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LeoMarr posted:10 employees at 15 bucks an hour now costs you 150 instead of 100. a 33% increase in operating costs in a split second. Please tell me some businesses that could handle losing 1600 per day for 10 employees. Why is the company paying 10 people to do a job that can be more profitably done with 9? You know that businesses want this thing called profit, right, the difference between income and expenses? If a business can cut expenses without hurting income too much, and come out ahead in profit, they wouldn't wait for the minimum wage, they would do it right now.
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May 5, 2015 11:20
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LeoMarr posted:Let's ask Alex Jones Nope 
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May 5, 2015 13:54
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asdf32 posted:Because 10 was most profitable until wages went up 50% and then it wasn't. But this isn't a real thing that happened. This is a fantasy, and instead of justifying it, now you're saying "just because". And you've admitted elsewhere that the minimum wage does not cause unemployment, so this fantasy is in direct conflict with what you believe to be true about reality.
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May 5, 2015 14:04
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wateroverfire posted:As a business owner, I have to say that the idea that businesses always run as efficiently as possible wrt labor costs is something to approach very cautiously. It's one of those things that sounds like it's true but often isn't for lots of (sometimes) good reasons. Sure, but this is the same premise underlying "well businesses will just fire 10% of their workers". If we now say that businesses do not run their labor as efficiently as possible then there's no reason to believe they'll necessarily fire workers after a minimum wage hike either. Maybe they'll just operate with a lower rate of profit since you're saying they're okay with running with a lower rate of profit than they could really get anyway.
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May 5, 2015 14:07
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wateroverfire posted:It depends on how much of a hike we're talking about. Think of your own life as a for instance - maybe there are some things you slack off on addressing because it'd be sort of inconvenient to do , but if not dealing with them became enough of a pain in the rear end you'd do it. It's the same principal. This sounds very arbitrary. Why does this happen at $15/hr, and not $11 or $7.25 or $5.15? And why do surveys of the effects of minimum wage show no significant disemployment effect?
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May 5, 2015 14:58
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asdf32 posted:Nope. A key thing to realize is that just like any other cost increase, say oil or electricity, we understand the long term effect is that businesses will pass on costs to consumers, not just suddenly decide to live with lower profits. No, businesses do accept lower profit margins anytime that raising prices would be more than offset by a fall in sales. Your analysis would only be true if profits averaged out to zero over the long term.
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May 5, 2015 15:19
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wateroverfire posted:From upthread. This is just a lot of unsupported conjecture. The minimum wage has been $11/hr before in real dollars, and worker productivity has almost doubled since then. There's no reason to think that businesses can't afford to pay them a living wage.
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May 5, 2015 15:26
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wateroverfire posted:The legal arrangement in some states is that if a server's tips + wage don't meet the minimum the restaurant has to top them up to the minimum. In reality though, restaurants will pressure workers to accept less than minimum wage and not ask for top-ups if they want to keep their jobs.
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May 5, 2015 15:29
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I don't understand this "but how will restaurants afford to pay minimum wage"? That's the easiest one of all: loving charge more for food. Under the current theory, patrons are already willing to pay more since they voluntarily tack 15% onto the bill, so this should be zero problem. Unless servers aren't making minimum wage in tips, in which case the tipping system is a failure and should be ended.
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May 5, 2015 15:33
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asdf32 posted:So wait, raise your hand if your ideology includes the idea that zero businesses are on the edge of viability in the economy. Oh poo poo, well let's repeal all labor laws then, think how viable businesses will be when they don't have to have fire exits.
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May 5, 2015 15:40
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asdf32 posted:Some probably would be but who cares. Exactly. The businesses that starve their workers have no reason to exist.
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May 5, 2015 15:47
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asdf32 posted:You insufferable idiot. Businesses are not supposed to be responsible for life and death. They're supposed to produce shoes and pencils. When they happen to provide a good loving for people great! When they don't, it's everyone's responsibility to deal with it. You just reversed your position from like two posts ago, where you agreed we shouldn't give a poo poo whether lovely businesses fail in the face of laws that prevent death.
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May 5, 2015 15:54
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Markets aren't some ideal thing that exists in nature which we discover. Markets are defined and operate according to the laws we make based on what we think is acceptable. We decide through law whether human beings can be bought and sold as property on the market, what standards food has to meet to be sold on the market, whether to allow businesses in the market to hire children, or operate without fire exists, or pay overtime, or pay a minimum wage. Talking about how businesses are "supposed to give us pencils" and we have no right to regulate the quality of life of their employees is just ignorant about how the real world and our own economy works.
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May 5, 2015 16:12
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asdf32 posted:It depends on the cost. But society with a minimum wage is better than without, so yes by not having one and suffering all the despair, unhealthiness, and crime of an underclass, we are indeed costing society: the opportunity cost of the better welfare and happiness we'd have with a living wage.
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May 5, 2015 16:17
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asdf32 posted:Other people are the ones presenting baked in assumptions that they don't even seem to recognize. I.E. that businesses are supposed to provide a living wage and are somehow costing society if they don't. There's not some Platonic ideal of a business that's "supposed" to do some things and not others. Businesses are human institutions, like the market, and they are "supposed" to do whatever we get together and decide they're supposed to do through our governing institutions. If we make a law that says businesses have to pay overtime, then they are supposed to do that. If we make a law that says they cannot turn away customers or job applicants because of race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity, then businesses are not supposed to do that. If we make a law that says businesses have to pay at least $X/hr then businesses are supposed to do that.
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May 5, 2015 16:44
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Ocrassus posted:The economy is meant to serve as a method of distributing resources. Private property itself is predicated on a utilitarian argument, even the ones grounded in natural law (Locke, Grotius etc). Therefore businesses exist solely for the good of the society that they inhabit. Yeah but the utilitarian argument has been settled decisively in favor of the minimum wage, so all right-wingers have left is crying about the burden of placing life and death on the shoulders of business and how taxes and regulation just aren't fairrrrrr to Walmart, as if whether laws give Sam Walton a sad is of any consequence.
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May 5, 2015 16:58
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Okay so the minimum wage is justified on practical grounds, and whether it's unfair to plucky little business and makes them sad because they're "not supposed" to be responsible for a living wage is beside the point. Glad we got that settled then.
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May 5, 2015 17:02
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Typical Pubbie posted:A business should not be forced to close just because it can't afford a one-size-fits-all price control on wages. Why should a small business be forced to pay the same wages as a grossly profitable megacorporation? They aren't US Departmet of Labor posted:Who is Covered?
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May 5, 2015 17:11
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But as you said, it doesn't matter whether the company is "costing" society or not. What matters is whether the minimum wage is a practical way to get closer to the outcomes we want: an economy that provides a basic standard of living to all workers. And it is. We don't make pollution laws out of some cosmic sense of fairness either. We make them because they are a practical way to get the outcome we want: less pollution.
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May 5, 2015 17:28
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asdf32 posted:Yep we can easily quantify an almost infinite number of things Wal-Mart doesn't pay for. The next step is to construct reasonable arguments for why you think they're supposed to pay for those things. That's what's included in the notion of cost. Because it's more practical to get the money to pay for these things from people who have the money, instead of people who don't
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May 5, 2015 18:08
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Popular Thug Drink posted:You have so fair failed, in your duty to me, to provide a rational argument as to the arbitrary imposition of age limitations on so called "child" labor. Why do you want to punish the most productive preadolescents in our society? Why do you want to reward the low-skill nonpubescent? You obviously haven't read the Libertarian thread: asdf32 is pro-child-labor and thinks laws banning it are immoral. Interestingly, laws businesses don't like are, in his view, immoral. But when it comes to laws that help poor people, well get your morality out of here, this is economics!
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May 5, 2015 18:19
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euphronius posted:a libertarian should not be pro child labor as children lack the capacity to contract. Parents have the capacity to contract though, and it's their right to dispose of their tiny nimble-fingered property as they see fit.
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May 5, 2015 18:22
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asdf32 posted:Great reason to support almost every welfare policy except minimum wage. Pizza show owners and Wal-Mart customers are not exactly prime examples of the haves. Fortunately, labor costs scale with number of employees, so Wal-Mart will be paying more than a Mom& Pop pizza parlor (assuming Mom & Pop even do enough business to qualify as a covered business under the FLSA). And Wal-Mart customers that have minimum wage jobs benefit from the minimum wage. And the concern troll "but what if some of the cost is passed onto the poor customers" applies to all labor laws of any type, it's not a good reason to oppose labor laws.
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May 6, 2015 07:57
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asdf32 posted:So let's be clear that minimum wage can be expected to transfer some wealth but it does it really poorly. Significant chunks of the additional wages come from middle and lower class owners/consumers, not rich people. When the minimum wage was higher, wealth inequality was lower. That's not solid evidence, but since the correlation is the opposite of what you're suggesting, you should probably substantiate it with...something that's not pulled straight from your rear end.
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May 6, 2015 15:02
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Radish posted:If you take the rich's money they fly to their moon base and take all their jobs with them. The people left behind don't know how to exchange their labor for money or goods and thus will eventually starve to death. The burden of actually having to pay (ugh) wages to the poor for their labor is what's holding the titans of the earth back from inventing miracle metals, cloaking devices, and perpetual motion machines anyway. 
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May 6, 2015 15:10
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wateroverfire posted:Tell me all about how you'll know how to run your company better than your bosses after you and your shift mates seize control during the revolution. Why would the bosses go anywhere. They will still want money so they will still work their jobs even if they don't get to keep as much. People still wanted to be CEO under Marxist Kenyan Muslim Commie Eisenhower and his America-crumbling 90% tax rate.
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May 6, 2015 15:11
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on the left posted:Also, some Chinese guys recommended letting schoolchildren beat their teachers to death Sounds like a bad idea. Let's not.
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May 6, 2015 15:26
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Let's abolish all labor laws because full communism will solve all those problems anyway. And now we wait... ... ... ... ...
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May 6, 2015 15:42
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wateroverfire posted:In the like past 5 minutes of posting I made maybe $200. I've built up a mental image of your workplace over the past few threads. I'm imagining Wonka's factory, you drinking from a river of cash, employees scurrying to and fro asking "daddy may I" while the bronzed ovaries of your liberated equal-pay-earning women float lazily by. ...and Pinochet is off beating peasants in the corner or something I guess idk
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May 6, 2015 15:44
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wateroverfire posted:Or I'll finance the revolution and have my pick of the wreckage when it all ends in tears. Nah I'm going to snitch on you to the Revolutionary Tribunals for a better flat and a larger beet ration.
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May 6, 2015 16:49
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Why shouldn't we nationalize industries? We can start with health care: every developed country that nationalized their health care industries has cheaper, better results. The oil industries too, not only do countries that do this have an easier time affording a safety net, but our subsidies and guarantees have taken most of the risk out anyway, destroying the only justification for the owners' huge profits.
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May 6, 2015 17:07
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wateroverfire posted:Medicaid, pell grants, subsidized student loans forgiven after 10 years on income based repayment. Hmm. So the reason it doesn't suck as much to be poor as it used to under capitalism...is because of deviations from capitalism? wateroverfire posted:Eh how many different times can you double dip the progressive taxation angle? Oh well if our basic assumption is that any 18-year-old kid can unerringly predict the specifics of the economy and job market 4-10 years out, then we don't need student loans at all, they can buy whatever education they want on the incredible returns from their stockpicking financial wizardry. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 01:46 on May 7, 2015 |
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May 7, 2015 01:14
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I can't believe you started law school in 2005. Didn't you predict the timing of the housing bubble collapse and the resulting recession that slammed the door in the faces of new graduates? Why didn't you spend that time taking a massive short position in AIG and Citigroup?
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May 7, 2015 02:55
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asdf32 posted:Though a caveat is that poverty is more than economics at this point. Welfare spending in the US currently stands at ~14k per person in poverty (and has only ever generally increased). Clearly money isn't the whole picture. What do you mean by "welfare spending" 
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May 7, 2015 17:31
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Shayu posted:It's really a blessing that America will never see a $15 minimum wage anytime soon. Sure it's changing everyday but it's still are still the most economically free developed nation in the world. Both rich and poor alike are free to work for starvation wages 
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May 7, 2015 17:32
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asdf32 posted:I looked and didn't think they did but certainly healthcare should be considered in general. But that's a function of the underlying costs of health care, not an indication of the increasing generosity of the welfare state. And there's a tension in your arguments. You oppose the minimum wage because the solution to these problems is a robust welfare state. Then you complain that welfare doesn't actually do anything and money can't solve these problems after all. Maybe the solution to poverty is unregulated capitalism? Edit:  your sourcequote:[i] The number of people in poverty is not influenced by the benefits received from federal, state or non-profit programs. For example, SNAP benefits are not included as income to a poor person when determining their poverty status. Gee, I wonder why a family receiving food stamps whose value aren't included in their income for determining if they're in poverty are still determined to be in poverty? I guess food stamps didn't do anything 
VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 18:44 on May 7, 2015 |
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May 7, 2015 18:38
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But if everyone can afford food, shelter, and medicine, then all my years of work to get to a place where I can watch my inferiors starve were for naught! 
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May 8, 2015 01:13
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I made a $5 minimum wage back in the 90s. I'm so mad that these lazy kids today get $7 and I don't understand the real value of money so I think they're getting more for free. Please base national economic policy on my ignorant butthurt feelings, it's only fair.
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May 8, 2015 01:26
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asdf32 posted:That number has literally zero to do with how the market would otherwise price labor and setting prices (wages) in the market has negative consequences. What are these consequences, and where is the proof. The most recent literature shows there is little to no negative effect, and the positive effect of people having more money is obvious.
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May 8, 2015 02:35
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We've been lucky up til now, and labor laws have increased safety, prosperity, and quality of life despite the predictions of certain doom...but this time if we raise the minimum wage it will be certain doom! DOOOOOOOOM!
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May 8, 2015 02:42
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