Jake Winker Frogen
Platinum Member
- Apr 24, 2020
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Nope; it is globalization and valuation for the rich but not the poor. CEOs don't get paid on how productive they are but on the valuation of the Firm.You think a low minimum wage has caused fraying in American society? Seriously? That kind of fanciful leap of logic might have won over your college Political Science professor, Jake but it's a load of crap and I think even YOU know it! Our society is "fraying" because we've lost our work ethic...not because we work too much! It's "fraying" because our young take their cues from idiots they listen to in school and on the internet. It's "fraying" because we're obsessed with material goods that we haven't earned...can't afford...but want anyways!I answered the question, you just do not like the answer.
I must have missed the answer and cannot find it, so if you can humor me, one more time: If $15.00 an hour minimum wage is good for the economy, then $25.00 an hour is even better, correct? And if $25.00 an hour is better, then why not make it the best at $30.00 an hour?
The Cleveland point is a good one, of course employers are going to move if they can, if they are not tied to the current market or can export their goods and services to it after moving to the lowest paid labour market they will, hell most American employers are such savages they would only pay in canned food if it were legal.
But that only highlights several issues with the American economy, how a standard national minimum wage is required and the more subtle question what are the effects on demand in those low wage paying economies?
Exactly, now you have it. Employers will react to a huge minimum wage increase. They will move out of the country because all industry would have to pay their workers more money whether they were paying them minimum wage or not.
As a landlord, I try to give my tenants reasonably priced apartments. But what do I do when my costs start increasing? My grocery bill increases greatly. My plumber charges more money for services or repair. Same for my heating guy. Gasoline for lawn and snow removal equipment. Items I need to buy from Home Depot or my local hardware store for things I repair myself. The answer is I have to increase my rental prices. I won't take the loss. That's not why I bought into this business.
Besides higher rental prices, my tenants are also faced with the same problem I have: the cost of everything they buy went up. So even if they are making more money, how are they ahead?
I have answered the question about 15 dollars vice 25 twice but I cannot do anything about your reading comprehension skills, or lack thereof. (Your own logic would be why not pay one dollar per hour or even in canned food, that would create more jobs.) The premise is primitive.
See again the point about minimum wages increasing consumer demand and not being inflationary if they are below 50% of the medium wage.
As for companies moving out of America, they have been doing that even though America has some of the lowest minimum wages in the developed world.
But most of the American economy is service sector and that cannot move out, it requires the local market to serve.
Right now America is in a deflationary period, service sector wages are low. America needs demand and increasing the minimum wage increases consumer demand. Let alone addresses the grotesque working poverty in America.
15 dollars is well below the empirical evidence that minimum wages can be set without damaging either employment or inflation goals if it is below 50% of the medium wage, which 15 dollars is way under.
US wages are way below where they were in the American golden age of a working middle class in the 50s, 60s and early 70s, they lost ground ever since, this is one step to help repair the damage that primitive and barbaric economic thinking, make workers work ever more for ever less has done not only to the American economy but to the cohesion of an ever fraying and chaotic American society.
One of the attributes of a successful society is the belief hard work will lead to a better life, the increasing working poverty in the US does indeed lead to social instability, that is basic sociology and history, not a radical theory.
In fact the very election of nationalist demagogue Trump is a result to large degree of a blue collar working class that has seen their standard of living decline dramatically in the last few decades, so they responded to his economic nationalism and sadly were blindly loyal to the delusions of his rhetoric and personality, most poisonous of all the election fraud claims which has severely damaged political process and democracy itself.
Wages, poverty, the shrinking working middle class all have a lot to do with social cohesion.
A 15 dollar an hour minimum wage will not solve all this but it is a civilised step that will increase demand in a currently deflation demand collapse and offer hope to millions working in one of the most barbaric economies in the western, developed world.
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