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wateroverfire posted:Paying a token amount toward the cost of your education before getting the rest written off by the government - true injustice. Making public college education completely free would pay for itself several times over, but retarded conservative can't stand the idea of a sound investment if it benefits poor people at all Other countries are feeling so bad for us that they're starting to offer free college education to American students, that's how boneheaded and backwards-thinking our conservative leadership is
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May 6, 2015 18:23
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Geriatric Pirate posted:*in bizarro world where college is free in the US* is this actually said in places where college is free? I really doubt it
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May 6, 2015 18:48
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wateroverfire posted:I feel you and I think education makes life better for people, mostly. Knowledge isn't a scarce resource, and having a well-trained and well-educated population is the best way to ensure that your society has the best access to actually scarce resource. If you're worried about resource scarcity, you should be worried that Americans are not educated enough
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May 6, 2015 19:04
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Geriatric Pirate posted:it's said in this thread about welfare benefits I'm glad that you believe that knowledge is as essential to basic survival as food and shelter, but that's really not the case. I don't think that you'll find any progressives who argue that free education is an unfair corporate subsidy, so you're really just poorly trying to strawman
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May 6, 2015 19:08
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wateroverfire posted:The resources expended to transmit knowledge are scarce, is what I'm getting at. Not really. Maybe you can tell us which resources you think are so scarce that they prevent us from having free public education? wateroverfire posted:Unrelated but smelling tear gas in the air again because nearby students decided to march is not endearing me to education. Gee I wonder why students in that part of the world are mad right now, hmm could that be because the police keep randomly executing students? Nah I'm sure they're just uppity liberals, I'm sure if the police were randomly executing wealthy conservatives no one would make a big deal over it
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May 6, 2015 19:16
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Geriatric Pirate posted:Ok, got you. So using tax money to give people a thing they need for survival and their job (food) is an unfair subsidy to companies, but giving people something they don't really need to survive but need for their job is not. Makes so much sense. Which McDonalds franchise hires only college graduates? How many Walmart greeters are required to have Master's degrees? You're really bad at this strawman thing
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May 6, 2015 19:17
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Geriatric Pirate posted:Oh, so it's ok to subsidize Microsoft and Apple but not Walmart or McDonald's. Well actually we'd be subsidizing Walmart and McDonalds too since they hire college grads, just not to work at the cash register Furthermore, most progressives are in favor of a government-instituted mincome so your entire argument is standing on a foundation made of sand anyway
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May 6, 2015 19:20
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wateroverfire posted:I have to admit I am stymied every time someone in D&D goes "LOL you think resource scarcity is a thing" and am literally at a loss as to how to proceed. Maybe we have different meaning for scarcity. What do you have in mind by that term? I mean "we don't have unlimited resources and would have to shift resources from something else" rather than "we literally couldn't do this even if we really wanted to". Of course resources are scarce, but the only point in bringing up resource scarcity is if you're actually worried about the scarceness of particular resources. So which scarce resources are too scarce for us to have free education?
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May 6, 2015 19:24
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wateroverfire posted:This is also brain breaking to me. If resources are scarce, why would you not use them in a way that returns more resources so you can do more things next cycle? To do otherwise you are literally bleeding capability out of your system. IDGI. Most economists agree that free public education pays for itself, it's actually one of the best investments that you can make with public resources. Investing in ideas that have a positive ROI is brain-breaking to you?
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May 6, 2015 19:32
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Geriatric Pirate posted:it's not a strawman, people in this thread actually argued that welfare benefits are a subsidy to walmart because the government helps feed their workers If it's not a strawman then go quote the person who said that free education is an unfair subsidy for corporations. Go find that post and bring it here
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May 6, 2015 19:33
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wateroverfire posted:This seems like Citation Needed if ever the phrase applied. Government funding of higher education pays for itself 7.5 times over Here are some more sources that reinforce this idea: https://www.bostonfed.org/commdev/c&b/2008/spring/Trostel_invest_in_higher_ed.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/ref/college/collegespecial2/coll_aascu_povcohen.html http://www.wiscape.wisc.edu/docs/wiscapedocuments/wp006.pdf?sfvrsn=2
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May 6, 2015 19:48
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wateroverfire posted:Eh how many different times can you double dip the progressive taxation angle? It's not really any of those things. It's not more efficient because you have to have a fuckload of additional infrastructure to deal with student loans. That's countless dollars wasted on determining aid eligibility, aid amount, dealing with loan repayment and potentially deferment, etc. Relying on an income tax and simply making public universities free for everyone greatly simplifies the problem because you rely on already existing systems It's not more fair because the current system puts extreme financial burdens on students who probably can't predict the future. Job markets can shift considerably over 5 years, and two equally performing students with equal income and employment expectations may graduate with considerably different employment and income opportunities. The job market is completely beyond the control of individual students, and it's inherently unfair for a student to be hosed over by a bunch of education debt while graduating in the middle of a recession. Rather than charging based on expected income, we should charge based on actual income, and the simplest way of doing that is with progressive taxation. It doesn't really cut down on "dicking around after graduation", there is no precedent of this occurring more often in places where education is free vs the US. You pulled this idea from your rear end.
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May 7, 2015 01:06
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asdf32 posted:$15 minimum wage isn't far off from that buddy in terms of dollars or percents. I'm sorry that your education has failed you so badly
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May 8, 2015 04:41
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I've noticed that libertarians and conservatives often fall back on absurdist boundary condition arguments as though that's completely reasonable "But what if we made the minimum wage infinity dollars, that would be crazy, huh? Therefore a minimum wage increase to $15 is just as crazy!" "If you let gays get married then you have to let people marry children, animals, or even plants. Are you going to take responsibility when some guy puts his dick in his new cactus bride? I thought not! Ergo we can't let gays get married" "If you raise taxes on top earners then you may as well just make it a 100% tax, is that what you really want you loving communist?"
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May 8, 2015 04:48
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Typo posted:There's obviously two effects: No, it isn't. If you'd ever bother to read those threads instead of imagining what's in them, you'd find many posters explicitly stating the circumstances under which a minimum wage increase would have a net negative effect.
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May 8, 2015 09:59
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Typo posted:You realize there's way more than two papers showing this affect right? You realize there's way more than two papers showing the opposite effect, right?
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May 8, 2015 10:01
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Look, I think that it's clear that the minimum wage should be $0.00 ... and that we should have a guaranteed minimum income of $35k / year, paid for with progressive income taxes. But in lieu of that, I'm okay with having a minimum wage that is greater than or equal to a living wage. Why is this a controversial idea?
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May 8, 2015 10:05
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JeffersonClay posted:There's a lot of economic misconceptions in this post that I'll try to untangle. It's interesting then that every minimum wage increase in the past has had a negligible impact on inflation. Would you say this is due to labor costs actually being a pretty small fraction of the overall cost of running most businesses, or would you say that it's due to the fact that the prices of goods and services are determined by much more than their input costs?
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May 9, 2015 19:54
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JeffersonClay posted:I agree with that, with one caveat. The studies which show manageable price or employment effects from minimum wage increases are all based on studies on relatively small changes in the minimum wage. We don't really know what would happen after large increases in the minimum wage. So yeah, lets raise the minimum wage to 10 and then 11 and then 12 and see what happens. The thing is, even if you pass on 100% of the wage increase in the form of higher prices it's still going to be a negligible change, even if you bring the minimum wage to $15/hour. So even if we had no way of controlling inflation and passed the minimum wage increase anyway, and employers all decided to collude in order to increase prices due to the increase wage, the effect still wouldn't be that bad. That's why talking about inflation in a minimum wage discussion really doesn't make much sense. But in our universe, in reality, McDonalds is already charging us as much as it can for Big Macs. That price is primarily set by competition in the fast food market. Increasing their labor costs, which are a tiny fraction of the input cost to each Big Mac, is not going to significantly alter the supply/demand curve for Big Macs (caveat: increased sales due to min wage workers having more money will push the demand curve a little, but surely you can't argue that selling more Big Macs is a bad thing for McDonalds). quote:But people arguing for a 25 dollar minimum wage cannot have any real understanding of what the consequences would be. Aren't we actually discussing 15, not 25? QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 20:04 on May 9, 2015 |
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May 9, 2015 19:56
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asdf32 posted:No its not interesting. It's obvious because minimum wage increases in the past have been tiny in relation to the economy. If the argument is that a minimum wage increase causes a price increase, then that should be true even if the minimum wage increase is small. It's fascinating that people will continue to claim that even a small increase will result in a price increase despite all evidence to the contrary. quote:You're obfuscating things. If every dollar is passed on as costs increases then we need only count the dollars. If we're talking about a $15 minimum wage increase we're talking about boosting the pay of roughly 40% of the workforce. Whatever percentage of the economy that represents is how much costs are going to increase overall. It's not negligible for $15. I'm not obfuscating anything, you loving intellectual child. Even if 100% of the minimum wage increase goes into increased prices, minimum wage employees still come out way ahead in the game. But in reality, the prices of goods and services are not set by input costs alone. quote:Again, I don't think inflation is a prime problem for realistic minimum wage increases, but you're just not getting the analysis right here. You can't even correctly solve a 3rd grade math problem, why the gently caress should your opinion on economics matter?
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May 10, 2015 07:19
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Series DD Funding posted:Someone receiving a mincome is able to live without their employer regardless of wage. Yup, believe me, most of the people in this thread who would like the minimum wage to increase would happily throw out the minimum wage completely if a guaranteed minimum income was created
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May 10, 2015 07:32
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JeffersonClay posted:Is there empirical evidence that the minimum wage increases demand? The difference between inflation caused by QE and inflation caused by the minimum wage, is the inflation from QE is temporary, and can be turned off once demand recovers and inflation rebounds. Yes, there are a number of studies that have examined the link between minimum wage and demand. But it's kind of an obvious result anyway. Minimum wage workers tend to have an MPC of 1. Demand is defined in terms of dollars spent on goods. If you're spending every dollar that you earn, then every additional dollar that you earn is an additional dollar of demand generated, and that's before you even start thinking about the velocity of money.
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May 10, 2015 08:27
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Dude, I just watched Vital Signs explain to asdf32 the difference between exponential and linear functions. This came a day two days after failing to correctly calculate a percentage, and a few days after claiming that $15 is closer to $100 than it is to $7.50. asdf32, is everything okay? I'm serious, this is a troubling trend
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May 10, 2015 20:36
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Geriatric Pirate posted:Roughly 45% of Americans are out of the workforce for whatever reason [Citation Needed] Geriatric Pirate posted:What we should really concentrate on is the 5% of the workforce who make minimum wage. [Citation Needed] Geriatric Pirate posted:Those teenagers are the future. So it's your belief that minimum wage workers are mostly teenagers?
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May 10, 2015 20:54
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Geriatric Pirate posted:Like any good leftist, I exploded in rage because it was a subsidy to my future employer Do you also wake up furious at the thought that public roads and K-12 education are subsidies to your future employer?
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May 10, 2015 20:59
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Geriatric Pirate posted:Well you seem to think welfare payments are a subsidy so I guess you think those are too? So in your mind, paying people less than a living wage and forcing them onto food stamps is equivalent to having public roads?
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May 10, 2015 21:09
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Geriatric Pirate posted:Hmmm, it's missing key stats like "Median age: 24"[citation needed] and "Equally like to be from a household in the top 20% of incomes as the bottom 20%"[citation needed] or "Average family income: $53000"[citation needed] LeoMarr posted:a system where economic fortitude is directly related to population happiness and prosperity? wow! Yes, I agree, having strong labor unions does increase the happiness and prosperity of the population, we should get right on that
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May 10, 2015 21:11
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JeffersonClay posted:Inflation from fed policy goes away when the policy ends. It's temporary. Inflation from the minimum wage is permanent because the minimum wage isn't going to end when the economy recovers. [citation needed] euphronius posted:What is the difference between temporary and permanent inflation. it means that any day now the fed is going to be like "okay that's enough inflation, time to let prices settle to where they should be", they'll pull a big lever at Fed HQ and then suddenly gas will be $0.25/gallon and you'll be able to buy a moon pie for a nickel QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 21:32 on May 10, 2015 |
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May 10, 2015 21:27
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Geriatric Pirate posted:I'm focusing on actual minimum wage workers is that a sudden change (or even a staggered change over less than 5 years) in the minimum wage to $15 is about as realistic as a GMI. People in this thread are handwaving away actually useful anti-poverty policies because they're unrealistic yet seem to think $15 might happen. Sorry, not even the Republicans hate poor people that much. Delusion - a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. The child of a minimum wage worker benefits from a minimum wage increase even if that child does not work. Why do you continue to ignore this? Disability and social security payments are pegged to inflation, so these people are clearly not hurt by any hypothetical inflation resulting from a minimum wage increase. Why do you continue to ignore this? You are intentionally ignoring facts in order to continue pushing a particular narrative. You then accuse the people who bring up these facts of being delusional. Projecting much?
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May 11, 2015 01:03
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Geriatric Pirate posted:Man it's a good thing we have all these leftists here telling us to stop worrying about poor people who don't have jobs, they're well taken care of with cost of living adjustments. You keep trying to claim that all non-working Americans, including dependents and retirees, are poor. That is loving delusional. It's hard to take you seriously when you get even basic facts so horribly wrong
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May 11, 2015 01:05
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asdf32 posted:Nope, this is mostly all wrong too. Please put this at the top of all of your posts asdf32 posted:I'm sad people think they can use math and science in politics when they don't understand it. Pretend like I posted the ever-growing ironicat here I'm too lazy to copy-paste the url Hey are you still holding onto the idea that $15 is closer to $100 than it is to $7.25 or did you recant that? asdf32 posted:Yep except now instead of doubling, like the example above, we doubled all the minimum wage people AND added new people too. That's exponential. Which quantity do you believe is growing exponentially? Please be explicit because your posts are such a garbled mess of misused mathematical terms that it's hard to keep track of what you're trying to say vs the hosed up and wrong things that you're actually saying. As the minimum wage increase, what quantity grows exponentially? The number of people effected by the minimum wage increase? The total dollars representative of increase labor costs? The prices of goods? Explicitly state which quantity is growing exponentially as the minimum wage increases QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 01:21 on May 11, 2015 |
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May 11, 2015 01:18
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QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 06:27 on May 11, 2015 |
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May 11, 2015 06:22
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asdf32 posted:
Nope, that quantity does not grow exponentially as a function of minimum wage. Using actual data from the bureau of labor statistics from 2005, here's what that shape looks like with best-fit quadratic and exponential curves:  Would you like to change your answer?
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May 11, 2015 06:53
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Geriatric Pirate posted:Weren't you arguing it was linear at first? Nope, I only stated that the curve was definitely not exponential (because it loving obviously isn't). I think Vital Signs at one point suggested a linear relationship for a completely different quantity, but that was before asdf32 was explicit in defining what he thought was exponential
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May 11, 2015 10:25
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asdf32 posted:No we're not talking about a curve fit using a polynomial were just talking about the real life numbers. Assuming, as Series DD did, that workers impacted increases linearly with wage (crude but decent model here) then we're integrating a straight line (form AX+B) which has an answer with an x^2 term. This is basic calculus. The part that you're loving up is basic algebra vocabulary y = x^2 is not an exponential function
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May 11, 2015 10:34
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asdf32 posted:Quark where did you download the data? I have an old spreadsheet of numbers gathered from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if you dig around there you could probably find values newer than 2005 but I doubt that the overall shape is going to be any different asdf32 posted:If we want to know how much prices will go up across the economy "raw extra dollars" tells us that most directly. This is not a cut and dry point like you're trying to make it seem. When calculating the maximum potential price shift, you have to look at the ratio of old labor costs to new. Take the classic Big Mac example. If Big Macs are $4 and 25% of each Big Mac goes towards labor costs, then that means $1 of each Big Mac was going toward labor costs. The raw increase in wages does not tell us the maximum potential price increase of Big Macs; the ratio of (new labor cost - old labor cost) / (old labor cost) tells us that. If labor costs double, then you're looking at a price increase of no more than $1/BigMac, or a 25% increase in prices in exchange for a 100% increase in wages. But that's in the case where absolutely every last cent in the changed labor price is shifted to the consumer, which has never actually happened. In the simplest case a number of things could happen: 1) That $1/BigMac needs to become $2/BigMac (note that we doubled the wage to get here, and this is the maximum potential increase in prices) 2) I'll need to lay off employees in order to suppress labor costs (trying to make do with less, or trying to implement more automation of menial poo poo) 3) I'll need to use profits to pay employees (but not in a 1:1 ratio, because revenue spent on employee salaries is not taxed) In reality, some combination of these 3 things could happen. You could get a $0.25/BigMac price increase, lay off one employee, and then make up the rest of the difference with profits. Let's look at each of these options individually: 1) Raising prices is untenable because the price of goods is not dominated by input costs. You can get away with a small increase, but you'll never be able to shift a large amount of the new input cost to consumers because they'll just go somewhere else. Some of this price increase is going to come naturally from higher consumer demand, so yeah, expect a small price increase (maybe Big Macs cost $4.50 instead of $4 now). 2) Laying off employees is untenable because hopefully you're a Captain of Industry, so you don't have extra hands sitting around and doing nothing. If you need 5 employees to produce an optimal amount of profit, then firing one only actually hurts your ability to deal with the higher labor costs, contrary to surface impressions. 3) This one is what has happened with the minimum wage increases that we've seen in our lifetime. tl;dr Prices are not dominated by labor costs, staffing levels are not dominated by labor costs, labor costs are a large input in determining profitability, therefore prices and staffing levels will be negligibly effected and profitability will be primarily effected
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May 11, 2015 19:48
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wateroverfire posted:Dude you have absolutely no idea how business works and I pray god you are never anywhere near the levers of policy. =/ Do you have any actual counterarguments, or are you just here to chew gum and shitpost?
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May 11, 2015 20:46
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wateroverfire posted:You're not thinking long term and you're applying assumptions (that businesses have maximized prices, and minimized employment) that don't hold when you radically change the cost of inputs, which is what a $15 minimum wage would do. None of that is a substantial rebuttal to anything that I said. In fact, some of it explicitly agrees with what I said. I suspect that you didn't even read the whole post Going paragraph by paragraph A) We're talking about permanent changes in labor costs, profitability, and potentially prices and staffing. This is all long term. None of my assumptions only hold in the short-term. B ) Not everyone feels the same pinch. For instance, In N Out pays their employees substantially more than the federal minimum wage, so they're going to feel "the pinch" a lot less than McDonalds. More importantly, my post allowed for long-term price changes, especially as demand increases, so I don't know how you can claim that it doesn't. In any case, once a minimum wage in place then supply/demand pressure is what dominates changes in prices, not a minimum wage increase that occurred N years ago. C) Yes, I explicitly suggested that automation and "doing more with less" is something that employers would have greater pressure to seek out. But this is a red herring; these pressures already exist! Every employer seeks to do as much as they can with as few people as possible because that's the whole point of running a business: to maximize profits. Higher wages could bring on automation sooner, but that's a tangential discussion that really belongs in another thread (the oncoming eradication of menial labor as robotics advancements continue to increase) D) Yes, I explicitly said that a minimum wage increase will change labor costs. That's obvious. But it only really effects the bottom rungs here, in the US. GIven that we barely manufacturing anything anymore, it's unclear what your argument is meant to convey. You haven't provided any evidence to back up your claim that lower margins would be temporary. Higher minimum wage does not make automation cheaper, nor does it significantly change a supply/demand curve, so why would these other factors readjust significantly just to bring profit back to where it was? What mechanism causes these changes, and why?
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May 11, 2015 22:07
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JeffersonClay posted:When we look at the effects of previous minimum wage increases we don't see unambiguously positive results. We don't see unambiguously negative results, which we'd have to if any of the anti-minwage arguments were correct. We do see unambiguously positive results: people who were making less had their incomes boosted, which is good for those people.
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May 11, 2015 22:40
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JeffersonClay posted:When we look at the effects of previous minimum wage increases we don't see unambiguously positive results. ... a few hours later... JeffersonClay posted:We unambiguously see positive effects as well.  JeffersonClay posted:We do unambiguously see negative effects. We unambiguously see positive effects as well. Excellent, you seem confident in this statement. So explicitly state which effects you see as negative and positive. You've kind of half-heartedly done this in other posts, but I'd like a list of effects that you believe are significant and that are also unambiguously negative or positive. Provide citations, if possible. Simply saying "prices will shoot up by 10000%" will cause you to lose the game, since that's obviously bullshit. If you're actually interested in discussing this, that is.
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May 11, 2015 23:17
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