The U.S. has one of the stingiest minimum wage policies of any wealthy nation
- Thread starter 88m3
- Start date
Oh look, another doomsday soothsayer
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
@88mstein vs Napoleon
its like the clash of the titans
Feel free to chime in at anytime, Snowflake.
the cac mamba
Veteran
my states min wage is 11 an hour :jayfdup:
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
@88m3 weren't you just ragging on the republicans for removing the State and Local Tax deductions for places like NY and Chicago and LA?
We're already paying more in Federal tax dollars, I shouldn't have to pay red state's taxes 2-5 times over. It's absurd.
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88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
At the end of the day in state and federal benefits they just might be collecting more than that while their employers are getting concessions on top of that on your dime but hey who cares right?
I'm not saying it's as simple as just raising the minimum wage and the US will become a utopia or it can be applied across the board but something has to give. What's happening now doesn't work.
Opinion | Forget the $15 minimum wage. Here’s what a sensible compromise would look like.
Forget the $15 minimum wage. Here’s what a sensible compromise would look like.
There’s bad news from Seattle for advocates of a $15-an-hour minimum wage law. Turns out the measure’s costs to the city’s low-wage workers have outweighed benefits by 3 to 1, according to a new city-commissioned studyby University of Washington researchers. The average low-wage worker has lost $125 a month because of the higher-wage decree, the study found — even before it is fully phased in.
David Autor, a leading labor economist at MIT, told The Post the study seemed “very credible” and suggested that it might have enough “statistical power” to “change minds” in the perennial argument over the minimum wage.
Autor was wrong — not about the study’s credibility, but about its potential for moving people off their “priors.” The Seattle study met a furious counterattack from proponents of a $15 minimum. Defenders of the law came armed with a much rosier assessment of its impact by economists at a pro-labor University of California at Berkeley think tank, produced a few days before the more skeptical one came out.
It seems that Seattle’s mayor, a big advocate of the $15 minimum, had gotten a heads-up on the impending negative study and asked the Berkeley group to weigh in. Seattle Weekly called it “an object lesson in how quickly data can get weaponized in political debates like Seattle’s minimum wage fight.”
We need a more intellectually honest minimum wage debate, one that acknowledges both the intuitive moral appeal of preventing exploitation of the least-skilled, lowest-paid workers — and the countervailing risk of a wage so high that it harms the very people it’s supposed to help.
Years of contention have established two points: Very high minimum wages would be counterproductive economically, and a $0 minimum is impossible politically. Between those realities, economists, activists and politicians haggle endlessly. Meanwhile, better-targeted policies for rewarding work by low-income people — such as the earned-income tax credit wage supplement — get short shrift.
And so perhaps we should change the subject, from how high we set the wage to how we set it, period. The goal: a relatively objective process, as opposed to just picking a number that sounds good to Bernie Sanders or, for that matter, the restaurant lobby.
Undemocratic, you say? The author of the federal minimum wage, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, believed that this was an issue best left to technocrats. His first proposal for a minimum wage called on the Labor Department to fine-tune it, industry by industry.
Congress rejected that idea, sparing the country a bureaucratic nightmare while creating a political one: a federal minimum wage that can be changed only if lawmakers act.
FDR’s methods were clumsy, but his instinct was sound: If government is going to make a rule for the labor market, the least it can do is base it on facts about the labor market.
Congress should benchmark the minimum-wage level to historical data, then connect it to an independent adjustment factor, so that when it rises, it does so consistently and in response to shifts in the economy — not the political winds.
Consider: Since 1938, the federal minimum wage has not exceeded 54 percent of average private-sector hourly wages, a level it hit in 1968, nor fallen below 28 percent, which is where the $7.25 federal minimum ranks today.
The midpoint between those extremes is 41 percent, a number that felicitously resembles ratios between minimum and average wages in other advanced industrial countries.
Multiplying 41 percent by the current average hourly wage, $26.22, yields a new federal minimum of $10.75. Phase it in over a few years, index it to wage growth or an equivalent factor — and move on to less contentious topics like health care, or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
It would require Republicans to make a huge ideological concession. But the payoff for them would be significant: the immediate, and permanent, defusing of an issue that naturally favors Democrats.
Businesses might complain. But a 41-percent-of-average-wage minimum wage would not be that big a hit to them, given that more than half of all workers already live in states or cities, such as Seattle, that have raised the minimum wage above the federal level, in response to political campaigns that sprouted in the absence of congressional action.
Indeed, to account for local labor markets, Congress might grant states waivers to set their own minimum wages higher or lower than the federal one, provided that they do so by applying the federal methodology to state wage levels. Heaven knows our states and cities could do with one less thing to argue about, too.
Read more from Charles Lane’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
@GzUp @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Blessed Is the Man @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Darth Nubian @Dameon Farrow @jj23 @General Bravo III @2stainz @BigMoneyGrip @hashmander @Call Me James @MVike28 @VR Tripper @Soymuscle Mike @BaileyPark31 @Darth Nubian
Forget the $15 minimum wage. Here’s what a sensible compromise would look like.
There’s bad news from Seattle for advocates of a $15-an-hour minimum wage law. Turns out the measure’s costs to the city’s low-wage workers have outweighed benefits by 3 to 1, according to a new city-commissioned studyby University of Washington researchers. The average low-wage worker has lost $125 a month because of the higher-wage decree, the study found — even before it is fully phased in.
David Autor, a leading labor economist at MIT, told The Post the study seemed “very credible” and suggested that it might have enough “statistical power” to “change minds” in the perennial argument over the minimum wage.
Autor was wrong — not about the study’s credibility, but about its potential for moving people off their “priors.” The Seattle study met a furious counterattack from proponents of a $15 minimum. Defenders of the law came armed with a much rosier assessment of its impact by economists at a pro-labor University of California at Berkeley think tank, produced a few days before the more skeptical one came out.
It seems that Seattle’s mayor, a big advocate of the $15 minimum, had gotten a heads-up on the impending negative study and asked the Berkeley group to weigh in. Seattle Weekly called it “an object lesson in how quickly data can get weaponized in political debates like Seattle’s minimum wage fight.”
We need a more intellectually honest minimum wage debate, one that acknowledges both the intuitive moral appeal of preventing exploitation of the least-skilled, lowest-paid workers — and the countervailing risk of a wage so high that it harms the very people it’s supposed to help.
Years of contention have established two points: Very high minimum wages would be counterproductive economically, and a $0 minimum is impossible politically. Between those realities, economists, activists and politicians haggle endlessly. Meanwhile, better-targeted policies for rewarding work by low-income people — such as the earned-income tax credit wage supplement — get short shrift.
And so perhaps we should change the subject, from how high we set the wage to how we set it, period. The goal: a relatively objective process, as opposed to just picking a number that sounds good to Bernie Sanders or, for that matter, the restaurant lobby.
Undemocratic, you say? The author of the federal minimum wage, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, believed that this was an issue best left to technocrats. His first proposal for a minimum wage called on the Labor Department to fine-tune it, industry by industry.
Congress rejected that idea, sparing the country a bureaucratic nightmare while creating a political one: a federal minimum wage that can be changed only if lawmakers act.
FDR’s methods were clumsy, but his instinct was sound: If government is going to make a rule for the labor market, the least it can do is base it on facts about the labor market.
Congress should benchmark the minimum-wage level to historical data, then connect it to an independent adjustment factor, so that when it rises, it does so consistently and in response to shifts in the economy — not the political winds.
Consider: Since 1938, the federal minimum wage has not exceeded 54 percent of average private-sector hourly wages, a level it hit in 1968, nor fallen below 28 percent, which is where the $7.25 federal minimum ranks today.
The midpoint between those extremes is 41 percent, a number that felicitously resembles ratios between minimum and average wages in other advanced industrial countries.
Multiplying 41 percent by the current average hourly wage, $26.22, yields a new federal minimum of $10.75. Phase it in over a few years, index it to wage growth or an equivalent factor — and move on to less contentious topics like health care, or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
It would require Republicans to make a huge ideological concession. But the payoff for them would be significant: the immediate, and permanent, defusing of an issue that naturally favors Democrats.
Businesses might complain. But a 41-percent-of-average-wage minimum wage would not be that big a hit to them, given that more than half of all workers already live in states or cities, such as Seattle, that have raised the minimum wage above the federal level, in response to political campaigns that sprouted in the absence of congressional action.
Indeed, to account for local labor markets, Congress might grant states waivers to set their own minimum wages higher or lower than the federal one, provided that they do so by applying the federal methodology to state wage levels. Heaven knows our states and cities could do with one less thing to argue about, too.
Read more from Charles Lane’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
@GzUp @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Blessed Is the Man @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Darth Nubian @Dameon Farrow @jj23 @General Bravo III @2stainz @BigMoneyGrip @hashmander @Call Me James @MVike28 @VR Tripper @Soymuscle Mike @BaileyPark31 @Darth Nubian
Wage growth comes from the people who make more money.
We need a change in CULTURE. Minimum wage is a bandaid when you need surgery.
I don't understand why you can't see this.
Yeah, $7 is too low. I get that.
But this talk about $15 is laughable and you know it. Especially in red states.
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There's a war on the 99% going on right now so we have to do everything we can to point it out and defend ourselves from the pillaging. The estate tax is an easy point to make about how one group wants to keep it easy while making life harder for others. We're talking generations of wealth that the top is fighting for that won't go back into the country it was made in. The problem with you and other conservative economist is that you just see the minimum wage from the perspective of the floor and not for the reverberations it sends throughout the salary tree. There's also the huge issue of labor increasing tremendously yet wages being stagnant for almost 40 years. It's not "raise the minimum wage so we can all relax and work at Applebees." Or my favorite "Those jobs aren't supposed to be careers." Raising wages for those types that have to make ends meet in those situations is not gonna destroy the hegemony.Because the arguments are *SURPRISE* vastly different.
How do you all say this shyt with no sort of internal conflict?
I'm all for keeping or even expanding the estate tax. You know its possible to hold these notions right?
This is where you fukked up.
Wage stagnation has NOTHING to do with minimum wage.
Causes of Wage Stagnation (Thats a liberal source, btw.)
It has to do with the culture of compensation often at the top, and other things not even remotely related to the minimum wage, as well as the financialization of big business
This is the problem with this emotional shyt. You want to help people so bad that you will just go for the low hanging fruit instead of doing real substantive measures that really raise wages organically.
I'm NOT a conservative
Let me repeat, I am NOT conservative economically.
Things just have to make sense. You HURT people by just moving the wage floor arbitrarily.
And yeah, some things aren't meant to be careers. You just gotta accept that. The minimum wage isn't supposed to be comfortable. You'd know this considering that many cities have to increase MW above federal levels just to adjust for local demands and costs of living.
@GzUp @wire28 @Atlrocafella @Blessed Is the Man @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Darth Nubian @Dameon Farrow @jj23 @General Bravo III @2stainz @BigMoneyGrip @hashmander @Call Me James @MVike28 @VR Tripper @Soymuscle Mike @BaileyPark31 @Darth Nubian
The difference between a minimum wage and the salary of a doctor is that the doctor studied for a decade and is doing a very specialized job while the MW jobs are just manual work that anyone can do. 15$ an hour is much better than a measly 7$ an hour. The rich are already squeezing the poor dry, while we just want to take what we need to feed our families.
How old are you? Because you're really not trying too hard in this debate.
Yes. I know 7 is less than 15.
Now why not $10.10? And then if certain cities can afford $15, they can pay $15?
Why double the MW in places that can't afford it? And why do you think all MW is manual labor?
Yeah, I didn't say anything about the minimum wage being the sole reason for wage stagnation. It's a factor and was proven in the 90s during the last increase that companies had to raise wages within for people making above the MW. It also helps competition in the market for people seeking jobs. There are many other factors such as the destruction of unions, younger people replacing older people in the market, and potential interest rate hikes, etc.
You seem to be coming at this more emotionally than I am though. At some point, the minimum wage will have to increase to reflect the times. Has nothing to do with being Mother Teresa-like or anything. If I'm understanding your perspective there shouldn't be a floor and we just let companies decide wages based on other metrics? Or is it "states rights?" Because, if it's still $7.25 in let's say 2050, that would be kind of ridiculous am I right?