(US) Do you support a $15 minimum wage?

[suarezguy]

It's kind of amazing how raising the minimum wage is supposedly a disaster if done, yet every place where it happens seems to work just fine.

Few places seem to have increased it to the $15 level.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Fuck it, I'm gonna bring the data.

In 2016, California became the first state to adopt legislation that will gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. New York City, Seattle, and Washington D.C. also have plans to phase in a $15-per-hour wage floor. Others are raising wages above the federally mandated rate, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. On August 1, 2016, for example, Minnesota’s minimum wage rose to $9.50 per hour at the state’s largest companies.

At the macro level, a substantial increase in the federal minimum wage is likely to have broad effects, with some studies predicting that it could “ripple” across the economy, boosting the wages of nearly 30 percent of the American workforce

Evidence leads us to conclude that moderate increases in the minimum wage are a useful means of raising wages in the lower part of the wage distribution that has little or no effect on employment and hours. This is what one seeks in a policy tool, solid benefits with small costs. That said, current research does not speak to whether the same results would hold for large increases in the minimum wage.

Scholarly debates over the minimum wage have taken a distinct shape over the past two decades. In the 1990s, Princeton’s Alan Krueger — now Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers — and his colleague David Card produced a seminal paper that has framed much of the subsequent debate. Those scholars examined the results of a New Jersey law raising the minimum wage, comparing the outcomes in the fast food industry to those in the bordering state of Pennsylvania, where wage laws remained the same. Their study called into question textbook assumptions about how labor markets might work. The findings included:

• The data indicated “no evidence that the rise in New Jersey’s minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state.”
• Further, “prices of fast-food meals increased in New Jersey relative to Pennsylvania, suggesting that much of the burden of the minimum-wage rise was passed on to consumers.”

That paper’s implication was that the neoclassical models, which suggested the opposite would happen, didn’t comport with reality — data triumphed over theory. For the next decade, the economics profession saw an extended debate about whether that paper’s fundamental insights were right and could be extended to support policy. Krueger and Card had to defend their findings in a follow-up to the original paper. In 2000, dozens of pages of an issue of the American Economic Review were dedicated to this fight, as Timothy Taylor notes at his “Conversable Economist” blog.

Some subsequent studies have generally supported aspects of Krueger/Card. A 2004 study of available literature, “The Effect of Minimum Wage on Prices,” analyzed a wide variety of research on the impact of changes in the minimum wage. The paper, from the University of Leicester, found that firms tend to respond to minimum wage increases not by reducing production or employment, but by raising prices. Overall, price increases are modest: For example, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage would increase food prices by no more than 4 percent and overall prices by no more than 0.4 percent, significantly less than the minimum-wage increase.

In a 2010 study published in Review of Economics and Statistics, scholars Arindrajit Dube, T. William Lester and Michael Reich also looked at low-wage sectors in states that raised the minimum wage and compared them with those in bordering areas where there were no mandated wage changes. They found “strong earnings effects and no employment effects of minimum-wage increases.”

Let me quote that again: strong earnings effects and no employment effects of minimum-wage increases.

There are indications of some negatives, too, but they are inconsistent:

A 2013 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Revisiting the Minimum Wage-Employment Debate: Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater?” casts doubt on some of the existing research methods and data modeling that economists have used. The paper’s authors, which include longtime subject experts David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board, find that the overall evidence “still shows that minimum wages pose a tradeoff of higher wages for some against job losses for others, and that policymakers need to bear this tradeoff in mind when making decisions about increasing the minimum wage.” These scholars have written previously that, in the short run, minimum wage increases both help some families get out of poverty and make it more likely that previously non-poor families may fall into poverty.

At the ground level, this all suggests that a small firm in a low-wage region might, for example, respond to an increase in the minimum wage by having the owner pick up more hours herself and cut back on an employee’s overtime hours. A large firm might likewise try to squeeze more work out of its salaried managers and hire more part-time workers, to avoid benefits obligations. At the same time, because work has a social dimension — and is not purely an economic endeavor — many employees might keep their jobs at the higher mandated wages because of employer loyalty or trust, or the simple desire to avoid the complications of restructuring business operations to account for fewer workers. The lesson here is to distrust sweeping generalizations about what might result from a minimum-wage increase within the national labor market as a whole.

Don't forget that people who are paid very little tend to benefit from government programs--in other words, costs are shifted from employers to taxpayers. Minimum wage hikes help reverse this:

It’s worth keeping in mind that low wages impact more than just workers. The Earned Income Tax Credit(EITC) is, in effect, a wage subsidy, and consequently paid for by taxpayers, not private firms. A 2013 study from U.C. Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Fast Food, Poverty Wages: The Public Cost of Low-wage Jobs in the Fast-Food Industry,” found that workers at McDonalds and other major restaurant chains use federal and state programs at far higher rates than other workers — costs that are again picked up by society. A raise in the minimum wage might, in theory, shift some of the burden back to private companies, something that some labor economists see as being only fair.

A 2004 briefing paper from the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center, “Hidden Cost of Wal-Mart Jobs,” analyzes this issue through a study of the nation’s largest retail employer. As Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein has suggested, however, the overall cost-benefit analysis for such retailers must account for more than just wages.

 

[Awesome Possum]

Few places seem to have increased it to the $15 level.

Seems to be working in the ones that do though.

 

[scotthm]

I guess, if you won't explain your "give you and excuse to stay in a minimum wage job all your life" comment, I'm afraid I'm gonna have to assume that my assessment was correct.

It was (I believe obviously) a bit of hyperbole.

People growing up in poverty learn from society that they have no value, that they don't matter, and with no jobs available, they see no future for themselves. When you see that society has given up on you, why should you keep following society's rules? ...some people will be convinced that the only way to get to what this society values, money and power, is through crime.

And then you have the rich and super-rich, specifically those who were born into this life of privileges. Because, if you were taught from day one that you are entitled to only the best things in life, that you don't have to work, but have others work for you, that you can treat these people working for you like shit without repercussions, then that's what you will believe and that's how you will behave when you're grown up.

So it sounds like you feel the poor and the super-rich have a lot in common--they both want to take from those of us in the middle.
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[Kai "the spy"]

It was (I believe obviously) a bit of hyperbole.

Hyperbole?! That was a verbal attack on my person, and not the only one, as you coupled it with the "You hate old people"* accusation.

*See, that is a bit hyperbole, as you "merely" accused me of not having compassion for them.

So it sounds like you feel the poor and the super-rich have a lot in common--they both want to take from those of us in the middle.
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No, the poor are forced by circumstances to take from those in the middle. And the reason they take from the middle instead of the rich is because the politicians refuse to raise taxes on those rich because they make big donations, while they have so much they could easily share without actually losing anything in regards to quality of life.
The rich exploit the poor and those in the middle because they feel they are entitled to it, or simply because they think they can get away with it. Which they can, most of the time.

See, basically, both types of people could be helped to "shape their character", as the old saying goes, by changing the poor people's circumstances for the better (like, you know, raising the minimum wage), while once in a while denying rich people something they want, or making them give something back to the society that blessed them with their fortunes. Bring both of them a little closer to those in the middle, have the middle class actually grow again.

 

[scotthm]

Hyperbole?! That was a verbal attack on my person

No, it wasn't. What would be the point?
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[Relayer1]

Don't forget that people who are paid very little tend to benefit from government programs--in other words, costs are shifted from employers to taxpayers. Minimum wage hikes help reverse this:

Or to put it another way - it reduces businesses reliance on state handouts to pay their staff.

It encourages the business to stand on it's own feet and make something of itself...

 

[GabyBee]

Or to put it another way - it reduces businesses reliance on state handouts to pay their staff.

It encourages the business to stand on it's own feet and make something of itself...

It's almost as if... the liberals are proposing the end of crony capitalism. That's how far the right wing has gone lately. Believing in true capitalism is seen as a "liberal" ideology. Republicans believe in crony capitalism. What the fuck?

 

[MacLeod]

The irony is from an outside perspective both the two main US parties are on the right side of the left-right spectrum.

 

[Kai "the spy"]

No, it wasn't. What would be the point?
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I don't know, maybe you feel you can't make an argument without stooping to that level.

It doesn't even bother me that much that you were judging my work ethics and my hopes for my career without knowing what they were, as I know what you wrote wasn't true and I could easily show it was wrong. What bothers me about it is that you don't even acknowledge what you did there.

And another thing I have noticed is how you select which parts of my posts to quote to your convenience. You quoted me like this:

Hyperbole?! That was a verbal attack on my person

But the complete sentence was this:

Hyperbole?! That was a verbal attack on my person, and not the only one, as you coupled it with the "You hate old people"* accusation.

You have a problem with context, it seems to me.
And while you at least "acknowledged" your accusation of me wanting an excuse to "stay in a minimum wage job all (my) life" as hyperbole, you've ignored me calling you out on your bullshit accusation of me having no compassion for elderly retirees.

And it's also interesting that you totally ignored the part of my post that was actually about the issue (albeit indirectly), namely my lay-sociological assessment of the differing problems of lower and higher classes, which made up the bigger part of my post. Not interested in the actual debate, anymore?

Or to put it another way - it reduces businesses reliance on state handouts to pay their staff.

It encourages the business to stand on it's own feet and make something of itself...

Love your argumentation there.

 

[scotthm]

And another thing I have noticed is how you select which parts of my posts to quote to your convenience. You quoted me like this:

Hyperbole?! That was a verbal attack on my person

But the complete sentence was this:

Hyperbole?! That was a verbal attack on my person, and not the only one, as you coupled it with the "You hate old people"* accusation.

You have a problem with context, it seems to me.

I quoted what I was responding to. I didn't see a need to quote a misquote.

I think we should stop trying to make this personal and just tone things down a bit.
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[feek61]

I think we should stop trying to make this personal and just tone things down a bit.
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Which seems to be impossible here because of the intolerance of differences of opinions of certain individuals who would rather bully and stoop to personal attacks instead of having a civil discussion.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Which seems to be impossible here because of the intolerance of differences of opinions of certain individuals who would rather bully and stoop to personal attacks instead of having a civil discussion.

Yeah, nothing more irritating than when the poors have the temerity to be rude to their betters, I guess.

 

[feek61]

Oh brother!

 

[Kai "the spy"]

I quoted what I was responding to. I didn't see a need to quote a misquote.

Next time, feel free to also quote my correct quotation:

Hyperbole?! That was a verbal attack on my person, and not the only one, as you coupled it with the "You hate old people"* accusation.

*See, that is a bit hyperbole, as you "merely" accused me of not having compassion for them.

I think we should stop trying to make this personal and just tone things down a bit.
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Hey, I didn't make things personal, you did. And now that I'm calling you out on your bullshit, you don't even want to acknowledge it, much less apologize, and just pretend like nothing happened? Sorry, I won't make it this easy for you.

Which seems to be impossible here because of the intolerance of differences of opinions of certain individuals who would rather bully and stoop to personal attacks instead of having a civil discussion.

So, you agree that it was wrong of @scotthm to accuse me of not having compassion with elderly retirees, as well as accusing me of looking for excuses to stay in a minimum wage job all my life.

 

[scotthm]

Hey, I didn't make things personal, you did. And now that I'm calling you out on your bullshit, you don't even want to acknowledge it, much less apologize, and just pretend like nothing happened? Sorry, I won't make it this easy for you.

I think I'm beginning to understand your predicament, so I'll make this easy for you. Good luck.
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[Nyotarules]

My, my, aren't we optimistic? You've got him defeated before he even begins. No wonder your "Burger King" guy can't get ahead, he doesn't think it's possible.
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Pity he does not have a trust fund or a rich daddy, maybe he should marry that old rich white lady living in Beverly hills or at least be her eye candy.

 

[Nyotarules]

There are people with very substantial incomes who have trouble "making ends meet", so that's not a very objective criteria.
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True, depends on what ends they want to meet. For some folks going from two mansions to one mansion and from four cars to two cars, is trying to make ends meet. No matter how well off one is, most folks always live above their means. Its the clever wealthy folks who make their money work for them who are so rich, living off the interest alone keeps them in a fabulous lifestyle, that do not have to worry about such things.
Wealth like poverty is relative, but if one is one pay check away from poverty or trying to make ends meet, then you are definitely not well off no matter how substantial your pretax salary might be. And that probably describes most middle class wage earners, so the idea of such folks looking down on wefare claimants or being anti minimum wage is laughable.

 

[Nyotarules]

Everyone can't get to the top.

And those at the top have no intention of too many people getting there. Why turn that economic triangle into a flatline????

 

[Nyotarules]

People often have the mistaken belief that harder work = more money. If that were actually so, there would be millions of millionaires in this country. Hell, I'd be sitting on a gold mine. Instead, I work very hard for very little, and yet there are people who made millions today simply by having money in their bank accounts. So the axiom that more work = more money is demonstrably false.

If that were true my ancestors picking cotton and sugar would have been be millionaires, now if only those darn masters had bothered to pay em!