(November 6, 2014 at 10:05 pm)Heywood Wrote:(November 6, 2014 at 9:06 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote: How about my suggestion: Minimum wage set to where a full time worker isn't eligible for food stamps.
Then somebody could get rid of the minimum wage for most people by setting the eligibility of food stamps at say income less than $1000 a year. Or the could raise the minimum wage by increasing eligibility for food stamps to say $100,000 a year.
Your proposal is complicated and ripe for abuse.
(November 6, 2014 at 9:06 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote: Market forces would force a higher minimum wage without food stamps. No one will work 40 hours and still starve to death. Even conservative 19th century economists agreed there was a "natural minimum wage", set to base subsistence level.
Do you have any evidence that people who worked 40 hours a week or more ever starved to death in this country? There was a lot of time when we didn't have minimum wage and outside special cases like people with eating disorders I doubt there has been an instance where a full time employee has ever starved to death.
(November 6, 2014 at 9:06 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote: Because there are food stamps, business can get away with paying less than that natural minimum wage. This is a subsidy for their labor costs.
If you're complaint is that food stamps are a subsidy for businesses....get rid of food stamps and then you won't be subsidizing businesses
(November 6, 2014 at 9:06 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote: The minimum wage needs to be set where a 40 hour a week worker doesn't need welfare to survive. Then you'll see food stamp consumption cut in half.
You're probably not old enough to remember(perhaps you weren't even born) but there was a time when we set the price of gas so that working families didn't have to spend all their income just to drive to work and back.....that turned out to be an utter disaster.
I'm sorry I just don't have confidence in the government's ability to set an optimum minimum wage. The market seems to work so much better.
Mixed economies work, you cannot have all nanny state like North Korea , or no rule like Somalia, Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason it didn't work back then was not because of government, but because of the way business influence the lawmaking.
We do not have a supply and demand market. The prices are not set by buyer demand. They are set by global corporate competition between corporations. We now have a rigged market dictated on us and we are to accept the crumbs thrown at us.
Economies now are about how much you can cut labor in order to maximize profits.
There is no way anyone can live on 7.25 and not even 10 or 15 in places like NYC.
Pay is not keeping up with the cost of living. The only way to create less dependency is to keep prices low and raise wages. Whatever profits lost in higher wages will be made up by more demand because workers will have more to spend.
