RR I just wanted to address this point. The vast majority of people paid below min wage are waitstaff or people who work for tips. They are probably due for an adjustment to that. Do you know the age of people who earn exactly the minimum wage? I don't off the top of my head but I will venture a guess that the majority are below the age of 21. The numbers are on the Bureau of Labor Statistics site if you feel like doing the research. I've done it before and I don't really feel like digging into the numbers now. All this stated, the states and municipalities are free to adjust their minimum wage as they see fit. More than half of the states are above the federal min wage level. Further, if you are running a business good luck finding someone that will work for min wage even if you do then they probably won't be the most productive employee. It's simply very hard to find jobs that even pay min wage anymore. Wal-Mart is going to be at $11/hr soon. Most fast food places are $10/hr and up. 11 of the 15 largest states (that represents about 2/3rd of the US population) have minimum wages above the federal minimum. I agree min wage is behind the times and it needs to have an age adjustment in it and some kind of CPI adjustment would be good as well. If we had min wage increasing at the rate of CPI since the last adjustment in 2009 we would be around $8.50/hr. edit...I've got too much time on my hands so I did a weighted average minimum wage based on the population of the 15 largest states and I came up with something around $8.96/hr to be the weighted min wage across those states. So take that forever that is worth....probably very little lol.
A Legit concern We produce FAR MORE NOW with FAR LESS EMployees I think it will continue in that direction Rocket River
Age adjustment gets really dicey Same Job different Pay won't fly too much I use the term minimum wage but it is more like Less than 'living wage' Rocket River
I know some countries have it and it’s primarily so that teens don’t get totally pushed out of the workforce. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_law
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the minimum wage in the United States would have been $18.28 in 2013 if the minimum wage kept pace with labor productivity.[128] To adjust for increased rates of worker productivity in the United States, raising the minimum wage to $22 (or more) an hour has been presented. That's the last line under your above reference. I honestly believe it's all about making as much as you can off workers as long as the government doesn't object to the pay you are giving them. Republicans have always been against raising minimum wage. I don't agree with a lot of Democratic stances, but their wanting to increase minimum wage was one I agree with. Politics is ugly on both sides though, and I don't agree with keeping minimum wage so low any more than I agree with some of our liberal gun laws. Sometimes both parties just strike down laws presented by the other because they can, whether it is to show their power or simply to make their big donors happy. That's the big problem with politics.
Why not just make it $50 an hour? You know, just to get ahead of the game.....then we can make it $75 an hour a few years later. I mean, that's the only way for an arbitrary minimum to work as a "living wage" right? Venezuela recently tripled their minimum wage to 3 million Bolivars a month so their people are really doing well now, we should follow suit. Imagine how great it'll be when poor people are able to make 3 million dollars a month!!!!
Fiscally, yeah, I'm pretty conservative because I'm a libertarian. I view every dollar you give to one person as a dollar you have to seal from another person. I'm not an extreme libertarian, so I'm fine with some government programs like that, but I just need them to justify themselves and I need them to be effective in order to exist. If we were talking social issues, I'd probably come across pretty liberal for the same reason.
To answer the OP, it definitely is a difficult question. And from my understanding the conservative " plan " is more like a statement of the trade-offs. To begin, this idea of free-markets, capitalism, efficiency ... whatever you want to call it... is theoretical. We don't have unadulterated capitalism , but we ( the govt and people in charge ) want as many facets of this framework installed in our system because they theoretically lead to people being better off on average. However, in reality we start to see a much more complicated picture and have to look at different situations and the incentives they create. That's if you believe the government has a goal ( in it policy ) of improving the well-being of everyone. To get to the question of the plan to deal with workers and people who are not able to support themselves .... progressives introduce "inefficiency" into the system in form of government programs to help mitigate the pains from friction. In this theoretical economy , over time, everyone can find a job and get compensated relative to their contribution. The problem here is that "over time " is significant. If you are in-between jobs or not working a job that can sustain you... over time you should be able to get a "better" job. However, the impacts of that time lag induces harm. The theoretical conservative viewpoint, is that private actors will arise to take care of the people in that situation. Places like food banks , homeless shelters, low-cost training programs , tips . The idea being , that if our society values helping people out or maybe even just has a norm of doing so , the solution can manifest itself without the inefficiency of a government doing the redistribution. Once again , this is theoretical and elements like time lag come into play. I think that the answer to your question depends on how you feel about the incentives that either path takes. Like you said, a lack of these programs ( and absence of private solutions ) can lead towards incentivizing criminal behavior as a means of supporting oneself. However, the inverse is true that too much "help" can create dis-incentives for people to explore avenues for people to "pull them selves up by their bootstraps" Because once you start removing incentives then you remove the self-interest that makes capitalism "work" and provide economic growth ( if you care about that ) So in essence there is an efficient level of "help" to provide . For the record. i dont have a problem wit the current level of help.... If anything i have issues with the efficiency with which it provided and the way information about it is disseminated.
Meh, it's for their own good. They can see the suffering around them, no one from UNICEF has stated they are bamboozled. China's 1 child policy is a huge reason they're doing so well today. Pretending like the poor can have as many kids as they want is like pretending someone middle class can say the same stuff Trump says without repercussions. Things like welfare, minimal universal wage etc aren't really going to solve problems in a top heavy capitalist country like the US. You need to control dependents.
It would be worse without it. Much worse. This analysis is way too broad a brush. That's a terrible idea - how many idiots get good grades, fancy degree's and do destructive things with, like the subprime housing crisis? Or bankers needing to be bailed out? More like tax credits for the bottom 80% who limit kids.
China officially abandoned their one child policy 5 or so years ago. The policy unofficially ended a long time ago. Controlling the number of children born in poverty or at risk in the USA certainly can have an impact. The problem is that it is not a politically popular idea in the USA. Access to abortion, incentives to strong family planning would all be needed and that isn’t politically possible.
I don't think labor productivity is a fair metric to use to determine what minimum wage should be. Without doing any research I would venture to guess these lower skilled jobs that we are generally talking about when we are discussing minimum wage do not have the same productivity gains that America has produced as a whole. Also, American productivity growth has been flattening. If you applied the productivity growth since the last min wage hike in 2009 then you would get about a 70 cent increase in the min wage. If you apply the CPI percentage increases then you get about a $1.20 increase in the min wage.
No way will I ever agree the cost of living has been the same for so many years. It is an unreasonable and unfair amount right now for people actually working for a living. I'd rather give more money to people working then just hand out money to those who aren't even trying to find work.
Ok so I guess my coffee got me motivated to do random tasks but I was curious if there was some way to integrate productivity into the min wage calculation. I played around with it for a bit and I realized you don't need a big productivity adjustment in the min wage calculation to get some more accurate approximations of where min wage probably should be. So I went back to 1992 which was the first full year after min wage went up to $4.25. I looked at productivity, CPI, and GDP growth. GDP growth was the biggest on average of these 3 so I just applied the yearly GDP growth as the adjustment to min wage and arrived at a min wage of $8.49/hr in 2019 (I just used the estimates for these growth rates for 2018). Then I decided to add in a productivity adjustment that was 1% of the productivity growth to the CPI and GDP growth numbers. So like if you had a 3% productivity growth rate and a 3% GDP growth rate then I would simply made the annual adjustment 3.03% (1% of 3% equaling to .03%). Overall, this adjustment amounted to only about .1% on average, but it had big effects with compounding. With those adjustments it yielded a min wage of $11.09/hr if you used GDP + productivity adjustment and $10.22/hr if you used CPI + productivity adjustment. All of this is probably too complicated for the govt to enact but it would seem some sort of productivity bonus added into CPI or GDP annual increases would be fair. It also seems that using GDP growth rate instead of CPI growth rate would be more favorable for lower wage workers. In states that have automatic min wage increases they use CPI growth adjustments and not GDP. If you're curious productivity growth averaged about 1.97%, CPI growth was around 2.29%, and GDP growth was around 2.60%. I hope I didn't make any mistakes, but I probably did.
