I’m sure y’all have seen this graph of productivity pulling away from wages:
Increasing minimum wages are a blunt instrument to fixing this, and the status quo of people working for a living not getting ahead vs the people who own for a living doing fantastically better is not going to have a good outcome.
Minimum wages provide bargaining power by fiat, we used to have unions but they’re almost completely defeated, and nearly irrelevant.
Well, minimum wage is close to 14 an hour up here. 13.69
This is also one of the most expensive states in America to live in. About $4.50 for a gallon of milk, $1200 for a cramped 1 bedroom or studio apartment or a run down trailer. $500 for a trailer space with no trailer.
Pack of cigarettes is about $9 to 10 with tax. There’s a %17 liquor tax on top of %8 sales tax and crazy high property tax.
It has perhaps the most hostile anti-business environment of any state I have ever been in, with the exception of the real estate industry which is from what I can tell basically just one giant racket where the owners raise the rent to as close to what they estimate your profits might be as soon as they are allowed to raise what they charge. If that forces you out, they don’t care because someone else will rent it at what you were paying before as soon as you vacate.
I hate this state. Washington is beautiful in the spring and summer but just fucking garbage on all counts in every other way. If it weren’t for Boeing and Amazon the whole place would dry up and blow away.
What ever the answer is for cost discrepancies between states, it probably has a lot more to due with the price people are willing to pay for goods than it does with the minimum wage.
A lot of the interior of the US is subsidized by the exterior.
A quick look tells me The states with the highest personal income per capita are Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey. The states with the lowest personal income per capita are Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama, New Mexico and Kentucky.
I’m guessing you can charge more in the former than the latter and get away with it. Although that does create and arbitrage situation. So I’m sure they get people from the more expensive states going to the least expensive one to buy things all the time.
All I know is that from what I have read minimum wage seems to play a small role In economic balancing act going on.
Ah, no, I think he mentions some research…
Part of the problem is it’s not clear from ANY research that raising the minimum wage to $15 will have an overall positive effect.
So, if no research supports it, why?
Unemployment in the US was dropping to essentially full employment in the US BEFORE COVID hit.
And the minimum wage was NOT raised.
So… You were asking?
You pointed out a correlation, implying causation, when you offer no proof but the correlation.
You were asking?
Plus, comparing one province, which is, I believe, the most populous and richest? To the entire USA Economy?
You were asking?
Again, comparing one city to the entire US economy.
Apples and oranges, and cherries.
Need a state income tax.
The underlying assumption you are making is that there is something wrong with the picture.
Minimum wage jobs are entry level jobs.
Comparing that to fully trained professionals making high salaries, and CEOs who get paid a lot plus non-ordinary income is a bit of a stretch.
It’s a blunt instrument alright, and it seems it may do more harm than good.
As far as unions go, they still have PLENTY of power.
The article does address that, doesn’t it?
Guess who is making lots of campaign donations?
Realtors is my guess?
10.8% of jobs represented by a union is “plenty”? They might be more powerful in your particular industry, I don’t know what industry you’re in, but then again if you’re taking the National Review for gospel I can understand why their existence at all is offensive. I found the article only cited few actual studies, and tried to refute them with editorials citing other editorials and sneering condescension, which might make it more convincing to someone already convinced. I’ll not dismiss the article’s thesis out of hand, but I’ll need some better evidence to accept it’s conclusion.
Why do you think real wages gradually decreasing is a good thing? That statistic isn’t just minimum wages decreasing (once again in real terms), that’s everybody. Even the article stated how labor is being crowded out by automation, so decreasing regular people’s bargaining power by slowly but surely dropping the statutory wage floor doesn’t benefit anyone.
You really can’t sell goods and services to people who are making less and less money, and it does not make me sleep well at night knowing more and more of our national productivity is going to propping up financial instruments and real estate than actual productive uses.
Switzerland is a good comparison
Very capitalist, love guns
Also the flag is a big plus
The local realtors are plugged into the local Dutch community power trip. The band wagon hitch hiking up here is just next level. If I see another dumb kid who has never lived further south than Portland flying a confederate flag from the back of the pick up his 120k a year Aviation engineer dad bought for him it will be too soon. It’s a little worse than someone telling me they’re a socialist but they’ve never even heard the name “karl marx” or the implications of the “means of production” but it’s close enough for discomfort. They can’t define capital if their life depended on it, but they think using it as a tool of the meritocracy must be bad. (Edit: Well, they would if somebody told them what a meritocracy was supposed to be.)
There’s no numbskull quite like a Washington numbskull.
Talking to some of these people is like chewing a yard of tinfoil with a mouth full of fillings.
I posted the National Review article as a starting point for discussion.
I don’t take it as gospel.
DISCUSSION
Jeez…
I know, I cringe when I see some idiot with a Confederate flag here…like, really, dude?
I think that? Why do you think that?
You are ASSUMING that raising the minimum wage will cause an overall increase in other wages (hourly wage jobs), I think?
Nobody really knows what will happen, do they?
Wages were stagnant for a long time. They started creeping up, finally, because the post 2008 economy finally started reviving. About the time Trump got elected, and then further tax reforms/reductions got passed. Then COVID hit and gave us ALL a big “fuckyou”.
I’m not convinced that raising the minimum wage will have THAT much effect. If it does get raised, I suggest it be done in stages, to give business (mostly small businesses) time to adjust.
And personally, I have no problem indexing it to CPI, inflation, or something else rational.
The kind of guys that fly that back home are the kinds of guys that would beat them to a pulp for entertainment. I’ve seen it so many god damned times. I once heard a girl (who I went to college with no less) brag about taking part in the beating of god damned Red Cross volunteers from New York who came down to help with Katrina. Her gang of local tribal idiots sure showed those snow birds what fer.
I’m just so sick of all the domestic stupidity. I have got to get the fuck out and do something to put this shit behind me or I’m going to flip out soon.
me too, man, me too
But maybe part of the problem has been that a lot of folks do not realize that there are a lot of folks as you described…
I assumed you believed wages not keeping pace with productivity is either OK or good in and of itself, which I found strange. My apologies for this assumption.
Tying the minimum wage to some metric like CPI is a popular policy even among progressives, so periodic legislative intervention isn’t necessary, and business leaders can predict how the minimum will change more easily. I’ve not heard much argument against this, and I like it.
Even the Raise the Wage Act doesn’t spike the minimum wage up to $15 right away, it does so slowly until 2025, doing this all at once is bad and wrong for all the reasons asserted in the article and by posters here.
It’s true that Walmart can afford the full minimum much more easily than young upstart companies, and I don’t think they’ll lobby against this too hard for that reason. One idea I’ve been working on to split this difference is to subsidize small business wages. For companies underneath a specific size/age, they only need to pay $8/hr or so, and the rest would be made up with a negative income tax paid every pay period.
Thanks for realizing the assumption thing, no offense taken.
A huge issue in any sort of civil discussion or debate is that people start assuming stuff. It goes down hill from there.
Tying min wage to some sort of index is good. However, I don’t think trying to make it a “living wage” is going to work. That varies depending on who is earning the “living wage” where.
And this IS my opinion, “living wage” is a feel-good propaganda term, essentially.
So 15 bucks and hour is not a “living wage” for a family of 4, with a single working parent. Where I live, in rural Idaho, vs, say, as an extreme, San Francisco Bay area? New York City?
Even if you index it to CPI on a rolling 5 year average, or whatever index measure.
It’s not just young upstart companies. It’s established small businesses. Who employ a LOT of people.
My opinion again, I think the more progressive/leftist who are pursuing this don’t really care about small businesses, because those groups are essentially ant-capitalist/free-ish market in general.
I’m not sure how they envision our economy working, frankly. It definitely needs some work, but not a radical makeover.
And the wage subsidy was noted as a potential “fix” in the NR article…or one of the links, at least.