Do you believe in a living wage?

I have journels from my grand parents great grandparents and further back. All were small acreage farmers and all went to school. That was why I asked about it only being a few.

 

The government sets that and that is one thing that was tighten under welfare reform and as I recall lessened under the Obama administration. So let's go back to those standards and tighten the disability standards.

 

Well I did and you said people who work should be able to afford housing, food and transportation.

What if the value of the job is below what it takes to afford housing, food and transportation?

 

If people can buy it for $50 then that's what it is worth.

You can't say the value is some number that is higher than you can get for it.

 

Well, we all know that personal anecdote does not equate broad statistics, nor is it necessary to know that there exists people who cannot afford it.
It is, alas, difficult to find information on attendance or otherwise from the eras before tax-funded schooling, but the wiki has some decent stats:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_United_States#Attendance

"The 1840 census indicated that of the 3.68 million children between the ages of five and fifteen, about 55% attended primary schools and academies. Many families could not afford to pay for their children to go to school or spare them from farm work.[55] Beginning in the late 1830s, more private academies were established for girls for education past primary school, especially in northern states. Some offered classical education similar to that offered to boys.

Data from the indentured servant contracts of German immigrant children in Pennsylvania from 1771–1817 show that the number of children receiving education increased from 33.3% in 1771–1773 to 69% in 1787–1804. Additionally, the same data showed that the ratio of school education versus home education rose from .25 in 1771–1773 to 1.68 in 1787–1804.[56] While some African Americans managed to achieve literacy, southern states largely prohibited schooling to blacks."

There is also this paper on the effects of compulsory schooling, obviously being very good at upping attendance: http://www.nber.org/papers/h0089.pdf

Regardless of the current state of affairs, it would appear to me to be ample evidence that the government had a good hand in improving education in the past.

 

That's why I said social programs should be built around teaching skills. With skills, people can get a job which at least provides for that.

I honestly don't know a whole lot about housing programs, but I'd assume we'd still have affordable housing programs, since housing is the bulk of your expenses by and large. Of course a lot of this is regional.

The issue now is that we have people in their 20s and 30s who SHOULD have skills and don't, so these people often take the only jobs they can find which are entry level jobs. This cuts out our high school and college graduates, compounding the problem.

There's a big difference between a single 19 year old making $10 an hour and a 30 year old with 2 kids making $10 an hour.

Again, the goal is to bring people's skills up to meet the wage, not raise the wage because of a lack of skills.

It's a pretty complex situation so the question is a bit hard to answer.

The goal is to create that vision, where people have the skills that qualify them for jobs enabling them at least a basic quality of life.

 

ok, this - what you just did - is what is called a straw man.



I said that the market value is $300 - fyi, market value means:



But I'm glad to see that you've just inadvertently admitted that a commodity's worth is it's market value, which is exactly what I said.

 

Employers make job offers that are as low as possible in order to hire someone who can do the job. As low as possible. NOT some function of the value of the work product. If there are a lot of qualified applicants, they can lower the compensation they offer. This is the labor market - offering as low as possible, regardless.

Then, when employers go to sell their product or service, they set a price that maximizes their profit - a price that includes how many they can produce and how many they can sell at various possible price points. There are various theories on how to set price, depending to some degree on the type of product or service and the corporate direction. So, Apple wants to own the market, so they price to sell to everyone. Those who sell vertical manufacturing systems sell a very small number and demand huge prices. Whatever.

You can see that the employment strategy is different and reasonably separate from the product sales side.

So, it is true that if the employer ends up unable to hire employees at a rate that allows them to make a product, there is a problem.

But, most companies can stay profitable while offering more compensation. We've seen corporate profitability rising rapidly, while cost of labor has not. Moving a small amount more of that profitability toward employees at the very bottom is a good idea - it allows more people to have money to buy stuff (spurring the economy), it means lower taxes and less social safety net bureaucracy. It means people aren't faced with loss of support if they work one more hour (or whatever) and they spend less time doing the work to keep registered for aid, etc.

Also, remember that employers in your city face the same employment factors. So, if the company has to charge more due to labor costs, the competition does, too.

 

At no point in your post below did you even come close to responding to my point. If you make it a crime to sell beer for any less than $15/bottle, then Coors won't sell - it isn't worth anything close to that. And if you make it a crime to pay employees anything less than $15/hr, the many employees whose labor isn't worth even close to $15/hr will be out of jobs.

And when it comes to human labor, that has far more drastic long-term problems, because you make it cost-prohibitive to hire low-skill, low-education workers - who happen to often be urban minorities, and in the long-term such policies hurt those most in need, and also create a drain on the state by having priced out of work by draconian bureaucratic policies. If you have a problem with employees getting welfare benefits, it hardly makes sense to force more into dependency on the state by effectively making it illegal to hire them.

 

You aren't talking about people being able to support themselves, with welfare and with a minimum wage people are being subsidized through a government program.

 

Yes - I totally agree that Coors beer isn't worth anything close to that.

But, comparing a worker to a can of beer hits me as a little too off the rails to deserve a response.

 

Yes. I believe that YOU determine your own "living wage", not your employer or the gubmint!

 

True, some companies will be hit harder than others. But look at your statement: "Some have thin margins which can't budge, and some have fat margins with room to cut." That's a very subjective statement. Who is going to decide whether a company has a "fat" or "thin" margin? The govt. And what you are leading to is a minimum wage partly based on company profit margin - and that means severe govt intrusion into the basic functioning of every company in the nation.

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In 2015, from the BLS, there were 133.7 million workers in the USA. 2.6 million (1.9% of all workers) were at or below the federal minimum wage. Right at 50% of all individual workers earn $30,000 or less a year - which is about $15 an hour.

If the min wage goes from $7.25 to $8.25, it does not affect many people, and it does not have much of an economic impact.

But if the min wage goes to $15 an hour, that directly affects 50% of the entire US workforce - 50% of all workers in the USA will get a raise. And the workers above the 50% level will also want a raise. That will have a huge negative impact on businesses, the cost of goods, inflation, productivity. The economy will collapse.

 

Individuals can certainly fail even if they have a good salary. One can look at bankruptcy info, for example.

But, there are agencies that analyze prices for housing, food, etc., along with tapping into the experience of groups who provide aid and come up with a useful understanding of what it takes to be likely to succeed.

Corporations do the same sort of thing when they analyze cost of living for their location and other locations in order to do things like ensuring their compensation packages are competitive, or considering moving to a different location.

 

The issue is "living wage".

I would say a living wage would be enough to live on without being subsidized by the government or private charity (such as Catholic Charities).

That wage minimum would depend on where one is living. $15/hour might be more than enough in some places while being not enough in others.

 

Nobody decides which companies have fat margins except the invisible hand of the market! Just because the government sets a regulation doesn't mean that it is not still survival of the fittest amongst companies; eventually, one will survive that can handle the increased cost while still winning market share. That's the beauty of capitalism; it fills its own boundaries on its own, right?

The small percent of direct minimum wage earners should not mislead from the ripple effects of a MW change, the effects of which have been analyzed to taper off after the bottom 30 million workers.

I do not make a stance regarding the actual number; obviously 15/hr overnight would be catastrophic. But phased in over X years?
I merely wish to disagree with the platform of those who believe in no MW at all, my only assertion being that, if it is possible for CPI to outrun MW as it has been doing for decades, that it is at a minimum possible to have MW match CPI in pace, if not even exceed it as it did from the 40s to the 70s!

And yes, it is a running treadmill of change, but that is not something we can get rid of unless we changed how we viewed inflation in monetary policy.

 

more govt intrusion into an area where they have no business to be

How about cutting back regulations incl Dodd/Frank so small businesses can grow?

How about closing the southern border and getting aggressive on deportations. Then people can decide if they want to spend 25% more to have their lawns mowed, home painted or do it themselves.

What is wrong with getting a roommate or 2? To the $15 pe rhour min wager people, what do you say to the person who improved themself and moved up and now earn $16 per hour, double the MW just to see everyone else now get $1 less than him? In essence, those folks above the new MW actually see their buying power reduced due to inflation to cover the MW increase and also, the job cuts due to higher labor cists could also result in higher taxes or layoffs for that $16 per hour person
There's no substitute for the free market with respect to labor value

 

The government would never go along with it. The function of Bureaucracy is to expand, not contract. The federal government wields incredible power and control over the States, counties and people with its 83 different Welfare Programs that cost $1.3+ TRILLION annually. That's why the idea of Universal Basic Income is fantastical. The federal government would never surrender the power and control it currently enjoys to implement UBI.

 

Then stop consuming...the Cost-of-Living will decrease.

 

Absolutely, and with Affluence comes lower Birth Rates, which debunks the Liberal myth of over-population.

There's only hope if the US can achieve extreme efficiency in government and business. That would require government to down-size and decentralize, and I just don't see that happening.

 

An increase in the minimum wage doesn't guarantee that other workers will see their wages rise.

And you're willing to throw retirees and pensioners under the bus?

This CBO study shows a loss of 500,000 jobs if the federal minimum wage increased to $10.10.

http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/44995-MinimumWage.pdf

You mean the economy has been flourishing in spite of minimum wage.

 

You're probably right.

 

All you need is a high school education as far as social programs. Employers will train you. Go by the car manufacturing plants and see their training centers for example. And then there are the state and local government partnerships to create training centers and skills centers, we have one here to teach maritime welding and pipefitting and ship fitting and they can't get people stay after a few months if come it at all. I call on manufacturing and am told time and again they can't get people to come in and stay on the job.

There's plenty of ways for a person to increase their skills or increase their skills and improve their lot. The question is how do you get them to do it?

 

Where did you get that idea? Do they control the cost of their employees yes. But I have many times hired someone and paid them more than I could have paid another candidate. Retention also comes into how much you pay someone especially a quality loyal worker.

 

The reason most of the silicon mega corporations oppose Trump is specifically because they not only oppose Americans having a living wage, the favor Americans having NO wage in outsourcing production to essentially foreign sweatshops and overall being union busting companies - while they pretend they are social liberals.

The rich donor class of the Democratic Party have all but destroyed and completely reversed what the Democratic Party stood for. The Democratic Party stands for what makes the super rich still richer.