Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news for liberals

[Dr. Zaus]

A $15 minimum wage is just insane when many skilled jobs don't pay that much. If I were running a business there I'd slash my workforce and hours too plus I'd be hiring all students to pay student wages which are different.

I'm betting you just read the headline and didn't read the article. If you had, you might have learned that this increase had an overall positive effect on Seattle workers. For example:

"Indeed, while employment overall did not change, that was because employers replaced low-paying jobs with high-paying jobs. The number of workers making over $19 an hour increased abruptly, while the number making less than that amount declined, Vigdor and his colleagues found."​

Also note this study intentionally excluded bigger businesses with multiple storefronts. Its data set lacks the big chains one normally associates with minimum wage jobs.

Yet, as per the quote above, that isn't what happened.

 

[Moonbeam]

Yet, as per the quote above, that isn't what happened.

I don't see what reality has to do with this. I have formed an opinion that people of low skill deserve not to get paid much or that they should go to heaven. You have to be worthy to be in my group. What's the point of doing being good if there's no reward. and the undeserving get one. It's immoral and unfair to hard workers.

 

[Dr. Zaus]

I don't see what reality has to do with this. I have formed an opinion that people of low skill deserve not to get paid much or that they should go to heaven. You have to be worthy to be in my group. What's the point of doing being good if there's no reward. and the undeserving get one.

As some jew once said "I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

I don't think he was lying - but it seems many here do...

 

[senseamp]

A $15 minimum wage is just insane when many skilled jobs don't pay that much. If I were running a business there I'd slash my workforce and hours too plus I'd be hiring all students to pay student wages which are different.

That's because you have a low value add mentality.

 

[Moonbeam]

As some jew once said "I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

He was probably lying.

You are probably one of those liberal types that just has to complexify everything that is natural and simple like some hair brained idea that the people making 100s of times what the poor make are 100s of times more productive, that the generally came from a class of people who can afford to take risks and have a body of peers to lean on for loans etc. I got my 'better than others all sewed up and no conplexifying worms are going to eat into my ego bliss. Jews have a bad habit of thinking too much and they missed the Jesus bus so yes, probably wrong. Also game theory tells us that people improve in moral behavior if you make them feel like shit. I remember when the rain fell for 40 days and the good folk were in a boat taking care of my pet boa so who really knows.

 

[zzyzxroad]

You are probably one of those liberal types that just has to complexify everything that is natural and simple like some hair brained idea that the people making 100s of times what the poor make are 100s of times more productive, that the generally came from a class of people who can afford to take risks and have a body of peers to lean on for loans etc. I got my 'better than others all sewed up and no conplexifying worms are going to eat into my ego bliss. Jews have a bad habit of thinking too much and they missed the Jesus bus so yes, probably wrong. Also game theory tells us that people improve in moral behavior if you make them feel like shit. I remember when the rain fell for 40 days and the good folk were in a boat taking care of my pet boa so who really knows.

Yeah but umm...

 

[Moonbeam]

DC: I don't think he was lying - but it seems many here do...

I remember being told to think, "there but for the grace of God go I" but I think differently now. I say now, there but for my infinite ability to avoid self observation goes not I but some worthless smuck. If I prayed for those kinds of worthless assholes it would mean forgiving myself for being just like them. How am I supposed to forgive when I carry all that hate. Please, anything but knowing how worthless I feel and project onto the other. It's only that projection that saves me from remembering my pain. Please try to be nice. I'm really in bad shape. Hate helps me avoid pain.

 

[Dr. Zaus]

DC: I don't think he was lying - but it seems many here do...

I remember being told to think, "there but for the grace of God go I" but I think differently now. I say now, there but for my infinite ability to avoid self observation goes not I but some worthless smuck. If I prayed for those kinds of worthless assholes it would mean forgiving myself for being just like them. How am I supposed to forgive when I carry all that hate. Please, anything but knowing how worthless I feel and project onto the other. It's only that projection that saves me from remembering my pain. Please try to be nice. I'm really in bad shape. Hate helps me avoid pain.

That's fair. I should probably stop taunting folks for not being as superior, and totally free of evil hate, as I pretend to be in front of my internet friends. I do apologize for torturing you so, I hadn't realized how deep and necessary such hate was for your very essence - to hold your being together. What's really important, however, is that by having people who agree with me, I know that no matter what - I'm the good guy!

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1339028342799498

 

[Moonbeam]

That's fair. I should probably stop taunting folks for not being as superior, and totally free of evil hate, as I pretend to be in front of my internet friends. I do apologize for torturing you so, I hadn't realized how deep and necessary such hate was for your very essence - to hold your being together. What's really important, however, is that by having people who agree with me, I know that no matter what - I'm the good guy!

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1339028342799498

You mean knowing how worthless I feel doesn't make me the good guy? Maybe life just isn't fair.

Anyway, I know you have notices a undercurrent among liberals that people who don't think like them are evil so I just wanted to suggest that conservatives have moral reasons for opposing minimum wage laws that are based on unexamined assumptions about the proper reward for virtue, namely the inane notion that reward implies virtue rather than the other way round and money or its absence and virtue always have a 1 to 1 correspondence. Virtue should be rewarded but what virtue is, is always assumed by the 'good guys'.

 

[Dr. Zaus]

You mean knowing how worthless I feel doesn't make me the good guy? Maybe life just isn't fair.

Anyway, I know you have notices a undercurrent among liberals that people who don't think like them are evil so I just wanted to suggest that conservatives have moral reasons for opposing minimum wage laws that are based on unexamined assumptions about the proper reward for virtue, namely the inane notion that reward implies virtue rather than the other way round and money or its absence and virtue always have a 1 to 1 correspondence. Virtue should be rewarded but what virtue is, is always assumed by the 'good guys'.

The problem I see here is that we've got virtue defined by our community.

Community is everyone who agrees with me, makes me feel good that I said something, and otherwise shows me that I'm a worthy (tm) person.

In this way what accomplishment is, could be, or should be is defined for me by my community. Thus virtue ethics is a function of who I affiliate with.


When someone says "you are evil/unethical for XYZ" they are just pointing out that "you affiliate with a different group of people." I find my self much more interested in helping people find their way out by seeing that all of our identity-groups are filled with internal contradictions - none of them worthy of loyalty.

Once that's established... well I looked into the pit of nothing and staring back I saw that for me there was no choice at all - as foam on the sea soon to dissipate back I'm free to decide how my little bubble pops as I return to the sea.

What I want, in what ever small way I can, is to make things better for my fellow bits of frothy sea water. I suck at this, so I see quite clearly this hasn't saved me from being a little popping bubble.

So I entirely get why there is a whole community of frothy bubbles who have no concern at all for the other frothy bubbles and when and how they pop, much less the sea-water itself.

Resisting the Borg is the definition of Futile - perhaps the mind typing this is the fever delusion of a man being assimilated.

 

[IntelUser2000]

I don't see what reality has to do with this. I have formed an opinion that people of low skill deserve not to get paid much or that they should go to heaven. You have to be worthy to be in my group. What's the point of doing being good if there's no reward. and the undeserving get one. It's immoral and unfair to hard workers.

Moonbeam has a point. He will be doing what is logical.

Artificially imposing a limit will never do good. Rather than increase minimum wages significantly(thus bring other side effects), something else should have been done. Like say, provide an incentive to improve training for those lacking skills. Or, allow pay to be much lower(say $5/hour) but only for the period when they are being trained so they can prove their worth by working. The much lower barrier means there's just less risk to train a new employee.

If you don't have work anyway earning $5/hour is better than being unemployed. The problem is most of those people don't have* to work and they just... don't.

*I am sorry but unless you are on the verge of being homeless, if you are in an extended period of unemployment and complaining minimum wages suck, you aren't really in a bad situation. Suck it up instead.

 

[Dr. Zaus]

Moonbeam has a point. He will be doing what is logical.

Artificially imposing a limit will never do good. Rather than increase minimum wages significantly(thus bring other side effects), something else should have been done. Like say, provide an incentive to improve training for those lacking skills. Or, allow pay to be much lower(say $5/hour) but only for the period when they are being trained so they can prove their worth by working. The much lower barrier means there's just less risk to train a new employee.

If you don't have work anyway earning $5/hour is better than being unemployed. The problem is most of those people don't have* to work and they just... don't.

*I am sorry but unless you are on the verge of being homeless, if you are in an extended period of unemployment and complaining minimum wages suck, you aren't really in a bad situation. Suck it up instead.

a per-paycheck earned income tax credit to bring a family working minimum wage up to a living wage; and a minimum wage at a living wage for a single person, makes sense.

This is lower than we think. A single person household needs only 40 hours a week at $9 an hour to be at 150% of poverty.

BTW, this is nearly what we do already, just a bit more money and spread out per-paycheck instead of as a lump-sum after taxes are filed.

 

[Puffnstuff]

Yet, as per the quote above, that isn't what happened.

If we read the article we can glean some details of the study on the effects of this action.
On the whole, the study estimates, the average low-wage worker in the city lost $125 a month because of the hike in the minimum.
Want more proof on the effects of this idiotic law? Only people who have absolutely no clue about how to run a business would enact a law like this one. Jobs are being lost in Seattle and gained in the surrounding communities where the wages are normal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/business/economy/seattle-minimum-wage.html
http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/26/news/seattle-minimum-wage-15/index.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timwor...e-kills-jobs-lowers-low-incomes/#65e3acb34cdb
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/arti...inful-lesson-on-the-road-to-a-15-minimum-wage

 

[ch33zw1z]

I didn't click all the links. Is the price of the product not increasing?

 

[Puffnstuff]

I didn't click all the links. Is the price of the product not increasing?

You can't increase the costs to your customers beyond fair market value unless you want to lose business. If you are being forced to incur higher costs, in this case direct labor costs, then you have to compensate to balance the books. Since you cannot increase your prices you have to reduce hours to keep your direct labor costs within budget.

 

[ch33zw1z]

You can't increase the costs to your customers beyond fair market value unless you want to lose business. If you are being forced to incur higher costs, in this case direct labor costs, then you have to compensate to balance the books. Since you cannot increase your prices you have to reduce hours to keep your direct labor costs within budget.

So basically, their product isn't worth it

Anyone who thinks a minimum wage job is easy peasy needs to work one a bit more.

Flipping burgers may be easy, but dealing with the public takes a special skill. Customers are often heinous, condescending pricks.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

I guess it sucks for companies in seattle that compete with companies outside of seattle, it's not like they can levy a seattle import tax.

But I think a minimum wage increase is almost always a good thing. Prices may increase, but labour is only a part of the price, so they don't increase as much as the income of the minimum wage worker, so the worker is better off.

There are other ways to make minimum wage livable of course, sponsor low cost housing, medical care, education, progressive income tax ect. I guess most first world places do a little of everything, seems to work ok.

 

[1prophet]

What's precious is that Seattle's Amazon is almost single handedly destroying their retail industry and entry level jobs, but Trump supporters are more concerned that Seattle's minimum wage is too high. It's like some dude is banging their wife, and these cucks are sitting in a corner saying "excuse me sir, you you have a zit on your back."

And if Jeff Bezos name was Koch all the pretend liberals here and elsewhere would be all over Amazon for that, but since he opens up his checkbook for democrat liberal causes, crickets.

 

[Puffnstuff]

So basically, their product isn't worth it

Anyone who thinks a minimum wage job is easy peasy needs to work one a bit more.

Flipping burgers may be easy, but dealing with the public takes a special skill. Customers are often heinous, condescending pricks.

We have to keep in mind that minimum wage jobs were never meant to be careers, rather they serve as launching points for people entering the workforce. Livable wages require more advanced skillsets so to arbitrarily decide that all workers should immediately qualify for a high minimum wage is not only ludicrous bot detrimental to the job market.

Lets suppose that we have a budget to run our homes and a constant income. That value remains constant, however, we are suddenly faced with an increase in our home owners insurance. The difference in the new price and the old price must be compensated for in order for our household to remain within its budget.

If the price rose by $50 per month then that money must be taken from other areas such as our discretionary budget. This means that we stop eating out more times a month, or stop going to the golf club one time a month or whatever it is that you do that costs around that amount. When everybody has to do the same thing there are some far reaching consequences that will impact everyone in that economy of scale. The business owners affected by a mandated increase in their direct labor costs cannot magically make more income appear and have to reduce their labor costs to remain within their budget.

 

[ch33zw1z]

I live what you're describing. You're preaching to the choir. If people feel the product is worth it, then they'll pay.

Either way, these types of things are really just band aids to the root cause, which is corporate welfare.

 

[1prophet]

nordic countries are liberal and they are the best places to live on the planet.

You got that right, those lily white liberal countries sure are the best, that's why the top country is building a fence to keep those brown people out.

Norway to erect a 660-foot fence to keep out Syrian refugees
http://www.businessinsider.com/r-to-deter-refugees-norway-readies-fence-on-ex-cold-war-border-2016-8

The only difference between you progressives and the conservatives you hate so much is you know to wear your white sheets on the inside instead of the outside.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420877/whitest-privilege-kevin-d-williamson
The Whitest Privilege

The American’s Left’s blond-haired, blue-eyed fantasyland The curious task of the American Left is to eliminate “white privilege” by forcing people to adopt Nordic social arrangements at gunpoint. Progressives have a longstanding love affair with the nations of northern Europe, which are, or in some cases were until the day before yesterday, ethnically homogeneous, overwhelmingly white, hostile to immigration,

nationalistic, and frankly racist in much of their domestic policy. In this the so-called progressives are joined, as they traditionally have been, by brutish white supremacists and knuckle-dragging anti-Semites, who believe that they discern within the Nordic peoples the last remnant of white European purity and who frequently adopt Nordic icons and myths, incorporating them into an oddball cult of whiteness. American progressivism is a cult of whiteness, too: It imagines re-creating Danish society in Los Angeles, which is not full of Danish people, ascribing to Scandinavian social policies certain mystical tendencies that render them universal in their applicability. Call it “Nordic Exceptionalism.”

The Left occasionally indulges in bouts of romantic exoticism — its pin-ups have included Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Mao Zedong; we might even count Benito Mussolini, “that admirable Italian gentleman” who would not have been counted sufficiently white to join Franklin Roosevelt’s country club — but the welfare states that progressives dream about are the whitest ones: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, etc. The significance of this never quite seems to occur to progressives. When it is suggested that the central-planning, welfare-statist policies that they favor are bound to produce results familiar to the unhappy residents of, e.g., Cuba, Venezuela, or Bolivia — privation, chaos, repression, political violence — American progressives reliably reply: “No, no, we don’t want that kind of socialism. We want socialism like they have it in Finland.” Translation: “We want white socialism, not brown socialism!





Let's see how long that white liberal utopia lasts when non assimilating religious right type refugees with their westboro baptist type views over run those countries thanks to liberal apologists

 

[ch33zw1z]

And if Jeff Bezos name was Koch all the pretend liberals here and elsewhere would be all over Amazon for that, but since he opens up his checkbook for democrat liberal causes, crickets.

I don't think the generalization fits. Go ahead and start a thread to find out. You present a situation like that to Libs, I bet it won't go as you describe.

 

[frowertr]

I own my own business that employees several people. The moment im forced to pay $15/hour to them is the moment I lay them all off, downscale, and do it myself. The majority I employ arent worth anywhere near that much...

 

[ch33zw1z]

If you can do it yourself anyways, why would you pay someone?

 

[jmagg]

I own my own business that employees several people. The moment im forced to pay $15/hour to them is the moment I lay them all off, downscale, and do it myself. The majority I employ arent worth anywhere near that much...

Quite possibly they work as hard as your wage allows, it's a two way street. People need to get fair compensation for what they do, otherwise its hard to give a shit. You should do it all by yourself.