Minimum wage helps poor people?

[dawp]

even if it didn't, it goes against the laws of nature and of nature's god.

lol

 

[dawp]

I think I have.

Would I today? No.

Would I benefit by people working for $2.50/hour, yes.

Especially if they were off the Government payroll.

-John

At $2.50/hr, they would still be on that teat. And crime would probably be higher than it is.

 

[Zorkorist]

I disagree.

The entire environment for poor people would be elevated, as soon as some of them are able to go out and make money. Others will take notice, and get jealous that xyz has a job.

No more can the gangs attack the young, and tell them how disparaging their life is.. the young will know better, as they have had the opportunity to go out and make money by working.

Mother's, Father's, that had about given up, can go find jobs that demand of them exactly what they are willing to give.

-John

 

[Craig234]

You have out done yourself. 4 posts!

Be 6 if you hadn't interrupted the post before.

 

[JoshGuru7]

Minimum wage laws do create unemployment for exactly the reasons cited by the OP. I would personally get rid of them and handle wealth redistribution differently, but I'll briefly state the economic argument for their existence below since nobody else has bothered to do so yet.

the centrist view is probably that minimum wages "do," in fact, reduce employment, but that the effects are small and swamped by other forces... Now to me, at least, the obvious question is, why take this route? Why increase the cost of labor to employers so sharply, which--Card/Krueger notwithstanding--must pose a significant risk of pricing some workers out of the market, in order to give those workers so little extra income? Why not give them the money directly, say, via an increase in the tax credit?

Most liberal economists argue that increases in unemployment might be large in theory, but are small in practice and do not outweigh the benefits that minimum wage laws bring.

The benefit here is redistribution of wealth, and minimum wage does help poor people in the United States because we have welfare. Without a minimum wage law, John and Susan may be making $5 each ($10 total). With a minimum wage law, John may make $8 and Susan will make $0... but Susan will get unemployment benefits of $5 and therefore the poor people in our example are better off ($13 total). The $5 in the second case came from Phil and thus he is worse off, but the merit of redistribution of wealth isn't the question posed by the OP.

 

[Zorkorist]

There are more benefits and losses than economical benfits and losses. Minimum Wage is a degrading Government standard that, along with Welfare, only serves to perpetuate failure.

It does nothing to foster the American Dream, rather it, like many Government programs, is a nightmare.

-John

 

[dmcowen674]

If I was an unemployed unskilled worker, absolutely.

Ah but there are no jobs for skilled workers either, they were sent away.

So what country are you moving to?

 

[dmcowen674]

I can find much higher paid jobs, so no, why would I?

Where? Higher Paid skilled jobs have been sent away as well.

What country are you moving to?

 

[dmcowen674]

If the option is between working hard for unlivable wages and crime, which do you think is often chosen?

He will find out soon enough as record number of skilled jobs are being shipped overseas now.

 

[Acanthus]

There is no better solution.

If you remove minimum wage laws, employers will just cut wages and benefits to the market value (read: 3rd world levels). You will then be adding ~40,000,000+ more people to the welfare and healthcare problem.

There is, like everywhere else in economics, a point where raising minimum wage further will damage employment numbers significantly enough to matter... $7.25 is not that number.

 

[Red Dawn]

If I was an unemployed unskilled worker, absolutely.

How about if you were an unemployed skilled worker?

 

[gingermeggs]

Nothing' can help the poor in that corrupted, shithole called a country!
Zimbabwe has a brighter future!
Its just all turned to shit I am afraid.......

No Virginia!
saintee' clause- was a marketing gimmick!
I wouldn't light up a fart for $7.25!

Hope that answered your question.

 

[ebaycj]

No more can the gangs attack the young, and tell them how disparaging their life is.. the young will know better, as they have had the opportunity to go out and make money by working.

I LOL'd.

Have you ever lived in a gang infested area? I guarantee you that plentiful $5 an hour jobs won't deter gang recruitment AT ALL.

 

[biostud]

Minimum wage, Social Security, and other Government Regulations or Taxes are simply Government exercising control over our lives. Control, that our founding fathers never imagined.

-John

I guess they never imagined the internet or genetic engineering either, but the world changes, and so should our society.

 

[matt0611]

Where? Higher Paid skilled jobs have been sent away as well.

What country are you moving to?

Well I have a job and get paid well above minimum wage, so the U.S. I guess?

 

[drebo]

Minimum wage causes inflation. Inflation hits poor people (those on subsistence income) first. Minimum wage, therefore, does more harm than good to poor people.

The dollar amount is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is the relative buying power of low-wage earners. People forget that for every dollar a company pays a person, that company pays another dollar or more in workers comp insurance, unemployment, payroll taxes, benefits, etc. If that business pays an aggregate $5/hr for an employee instead of $14.50/hr for an employee...well, that's an extra $9.50 saved in payroll...that will go a long way toward making product cheaper.

Thus, a worker making $2.50 has the same relative buying power as a worker making $7.25. This is, of course, assuming we do not have a fixed supply of money (which we don't).

The problem is that we can't go back and reduce minimum wage because the inflation has already happened. At least we haven't had an increase in several years, and hopefully we won't have any more increases ever.

 

[IBMer]

Minimum wage causes inflation. Inflation hits poor people (those on subsistence income) first. Minimum wage, therefore, does more harm than good to poor people.

I seriously doubt the wages of 2 percent of the work force alone causes inflation.

 

[jackstar7]

This thread is full of truthiness.

 

[silverpig]

There is no better solution.

If you remove minimum wage laws, employers will just cut wages and benefits to the market value (read: 3rd world levels). You will then be adding ~40,000,000+ more people to the welfare and healthcare problem.

There is, like everywhere else in economics, a point where raising minimum wage further will damage employment numbers significantly enough to matter... $7.25 is not that number.

Not really. If the third world set the market rate for all of that work, then employers wouldn't pay minimum wage in the US for that work. They'd get someone in another country to do it. Lowering the minimum wage (or getting rid of it) would bring some of that work back.

Remember, you can't get a guy in India to serve a New Yorker a BigMac.

 

[rudder]

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-battle-front/

An important new study exploiting this opportunity will appear this month in The Review of Economics and Statistics. The economists Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, T. William Lester of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Michael Reich of the University of California, Berkeley, closely analyze employment trends for several categories of low-wage workers over a 16-year period in all counties sharing a common border with a county in another state where minimum wage increases followed a different trajectory.

They report that increases in minimum wages had no negative effects on low-wage employment and successfully increased the income of workers in food services and retail employment, as well as the narrower category of workers in restaurants.

The study successfully addresses a number of criticisms previously leveled at the case-study approach and points to flaws in all previous studies that have found negative employment effects.

https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/folbre/...ube_proof2.pdf

/thread

I see your point. A higher minimum wage helps poor people because this one study shows the number of jobs stayed the same. Of course we need to look at if companies in this study were operating a minimum staff to begin with. Money doesn't just poof out of thin air. An increase in minimum wage for one person means a decrease in money for someone else. A business has to hope that the increase costs can be spread out over a large number of consumers so no one notices price increases as much.

 

[JoshGuru7]

There are more benefits and losses than economical benfits and losses.

I know most people think "money", but anything that is scarce is an economic concept. Your time, your happiness, the environment, your health and safety, what you eat, where your live, what you do. Anytime you make a decision regarding these you are implicity putting a value on them (revealed preference) that can usually be worked backwards into dollars. Doing this explicitly is important for discussions of public policy for reasons of both transparency and consistency.

For the record, the reason why I don't like minimum wage laws is that I think those benefits and losses you refer to are significant real costs that can be avoided if wealth redistribution were to be handled differently by something like a negative income tax. The current system has terrible incentives for somebody on welfare to get a low paying job, and until we restructure welfare it doesn't really make sense to me to do anything to minimum wage laws.

 

[Acanthus]

Not really. If the third world set the market rate for all of that work, then employers wouldn't pay minimum wage in the US for that work. They'd get someone in another country to do it. Lowering the minimum wage (or getting rid of it) would bring some of that work back.

Remember, you can't get a guy in India to serve a New Yorker a BigMac.

No, but you can get a guy in India to run the fucking drive thru. Which is precisely what Wendy's and Arby's are doing.

Even the McJobs arent safe from slave labor wages.

We have lost over 8 million jobs and counting to outsourcing.