Minimum Wage = Maximum Nonsense - A Masochistic Invitation to Derision

Could it be that we are encouraged to hate our working lives?

So we ARE more greedy to save to have fun and not share between others and focus on our families?

Save for when we are old so we can eat good and have fun.


Is greed infused on a more basic level?
And if you cant be greedy, be a burden?

reply to post by Biigs


I think humanity is fundamentally good, statistically speaking.

But it is the nature of evil that it usually comes to rise to the top of the pile and impose its rule and ways on everyone if good men do nothing.

Good men seldom do much to curb evil. By their very nature they are tolerant, goodwilled, forgiving.

What is needed is good men with just enough evil in them not to stand it, to sit back and take it, but instead to kick evil's ass. These people are very rare.

reply to post by Pejeu


The misconception is that everyone is equal. They are not.

People get confused with giving eberyone the same EVERYTHING and letting people succeed/fail and prove themselves and getting some sort of civilized discount/bonus.


Why let failures succeed, sounds like evolutionary suicide.
If a stupid, bad, thieving, lying father/mother wants to raise children, why not HE/SHE be limited by HIS/HER income like i am because i plan ahead?
Right now we are raising more people BAD for our society's than we are restricting them and promoting good ones.

Why isn't it "raise a child that performs in the top ten percent, receive a 20% tax break and free hospital fees for your next" everyone loves having kids, but you cant just squirt them out every year and things are magically going to make everyone a happy millionaire.

reply to post by tinfoilman

You could, the gov actually does a form of this when they lower taxes. It's basically the same thing. But the classic question is when do you lower taxes and let people fend for themselves with their own money or when do you tax and use people's money in a way they couldn't do themselves, like build public highways or have social welfare programs?

You realize how they changed us from a constitutional republic to a majority rules democracy right?

Thats how they are taking our individual power by doing exactly what you just said above.

reply to post by Biigs


Tax breaks for the smart kids! That will go over really well.. Lol
Some people make bad decisions their whole life and should pay for those decisions.
Some people are dealt a bad hand. (Handicap,environment,financial) and can not overcome those odds. Do we become a nanny state or let people fail?
Unfortunately it's the kids that suffer and repeat the parents failures

reply to post by Biigs

I don't think greed is the problem here, it might be laziness or apathy.

As a business owner/creator, I have been highly focused and gone the extra mile with each of my customers with the expectation that my attentiveness would guarantee customer satisfaction which would ultimately produce references and more and more work. Is that greed? Sounds like it to me, I want more money and I did what I could to get it. I also forced my competitors to step up their game or throw in the towel, does that make me predatory?

If I had access to government and could direct the creation of regulations to avoid all that hassle of working hard and could instead just legislate my competition out of business and didn't have to bother to do a good job and expected to be similarly rewarded, I would consider that laziness or apathy.

If I could cut my workers pay and raise my daily take while discouraging them from being efficient and happy producers I would be stupid and short sighted, not greedy. My business would collapse.

As it happens, that is the default attitude of any producer of goods or services if their compensation/job security is not directly connected to their performance.

While I am sure there are some Mr. Burns' out there, I don't think they are common. The real super rich are entrenched in monopolies supported by government regulations and most likely fit into the lazy or apathetic classification. They simply could not compete in a free market without the threat of state violence maintaining their market share artificially.

The idea behind raising minimum wage (or any wage) is to redistribute wealth in a manner that makes more people happy.

Business owners are supposed to accept lower profits for themselves and spread the difference to their employees.

In other words, raising the mnimum wage is taking from the rich and giving it to the poor.

I do not know about you, but to me this sounds like what Jesus would do, and so I fully support the idea. It is very Christian to share, as our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ taught us.

masterp
The idea behind raising minimum wage (or any wage) is to redistribute wealth in a manner that makes more people happy.

Business owners are supposed to accept lower profits for themselves and spread the difference to their employees.

In other words, raising the mnimum wage is taking from the rich and giving it to the poor.

I do not know about you, but to me this sounds like what Jesus would do, and so I fully support the idea. It is very Christian to share, as our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ taught us.

Jesus can give you his share if he wants. He is the son of god so he has a good retirement plan.

As for business owners, how much profit is acceptable to you? Is it a percentage or a certain amount of money. Apple made a huge profit percentage wise, Exxon made about 10% profit for its share holders but that was a huge dolor amount.

Minimum wage is necessary but it shouldn't be raised just for the sake of raising it. It should only be raised as inflation is raised and it should be lowered as deflation occurs (does that even happen?). There are even some that believe that there should be real-time payments made with the power of "the cloud" but ehh-- too scary. They say things like if the value of the dollar goes up, so does your hourly pay and it would be done on a live basis and when you get home you see that money in your bank. but quite honestly, such a fluid system sounds too easy to game the system through corruption and one thing we understand about the economy is that corruption conquers all.

Raising minimum wage has its downfalls like the loss of hours, jobs, and benefits. Businesses even go bankrupt over this because they have to compete against big corp and a mom and pops shop can't really compete against zero-thin margins and when things like obamacare gets implemented or when minimum wage goes up, there goes that shop and only big corps benefits from this.

I also fit into the category of libertarian but I've seen what little to no minimum wage laws do to people, and what happens is that other countries that do have higher minimum wage laws end up outsourcing and your country becomes victim to incredibly low paying wages because you have no choice in the matter. If you bring minimum wage too low you become a third world country, if you bring it too high your country bankrupts and you become a third world country. The difficult lies in math but it seems that politicians don't care about math, they only care about approval ratings and what they can secretly pocket while in office. F-them.

EDIT: I just want to add that if you're working at a minimum wage job and you're not a teenager then what happened? Get your act together and get a career job! A real job will not pay you anywhere close to minimum wage, they compete for talent and without talent they can't release high-quality products. This part of the industry is self-correcting but if you flip burgers and don't have a minimum wage law, then it's very well possible that $1/hr is petitioned but I doubt many people would ever care to work there. They would have a better chance at replacing staff with robots which would probably be better than messing with my order half the time IMO.

reply to post by Em2013


You are right on the money, so to speak.
Making changes of any kind has some consequences.
When did the auto companies start using robots? They replaced employees with machines, that improved work rate and they work 24/7. No pension ,no healthcare , sick days. That sounds terrible for the people that got fired, and it was.
The other side of the coin is that production increased, quality increased (no human error) and the cars were more consistent. Production went up so they had to order more parts which are in many cases made by smaller companies under contract. It should have kept production costs lower and competition should keep the price of the car lower.
That's how it should work anyhow.

onequestion
reply to post by tinfoilman

 

You could, the gov actually does a form of this when they lower taxes. It's basically the same thing. But the classic question is when do you lower taxes and let people fend for themselves with their own money or when do you tax and use people's money in a way they couldn't do themselves, like build public highways or have social welfare programs?

You realize how they changed us from a constitutional republic to a majority rules democracy right?

Thats how they are taking our individual power by doing exactly what you just said above.

What's that? Our representatives still vote for us, it's still a Republic.

masterp
The idea behind raising minimum wage (or any wage) is to redistribute wealth in a manner that makes more people happy.

Business owners are supposed to accept lower profits for themselves and spread the difference to their employees.

In other words, raising the mnimum wage is taking from the rich and giving it to the poor.

I do not know about you, but to me this sounds like what Jesus would do, and so I fully support the idea. It is very Christian to share, as our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ taught us.

I think you have a very different idea of what it means to be a Christian than Jesus Christ would have and that is a problem.

I would say that Jesus wanted people to be generous and always take care of people in need. Never to turn away strangers and to visit the infirm.

If you passed a law in Rome that forcibly took money from big fat rich elitist Romans throwing out leftover hummingbird tongue paté from their disgusting pedophilic orgies (that's what you are getting at right) and redistributed it to poor people and turned around to Jesus and said "see, now we are generous", I think you know what he would say.

It is up to you personally to do these things, not impose that responsibility on others. Lead by example not by the point of the spear.

He would also discourage you from allowing any earthly organization to come between you and your personal Lord and savior.

Sorry this has to come from a Taoist but, I calls 'em as I sees 'em.

reply to post by greencmp


Where does it say in the Bible that Jesus would be against a law that redistributes wealth? not that I am doubting you, just asking out of curiosity.

masterp
reply to post by greencmp

 

Where does it say in the Bible that Jesus would be against a law that redistributes wealth? not that I am doubting you, just asking out of curiosity.

I don't actually know but, my understanding of Christian philosophy is that it is personal and voluntary.

No mandatory actions could ever be considered honest or spiritually significant.

If you take a job that pays 8.50 an hour...that's what you agreed to, bottom line.
If they raise the minimum wage, it would be passed onto the buyers of the service or item that is being made. That means the same item would be MORE expensive then...so you still would not be able to afford it.
It would however make it so less people are working because of more going out to make said product...let me give you an example...
A hamburger from McDonalds...lets look at the beef patty
1)A farmer has to buy feed, to feed the cow... it costs more due to raising minimum wage.
2)A farm hand takes care of the cow, 3)transport the cow to livestock sale and farmer has to sell the cow, 4) transport the cow to new owner of cow,5) slaughtering costs of the cow,6) processing and packaging of cow,7) shipping of cow,8) cooking the cow,9) buying the cooked product of cow...
OK now let me just explain something...every place ..every stop along the way, the price of the labor increased....I #'d them for you...I even left out several steps along the way, including vet bills and all kinds of other things that add to the total cost of the cow....if you want to be mad...think, each spot that is here to raise the price, there are taxes paid for the same thing at each step along the way...this is just for the meat in a burger...there is still the paper to wrap it in, the lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, mustard, mayo...they are all taxed several time along the way, and every time they get handled by a person that has a higher pay rate ...the price goes up more and more for the item...this is just food for thought people!!

saltdog
It would however make it so less people are working because of more going out to make said product...

Yet another person that doesn't understand economic growth. Minimum wage is a pro-growth policy. Look around your town and count how many businesses there are now compared to the 80's, 70's, 50's. Count how many jobs were around in the 30's when minimum wage was first passed? MW has only gone up since right?

Shouldn't have all the MW jobs disappeared by now? Have all the businesses fired all their employees? Have all the gas stations went broke? All the fast food workers fired? Obviously not. In fact when it comes to service type businesses, the kind most likely to pay minimum wage, the kind most likely to hire the poor, we have more of them than ever compared to when MW first started. A friggin McDonald's on every corner. Obviously something is wrong with your logic.

That flaw is you're looking at a static economy where new businesses never open up. But if you focus on growth then over the long haul you end up with more jobs. Even at the short term cost of a few businesses here and there that were probably going broke anyway.

It doesn't matter if one restaurant owner, that's probably going broke anyway, fires a restaurant a worker or two if someone else is building five new restaurants down the street. It's penny wise and pound foolish to worry about the restaurant that's going broke. You worry about how to grow your economy.

Another flaw in your logic is that corporate business, corporate greed, doesn't throw up its hands and say well MW went up! There's nothing we can do! Profits are down! Fire everyone and shut the doors! Everybody go home!

Nope, what corporate business does is say, well we need more profit, BUILD MORE STORES! EXPAND! AND GROW! That's how that works. We need to compete and capture more of the market than the other guy.

Raising MW gives the poorest, who are probably in debt up to their friggin eyeballs, a chance to inflate out of their current debt just like everyone else does, buy more crap, take on new debt up to their eyeballs, which gives a little more growth to economy because those poor people just bought more crap that won't last. But the debt from it will until the next time they raise the MW. See how that works?

reply to post by Krazysh0t


Those immigrants live here just the same. They don't have some special power or immigrants only grocery centers.

Actually most immigrants work hard and make more than minimum wage as it is. They do a lot of jobs for less money, but those jobs they are doing for less AREN'T minimum wage jobs. They are hard labor or dangerous jobs.

When is the last time you saw an immigrant working minimum wage? They don't, but even if they did, it would be difficult for them to get jobs at these corporations becaues they are illegal.

Most of the immigrants work under the table, or contract work. They aren't making minimum wage as it is.

So no, that argument is not valid. The market will correct itself.
If we abolished minimum wage I am 100 percent certain that wages would rise and at the very least linger at the current minimum wage.

Minimum wage sets an expectation and makes people less likely to actually job search. They know all the jobs they applied for are minimum wage so what's the point in taking one over the other?

GogoVicMorrow
reply to post by Krazysh0t

 

The market will correct itself.

The market won't correct itself if we abolish minimum wage because MW has virtually no influence on the current state of the market. Most employees don't get paid minimum wage. Most employees who get hired in at minimum wage won't make minimum wage by the time MW goes up again because they will have gotten raises by the time it goes up again. The percentage of people making MW is small.

Screwing a very small percentage of your populace, who are poor and who already get paid the least and need the help the most, will not correct a 17 TRILLION DOLLAR MARKET! Anybody that thinks so never took 1st grade math.

MW is usually raised behind inflation meaning the inflation has already happened for other reasons. Like the price of oil going up and thousands of other things that actually cause inflation. THOSE THINGS WILL STILL BE THERE! The prices jacked through the roof due to oil? Sill gonna be a problem even after screwing the MW. The reason oil prices are jacked through the roof isn't because poor people are buying too much of it! It's because everyone is buying too much of it and we're RUNNING OUT OF IT!

Health care costs through the roof? Guess what? Poor MW workers that can't afford insurance now won't be able to afford it after you cut their wages in half either. Doctors don't make minimum wage. Neither does the fancy new multi-million dollar MRI machine that just came in yesterday. Nor do the people that build it.

I'm sorry if you want to "correct" a 17 trillion dollar economy you're gonna have to find a larger source of money. If you have to screw the people at the bottom to fix the problem, then the problem isn't worth fixing! Any solution to any problem should help the lesser FIRST before the greater.

reply to post by Krazysh0t


The argument is that no one will work for pennies when the guy down the street is hiring for $10 an hour.

It would actually be a detriment to a company to hire someone for pennis because they would have to be so dumb that it would be a liability to the company.

The free market will determine the minimum wage.

amfirst1
reply to post by Krazysh0t

 

The free market will determine the minimum wage.

Then why doesn't it already do this? Why do the politicians have to keep raising MW? Because we don't have a completely free market. That's a theoretical construct taught in schools that doesn't exist in the real world. You know that right? Virtually every economist will tell you that's all theoretical and does not accurately model any real world economy which is a mixture of free/non-free markets/government regulated markets where employees are not simply an economic commodity.

The politicians have to keep raising it to adjust MW for those 2% or 3% of workers whom have basically no bargaining power and whom the market did not magically "correct" itself for.

For example if we raise MW to $10 an hour today and say we have theoretical 2% inflation for the next 10 years due to other things like oil price and just economic growth in general. Then in seven to ten years when we go to raise MW again there shouldn't be anybody left making $10 an hour right? So it shouldn't be a problem right? Their wages should have been "corrected" by the free market a long time ago right? Wages should have increased around 2% per year right?

The market should have adjusted their wages higher due to inflation through cost of living raises, promotions, and even brand new workers shouldn't be making $10 an hour anymore. Even base hiring pay for virtually every company should also have increased over the years due to the inflation right?

And for most workers IT DOES! Most companies do give promotions, cost of living increases, or something comparable. That's why you have so few MW workers. However, low and behold here it is 10 years later and you still have a few crappy businesses hiring people at $10 an hour just to save a few bucks at the expense of the lowliest people with no bargaining power. For these people the market has not "corrected" itself. So the politicians come in and raise the MW again! Which should be pegged to inflation anyway in my opinion.

If your business is doing well this should not be a problem for you! Your employee wages should have kept pace with inflation over the years and you probably shouldn't have any employees left even making the NEW wage the politicians are going to raise it to let alone the seven year old wages.

But for some very few companies, they don't get the hint. They continue to pay their employees the very minimum that they can by taking advantage of the poorest people with no bargaining power just to try and undercut the other guy. So we make them adjust for inflation kicking and screaming if we have to.

And it doesn't hurt anything. There's not near enough MW wage workers to raise prices if we increase MW behind inflation and there's not near enough MW workers to bring prices down if we abolish it. It will make virtually no difference in the price of your cheeseburger, but it can make a huge difference to those 2% of workers who have old debt.

The prices in our economy are not going to be influenced if you cut a few dollars out of the checks of the lowest paid people in the country. That's completely absurd to even think such a thing could bring down prices in any significant amount. What you want to completely abolish minimum wage so you can buy a cheeseburger for half a penny cheaper? Then inflation continues to happen anyway so tomorrow it's two pennies more anyway?

We can not have pro-growth policies if we cater to stagnant companies that don't grow, don't increase their pay scales simply because they're stuck in the past and don't want to change. We have to have policies that grow the economy over the long haul and since we have a fiat currency that means prices are going to go up and inflation is going to go up over time.

Look at the technological and economic growth we've had since the 30s when the MW was enacted. Don't you see the world is better now? The poorest person I know has eight televisions, is fat, and owns a new iPhone. The poorest people in our country usually have more wealth than the so called "rich" people in other countries.

That's what happens when an economy grows. You may still be "poor" relative to the rich people in your country but your quality of life is vastly superior to what it would have been had the economy never grown.