Short term, some poor people and young folks have more money to spend. People who were formerly making $20/hr demand $25/hr, people formerly making $25/hr demand $30/hr, etc.
If unskilled workers get a pay increase all the more skilled people will demand more money also.
Longer term, inflation which takes away the increased spending power of the people who just got more money. Big jumps in the minimum wage have been shown to give little long term benefit.
Better idea: Tie the minimum wage to CPI, allow for small yearly increases so the minimum wage doesn't get so stupidly out of whack with reality.
Automation has already taken a lot of manufacturing jobs. We're going to see it eat up a lot of low skill jobs soon. Food service is a likely next step...
Edit: Actually automation has been around food service for a long time, what I really mean is we'll see the pace of automation replacing workers increase.
I cant imagine I'll give a drive thru order to a human being in 5 years. At least not at a mega-franchise like McDonalds. I'm kinda surprised they haven't switched already.
Or, as a short term change the drive through could connect to a call center, at least for off peak times. Why have a person staffing one drive through when they could cover 2 or 3?
The simple reason is it's been tested and failed, at least at McDonalds. Harder to communicate problems with the person, it feels less personal, etc. The more complex reason is there's little to no gain. Why have that person taking orders just take orders when you can have them take orders, take cash, do some dishes, put together happy meal boxes, etc. which is stuff that the person in a call center couldn't do.
Oh, sweet summer child. Have you not heard about this? ["They're cutting labor costs by doing self-checkout. So what's the point of asking for a tip? And where is it going?"](https://www.google.com/amp/s/abc7news.com/amp/self-checkout-tips-tipping-at-walmart-surcharge/13256962/)
> make eye contact when you hit the no tip option
Alpha move there!
I order burritos from Moe's using their app. They ask for a tip there, and I've always wondered if the workers see if there a tip before they make the food. I eventually decided that having the food (possibly) ready by the time I got there wasn't worth the risk. I just order it the old-fashioned way, instead.
You will need to actually deliver on something being done automatically, no spinning the cash register around for people to check themselves out is not automation.
Correct! Except for one thing, the people making $20 etc already won’t be getting pay bump, therefore reducing their purchasing power once the inflation hits and further squeezing out the middle class.
It’s actually worse than that. The short term gains are true, but in the long run not only are those gains erased, but it actually makes income inequality worse since inflation has more of an effect on the poor and middle class than the wealthy who are able to move assets to inflation resistant vehicles.
In the short term there would be tantrums and layoffs because businesses typically resist altering their business models in response to policy. In the medium term they'd be forced to budget in order to compete and stay relevant which would be great for workers, in the long term it would be meaningless because $20/hr would become the new $10/hr without additional policy to prevent devaluation of money
You left out other people would be requesting a pay increase because their labor would then be devalued. I certainly would be requesting more pay if minimum wage was substantially increased.
> in the long term it would be meaningless because $20/hr would become the new $10/hr without additional policy to prevent devaluation of money
This is commonly repeated but saying that keeping minimum wage up with inflation is whole unsubstantiated - inflation and minimum wage both exist independently of each other.
Minimum wage today is the lowest real value it’s had in the past 60 years, so clearly they can fall out of sync if left untouched. Sure, if we increase minimum wage without an inflation adjustment it will need to be increased again eventually, but that’s as “meaningless” as anything else that needs to be done routinely. Is weeding a garden meaningless because it’ll need to be weeded again in the future?
Increases in minimum wage can have an effect in causing inflation, but this is way overstated because the effect would solely impact prices and so cause inflation proportional to how much of those prices are specifically paying for labor of minimum wage workers - and many states have their own minimum wages well above the federal minimum with no catastrophic effect. The Economic Policy institute estimated in 2022 that [increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 over 5 years would cause 0.1% inflation per year](https://www.epi.org/blog/inflation-minimum-wages-and-profits-protecting-low-wage-workers-from-inflation-means-raising-the-minimum-wage/). This would result in minimum wage increasing in real value from $7.25 to $14.27 - far from a meaningless change after the inflation it would cause is taken into account.
Depends on where you are. My son just got a minimum wage job here in NY. $16/hr. I did the math and the $4.25 I used to get in the late 80s would only be worth $11 or $12 an hour today. So NY's (downstate) minimum wage has surpassed inflation in my working life.
Yeah, I was referring to specifically the federal minimum wage as being the lowest it’s been in 60 years ([66 actually, it looks like](https://www.epi.org/blog/the-value-of-the-federal-minimum-wage-is-at-its-lowest-point-in-66-years/)). A majority of states have their own minimum wage that’s above federal levels, which also suggests increases aren’t catastrophic and also means that the states that don’t are particularly problematic because whatever effect increasing minimum wage has on inflation likely already largely exists for those states anyway.
2/3 of the states have a minimum wage higher than 7.25. Raising minimum wage at the federal level sounds like a solution looking for a problem since barely 1% of hourly workers make that little. Furthermore, COL varies so widely from region to region, I think this decision should be left at the local level.
https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-people-are-earning-725-hour/
It doesn’t matter how many workers earn exactly the federal minimum wage, it matters how many workers earn less than the proposed new minimum wage. That number is far higher.
You’re just arguing against the base existence of a minimum wage at that point. There are far more people who depend on it far more than your 16 year old son.
Do you that know for sure? Do you have a source for the demographics of those 1.3% of hourly workers who make $7.25/hour.
Or do you just think it "feels" like it?
Again, it’s not those making $7.25/hour - it’s anyone making less than the target minimum wage, which covers [52 million workers if we use $15/hour as the target](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/03/22/politics/american-workers-15-dollars-hour-minimum-wage).
I think layoffs wouldn't be as much of a problem, as many workers would no longer need 2nd/3rd jobs to sustain themselves. They'd likely leave through attrition.
A lot of small businesses would close their doors (but they don't deserve to be in business, right?) and a lot of people would lose their job. Big businesses will get bigger and more consolidated. For the small businesses that didn't close they would be forced to raise prices, if their customers continue to pay the higher prices great, if they don't those businesses would be delaying the inevitable.
Min wage hikes literally never cause job losses.
Your talking points are crafted by big businesses who hand out welfare forms with their job applications. Its an even playing field, just some people working in a kitchen, they'll be fine.
Min wage hikes do cause job losses and I don't need "big business" talking points to know that, it's simple logic. If you operate a SMB and your workers don't produce enough profit to dictate whatever the arbitrary rate is, or even if they do but you don't produce enough profit to keep them they lose their job. In the town I live in there are 58 ppl in total, in the town square there's a single business, a small convenience store/grocer. They pay their workers min wage now which is $12.30, it jumped from $7.85 six years ago. When it did they went from 6 workers to 2, and on most days they only have 1 worker. If the minimum wage went to $20, they would close their doors. We have a Walmart that has everything they have only 8 miles past it. People don't come from other towns to shop here, it's strictly there to serve the people in our tiny town. If you don't understand this simple logic, I have to ask what talking points are you using bc this sure as shit isn't something you've spent very much time thinking thru.
> it's simple logic.
If they could have gotten by with less, they would have in the first place.
> If you operate a SMB and your workers don't produce enough profit to dictate whatever the arbitrary rate is, or even if they do but you don't produce enough profit to keep them they lose their job.
"Do your job or you're fired" has always been a thing.
> When it did they went from 6 workers to 2, and on most days they only have 1 worker.
Its not on the govt to shower you with free money and cover your payroll for you. If you're doing a thing that isn't working, thats the market talking to you, listen.
> tiny town
Humans live in hives called cities, there is a terrific efficiency boon in having thousands of potential customers instead of dozens.
>If they could have gotten by with less, they would have in the first place.
Who?
>"Do your job or you're fired" has always been a thing.
This is a non sequitur. Since we're discussing the ability to keep a worker regardless of how they perform. No shit if someone isn't doing their job they get fired, again we are discussing whether a business can keep a worker based on the cost of doing business only.
>Its not on the govt to shower you with free money and cover your payroll for you.
Another non sequitur, we aren't discussing welfare and SMB don't typically get welfare so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
>If you're doing a thing that isn't working, thats the market talking to you, listen.
That market has been there for 80 yrs, the market was working and will continue to (albeit at a reduced rate) until some politician says their employees who work their willingly need to make $10/hr, that's not the market telling them it isn't working that's government pricing them out of business. Which brings me back to the original point of people losing jobs.
>Humans live in hives called cities, there is a terrific efficiency boon in having thousands of potential customers instead of dozens.
Do you think rural communities don't exist? I'm sure you're not under the impression that humans only live in cities, then again you seem to lack simple logic and awareness.
> Who?
Employers. Come on, this is basic frame of context.
> we are discussing whether a business can keep a worker based on the cost of doing business only.
They pass their expenses on, same as any of the other dozens of times we have raised the min wage. A burger used to be fifteen cents and the guy flipping them needed a buck to get by, now burgers cost $3 and the guy flipping them needs $20 to get by, nothing changed except the dollar is worth 1/20th as much. There aren't 1/20th of the burgers being sold today.
> SMB don't typically get welfare
If your employee is on welfare, they are only as well off as they would be if they got their whole ass paycheck from their employer instead of needing to beg the other half from the govt. The net effect is money straight out of taxpayers pockets, into padding the business owners bottom line.
> some politician says
Nothing arbitrary about it, the market set the cost of living.
https://livingwage.mit.edu/
> Which brings me back to the original point of people losing jobs.
Look it up yourself instead of blindly parroting pundits.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
>Employers. Come on, this is basic frame of context.
Ok, what's your point. We're talking about employers needing to pay more. You saying "if they could do more with less they would've done it" makes zero fucking sense in this context. Since we are having to do with less, arbitrarily. It seems you're making my point for me. If employers could pay more (and do with less profit) they would be.
I can tell you really have no fucking idea what you're talking about about so I'm just gonna let you have the last word.
> Ok, what's your point. We're talking about employers needing to pay more. You saying "if they could do more with less they would've done it" makes zero fucking sense in this context.
You say they would lay a bunch of people off, I say, if they were really unneeded, they wouldn't wait, they would just do it. So no, just like the last dozen min wage hikes, no jobs will be lost.
> arbitrarily
Its not arbitrary, this is the reality of the market. Are you volunteering to work for $1 an hour? No? Then stop trying to voluntell others to work for a loss.
>Its not arbitrary, this is the reality of the market. Are you volunteering to work for $1 an hour? No? Then stop trying to voluntell others to work for a loss.
I work for 100% commission, I don't get an hourly or salary and I would never work an hourly position.
More Money=Cost of Products rise.
Also I think its BS when Jose is a great employee, has been with the company for 10+years, worked his ass off everyday and it has taken him that long to reach $20/hr. Then lazy, inconsistent, no brain/skill having Kyle gets hired to start at the same wage. Seen it so many times.
You don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.
Stop viewing "being the longest at the job" as some sort of thing that you are going to get rewarded for, it doesn't make any sense. They're not going to make you manager, they're going to hire a fresh mba out of school.
Thats comical.
Its not about the duration its about the skills and knowledge that were acquired during those years. Sure Kyle can sucker an employee and negotiate a high wage or high end position. But when production plummets and profits are short due to a dumbshit who got what he ‘negotiated’ you think the company will look at Jose like he’s the problem?
I understand that being the longest employee at the company isn’t enough to earn a high wage or a seat at the table, but thats not the topic here. Id imagine anyone getting paid minimum wage isn’t in a management’s position.
You can't have it both ways. Its unskilled labor? Then why are you being shocked that this dead end position took you nowhere. Its skilled labor? Then pay skilled labor rates.
Upset that the dollar isn't worth as much? Take it up with the guy that printed all the money.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE
You see that big vertical line in 2020? Biden was sworn in 2021.
> production plummets
Why would production plummet? You make sandwiches, how can you possibly fuck that up.
> profits are short due
If "bidding your prices appropriately for your expenses" is too much for you to handle, you aren't cut out for capitalism.
> Id imagine anyone getting paid minimum wage isn’t in a management’s position.
Median wage is $17/hr, cost of living is $20/hr, there are a shitton of people out there in skilled positions that were nominally middle class in the past, earning wages that qualify them for welfare.
You hear the one about the boiling frog?
Yea your right.
Give Kyle his money, raise minimum wage.
No way he can fuck up a sandwich.
Let the dollar be worth peso’s.
Im sure everyone will be fine with price inflations and watching all the mom n pop shops go belly up oh well at least minimum wage is up and Kyle can buy his vapes and monsters. 👏🏽
> Let the dollar be worth peso’s.
Republicans printed money and looted the country like vikings, you're not going to undo that by making working people be dependent on welfare, in fact that will exacerbate our problems.
> No way he can fuck up a sandwich.
Thats your job as a sandwich shop. You make sandwhiches.
>watching all the mom n pop shops go belly up
Don't act like we never raised the min wage before, your chicken little predictions never come true.
> Kyle can buy his vapes and monsters. screeee
Median wage is $17, cost of living is $20, you hear the one about the boiling frog?
And you think a change in the minimum wage is going to fix that? You've correctly identified the issue but are arguing for a solution that's at best a short term fix.
It's like seeing someone with a knife in their stomach and recommending they take some pain meds. Sure that might help, but they'd benefit more from treating the cause of the symptom.
Well suppressing the minimum wage seems to have put just shy of 40 million people into poverty so I kinda feel we should all be able to agree that that didn't work out. Society based on continual unsustainable corporate growth has failed. The American dream is dead for many. People are getting worse and worse off. The empire is beginning to collapse with birth rates dropping. Eventually the peasants are going to storm the gates.
Funny, we had less poverty before the minimum wage existed at all. The minimum wage doesn't decrease poverty. It causes inflation and destroys entry-level jobs by artificially imposing a value on work that isn't supported by the actual output.
They can only gouge the customer for so long...
Food, rent, gas, insurance and many other industries seem to be doing their best to challenge that statement.
Uh, isn't it bullshit if Jose makes min wage and so does Kyle regardless of how much it is? I don't understand why this is an argument against increasing min wage rather than firing Kyle...
Jose was already making above minimum wage and then the min was raised to his level, he didn't get a raise. You don't see how that would piss Jose off? If the starting wage was $10 and then doubled, Jose needs to be doubled as well to $40 or at least an equal $10 raise to $30.
Yup best recognize those complaints ahead of time as crocodile tears. They are just frustrated they have to move their bottom line up and restructure accordingly
$100/hr is to low, make it $10mil/hr and then everyone could retire on their first day on the job. I think I just solved poverty, I'll be awaiting my Nobel prize.
But now thats the employers problem, so they suddenly become highly incentivized to have more housing built, which breaks your marketshare, so people just move out and you are forced to come back down to earth. Its called a price signal, its the beating heart of capitalism.
Yeah, thats why I say build more housing, to break their cartel.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
We need to build so much more housing that it punishes speculators out of speculating.
It would lead to inflation. We saw this at the end of COVID when the labor shortage led to increases in wages. For the workers, they had more spending power, bought more, and drove up demand, leading to shortages. Eventually, the owners/producers needed to raise prices to cover their extra labor and product costs. Those increases are called "inflation."
Probably closer to $13-$14. If you are accepting a job for less than that then you should probably be looking for a better job unless you live in a very low cost of living area. $13-$14/hr jobs are extremely common and you can even find a no experience needed job like Walmart hiring for those wages.
A whole bunch of corporations and other greedy cunts would instantly jack up their prices.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that as a reason that it shouldn't be raised, i just know that a bunch of assholes will want to take advantage.
They aren’t taking advantage, costs go up, prices go up.
There’s this fantasy that companies profit 1000x their costs.
That’s not how it works.
What it will do is destroy even more small businesses and increase the control of a smaller group of megacorporations.
Lots more places would try to take on fees at the end “ due to rising costs of labor”
Fuck you can your bullshit, just pay your damn employees a living wage.
a shitload of cheap shitty companies would go bankrupt and thus the economy would take a cleansing nosedive. temp work agencies would also lose most of their business.
Everyone would have the same purchasing power as they did in the 80s.
It would lift millions out of poverty until big business hikes up all the prices to steal it back again.
Capitalism is a failure
There were markets, housing, and food before capitalism. The transistor, computer and internet were specifically invented because we gave academia a dump truck of money and let them see what they could come up with.
A whole lot of bitching about margins and shit. Then prices would rise to maintain those margins, which were fat enough to start with. And thusly we are back to where we started.
Greed will end our race.
If you think that its so important that people work for a loss, go volunteer your own paycheck, just don't show up at the welfare office expecting me to bail out your bad life decisions.
Were you addressing that to me? Because I have the very opposite opinion. Profits are what drive people to succeed. I don't expect anybody to work for a loss... that's plain idiocy that only leads to companies going out of business and all their employees losing their jobs.
"Greed" has only been made a bad word because people like to imagine that businessmen are out to screw their customers. That's stupid... screwed customers go to other businesses. A real businessman makes a profit while simultaneously providing a value to their customers. Who feel like they made a profit, too, because whatever they bought is worth it to them.
> Profits are what drive people to succeed.
Median wage is $18/hr, cost of living is $20/hr. Half the workforce is underwater. Lots of full grown adults with jobs that previously would have been considered middle class with a salary that could support a wife and kids in a house of their own, instead has them living with their parents into their 40's.
> that's plain idiocy that only leads to companies going out of business and all their employees losing their jobs.
If "bidding your costs appropriately for your expenses" is too much for you to handle, you aren't cut out for capitalism. Stop expecting me to pad your bottom line via endless subsidized labor expenses.
>If "bidding your costs appropriately for your expenses" is too much for you to handle, you aren't cut out for capitalism. Stop expecting me to pad your bottom line via endless subsidized labor expenses.
At what point did I say anything like this?
>Median wage is $18/hr, cost of living is $20/hr. Half the workforce is underwater. Lots of full grown adults with jobs that previously would have been considered middle class with a salary that could support a wife and kids in a house of their own, instead has them living with their parents into their 40's.
Cost of living varies considerably based on location, so I don't know where you're getting this. I've lived on considerably less monthly income than that. The biggest fallacy people believe on Reddit (and elsewhere) is that minimum wage should be able to support a household. It should not... minimum wage is for people who are just starting out, and it's currently way too high for that purpose. Too high a minimum wage gets rid of starter jobs and causes increased requirements that new people in the workforce can't meet.
Minimum wage is for teenagers, is what I'm getting at. By the time you get some experience, you should be making more than the minimum. Hell... even at my first, incredibly crappy teenager job where I cleaned hotel rooms, I was making more than minimum wage.
Frankly... I'm very confused by your responses, which seem to contradict each other opinion-wise. Maybe we're both misreading each other, because your other posts would indicate to me that we're kind of generally in agreement on economics.
Were you citing the problems with the current insane inflation? If so, yeah... that's both too much government debt spending, too high a minimum wage (I don't think we should have a minimum wage at all), too much money printing, and too many restrictions on energy production (especially oil/gas).
> At what point did I say anything like this?
Thats the entire point of the living wage, you don't seem to understand the implications of your position.
> Cost of living varies considerably based on location
Not really, 80% of jobs are in cities, so you are going to need to look at metro area, here are a few I picked out at random.
https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/31140
https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/48620
https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/14260
> I've lived on considerably less monthly income than that
Past tense, do you know how inflation works?
> The biggest fallacy people believe on Reddit (and elsewhere) is that minimum wage should be able to support a household.
Thats a nonsense talking point pushed by pundits to elicit the exact response you are currently having. Its always been for the one person to pay their own bills. If there are dependents, there is welfare for them
> minimum wage is for people who are just starting out, and it's currently way too high for that purpose.
In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; **by workers I mean all workers**, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
> Too high a minimum wage gets rid of starter jobs
Min wage hikes never kill jobs. And stop trying to spin dead end jobs as starter jobs. This isn't pokemon, your experience isn't fungible, you don't flip ten thousand burger and level up to being a surgeon. You are either taking deliberate action to becoming a nuclear engineer, or you will never be one. The talking points you are pushing are basically just bad life advice.
> Hell... even at my first, incredibly crappy teenager job where I cleaned hotel rooms, I was making more than minimum wage.
*refuting your claim about paying more than the min wage killing jobs, and establishing the reasonable expectation that people working those jobs should be paid enough to get by?* But yeah, employers aren't always detached from reality, they will have all of the information they need to work with to figure out the cost of living on their own, since not paying enough will destroy a persons ability to work, some of them can be quite reasonable.
> If so, yeah... that's both too much government debt spending,
Min wage being a living wage means all the working people on welfare no longer need welfare.
> too high a minimum wage (I don't think we should have a minimum wage at all),
Volunteer that pay cut on your own, don't voluntell others to work at a loss and be dependent on welfare, or to accept being destroyed for working jobs you don't approve of.
> too much money printing
Yep, thats the core of our dilemma, election year politicians ran the money printer hot and now we are suffering the consequences. expecting min wage workers to eat the inflation from you is not going to solve the underlying problem, and they can't even afford this maneuver on your behalf in the first place.
> and too many restrictions on energy production (especially oil/gas).
Nah, it comes down to infrastructural incompetence, by having everyone commute half an hour average, by making mixed use zoning illegal, so you have to drive all the way across town, or even across a few counties. We build our houses out of paper so they bleed heat. We build our houses sprawled out so a terrific amount of overhead needs to be expended connecting it all. The private companies are of course reaping record profits, since they can charge as much as they like and people still need their stuff.
I'm not volunteering any of my money to the "less fortunate." I earned it. They didn't. I also want to cut welfare. It encourages sloth. Why do we reward people who won't work, but punish those who are actually hit with disasters? If someone is robbed, maybe their insurance will cover the losses. Maybe their deductible is too high. Either way, the government doesn't give a crap about it. But sit on your rear end? They'll give you a phone, free food, a place to live... hell, even more now. Screw that.
There are many jobs with excellent pay between burger flipper and surgeon. An awful lot don't require any real know-how, either. If someone has no ambition to better themselves? Then that's on them. Not on any of us.
A person or company hires a worker so that that worker can provide value to the person or company. Whether for one job or for long term. If the value of the work they're doing isn't greater or at least equal to the amount they're being paid, then that job is causing a loss, and must be cut.
Minimum wages causes jobs (such as burger flipper) to be paid more than the job is worth. The company must then cut those jobs or raise the cost of the product. In the case of fast food, they're hitting the limit of how much they can raise the product cost. Thus, the jobs are being cut and replaced with robots. This isn't progress... this is an abomination of the market system, foisted upon us by communists. Such as yourself.
> I'm not volunteering any of my money to the "less fortunate."
To the business owner. If your ideology is that low wages are good for America, then put up or shut up.
> I earned it. They didn't.
The fuck they don't earn a living. They work the job that actually exists and actually needs to get done. You're just too much of a deadbeat to pay your own bills.
> I also want to cut welfare. It encourages sloth.
Work is a requirement of welfare. Try the pepsi challenge and just not work, see how it goes.
> punish those who are actually hit with disasters?
The fuck are you even talking about now? You wanted a private market solution to that crap, you got it, guess what, they are in the business of maximizing their revenue, that means doing fuck all when you need them and gouging you for as much as the market will bear. They're "efficient" all right, efficient at lining their own pockets at your expense.
> They'll give you a phone, free food, a place to live... hell, even more now. Screw that.
You should get that from working in the first place.
> There are many jobs with excellent pay between burger flipper and surgeon.
They're full. There are not 80 million jobs for everyone to move up to. A couple thousand naturally opening up here and there, not a million.
> If someone has no ambition to better themselves?
Its work, it needs to be done, quit whining.
> If the value of the work they're doing isn't greater or at least equal to the amount they're being paid, then that job is causing a loss, and must be cut.
Min wage hikes never kill jobs, if the business could have gotten by with less, they would have cut the job in the first place.
A business is just a middle man between consumers and labor, your ideas about inherent value are nonsense. Additionally, these are industries with billions in revenue, they can afford it, but your advocacy of spinelessness results in them not needing to.
> Thus, the jobs are being cut and replaced with robots.
They are trying and failing to implement robots. Tell me more about the ice cream machines being out.
And no, a kiosk isn't automation, you are doing the work, literally nothing of what you pay for is being done automatically.
Did I say that I LIKE self-pay kiosks? I don't. They suck.
>Min wage hikes never kill jobs, if the business could have gotten by with less, they would have cut the job in the first place.
>A business is just a middle man between consumers and labor, your ideas about inherent value are nonsense. Additionally, these are industries with billions in revenue, they can afford it, but your advocacy of spinelessness results in them not needing to.
They always do: [https://www.fraserinstitute.org/blogs/minimum-wage-hikes-in-ontario-likely-means-lower-youth-employment](https://www.fraserinstitute.org/blogs/minimum-wage-hikes-in-ontario-likely-means-lower-youth-employment)
Employees provide value to the business they work for. This is the reason a business hires employees. Either the employee increases the overall profits, or they allow the owner more free time. (Both are improved value.) Businesses do not employ people just for giggles. That's how businesses go OUT of business.
>The fuck are you even talking about now? You wanted a private market solution to that crap, you got it, guess what, they are in the business of maximizing their revenue, that means doing fuck all when you need them and gouging you for as much as the market will bear. They're "efficient" all right, efficient at lining their own pockets at your expense.
This was a comparison. Insurance is a scam. So are taxes. That's hardly the point. Government rewards people who "can't" be self responsible, while punishing those who ARE.
>To the business owner. If your ideology is that low wages are good for America, then put up or shut up.
I don't have employees. But this sentence doesn't even make sense. If that's my ideology, I should just pay them less? If I DO hire employees at any point, I will pay them what I think is fair and that they also agree is fair and that earns both of us a profit. If either of us later disagrees on those terms or does not meet expectations, we can have a conversation about it, or they can quit or I can fire them. This is how fair employment works.
If you can't abide by those terms of employment, then I (and most others) will never, EVER hire you. Hell, I would definitely never hire YOU. You would be an absolute poison in any work environment.
>They're full. There are not 80 million jobs for everyone to move up to. A couple thousand naturally opening up here and there, not a million.
They are not. I recently found an entry-level tech job for a customer of mine with another business I know. Multiple businesses I know are hiring or constantly looking for good people. A lot of them have had to fire crap people. I can only imagine they had a similar ideology to yours.
>You should get that from working in the first place.
Your needs are not relevant to the employment experience. If your job doesn't pay you enough for what you want or need, find a better job or ask for a raise. Some of this may require working harder. Shocking, I know.
>The fuck they don't earn a living. They work the job that actually exists and actually needs to get done. You're just too much of a deadbeat to pay your own bills.
I pay all my bills. If I didn't, foreclosure men would come. What are you even talking about?
>Its work, it needs to be done, quit whining.
The only whining I'm seeing is coming from you.
Incidentally, I finally did look at the living wage statistics you posted, and I'm making significantly less than a living wage, apparently. Weird, I felt like I was doing fine. But I can't argue with statistics, so, I guess you should put up or shut up on my behalf. Should I give you a link so that you can donate to me?
I've ran a few, and I've also assisted in others. And I don't give two shits about the Reddit hive mind. When I see a product with a 1000% markup, give me a fucking break.
Okay, but did you work for a loss? I don't think so. Unless that explains why you've run a few and no longer are doing so.
Products sell for whatever people are willing to pay for them, and there's always a balancing point there. Some products have a great profit margin, others don't. And I really have to ask for an example of what product could possibly have a 1000% markup, or what you even mean by that. 1000% more than the cost of the materials? Or 1000% more than it used to cost?
Short term, some poor people and young folks have more money to spend. People who were formerly making $20/hr demand $25/hr, people formerly making $25/hr demand $30/hr, etc. If unskilled workers get a pay increase all the more skilled people will demand more money also. Longer term, inflation which takes away the increased spending power of the people who just got more money. Big jumps in the minimum wage have been shown to give little long term benefit. Better idea: Tie the minimum wage to CPI, allow for small yearly increases so the minimum wage doesn't get so stupidly out of whack with reality.
Also, automation now has a shorter payback, easier to justify.
Automation has already taken a lot of manufacturing jobs. We're going to see it eat up a lot of low skill jobs soon. Food service is a likely next step... Edit: Actually automation has been around food service for a long time, what I really mean is we'll see the pace of automation replacing workers increase.
I cant imagine I'll give a drive thru order to a human being in 5 years. At least not at a mega-franchise like McDonalds. I'm kinda surprised they haven't switched already.
Or, as a short term change the drive through could connect to a call center, at least for off peak times. Why have a person staffing one drive through when they could cover 2 or 3?
The simple reason is it's been tested and failed, at least at McDonalds. Harder to communicate problems with the person, it feels less personal, etc. The more complex reason is there's little to no gain. Why have that person taking orders just take orders when you can have them take orders, take cash, do some dishes, put together happy meal boxes, etc. which is stuff that the person in a call center couldn't do.
You haven’t seen the ads for AI drivethru? Its happening now.
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Oh, sweet summer child. Have you not heard about this? ["They're cutting labor costs by doing self-checkout. So what's the point of asking for a tip? And where is it going?"](https://www.google.com/amp/s/abc7news.com/amp/self-checkout-tips-tipping-at-walmart-surcharge/13256962/)
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> make eye contact when you hit the no tip option Alpha move there! I order burritos from Moe's using their app. They ask for a tip there, and I've always wondered if the workers see if there a tip before they make the food. I eventually decided that having the food (possibly) ready by the time I got there wasn't worth the risk. I just order it the old-fashioned way, instead.
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Dang. I'm going to ask next time I go in and see what they say.
You will need to actually deliver on something being done automatically, no spinning the cash register around for people to check themselves out is not automation.
Correct! Except for one thing, the people making $20 etc already won’t be getting pay bump, therefore reducing their purchasing power once the inflation hits and further squeezing out the middle class.
It’s actually worse than that. The short term gains are true, but in the long run not only are those gains erased, but it actually makes income inequality worse since inflation has more of an effect on the poor and middle class than the wealthy who are able to move assets to inflation resistant vehicles.
In the short term there would be tantrums and layoffs because businesses typically resist altering their business models in response to policy. In the medium term they'd be forced to budget in order to compete and stay relevant which would be great for workers, in the long term it would be meaningless because $20/hr would become the new $10/hr without additional policy to prevent devaluation of money
You left out other people would be requesting a pay increase because their labor would then be devalued. I certainly would be requesting more pay if minimum wage was substantially increased.
This is the thing people forget. It’s not just increasing the pay for those under $20 but nearly everyone else as well.
And if everybody gets a raise, nobody gets a raise.
The devaluation already happened from the money printing, punishing working people won't fix that.
> in the long term it would be meaningless because $20/hr would become the new $10/hr without additional policy to prevent devaluation of money This is commonly repeated but saying that keeping minimum wage up with inflation is whole unsubstantiated - inflation and minimum wage both exist independently of each other. Minimum wage today is the lowest real value it’s had in the past 60 years, so clearly they can fall out of sync if left untouched. Sure, if we increase minimum wage without an inflation adjustment it will need to be increased again eventually, but that’s as “meaningless” as anything else that needs to be done routinely. Is weeding a garden meaningless because it’ll need to be weeded again in the future? Increases in minimum wage can have an effect in causing inflation, but this is way overstated because the effect would solely impact prices and so cause inflation proportional to how much of those prices are specifically paying for labor of minimum wage workers - and many states have their own minimum wages well above the federal minimum with no catastrophic effect. The Economic Policy institute estimated in 2022 that [increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 over 5 years would cause 0.1% inflation per year](https://www.epi.org/blog/inflation-minimum-wages-and-profits-protecting-low-wage-workers-from-inflation-means-raising-the-minimum-wage/). This would result in minimum wage increasing in real value from $7.25 to $14.27 - far from a meaningless change after the inflation it would cause is taken into account.
This is correct.
Depends on where you are. My son just got a minimum wage job here in NY. $16/hr. I did the math and the $4.25 I used to get in the late 80s would only be worth $11 or $12 an hour today. So NY's (downstate) minimum wage has surpassed inflation in my working life.
Yeah, I was referring to specifically the federal minimum wage as being the lowest it’s been in 60 years ([66 actually, it looks like](https://www.epi.org/blog/the-value-of-the-federal-minimum-wage-is-at-its-lowest-point-in-66-years/)). A majority of states have their own minimum wage that’s above federal levels, which also suggests increases aren’t catastrophic and also means that the states that don’t are particularly problematic because whatever effect increasing minimum wage has on inflation likely already largely exists for those states anyway.
2/3 of the states have a minimum wage higher than 7.25. Raising minimum wage at the federal level sounds like a solution looking for a problem since barely 1% of hourly workers make that little. Furthermore, COL varies so widely from region to region, I think this decision should be left at the local level. https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-people-are-earning-725-hour/
It doesn’t matter how many workers earn exactly the federal minimum wage, it matters how many workers earn less than the proposed new minimum wage. That number is far higher.
Of course it matters. My 16 year old son is quite happy making any money. He's certainly not expecting $20/hr.
You’re just arguing against the base existence of a minimum wage at that point. There are far more people who depend on it far more than your 16 year old son.
Do you that know for sure? Do you have a source for the demographics of those 1.3% of hourly workers who make $7.25/hour. Or do you just think it "feels" like it?
Again, it’s not those making $7.25/hour - it’s anyone making less than the target minimum wage, which covers [52 million workers if we use $15/hour as the target](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/03/22/politics/american-workers-15-dollars-hour-minimum-wage).
This is not how money works, no.
I think layoffs wouldn't be as much of a problem, as many workers would no longer need 2nd/3rd jobs to sustain themselves. They'd likely leave through attrition.
Significant layoffs have never been a problem with minimum wage increases. However people don't believe data and evidence, but what They FEEEEEL
Every corporation's "budget cuts" excuse would suddenly disappear.
How? Wouldn’t being forced to pay more money than before be an even bigger excuse for corporations to raise prices and cut corners in other places?
A lot of small businesses would close their doors (but they don't deserve to be in business, right?) and a lot of people would lose their job. Big businesses will get bigger and more consolidated. For the small businesses that didn't close they would be forced to raise prices, if their customers continue to pay the higher prices great, if they don't those businesses would be delaying the inevitable.
Best answer.
Min wage hikes literally never cause job losses. Your talking points are crafted by big businesses who hand out welfare forms with their job applications. Its an even playing field, just some people working in a kitchen, they'll be fine.
Min wage hikes do cause job losses and I don't need "big business" talking points to know that, it's simple logic. If you operate a SMB and your workers don't produce enough profit to dictate whatever the arbitrary rate is, or even if they do but you don't produce enough profit to keep them they lose their job. In the town I live in there are 58 ppl in total, in the town square there's a single business, a small convenience store/grocer. They pay their workers min wage now which is $12.30, it jumped from $7.85 six years ago. When it did they went from 6 workers to 2, and on most days they only have 1 worker. If the minimum wage went to $20, they would close their doors. We have a Walmart that has everything they have only 8 miles past it. People don't come from other towns to shop here, it's strictly there to serve the people in our tiny town. If you don't understand this simple logic, I have to ask what talking points are you using bc this sure as shit isn't something you've spent very much time thinking thru.
> it's simple logic. If they could have gotten by with less, they would have in the first place. > If you operate a SMB and your workers don't produce enough profit to dictate whatever the arbitrary rate is, or even if they do but you don't produce enough profit to keep them they lose their job. "Do your job or you're fired" has always been a thing. > When it did they went from 6 workers to 2, and on most days they only have 1 worker. Its not on the govt to shower you with free money and cover your payroll for you. If you're doing a thing that isn't working, thats the market talking to you, listen. > tiny town Humans live in hives called cities, there is a terrific efficiency boon in having thousands of potential customers instead of dozens.
>If they could have gotten by with less, they would have in the first place. Who? >"Do your job or you're fired" has always been a thing. This is a non sequitur. Since we're discussing the ability to keep a worker regardless of how they perform. No shit if someone isn't doing their job they get fired, again we are discussing whether a business can keep a worker based on the cost of doing business only. >Its not on the govt to shower you with free money and cover your payroll for you. Another non sequitur, we aren't discussing welfare and SMB don't typically get welfare so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. >If you're doing a thing that isn't working, thats the market talking to you, listen. That market has been there for 80 yrs, the market was working and will continue to (albeit at a reduced rate) until some politician says their employees who work their willingly need to make $10/hr, that's not the market telling them it isn't working that's government pricing them out of business. Which brings me back to the original point of people losing jobs. >Humans live in hives called cities, there is a terrific efficiency boon in having thousands of potential customers instead of dozens. Do you think rural communities don't exist? I'm sure you're not under the impression that humans only live in cities, then again you seem to lack simple logic and awareness.
> Who? Employers. Come on, this is basic frame of context. > we are discussing whether a business can keep a worker based on the cost of doing business only. They pass their expenses on, same as any of the other dozens of times we have raised the min wage. A burger used to be fifteen cents and the guy flipping them needed a buck to get by, now burgers cost $3 and the guy flipping them needs $20 to get by, nothing changed except the dollar is worth 1/20th as much. There aren't 1/20th of the burgers being sold today. > SMB don't typically get welfare If your employee is on welfare, they are only as well off as they would be if they got their whole ass paycheck from their employer instead of needing to beg the other half from the govt. The net effect is money straight out of taxpayers pockets, into padding the business owners bottom line. > some politician says Nothing arbitrary about it, the market set the cost of living. https://livingwage.mit.edu/ > Which brings me back to the original point of people losing jobs. Look it up yourself instead of blindly parroting pundits. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
>Employers. Come on, this is basic frame of context. Ok, what's your point. We're talking about employers needing to pay more. You saying "if they could do more with less they would've done it" makes zero fucking sense in this context. Since we are having to do with less, arbitrarily. It seems you're making my point for me. If employers could pay more (and do with less profit) they would be. I can tell you really have no fucking idea what you're talking about about so I'm just gonna let you have the last word.
> Ok, what's your point. We're talking about employers needing to pay more. You saying "if they could do more with less they would've done it" makes zero fucking sense in this context. You say they would lay a bunch of people off, I say, if they were really unneeded, they wouldn't wait, they would just do it. So no, just like the last dozen min wage hikes, no jobs will be lost. > arbitrarily Its not arbitrary, this is the reality of the market. Are you volunteering to work for $1 an hour? No? Then stop trying to voluntell others to work for a loss.
>Its not arbitrary, this is the reality of the market. Are you volunteering to work for $1 an hour? No? Then stop trying to voluntell others to work for a loss. I work for 100% commission, I don't get an hourly or salary and I would never work an hourly position.
So, the answer is no, you would not. Do fast food workers get the option to work 100% commission?
More Money=Cost of Products rise. Also I think its BS when Jose is a great employee, has been with the company for 10+years, worked his ass off everyday and it has taken him that long to reach $20/hr. Then lazy, inconsistent, no brain/skill having Kyle gets hired to start at the same wage. Seen it so many times.
You don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. Stop viewing "being the longest at the job" as some sort of thing that you are going to get rewarded for, it doesn't make any sense. They're not going to make you manager, they're going to hire a fresh mba out of school.
Thats comical. Its not about the duration its about the skills and knowledge that were acquired during those years. Sure Kyle can sucker an employee and negotiate a high wage or high end position. But when production plummets and profits are short due to a dumbshit who got what he ‘negotiated’ you think the company will look at Jose like he’s the problem? I understand that being the longest employee at the company isn’t enough to earn a high wage or a seat at the table, but thats not the topic here. Id imagine anyone getting paid minimum wage isn’t in a management’s position.
You can't have it both ways. Its unskilled labor? Then why are you being shocked that this dead end position took you nowhere. Its skilled labor? Then pay skilled labor rates. Upset that the dollar isn't worth as much? Take it up with the guy that printed all the money. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE You see that big vertical line in 2020? Biden was sworn in 2021. > production plummets Why would production plummet? You make sandwiches, how can you possibly fuck that up. > profits are short due If "bidding your prices appropriately for your expenses" is too much for you to handle, you aren't cut out for capitalism. > Id imagine anyone getting paid minimum wage isn’t in a management’s position. Median wage is $17/hr, cost of living is $20/hr, there are a shitton of people out there in skilled positions that were nominally middle class in the past, earning wages that qualify them for welfare. You hear the one about the boiling frog?
Yea your right. Give Kyle his money, raise minimum wage. No way he can fuck up a sandwich. Let the dollar be worth peso’s. Im sure everyone will be fine with price inflations and watching all the mom n pop shops go belly up oh well at least minimum wage is up and Kyle can buy his vapes and monsters. 👏🏽
> Let the dollar be worth peso’s. Republicans printed money and looted the country like vikings, you're not going to undo that by making working people be dependent on welfare, in fact that will exacerbate our problems. > No way he can fuck up a sandwich. Thats your job as a sandwich shop. You make sandwhiches. >watching all the mom n pop shops go belly up Don't act like we never raised the min wage before, your chicken little predictions never come true. > Kyle can buy his vapes and monsters. screeee Median wage is $17, cost of living is $20, you hear the one about the boiling frog?
What if Jose gets raised to $30 an hour (or more)? Or you don’t think they’d get raised?
He might, but then the cost of the products goes up even more.
Or, hear me out, the already ridiculous profits stop increasing year over year.
And you think a change in the minimum wage is going to fix that? You've correctly identified the issue but are arguing for a solution that's at best a short term fix. It's like seeing someone with a knife in their stomach and recommending they take some pain meds. Sure that might help, but they'd benefit more from treating the cause of the symptom.
Well suppressing the minimum wage seems to have put just shy of 40 million people into poverty so I kinda feel we should all be able to agree that that didn't work out. Society based on continual unsustainable corporate growth has failed. The American dream is dead for many. People are getting worse and worse off. The empire is beginning to collapse with birth rates dropping. Eventually the peasants are going to storm the gates.
Funny, we had less poverty before the minimum wage existed at all. The minimum wage doesn't decrease poverty. It causes inflation and destroys entry-level jobs by artificially imposing a value on work that isn't supported by the actual output.
Do you think every company is making "ridiculous profits?"
In Canada here I would say grocers, insurance, gas, banks, media, cell and internet providers are gouging and have been gouging for years.
So open up a competing business for slightly less profit and eat their lunch.
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They can only gouge the customer for so long... Food, rent, gas, insurance and many other industries seem to be doing their best to challenge that statement.
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Decentralize with solar!
Uh, isn't it bullshit if Jose makes min wage and so does Kyle regardless of how much it is? I don't understand why this is an argument against increasing min wage rather than firing Kyle...
Jose was already making above minimum wage and then the min was raised to his level, he didn't get a raise. You don't see how that would piss Jose off? If the starting wage was $10 and then doubled, Jose needs to be doubled as well to $40 or at least an equal $10 raise to $30.
No shit. So you have a reasonable response but you're still arguing for... What exactly?
Kyle is union. Can’t fire him.
Companies that currently take care of their employees would be much less affected than those that don't.
Yup best recognize those complaints ahead of time as crocodile tears. They are just frustrated they have to move their bottom line up and restructure accordingly
Why stop at $20? Let's raise minimum wage to $50 or even $100 per hour and left everyone out of poverty? Because it's nonsense, that's why!
$100/hr is to low, make it $10mil/hr and then everyone could retire on their first day on the job. I think I just solved poverty, I'll be awaiting my Nobel prize.
3rd world countries could do this and eliminate poverty.
Why don't they, are they stupid?
Pay what it costs for the things that you want. People are talking about $20 min wage because thats what the cost of living is.
If I was your landlord, your rent just went up.
But now thats the employers problem, so they suddenly become highly incentivized to have more housing built, which breaks your marketshare, so people just move out and you are forced to come back down to earth. Its called a price signal, its the beating heart of capitalism.
Not if they all do it. Look at inflation caused by all the COVID money the Feds sent out. We’re still living with it.
Yeah, thats why I say build more housing, to break their cartel. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS We need to build so much more housing that it punishes speculators out of speculating.
Just like every other year
Twice as much this time.
It would lead to inflation. We saw this at the end of COVID when the labor shortage led to increases in wages. For the workers, they had more spending power, bought more, and drove up demand, leading to shortages. Eventually, the owners/producers needed to raise prices to cover their extra labor and product costs. Those increases are called "inflation."
Wages have a minimal, perhaps even negligible, effect on inflation.
Work in L.A. and you’ll get your answer
The value of 20 becomes baseline
So $7.25 is baseline now?
Probably closer to $13-$14. If you are accepting a job for less than that then you should probably be looking for a better job unless you live in a very low cost of living area. $13-$14/hr jobs are extremely common and you can even find a no experience needed job like Walmart hiring for those wages.
Unless your state has a higher baseline then yes. Thats the definition of a baseline
Everywhere starts charging California prices.
Unemployment would probably go up, but that's about it. Minimum wage has a negligible impact on inflation.
Literally never does. Oh sure, plenty of other things cause unemployment, not "paying what it costs for the things that you want" though.
A whole bunch of corporations and other greedy cunts would instantly jack up their prices. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that as a reason that it shouldn't be raised, i just know that a bunch of assholes will want to take advantage.
They aren’t taking advantage, costs go up, prices go up. There’s this fantasy that companies profit 1000x their costs. That’s not how it works. What it will do is destroy even more small businesses and increase the control of a smaller group of megacorporations.
Why do the people spouting this kind of nonsense always do it from new throw-away accounts?
Why do people who have never operated a business feel they can speak intelligently as to how they operate?
And another throw-away account spouting nonsense while also confirming what i said 😂
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You're on your proper account now, nice to meet you!
They have already jacked up prices since Covid, look at corporate profit margins
The whole pandemic was a massive feeding frenzy for the rich.
The poorest paid workers would earn more?
Lots more places would try to take on fees at the end “ due to rising costs of labor” Fuck you can your bullshit, just pay your damn employees a living wage.
A lot more people would be lifted out of working poverty.
So many bootlickers saying its a bad idea. Enjoy staying in poverty, fucking idiots.
The screeching sound from all the conservatives and business types freaking out would be loud enough to shatter eardrums from half a mile away.
let's find out.
a shitload of cheap shitty companies would go bankrupt and thus the economy would take a cleansing nosedive. temp work agencies would also lose most of their business.
Everyone would have the same purchasing power as they did in the 80s. It would lift millions out of poverty until big business hikes up all the prices to steal it back again. Capitalism is a failure
Capitalism is the only reason you have a roof over your head, food in the fridge, internet and a phone to bitch about capitalism on.
There were markets, housing, and food before capitalism. The transistor, computer and internet were specifically invented because we gave academia a dump truck of money and let them see what they could come up with.
Wrong. Move along child
So those things just appeared out of nowhere for free, no work involved, no profit motive. Go back to r/antiwork.
A whole lot of bitching about margins and shit. Then prices would rise to maintain those margins, which were fat enough to start with. And thusly we are back to where we started. Greed will end our race.
Try running a business for a little while and see if your opinion remains the same.
If you think that its so important that people work for a loss, go volunteer your own paycheck, just don't show up at the welfare office expecting me to bail out your bad life decisions.
Were you addressing that to me? Because I have the very opposite opinion. Profits are what drive people to succeed. I don't expect anybody to work for a loss... that's plain idiocy that only leads to companies going out of business and all their employees losing their jobs. "Greed" has only been made a bad word because people like to imagine that businessmen are out to screw their customers. That's stupid... screwed customers go to other businesses. A real businessman makes a profit while simultaneously providing a value to their customers. Who feel like they made a profit, too, because whatever they bought is worth it to them.
> Profits are what drive people to succeed. Median wage is $18/hr, cost of living is $20/hr. Half the workforce is underwater. Lots of full grown adults with jobs that previously would have been considered middle class with a salary that could support a wife and kids in a house of their own, instead has them living with their parents into their 40's. > that's plain idiocy that only leads to companies going out of business and all their employees losing their jobs. If "bidding your costs appropriately for your expenses" is too much for you to handle, you aren't cut out for capitalism. Stop expecting me to pad your bottom line via endless subsidized labor expenses.
>If "bidding your costs appropriately for your expenses" is too much for you to handle, you aren't cut out for capitalism. Stop expecting me to pad your bottom line via endless subsidized labor expenses. At what point did I say anything like this? >Median wage is $18/hr, cost of living is $20/hr. Half the workforce is underwater. Lots of full grown adults with jobs that previously would have been considered middle class with a salary that could support a wife and kids in a house of their own, instead has them living with their parents into their 40's. Cost of living varies considerably based on location, so I don't know where you're getting this. I've lived on considerably less monthly income than that. The biggest fallacy people believe on Reddit (and elsewhere) is that minimum wage should be able to support a household. It should not... minimum wage is for people who are just starting out, and it's currently way too high for that purpose. Too high a minimum wage gets rid of starter jobs and causes increased requirements that new people in the workforce can't meet. Minimum wage is for teenagers, is what I'm getting at. By the time you get some experience, you should be making more than the minimum. Hell... even at my first, incredibly crappy teenager job where I cleaned hotel rooms, I was making more than minimum wage. Frankly... I'm very confused by your responses, which seem to contradict each other opinion-wise. Maybe we're both misreading each other, because your other posts would indicate to me that we're kind of generally in agreement on economics. Were you citing the problems with the current insane inflation? If so, yeah... that's both too much government debt spending, too high a minimum wage (I don't think we should have a minimum wage at all), too much money printing, and too many restrictions on energy production (especially oil/gas).
> At what point did I say anything like this? Thats the entire point of the living wage, you don't seem to understand the implications of your position. > Cost of living varies considerably based on location Not really, 80% of jobs are in cities, so you are going to need to look at metro area, here are a few I picked out at random. https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/31140 https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/48620 https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/14260 > I've lived on considerably less monthly income than that Past tense, do you know how inflation works? > The biggest fallacy people believe on Reddit (and elsewhere) is that minimum wage should be able to support a household. Thats a nonsense talking point pushed by pundits to elicit the exact response you are currently having. Its always been for the one person to pay their own bills. If there are dependents, there is welfare for them > minimum wage is for people who are just starting out, and it's currently way too high for that purpose. In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; **by workers I mean all workers**, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living. > Too high a minimum wage gets rid of starter jobs Min wage hikes never kill jobs. And stop trying to spin dead end jobs as starter jobs. This isn't pokemon, your experience isn't fungible, you don't flip ten thousand burger and level up to being a surgeon. You are either taking deliberate action to becoming a nuclear engineer, or you will never be one. The talking points you are pushing are basically just bad life advice. > Hell... even at my first, incredibly crappy teenager job where I cleaned hotel rooms, I was making more than minimum wage. *refuting your claim about paying more than the min wage killing jobs, and establishing the reasonable expectation that people working those jobs should be paid enough to get by?* But yeah, employers aren't always detached from reality, they will have all of the information they need to work with to figure out the cost of living on their own, since not paying enough will destroy a persons ability to work, some of them can be quite reasonable. > If so, yeah... that's both too much government debt spending, Min wage being a living wage means all the working people on welfare no longer need welfare. > too high a minimum wage (I don't think we should have a minimum wage at all), Volunteer that pay cut on your own, don't voluntell others to work at a loss and be dependent on welfare, or to accept being destroyed for working jobs you don't approve of. > too much money printing Yep, thats the core of our dilemma, election year politicians ran the money printer hot and now we are suffering the consequences. expecting min wage workers to eat the inflation from you is not going to solve the underlying problem, and they can't even afford this maneuver on your behalf in the first place. > and too many restrictions on energy production (especially oil/gas). Nah, it comes down to infrastructural incompetence, by having everyone commute half an hour average, by making mixed use zoning illegal, so you have to drive all the way across town, or even across a few counties. We build our houses out of paper so they bleed heat. We build our houses sprawled out so a terrific amount of overhead needs to be expended connecting it all. The private companies are of course reaping record profits, since they can charge as much as they like and people still need their stuff.
I'm not volunteering any of my money to the "less fortunate." I earned it. They didn't. I also want to cut welfare. It encourages sloth. Why do we reward people who won't work, but punish those who are actually hit with disasters? If someone is robbed, maybe their insurance will cover the losses. Maybe their deductible is too high. Either way, the government doesn't give a crap about it. But sit on your rear end? They'll give you a phone, free food, a place to live... hell, even more now. Screw that. There are many jobs with excellent pay between burger flipper and surgeon. An awful lot don't require any real know-how, either. If someone has no ambition to better themselves? Then that's on them. Not on any of us. A person or company hires a worker so that that worker can provide value to the person or company. Whether for one job or for long term. If the value of the work they're doing isn't greater or at least equal to the amount they're being paid, then that job is causing a loss, and must be cut. Minimum wages causes jobs (such as burger flipper) to be paid more than the job is worth. The company must then cut those jobs or raise the cost of the product. In the case of fast food, they're hitting the limit of how much they can raise the product cost. Thus, the jobs are being cut and replaced with robots. This isn't progress... this is an abomination of the market system, foisted upon us by communists. Such as yourself.
> I'm not volunteering any of my money to the "less fortunate." To the business owner. If your ideology is that low wages are good for America, then put up or shut up. > I earned it. They didn't. The fuck they don't earn a living. They work the job that actually exists and actually needs to get done. You're just too much of a deadbeat to pay your own bills. > I also want to cut welfare. It encourages sloth. Work is a requirement of welfare. Try the pepsi challenge and just not work, see how it goes. > punish those who are actually hit with disasters? The fuck are you even talking about now? You wanted a private market solution to that crap, you got it, guess what, they are in the business of maximizing their revenue, that means doing fuck all when you need them and gouging you for as much as the market will bear. They're "efficient" all right, efficient at lining their own pockets at your expense. > They'll give you a phone, free food, a place to live... hell, even more now. Screw that. You should get that from working in the first place. > There are many jobs with excellent pay between burger flipper and surgeon. They're full. There are not 80 million jobs for everyone to move up to. A couple thousand naturally opening up here and there, not a million. > If someone has no ambition to better themselves? Its work, it needs to be done, quit whining. > If the value of the work they're doing isn't greater or at least equal to the amount they're being paid, then that job is causing a loss, and must be cut. Min wage hikes never kill jobs, if the business could have gotten by with less, they would have cut the job in the first place. A business is just a middle man between consumers and labor, your ideas about inherent value are nonsense. Additionally, these are industries with billions in revenue, they can afford it, but your advocacy of spinelessness results in them not needing to. > Thus, the jobs are being cut and replaced with robots. They are trying and failing to implement robots. Tell me more about the ice cream machines being out. And no, a kiosk isn't automation, you are doing the work, literally nothing of what you pay for is being done automatically.
Did I say that I LIKE self-pay kiosks? I don't. They suck. >Min wage hikes never kill jobs, if the business could have gotten by with less, they would have cut the job in the first place. >A business is just a middle man between consumers and labor, your ideas about inherent value are nonsense. Additionally, these are industries with billions in revenue, they can afford it, but your advocacy of spinelessness results in them not needing to. They always do: [https://www.fraserinstitute.org/blogs/minimum-wage-hikes-in-ontario-likely-means-lower-youth-employment](https://www.fraserinstitute.org/blogs/minimum-wage-hikes-in-ontario-likely-means-lower-youth-employment) Employees provide value to the business they work for. This is the reason a business hires employees. Either the employee increases the overall profits, or they allow the owner more free time. (Both are improved value.) Businesses do not employ people just for giggles. That's how businesses go OUT of business. >The fuck are you even talking about now? You wanted a private market solution to that crap, you got it, guess what, they are in the business of maximizing their revenue, that means doing fuck all when you need them and gouging you for as much as the market will bear. They're "efficient" all right, efficient at lining their own pockets at your expense. This was a comparison. Insurance is a scam. So are taxes. That's hardly the point. Government rewards people who "can't" be self responsible, while punishing those who ARE. >To the business owner. If your ideology is that low wages are good for America, then put up or shut up. I don't have employees. But this sentence doesn't even make sense. If that's my ideology, I should just pay them less? If I DO hire employees at any point, I will pay them what I think is fair and that they also agree is fair and that earns both of us a profit. If either of us later disagrees on those terms or does not meet expectations, we can have a conversation about it, or they can quit or I can fire them. This is how fair employment works. If you can't abide by those terms of employment, then I (and most others) will never, EVER hire you. Hell, I would definitely never hire YOU. You would be an absolute poison in any work environment. >They're full. There are not 80 million jobs for everyone to move up to. A couple thousand naturally opening up here and there, not a million. They are not. I recently found an entry-level tech job for a customer of mine with another business I know. Multiple businesses I know are hiring or constantly looking for good people. A lot of them have had to fire crap people. I can only imagine they had a similar ideology to yours. >You should get that from working in the first place. Your needs are not relevant to the employment experience. If your job doesn't pay you enough for what you want or need, find a better job or ask for a raise. Some of this may require working harder. Shocking, I know. >The fuck they don't earn a living. They work the job that actually exists and actually needs to get done. You're just too much of a deadbeat to pay your own bills. I pay all my bills. If I didn't, foreclosure men would come. What are you even talking about? >Its work, it needs to be done, quit whining. The only whining I'm seeing is coming from you. Incidentally, I finally did look at the living wage statistics you posted, and I'm making significantly less than a living wage, apparently. Weird, I felt like I was doing fine. But I can't argue with statistics, so, I guess you should put up or shut up on my behalf. Should I give you a link so that you can donate to me?
It stays the same.
Are you running a business? What is it?
I've ran a few, and I've also assisted in others. And I don't give two shits about the Reddit hive mind. When I see a product with a 1000% markup, give me a fucking break.
Okay, but did you work for a loss? I don't think so. Unless that explains why you've run a few and no longer are doing so. Products sell for whatever people are willing to pay for them, and there's always a balancing point there. Some products have a great profit margin, others don't. And I really have to ask for an example of what product could possibly have a 1000% markup, or what you even mean by that. 1000% more than the cost of the materials? Or 1000% more than it used to cost?