Maybe. My thoughts are more that the economy is doing well, wages are going up, small businesses can not find anyone to work at the minimum wage. In that case small business has no reason to fight a minimum wage increase. So the increase in minimum wage gets approved.
That is pretty much the case now. The economy is strong, wages are beginning to increase. In many states the state minumum wage is greater than the federal minimum wage. Looks like the minimum wage will be increased, but wages and employment are riseing and will continue to rise regardless of the minimum wage.
Actually we still have a free market world economy, regardless of what you say. ( You might be right about the economy in the US. ) And the " invisible hand " is shipping jobs offshore.
I actually am not against a minimum wage law. But the minimum wage needs to be just below what the free market economy dictates. It would then keep the weak and the helpless from being exploited, but not affect the economy. But there are problems with a federal minimum wage. One size does not fit both New York and Mississippi.
It's funny but I've been saying the same thing for years now. Just imagine if everyone had a PhD, what difference would it make? There would still only be a certain percentage of jobs that required that level of education. It's the same with all the other degrees. If everyone was credentialed the jobs available would still be the same. Most of them would not require a degree and most would not pay very well. So simply giving everyone a college education would do nothing to provide the jobs they would need to justify that level of education. We are still going to need a lot more Indians than chiefs no matter how you slice it and that is why so many people with good educations are doing jobs that don't require them.
They're all logical, Dan. You just keep trying to shoehorn reality into your political dogma.
Have you considered trying to look at the facts to see what they mean sometime, rather than looking for facts that say what you want the world to mean?
The BLS/DOC figures I provided were drawn from data that are extensive, and you can plot them, chart them, or eat them for lunch, if you want. Go to the BLS website and play with their applet that makes tables and graphs your data.
If you graph minimum wage hikes against employment, or against GDP, you'll find that the economy doesn't give a damn about wage hikes one way or the other. The effect is so trivial, whichever way it actually goes, that it's completely swallowed up by larger economic factors.
As I said in the beginning, the evidence about the minimum is equivocal. That's why I pointed to that website that had so many links; you can find an economist to support either side you want. If you take the position that minimum wage hikes are good for workers or the economy, or that they're bad, what we learn is not how much you do or don't know about economics, but rather the degree to which your political idealogy is blindly doctrinaire, or not.
Old beliefs die hard. In some folks they never die at all. There is a segment of the population that still thinks that the 1890s laissez faire policies were the best thing we ever had going. They still do, and you hear them quite often. They are always far right wing types too, and no matter what facts you present to them that disprove their beliefs it never changes their minds. But the point is that anyone who can't see that everywhere governments intervene in a country's economy the citizens of that country are better off, (except of course if it's a dictatorship masquerading as a communist or socialist state) is just in denial. And I'm not talking about a river in Egypt.
Oh, boy, there it comes... Those graphs aren't to show real-world economics, they're to show a basic theory abstracted from the messiness of the real economic world. They're like learning to draw a straight line before you use a French curve.
I never said it does. I said the evidence is equivocal. I think the most that happens is that some people get a little happier. It makes them feel good and buy a little more stuff.
Why don't you give your logic book a break and actually take a look at the numbers, Dan? I mean, are you more interested in the glory of your theories or in the actual EVIDENCE that minimum wages have virtually no effect at all?
There's a ton of data at the BLS website that you can make into all kinds of nice curvy charts. Best of all, they aren't about some isolated theory; they're about WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS.
This is not rocket science, Dan. All you have to do is look at the numbers and make a nice graph for yourself. No higher math at all in involved.
However, there is one thing required that might give you some trouble. You have to actually open your mind to the facts, and put your theories aside.
Where the hell did all that cockamamie theory come from? What evidence can you show us that you know what you're talking about? I don't mean your grades from economics class, I mean some Labor Department figures.
What they've got is GM's technical and management knowledge. GM shipped it to them. Now they're shipping it back to us, in the form of complete engines. The cost of shipping wasn't bad at all.
Yeah. Some guys here remind me of ancient Greek mathematicians. They said that nature would never allow messy mathematical relationships to exist in fundamental matters. So they decided that pi HAD to be 3. Exactly 3. And if anybody got a different answer by actually measuring it, well, that just proves the inferiority of going out and observing the world, as opposed to sitting in an armchair and applying deductive logic.
I love to see them spend two weeks that world run by Standard Oil, and the railroad monopolies, and the banking trusts. That would clear the air for them about lassaiz faire, for a lifetime.
Oh, well, there are left wing types who do that too. We just don't see as many of them here.
Hmm. Be careful about that thought, because there are lots of countries with lots of intervention, and with thoroughly screwed up economies.
The trick is to harness that great economic engine of free enterprise so it does the most good. Most of the time, in most ways, that means leaving it alone as much as possible.
But it's like a big-block engine. It can really impress the hell out of you with its power, but watch you don't get too mesmerized to use the throttle. Otherwise, it's going to blow up in a spectacular way.
It does however have the effect of driving wages down because of an oversupply. Operationally at this point, the tax payers and students are investing huge sums of money to drive wages *DOWN*.
When you have 10 players and 9 chairs, someone will always be out when the music stops no matter how well they are trained/conditioned.
Lets try investment job retention/creation (with the jobs nailed to the floor) before we p**s off any more money creating deeper "threat labor" pools.
Unka' George (George McDuffee) .............................. Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be "too clever by half." The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.
John Major (b. 1943), British Conservative politician, prime minister. Quoted in: Observer (London, 7 July 1991).
Archimedes is famous for many things, one of them using a limiting process (in ~250 BC) to estimate the true value of Pi. Limiting processes are at the core of Calculus.
I am going back to metalworking. As I said your argument is that correlation equals cause. And you know that is not true. You argued against that when the correlation was between the economy and who got elected.
When I point out errors in your arguments, you go off and claim I have a political dogma. It would win you no prizes in high school debate.
I don't doubt the figures you present, and I agree that the effect is trivial on the economy as long as the minimum wage is close to what the wages would be if there is no minimum wage law. Using that logic, there is no compelling reason to have a mimimum wage law. But the minimum wage law does have some effect.
However the effects on the microscale, rather than the macroscale, are not what politicians would have you believe. On a microscale, the minimum wage law hurts the uneducated and unskilled. Prices them out of a job and replaces them with a machine. I have done the math and figured out when one should hire a backhoe and when one should hire a ditch digger. No dogma here. I have hired both ditch diggers and backhoes.
The mimimum wage law helps the union worker making the machines.
Now your argument is that since the web site has economists that argue for and against minimum wage hikes, that my thoughts on minimum wage is blindly doctrinaire. By extension that means that all those economists who express the same ideas as I do must also be blindly doctrinaire. And it pretty much follows that the ones on the other side are also blindly doctrinaire. In short regardless of how informed and intelligent I am, if I disagree with you I have a political dogma and blindly follow it. Nice try, but it is not a logical argument. You might as well say my mother wears GI boots.
I enjoy an argument based on facts and logic, but can see that there are no such arguments here.
One of the ways to test a theory is to see how it works at the extremes. If it works at both extremes, then it is almost certain to work in between the extremes. The minimum wage does not work at ten cents an hour. It does not work at $100 / hour. Can you come up with good reasons why it should not work at $100 / hour? Then you ought to be able to figure out exactly the level where it will work best. But most all of the arguments claim it helps the poor if it is raised to some arbitrary level without any explanation of why that is exactly the right level.
If the minimum wage is set to about what the wages would be without any minimum wage law, then people claim it works. Works meaning it helps the uneducated and unskilled. But it is extremely hard to prove that claim. What is does do is make states some states less competitive and other states as New York more competitive. But does not make any state more competitive with say China. So instead of factories going to say Alabama, they go to China. Before shipping costs dropped from the use of container ships, it helped the industrial states sell more power equipment that reduced the need for unskilled labor.
You did note that WalMart is for increasing the minimum wage. Walmart already pays somewhat over the minimum wage so it will have little effect on them. But it will raise the cost of its competitors.
So it did in a way make things better by increasing the use of machinery, but did not help the unskilled laborer. Now it helps the low wage countries as China. Since I am for improving the lot of everyone ( not just those in the US ), I suppose I should be for the minimum wage being raised. I just believe the arguments for raising the mimimum wage are incorrect.
A worthy use of one's time, as we all have to remind ourselves every once in a while. d8-)
No. My argument is that a LACK of correlation makes the theory suspect. It's a case of a theory that conflicts with the data that the theory is supposed to predict. Only it doesn't.
I argue against correlation being equated with cause. That's a different issue. This is more like the experiment you use to test a theory. The data is there (employment rates before, during, and after a minimum wage hike), it's easy to find, and it shoots all theories right between the eyes.
You didn't find an error in my argument, because you imagined my argument in your own head. I never said that increasing the minimum wage increases employment, yet you claimed I did. I said it was equivocal, and then directed you to a list of CONTRADICTORY arguments on the subject by supposed experts. I pointed out that wage increases have NOT had a negative effect on employment, and supplied the data to prove it. Who is going to have trouble in a real debate?
As for the political dogma, if you're actually a liberal who argues against increasing the minimum wage, my apologies, Dan. There is little real data to support either side of this argument. You almost always can tell what someone's political philosophy is by his position on minimum wages. For example, it should be easy from this discussion to tell that I'm a centrist. d8-) The data tell me that it has almost no effect on the economy, or on employment, at all.
The argument against it is that it drives down employment. To that degree, it appears not to have any measurable effect at all. There also is no data to suggest that it hurts the economy.
We have minimum wage laws because we didn't like the result we got when we didn't have them. They're some protection against a race to the bottom. I have no doubt whatsoever that some employers would try to cut wages below the current minimum if they could, arguing that they were compelled to do so in order to remain competitive with China.
And, the flip side of your "why not $1,000/hr." argument, have you calculated how low you'll have to make wages in order to have them dig those ditches with their hands, so you don't have to invest in shovels? How about plowing with horses, or maybe with the farmer's wife? You could really boost employment in agriculture if you got rid of machines there, too.
Not at all, Dan. All it says is that it's a subject that gets people charged up if they are particularly doctrinaire, on one side or the other. You were trying to make it sound like I'm too stupid or illogical to buy into your arguments. I was pointing out that some very expert economists also don't buy your arguments.
Those who get wound up about it usually are.
Not necessarily, but most people who claim incontrovertible "logic" on their side, in this highly equivocal field, in which the bottom-line data seems to suggest that the world shrugs off all arguments about it and chugs happily along either way, usually have their minds made up. How can you take a position on either side, if you really know the complexity of the arguments, and claim that you have slam-dunk logic on your side?
What "facts" have you presented? As far as I can see, most of what you've presented is a mixture of anecdotes and theoretical speculation.
In the discussions I'm usually involved in, outside of this NG, the fact that the data show no correlative changes in employment over time, relative to minimum wage hikes, would be the central, interesting issue. The people I work with, for example, would be very curious about that bottom-line data and why it seems to upend all the theoretical arguments. Here, you give it a quick pass and then move back onto your speculations. Those are the kinds of facts and logic that interest me. Speculation is good for fun, but when someone brings up his academic expertise and then reverts to undocumented theories, I kind of lose interest.
Man alive, George, you are a real data junkie! I'll bet the Internet is like Christmas every day to you. d8-)
What do you think of those little graph-making applets on the BLS (and, IIRC, the BEA) websites? Pretty cool. You can really test your ideas in a hurry with them. And they're good for producing all kinds of interesting suprises.
True enough. It makes you wonder what went wrong here, and what's going to happen to the people working at the bottom end of the employment ladder. Around here the immigrants seem to live about 8 or so to an apartment. Is that the future for everyone who lives at a sustained low wage?
In article , " snipped-for-privacy@krl.org" wrote:
Well, I think in the end everything is pretty arbitrary. Let's use an example we're all familiar with: cutting speed. You ask a bunch of machinists what speed is best for cutting something with whatever tool and you're going to get some variations in the answers, even though none of them give you speeds way out of bounds. Several of them will likely give you a range along with the command to "feel it out and pick what works best." And that's something simple and mechanical. Obviously, one foot per minute is too slow, and a thousand feet per second is too fast, but these still exists a speed in between that is workable. Likewise with minimum wage, ten pennies an hour is too little, and eight grand a day is too much. But you go asking people who know and have a reasonable amount of skill in the field, you'll get a smattering of different answers in between and reasonable. After all, if something simple has a rage ("tolerance," if you prefer) something far more complex would be reasonably expected to have one too. So I just don't buy that line of reasoning you put forth up there. It's reasonable to expect some sort of explanation of the figure put forth, sure, but I think you're demanding perfection when "good enough" will work fine. I believe that the $7.50 number showed up because it's in line with what the minimum wage has historically hovered at (adjusted for inflation) for a good chunk of its history. It worked then, they figure it'll work now. I don't see why it won't. The "This worked last time I tried it," line of thinking works pretty well.
I don't think anyone's expecting minimum wage to address the trade deficit with China. It's just expected to spread money around more evenly within the US.
That seems to imply that lowering the minimum wage would help us compete with China. I do not believe that. We're hemorrhaging money into China because people have found they can make money on the margins by selling our assets to them. Those people are not on minimum wage and will not stop, speed up, or slow down because of it. Also, over the last few years minimum wage has been static (even falling, relative to inflation) but our deficit with China has been growing. That doesn't seem to be much of a correlation.
Funny thing, Ed: minimum wage is just _one_ issue that can almost always tell you a man's political philosophy. Global warming, Iraqui WMD (pre-2003), and abstinence-only, to name but a few, work equally well. What's amazing is how well they correlate. Show me a man who doubts global warming, and I lay 12 to 7 he opposes the minimum wage.
Now, why the hell should that be? Why do people tend to have such a small number of _bundles_ of opinions? Last I heard, there are more mutual funds (bundles of stocks) than there are stocks. But although there are many more "issues" than stocks (if you'll pardon the pun), there are far fewer political philosophies (bundles of opinions) than there are issues.
A true political philosopher would say you are merely fickle :-)
=========================================================== It's not over the last few years. The minimum wage in CPI-U CV dollars is the lowest since Jan 1954 although Jan 1990 (5.34$) was close.
Unka' George (George McDuffee) .............................. Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be "too clever by half." The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.
John Major (b. 1943), British Conservative politician, prime minister. Quoted in: Observer (London, 7 July 1991).
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