Minimum wage, or Living wage

jem said:
1. wow...
reality... jobs are lost.
leftist... that ok because we want to believe its a good thing.

Pretty much what Jerry Brown said as he was signing a minimum wage hike.
This approach to govt by the left was properly called moral narcissism.


2. Then and this is what really bugs me... you can't even get these economically delusional moral narcissists to engage on the idea that by importing cheaper labor at one million people per year... they are taking even more jobs away from the people they are pretending to wish to help.

3. you have a job shortage... you sell your party out to the business who want cheaper labor... you therefore bring in skilled workers on H1-Bs and non skilled by a million a year... and allow 20 million illegal aliens in.
Driving up the costs of living and driving down the wages of constructions workers and restaurant workers...

Then you say lets create a minimum wages and destroy more jobs.
What the hell is wrong with you all on the left?
And instead of also halting immigration you... deport even fewer illegal aliens than you bring in new groups of people who may even be terrorists.

4. And then you wonder why people are voting for an outsider who says he will stop this crazy shit.
More...
At least in the technology sector, I am not certain but the theory is that corporations are complaining that there aren't that many high skilled tech workers in the US. That is what corporations have sold the government anyway. The actual Truth? I seem to remember that this is a myth and is probably a ploy to get cheaper labor. When those people with low paying jobs lose their job, asking them to "retrain" is probably not going to work all that well. If they wanted to be in the white collar job they probably would have done it at an earlier age.

I agree on the non-tech side, or if I can call it this, the trade side. Most of those people don't like school to begin with, so by default they go into manufacturing or working with their hands in general. Those jobs don't pay great, but they at least used to pay enough where you could get by without the enormous stress that these people have today. Or maybe they didn't get payed that well, but everything costs so much today! Squeezed from both sides is probably fact.

I think we need to rethink certain types of immigration and "Free Trade" in general. It is a very difficult issue because even highly skilled immigrants often take a work with your hands mostly low paying jobs while they bootstrap their lives again. Sooo hard....

I am not sure how much can be done. When government tries to regulate, corporations find ways around it. Then the cat and mouse game continues until you get so much regulation it starts to hurt the average joe trying to run his small business.

I wonder if this could be solved by inverting how taxes are payed. There is no employment/payroll taxes. The corporation pays a flat rate. Thing is, Capitalists see this and raise prices because they know the population now have more wages to spend. So the money ends up in the people that control the "means of production" once again.

It is a hornets nest of implications, and I am nearly certain that raw Capitalism and "The Free Market" is not the correct methodology.
 
Last edited:
Anubis said:
… careful analysts will often summarize the new research in a nuanced way, saying “modest” increases in the minimum wage appear to have little impact on employment. But the proposed increase from $7.25 to $10.10 an
hour is a 39-percent increase, which can hardly be characterized as “modest.” Such an increase, therefore, could well destroy teenagers’ jobs, notwithstanding the revisionist studies."
More...
This is a point I have repeatedly made,i.e., the gap between the present wage floor and where the target is has much to do with the potential impact of a wage increase. The greater the gap that must be made up, the longer the time required to make it up. Although the present gap is large, if the increments are the right size and spread out over time, the impact on jobs can be minimized. That should be the goal.

The best government policy is to see that wages remain in balance with the CPI. But government gridlock along ideological lines has prevented timely implementation of measures to maintain balance. We have seen steadily declining real wages for the past three decades. So now, turning that damaging reality around is going to take longer then had we been paying attention all along. When you are in business you want low wages. Good governments, however, recognize wage imbalances are, in the long run, bad for both business and social stability. It is governments' legitimate role to not let wage disparities go too far.

That these problems arise spontaneously in any large economy is still more evidence that the textbook "free market" construct does not exist in the real world any more than, say, "efficient markets" exist. Both constructs are useful axioms, but one should never lose sight of reality and begin thinking these artificial constructs actually duplicate reality.
 
I appreciate the effort to try and think this through... and I think some or your initial thoughts on immigration are likely correct... but then you do what I see too much of.

Acting like it may be complicated and hard to figure out is what big govt apologists do when we see examples of shitty govt. (by the way the next page in the play book is to say say the voters voted for it. we didn't - the politicians are purchased by the cronies)

If its complicated as you say... (although its not... because a million immigrants a year plus illegal immigrants a year.... drive down wages and drive up housing and other costs.) lets just halt immigration until we have time to figure it out.

nitro said:
At least in the technology sector, I am not certain but the theory is that corporations are complaining that there aren't that many high skilled tech workers in the US. That is what corporations have sold the government anyway. The actual Truth? I seem to remember that this is a myth and is probably a ploy to get cheaper labor. When those people with low paying jobs lose their job, asking them to "retrain" is probably not going to work all that well. If they wanted to be in the white collar job they probably would have done it at an earlier age.

I agree on the non-tech side, or if I can call it this, the trade side. Most of those people don't like school to begin with, so by default they go into manufacturing or working with their hands in general. Those jobs don't pay great, but they at least used to pay enough where you could get by without the enormous stress that these people have today. Or maybe they didn't get payed that well, but everything costs so much today! Squeezed from both sides is probably fact.

I think we need to rethink certain types of immigration and "Free Trade" in general. It is a very difficult issue because even highly skilled immigrants often take a work with your hands mostly low paying jobs while they bootstrap their lives again. Sooo hard....

I am not sure how much can be done. When government tries to regulate, corporations find ways around it. Then the cat and mouse game continues until you get so much regulation it starts to hurt the average joe trying to run his small business.

I wonder if this could be solved by inverting how taxes are payed. There is no employment/payroll taxes. The corporation pays a flat rate. Thing is, Capitalists see this and raise prices because they know the population now have more wages to spend. So the money ends up in the people that control the "means of production" once again.

It is a hornets nest of implications, and I am nearly certain that raw Capitalism and "The Free Market" is not the correct methodology.
More...
 
16 years lost, with real inflation rising out of control. See next post.
HHI.png
 
If You Want To Know The Real Rate Of Inflation, Don't Bother With The CPI

Common sense tells us the Consumer Price Index is not an adequate measure of inflation. For the second year in a row the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) remained under 2 percent. On average, consumer prices increased 1.5 percent, according to the government. However, the government has incentives to keep this statistic as low as possible. In fact, the CPI doesn’t even measure inflation, rather a range of consumer spending behaviors. The CPI is perhaps one of the most important government statistics because it affects a number of public programs and is used as a benchmark to set public policy. But it’s accuracy is questionable, especially when compared with other agency’s inflation measures.

Why does the government want low inflation numbers?

The CPI is tied to the incomes of about 80 million Americans, specifically: Social Security beneficiaries, food stamp recipients, military and federal Civil Service retirees and survivors, and children on school lunch programs. The higher the CPI, the more money the government needs to spend on these income payments to keep pace with the cost of living. However, this same government is about $17 trillion in debt. If the CPI is low, the less money the government needs to spend on cost of living adjustments, something seniors are astutely aware of.

The government has a few resources at its disposal to manipulate the CPI. First, the Bureau of Labor Statistics operates under a veil of secrecy. The raw data used to calculate the CPI is not available to the public. When I asked why, I was told “so companies can’t compare prices.” This makes very little sense because companies can easily compare prices with data openly available on the internet. It also makes it impossible to audit their findings. Additionally, over the past 30 years, the governmenthas changed the way it calculates inflation more than 20 times. These ‘methodological improvements’ to the CPI are said to give a more accurate measure of consumer prices. However, these changes could also be a convenient way to include or exclude certain products that give favorably low results, but there’s no way to know, given the lack of transparency.

So how is the CPI calculated?...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/periann...lation-dont-bother-with-the-cpi/#1d246e20118b
 
nitro said:
If You Want To Know The Real Rate Of Inflation, Don't Bother With The CPI

Common sense tells us the Consumer Price Index is not an adequate measure of inflation. For the second year in a row the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) remained under 2 percent. On average, consumer prices increased 1.5 percent, according to the government. However, the government has incentives to keep this statistic as low as possible. In fact, the CPI doesn’t even measure inflation, rather a range of consumer spending behaviors. The CPI is perhaps one of the most important government statistics because it affects a number of public programs and is used as a benchmark to set public policy. But it’s accuracy is questionable, especially when compared with other agency’s inflation measures.

Why does the government want low inflation numbers?

The CPI is tied to the incomes of about 80 million Americans, specifically: Social Security beneficiaries, food stamp recipients, military and federal Civil Service retirees and survivors, and children on school lunch programs. The higher the CPI, the more money the government needs to spend on these income payments to keep pace with the cost of living. However, this same government is about $17 trillion in debt. If the CPI is low, the less money the government needs to spend on cost of living adjustments, something seniors are astutely aware of.

The government has a few resources at its disposal to manipulate the CPI. First, the Bureau of Labor Statistics operates under a veil of secrecy. The raw data used to calculate the CPI is not available to the public. When I asked why, I was told “so companies can’t compare prices.” This makes very little sense because companies can easily compare prices with data openly available on the internet. It also makes it impossible to audit their findings. Additionally, over the past 30 years, the governmenthas changed the way it calculates inflation more than 20 times. These ‘methodological improvements’ to the CPI are said to give a more accurate measure of consumer prices. However, these changes could also be a convenient way to include or exclude certain products that give favorably low results, but there’s no way to know, given the lack of transparency.

So how is the CPI calculated?...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/periann...lation-dont-bother-with-the-cpi/#1d246e20118b
More...

Should we use MIT's Billion Prices Project data instead?
 
How I went from middle class to homeless

Trash bags and boxes fill Joe's mobile home in a Philadelphia suburb. This isn't spring cleaning. Joe is about to become homeless.
Unless "a miracle happens," Joe will likely live in his 2001 Chevrolet Venture minivan by the summer. He removed the seats in the back to make space for a sleeping bag, his laptop and some clothes.

Soon to turn 61, Joe never imagined he would be in this position.

"When I was a kid growing up...America was the greatest place on planet earth. We were the envy of the civilized world. I never thought this could happen here," Joe says. CNNMoney agreed not to use his last name because he worries potential future employers will Google him.

Joe's big fear is that people assume he's lazy. He wore a suit for his interview with CNNMoney and hid his eyes behind big dark glasses because he is ashamed his life has come to this.

Joe's worked all his life, starting at age 11 pushing a broom around an uncle's shop. He earned two associate's degrees in electrical engineering technology and mechanical engineering technology and built a "blue collar" career as a technician, tester and machine operator. He loves factories and figuring out how things work.

Related: Americans fear a life of 'dead-end crap jobs with crap wages'

Trump talks often about manufacturing job losses...

http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/26/new...dex.html?iid=ob_homepage_deskrecommended_pool
 
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