No, but the people have a responsibility to make sure that the system (government, regulations, laws) are not increasingly rigged *against* them.

The biggest problem is not that people fail when given an equal starting point, but that some people are *starting* their lives with such a disadvantaged that they inevitably fail. They don't even have a chance to begin to imagine the American dream, let alone participate.

I would be fine with people failing from an equal starting point.


We're just so unbelievably far from that, at this point, it's absurd.


When the children of billionaires like the Koch brothers have to go on food stamps because their efforts in life failed, then I will believe the system is fair.

Just do what I did...

1. Work hard in high school
2. Get a scholarship
3. Get a degree
4. Get a job
5. Work harder than everyone else (when Im not playing earth)
6. Get promoted
7. Become a boss

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NisCkxU544c

I have yet to see anybody refute the math that SAM_DANGER presented earlier. While his numbers are a bit high, going from $8/hr rather than a probably more reasonable $10/hr, that would still mean the business is dramatically in the red.

Are you guys just going to continue to ignore this, or would you care to explain why he's wrong?

Let me get this straight, you cannot even predict what a change to DR in this game will cause, but you have a very grounded opinion of what a change in US minimum wage will do to the US economy? Mindabsofcukinglutely blown!

While you are at it, can you enlighten us on what this change will do to a cocoa farmer in Ghana? Show your answer while you are at it.

Rasing/lowering the minimum wage will not solve anything. Its debt, that creates these types of problems. Not current bills, dinner or kids...oh and alcohol and drugs. As a person who has spent most of his life behind, debt is the biggest problem. If it wasnt for outstanding bills from when iwas younger and went unemployed due to a.bad situation, things be grand. I make decent money NOW but not when i hit the work field as first. My previous debts stopped alot of good things from happening

Get the f*ck out of here with raise the minimum wage fluff. Stop asking for handouts, if you don't like the wage your job is paying you. Ask for a raise, or go find another job. Jobs at Mcdonalds are not suppose to be bread winner jobs. The American Dream has always been, you work hard, better yourself and you can succeed(Make more money). Seize the opportunity, do not expect someone to hand it to you.

Sure we can predict what a DR change will do; the general idea anyway. As for the precise numbers, that's always harder to pin down.

I have never actually earned minimum wage; closest I came was when i was 19 working at Safeway, but it was unionized so I got better than minimum wage. Obviously as an engineer I make 3 to 4x more than the minimum wage (note, in Canada the minimum wage is much higher than in the states; Alberta, where I live, has the lowest minimum wage of $9.95/hr).

Sure, but don't you think debt is easier to solve when you make twice as much as before?

1) You aren't factoring in the added patronage due to the fact that everybody has more money.

2) Why not raise prices, if labour is *actually* such a significant portion of your costs? The service-industry is about the only area where labour is a significant portion of any costs.

3) You don't have a *right* to profit; in a truly free market, the profits should be marginal anyway.

There is only so much money dude, inflation will happen in a cascading effect. It only hurts the middle class, their salaries won't suddenly double. Companies have budgets...

All companies would have to charge double if they want to double their employees salaries... Guess what happens to those making minimum wage now... They are paying double for everything.

I doubt you'd create a ton of inflation just because people can actually afford to live. It's not like they'll be out buying extra big screen TV's. And you're right about there only being so much money at any given time, however, it's currently flowing up to the top 1% at a very rapid rate; this would merely distribute some of that money outwards, and stem the flow a tiny bit.

No, they wouldn't have to charge double, as most costs are independent of labour. The price of oil, copper, steel, the base commodities that make up most goods are independent of labour. More and more manufacturing and agriculture is automated or mechanized, making them largely labour independent as well. Only the service industry has a significant labour cost.

Given productivity has nearly doubled since 1968, you *might* see a rise in services, like restaurants, to the levels - in real terms - of the mid 1960's; which probably wouldn't be that bad a thing anyway, judging by the nostalgia shown for that time.

I like how I said that part about being mad that somebody might make half as much as me, except that I never said that. What I said was that compensation should be commensurate with value and doubling minimum wage will DEvalue middle income wages.

As for the 'mad' part, the only thing I am mad about is that our educational system is apparently turning out kids that don't understand the very simplest economic principles. If you don't think inflation has anything to do with the minimum wage , then this is going to be a very hard argument to have using words and stuff.

I was going to go on explaining about how any monetary system is zero sum and artificially increasing the value of unskilled labor has to lead to an equivalent subtraction of value somewhere else. If you double the minimum wage to $15 and DON'T also increase the wages of diesel mechanics, nurses, and hydrogeologists - then you are in effect devaluing the wages of the skilled workers. If on the other hand you increase the value of all labor equally (which the market will ultimately do) then you have essentially accomplished nothing but increasing inflation.

Or anyway, thats what I would say if I thought you could grasp it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8I9pYCl9AQ

Except you're negating the fact that most of that transference would come from the 1% to the barely-able-to-survive. It would definitely put some upwards pressure on middle wages, but that's probably a *good* thing; after all, we've been in this race to the bottom since Regan came into power, which has resulted in increasing income inequality; this is a good first step to reversing that insanity.

So, in your example of the Koch brothers, or here how about a rea life example... YOUR children.... Your children should not be able to inherit a dime that you earned? Because that would have them on an uneven playing field to say, the kid in the city whose single deadbeat mother cant provide for him nor teach him how to read because she dropped out of school herself.

I love how there is so much hate on the megarich, they earned their money, or their parents earned their money and it allowed their children to have a better lifestyle.



Me personally, I grew up BROKE. One of 7 kids, we had nothing fancy nothing new, struggled to eat full meals regularly. So fluff you for telling me that because I didnt have rich parents I cant make it in this country. I have earned every damn thing I have and I have NEVER taken a handout. I dont need it. I took it upon myself to ensure than my children will have opportunities that I didnt get to have, it hasnt been easy, it shouldn't be easy. THAT is the american dream. so dont lecture me on inequality of starting points and inherent advantages. those are fluffing excuses and they are why certain segments of society are where they are. because instead of having to personal responsibility and doing better for themselves and their future children, they play the victim of society card. Nobody is promised success in America, everybody is promised a chance.


Doubling minimum wage overnight would cripple small business, if you think otherwise you are a fool.

QZ, it HAS TO COME FROM SOMEWHERE. Where?

You act as if everybody in America works for giant corporations, when they don't. Raising the minimum wage to $15 will crush small business and ultimately give Wal Mart and even bigger slice of the pie. When they no longer have to compete with small business THEN they can charge whatever they want to cover their increased wages.

The only way that a monetary system is not a zero sum system is to print more money. If EVERYBODY gets a $7 raise, then NOBODY really gets anything.

Nothing in this world is free except for ghost acres.

ttt

No, but the remote possibility of failure is what I'm referring to. I do believe in an inheritance tax, not 100% obviously, but significant. If my kids inherited everything I will have earned, failure would still be well within their reach, if they didn't work, for example.

The kids of billionaires could retire from day 1, and still be richer than all of us several generations later.



I don't actually hate the mega-rich; however, I *DO* despise the tactics of a small group of them who consistently try to buy more power. The mega-rich I admire would include Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, to name a couple.



Earned is an awfully strong word for how a lot of the old-money in the US came into being. But that's another discussion.



I'm not saying you can't; I'm saying the odds were heavily stacked against you. And I commend you for doing so well. Incidentally, what do you mean by make it? Becoming middle class, or even top 10% is extremely commendable in and of itself, however it's the top 1% that is nearly impossible to break into.



Exactly. And it's this promise that should be maintained; when the odds are increasingly stacked against you, the promise is broken.



Who said anything about overnight? That said, you are being blind to the ripple effect it would cause; the increased prosperity of 38% of Americans would be significant enough to buoy businesses of all kinds.

Observe what happened during the boom here in Alberta; McDonalds was paying something like $11/hr and willing to pay for $1000 of your tuition, because they couldn't find anybody to work there. Yet, small businesses didn't seem to suffer. In fact, the general prosperity kept everything moving along quite nicely, despite the fact that there was a demand-induced increase in the average minimum wage.

Prosperity is good; you don't always have to race for the bottom line.

Surely you make more than 3-4x that? :P

Unless you're fresh out of school I guess.

Sadly, engineers don't make as much as you would think... https://www.apega.ca/.../SalarySurvey/VPS2013.pdf

The first 3 categories in the survey average $54k (8.3%), $72k (5.7%) and $84k (3.7%).

And yes, I'm recently out of school (2011), because I did a masters.

Nothing is free QZ, you know full well that a booming micro-economic success is not scaleable. Alberta's gain was somebody elses loss.

regarding inflation:
low inflation is actually really bad for productivity.

Think about it this way: it's easier to give someone a 5% pay raise in a 10% inflationary environment than it is to give someone a 5% pay cut in a 0% inflationary environment. Also the impact on moral is very different.

Someone do a plot of small business bankruptcy rate vs minimum wage (adjusted for inflation) and show us the connection. I don't know if there is one but that would be far more informative than simply arguing economic theory:P

Well, we weren't competing against anybody, given it was a natural-resource boom. The losers would only be the global economy paying that price for oil, or future Canadians, no longer having the natural resource....

As for "the american dream".. you already pay plenty of people less than what the law allows as is.... :P

I did find this nice graph: http://filipspagnoli.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/minimum-wage.png

and this: https://www.stlouisfed.org/...ages/bankruptcy_graph.gif

there... could be a correlation; hard to say

I also find it funny that you mention Bill Gates and Warren Buffet as ultra rich that you admire... both of whom came frow prominent familes and had a leg up, the same thing you rail against in your agrument for a raised minimum wage...

Both were taught that if you win you are rewarded, if you lose you face a penalty. That is as free market as it comes.

Both men worked their asses off from the time they were capable of doing so. They had more money earned and saved by the time they were 20 than most of have ever had on hand at any one point in time. (Inflation adjusted)

These men understand that in economics as in life, there are winners and losers. Most of those losers are professional athletes. 70% of said athlestes are bankrupt within 5 years of retiring.

https://www.youtube.com/user/senelizabethwarren

I'm not even American.

Im curious about elizabeth warren....what ethnicity is she? Can you tell me? Because based on her history of blatantly not telling the truth for 20+years, i cannot trust her word...

Some from the 1%. A majority from small businesses. The vast majority of small business owners are not part of the 1%.

I seriously doubt that any of the people in here advocating for a raise in the minimum wage are making minimum wage. None of "us" are "asking" for a handout so your comments are entirely off the mark.

Can you show me the data where previous increases in the statutory minimum wage led directly to a decline in small business in America?

You are aware of the economic theories of specialization? It is not a zero-sum game.

Hmm, I kind of run a kind of small business.

on a store level we spend about 45% of gross income on salary. Our worst staff earns 50-60% more then minimum wage(min wage is $10/hr i think). But if minimum wage were doubled - unless it led to an immediate increase in sales - we would lay off staff at best, or at worst be forced to shut down entirely.

We just aren't large enough to push the new costs on to customers. You can mock our business model, but we currently turn a profit and pay our new staff enough to live and provide a good paycheque to all our experienced staff.

That's ridiculous. A one third rule is for writing a mortgage and is a pretax income measure. And besides that you can EASILY get a place to crash in Seattle for $535 a month. Just look it up.


I was a student just a few years ago and I lived off of $700/month. $350/mo on rent $200 on food and $150 or so on booze and laundry. I had absolutely no financial security, but it was survival and cause I was healthy, it was fine. Just for comparison sake, I don't know how best to measure affordability but if you look at median household income in 2011 where I live(Victoria, BC) was $70k/year USD as opposed to Seattle which is 80 miles away where it is $52k(city of seattle)-$65k(forbes)/year.

Stupid google couldn't pull up US census info for most accurate household income in seattle and I'm too lazy to research it.

IT DOESN'T TAKE "ECONOMIC THEORY" TO UNDERSTAND THAT ULTIMATELY IT *IS* A ZERO-SUM GAME. IT TAKES ARITHMETIC. THERE IS A FINITE SUPPLY OF DOLLARS IN CIRCULATION. DOLLARS CHANGE HAND BY ONE OF TWO MEANS:
1: TWO PARTIES VOLUNTARILY MAKE AN EXCHANGE (E.G., A PURCHASE OF GOODS OR SERVICES), OR
2: ONE PARTY TAKES FROM THE OTHER BY FORCE (E.G., ROBBERY OR TAXATION)

NEITHER OF THESE CREATES NEW MONEY. NEW MONEY IS ONLY CREATED WHEN GOVERNMENTS (OR IN THE CASE OF THE U.S., PSEUDO-GOVERNMENTAL UNELECTED BODIES COMPRISED OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE REVILED "1%") WISH IT INTO BEING. WHEN THEY DO THIS, IT BY NATURE DECREASES THE VALUE OF ALL OF THE MONEY THAT WAS PREVIOUSLY IN CIRCULATION.

Right, but no plans call for an immediate doubling; most involve incremental increases on a 3 to 5 year time frame. A doubling overnight *would* cause shocks, because there'd be a delay between paying people, and them realizing they had more money. Hysteresis even.

WOULD THAT BE THE SAME 1% THAT SOMEHOW AREN'T "JOB CREATORS?"

I was a student a couple years ago, and barely got by on $1200/month; rent in Edmonton is, admittedly, somewhat higher than many places. A 1 bedroom apartment will run you $950/month on the low end....

Living in the City is MUCH more expensive than living outside of the city. Again,we come back to supply/demand and, here we go, the market setting the price.

I dont get what is so difficult for you people to understand.

When your parent were growing up, things were cheaper, when people started making more, every got more expensive. As minimum wage goes up, so does the cost of everything else.

The "living wage" as you call it, is a complete joke of a phrase.

I have friends that are uneducated, working minimum wage at 7.40/hr and "live"
They don't have kids, they don't have nice things, they simply get by. That is not the choice I would like, but they live.

The idea that people are so bad off working for minimum wage is pathetic. Minimum wage is by all means, enough to get by.

I think the idea is for a single mom with a kid or two to be able to support themselves.

When my parents were growing up, the minimum wage was *higher*! Adjusted for inflation.

It's all perspective. A one bedroom apartment in Victoria runs you $700-1500/mo. But a room in a house costs a fraction of that.

That you barely got by on $1200 a month in Edmonton is a testament to your living standards. Not to the ability to prosper on significantly less. I once spent close to a year in a government funded group living volunteer program that traveled around Canada and had a per person living expenses budget under $400/mo to cover everything(accom, food, utilities, transport, entertainment etc etc) and we prospered. My group spent 3 months living in a suburb of calgary within those constraints. We couldn't afford to buy bread(we made everything by hand), but we lived well. This was while everyone was engaged in 40 hour unpaid volunteer work weeks. And they operated on the same per person budget up until two years ago when their funding was ended.

Now this isn't meant to be an example of how to live, but for everyone who says $1600/mo would have you on the street I like to point out that $400/mo had me kneading bread and arguing marx.

EDIT: I never argued marx. But we had 5 francophones and 6 RoCs. We argued separatism till the sun came up.

And I do agree with you qz that minimum wage is obviously insufficient for a single mother. Reputable licensed non profit childcare will likely cost as much as someone being paid minimum wage earns. But then you're back to fixing a loose screw with a sledgehammer.

I can't find a source I would consider reputable. But the right wing think tanks that come up in google seem to think between 5-10% of all people earning minimum wage are single parents. Definitely not impetus to retool a large part of our economy.

Perhaps this mother should have considered her financial situation prior to having children, no?
I know for a fact that I practice that method. I know I cannot afford a child right now, so I am not going to put myself in a position to have them until I can.
Personal responsibility is a real neat thing.

I also will not buy a house that I cannot afford, I will not buy a car that I cannot afford, even if the bank (do we trust them?) tells me I qualify for a loan much higher than I can afford, I will not take it.

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

education is vital...

this is actually my favorite chart:

http://www.nytimes.com/...ASS_GRAPHIC/index_01.html

Perhaps, but with the divorce rate being somewhere north of 50% these days, that doesn't always work out methinks.

I agree, 100%; we need to make schooling and access to affordable public university a priority. A stable home life and income that could support said education could also help.



It doesn't tell give me the option to select a Professional Degree AND a Masters =(

...

Having a child isn't a consideration you make using the same process as buying a car or even a house. It's clear you're not ready for children for that reason -- let alone the money issue.

Are you also against abortion too? Because then you'll hit the hypcocrisy trifecta on this issue! :p

But I do agree that you cannot at all trust banks to be thinking about your best interest; it's in their interest to have you teetering on the razors edge of financial instability.

^^
What he said.

this is where i agree with u.. while i havent put in 2 decades doing what im doing (hence my age is almost 32) i have been doing it over 6 yrs in the medical fields with a license to do what i do.. if i didnt work for the state "now" id still be making $10.15 in the private sector.. but yes i agree. i make $15.41 with a medical license with the state as my employer, and they wanna bump the minimum wage up to near me to flip burgers is bullfluff

Liberals point of view on economics is based on this ideal of an Utopian world where everything is perfect.

You libs stick to your touchy feely fluff and let free markets determine and set the wages, I don't need the whinny lazy lil fluff to make my wage while I outperform him just because some libs want to shove their Utopian ideals down my throat, mkay?

Thanks!