California is first state to approve $15 minimum wage

[Adam Jensen]

Any business that has minimum wage employees will raise the price on their goods and/or services thus raising the cost of living so this makes perfect sense.

For the millionth time, the rise of goods and services as a result of a wage hike, is much lower than the rise of worker purchasing power, until a specific point that is beyond what we're currently asking for.

[Endus]

Just to be clear, as the owner of the widget shop, I still want to be able to afford the same amount of didgets as I could before.

That's fine.

It's a completely unreasonable demand, considering you're wealthy, but you're free to want that. I'm not going to support letting your workers suffer in hardship so you can buy more didgets, though, and that's what you're pushing for, here.

[Captain N]

You bring up me ignoring historical data yet you do the same thing by ignoring the poverty that minimum wage laws has created. Feel free to link any of your historical data though, I'll be waiting patiently lol. But yes, as the clip stated, the introduction of minimum wage laws exacerbated unemployment and poverty, in particular for blacks in America.

And now you are moving the goal posts once again on the subject of Nordic countries lol. I'm merely stating that we are seeing the beginnings of unemployment for them again, you ignore this and say "well they still have their social programs intact" purposely ignoring that I've stated that this is the introductory stage. Keep bringing it up if it helps you feel better. You also ignore the businesses, that you know, hire these people at the same time, stating that there will be lay offs.

When those cashiers, food service employees, and other low skill workers are unemployed, you may be singing a different toon? Or maybe you will be unaware? Perhaps because you won't encounter the consequences you think they are not a big deal lol. And likewise the concept that anything less than $15 an hour is "not a livable wage" is hilarious. How many are starving in America right now?

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Nah, just showing him why he is wrong in ways that he probably doesn't comprehend yet.

Wait did you serious use the Sowell clip to prove that Blacks are in Poverty because of Minimum Wage Laws? Holy Christ dude you didn't just move the goalposts you moved the entire game. And the onus is on you to prove this whole fiasco of mass layoffs not on me...but if you want to play the game of using one outdated video to prove a point I'll bite for the sake of your silly little lies.

http://www.dol.gov/featured/minimum-wage/mythbuster

Myth: Increasing the minimum wage will cause people to lose their jobs.

Not true: In a letter to President Obama and congressional leaders urging a minimum wage increase, more than 600 economists, including 7 Nobel Prize winners wrote, "In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market. Research suggests that a minimum-wage increase could have a small stimulative effect on the economy as low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth, and providing some help on the jobs front."

There was also a review done by The University of Vermont that showed increased wages also led to an employment boon in some areas and no effect to unemployment in others, but that received harsh criticism from Conservative think-tanks for unknown reasons....lol

There was a marginal increase in unemployment in Montana .02 and in Washington .06 as well but all others showed improvement or no effects.

http://www.uvm.edu/~vlrs/doc/min_wage.htm

When I go into Google asking for Minimum Wage Correlation with unemployment the only places that show negative effects are Conservative think tanks and Forbes. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong info?

[Sprinky]

That's fine.

It's a completely unreasonable demand, considering you're wealthy, but you're free to want that. I'm not going to support letting your workers suffer in hardship so you can buy more didgets, though, and that's what you're pushing for, here.

If I drop from buying 1000 didgets a week down to 750 didgets a week because I can no longer afford 1000 didgets, guess who's getting fired from the didget store to pay for that loss in income?

[Orlong]

So employing illegal immigrants for work is sad? This is a liberal first lol. But that's not the only problem, and Endus did provide a chart, however are time is much different from the 1970's and 80's, namely with massive automation, which companies are only going to focus on even more once these wage increases start to arrive. This type of thing is actually occurring right now in those Nordic countries where people get paid $20+ an hour to do fast food, the restaurants there are already experimenting with this type of machinery as a way to save money. And while automation is inevitable, the wacky wage increases we've seen are only putting a heavy incentive on speeding up the process as quickly as possible.

So yeah as I mentioned, for the people that do get to keep their jobs, it won't be a bad thing, but for those that get laid off, they are going to have a much harder time re-entering the workforce. And for the record I'm not against increasing the minimum wage, I just don't think it should be by an irrational amount.

People are always retiring to make more better jobs for the other people to move up to

[Endus]

If I drop from buying 1000 didgets a week down to 750 didgets a week because I can no longer afford 1000 didgets, guess who's getting fired from the didget store to pay for that loss in income?

So to punish your employees for making a decent wage, you're going to shaft your own production and lose even more money? You're consistently failing to have a rational point.

[Captain N]

So to punish your employees for making a decent wage, you're going to shaft your own production and lose even more money? You're consistently failing to have a rational point.

That seems to be the method many of them use. If I have to pay my employees more I'm going to do things to make my business suffer even more than the cost of the increased wages would do. Personally I find it difficult to believe many of these self-proclaimed small business owners are telling the truth. We have a long-standing history of wage increases in this country that didn't cause the disasters they claim yet they're the ones claiming they're going to sabotage their own businesses before paying those they deem unworthy livable wages.

[Orlong]

WTF? Seriously?

I don't have time for a second job, I don't have the stress for a second job. I can't get a job where my family lives because they are no jobs available.

I wasn't born to work 80 hours a week for some other fuckface for the rest of my life. No one was.

Thats what I would expect to hear from the entitlement generation that doesnt want to earn or wait for anything

[Sprinky]

So to punish your employees for making a decent wage, you're going to shaft your own production and lose even more money? You're consistently failing to have a rational point.

You need to remember that I'm the owner of the widget store not the didget store. As you said, the didget store has to put his prices up too so now I wont be able to afford as many didgets each week. To cover the loss in didget sales the didget store owner will have to cut his production down so one of his workers will be fired.

You seem to think that I am trying to punish people and keep them in poverty, that's not the case at all and I'm more than happy for people to earn whatever they want. I just wanted to make the point that I won't allow myself to get poorer in relativity to the lower paid people and that goes for anyone with a grain of business sense.

I know in real world examples outside of the widget/didget store many other things come into the equation, but when you are talking about big business you are never going to see the company margins dropping, which means that the spread of wealth will always remain the same. Sure some less intelligent people will miss this fact and their businesses will fail because of that, but overall the impact of increasing minimum wage is going to be extremely minimal.

Try to think of margins in percentage rather than cash values, as percentages is what the real world operates in.

[Scathbais]

You might be being sarcastic, but you actually might be right. I think $15 might be a little bit too high at this point, but by 2022, we'll have even more inflation.

Neither of you seem to understand basic math. With inflation at 3%, how exactly does one calculate that a 67% increase in the minimum wage is appropriate? A $25 minimum wage would destroy our economy.

[May90]

Given how expensive life in California is, $15/h doesn't seem like much for the minimum wage to me, really...

[Deleted]

when do i get my raise? I make that now, so i should be good for what, 25 bucks?

Ask your employer. The 15 dollar just sets a minumum the rest will be markets at work.
If x job is 15 dollar and you find your job to be more important/valuable than negotiate for more.

[Masark]

Neither of you seem to understand basic math. With inflation at 3%, how exactly does one calculate that a 67% increase in the minimum wage is appropriate?

Try multiplying that 3% by how many years the minimum wage has not been increased or has been increased at a rate less than inflation.

[Yvaelle]

People are always retiring to make more better jobs for the other people to move up to

Actually, you're touching on what I argue is the biggest economic problem of this century. (Exempting my ~conspiracy theory that all fiat currencies may be hiding a bubble bigger than anything in history).

Life expectancy has risen so fast over the last century that people aren't exiting the workforce as quickly as they are entering it. This has meant that new jobs are not opening up higher up the ladder to pull millennials into management or executive positions: instead, baby boomers are lingering in these positions for over a decade longer than their predecessors, on average.

Consider it from a different perspective - Social Security. When FDR implemented Social Security, the average life expectancy was 62 in the US, and men couldn't collect social security until they were 65. This meant that most of the workforce was paying into a system when they would die before ever receiving a paycheck: happily I might add, it was insurance against dying impoverished on the streets if they did happen to live long. Today, you can begin collecting US social security at 62, but life expectancy is now 79.

A system that before only had to pay for less than half of payees, for a few years at most - now has to pay for virtually everyone for almost 20 years on average. Social security was never designed to account for advances in medical gerontology. Further, the years that have been added haven't been more years of suffering - but more years with high quality of life. Typically it has remained true that the last 5 years of life are when our bodies start breaking down - this was true when life expectancy was 40, and remains true for people living to 100+ nowadays. We're adding more productive years, and that has meant more old people in the workforce far longer.

And to be fair - they are right to stay in longer - because it's hard to plan retirement when you don't know if you are going to die tomorrow or 40+ years after you retire. Aubrey Du Grey, arguably the world's foremost expert on life extension, predicts we may already be living amongst the world's first immortals - which is to say that some people alive today (which generation this applies to is a subject of debate), may be in a position where improvements in technology advance faster than they age: not that aging is cured, but that new advances could give them more life faster than they age.

If that's true, there could be some exceptionally fit and long-lived executives in power today, who enjoy their work, and who may find they never feel the need to retire: immortal executives. Executives who don't die, never get replaced - upward mobility freezes throughout the company. Something that has been true since the dawn of capitalist labour - may cease to be true soon. It's already started - not that executives are immortal - but work it back a step - if baby boomers stay in the workforce 10-20 years longer than the greatest generation, then upward mobility will slow. If in those extra 10-20 years, life extension gives them another 21 years of useful life - they may never exit unless they want to and have the financial stability to support themselves indefinitely (and even few in the top 1% are confident of that).

[Endus]

You need to remember that I'm the owner of the widget store not the didget store. As you said, the didget store has to put his prices up too so now I wont be able to afford as many didgets each week. To cover the loss in didget sales the didget store owner will have to cut his production down so one of his workers will be fired.

And now you're basing your entire argument on the idea that the only consumers in the market are wealthy business owners. Which is just flat-out untrue.

You seem to think that I am trying to punish people and keep them in poverty, that's not the case at all and I'm more than happy for people to earn whatever they want.

You are explicitly arguing against that, by saying it's unfair to wealthy business owners for them to make that much.

Try to think of margins in percentage rather than cash values, as percentages is what the real world operates in.

The math involved is proportional mathematics. Using percentages doesn't change anything about it. In the real world, increasing a fractional cost means that the effect on the price must be proportional to that fraction. Unless you're introducing other factors, like your attempt to introduce profiteering as if that were an effect of the wage increase (it is not).

Neither of you seem to understand basic math. With inflation at 3%, how exactly does one calculate that a 67% increase in the minimum wage is appropriate? A $25 minimum wage would destroy our economy.

First, it's a 50% increase, over 6 years. The California minimum wage is currently $10 as of 2016, and this change would put it at $15 by 2022.
Second, that increase is only about 6% per year, averaged out (and taking compounding into consideration), and while that's double the rate of inflation, the argument has been that the current minimum wage has been lagging behind too far below the cost of living, and should be bumped higher; the only way to do that is to increase it faster than inflation.

[RickJamesLich]

Wait did you serious use the Sowell clip to prove that Blacks are in Poverty because of Minimum Wage Laws? Holy Christ dude you didn't just move the goalposts you moved the entire game. And the onus is on you to prove this whole fiasco of mass layoffs not on me...but if you want to play the game of using one outdated video to prove a point I'll bite for the sake of your silly little lies.

http://www.dol.gov/featured/minimum-wage/mythbuster

Myth: Increasing the minimum wage will cause people to lose their jobs.

Not true: In a letter to President Obama and congressional leaders urging a minimum wage increase, more than 600 economists, including 7 Nobel Prize winners wrote, "In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market. Research suggests that a minimum-wage increase could have a small stimulative effect on the economy as low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth, and providing some help on the jobs front."

There was also a review done by The University of Vermont that showed increased wages also led to an employment boon in some areas and no effect to unemployment in others, but that received harsh criticism from Conservative think-tanks for unknown reasons....lol

There was a marginal increase in unemployment in Montana .02 and in Washington .06 as well but all others showed improvement or no effects.

http://www.uvm.edu/~vlrs/doc/min_wage.htm

When I go into Google asking for Minimum Wage Correlation with unemployment the only places that show negative effects are Conservative think tanks and Forbes. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong info?

Wow still ignoring the link are we? Since when is an attack on the minimum wage laws "moving the goal posts" in a debate over the minimum wage? lmao, you gotta explain this one.

I'm glad you mention my outdated video while posting outdated links from studies done in the 90's. Here's a much more recent 2014 study from Jeffrey Clemons, unlike the study you posted, this is over a 3 year period, not just 1 year:

http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~mwither/pdf...20Earnings.pdf

In it he cites:

We estimate the minimum wage's effects on low-skilled workers' employment and income trajectories. Our approach exploits two dimensions of the data we analyze. First, we compare workers in states that were bound by recent increases in the federal minimum wage to workers in states that were not. Second, we use 12 months of baseline data to divide low-skilled workers into a "target" group, whose baseline wage rates were directly affected, and a "within-state control" group with slightly higher baseline wage rates. Over three subsequent years, we find that binding minimum wage increases had significant, negative effects on the employment and income growth of targeted workers. Lost income reflects contributions from employment declines, increased probabilities of working without pay (i.e., an "internship" effect), and lost wage growth associated with reductions in experience accumulation. Methodologically, we show that our approach identifies targeted workers more precisely than the demographic and industrial proxies used regularly in the literature. Additionally, because we identify targeted workers on a population-wide basis, our approach is relatively well suited for extrapolating to estimates of the minimum wage's effects on aggregate employment. Over the late 2000s, the average effective minimum wage rose by 30 percent across the United States. We estimate that these minimum wage increases reduced the national employment-to-population ratio by 0.7 percentage point.

Essentially low and unskilled workers are hit the hardest by these minimum wage increases, creating poverty in the process as the younger generation misses out on opportunities for work experience and missing out on higher pay opportunities down the road. As I mentioned previously, minimum wage laws in particular have negatively impacted minorities, and on top of this encourages automation, once again leading to more job loss.

As for only seeing conversative think tanks disagreeing with the minimum wage laws, have you considered that it may only be liberal think tanks that are promoting minimum wage increases?

[Adam Jensen]

Thats what I would expect to hear from the entitlement generation that doesnt want to earn or wait for anything

So I should spend my entire awake life (and some of my sleeping life) working? What sort of life is that?

[Kellhound]

B: Are you going to actually directly respond to the point I raised at some point?
C: Are you going to actually directly respond to the point I raised at some point?
D: Are you going to actually directly respond to the point I raised at some point?

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No the thread is about the minimum wage in California not its poverty rate. Moreover the post he responded to was a direct comparison between red and blue states stating that blue states are richer and more prosperous and that red states are poorer (in itself a response to Knada claiming the exact opposite (see I directly responded on point to the claim being made!)).

So why did he not respond directly to the point I was making? Is it because that point is factually correct? Instead he cherry picks and goes into whataboutery land because he doesn't like the truth and doesn't want to admit it.

The point is you are looking at the top numbers and ignoring that those states with top income often have higher levels of actual poverty. It is a simple concept. You would also say I cherry picked if in stead I pointed out that the 3 states with the lowest poverty rates adjusted for cost of living were Iowa, Wyoming, and North Dakota. Here is another thing, D.C has the highest GDP per capita in the US (by over 2x), and the highest level of poverty using national numbers and 2nd highest using adjusted numbers.

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Well Wells, you see - long ago we had 100% rural employment, and 100% of employed people were rural - everyone foraged, hunted, crafted, built shelter, took care of children, etc.

Then the conservative apocalypse struck. The dreaded socialists invaded their lands, began building bigger tribes - with greater specialization - and better social safety nets to maximize gross productivity. They even went so far as to learn new knowledge and record it - the same thing that got us kicked out of Eden! The heretics! The fools!

Soon - sure enough - they'd built entire cities full of knowledge, heretical technology, governance ruled by policy interested in their collective best interest. It was a dark time for conservatives - these social people were ruining their way of life - luring the children to their 'societies' with promises of a better life. Unemployment fell dramatically in rural areas - as fewer people were foraging and hunting anymore. So you see - liberalism is to blame for the fall of conservative traditions

Nice story, but not even close to the truth to what I was talking about.

[Sprinky]

And now you're basing your entire argument on the idea that the only consumers in the market are wealthy business owners. Which is just flat-out untrue.

A fair point that I hadn't fully thought through, I suppose I could argue that my low paid employees are more interested in the simple things in life like drugs and alcohol than they are in didgets, but I guess my main sticking point is that I am not happy that I will no longer to be able to afford as many didgets myself.

You are explicitly arguing against that, by saying it's unfair to wealthy business owners for them to make that much.

Note I don't care if my workers earn $100 per hour, as long as my own wage goes up at the same percentage rate as theirs does.

The math involved is proportional mathematics. Using percentages doesn't change anything about it. In the real world, increasing a fractional cost means that the effect on the price must be proportional to that fraction. Unless you're introducing other factors, like your attempt to introduce profiteering as if that were an effect of the wage increase (it is not).

I haven't checked into the fine details of the term profiteering, but if increasing my own wage at the same percentage rate as everyone else's is profiteering then I guess you are right again.

Bottom line is that as a business owner I will be increasing the business's profit at least at the same rate as I increase employee wages. Anything less would be devaluing the business.

If this rise in my prices causes the company to lose contracts due to being overpriced I will have to look carefully into other options such as employing lower cost labour, automation, or putting extra pressure on the staff to increase productivity.

Note: About the lower cost labour, I'm referring to the UK where my business resides as we are going through a similar minimum wage increase right now. In the UK the minimum wage has only been raised considerably for the over 25's. So it may put some of the slower over 25's at risk from fresh blood coming out of school/college.

EDIT: This article just popped up on my news feed and is very relevant to the topic. This shows how our leading DIY store is handling the rise in minimum wage. Others will follow suit in their own ways.

https://www.change.org/p/don-t-use-l...t-pay-benefits

[Deleted]

Well, I'm glad California decided to beta test this: they get to see the bugs first.

Let's hope the devs will fix it before the release in other countries.