate at 55%

dagw 14y ago

For comparison, Germany has no statutory minimum wage However they do have various social systems in place where basically the government will make up the difference between what you earn and what you need to live for people working very low wage jobs.

Riesling 14y ago

> For comparison, Germany has no statutory minimum wage This is true, but you cannot use that as an argument, because the German system cannot be compared to the U.S. system. There are two reasons for having no minimum wage in Germany. First: It us up to the individual unions to negotiate a minimum wage. And unions still have a lot of power in Germany. So many jobs actually do have a minimum wage. Second: If someone in Germany has a job that does not produce a living wage, the person automatically qualifies for social security money paid by the state. Besides that, a minimum wage on a state-wide level will be implemented in the next years. I am sure of that. There are more and more non union regulated industries that have started to pay very low wages.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

> Then let's raise it to $1000 an hour. Like most things, increasing the minimum wage is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

mncolinlee 14y ago

Raising operating system register sizes does not work. If you think it does, then let's extend the minimum register length beyond the limits of virtual memory. We'll all be able to store unlimited data. What would you store in a 64-bit variable anyway? A boolean which only needs one bit of storage? We already see aggregate memory usage on Windows 7 systems (at least in the United States) above 2GB with no programs loaded. [1] For comparison, the classic Atari only requires eight bits (except for certain operations) as the minimum size for memory addresses. Not exactly a bastion of weak and sluggish games. [2] Did you notice what I did?