Republicans successfully block minimum wage bill

[Elegiac]

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...onique-de-rugy

Mark Wilson has a Cato Institute study about the impact of minimum wage that is also a great read. The study lists other consequences of raising the minimum wage:

-Increasing the likelihood and duration of unemployment for low-wage workers, particularly during economic downturns;
-Encouraging employers to cut worker training;
-Increasing job turnover;
-Discouraging part-time work and reducing school attendance;
-Driving workers into uncovered jobs, thus reducing wages in those sectors;
-Encouraging employers to cut back on fringe benefits (that’s the substitution of capital for labor)
-Encouraging employers to install labor saving devices;
-Increasing inflationary pressure;
-Increasing teenage crime rates as a result of higher unemployment; and
-Encouraging employers to hire illegal aliens.

None of which have happened when the minimum wage was raised historically in any industrial country.

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But wages only went up 100% for those making minimum wage, those of making more than the new minimum wage wouldnt see that increase and we would pay more for the same stuff

Minimum wage increases bubble up and generally see upward shifts in wages across the board.

[Deleted]

And your solution is to raise the minimum wage. An action that does nothing to help people get out of those low-end jobs and will, most likely, result in inflation.

You do know we will always have those jobs?, someone needs to flip that burger.
Also, INFLATION = GOOD.

[Orlong]

So many of those countries referenced aren't socialist in Europe.

Really? Spain, Greece, the UK, and Australia arent Socialist?

[Druidjezus]

What's worse is that it's really basic math.

Let's say you're selling widgets for $5, and they cost $3 to produce, giving you a net profit of $2 per widget. Let's even exaggerate most wage costs because your widgets are hand-made; your labor costs are 50% of the total production cost, or $1.50.

Now, let's say wages double.

That means your production cost is now $4.50. You could still make a profit, selling at $5, but you want to protect your profit margins, so you start selling them for $6.50. This means you keep making $2/widget, and the price increase is just under 25%.

Now, apply that to all industries. Prices have gone up 25% across the board. That sounds bad, right?

You're forgetting that wages went up 100%. Net buying power increased.

The only way that a wage increase to labor costs can mean an increase in prices in a 1:1 ratio, resulting in no gains to actual net buying power for those whose wages increased, is if labor is 100% of your production costs, and you have a razor-thin profit margin. Which is basically not true of any business out there, or at least no successful one.

This isn't political. It's simple, basic math. The numbers don't lie; wage increases cannot lead to price increases on a 1:1 ratio, not without some additional factor affecting that final price, like the owner increasing their profit margins. This isn't a libs vs. cons thing, or a dems vs. repubs; it's straight up proportional math.

That is too much of an oversimplification though, if the price of your widget goes up, then most likely so did the cost of goods to produce your widget, as well as every other widget down the line.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but let's tack on to your example. Say I'm producing a Widget that I sell for $10, $3 of that is labor costs and $5 is the price of your widget that I use as the core of my product. Labor costs went up by double, so now it's $6 labor and $6.50 for your widget, I have to increase my price to $14.50, a 45% increase, to maintain the same dollar amount of profit. If I wanted to keep the same PERCENT margin, then my price would be $15.63, a 56.3% increase in price.

Still a net gain for the consumer though, but my point is it has a ripple effect on the cost of materials as well.

[Orlong]

And let's take a look at quality of life indexes and see where a lot of those Euro countries stand

]

That quality of life wont continue when they go bankrupt

[Masark]

In theory that shouldn't occur

But in practise, unemployed persons outnumber job openings in general and this is also the case in most individual sectors. All the train-train-train in the universe isn't going to magick jobs out of the ether.

[Mavick]

Greater social mobility and greater buying power.

According to what I just looked at Swiss purchasing power was about 50% worse than the US.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PPPC.RF

[Druidjezus]

You may like the moderate title, but you are extremely right wing with your thinking.

You know my stance on one issue, please don't purport to be some kind of authority about who I am or what I think.

[Masark]

Why am I not surprised somebody will complain about this?

Raising the minimum wage will just result in prices being raised.

Your nonsense has been repeatedly addressed and found to be nonsense upthread.

[Orlong]

(Australia's minimum wage was 16.85 AUD an hour on that date, and they're markedly more socialist than America)

And they are on the list of countries likely to go bankrupt

[Xanjori]

That quality of life wont continue when they go bankrupt

The fact you think the UK even has a chance of going bankrupt is hilarious. If the UKs economy continues to grow as it does, it will be the biggest economy in Europe within 15 years, overtaking Germany.

[TheTaurenOrc]

Countries like Switzerland, is that the Nordic country you're referring too? Here's some rhetoric for you then:

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living...=United+States

Derp.

The big items that really matter are way, way off. Rent in a US city centre $1000 for a one bed? $750 outside the city centre? What a joke its more like $1800 and $1200. At least where I am.

If you are in the middle of nowhere, like Montana or Wisconsin perhaps two people could get by on minimum wage. But the majority of the country lives in states where the cost of living is twice as much but the minimum wage is only 10% higher.

[Kezmaefele]

http://reason.com/archives/2014/03/0...minimum-wage-i

1. It’s a big country. The costs of living, especially housing, vary widely in America from state to state and city to city. If the point of raising the minimum wage is to provide a “living wage,” why should the minimum wage in low-cost areas such as Texas or Oklahoma be the same as in high-cost areas such as San Francisco or Manhattan?

2. The states are already taking care of it. Twenty states and the District of Columbia already have minimum wages higher than the current federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.

3. Private industry and the free market are already taking care of it. Even low-skill, entry level positions in many areas already pay higher than minimum wage.

4. As an anti-poverty tool, it is a blunt instrument. A post by David Henderson cited by the chairman of the Harvard Economics Department, Greg Mankiw, points out that a lot of minimum wage earners are second or third-job holders in households with other income. That could include a teenage summer employee whose parents both have jobs. Other minimum wage workers may include retirees with income from savings and Social Security who own their homes mortgage-free.

5. It’s not clear that it’s constitutional. The Supreme Court, in its opinion in the 1923 case Adkins v. Children’s Hospital of District of Columbia, made a strong argument that a minimum wage was a violation of the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of contract embedded in the Fifth Amendment’s language about due process and the deprivation of liberty and property: “To the extent that the sum fixed exceeds the fair value of the services rendered, it amounts to a compulsory exaction from the employer for the support of a partially indigent person, for whose condition there rests upon him no peculiar responsibility, and therefore, in effect, arbitrarily shifts to his shoulders a burden which, if it belongs to anybody, belongs to society as a whole.” The Court later, in the 1937 case West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, reversed Adkins by a five to four margin. But maybe the court was right the first time around.

6. Even if the freedom of contract isn’t protected by the Constitution, it’s a natural right that should not be infringed. As President Kennedy put it in his inaugural address, “the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” If two free people want to enter into a voluntary, consensual agreement that doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s rights, why should the government stop them? If someone wants to work for $5 an hour, and someone wants to hire that person for that much, and no one is forcing either one of them to enter into the agreement, by what authority does government step in and stop them?

7. It would eliminate jobs. Ordering businesses to pay entry-level workers more will make them hire fewer of them, and consider replacing more workers with robots or computers. That’s good if you are in the robot or computer business, but not so good if you are trying to combat unemployment. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that President Obama’s proposed $10.10 wage, once fully implemented, “would reduce total employment by about 500,000 workers.”

8. It would reduce the incentive for low-wage workers to get an education and move up to a higher-paying job. The lower the minimum wage, the more eager a minimum wage worker would be to enroll in a community college course at night, improve his or her skills, and apply for a higher-paying job. Making the entry-level jobs higher paying increases the risk that workers will get stuck in them for longer instead of moving on to something more rewarding.

9. It’s a sneaky way to increase welfare spending and raise taxes. Raising taxes to spend more on welfare is a political loser. But raising the minimum wage puts money in the pockets of working poor people, at the expense of business owners (and of consumers who would pay in the form of higher prices). If politicians want to increase the earned income tax credit or other work-related welfare benefits, they should do the hard work of building political support for such policies, rather than choosing the roundabout approach of a minimum wage increase.

[ozzie347]

That quality of life wont continue when they go bankrupt

There's no threat of that and you have no proof to the contrary. If you remove the economic threat of the 1%, you have no problem running such programs.

[Elegiac]

And they are on the list of countries likely to go bankrupt

If they are, it goes to show you how shit your source is considering Australia wasn't affected by the financial crisis.

[SL1200]

You know my stance on one issue, please don't purport to be some kind of authority about who I am or what I think.

Your "let em die" position firmly places you in the far right wing.

[Resurgo]

I never said anything about costs going up in proportion. Simply put, costs go up. The prices of everything are set by a myriad of factors, some have more pressure via geography than others.

Here's a simple example: Try and find a $5 Footlong sub at Subway in a place like Hawaii. You're not going to, because their costs of living are much higher, with much higher minimum wages. More than likely, the same can be said for a place like San Francisco. However, out here in the Pittsburgh area, I can find $5 footlongs all day long.
Increase the minimum wage to $10 everywhere, and see if you'll see that anymore?
However, I am NOT saying that raising minimum wages will translate to an immediate disappearance of the $5 footlong. What I am saying is that this will start a chain reaction of price increases along the way.

It's no different than the effect you saw a few years back when the prices of gas skyrocketed. Sure there's the immediate sticker shock of the price at the pump. Little by little, other prices rose up to fall in line. Food prices go up now because the price of gas to transport that food went up. Some people added fuel surcharges, others just baked the price increase into their goods. Price of materials go up now as well, (gotta have oil to make rubber, that goes into tires, etc). None of this was immediate, but was felt little by little.
Oil prices fell back for a bit there. Instead of near $5 a gallon at the pump, out here, they fell as low as $3.40 a gallon. However, here's the rub of it all. Have prices of things like tires gotten any cheaper? I know the last time I bought tires, they sure didn't.

-Increasing the likelihood and duration of unemployment for low-wage workers, particularly during economic downturns;
Didn't this just happen in recent history? Like less than 5 years ago? I do recall congress voting to extend unemployment benefits because people weren't finding work...

And yes, I do realize it wasn't because of minimum wage increases, however, nothing happens with immediacy. One change isn't felt right away, but in a ripple effect.

[RaenavenBlacksun]

Citation needed.

Your post doesn't include factors like increased purchasing power, lower taxes as welfare burdens are reduced, etc.

I could make a phenomenal pro-minimum wage hike post too if I only look at one set of factors.

Unfortunately, your list of factors have no real weight. Being someone who only has the education to work BS retail jobs, I have watched companies downside greatly over minimum wage increases. Imagine trying to do a sales floor job, and being called to run a register, go pull a bicycle off a rack across the store, do a group of hunting/fishing licenses AND cover someone else's department...all within the same ten minute period because a company can't be arsed to hire enough people to cover all these areas. AND, to top it off, know that each department is only allowed to schedule ONE person per block of hours, two at the most, meaning a department that obviously needs 8 people to run efficiently is only allowed to have 3.

That is the reality of being in the middle of this clusterfluff.

I also know that these companies wouldn't scale the pay of other employees, so my department manager hubby who makes $13/hr currently, would still only make that much after bumping minimum $2, knocking his pay down to the equivalent to of a cashier.

[Sky High]

Really? Spain, Greece, the UK, and Australia arent Socialist?

when it's VERY none socialist policies that got them into the situation they are in then it kind of shoots your whole argument to shit. plus they have socialist policies, so do we, does that make us socialist? no! because having a high school level grasp on economics says there is no such thing as a pure socialist state. seriously this shit isn't hard to learn about.

[Endus]

But wages only went up 100% for those making minimum wage, those of making more than the new minimum wage wouldnt see that increase and we would pay more for the same stuff

And if we look at any of the hundreds of times minimum wages have been increased around the world over the last century or so, we can see that wages across the board end up increasing in a ripple effect.

The average income in the 1940 census was around $1,900.00. That's not a missing decimal point; almost two thousand dollars per year. I'm using that date because the USA implemented minimum wage laws in '38, so we're talking about an era at the dawn of the minimum wage.

If your claim had any legitimacy, everyone in the middle class would be making minimum wage, today, because the minimum wage has so significantly overtaken that value. What has actually happened, in every case, is that those other wages do increase, along with the minimum wage and other factors, like inflation.

And let's be clear; they are related. The reason the US needs an increase to the minimum wage is that it has not kept pace with inflation. Many people's middle-class incomes come with expected cost-of-living pay raises every year or two. Those are the wages being increased to account for this kind of thing. It's already happening, despite your claims that it wouldn't. You're ignoring reality.