Before a certain point, minimum wage benefits vulnerable people who are at risk of being indentured and exploited, it makes sure that people can afford their own bed and board rather than having it provided by an unscrupulous employer who then tosses them a nickel each month as a technicality so no one can call it slavery.
However beyond a certain point minimum wage does not increase wages, it merely makes jobs that pay less than minimum wage illegal, forcing businesses to stop employing citizens and to either outsource, bring in migrant workers, pay people "under the table" (usually illegal immigrants), to downsize or employ people at a loss until they go bankrupt. You could argue this "certain point" is more like a ratio and while a high minimum wage incurs a loss of economic productivity it is worth it to help the poorest in society by a negligible amount, however when you take into account the fact there are alternatives and complements to minimum wage then it is time to stop viewing minimum wage as a single cure-all-ills.
Minimum wage fans have good intentions, just as I probably have something to learn from them, they have something to learn from me. As much as I would only like to argue about the advantages of minimum wage, I am an engineer and so I can't ignore the disadvantages, we should begin focusing on workfare and welfare programs that help open up jobs, help people retrain and search for work, which although won't be without problems, will achieve the same practical goals we all value.
Also, being far more practical, you would think these ideas could be easily popularized among middle class conservative folks who are skeptical about minimum wage, it would help republicans attract people who care about the poor and help democrats attract people who want the economy managed intelligently.
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Anonymous2013-12-04 7:40
Fuck minimum wage.
Redistribute the wealth, even fucking destroy the imaginary 'wealth', someone having "47 billion dollars" is fucking insanity.
Why should any man be paid more than another?
No 5 is just jealous that people write better content and create better video than him. He is also stupid that he cannot read and always like to engage and troll in stupid politics discussion rather than provide useful information here.
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Anonymous2013-12-06 14:34
>>7 No 5 is just jealous that people write better content and create better video than him.
So you know >>5 and who he is and what he does and who he is "jealous" of? Are you the NSA? He is also stupid that he cannot read and always like to engage and troll in stupid politics discussion rather than provide useful information here.
So wealth inequality and the minimum wage aren't related? Serious question, do you think things are completely separate and happen in a vacuum and that there's no interrelation between them at all?
I don't claim to know everything on this particular topic, but from what I do know is that pretty much every other advanced industrialized country has (when currency conversion and inflation are accounted for) higher minimum wages and a workforce that has higher membership in the labor/trade unions, in turn their wealth inequality is less.
Well actually, the worthiness or rather feasibility of minimum wage depends on careful, accurate research of whether most employers CAN afford a minimum wage for all of their below-minimum wage workers. If so, and they are just holding back money due to greed, it should be implanted, and walmart comes into mind as it will only cost a 10c rise in all products at most to do this.
Minimum wage also improves the economy because it allows more disposable income for more people, so they can spend more and buy products from businesses, which will increase the demand for those products. If the demand increases the businesses begin to hire more workers as demand is what actually creates jobs rather than availability of money.
So, minimum wage SHOULD be implanted automatically, provided we can prove it is affordable.
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Anonymous2013-12-21 3:16
>8
100% this.
The "Trickle Down Economics" is to blame for the last
quarter century.
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Anonymous2013-12-28 5:08
Wage jumps may add to India's inflation woes
Soaring food prices spark pay rise demands from blue-collar workers
Vendors manning their stalls at a wholesale food market in Mumbai. Vegetable prices went up by 95 per cent in the past year, pushing India's headline inflation rate last month to 7.5 per cent, a 14-month high.
NEW DELHI - Struggling to cope with soaring food prices, migrant workers in India are demanding - and increases in pay and benefits.
But such gains by migrants and the rural poor do not come without a cost to the rest of the country.
More than pressuring corporate profits, these rapid blue-collar wage increases threaten efforts to quell inflation by India's new central bank chief Raghuram Rajan's the former International Monetary Fund economist who take over as governor at the Reserve Bank of India in September.
Mr Rajan has made price stability a policy priority, calling it a prerequisite for reviving economic growth that has slipped to 5 per cent a year, the lowest in a decade. Despite little evidence that interest rates can control food prices, he has raised rates twice since taking over to prevent food-price inflation from spilling over into the sider economy. He has warned of another hike next month if prices do not cool.
"India has become a high-cost economy," said India Rating & Research chief economist Devendra Kumar Pant.
Take onions, which figure in almost every Indian meal. Prices shot up 190 per cent to US$1.60 a kilogram in the past year, making them more expensive in India than in the United States, where incomes are roughly 35 times higher. That helped push vegetable prices up 95 per cent in the past year and pushed India's headline inflation rate last month to 7.5 per cent, a 14-month high.
And while vegetable prices are expected to start easing next month following a bumper harvest, subsidised government purchases of grains and rising farming costs mean overall food inflation is not likely to slow down.
Adding to wage inflation is a pickup in economic activity and job creation in laggard states of central and eastern India, which in the past used to be the main source of migrant labour.
While India has long suffered from a dearth of workers like plumbers and electricians, efforts to alleviate poverty in poor, rural areas have helped stifle what was once a flood of cheap, unskilled labour from India's poorest states.
Wages for blue-collar workers, skilled and unskilled, are growing by an estimated 15 per cent a year, according to government data, faster than the 6 per cent average inflation rate, but barely above the 13 per cent average annual increase in food prices.
With jobs and wages rising so fast at home, big cities offer less of a lure to rural workers - providing ammunition for workers demanding higher wages.
"Wages in states like Bihar are more or less comparable to those in Delhi," said Mr Ram Kumar, a contractor who supplies workers to construction projects. "But the cost of living is much cheaper than Delhi. So there's not much to gain from coming to big cities."
Weak demand has so far not allowed developers to pass rising labour costs on to buyers, but appears certain to change.
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Anonymous2014-01-02 0:36
>>11 So, minimum wage SHOULD be implanted automatically
I think a few states have made it so that minimum wage is automatically increased by calculated cost of living increases, rather than relying on direct legislative action. The Federal government should do this instead. There also needs to be a better way at calculating the cost of living as well.
our tax dollars are actually subsidizing these businesses that do not pay livable wages. A majority of these people making low wages are on some sort of Gov program because nobody can live on 7,8or9 dollars an hour, by raising the min wage we will save money and force the corporations to stop sucking on the governments tit.