Kyle wrote:On the other hand, I also don't really understand the reasoning behind increasing the minimum wage if it's simply going to put minimum wage employees out of work. So then they go from making low wages to no wages. What in the world would you accomplish by doing that?
Jason Toddman wrote:1. If you don't pay people enough to live on, why should they bother to work at all? They may as well go on welfare and take it easy. Like the old song goes, "Sixteen tons (of shoveling coal), and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt."
Get rid of welfare, or set a time table for it to only lasts up to 6 months, forcing able bodied people to go to work.
2. When people can't earn enough to pay their bills, they have to go on food stamps and other assistance. Guess who pays for all that. We, the other hard-working taxpayers. Not the business owners though; they get huge tax breaks and - in the case of larger businesses and corporations - obscene profits. Many businesses literally exploit their workers. Yeah, I know that sounds like the old Socialist/Communist propaganda; but that doesn't mean that it's entirely untrue! If people like Marx hadn't had a valid point,we wouldn't have endured the scourge of Communism in the first place!
Walmart is a notorious case in point. MacDonald's is another. The CEOs of each say they see nothing wrong with their employees having to go on food stamps and other supplementary assistance - passing the cost onto all of us rather than bear their fair share.
Stop allowing people to depend on government, same with point one kick people off social programs after x amount of time, if they are abled bodied to work. If they are disabled and cannot work, they should be the only exception to life long social programs.
3. I make above minimum wage but i haven't had a pay raise in ten years. Meanwhile my rent, food, health insurance, and other bills keep going up and up. I havent' had a vacation in all that time, while my employers take four two-week vacations or more to some exotic location every freaking year. How come the cost of everything else goes up but the worth of my hard labor does not?
Because we currently do not have a market society. If we abolish the minimum wage then it creates competitiveness, the harder working people would get paid more.
4. Business people get to set the price of what they charge for goods and services. Common laborers do not; they have to get what their employers will pay while having to pay what their landlords and other folks charge. Dos that really seem fair to you?
Yes, its about profit. The goal of business is to make a profit.If people feel the work they do is worth a certain amount of money the employer is willing to pay them then it is fair.
5. Unless there are steady, regular increases in the minimum wage, peoples' wages will never rise and poverty levels will steadily increase. Too many employers won't raise wages to a livable level until they are forced to. If not for minimum wage laws, many more people would probably be earning what is now minimum wage - and a great many probably would be paid a great deal less than that.
As an employer its your choice what you pay your people, just as much as its the employees choice if they want to work for the wages the employer sets.
6. Many who are against minimum wage increases live and act like someone right out of a Charles Dickens novel. Some (including the Tea Party retard of a governor my state is currently saddled with somehow) even want to roll back child labor laws, forcing school children to work to earn their lunch money for instance. Is that really the kind of world you want to live in?
I dont support government acting as a charity. People should earn their income, and if their skills are valuable to an employer they will get paid accordingly. If I need to pick between you and person X and the job is a mission to Mars...if you have a degree in science, you have skills in engineering and have credentials, and person X is a recent graduate from a city college with average grades I would pick you and pay you for what your skills are worth.
7. If you can't pay employees wage they can pay their basic bills with, then maybe you shouldn't be in business in the first place.
Or people should seek jobs in which they make enough money.
1. Get rid of welfare, or set a time table for it to only lasts up to 6 months, forcing able bodied people to go to work.
And if there are no decent jobs available, then what?
zanev wrote:I used small numbers in my example for the ease of me doing the math. I have no knowledge of how flower shops work.
xtc wrote:As was suggested by the great Jonathan Swift: the Americans (he suggested the Irish) could always eat the poor and that would go some way to solving the problem.
That is certainly no more preposterous than some of the right-wing la-la land stuff being espoused here.
Yes, its about profit. The goal of business is to make a profit.If people feel the work they do is worth a certain amount of money the employer is willing to pay them then it is fair.
NemesisPrime wrote:
There's a reason here in the states the right-wing is called "The Stupid Party".
zanev wrote:I used small numbers in my example for the ease of me doing the math. I have no knowledge of how flower shops work.
Jason Toddman wrote:Kyle wrote:On the other hand, I also don't really understand the reasoning behind increasing the minimum wage if it's simply going to put minimum wage employees out of work. So then they go from making low wages to no wages. What in the world would you accomplish by doing that?
That's an easy one. That's what conservatives and rich folks always say every time the subject comes up to scare people into voting to keep the status quo, just so they can keep the money for themselves. Every time they scare people, but every time the minimum wage had increased, none of their dire predictions have come true. But they continue to do it every time in hopes of scaring people out of the idea. i know; I'm old enough to remember several different times they've done this since i began working for an hourly wage (as opposed to seasonal work as previously) in 1977, when minimum wage was only $2.65 an hour!
Btw if minimum wage had kept pace with inflation from 1977 to now, minimum wage would be about $10.60 an hour now (as a dollar then had the same average buying power as $4 now).
NemesisPrime wrote:xtc wrote:As was suggested by the great Jonathan Swift: the Americans (he suggested the Irish) could always eat the poor and that would go some way to solving the problem.
That is certainly no more preposterous than some of the right-wing la-la land stuff being espoused here.
Don't tell them that, we don't need to be giving them ideas.
There's a reason here in the states the right-wing is called "The Stupid Party".
xtc wrote:Pardon my ignorance but what is the "nonpartisan" CBO?
xtc wrote:Kyle, as with most ultra rightists, you miss the point. The poor can support themselves by reducing their population whilst leaving the rich unaffected. That suggestion transcends time.
"Elitist" left-wingers? An oxymoron, surely. We don't really want to line the rich up against the wall and shoot them, we just want an equitable share of the wealth created by those who do not own the means of production. (OOps! Sniff! Sniff! Do I smell a Marxist? Call for the Un-American Activities Committee at once.)
Property might well not be theft, I own my own house (or at least the bank gets first dibs on it when I die) but, without doing anything there are drones who control the wealth of the nation through the ownership of vast tracts of land without having any intention of distributing same.
It has become increasingly difficult for the labourer to be worthy of his hire as production no longer takes place in either this country or America. Will you offer a job to someone in need? Please, create jobs. Don't just discard those inconvenient people who genuinely can't find employment that will enable them to survive.
Here's a suggestion for both sides of the Pond:: build housing. Provide employment and give people decent places to live. I don't know what the American term is but we over here need social housing to replace that which was sold-off by Thatcher without any intention of replacing it.
Pardon my ignorance but what is the "nonpartisan" CBO?
WHEW!! That's better.
I haven't had a really good rant since I was a union rep. (Other than the one about shit on DA)
Jason Toddman wrote:xtc wrote:Pardon my ignorance but what is the "nonpartisan" CBO?
The CBO is the Congressional Budget Office. Supposedly it is non-partisan; take is, it doesn't take sides, but I kind of question that.
Here's an article about what Kyle was talking about.
http://news.yahoo.com/10-10-minimum-wag ... 4AGjTQtDMD
As this article points out:
• The overall evidence in the new report by the CBO still implies that the benefits of boosting the minimum wage – higher income and reduced poverty – may outweigh the costs.
• The CBO isn’t widely viewed as the arbiter of broad economic-policy questions (such as the minimum wage) the same way it is on federal budget matters like forecasts of tax revenues or deficits.