I give an example (a personal one at that) and you shoot it down without a counter argument. Straw-man argument incoming. Try reading the whole thread and keep up.
Very true, i don't know about the US, but here in the UK decades of poor education at the hands of incompetent goverment after incompetent governemnt have went hand in hand with poverty and deprivation since from way back from in 60s, although it has somewhat improved somewhat in the 2000s, but generations of poorly educated sways of the population struggling on daily, caught in a vicious circle of poor wages, living hand to mouth, and high living costs, and no matter how hard and long they work they cannot escape that life, but they certaily should not be classed as lazy or unmotivated, that is just a horrible way to look at those unfortunate to be born into a life of poverty and struggle no matter how hard they work and try to escape.
Is minimum wage too low? Yes. But at the same point, people working those jobs typically put minimum effort in school and in finding work after school. So it comes with the territory. I'm speaking of in the U.S. I can't speak for other countries.
Not shooting it down just saying you're basing your opinions on a very small sample size of a very large group. Strawman yeah every right winger starts with that bs, if your going to talk down to people do so from a position of strength.
LOL and now you call me a right winger. You should really stop making this same mistake over and over. Don't make this a right v left thing this thread has gone 4 pages without resorting to political mud slinging. Come with facts and opinions to support your side of the argument at hand. This is not a political debate more of an economic one. My sample size is small but accurate according to others with similar small sample sizes. Also a simple understanding of human behavior is used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_man As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or, in better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X... What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct. he is the man who never is thought of.... I call him the forgotten man... He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays..."
It's a never ending cycle that will never get fixed. Personally I think the minimum wage is too low but that might also be because of the ridiculous cost of living where I live. A 1 bedroom apartment is over $2k a month here and it goes up every year. And that's not including utilities. It's impossible for anyone making minimum wage to afford that. Even the so called "rent controlled" apartments where the rent is discounted but you can't make over a certain amount are mostly out of reach for minimum wage workers. So these people only have a couple options: They can go to school to get a better education and pay a fortune for the degree which they might never get a job to be able to pay the loan back. Continue to work minimum wage and get nowhere. Or they can move out of the more expensive area to somewhere with a cheaper cost of living and hope to succeed more there. But what happens when rents continue to soar and more and more people start moving out of the cities into the more rural areas? You can bet that home prices/cost of living will increase in those areas too. I will agree with the above posters that there are "some" people that just don't care about succeeding and will do the bare minimum to get by, but that is hardly the majority of the people that work minimum wage.
cost of living is cheap where I live and jobs are everywhere... cyber security jobs at Fort Gordon is just another addition to the revenue/ Good jobs here and great fishing too!
Fundamentally, we all want stuff as cheap as possible yet want to eradicate the idea of poverty. A bit of an oxymoron yes? You cannot drive up the minimum wage without increasing the costs of the services that are provided, period. Companies will not simply absorb the cost without trying to pass it onto the consumers first. I look at, and try to understand, what kind of roles are minimum wage based and other roles that are not. It all, IMO, correlates to the type of industry one supplies and profits expected, as well as the cost to train said person into a role and availability of other workers. Would you expect someone working for Microsoft as a programmer to be on minimum wage or would you expect someone who stacks the shelf's at a major supermarket to be on a salary £50k a year job? Of course not. The way i see it is minimum wage is there to protect workers from being screwed over by companies. At the end of the day, minimum wage roles tend to be a low skills role which can more often than not have someone else trained into that role in next to no time at all. Please correct me if i am wrong but that is the logical way of seeing it from my POV. I fully agree with what you say LoopHole35, luck does help but at the end of the day it is all down to drive. At least in the Western world, we all have an opportunity to go to school and do well. If you choose to be a tit at school, mess around, sod your education and then only manage to scrap by in life, you only have yourself to blame.
Another perspective. Is the living waging too low, or the living costs too high? I would argue the latter.
1: Almost - what we all want is the Cost Of Living to better reflect the Cost Of Employment (salary, training, benefits, market rates, geographical deviation, demand) 2: Almost - what you can do is reduce the Cost Of Living which in turn means more money in the back pockets of citizens, which leads to an increase in demand which equates to an decrease in the Cost Of Living. 3: I see you point, but here is an equivalence: If job (a) is full-time and requires five steps, yet is high in the Cost Of Employment, then Job (a) can be replaced with five part-time jobs (b, c, d, e, f) for each of the steps, so long as the Cost Of Employment is less than job (a), then the company wins. This is: IF (a) is greater than (b, c, d, e, f), THEN sack (a) and hire (b, c, d, e, f) = more profit I think that is closer than passing the cost on, and can be seen in instances where governments make claims that employment is going up and UN-employment is going down - what they do not always make clear is that companies are hiring LESS full-time HIGH-SKILL ROLES and replacing them with MORE part-time LOW-SKILL ROLES. Now, this does not mean the actual staff they are hiring are not super-geniuses with five gajillion degrees from MIT, it simply means the QUANTITY of LOW SKILL ROLES is increasing faster than the rate at which HIGH-SKILL ROLES are avaliable. This leads to an imbalance, especially when the Cost Of Living and Cost Of Employment is factored into the math. TLDR, the more people working for lower money when the Cost Of Living keeps increasing means increases in debt, crime, attainment, productivity and nearly everything which holds the global economy together. The solution is NOT to increase the minimum wage, but to remove it. 4: see (3) 5: Why not - why not make all companies nationalised? If not, then (as the future president said) you are sanctioning inequality by allowing someone to earn more than someone else by the rule of law (minimum wages are enforced by law - companies are forced to pay staff the minimum). 6: Not true - it is enforcement, artificially creating a state in which employees cannot negotiate their wages. 7: see (3) - a HIGH-SKILL job gets broken down into 5 LOW-SKILL jobs. Happens everyday. 8: Not sure what you mean, I see your POV clearly and you are partially correct on nearly every point you have made. 9: No comment from me or for me, so I can't comment. 10: True, but the school systems around the world differ hugely - someone who flunks in one country will not flunk in another school system. It doesn't mean the school system is 'dumbed-down' in some countries, it means the system of per-scripted schooling is not effective to every-single-student. Education is a very big topic, and the easy answer is never that easy. I recall seeing CV's put on my desk that were from people who did not know spelling or grammar, yet; went to universities and gained degrees. (Over time, I have learnt to divide a pile of CV's into two piles, and flip a coin as to which CV's I consider and put the others into the recycling bin. My logic is this: Whomever is left on my desk, must be; by design "lucky" and therefore is worthy of consideration - the others get a 'dear charlie' and are 'kept on file'.) In short, having the minimum wage kills the economy - and we need to reduce the Cost of Living. Good points, though 'sir.
Hey, I am all for a minimum wage increase, got to pay for those tattoos somehow. (hunkering down for Irma and feedback)
https://systemicdisorder.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/productivity-chart-1948-2013.png?w=640&h=412 Every pro-business argument in this thread debunked in one easy chart. Your BS arguments about simplified economics 101 supply/demand don't hold up in the real world. There are facts here, and one of them, the largest, is that worker productivity has increased at almost 2.5x the rate of wages. These lost wages come at the expense of the workers and go directly to shareholders and management. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/CEO_pay_v._average_slub.png Maybe the minimum wage isn't the mechanism for this. I don't know. But if you're against the minimum wage, it's time for you to figure out an alternative that fairly compensates workers because what we currently have does not.
Minimum wage here is $18.29, plus at least 25 percent casual loading (depends on agreement) if you aren't a permanent employee. You also get double time and a half on public holidays if not covered under a separate agreement, and every Sunday is considered a public holiday! Earlier this year this was dropped to time and a half by the Fair Work Commission, an independent advisory board to the government, upon which the current pro-business federal government agreed. The party currently in power believe if you support business the flow on effect benefits employees. Paying people $60+ an hour on Sunday isn't affordable for most businesses! Which is why if you ever visit Australia you will find that shopping sucks on a Sunday. Most big business with their own agreements are open, but it's too expensive for smaller business. The opposition party is union based, anyone that earns a healthy wage and businesses are treated as they're evil. They were vehemently opposing the change, but guess who in the last 10 years set up the Fair Work Commission in its current form?... Politics lol. Low minimum wage in the US is supplemented with tips, which is great if you're young, attractive, and have genetic assets that make your name tag stand out to 50 percent of the population. Must be a lot of resentful staff out there! Some claim it gets you better service as a customer 'having' to pay 15 percent extra for your meal etc, but it just means your service experience is potentially fake and insincere. It's also not fair on all those people who aren't 'hot' or endearing that don't get service jobs and get paid minimum wage and working hard to get even that.
In answer to your suggestion, the alternative is to remove it because it does not work. You will not have to accommodate for a replacement, or supplementary measure as that affects taxpayers. The problem is it will mean those with existing arrangements with employers must be removed from the job market in totality before the total benefit can be realised. I'm saying, when they retire or leave the company they are with and go to another company. It might be argued that if you give companies too much control when (for example) an employee has a pay review, then employees could be negatively impacted. Another example of when this might be troublesome (if companies are given too much control) would be if a temporary employee is offered a full contract, or is promoted. Again, too much control in the hands of the companies, the more problematic it becomes. The logical solution is to allow the market to adjust over time, but not to (additionally) try and control/restrict free market movement from a governmental stance, by wing-clipping companies. This, is partially why there is a problem with minimum wage: it restricts the natural flow of the free market by wage control.
I really don't see what the big deal is with raising the minimum wage. This puts more money into the hands of people who will spend it (as opposed to tax breaks for the rich, which goes into savings or the stock market). More people with more money to spend means more money for businesses, negating the impact of the wage hike. I mean, that money doesn't just disappear into thin air - it gets reinvested back into the economy. The idea that businesses need to raise prices is bogus, and I think it's basically a veiled threat. I gave the example of my sister before, who definitely does NOT need to raise prices to offset a minimum wage hike, but complains about it and talks as if she has to. I think that's a much bigger issue, and probably won't be resolved as long as the current fractional-reserve banking system remains intact. The only solution that I can see is nationalizing the entire banking sector (and doing it worldwide) but I see very little appetite for that. As long as banks charge interest for their loans, we will always have a growing money supply, and thus persistent inflation.
I would love to see how much people get away with government subsidys.... I'm going to dress up like a hobo and see what I can get for Free! Video coming soon!
