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So the poor should just die? We shouldn't pay a livable wage because of this scenario that hardly ever happens? The birthrate of the poor is not 6 children. The average family size is about the same as the national average. In fact, only 5.8% of families were under the poverty level whereas 19.1% of single people were. 26.6% of single parent households were in poverty.
For welfare recipients, 73% of them had two or fewer children this is versus 79% for the total nation. Thus, family size is only slightly larger.
Why not have a livable wage?
why not a 'livable wage'? .....fine then set it by STATE law...not federally
just how would you set a livable wage ..federally...they cant even decide what a minimum wage sgould be
ok let's set the 'livable' wage...set it NATIONALLY for let's say New York levels...the 'livable' (expanded minimum) wage....$30/hr MINIMUM.....or should we set it by Mississippi small town standards....$4/hr MAXIMUM
get the point
setting a FEDERAL livable wage or even a minimum wage is UNCONSTITUTIONAL, because you CAN NOT set it as a nation
The debate shouldn't be there because the minimum wage is a detriment to individual liberty and should not take place in a free society.
No it keeps the unemployed unemployed if the employer doesn't think they will bring up more than the minimum wage. Obviously YOU have never ran a business.
Using cheap words like greed won't affect me. The profit motive is what makes people engage in mutually beneficial trade. Your and a lot of other people's misunderstanding of economics is unfortunately the reason of the downfall of the US
How is a min. wage detrimental? You're not showing how you reach your conclusions.
What are you talking about it keeps the unemployed unemployed? How? I see you've never ran a business nor read a text book.
Greed is not a cheap word btw. We have data to support the ridiculousness of how quick the rich got over the last few decades vs. everyone else. It's greed.
The debate shouldn't be there because the minimum wage is a detriment to individual liberty and should not take place in a free society.
No it keeps the unemployed unemployed if the employer doesn't think they will bring up more than the minimum wage. Obviously YOU have never ran a business.
Using cheap words like greed won't affect me. The profit motive is what makes people engage in mutually beneficial trade. Your and a lot of other people's misunderstanding of economics is unfortunately the reason of the downfall of the US
Claiming no one else knows anything about business while not providing any factual data other than the worn out excuse that everyone will have to layoff their workers and that the sky will fall makes me wonder how much you know about how businesses are actually done. How many minimum wage earners do most companies even have? If they are trhe majority then you are runing a sweat shop. If not many then the impact is minimal at worst. Excuses excuses, that is what I see from those against minimum wages.
Casper
why not a 'livable wage'? .....fine then set it by STATE law...not federally
just how would you set a livable wage ..federally...they cant even decide what a minimum wage sgould be
ok let's set the 'livable' wage...set it NATIONALLY for let's say New York levels...the 'livable' (expanded minimum) wage....$30/hr MINIMUM.....or should we set it by Mississippi small town standards....$4/hr MAXIMUM
get the point
setting a FEDERAL livable wage or even a minimum wage is UNCONSTITUTIONAL, because you CAN NOT set it as a nation
It's not unconstitutional. Also we do have min. wage differences by state already. I agree with continuing this and actually expanding it to an actual livable wage.
Having a federal min. wage ensures that if states wanted to screw over a part of their population they wouldn't be as screwed.
Greed is not a cheap word btw. We have data to support the ridiculousness of how quick the rich got over the last few decades vs. everyone else. It's greed.
and your 'data' has nothing to do with minimum wage
It's not unconstitutional. Also we do have min. wage differences by state already. I agree with continuing this and actually expanding it to an actual livable wage.
Having a federal min. wage ensures that if states wanted to screw over a part of their population they wouldn't be as screwed.
first off...it is UNconstitutional.....you doubt me...show me in the constitution where it states the FEDERAL government has the power to set a minimum wage
second. the minimum wage is already a problem in this country and expanding the problems
you need $20/hr JUST TO GET BY in new york
you can live just fine on $6/hr in mississippi
so what does FEDERALLY setting the minimum wage at $7 do...not a darn thing for new york, but people in mississippi have a wage over livable...totall UNFAIR and UNCONSTITUTIONAL
and your 'data' has nothing to do with minimum wage
the rich/poor gap has increase WORLD WIDE
We are talking about here in the US. No, not every country has seen a wealth gap increase. We aren't talking about globally country vs. country, rather internally class vs. class.
By raising the minimum wage, the government doesn’t guarantee jobs. It guarantees only that those who get jobs will be paid at least that minimum. But precisely by requiring this, the government destroys jobs. Someone whom an employer was willing to pay only the oldt minimum wage of $5.15 might not produce enough to be worth paying, say, $7.25.
It’s not all or nothing. Some of the workers currently earning $5.15 would find their wages rising to $7.25. But the marginal tasks, the least important tasks in the workplace, would not be worth $7.25, thus costing jobs. In the long run, employers will find more capital-intensive ways of having those tasks accomplished.
Economists’ consensus estimate is that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage would destroy 1 to 2 percent of youths’ jobs. A federal increase to $7.25 would, therefore, destroy about 800,000 to 1.6 million youths’ jobs. Some older low-skilled workers would also suffer. And the hurt to youths isn’t just short term, according to economists David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine, and Olena Nizalova of Michigan State University. In a 2004 National Bureau of Economic Research study, they found that as people reached their late 20s they worked less and earned less the longer they had been exposed, especially as teenagers, to a high minimum wage.
Those adverse effects, they found, were stronger for black teenagers, recalling the famous line from liberal economist Paul Samuelson’s 1970 textbook, Economics, about a proposal to raise the minimum wage to $2: “What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2.00 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?”
But couldn’t job losses of 1 to 2 percent be worth it, if the remaining 98 to 99 percent get a wage increase? This isn’t the trade-off, for two reasons. First and most important, the majority of youths are already earning more than the higher minimum that is typically proposed. For instance, in a study of a proposed minimum-wage increase in California to $7.75 from $6.75, economist David A. Macpherson of Florida State University and Craig Garthwaite of the employer-funded Employment Policies Institute found that, of 1.48 million California youths with jobs, 79 percent earned a wage higher than $7.75, and there’s no guarantee that these workers would get an increase. Some, but probably not most, would get what are called “spillover benefits” because of the new pressure on the wage structure. That is, they would get higher wages than before due to employers’ desire to maintain a differential between the wages of the lowest-paid and the wages of those further up in the wage structure.
Second, because the minimum wage does not make employees automatically more productive, employers who must pay higher wages will look for other ways to compensate: by cutting nonwage benefits, by working the labor force harder, or by cutting training. Interestingly, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a union-funded organization in Washington that pushes for higher minimum wages, implicitly admits the last two. On its website EPI states, “employers may be able to absorb some of the costs of a wage increase through higher productivity, lower recruiting and training costs, decreased absenteeism, and increased worker morale.” How would an employer get higher productivity and decreased absenteeism? By working employees harder and firing those who miss work. How would an employer lower training costs? By training less.
Nor is raising the minimum wage a good way to reduce poverty. The usual stereotype is a minimum-wage parent with no other family members working. But that’s a small segment of minimum-wage workers. The EPI website states that 14.9 million workers would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage to $7.25, 6.6 million of whom currently earn less than $7.25—it assumes zero job loss—and 8.3 million of whom earn more but, it claims, get a spillover. Yet EPI admits that only 1.4 million of the 14.9 million, less than 10 percent, are single parents with children.
The economists’ consensus about the job-destroying aspect of the minimum wage is less strong than it used to be. In the late 1970s, 90 percent of economists surveyed agreed or partly agreed with the statement that “a minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers.” By 2003, this percentage had fallen to 73 percent, still a strong consensus, but a weaker one than previously. What happened?
The answer is one major study and a book by economists David Card, now at the University of California, Berkeley, and Alan Krueger of Princeton. In a 1994 study of the effect of a minimum-wage increase in New Jersey, they found higher growth of jobs at fast-food restaurants in New Jersey than in Pennsylvania, whose state government had not increased the minimum wage. This study convinced a lot of people, including some economists. It was comical to see Senator Edward Kennedy hype this study when he had never before mentioned any economic studies of the minimum wage.
On the basis of criticism of their data from David Neumark and economist William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board, Card and Krueger moderated their findings, later concluding that fast-food jobs grew no more slowly, rather than more quickly, in New Jersey than in Pennsylvania. But they never answered a more fundamental criticism, namely, that the standard economists’ minimum-wage analysis makes no predictions about narrowly defined industries. As Donald Deere and Finis Welch of Texas A&M University and Kevin M. Murphy of the University of Chicago pointed out, an increased minimum wage could help expand jobs at franchised fast-food outlets by hobbling competition from local pizza places and sandwich shops. This could explain, in fact, why Card and Krueger found fast-food prices rising more quickly in New Jersey than in Pennsylvania, a fact they were unable to explain.
Even many who favor increasing the minimum wage admit it would destroy jobs. In a recent New York Times op-ed favoring a minimum-wage increase, Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic candidate for president, and Daniel Mitchell of UCLA’s Graduate School of Management write, “it’s possible some low-end jobs may be lost.” They claim that, somehow, those who lose jobs will disproportionately be illegal immigrants.
The focused support for the minimum wage comes mainly from labor unions, all of whose members earn more than the minimum. This isn’t benevolence at work but greed. Union leaders understand that the minimum wage prices out their low-wage competition: It acts like an internal tariff. If only most Americans understood.
reprinted with permission from
David R. Henderson
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,so I cut to the chase
