Raising the minimum wage = Trickle up economics
I made no definitive statement. I just asked a question.
The premises being presented in the OP and by Joe do contain definitive statements that raising the minimum wage leads to unemployment and higher inflation. These ideas are not even examined in that paper brought up at the beginning of the op-ed you linked. And the actual reality is far more nuanced and complicated
The article in the OP is terrible punditry and can be best summarised as;
“Liberals are so stupid they don’t understand supply and demand”
The reality is most of economic “research” relies and correlations. Because it is difficult to test ideas in controlled environments.
Right. The classic case of projecting positive values onto people who do not deserve them due to mistakenly identifying with some element of their identity as it is imagined rather than as it is.
JoJo Rabbit syndrome. They don’t see the toxicity until it tries to break a beer bottle across their expensive dental work.
They’d never do that. I identify with them so they must be just like me.
Uh, nope.
I’ve seen a kid literally piss his pants from fear on the school bus because an older kid found out they moved to town from that yankee den of cowards known as Shreveport.
why do people constantly, grindingly, unyieldingly repeat the sentiment that “minimum wage isn’t meant to be lived on” or “Minimum wage is a starter wage” when it’s neither a true statement of intent, nor a true statement historically nor a true statement presently regarding the demographics of min wage workers?
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Point.
People work minimum wage jobs because that’s all they managed to get.
It’s not meant as anything other than an exchange of pay for labor. It’s neither charity nor robbery. It is a means to an end for both parties.
exactly, people who take this “it’s a training wage” line are a) ignoring that it’s literally not b) ignoring that a lower training wage actually exists and c) unwittingly making the argument that if your family has enough money to treat your teenage wages as an allowance for learning a life lesson, you get (and by implication deserve) a head start… is it an internship or a job?
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We might be the wealthiest provinces in Canada. But I believe you are still the wealthiest nation on earth. (GDP/capital)
So I’m not sure it’s terribly false comparison.
No bullshit would be posting the study that this OPINION piece is based on, then letting others educate themselves.
You should always be suspect when an essay like this doesn’t explicitly link to the study they claim to be using to support their claims. Why would the author want to keep the reader from being able to easily find their source? Is it because they are “spinning” the narrative? Most certainly.
Also odd that the author says that the Card\Krueger study has “many problems”, but doesn’t apply the same rational to the study he is using to support his spurious claims.
Do you ever perform any semblance of due-diligence before posting these opinions?
I doubt it, if you had you might have seen this, Seattle Minimum Wage Study: Why It’s Utter B.S. | Fortune
Please note the fact that the link I supplied includes a link directly to the study they are reporting on. This shows the openness of the author, not worried about being shown to be a fraud, like Kevin D. Williamson at NR is.
“The research has significant flaws—most glaringly that its data excludes 40% of the Seattle workforce.” and “the data it analyzed excluded business with multiple locations, such as chain restaurants and big box retailers.”
So they didn’t even study the employees who work at McDonald’s and Walmart – who are precisely the low paid employees who would have had their wage increased. Why would they not include these folks?
Those of you that are protectionist about wages because it has a knock on effect with regards to inflation, would you advocate protectionism with regards to raw materials prices for the same reason?
Economics isn’t really ideological. It is cause and effect.
So you don’t really have to make the same stance across the board. You can just choose maximum benefit minimum impact.
My knowledge of Economics is pretty shit. So I don’t know where that essentially stops and starts. But I am sure there are some egg heads who can work that sort of thing out.
I’m with Doofa on this - the UK and EU have had minimum wages for years - seems to work fine - remember wealth also trickles up
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Economics are most certainly ideological.
Marx isn’t taught in the US, even in the highest levels. Well, it may be now, but the economist Richard Wolff claims he had to learn on his own.
"I have an education here in the United States that makes me a bit of a poster boy for the elite system. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate. Then I went to Stanford University in California for my Master’s degree in Economics and I got my PhD in Economics at Yale University. This is sort of like having an education that is half Oxford, half Cambridge etc, etc. In all of those years, ten years, that I spent in the three arguably best universities in the United States, I was never required to read one word of Karl Marx’s analysis of how a capitalist system works. "
Marx has been villified by economists to the point his name is a bad word. Why? Marx was only attempting to describe how economies work, just like Smith and Keynes.
It wouldn’t be because of fear?
No, certainly not, capitalists fear nothing.
EDIT: typo
Communism was an economical disaster, I’m surprised anyone even mentions both it and Marx in relation to economics apart from what not to do.
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Where has there ever been a pure Communist state?
It’s easy to fall back on your implicit bias and parrot what you’ve heard from others. But this is not how intellectuals deal with things.
Do better.
There can’t be a true communist state. There will not be.
Revolution is the first stage, followed then by the proletarian dictatorship which will produce the means, re-education and de-classification of the bourgeois included, to achieve Communism, a state in which not even private property is needed because all means of production have been asigned “scientifically” and a “new man” is born that seeks not personal benefit, but that of society.
This is the bit of it I understand.
It sucks.
It sucks specially when science is called upon “fairly” assigning resources to individuals, as the objectivation of an individual “value” is supposed to be achievable through scientific measure.
Spain is starting to give a free monthly pay to unemployed people (Ingreso Vital Mínimo/Renta Básica de Ciudadanía/…), so I just think our horizons of expectations are quite different.
Spanish minimum wage was recently rised.
And actually what is happening is that, in combination with the free aid check, many tax paying workers have gone into irregular economy to be able to ask for this mentioned minimum rent.
Both the worker and the hiring small business can even agree in it, and most of our economy flow rely on small businesses
As the boss stops paying Social Security, and the worker gets a free check, money literally dissapears from our Welfare State System(Instituto Nacional de la Seguridad Social).
Less taxpayers and more aids leads to a weakening of our Institutions (Public Health System, Public Schools…), and that ends up with an increasing insecurity, for the whole of the economy, making business although faster, way smaller and way riskier.
A minimum wage can be good on a flowing economy, maybe, but it can fuck up things when done wrong.
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Soviet Union was an economic disaster
If Cuba was not persecuted by the US, for only ideological reasons, it is arguably sustainable
Until USA takes it’s boot off Cuba’so kneck we will not know
China is also doing rather well though it is arguable as to whether they are still communist
Do better at what? Highlight the failures if communism? It achieves that on its own with its complete failure in theory and practice.
Of course there has never been a pure communist state. Pure communism means utopia and that is of course unachievable. We just have the collection of cluster-fucks and countless millions dead thanks to it’s insane ideology.
Don’t ad hominem me when you don’t know me.
This is not how intellectuals do things.
Do better.
Thanks for being honest about that.
It’s good to here a non-confrontational, factual, real world account, thanks!
This is the type of discussion I’m looking for here. You assholes who are being stupid tone it down.