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Let's take Walmart. Say the employees currently earn $10 per hour.
What would bumping them up to $22 cost Walmart.....
2012 net earnings $15,000,000,000
Number of employees 2,000,000
2,000,000 getting an additional $12/hour for let's say just 20 hours per week comes to $480,000,000 per week.
Now let's say they work for 52 weeks per year and that comes to $24,960,000,000.
If their net income (after all expenses/taxes/etc) is only $15 billion and bumping up wages for just part time to $22/hour will cost them an extra $25 billion per year...just where are they going to come up with $10 extra billion needed to cover these salaries ? And they have no profits. So Walmart declares bankruptcy within 8 months of this "new salary" because they ran out of money.
And Walmart is profitable by today's standards.
Imagine those companies that are not making billions per year in net profits ?
You can't calculate this with out taking into the account that Walmart can and would raise prices, and that people who make minimum wage, now $22 an hour, can afford it.
If you could really calculate the outcome to a billion dollars, I'd recommend you for Lord of the universe.
You can't calculate this with out taking into the account that Walmart can and would raise prices, and that people who make minimum wage, now $22 an hour, can afford it.
If you could really calculate the outcome to a billion dollars, I'd recommend you for Lord of the universe.
if they can't afford it now, they couldnt afford it once walmart adjust it's prices to account for it's new drastically increased expenses.There would be drastic price increases everywhere, tons of businesses going under, a lot more people without jobs and really only the super weathy wouldnt have the quality of their lives affected.
if scientific research wasnt worth a ****load more money than 7 dollars an hour he would only be making 7 dollars an hour and scientific research would attract the dumbest of the dumb.
The amount of advances society has made in the last 100 year in science and medicine is remarkable and would have never been possible using minimum wage workers.
Money doesn't attract people in that field!!!! How can't you understand this? Google the Nobel Prize winners over the last X amount of years and here is what you'll read in the bios...in a nutshell...
"John Doe then turned down a position at Corp X to focus on the vaccine"
"Jane Doe shared the patent with fellow researchers at X University to expand on the theory rather than selling it."
I mean, according to your logic, people are like PAC Man just mindlessly walking thru life eating pellets (money) over and over.
Money doesn't attract people in that field!!!! How can't you understand this? Google the Nobel Prize winners over the last X amount of years and here is what you'll read in the bios...in a nutshell...
"John Doe then turned down a position at Corp X to focus on the vaccine"
"Jane Doe shared the patent with fellow researchers at X University to expand on the theory rather than selling it."
I mean, according to your logic, people are like PAC Man just mindlessly walking thru life eating pellets (money) over and over.
How many levels did that game have again?
Yea and the guy who invented the vaccine for polio gave it away for free- but what's your point.Of course money motivates most scientific people to some degree. If they had no money and were starving and scientific research paid nothing they wouldnt be able to do any research. I grant you there are some very rare people who really would work for food and shelter and dedicate their lives to science and be perfectly happy. But by and large the money helps to attract the best and brightest minds.I'm not saying it's the only factor but it definitely helps. People like knowing they will make a good living, satisfy their intellectual curiosity,enjoy solving a puzzle so to speak, and hopefully be able to help those who need it.
There is a big difference b/w passing up being filthy rich to work in science and medicne and make a good living and passing up a good living in something to work in science and medicine for min wage.
If scientific reseachers made BK wages we would be so much worse off.
if scientific research wasnt worth a ****load more money than 7 dollars an hour he would only be making 7 dollars an hour and scientific research would attract the dumbest of the dumb.
The amount of advances society has made in the last 100 year in science and medicine is remarkable and would have never been possible using minimum wage workers.
But is HIS scientific research worth that much? But some people do think it is, so I guess that would be enough, and part of that industry's function is to make people think it is even if it isnt. And I took out my angry girl statement, sorry.
There was a time when scientific research did not pay much at all. That is when most of the ground breaking, earth shattering discoveries that open the floodgates for modern society to appear. And that paved the way for the modern R&D industry.
But honestly, these last 30 to 20 yrs, has there been any "breakthroughs"?
But is HIS scientific research worth that much? But some people do think it is, so I guess that would be enough, and part of that industry's function is to make people think it is even if it isnt. And I took out my angry girl statement, sorry.
There was a time when scientific research did not pay much at all. That is when most of the ground breaking, earth shattering discoveries that open the floodgates for modern society to appear. And that paved the way for the modern R&D industry.
But honestly, these last 30 to 20 yrs, has there been any "breakthroughs"?
just off the top of my head there have been huge breakthrough with aids, cancer, surguries and most of the knowledge I have on those topics is from people I know who had those diseases and a few different kinds of surguries and I saw how awful,inneficient or non existant the the treatments would have been 20 years ago.Even the lasik I got 2 years ago was far better and a lot less riskier than what was out there 20-30 years ago.
My grandmother's sister died from melonoma about ten years ago and now the kind she had would basically be a joke to treat.
I'm not sure if you follow sports but I even remember a few years ago Chipper Jones needed some kind of knee surgury and was going to be out 4-6 months. If he had gotten it when he first came into the league the recovery time would have been 2 years and a full recovery wouldnt have been nearly as likely.
I'm really not sure what time period you're referring to but the advancements made in the last 50 years are far greater than the advancements that used to take thousands.
If you want to go back to using science and medicine from 20-30 years ago that's your prerogative.
Last edited by bxlefty23; 03-21-2013 at 08:32 PM..
Yea and the guy who invented the vaccine for polio gave it away for free- but what's your point.Of course money motivates most scientific people to some degree. If they had no money and were starving and scientific research paid nothing they wouldnt be able to do any research. I grant you there are some very rare people who really would work for food and shelter and dedicate their lives to science and be perfectly happy. But by and large the money helps to attract the best and brightest minds.
No, money attracts the CEOs and business folks who ride the coattails of the man made system we've created. Those Nobel Prize winners were weirdos from birth. Solving complex equations while I was eating glue and shoving crayons up my nose.
I'm advocating a system that simply meets the basic needs of everyone. I don't necessarily know if a $22 min wage is the answer or not. I do know that I currently make $18 per hour and if min wage went up to $22 per hour tomorrow I wouldn't quit to work at BK. And I'm an average Joe with no real talent or skills either.
just off the top of my head there have been huge breakthrough with aids, cancer, surguries and most of the knowledge I have on those topics is from people I know who had those diseases and a few different kinds of surguries and I saw how awful,inneficient or non existant the the treatments would have been 20 years ago.Even the lasik I got 2 years ago was far better and a lot less riskier than what was out there 20-30 years ago.
My grandmother's sister died from melonoma about ten years ago and now the kind she had would basically be a joke to treat.
I'm not sure if you follow sports but I even remember a few years ago Chipper Jones needed some kind of knee surgury and was going to be out 4-6 months. If he had gotten it when he first came into the league the recovery time would have been 2 years and a full recovery wouldnt have been nearly as likely.
I'm really not sure what time period you're referring to but the advancements made in the last 50 years are far greater than the advancements that used to take thousands.
If you want to go back to using science and medicine from 20-30 years ago that's your prerogative.
I guess I was referring more to consumer tech, industrial, and hard sciences, not so much medicine. But thats ok, I am off topic anyways.
Money doesn't attract people in that field!!!! How can't you understand this? Google the Nobel Prize winners over the last X amount of years and here is what you'll read in the bios...in a nutshell...
"John Doe then turned down a position at Corp X to focus on the vaccine"
"Jane Doe shared the patent with fellow researchers at X University to expand on the theory rather than selling it."
I mean, according to your logic, people are like PAC Man just mindlessly walking thru life eating pellets (money) over and over.
How many levels did that game have again?
But what you aren't realizing is that they aren't turning down $500/hr jobs to work at $8/hr jobs. They are turning down (for example) $40/hr jobs to work at $25/hr jobs where they have more freedom and flexibility.
And if you don't think there are plenty of scientists who make discoveries, sell to the highest bidder, then try to repeat the process....
I recently moved to Australia where the minimum wage is around $20/hr. The legal minimum is a little lower but most people actually get paid a little more.
Anyway, housing costs and some consumer goods are considerably more expensive but things like food, cars, utilities are generally about the same to slightly higher than the US. The high cost of housing has more to do with a scarcity of developable land and foreign speculation than with high wages . . . and the consumer goods issue is currently under investigation - again, one would expect things to be slightly more expensive here but there's clearly some gouging going on. Apple, Microsoft grilled over Australian prices - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Anyway, point is, wages are high (and have been for a long time) and the sky hasn't fallen. Unemployment is around 5%.
The real difference is that in the US a) when wages get too high the gov't opens the flood gates at the border until wages level off again. b) We only seem to import the destitute and desperate of the earth to further undercut the wages of our own working poor rather than only offering visas to well educated people who already speak our language. c) a lot of americans are obsessed with what they think other people "deserve" to make. It's all over this thread. "Cleaning toilets? there's no skill in that. That's not worth more than $8/hr." But in reality it's a crappy job that most americans won't do for $8 . . . so in a real market you would raise the wage until you attracted the talent you were looking for - in a place like Philly I imagine that would fall somewhere in the range of $13/hr. In the US we circumvent the market by pretending that we're not sure if the guy scrubbing the toilet (who doesn't speak any english) is in the country legally or not.
Whether you are a low paid service worker or not there's been no wage growth for men since 1972. An economy based on services and technology can't survive if no one can afford to buy what's being sold.
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