(October 7, 2016 at 5:10 pm)KUSA Wrote: We need more higher paying jobs so less people will have to work minimum wage jobs.

This country needs more industry.

Well don't rely on cunts like Drumpf to provide them!  Him and his ilk are the reason that jobs were outsourced in the first place.

Industry isn't returning.

(October 7, 2016 at 5:18 pm)mlmooney89 Wrote: I think the issue with most min wage arguments is the amount they want to raise it. $15 an hour is a bit much for across the board. The places that need it for higher COL could use it but that is entirely too much for smaller areas.

I tend to agree with this as well. One can envision a system in which minimum wage is tied to a cost-of-living index and is updated every 5 or 10 years. A pleasant secondary effect would that this would incentivize large employers who don't want to pay high minimum wages to lobby for/otherwise attempt to attain lower costs of living for the general population.

(October 7, 2016 at 6:21 pm)TheRealJoeFish Wrote:

(October 7, 2016 at 5:18 pm)mlmooney89 Wrote: I think the issue with most min wage arguments is the amount they want to raise it. $15 an hour is a bit much for across the board. The places that need it for higher COL could use it but that is entirely too much for smaller areas.

I tend to agree with this as well. One can envision a system in which minimum wage is tied to a cost-of-living index and is updated every 5 or 10 years. A pleasant secondary effect would that this would incentivize large employers who don't want to pay high minimum wages to lobby for/otherwise attempt to attain lower costs of living for the general population.

That seems reasonable.  But, in general, I'm in favor of paying everyone enough that the rest of us don't have to subsidize their shitty pay with food stamps and other assistance.

(October 7, 2016 at 5:18 pm)mlmooney89 Wrote: I think the issue with most min wage arguments is the amount they want to raise it. $15 an hour is a bit much for across the board. The places that need it for higher COL could use it but that is entirely too much for smaller areas. I used to pay all my bills living in a town of 30,000 people making what I make now with my main job. Here in Austin I need a second job to make up the difference. My old town would be wiped out with that kind of min wage. Because I read that others are talking about milk as an example but really if a small store has to pay people twice as much they have to comp that somehow so yes the milk could go up. Then there are things like where you are. Milk in Hawaii is crazy because it has to be brought in and has nothing to do with min wage.

Think about this for a moment.  It takes 40 senators to stop any piece of legislation dead in its tracks.  Can you hear the screaming from places like Kansas, Alabama, Wyoming, etc, if their senators gave a raise to "city slickers" and fucked over "real 'murricans?"

(October 7, 2016 at 5:10 pm)KUSA Wrote: We need more higher paying jobs so less people will have to work minimum wage jobs.

This country needs more industry.

"Industry".  My wife staffs for "industry"...right at the minimum wage. The reason we don't have more "industry" is because people wouldn't accept -less- than the minimum wage. You see..."industry", big consumer of sub minimum wage labor. She spends her days trying to help a toyota sub come to the realization that paying people as little as they do is why they have retention and labor problems, leading to profit loss.

It's like they've been programmed not to hear her, or see the piles and piles of stats she compiles....and it's funny, because they're paying her to do it...so that they can then ignore her. Before someone comes back with "so and so has high average wages"..yeah, they do..because paying people like my wife spikes the stats of their army of low wage earners. So now it's twice as funny.....right?

"Industry" is gone, it's never coming back, it was a blip specific to a time and place....and it's nothing to cry over.

(October 7, 2016 at 4:50 pm)vorlon13 Wrote:

(October 7, 2016 at 2:40 pm)Excited Penguin Wrote: I've always wondered this. Why can't the government just print out money and give it to everyone?

Boo

That is precisely what the government is actually doing.

They are spending $2400000000 every day more than they are taking in.

And that's how you get a $20000000000 national debt that is going to be a total cluster abortion fuck to pay back without a rapidly growing economy when you're trying to do it.

Or a big ass war economy. Kind of Orwellian, but there ya go.

(October 7, 2016 at 12:45 pm)Tiberius Wrote: There might be a slight increase, but it wouldn't be as much as the increase in wages.

Competition keeps costs down as well.

It might not be as much. But if it ends up being 95% as much, then what have really solved?

I'm no economist but I'm pretty sure I understand a few thing that few seem to realize in these conversations. Increasing the minimum wage does not just increase wages for minimum wage jobs. It also forces an increase in the wages of lots of other jobs. 

I work in trucking. It is a thankless profession which often requires a lifestyle chock full of downsides. Long hours, lots of regulation and oversight, not much respect from public or peers. Pay is often so so but for most who do it, its their best option for being able to make the money they do. In lots of markets, many local trucking jobs pay in the range of $12-$17/hour. Over the road trucking pays by the mile not the hour but often by the time you add it up, you're not taking home much more than $15-$19/hour and your away all the time.

Now lets raise the minimum wage to $15/hour. Why would anyone subject themselves to the downsides of driving a truck for $12-$17/hour when they can stock shelves at Walmart or flip burgers for virtually the same money?

So that means the going rate of local trucking jobs has to go up. Way up. And if the going rate of local trucking goes up, then the more lucrative rate of over the road trucking must also go up. And if the cost of truck drivers goes up, the cost of EVERYTHING goes up. 

So great, the guy schlepping away at Subway is making $15/hour now instead of $8.25 or whatever it is. Right now the average Subway sale adds about $7 to the cash drawer. When everyone is making $15/hr and the average Subway sale is adding $12 or $14 to the cash drawer, what have we really solved?

(October 7, 2016 at 5:10 pm)KUSA Wrote: We need more higher paying jobs so less people will have to work minimum wage jobs.

This country needs more industry.

Again, it is more complicated than that.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/4/1/1...kills-Scam

Quote:H-1B Guest Worker Fraud and the "Lacking Skills" Scam

Quote:In the video below immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explain how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants; and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1B workers.

Watch in the video what corporations and Congress really mean by a "shortage of skilled U.S. workers". Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard and thousands of other companies are running fake ads in Sunday newspapers across the country each week.

(October 7, 2016 at 7:29 pm)johan Wrote: So great, the guy schlepping away at Subway is making $15/hour now instead of $8.25 or whatever it is. Right now the average Subway sale adds about $7 to the cash drawer. When everyone is making $15/hr and the average Subway sale is adding $12 or $14 to the cash drawer, what have we really solved?

The absurd concentration of the proceeds into the hands of the very few who own the brand, rather than those who actually -make- the product? My industry is notorious. In my industry, you can legally be employed...for free. Not kidding. I can, if I wanted to..pay a person zero dollars. OFC me and all my buddies will make plenty of dollars off their work.....there's no shortage of meat at the table, just no legal compulsion to give any of it to the people who slaughter that calf, as it were. Mostly, though, we pay people @2 dollars an hour and then pocket the rest. Raising their wages won't raise the price of the product, because even though the cost of the product is related to their wages, the price paid at point of sale is not related to the cost of production, in truth..it's just an issue of marketing....which I'm hella good at.

The industry standard is 2, I pay 10, and I -still- make more money than guys using the standard model. Thus cutting the lie that raising wages raises the price of the product as some general rule. Maybe we've just got a bunch of stupid assholes who don't know how to turn a profit running things? The "cost" of raising wages is nothing more than the cost of their ineptitude. When I prototype a system, if it can't pay the lowest paid employee at least ten an hour, I consider it a failure. It -is- a failure. Work cannot be sustainably done if work cannot sustain..you see? It's just a matter of time until it gets outsourced to some third world shithole, or stops being done altogether. If I can't pay a person a wage that keeps them...they'll leave, and that means I lose productivity. Sure, there may be another asshole to exploit, but eventually, we run out of people willing to be shit on locally. This is why factories move. This is why we can't keep doing this.