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#102 Mar 04 2014 at 2:40 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
Friar Bijou wrote:
Ok, if I'm reading you correctly, gbaji, having the, say, top 20% of wage earners making more and more money each year driving up prices is cool. If the bottom 30% make more money and that drives up prices, that's bad.


It's not about making more money. It's about the government passing a law forcing them to be paid more money. The top 20% of wage earners are earning their wages because the market naturally values whatever they do at that amount. Period.

Edited, Mar 3rd 2014 10:56pm by gbaji


Who or what "naturally values" any individual person to the extent they make as much as the top 10-20%? They could suddenly die and be replaced with someone who is equally, if not more qualified than they are, within 24 hours. They make as much as they do because that is how much they have decided to take for themselves and those closest to them. In other words, it is how much they "naturally value" themselves over the rest of their company.

Quote:
If the government raises the minimum wage, that means that everyone who's wage is actually increased by that is now getting paid more than their labor is actually valued by the market


So what then? Suppose there was no minimum wage at all.

People would be "earning" $0.75 a week the way they do in the third world-- because that is how much their labor is "valued by the market." Millions of people would just have to accept this, working like animals just to save up for a loaf of bread to eat once in a while. These companies would not treat American workers any differently than they do their peasants in other countries.

Typically the response to this would be: "Oh well then they should all just go to college and get better jobs then. All of these people who are fast food/retail workers, janitors, bank tellers, delivery men/women, factory workers, Baggage porters/bellhops, call center workers, Funeral attendants, maids, security guards, waiters/waitresses, taxi drivers-- all of these people are simply lazy and unmotivated, stupid and perpetually on drugs and alcohol. They should all quit what they're doing and go back to school so they can add to the already enormous pile of people fighting for those "good" jobs.

Actually, what I am now expecting is for you to say that they won't be paid so little. Perhaps they will somehow get paid even more! Or perhaps BECAUSE they don't get paid anything, the price of day to day life will go down so tremendously that it won't make a difference. Meanwhile the top 10-20% control more money than ever before. The money has not been removed from the economy, it is just no longer in the hands of the people who will circulate it to places that aren't the top 10-20%. Because of this, the economy as we know now exists exclusively at the top. Everyone else must now resort to bartering cows and chickens, while their underage daughters vie for the attention of those few wealthy businessmen in the area who might give them a shiny new nickle for sucking their ****.

All of this only after the first initial waves of massive and widespread murder and looting, destruction of property and public hysteria.

I am not making this up. This is how much of the rest of the world works already. Why are we trying so hard to make it happen here?


Edited, Mar 4th 2014 11:46pm by Kuwoobie
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#103 Mar 04 2014 at 2:47 PM Rating: Excellent
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lolgaxe wrote:
rdmcandie wrote:
And McD's still rakes in a pile of cash because the people working there can afford to eat there!
And they get healthcare which they'll need for eating those burgers.
If they're following the McDonald's healthy living guidelines, they're eating at Subway.
#104 Mar 04 2014 at 2:48 PM Rating: Excellent
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If you don't like making less than a dollar an hour, you just pick up and go next door. It's just that simple.
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#105 Mar 04 2014 at 2:54 PM Rating: Excellent
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Call them a private contractor and pay them by the widget. It's better for everyone.
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#106 Mar 04 2014 at 2:55 PM Rating: Good
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lolgaxe wrote:
If you don't like making less than a dollar an hour, you just pick up and go next door. It's just that simple.


I really wanted to fit that in there somehow. I love that argument. It's like we are imagining there aren't tens of thousands of people in each individual city desperately looking for a job somewhere, anywhere --like we are pretending that we still have bargaining power whereas bargaining with an employer today means being fired and instantly replaced by someone who won't try to bargain.
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#107 Mar 04 2014 at 3:08 PM Rating: Good
Kuwoobie wrote:
lolgaxe wrote:
If you don't like making less than a dollar an hour, you just pick up and go next door. It's just that simple.


I really wanted to fit that in there somehow. I love that argument. It's like we are imagining there aren't tens of thousands of people in each individual city desperately looking for a job somewhere, anywhere --like we are pretending that we still have bargaining power whereas bargaining with an employer today means being fired and instantly replaced by someone who won't try to bargain.


And, you know, making less than a dollar an hour means you have so much incidental cash to pick up and move your entire household.
#108 Mar 04 2014 at 3:11 PM Rating: Excellent
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#109 Mar 04 2014 at 3:32 PM Rating: Excellent
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Why mine silver? You can just mine gold instead! Smiley: nod
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#110 Mar 04 2014 at 3:59 PM Rating: Decent
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lolgaxe wrote:
rdmcandie wrote:
And McD's still rakes in a pile of cash because the people working there can afford to eat there!
And they get healthcare which they'll need for eating those burgers.


I didn't want to get greedy laying down all that juicy socialism at one time.

lolgaxe wrote:
If you don't like making less than a dollar an hour, you just pick up and go next door. It's just that simple.


Some people call that illegal immigration, others calling it doing **** jobs real people don't want to do.

Edited, Mar 4th 2014 5:02pm by rdmcandie
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#111 Mar 04 2014 at 4:01 PM Rating: Default
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Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Suddenly, the employer must charge more for the product his workers produce in order to pay the higher wage.
Or, y'know, make less of a profit.


What do you suppose the employer does with that profit? Put it in a vault and roll around in it?


Quote:
A. Employer makes $1 million/year in profit while paying $X/hr in wages. Employees need foodstamps, subsidised housing, etc.

B. Employer makes $800k/year profit while paying employees $1.5X/hr in wages (a 50% increase, in case math befuddles you). Employees no longer a burden on the welfare system.


You're introducing an entirely new/different thing though. Government welfare is a whole different ball game. Here's the problem though. The employer (and all the other employers and higher wage earners) pays the foodstamps and other subsidies via taxes. Does the employer get a tax break for doing this?

While that's a tangent, it does raise another issue. Let's assume the employer pays 35% taxes on the dollars earned between $800k and $1m. So the tax/welfare system presents him with two options:

1. Pay his employees enough so that they don't need foodstamps and other assistance, at the cost of $200k/year.

2. Don't do that, and pay $70k/year in taxes on the extra $200k/year he earns.


Kind of a no brainer, isn't it? I'm not trying to make a broad argument about what wages the employer should pay his employees, just explaining why it makes zero sense for any employer to choose to do that for the reason you stated.

The point here is that the employer should only pay employees more based on the value of that employees labor relative to other factors in the economy. Taking into account other costs incurred by the employee (even tax funded ones) isn't a factor. What will drive an employer to pay an employee more is if that employee generates more value for the employer than the proposed wage *and* the employee might leave and work for his competitor if he doesn't pay him that higher wage. That's it.

You're trying to make this about some kind of ethical obligation on the part of the employer, but that's always going to be a failing argument. Why don't you choose to spend 50% more for a loaf of bread in the store? I mean, think how much good that would do for other people? You don't do this because it makes no sense for you to pay more for something than you have to. Exactly as the employer has no reason to pay more for labor than he has to.
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#112 Mar 04 2014 at 4:07 PM Rating: Default
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Timelordwho wrote:
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If your wages increase naturally as a result of your labor being valued more, that has no negative effect. But if everyone's wages are raised artificially, it has a negative effect. Huge difference. This is not about "rich vs poor". It's about how we value things in a market. So if you earn minimum wage and over time increase your wage from $7.50/hour to $9.50/hour, you gain $2/hour. But if you and every other minimum wage earner have your earnings increased to $9.50/hour, you gain nothing. Please tell me you can see why this is true?


You only gain nothing if you're primary concern is relative standing, rather than buying power, which is probably the least important thing to care about.


Relative standing *is* buying power. There's maybe a brief period of time while the economy adjusts to the new higher minimum wage in which those who just received higher wages have a slight buying power benefit. Then it adjusts and they lose those gains. End result is that they gain nothing, and everyone who was previously higher than minimum wage but is now at minimum wage loses buying power.

As I keep saying, the primary effect of raising minimum wage is to destroy the economic gains by those who are just above it. The working class people who have wages just high enough not to gain anything, but still low enough to be significant relative to the new higher wage suffer the most from a minimum wage hike because their relative earnings are decreased. And those are the people we should least desire to harm IMO. You're hurting the single mom trying to raise her kids so you can reward the high school student with a higher wage while working part time at Cinnabon. It's moronic.
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#113 Mar 04 2014 at 4:08 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
'
While that's a tangent, it does raise another issue. Let's assume the employer pays 35% taxes on the dollars earned between $800k and $1m. So the tax/welfare system presents him with two options:

1. Pay his employees enough so that they don't need foodstamps and other assistance, at the cost of $200k/year.

2. Don't do that, and pay $70k/year in taxes on the extra $200k/year he earns.


My economic plan increases earnings for the majority of the population, gives tax breaks to businesses and every individual, invests in infrastructure, healthscience, emergent technology, and creates thousands of new jobs.

Yours accomplishes nothing but put a higher burden on business owners and the wealthy within the tax system.

Quote:
What do you suppose the employer does with that profit? Put it in a vault and roll around in it?


They pay their executives (in McD's case) $9,200/hr or just over 1100x the average rate of pay of their employees. (including Bonuses). So its more like a dozen dudes locking it in a vault and rolling around in it as I am sure the rest of the executive level makes bank too.




Edited, Mar 4th 2014 5:18pm by rdmcandie
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#114 Mar 04 2014 at 4:18 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
I'm not trying to make a broad argument about what wages the employer should pay his employees, just explaining why it makes zero sense for any employer to choose to do that for the reason you stated.
Well good news is you didn't do the first part, but bad news is you continue to fail at that second goal of yours.
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#115 Mar 04 2014 at 4:27 PM Rating: Default
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Kuwoobie wrote:
Who or what "naturally values" any individual person to the extent they make as much as the top 10-20%?


Um... Lots of people do. Where do you think those salaries come from?

Quote:
They could suddenly die and be replaced with someone who is equally, if not more qualified than they are, within 24 hours.


No. They couldn't. Because if they could, they wouldn't be paid that much. It's bizarre that you assume that employers are universally greedy and unwilling to pay someone an extra dollar an hour unless forced to when we're talking about minimum wage, but then you're equally positive that for some unexplained reason these same people are willing to pay 6+ figure salaries for some employers even though they could replace them easily with someone making 1/10th as much.

That makes no sense.

Quote:
They make as much as they do because that is how much they have decided to take for themselves and those closest to them. In other words, it is how much they "naturally value" themselves over the rest of their company.


You have such a skewed view of the world. Most of the top 20% earners have bosses, who choose to pay them their salaries. The top 20% is everyone who makes more than ~$58k/year. Do you get that? Those people aren't paying themselves, and they aren't cheating the system. Someone else values their labor at that level. The top 10% is all those earning ~$82k/year or higher. Again, this is not just CEOs and "rich folks", handing each other a fine life of luxury while all the little people scrounge around for scraps. These are normal salary earners.

I'm baffled by your bizarre idea that there's some magical group of people who just "pay themselves" in some unfair way. We all earn our salaries. There's no magic.

Quote:
So what then? Suppose there was no minimum wage at all.

People would be "earning" $0.75 a week the way they do in the third world-- because that is how much their labor is "valued by the market." Millions of people would just have to accept this, working like animals just to save up for a loaf of bread to eat once in a while. These companies would not treat American workers any differently than they do their peasants in other countries.


Why do you think that? 95.3% of all earners make more than minimum wage. If what you claimed were true, why do *any* of those people make more than minimum wage? Your argument assumes that no employer would pay more than the government forced them to with minimum wage laws. But that's clearly and demonstrably not true. The overwhelming majority of workers earn wages that are not forced by minimum wage laws.

We could speculate that maybe some of those 4.7% who are currently earning minimum wage might be paid less. But how much less? Remember that the bulk of those people are teenagers and students working part time for extra cash. They don't need the money. If the wage is too low, they just wont work. Again you seem to be proceeding from the strange assumption that there are no market forces which might result in a higher wage than that forced by the government, despite absolute evidence that this happens all the time.

Wages will settle at what the market values them. Period. We know that the bulk of wages already settle to an amount higher than the current minimum wage. There's no reason to think those wage would be affected at all if we eliminated minimum wage. So unless you assume you will always be in that bottom 4.7% of earners, then you aren't going to be harmed by eliminating the minimum wage. Put another way, unless you intend to always remain in that bottom group you currently are not being benefited by the existence of a minimum wage.

Quote:
<bunch of hysteria>

I am not making this up. This is how much of the rest of the world works already. Why are we trying so hard to make it happen here?


Yeah. You're making it up. What you're claiming would happen is insane. Our wages aren't that dramatic. There is no huge "gap" between the bottom masses and the top 10-20%. There's a very steady and gradual climb. One which everyone will advance along to some degree over their lifetime. Again, at the risk of stating the obvious, if what you believed were true, no one would earn more than minimum wage. Yet, nearly everyone earns more than minimum wage. We don't really need it.
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#116 Mar 04 2014 at 4:35 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:

Yeah. You're making it up. What you're claiming would happen is insane. Our wages aren't that dramatic. There is no huge "gap" between the bottom masses and the top 10-20%. There's a very steady and gradual climb. One which everyone will advance along to some degree over their lifetime. Again, at the risk of stating the obvious, if what you believed were true, no one would earn more than minimum wage. Yet, nearly everyone earns more than minimum wage. We don't really need it.


A very steady and gradual climb.


Edited, Mar 4th 2014 5:35pm by rdmcandie
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#117 Mar 04 2014 at 4:39 PM Rating: Excellent
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My economic plan


That's 5 cl of wine I'm never getting back.

Unless I sucked it out of the carpet, haha.

....BRB.
#118 Mar 04 2014 at 4:44 PM Rating: Excellent
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Quote:
Wages will settle at what the market values them. Period. We know that the bulk of wages already settle to an amount higher than the current minimum wage. There's no reason to think those wage would be affected at all if we eliminated minimum wage. So unless you assume you will always be in that bottom 4.7% of earners, then you aren't going to be harmed by eliminating the minimum wage. Put another way, unless you intend to always remain in that bottom group you currently are not being benefited by the existence of a minimum wage.
This statistic only works until you realize that you are including people making minimum wage + $0.10 are apparently in a group not affected by minimum wage, which is absurd to say the least. Even +$1, +$2 you'd be hard pressed to make that argument.

I think a more meaningful percentage would be percentage of people working as much as they can, while still being on food stamps. Sure they might make slightly over minimum wage, but they are a clear example of a company not taking it's responsibility to it's employees seriously, and are affected by minimum wage.
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#119 Mar 04 2014 at 4:56 PM Rating: Default
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Stalker rdmcandie wrote:
My economic plan increases earnings for the majority of the population, gives tax breaks to businesses and every individual, invests in infrastructure, healthscience, emergent technology, and creates thousands of new jobs.

Yours accomplishes nothing but put a higher burden on business owners and the wealthy within the tax system.


It's not "your plan" versus "my plan" though. I'm not saying what I think is best. I'm saying what employers will chose based on the current existing economic rules and taxes. Do you see how the very existence of the welfare subsidies reduces both the incentive for an employer to pay his low end employees more money *and* the low end employees need to demand a higher wage?

Again, I'm not proposing anything here (thought I already said that). I'm just pointing out how things are.

Quote:
Quote:
What do you suppose the employer does with that profit? Put it in a vault and roll around in it?


They pay their executives (in McD's case) $9,200/hr or just over 1100x the average rate of pay of their employees. (including Bonuses). So its more like a dozen dudes locking it in a vault and rolling around in it as I am sure the rest of the executive level makes bank too.


You're playing word games. That's CEOs not "executives". There is a difference and a reason why you play fast and loose with the language here. You want to make it seem like there's a large group of "rich people" benefiting at the expense of the poor. The reality is that there's only one CEO for each of those companies. Comparing just to the CEO is absurd. Labeling that comparison as though it's to "executives" is even more so.

Again, there's one CEO. For McDonalds, there's one CEO for 1.8 million employees. So while the ratio of his salary to the average worker is 1100:1, his decisions affect 1.8 million other employees. That's why he's paid more than the rest. CEO pay has increased over time relative to employees because corporations have gotten larger and more international than they used to be. A CEO is responsible for a lot more jobs today than they were 50 years ago.

It's a statistical game. Nothing more. And again, someone chooses to pay the CEO that much. They decide that paying him that much is worth more than paying someone else less. You're free to imagine that in a fairy tale world, this is done out of some bizarre plot to punish the little people somehow, but the reality is that those who make that decision think they'll make more money paying him that much than not. And ultimately, it's their money to make the decision with.

Edited, Mar 4th 2014 3:58pm by gbaji
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#120 Mar 04 2014 at 5:04 PM Rating: Decent
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Hey guys here is 3 paragraphs where I try to legitimize some dude earning 1000X the rate of his employees. Even though he can take 10x the pay and still live comfortably. 70$.hr@60hrs/wk(-2wk holiday) = 210K Personal Take home (before taxes).

Not a shabby chunk of money. Unless you a greedy ****.
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#121 Mar 04 2014 at 5:06 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
I'm saying what employers will chose based on the current existing economic rules and taxes.
I got it. I'm still not sure where you work, but there is no doubt the job you do involves a paper hat and a pushcart of some sort.
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#122 Mar 04 2014 at 5:12 PM Rating: Default
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Sir Xsarus wrote:
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Wages will settle at what the market values them. Period. We know that the bulk of wages already settle to an amount higher than the current minimum wage. There's no reason to think those wage would be affected at all if we eliminated minimum wage. So unless you assume you will always be in that bottom 4.7% of earners, then you aren't going to be harmed by eliminating the minimum wage. Put another way, unless you intend to always remain in that bottom group you currently are not being benefited by the existence of a minimum wage.
This statistic only works until you realize that you are including people making minimum wage + $0.10 are apparently in a group not affected by minimum wage, which is absurd to say the least. Even +$1, +$2 you'd be hard pressed to make that argument.


So what? The people making minimum wage +$1, and minimum wage +$2, minimum wage +$3, etc are as well. What's the point? You don't honestly think there's some conspiracy out there where millions of employees are paid just a few pennies over minimum wage so that the employer can say "I pay more than minimum wage" do you? Let me link to a personal income wiki. Look at the "income distribution" chart. It divides each line into $2.5k/year blocks. And while the percentage in each block does decrease as the numbers get higher, it's a relatively smooth change over time. It's not like there's this mass of people making just over minimum wage.


Quote:
I think a more meaningful percentage would be percentage of people working as much as they can, while still being on food stamps. Sure they might make slightly over minimum wage, but they are a clear example of a company not taking it's responsibility to it's employees seriously, and are affected by minimum wage.


How do you objectively measure "working as much as they can"? Also, this puts us in the strange position of creating a measurement that increases the number of "people in need" by raising the bar to which we grant the free thing. So if I decide that everyone earning less than $30k/year deserves food stamps, now your measurement says that if an employer isn't paying someone more than $30k/year, they aren't paying them enough.


That becomes completely circular. Someone is picking an arbitrary number at which they think is "not enough" for someone to make, setting food stamp conditions to that, and then that is used to "prove" the initial assumption (that it's not enough pay).

I think the problem is that you (and most people) are still trying to demand that pay meet some requirement based on need. But that's backwards. Pay should be based on the value of the labor. Period. Doing it any other way introduces factors which will make your labor force progressively less effective over time because the incentive to improve the value of labor disappears. If the only way to earn higher wages is by making your labor more valuable to your employer, every worker will endeavor to do just that, with the end result being a much more productive labor force, and a bigger economic pie for all. The more dependent workers are on wage laws and government supported union contracts to achieve higher pay, the less pay is attached to productivity, and the less efficient our workforce becomes, the smaller the economic pie is relatively, and the worse off we all are.

It looks good at first to approach wages from the point of view of the needs of the worker, but in the long run, that's a really bad way to do it, and ultimately, it's the workers who end out suffering for it.
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#123 Mar 04 2014 at 5:27 PM Rating: Good
Congratulations on losing scholar, gbaji.
#124 Mar 04 2014 at 5:28 PM Rating: Excellent
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#125 Mar 04 2014 at 5:46 PM Rating: Good
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That's quite an accomplishment. Amazing what posting from an alternate universe will do.
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#126 Mar 04 2014 at 5:58 PM Rating: Default
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Jeez I better stop posting constructive criticism in the Ukraine thread, and toe the party line or I might lose my hard earned Blue name too.
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