5 ms·

Finaly, they need to lower the minimum wage and cut government services, so more people are desperate enough to commit crimes. Or better yet institute an extre

Finaly, they need to lower the minimum wage and cut government services, so more people are desperate enough to commit crimes. Or better yet institute an extremely high minimum wage, so that if you're an unskilled laborer you remain unemployed because walmart greeters' labor isn't worth $20 an hour just because the government said it is. After all, it's not like working 0 hours a week at $20 an hour would make someone as desperate as working 40 hours a week at $5 an hour...

maigret 17y ago
Probably like that, you mean? http://www37.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=unemployment+us+netherlands http://www37.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=unemployment+us+nethe...
- discojesus 17y ago
  I never said anything about the Netherlands' unemployment rate. I said that all else being equal, the country with the higher minimum wage will have higher unemployment, because there is a larger barrier to entry to the job market. But if you would care to explain how a business that takes in some amount of revenue (say $100,000 a month) can magically afford to hire more employees when the minimum wage goes from $7 an hour to $15 an hour, I'm all ears.
  - DenisM 17y ago
    This is easy. When all your competitiors have to pay higher wages it drives consumer prices up and so your revenue goes up as well such that you can also pay higher wages. It only breaks down when some stores do not abide by the rules or when there is a substitute. Substitutes of course can be hunted down and taxed as well, to maintian equilibrium. As a side not, kindly lay off sarcasm. Thanks.
    - discojesus 17y ago
      This is easy. When all your competitiors have to pay higher wages it drives consumer prices up and so your revenue goes up as well such that you can also pay higher wages. This is an argument for the ability of a business to keep the same number of employees, not to hire more. Keeping the same staff you had the day before doesn't make the unemployment rate go down. This also assumes that your revenue goes up, which may not be the case since the government has instituted a staff-wide pay raise, but not all of your customers' incomes have gone up as well. And sarcasm is sometimes a very effective way of getting a point across. Sarcasm in my opinion is fair game; being malicious is something else altogether. *also, this doesn't answer the most basic question that proponents of higher minimum wage never seem to be able to answer, which is - if $5 an hour is bad, and $15 an hour is great, why not $30 an hour? And $50 an hour would be amazing, lifting people right out of poverty within weeks! So why not? After all, the unemployment rate doesn't go up as the minimum wage increases, right?
      - apu 17y ago
        $5/hr * 40 hrs/week * 50 weeks/yr = $10,000/yr salary is not really enough to survive. $15/$5 * $10,000/yr = $30,000/yr is. The point is not to make minimum-wage workers rich -- just enough so that they should be able to survive without having to work insane hours. And by your logic, if businesses can hire X new employees per year at a $5 minimum wage, then they should be able to hire 5X new employees with a $1 minimum wage. So should we lower the minimum wage even more so that businesses can hire more people and thus lower unemployment rates?
        discojesus 17y ago
        The point is not to make minimum-wage workers rich -- just enough so that they should be able to survive without having to work insane hours. $30k a year to survive isn't some natural law - when you make minimum wage $15 an hour, the prices for goods and services based on minimum wage labor goes up, and $30k a year is no longer enough to survive, so somebody gets the bright idea to say "hey we need to make the minimum wage higher..." also, you didn't refute my argument - if the minimum wage has nothing to do with the unemployment rate, then there would be no reason not to raise the minimum wage to something extremely high like $50 an hour. Of course, in reality, there is a very good reason not to make the minimum wage $50 an hour - it would cause much of the country to become unemployed. So should we lower the minimum wage even more so that businesses can hire more people and thus lower unemployment rates? Not to lower unemployment rates; you should lower it because a marketplace of individuals making voluntary exchanges is much better at deciding the value of someone's labor than the government is. The bottom line that for some reason people refuse to accept is just because you legislate it doesn't make it so. Wal-mart greeters don't make $50 an hour for a good reason - their labor doesn't generate anywhere near $50 an hour in extra revenue, and many people are willing to do the job for much less. (Sure you can arbitrarily decide to pay them $50 an hour, but don't act surprised when a candy bar becomes $10 and a gallon of gas goes up to $25 to compensate).
  - lucumo 17y ago
    > I said that all else being equal, the country with the higher minimum wage will have higher unemployment, because there is a larger barrier to entry to the job market. While this seems a straight-forward thought, the fact whether or not minimum wages affect employment is undecided amongst economists. Charges of ideological bias are flung from both sides, but there seems to be no concensu: "Until the 1990s, economists generally agreed that raising the minimum wage reduced employment. This consensus was weakened when some well-publicized empirical studies showed the opposite, but others consistently confirmed the original view. Today's consensus, if one exists, is that increasing the minimum wage has, at worst, minor negative effects." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Surveys_of_economists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Surveys_of_economi...
    - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
      the fact whether or not minimum wages affect employment is undecided amongst economists. Income minus expenses still equals the bottom line, right? I mean if you have two businesses on the internet selling the same product and one has three times the labor cost of the other, math doesn't suddenly change because economists can't get their act together, does it? Some real, live businessperson still has to add and subtract to eek out a business model, right? Or perhaps I missed something. It sounded like you were making a macro-economic argument in response to a micro-economic one.
  - MaysonL 17y ago
    An interesting side note: Forbes magazine had an article a couple of decades ago on a study comparing McDonalds franchises which found that those who paid more than minimum wage were more profitable than those that paid minimum wage (and yes the study did control for socio-economic status of the location: it was an apples to apples comparison).
ahoyhere 17y ago
discojesus, have you been to Europe much? There are no "useless" jobs like Wal-Mart greeters here. There are no Wal-Marts, or equivalents. The majority of people either run or are employed by what the US would consider very tiny businesses indeed... and those businesses are more critical to their community than the typical American business, by far. That hasn't been factored into your equation.
- vidarh 17y ago
  Well, Walmart owns ASDA, one of the dominant chains in the UK. No greeters, though - what a bizarre concept.
  - ahoyhere 17y ago
    The UK may be technically in the EU, but it is not European in currency or culture. It's much much more American than the other EU members.
    - vidarh 17y ago
      "European" culture is much more diverse than a lot of people think, including a lot of people in Europe. I find that people that talk about "European" culture tend to refer to the culture of western part of continental Europe, usually excluding Eastern Europe, Turkey, Scandinavia, the UK, Ireland etc. But even with a view that limited, there are vast cultural differences even within that group. There is no unified European culture (nor currency). There are certain limited areas where different but large subsets of Europe share common ideals, but that's it.
  - sho 17y ago
    Actually, coming from a country with a high minimum wage ($16/hr+), the idea of a company paying some otherwise-unemployable warm body $5/hr to stand at the door and do nothing all day except say hello to indifferent customers seems bizarre to me - not to mention demeaning and perverse. Our unemployment benefit is $6.20 an hour. I'd rather the poor guy stays at home, works on his novel or something, and keeps his dignity.

maigret 17y ago

Probably like that, you mean? http://www37.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=unemployment+us+netherlands http://www37.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=unemployment+us+nethe...

discojesus 17y ago
I never said anything about the Netherlands' unemployment rate. I said that all else being equal, the country with the higher minimum wage will have higher unemployment, because there is a larger barrier to entry to the job market. But if you would care to explain how a business that takes in some amount of revenue (say $100,000 a month) can magically afford to hire more employees when the minimum wage goes from $7 an hour to $15 an hour, I'm all ears.
- DenisM 17y ago
  This is easy. When all your competitiors have to pay higher wages it drives consumer prices up and so your revenue goes up as well such that you can also pay higher wages. It only breaks down when some stores do not abide by the rules or when there is a substitute. Substitutes of course can be hunted down and taxed as well, to maintian equilibrium. As a side not, kindly lay off sarcasm. Thanks.
  - discojesus 17y ago
    This is easy. When all your competitiors have to pay higher wages it drives consumer prices up and so your revenue goes up as well such that you can also pay higher wages. This is an argument for the ability of a business to keep the same number of employees, not to hire more. Keeping the same staff you had the day before doesn't make the unemployment rate go down. This also assumes that your revenue goes up, which may not be the case since the government has instituted a staff-wide pay raise, but not all of your customers' incomes have gone up as well. And sarcasm is sometimes a very effective way of getting a point across. Sarcasm in my opinion is fair game; being malicious is something else altogether. *also, this doesn't answer the most basic question that proponents of higher minimum wage never seem to be able to answer, which is - if $5 an hour is bad, and $15 an hour is great, why not $30 an hour? And $50 an hour would be amazing, lifting people right out of poverty within weeks! So why not? After all, the unemployment rate doesn't go up as the minimum wage increases, right?
    - apu 17y ago
      $5/hr * 40 hrs/week * 50 weeks/yr = $10,000/yr salary is not really enough to survive. $15/$5 * $10,000/yr = $30,000/yr is. The point is not to make minimum-wage workers rich -- just enough so that they should be able to survive without having to work insane hours. And by your logic, if businesses can hire X new employees per year at a $5 minimum wage, then they should be able to hire 5X new employees with a $1 minimum wage. So should we lower the minimum wage even more so that businesses can hire more people and thus lower unemployment rates?
      - discojesus 17y ago
        The point is not to make minimum-wage workers rich -- just enough so that they should be able to survive without having to work insane hours. $30k a year to survive isn't some natural law - when you make minimum wage $15 an hour, the prices for goods and services based on minimum wage labor goes up, and $30k a year is no longer enough to survive, so somebody gets the bright idea to say "hey we need to make the minimum wage higher..." also, you didn't refute my argument - if the minimum wage has nothing to do with the unemployment rate, then there would be no reason not to raise the minimum wage to something extremely high like $50 an hour. Of course, in reality, there is a very good reason not to make the minimum wage $50 an hour - it would cause much of the country to become unemployed. So should we lower the minimum wage even more so that businesses can hire more people and thus lower unemployment rates? Not to lower unemployment rates; you should lower it because a marketplace of individuals making voluntary exchanges is much better at deciding the value of someone's labor than the government is. The bottom line that for some reason people refuse to accept is just because you legislate it doesn't make it so. Wal-mart greeters don't make $50 an hour for a good reason - their labor doesn't generate anywhere near $50 an hour in extra revenue, and many people are willing to do the job for much less. (Sure you can arbitrarily decide to pay them $50 an hour, but don't act surprised when a candy bar becomes $10 and a gallon of gas goes up to $25 to compensate).
- lucumo 17y ago
  > I said that all else being equal, the country with the higher minimum wage will have higher unemployment, because there is a larger barrier to entry to the job market. While this seems a straight-forward thought, the fact whether or not minimum wages affect employment is undecided amongst economists. Charges of ideological bias are flung from both sides, but there seems to be no concensu: "Until the 1990s, economists generally agreed that raising the minimum wage reduced employment. This consensus was weakened when some well-publicized empirical studies showed the opposite, but others consistently confirmed the original view. Today's consensus, if one exists, is that increasing the minimum wage has, at worst, minor negative effects." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Empirical_studies [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Surveys_of_economists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Surveys_of_economi...
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    the fact whether or not minimum wages affect employment is undecided amongst economists. Income minus expenses still equals the bottom line, right? I mean if you have two businesses on the internet selling the same product and one has three times the labor cost of the other, math doesn't suddenly change because economists can't get their act together, does it? Some real, live businessperson still has to add and subtract to eek out a business model, right? Or perhaps I missed something. It sounded like you were making a macro-economic argument in response to a micro-economic one.
- MaysonL 17y ago
  An interesting side note: Forbes magazine had an article a couple of decades ago on a study comparing McDonalds franchises which found that those who paid more than minimum wage were more profitable than those that paid minimum wage (and yes the study did control for socio-economic status of the location: it was an apples to apples comparison).

ahoyhere 17y ago

discojesus, have you been to Europe much? There are no "useless" jobs like Wal-Mart greeters here. There are no Wal-Marts, or equivalents. The majority of people either run or are employed by what the US would consider very tiny businesses indeed... and those businesses are more critical to their community than the typical American business, by far. That hasn't been factored into your equation.

vidarh 17y ago
Well, Walmart owns ASDA, one of the dominant chains in the UK. No greeters, though - what a bizarre concept.
- ahoyhere 17y ago
  The UK may be technically in the EU, but it is not European in currency or culture. It's much much more American than the other EU members.
  - vidarh 17y ago
    "European" culture is much more diverse than a lot of people think, including a lot of people in Europe. I find that people that talk about "European" culture tend to refer to the culture of western part of continental Europe, usually excluding Eastern Europe, Turkey, Scandinavia, the UK, Ireland etc. But even with a view that limited, there are vast cultural differences even within that group. There is no unified European culture (nor currency). There are certain limited areas where different but large subsets of Europe share common ideals, but that's it.
- sho 17y ago
  Actually, coming from a country with a high minimum wage ($16/hr+), the idea of a company paying some otherwise-unemployable warm body $5/hr to stand at the door and do nothing all day except say hello to indifferent customers seems bizarre to me - not to mention demeaning and perverse. Our unemployment benefit is $6.20 an hour. I'd rather the poor guy stays at home, works on his novel or something, and keeps his dignity.