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States That Raised Minimum Wage See No Slow-Down In Job Growth
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Department of Labor has released data that some proponents of raising minimum wage are touting as evidence that higher minimum wage promotes job growth. While the data doesn't actually establish cause and effect, it does "run counter to a Congressional Budget Office report in February that said raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, as the White House supports, would cost 500,000 jobs." The data shows that the 13 states that raised their minimum wages in January added jobs at a faster rate than those that didn't. Other factors likely contributed to this outcome, but some economists are simply relieved that the higher wage factor didn't have a dramatically negative effect in general.
So the federal government staying out of the way lets local laws be different and we can see if the changes are good or not? Then people can go to where the laws are how they like them instead of having bad ones forced on them at a federal level.
Its almost as if the whole system was set up like this so only the obvious non-controversial laws should be at the federal level and everything else should be local.
Screw that, its too hard to force your views on others in every location, they should just force eveything on a federal level without Congress so those people who don't agree with me don't get a say.
Economic activity is increased by more people having more money to spend ?
Inconceivable !
That is because the additional money goes back into the local economy and not into an offshore account.
I bet jobs growth has increased because the delta between minimum wage in those regions and unemployment is great enough to motivate folks to get jobs. This will stabilize in a short time and I think jobs growth will stall and stagnate.
That's a ridiculous number. There are plenty of jobs out there ("We are experiencing a heavier call volume than usual, please be prepared to wait up to 40 minutes to speak to someone." "The next available appointment is in 8 months." "Your tires will be changed in 4 hours." "Limit one truck on bridge at a time due to structural decay".). Big companies especially are sitting on bales of cash, which could be put to good use (good for the companies, that is) by hiring more and paying employees more. The downward spiral of this country is directly due to the rich being scared of losing their riches and becoming risk-averse -- "Spend taxes on this unneeded defense project in my district, not on new infrastructure that could employ more now and enable more to be employed later." Sheesh.
It's a bit baffling how "some economists" weren't fully cognisant of what would happen when the minimum wage was raised. I mean it's not as though it's the first time it has happened, the effects should be well known by now. Kind of reminds me of the old joke:
A mathematician, an accountant and an economist apply for the same job.
The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks "What do two plus two equal?" The mathemetician replies "Four." The interviewer asks "Four, exactly?" The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says "Yes, four, exactly."
Then the interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The accountant says "On average, four - give or take ten percent, but on average, four."
Then the interviewer calls in the economist and poses the same question "What do two plus two equal?" The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says "What do you want it to equal?"
Automation and/or skyrocketing inequality will soon bring capitalism as we know it today crashing down. This is just sticking your finger in the dam.
The only way forward that doesn't involve revolution and bloodshed starts with mincome.
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Depending on where you live (state taxes?), that's at best a cool $350-$365 after payroll taxes (259-270 Euros) per week for a family of two to four.
After necessities like food, rent, electricity, phone, transportation, clothing, and so on, it's going to take some wicked budgeting skills to have any disposable income at all. Get it together Washington.
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Much of the demand for jobs is at the part time and low skill side. Maybe job growth has not been affected, but what about hours? Benefits?
Businesses generally were already at a level of employee's that is minimal. So I don't even if those businesses have to pay more they can reduce staff.
Nine of the 13 states increased their minimum wages automatically in line with inflation
In other words, in most states there was no increase. The minimum wage wage boost followed the economic growth.
Since there is no effect let's make minimum wage about $100,000 per year! A chicken iin every pot and a car in every garage!
Um, yeah, talk about misleading.
"Nine of the 13 states increased their minimum wages automatically in line with inflation: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. Four more states - Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island - approved legislation mandating the increase"
Correlation really does not indicate causality when you read the entire article. North Dakota has an oil boom, which is spiking employment. Ohio still grew, despite a MW of $7.95. The whole complaint by the CBO was that jobs would be lost if MW was increased to $10.10 across the ENTIRE COUNTRY. In these 13 states, most are no where close to $10.10/hr.
Bearded Dragon
Then lets keep it a state by state issue as it is supposed to be. Screw federal mandates for something states have control over.
The best performer is Florida which only raised it's minimum wage to keep pace with inflation by 14 cents/hr.
"The number of jobs in Florida has risen 1.6 percent this year, the most of the 13 states with higher minimums. Its minimum rose to $7.93 an hour from $7.79 last year."
In reality inflation is much worse for low income people in Florida so in real terms the minimum wage decreased for those people.
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Does anyone with an ownership interest in any business have more money than they need to survive?
If yes, they can reduce their own income and pay more to their employees. There's no reason not to beyond short-sighted, bloody-minded greed.
America was doing a lot better when it paid the owning classes less, and the working classes had more purchasing power.
if you're going to use reality as an indicator. Who does that?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
In Germany the unemployment rate used to be higher 20 years ago, with industry-wide minimum wages, several protections against unfair dismissals and no short-term contracts. Unemployed people had generous allowances, that's also why companies had to offer decent wages for them to accept to work.
Now, after the neoliberal Hartz "reforms", the unemployment rate has decreased, but also the average real salaries for the newly employed, factory workers and employees. And workers' rights have dramatically decreased too. In general, the lower/middle classes' life quality has dramatically worsened.
People and the media must stop watching metrics like GDP, you need to look at its distribution instead, with the Gini Coefficient for example. I prefer a country with a GDP increase of 1% a year evenly distributed than one with a 3% GDP increase with the first tenth of the population having a 30% income increase and zero for the remaining 90%.
Give us back protectionism, big state-owned companies, the welfare state and "socialism", please. We don't like this alleged new "freedom" (of the rich from the poor).
The growth rate also correlates quite well with the end of extended unemployment benefits. By raising the minimum wage, you've further increased the gap between the safety net and gainful employment, and thus given people more incentive to actually go and find work. More people working leads to capital actually creating value rather than being moved back and forth between the public and private piles. Good news, in general. However, we are talking about an awfully small sample size (a quarter, maybe two?). It will be interesting to see the data in a couple of years, assuming no major national or worldwide economic dislocation occurs, which, given the length of time that has expired since the last one and the cycles on which these things run, may very likely be just around the corner.
minimum wage is not about putting everyone at the current 80th %ile, it's about using diffuse market-collected money to make sure 20% of the people don't have to (a) starve or (b) mostly have the gummint pay for their stuff. I'm judged as a liberal by most people I meet, and even I don't want taxes paying for stuff the market can do if there is a workable alternative, which this seems to be. I'll take a law that creates a market condition over taxpayer largess. Why? The law sets a minimum that above which the market can adapt based on economic conditions. Taxes and handouts need constant tweaking by more laws and amendments.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Minimum wage was originally about making sure them damn n*****rs didn't take good union jobs by stopping them from undercutting the union with better prices. Now it is either pointless because in a booming economy you get paid more than min wage anyway, or it hurts those most in need, young school leavers with no experience and most likely the wrong color, by costing the business more than they are worth. Needless to say the business then turns around and hires older people with more experience and the young blacks get screwed over again.
It's always amusing to see these people who are against raising the minimum wage justify their claims by saying that it will decrease jobs. For one, there is no evidence of that, only primitive debunked economic theory. And Two, most tellingly, these people usually in no other way are concerned about the working class. Their sole policy aim is to make it easier for rich people to get richer. They will gladly make cuts in education and public transportation. They want to switch to a consumption tax system, transferring the tax burden even more to the working class. Anti union, pro-privatization etc.
So when they talk about fewer jobs they really mean less obscene profit. Looking at you Walmart...
Minimum wage increases don't immediately result in mass firings. What happens is that companies stall for a few months, then slow down hiring - and start laying people off. It usually takes about six months. Expect to see an increase in layoffs starting about the time the kids go back to school.
It would also be interesting to see the stats for "number of hours worked." The trend in most places has been towards switching to part time, and cutting back on hours worked. We already know that the national trend for the last few years has been "more jobs with less actual work." Lots and lots of former full-time workers who get 29 hours a week or less, more and more kids who get four or five half-days instead of three full days.
Raising the minimum wage doesn't cost jobs any more than inflation creates jobs.
It's a never-ending cat-and-mouse in a freemarket. Wherever they happen to be at this moment in the game, it reqiures the same people to play it.
Govt raises minimum wage. Consumer prices go up. Rinse, repeat, forever. Consumer prices are going to go up due to greed (as well as increases in minimum wage) so raising the minimum wage occasionally to offset it is necessary, even though it contributes to its own need.
Since the only way to offset inflation in a free market is to raise the minimum wage, it cannot be considered as a method to slow it. It's all just a shell game, aimed at trying to food the greedy into being less greedy, by doing things like lowering federal interest rates etc. They'll never stop it, all you can do is hope to keep its pace slow so you don't have runaway inflation. But it's a difficult act to balance, because retarding inflation tends to slow the economy.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
it is an art.
... the one that was done with a 'double blind' testing system, I'll pay attention to the results. Until then, there are far too many factors to establish any true cause/effect.
But I do know this ... living on a minimum wage salary has NEVER, in my entire 35 years in the labor force, been a 'living wage'. That's why most people learn new stuff and don't stay in it for more than a few months.
Or until they get motivated enough to find something else so they can move out of their mom's basement.
I have little sympathy for someone that can't find anything but a minimum wage job and then have to stay in it. I remember a few years ago when I saw a sign at a local fast-food place advertising a starting salary over $9/hour, a full $2 higher than the minimum wage at the time. When I looked behind the counter, I understood why, the staff was actually WORKING. The owner could afford the higher salary because he needed fewer people because they worked harder.
People with good attitudes and a willingness to learn don't make minimum wage for very long. People with limited skills who aren't very self-motivated do.
That's called 'competition' and it works very well. Subsidies (that is, paying more for something than it's worth) rarely work in the long term. They become crutches and excuses. The US has a long history of such failures .. student loans (increases tuition costs, created a price spiral, saddled thousands with high debt), housing subsidies (increased house prices and created a bubble), Cash for Clunkers (didn't do a damn thing), farm subsidies (can't get rid of the hidden tax that all US citizens that pay taxes pay for that ends up costing 50% of the population almost 3 times what the actual subsidy would be to them in terms of taxes and national debt), etc.
Too bad we haven't learned from these mistakes..
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
With a sucky economy previously then that statment means what ? Shit job growth before and still shit job growth....
How about stating if unemployment (employment decreases) have increased instead.
The problem is that economists and bleeding-heart liberals are stupid. You could raise "minimum wage" to $500 an hour, and prices would track it. Wal-Mart knows exactly how much minimum-wage people make - they even talked about the effect of the payroll tax cut repeal, and knew exactly how much it meant to their bottom line. Housing prices are always in line with what people make. So if corporations know exactly what percent of income goes to different categories like housing and groceries, they'll simply increase their prices to take the same percent out of each paycheck. That's what big data is for.
There is a mixed economic record of what happens to unemployment when you raise the minimum wage when there are more people looking for jobs than there are jobs. This adds some more evidence showing lack of correlation but not about causation. But the evidence is clear that for those employed raising the minimum wage is a very big win. The minimum wage will still keep people in poverty. It will keep Walmart workers needing to get food stamps, with the federal government in essence subsidizing the Walmart pay. The CBO's original estimate said there were different models for what would happen to unemployment, some increasing is slightly some even decreasing it. But the original estimate also showed that it would help a wide swath of Americans. The problem with the current economic situation is a lack of demand and that companies are hording money instead of spending it. If everyone and every company decided to go out and buy the sellers would feel better and since most buyers are actually also sellers we'd all do well. Raising minimum wage causes some more spending and that's good. That's not to say that it's always good. If the economy were overheating and minimum wage workers were paid say 10% of what corporate CEO's were, raising the minimum wage would probably be bad. But we're no where near that.
If it has no effect on unemployment, why not raise it to $1,000,000,000 per hour. Everyone would be rich!
Seriously, why do politicos always ignore the reality that so many things are functions...every change has some kind of impact, even if they can't measure it due to other changes.
The purpose of an economy is to support humans; the purpose of humans is not to support the economy. If your business is not successful enough that you cannot remain profitable while paying your employees a living wage then maybe we don't really need your business. Maybe you should go out of business and if your company really was filling a need then someone smarter than you can figure out how to fill that need while making enough profit to pay their people enough to live on. In the end only the really competent business will survive and workers will have enough money to actually live (and they will just end up plowing their income back into the economy thus spurring even more growth.) Or I guess we could have it the other way. We could have just a few rich people who can't figure out how to sell anything anymore because a large part of the population is too poor to even buy a pot to piss in.
Anyone who thinks raising the minimum wage in small amounts would decrease jobs is completely out of touch with reality. Employee wages is typically only a small part of a business's costs. Therefore a 50% increase in wage will usually only increase business costs by a few percentage points. Wage increases are small blips on the radar compared to rent costs, taxes, advertising, inventory overhead, etc. However, increasing mnimum wage greatly increases the amount of money in concsumers' pockets. This means more people are spending more money.
Now, while businesses spend a relatively small amount of their money on wages, almost all a business's income comes from sales (usually). This means a 50% increase in wage costs a businesses almost nothing, but can cause sales (income) to grow a lot.
There are plenty of examples of minimum wage increases improving the job market. Look at Canada, for instance. Over the past 13 years min wage in eastern Canada has almost doubled (from about $5.50 to $10.30). During that same time unemployment has dropped from about 7.5% to 6.9% and the standard of living has gone up.
Americans who think raising min wage will result in fewer jobs is completely delusional.
The minimum wage law is most properly described as a law saying that employers must discriminate against people who have low skills. That’s what the law says. The law says that here’s a man who has a skill that would justify a wage of $5 or $6 per hour (adjusted for today), but you may not employ him, it’s illegal, because if you employ him you must pay him $9 per hour. So what’s the result? To employ him at $9 per hour is to engage in charity. There’s nothing wrong with charity. But most employers are not in the position to engage in that kind of charity. Thus, the consequences of minimum wage laws have been almost wholly bad. We have increased unemployment and increased poverty.
Moreover, the effects have been concentrated on the groups that the do-gooders would most like to help. The people who have been hurt most by the minimum wage laws are the blacks. I have often said that the most anti-black law on the books of this land is the minimum wage law.
There is absolutely no positive objective achieved by the minimum wage law. Its real purpose is to reduce competition for the trade unions and make it easier for them to maintain the higher wages of their privileged members.
For example, I'm sure it'll take McDonalds a bit more time to replace their cashiers with fully automated walk up order and pay terminals. Then instead of multiple cashiers, they only need one person to bring the food from the back to the pick-up area.
When you look at list of states that raised the minimum wage, you see that they mainly border other states that didn't. I'd like to see an analysis of whether they just pulled people from the neighboring states. If that happened even to a small degree it would increase one state's stats and lower the other's.
I thought it had been known for decades that increased wages allow people to spent on non-essential items (rather than save money for rent and food) and provide more money into the economy. I've been hearing that line from my relatives and on the news ever since I was a kid.
Isn't it a no-brainer that raising the minimum wage stimulates the economy? Hasn't this been proven for a very long time now?
Florida raised it's minimum wage by $0.13 and that is going to have a detectible impact on employment in a state that is a magnet for business? It had virtually no impact on anyone except food delivery services raised their delivery fees to cover minimum wage increase for tip based employees (pizza delivery drivers) up to $4.91 @ hour. Had Florida raised it to $10.10 an hour, one would expect to see food delivery charges go to about $5.
In other news, the plants I fertilized and watered a little extra yesterday show no sign of extra growth today.
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Lets go $50 an hour minimum wage! If raising minimum wage creates jobs, lets make it a very high minimum wage! Is there a point where even people who are for a forced minimum wage think it is too high?
This really only works if just a portion of the states raise minimum wage. Because other states have a lower wage, they can make stuff cheaper an import them to states who have more money. But if all states raise at the same time it will not work that way as prices from all states rise equally to cover the expense of higher wages. Imported goods get cheaper and product made in the USA goes up.
Six months is too short of time. Companies long term plans start at 6 months in the future, so companies have not yet started to leave country because it is worth the cost to move to save money.
Saying raising costs of doing business results in more jobs, is like saying drinking more water results in peeing less.
Yeah. Because the kick started back in April with Connecticut voting to bump its minimum wage to 10.10...gradually...by 2017.
And that was in late March.
Everything else has happened since April (or later).
Sorry but this study is bunk. It hasn't had a long enough time to affect the market in any statistically significant way.
There's no allowances that existing open jobs weren't filled, as they had previously gone unfilled due to the pay being insufficient for people to bother.
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increasing the minimum wage to advance the economy is like putting a fan in front of a windmill to increase output. There are plenty of people that would greenlight and fund that project but I think I would rather hold out for a better investment opportunity.
good luck with that though....
Let's raise the minimum wage to $20/hr. It will be twice as good!
Because even $9 an hour is a shitty, exploitative wage?
I feel sorry for countries that don't see this. Minimum wage in the UK at the moment is $10.70 an hour, and it's risen (and will continue to rise) by about 20-30p (50c) an hour every year.
And this, this is the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM legal wage we expect someone to pay. And it's still shitty. A young kid, with no home or family, works their arse off just as much as I do (if not more) for the same amount of time, gets home, and discovers he can barely pay rent and eat food. That's not a wage. And in that kind of "work environment", we can't expect people to choose work over social security, which harms everyone.
Minimum wage is about stopping employers exploiting desperate workers. It's NOT about generating jobs, or curing poverty. It's stopping exploitation. In the same way that regulating prostitution doesn't generate jobs (just the opposite) or cure poverty (again, just the opposite), it just stops someone exploiting another human being.
To then bring race into it destroys your argument. You can play the race card if you like, but to bring it in when race isn't mentioned at all is just - again - exploitation of humans.
And, as the stats here show, minimum wage does nothing to harm existing jobs. That means the employers KNEW they were exploiting workers, and could have stopped it at any time voluntarily by charging more / paying more wages, but didn't. Instead they waited until they were MADE to, kicked up a token fuss, and then carried on as normal without thousands of businesses going bankrupt because of it.
If you want to hire someone, pay a fair wage. That's the message. All those companies didn't sack all of their workers when the laws came in, so they NEED to hire someone. They just want to exploit those people as much as legally possible.
For someone that wants to play the race card in the way you did, I would think you'd be more concerned about ending unnecessary exploitation of low-earners by high-earners, not allowing them to continue.
Really. So, business is forced to raise its labor cost and rather than seeking ways to maximize profit, they double down on more hiring?
There are so many logical fallacies here that I just can't believe that people engaged primarily in tech and science can be so stupid!!!
First, even if the representation of the article here is to be believed, the conclusion that somehow the cause of the job growth was the raise in minimum wage isn't actually supported. This is is the fallacy of Post hoc ergo propter hoc' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc). At Slashdot, such thinking can just chalked up to wishful thinking since the report purportedly supports the socialist wet dreams of the typical Slashdotter editor/reader. At the end, I bet the economic growth was substantially for other reasons and the minimum wage suppressed growth that might have been had without it... which brings me to the second fallacy here...
Second, the broken window fallacy (http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html). The fallacy that says we tend to focus only on "what is seen", and ignore the 'unseen, even though the unseen can be as consequential. The pro-minimum wage crowd focuses on what is seen: people with more spending money, but don't give a second thought to where that money came from. It came from profits which inevitably become capital investments that could have been put to better uses (which would have in turn expanded employment even moreso). Also I saw people talking about that capital going offshore, but it's capitalism unfriendly policies, like higher minimum wages that make foreign investment more attractive (after all, why would anyone want to move their workforce far away if all things were equal?) Also, the unseen are the losses taken in the ranks of the marginal worker. The worker than can be hired profitably at $9.00 an hour, because they produce $9.50 of output, but ceases to be a good investment at $10 since their output doesn't also change. These are entry level jobs and jobs that the very least skilled are qualified for and so are the job seekers that suffer when the minimum wage goes up. I started my career with just such a few of these jobs (bus boy, pizza delivery), and learned very basic work skills that I continue to use to this day (management and enterprise technology consulting). But everybody still with a job is what is seen, and those still standing have a little more money in their pocket. So we cheer when we in fact have shrunk what might have been.
Put all of this together, and we see the intellectual dishonesty that the minimum wage supporters, the egalitarians, the socialists and the fascists of Slashdot are willing to engage in to see their ideas imposed on those of us unwilling to grant it any moral standing.
fuck it it must be true then, since January, wow
Well if there are no ill effects, why don't we raise the minimum wage to $30 so that everyone gets to join in this wonderful phenomenon?
I work at a 100 person company. We pay our lowest employees about $10/hr already because nobody would stay working there for $7 or whatever the minimum is now. But, if it was raised to let's say $13, we would fire 30% of our staff and make the others work harder. We absolutely cannot afford to raise our prices any further and we cut all overhead expenses imaginable. Then go to a company that does pay minimum wage, which obviously implies that labor is their #1 expense, and try and raise it 20%. So this report cannot possibly be correct. The companies will fire people or raise their prices to the point where nobody buys their products and they have to go out of business.
Try to keep up.
Raising the minimum wage mandate tells you absolutely nothing about whether any wages were increased. Nationally, only about 3% of people are paid the minimum wage.
Summary says:
> The data shows that the 13 states that raised their minimum wages in January added jobs at a faster rate than those that didn't.
That's nice. This tells you exactly zero. This is like saying: after eating my own poop, my IQ was higher than John's. Comparing your post-state to others' post-state is pretty much the weakest approach to (trying to) suggest a causal link. You need to at least compare the pre-difference to the post-difference. In other words, prior to eating my own poop, I was 13 IQ points higher than John. After eating my own poop, I was 4 IQ points higher than John. I'm still smarter than John after eating my own poop, but looking at the initial state suggests a very different story.
Of course, none of this allows you to establish anything causal, but summary is so bogus with basic logic that this is obviously a conclusion looking for supporting data.
If you look at the details of the CBO report (http://www.cbo.gov/publication/44995) you'll see that the estimated decrease in total employment by 500,000 jobs was really just the mid-point of a broad range between a very slight decrease in employment and a decrease of 1 million jobs.
Did you even read the summary? "While the data does not establish cause and effect"...
Likely the data is saying, states with high growth can support a higher minimum wage, and not, a higher minimum wage creates growth. E.g. North Dakota can probably afford a $20 minimum wage without affecting growth much. Now lets see detroit survive with a $10 min wage rate.
In other words the whole premise of the article is factually incorrect and its all opinions and 'feelings'. It's like how yellen and bernake before her think if they have enough data they'll know exactly how to manage the economy.
Fatal conceit. You can never know all the data, worse yet, your intervention will change the outcome itself and thus interfere with your data collection. So anyone arguing a general minimum wage that's applicable to all industries and companies, is falling into the same argument of everyone needing, on average, a size 8 shoe.
Money is just an abstraction layer for exchange. It isn't money that is actually valuable, is the goods and services it can buy. So, you can increase the quantity of money all you want, but its alot harder to change the actual value, which is dependent on actual exchange. If you increase quantity of money, value stays the same, so the value per unit of money decreases. More wealth is not generated, only prices of goods and services rise to reach equilibrium. Its been tried over and over again... zimbabwe printed millions of dollars for each citizen... a loaf of bread now costs 100 trillion dollars. Many try to counter this with price fixing and redistribution, but that just adds value deficit into the system. Most economic problems of the modern era are deficit related. You cannot violate rules of exchange. Its as close to a law of physics you can get outside of science.
So how much did the cost of living raise in those areas?
How much did it suck for every person above the new minimum wage that suddenly got an effective state mandated pay cut?
Raising the minimum wage is worthless if you don't control pricing of products as well, the price of bread, milk and everything else just goes up to compensate for the new higher minimum wage.
It goes up not only because it must to balance out the increased cost, but it also goes up because it CAN, those minimum wage workers can afford to pay more so they will be charged more.
The standard of living remains the same for minimum wage workers, and goes down for everyone else who got off their asses and put effort into being more than a burger flipper.
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Price controls never have negative effects.
In that case, why not $20/hr? $50/hr? Since it has no negative effect.
Where?
There isn't any job growth. Hell, Microsoft is ditching 18,000 employees while STILL begging for more H1B Indian slave visas.
Corporatism != Free Market
In other news.
I just smoked a cigarette 5 minutes ago and I am not dead of lung cancer. In fact I feel better than before.
Therefore cigarettes are good for your health.
Without this being a national thing, the total cost of all goods and services available in those states is not fully impacted. If this were nationwide, all goods and services made anywhere in the country and used there would have prices impacted. Goods coming in through other states ports of entry would be impacted. It is hard to measure any rate of success with this due to so few states having done it.
Good for them if it is working on this small scale, but does that really correlate to it scaling up across the nation?
On a political website, someone was advocating $0.50 per hour as a minimum wage. The last time I made $0.50 per hour was when I was eight-years-old. The was big comic book money back in the 1970's. Woo-hoo!
employment would grown even more if wages were kept lower
People who have more money, spend more money. When people spend more money, more jobs are created. Anything that keeps money flowing within an econmy, whether it's the minimum wage or other forms of community reinvestment, spurs growth.
What kills jobs is hoarding money in hedge funds that do nothing but speculate on the value of currency.
Minimum wage has a plenty of historical proof behind it but that never makes any difference in our political debates. So why do we even bother with crap like this? If it creates jobs it'll be ignored; if it kills jobs it still will be ignored (and dismissed since it won't fit with history.)
Sure, you can raise the rate to higher levels eventually everything will go up in price as well with no net benefit; however, the world isn't that simple. Since the USA exports nothing and imports everything the impact won't be evenly spread as imports continue to be cheap and the 1 or 2 exports will rise in price (ignoring weapons export industry because that is special.) Local medium and small businesses will be at a disadvantage against larger business which can/do import easily --- but that isn't a whole lot different than today where most the big import friendly businesses have killed off smaller competition already.
As far as teen jobs paying enough to live on, those are no longer teen jobs--- there are simply not enough jobs to go around and that problem will continue due to outsourcing, automation, and "free trade." One can't try to maintain the past because that situation no longer exists today. Also don't forget, inflation is no longer reported (because it is got too high) so almost everybody is NOT getting enough of a raise to compensate for the inflation losses. I've never had a pay raise that even matched inflation; one has to switch jobs.
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The places likely to raise a minimum wage are the places where stuff cots too darn much. Because people want to be there. Because they or parts of them are booming. So lower wage people are angriest there. And also there is where one finds both the most people whose wages are so high they don't care what stuff costs, and the most people ideologically inclined to think that it is legitimate for government to attempt to be charitable to the things they themselves believe deserve charity. Hence the minimum wage kikes don't cause unemployment at the low end, as the hikes are being CAUSED by employment at the high end.
Those who think any government should do anything besides what governments are intended to do - protect life liberty and property by providing military security and domestic order and law, and foster prosperity through sound currency, sound law and sound infrastructure - those people really need to either pay the bill for it personally, or convince a majority in 3/4 of the States to impose a national value added tax to fund their goal.
Otherwise to Hell with it, no matter what it is.
So you didn't see 'slower growth'. How? How do you know that growth would not have been higher? By your opinion only and not facts. I love people who have never had even a single economics class, other than something taught in Cuba or Russia and haven't a clue on the most obvious aspects of how economies work.
The minimum wage affects those who are unable to earn some arbitrarily-set cutoff price. Growth of any jobs that pay that much or more is entirely beside the point.
Statists like to pretend that they're helping the poor with law that says "here you go, you get to earn at least this much!", but what these statues really do is say is "UNLESS you can earn this much, no job for you!"
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Wow.... Who teaches the congressional analyst macro economics, but of course raising the earning potential and income of an entire state is going to cause job growth. Consider it trickle up theory. As the income of citizens go up, so to does and will their amounts of discretionary income and ability to pay their bills in whole and on time. Therefore, while every employer had to pay more out in pay, due to minimum wage increase, those employers are probably experiencing larger then expected profits as an entire state's worth of workers now has more money to spend. More spent on more goods and services, means more job creation as businesses need to keep up with increased demand. Imagine what would happen if it were Federal, like the minimum wage laws already are.
I suppose I can agree that it is costly and not terrible effective. Alternatives:
a. tattoo a big ugly barcode on their forehead, then ship them home by packing them (standing room only) into the bottom of a ship that is slow, hot, filthy, and smelly
b. cane them, same as Thailand and Saudi Arabia do, then ship as above
c. have them dig a grave and stand in it, then shoot them, then send the video to their relatives
This works for both employer and employee. (if shipping an employer, send them to wherever most of their employees are getting shipped) It also works for landlords; doing business with an illegal alien in any significant way (beyond exchanging cash for pizza and such) needs to be a punishable offense.
4) Note that our cost of living is too high because we have too damn many stupid regulations. Housing is unaffordable because you aren't allowed to live in a shack. Travel is unaffordable because you aren't allowed to buy a rickshaw or tuk-tuk. Medical care is unaffordable because our training and standards for doctors are made for the tastes of the wealthy. Food is unaffordable because we have standards that limit the number of bugs in cereal, etc.
Basically, us well-off people have demanded standards that are simply unaffordable to many people. We aren't allowing them to have things they can afford.
anon for a reason
The reason Florida minimum wage is attached to inflation, like the other states, is for union contracts.
Does anyone actually think, that government, cares a shit about teenagers with part time jobs? About how someone can work at McDonalds and feed a family of four?
The only reason Florida did it was for union contracts. The was our goal and we got what we wanted. We got a great deal, our members now get a wage increasing with inflation, and requiring no negotiating of our contracts, and Florida got a great deal.
But it wasn't about some damn teenagers.
Source: Union contract negotiator.
Working as a cashier at McDonold's should not pay a wage high enough for someone to "live." Minimum wage jobs should be something people do while they are young, living with family, students, etc. If you want to earn a "living" get a real job and work your way up the ladder. If you are illegal, GTFO.
Which means nothing if the growth wasn't with minimum wage jobs.
Look at states with the lowest minimum wages. These states generally correlate to highest unemployment, lowest household median income, and highest poverty.
These are usually the same states that vote for politicians from the party that more openly advocates for business friendly taxes laws and minimum wage.
Suckers.
As with an increase in the price of gas, most of the effects of raising the minimum wage (and thus the price of labor) will have their impact felt over the course of years, as employers have time to implement programs that will replace more expensive people with less expensive machines.
Proving that raising the price of something increases the quantity demanded - well, that's a guaranteed Nobel Prize.
1000 bucks silly high? Ask the average CEO and he'll wholeheartedly disagree.
And he doesn't even pick anything!
Beside picking his stock options and/or yearly bonus and/or living compensations, that is.
C'mon this is from one of the many propaganda ministries of the regime. meh.
How many of the jobs "created" were just replacing full-time workers with more part-time workers to reduce benefit costs?
So how do you know what the job growth would have been sans the minimum wage hike? You don't...you can't measure what could have been. In general job growth has been poor and most new jobs created are lower paying part time work. Let's face it the average teenager working at a burger joint does not earn $10/hr. My kid is working at McD's for the summer before leaving for university, and is smarter than the average bear. They were amazed she figured out the French fry making process in about 5 minutes as some of their new recruits can't figure it out after two weeks. They took the chance on hiring her when she had no experience at all and knew she would only be working a few months but they like her because she is smart and works hard. If the minimum wage was $15/hr she and other such folks with no experience would never get a chance. If your 40 years old and have no working experience and your working at a fast food joint for minimum wage it is because you have just re-entered the work force or your a screw up. My eldest sister went back to work after her kids were raised, she started at McD's working the counter, then became a manager and then put herself though nursing school. She recently retired from nursing. If you want to work hard and invest in yourself you can provide for yourself/your family. If you go through life thinking someone owns you something you will always be disappointed.
We could have told you that.. no , wait.. we frikken DID! Over, and over, and over, and...
I believe, one of your founding fathers said any company that can't afford to pay a living wage to it's employees doesn'[t deserve to staay in business...
I know the intent of this thing is to help the little guy, but I can't help but to reason that corporations and larger companies maintaining higher margins will inevitably benefit, being able to operate on smaller margins.
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's spacious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
CT has done so and there is absolutely no job growth in CT before or after the wage increase.
Paul E. Bahre
First no numbers coming out of the Obama Administration should be trusted as they have a history of lying to suit the politics du jour.
Second, before the government got involved wages were based on demand and supply. If you couldn't find a job there was no safety net, you relied on the kindness of strangers. And big surprise, there were just as many poor folks as we have now, wages were fair, and everything worked out just fine. The whole idea that the government mandates wages, and pays unemployment is a creation of the Great Society of the 1960's, we survived just fine for millennia before that. Many would say we were better off...
It is already illegal to hire undocumented aliens, just enforce the damn laws...
Murphy was an optimist
A higher minimum wage means more Americans working.
Corporations don't care about that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
What did those states see in inflation? See more at Progress.org. BTW, how does one ID oneself here?
I would have to argue against transportation and mail services being funded by use fees. Setting aside the necessity of limiting abuse, it is vital to the economy that even the lowest denizens are able to move freely, and to send and receive their post -- especially in this age of Internet stores.
For a good example of the alternative, look to Central America, where postal systems may as well not exist. Transportation is in many cases subsidized, but even at that, a $10 bus ride across the country is equal to the daily wage of most of the populace. Ease of transportation is one of the most important factors in the efficiency of an economy. No one particularly likes junk mail, but consider the relative utility of being able to distribute sale flyers to your customers in few days, as opposed to a matter of months. Travel and transportation are universal necessities, and any universal service is the natural province of government. We gain the most when such services are provided at a minimum of expense; government does not exist to turn a profit. The more use, the more we benefit from economies of scale, and costs are more widely distributed. This argument can also be made for medical care and education, as well as energy, communications, and various other forms of infrastructure.
In summation, the cost of any service with universal subscription is a tax, and almost always a regressive one. Regressive taxation is an unhealthy way to structure societies, as evidenced by 18th-Century France.
A legitimate salary is whatever two people negotiate and agree upon as acceptable wages for the task(s) at hand.
Or do you really have a problem with that?
And, as the stats here show, minimum wage does nothing to harm existing jobs.
Your ignorance is appalling. The stats do NOT show this. They don't, in fact, show ANYTHING (a common problem with statistics, which never stops unethical politicians from abusing them). Take a research design class to understand this.
Correlation is not causation, and comparing entire states is generally meaningless (due to the large number of variables that can be responsible for differences independent of the variable of interest). A rising trend in a statistic can be expected to continue for some time, irregardless of government policies, and this fact is often exploited by the unscrupulous, who count on misunderstanding by the credulous (like you).
A research design class, along with a year or two of social science, should be a requirement for every high school degree, because far too many people share your ignorance.
If you want to understand the long term economic impact of minimum wage laws, go read some economics journals subject to peer review. Peer review is far from a perfect system, but at least you won't have self-serving professional liars in the mix.
raising the minimum wage up to $10.50 or higher has the added benefit of funding social security at a higher level at the same time many hardworking americans are set to retire... congress has borrowed against ssi funds every year to keep their budgets down and it has inhibited the growth of them. all our debts would be so much higher if we had not been screwed by congress this way...
"Where did this apple come from?"
--Alan Turing
Increasing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... will create more jobs in the economy
Casteism
Put a cap on Market Capitalization of NYSE listed companies. Economy will create millions of local and Non-H1B jobs.
Casteism
Economist Don Boudreaux and econ PhD Liya Palagashvili look at the published data of this study and evaluate whether the conclusion holds water in Obama's Misleading Minimum Wage Statistics.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.