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Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour
HughPickens.com writes: Jennifer Medina reports at the NY Times that the council of the nation's second-largest city voted by a 14-1 margin to increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020. Los Angeles and its almost 4 million residents represent one of the biggest victories yet for those pushing wage increases across the country. Proponents hope it will start to reverse the earning gap in the city, where the top 7% of households earn more than the bottom 67%.
Detractors point out the direct cost increase to businesses, which could total as much as a billion dollars per year. If a business can't handle the increased cost, the employees this measure was designed to help will lose their jobs when it folds. An editorial from the LA Times says it's vital for other cities nearby to increase their minimum wage, too, else businesses will gradually migrate to cheaper locations. They add, "While the minimum wage hike will certainly help the lowest-wage workers in the city, it should not be seen as the centerpiece of a meaningful jobs creation strategy. The fact is that far too many jobs in the city are low-wage jobs — some 37% of workers currently earn less than $13.25 an hour, according to the mayor's estimates — and even after the proposed increase, they would still be living on the edge of poverty."
Detractors point out the direct cost increase to businesses, which could total as much as a billion dollars per year. If a business can't handle the increased cost, the employees this measure was designed to help will lose their jobs when it folds. An editorial from the LA Times says it's vital for other cities nearby to increase their minimum wage, too, else businesses will gradually migrate to cheaper locations. They add, "While the minimum wage hike will certainly help the lowest-wage workers in the city, it should not be seen as the centerpiece of a meaningful jobs creation strategy. The fact is that far too many jobs in the city are low-wage jobs — some 37% of workers currently earn less than $13.25 an hour, according to the mayor's estimates — and even after the proposed increase, they would still be living on the edge of poverty."
Is Slashdot TRYING to lose readers? I thought this was a TECH forum.
If you really believe that a minimum wage can increase the welfare of poor people, why not raise it to $500/hour? Then we can all be rich!
I love seeing this crap in American articles. "Oh Noes! If we pay people more, it will cost businesses more!"
Lets look at this for a second.... Who are a businesses customers? Hint: It's the people who get paid a wage. These people get more money, more businesses get more customers. More customers mean more sales. More sales means more profits.
Is it really that hard to grasp that concept?
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
Minimum wage is a stupid answer to inequality. It raises costs for business, forces those at the margin out of business entirely, and does nothing for the unemployed except increase their number and raise the barrier to them getting a job.
The correct answer is "basic income". But that would mean lower costs to business, but higher taxes, so we can't have that.
Now let's get it up to $25.00/hr and then to $50.00/hr -- make those corporations pay what we're worth. They're rich, they can afford it! Demand Income Equality!
So, they want the government to force the minimums up higher to "living wages," but they don't think everything else will just inflate along with it? Everyone's salaries go up, too! Yay! Wait, groceries and gas just went up too! BOO! Whoa, the dollar is now worth 2 pesos? QUICK, CASH IN YOUR MONIES FROM ACAPULCO! Dude, where's my retirement savings?
I can finally afford to outsource my digestion.
Australia has a minimum wage of around $17USD/hour (around $20AUD) which increases 20% if you are a casual. Our poor people do well.
You know how everyone whines about big corporates making too much money; well this is the best way to redistribute that wealth.
Paying your poor people well, helps lift them out of poverty.
46137
...until he finds out that it cost him his job: http://redalertpolitics.com/20...
From the website:
Know a young conservative who should be on Red Alert's 2015 '30 Under 30' List? Nominate them by May 29. Read more at http://redalertpolitics.com/20...
The only way this could be a more blatant "Conservative" Propaganda site is if they named it Hitler Youth Life
In the short term, this may result in more uses of "... in the short term" or "... in the long term", but in the long term such requirements will result in a surfeit of posts containing the phrases "... in the long term" and "... in the short term", diluting the impact of the terms "... in the short term" and "... in the long term" and spreading out the moderation points that would have been concentrated on a smaller number of posts using the words "... in the long term" or "... in the short term", allowing posts that don't contain the expressions "... in the short term" and "... in the long term" to stand out and thus receive more moderation points, reversing the effect you profess to desire.
$15 per hour is Galdwell's tipping point.
So I have a university degree and I make about $40/hr "normally". But in software often the hours are super long, so it is common I work 12 hour days. So we're exempt, which means no OT pay, which turns that $40 into more like $26/hr. Ok, well, there's medical benefits too, so it's not strictly just the money.
But still I got ta start thinking.... all the stress and long hours and pressure of this job for $26/hr... or a min wage job at $15/hr with WAY less responsibility and the only stress is doing the same job every day? Never having the pressure of constantly facing things you've never done before in your life, that have to be predicted with an accurate schedule, developed over many months, and delivered on time?
It starts to become not such a clear choice any more. Sure, the money is still better. But not THAT much better, and is it worth the life stress? Not so sure.
What would we do without California to try stupid things so the rest of us learn good reasons avoid them?
In the short term, your mom sucks for bucks. In the long term, she get syphilis.
And since they form the base of our ever increasing need foor cheap tech labor, this topic is more than slashdot worthy!
If someone needs some comparison, France's national minimal hourly wage is 9,71 euros, that is 10.7 USD.
This is much lower, but to make a fair comparison, one would have to take expenses into account. The presence of socialized services lower expenses, especially for people at minimum wage that do not pay taxes on their income.
Just wait until businesses start laying off people to cover the cost of the new $15/hr.
got any data to go with your whine?
Nah they'll just hire more illegals
Jobs create per hour a certain amount of wealth.
No jobs naturally exist, which cost more in wages than the wealth they generate for the employer.
When the State enforces a minimum wage, all jobs which generate less wealth than that value are prevented from existing.
If you want to make people richer, encourage the overall growth rate of the economy - reduce taxes, reduce red tape, reduce import tariffs - for it is when the economy is growing that wages rise, and when it shrinks, that they fall. The State does a great deal to discourage economic growth, and by that does a great deal to discourage the growth in wages.
Indeed, a minimum wage, by eliminating the set of jobs which create less wealth, directly reduces the amount of business which can be done - it direct reduces the growth rate of the economy.
cali is already losing jobs to texas in droves, this is not gonna make it any better
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
yes why bother paying people when we can be communists and socialists and give them food stamps even though they are working 40 hours a week?
Smaller businesses trying to American Dream might struggle. Yes, plebs will be able to buy more, but it might not cut it.
Big businesses can soak it, but they're also better poised to just outsource/automate as we inch one more tick on "Human labor costs too much."
And it'll keep ticking. I won't waste emotions lamenting it, it's inevitable. We can't uninvent automation. I also accept that businesses are meant to act in their own interest, but meanwhile the money circulates less and less.
Much less. Your paycheck doesn't go to plebs, it flows upwards. You pay bills to phone companies, you pay car dealerships and bank mortages, you pay insurance/hospitals, and nothing flows down. You think the walmart portion trickles down to Joe? Nope. His job exists because it's an upward flow as well. Wealth is concentrating harder than diamonds and it's going to get worse before it gets worser.
I don't recommend trying to resculpt immutable facts (eg businesses will never hire money sinks); we'll need to adapt our world around them. But no one seems to know how, not plausibly.
I'm normally pretty libertarian when it comes to issues like this, but it doesn't surprise me especially in a state like California where the cost of most things has become overinflated. Wages are typically the last thing to rise...but something is different here...
The government's "basket of goods" used to calculate inflation is blatantly false and misleading, as are its unemployment numbers (look at U3, not the cooked statistics you hear on the news that were called out by Gallup's top guy). Particularly in a state like California where most of the population lives in a few densely-populated areas with horrible traffic and ever-rising rents and house prices, inflation has already greatly impacted individuals. The federal government has already encouraged this by making the FHA loan conforming limit different for high-priced California areas. Between this and speculators buying and sitting on houses as investments, the average slug has zero change of owning a home and struggles even to rent due to the growing techie population.
The difference is that the gap in overinflated places like California has been extended beyond any reasonable means by expansion of debt. It's all about the monthly payment for a good, not the total amount out of your pocket for that good irrespective of repairs and devaluation. Between the large bank failures and the constant pumping of the money supply, it appears that the debtors will win and the savers will lose at the expense of substantial amounts of inflation simply because compensation for productivity has to be based on something somewhat tangible, even if it's intellectual property. That underpinning simply isn't there. This is a giant souffle that will be hardened into place from the top and pull the bottom up with it.
So yes, raise the minimum wage if you will. But those prices will be passed along to consumers. Those in LA and the rest of California and like places should get used to $9-$10 McDonald's meals and $2 cans of soda and $2.50 for a basic pack of gum. Other than austerity and contraction (which may cycle multiple times between inflation before all is said and done), this was the only possible outcome whose chickens appear now to be coming home to roost. Welcome to the new normal, with effectively no consolation for the minimum wage earners.
socialism rules
signed,
useless niggers
By the fucking time they get to the 15$ min in 2020, it will need to be 25$. Why the hell are they playing chase the tail -- oh right, cause money.
There is no connection between the $15/hr and the pizza shop closing except web stories.
It's an expensive city in the middle of a desert! Stop living there sheeple!
The big problem with minimum wage is that it is usually set, then left alone for many years on end. This create a problem for people earning minimum wage, since their wages are not adjusted to reflect the cost of living. This is beneficial to businesses in the short term, because wages decrease in relation to other expenses. This is also detrimental to businesses in the long term, since it means that increases to the minimum wage tend to be large and create a correspondingly large jumps in expenses. It is much more sensible to link the minimum wage to the cost of living.
Convienently ignoring the source i see?
Wow pi$$ed off the liberals I see. GOOD! When California falls completely apart and run out of water we'll see who was right....
The Truth is a Virus!!!
The entire council should be Latino before then...
http://council.lacity.org/Dire...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Hope they manage it as well as illegal immigrate.....err yeah. Hope they manage as well as the electrical grid....oh wait. Hope they manage it as well as the highway system....hmmmmm. Hope they manage it as well as the water supply.......well fuck.
Translation: "I don't like your news so I'm going to attack the news source! If I label all the sites I don't like as "invalid propaganda" I win by default!"
The minimum wage in Melbourne Australia has been in the $15 range for many years, and where it 'hurts' is in the costs of the service sector. It's really tough to set the value of a Big Mac at like $5.50, and as a result I eat out much less than when I was in California. But, there is a large sector who will pay what it takes to indulge their behavioral addictions, and the service sector is nonetheless very robust. So yes there's a transfer of wealth into the lower income levels which results in them earning a living wage (minimum wage is tied to a percentage of the cost of living) and I find that far more tolerable than six people crammed into a 2-bedroom flat.
The real problem in this country is the lack of full-time jobs at lower pay scales. How much does a few bucks an hour help you if you're only able to get 20 hours a week at that rate? And of course part-time work doesn't come with the benefits of full-time work like health insurance & paid time off. Companies like Target & Walmart should be forced to offer more full-time jobs (with benefits) instead of forcing them to pay a few bucks more an hour.
Prices of EVERYTHING rises to match.
$15 is too much, should've raised it according to inflation, like any other decent country does.
under the present minimum wage, one qualifies for government assistance, which means the money is coming out of the taxpayers wallet.
As wages rise, businesses' labor costs will rise, which tends to increase the prices they have to charge to recover the cost of providing goods or services. Some of these goods and services are necessities, and the threshold for government assistance is indexed to costs of necessities. So increasing wage level increases costs, which increases the general price level, which increases the CPI, which increases how much one can make while remaining eligible for entitlements, which puts the taxpayers' situation right back where it was.
Yes because anyone who is in anyway conservative is a NAZI. Fuck off.
Even if the editors had endless queue of high quality submissions about bits, bytes, and physical and biological sciences, they would throw some political stories in the mix. The reason is because only a relative few readers are qualified to discuss the latest in astrophysics, let's say, but anyone can jump in and talk about politics.
Even when the story is about tech (e.g. Linux kernel) many of the posts are often either jokes ("THIS is the year etc") or about industry politics (systemd, different distros, etc). So when TFA is about straight politics, you get about a 5x or 10x increase in the number of posts.
You fuckers don't even know what poverty is. You make up some imaginary bullshit line and call it poverty level. The people who define these lines need to be stripped of all their assets. Then they'll really know poverty.
it will always be the minimum wage. The ridiculous arguments about "spending power" are being thrown around as if we should raise the minimum wage to $100 or $1000.
You cannot outrun inflation. You can pull "100 studies proving otherwise" out of your communist professors ass, but it won't change reality. Hell, that's probably his goal anyways. Crash the system so the people's revolution can take place and bob avakian can make his triumphant return.
Dude, Conservatives and Libertarians are "Individualists" who want smaller State than socialists. The Statist Collectivists are the socialists, and National Socialists are socialists (go an look at their 25 point program, which is completely socialist).
"Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian" [32 mins]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I understand that so many of my fellow freedom-loving Slashdotters do not yet understand this (no matter where they think they are on the State Power vs Individual Liberty political spectrum), because the modern control-freak inheritors of the National Socialist and Soviet Socialist agendas do not want you to understand what is really going on. But here is the most important thing about politics, "In order for the State to gain power, Individuals must lose power". The National Socialists were Big State, and Far Left. Please don't fall for this simplest of Jedi Mind Tricks folks.
Here's the most useful diagram that shows the political spectrum in terms of State Power vs Individual Liberty:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_TI8b...
To claim that conservatives are "Hitler Youth Lite" not only fulfills Godwin's Law, it also show you have fallen from the disinformation from the Extreme Left (Communists) who call the Far Left (National Socialists) "Far Right" simply because *everyone* is to the right of communists (and the mainstream media sympathize with this false narrative). The further right you go on the political spectrum the more you wish individuals had power and the state does not, until you go through the true Far Right (Libertarianism) and go to the Extreme Right (anarchy - where the State has no power at all).
Here's the simple Rule of Thumb for y'all:
More State power means further Leftward on the political spectrum until the State has all the power and the individual has none (Communism)
Less State power means further Rightward on the political spectrum until the Individual and full liberty and the State has no power (Anarchy)
You simple choose how much State power you'd like to trade off against Individual Liberty.
Or you work for an ISP in tech support
One thing that has turned really wrong in the United States is the overuse and abuse of euphemisms
The so-called "tech support" job is actually not much more than the job of a 'telephone receptionist' of yesteryear
Many people like to say that they work in the 'tech sector' because it sounds 'important', but the actual fact is that most of them don't contribute in any way in innovation nor to advance the technological field
A 'telephone receptionist' job is a 'telephone receptionist' job. Calling it a 'tech support' won't change the fact that it belongst to the lowest rung of the tech sector
thanks for stating the blatantly obvious
meanwhile the government keeps paying for the meals of walmart employees
food won't go up 50%
I don't see why not. Demand for staple foods is inelastic, which means the quantity demanded won't change much when the price level becomes higher.
In fact the only thing that would go up by 50% would be labor-intensive services.
Such as picking food, a cost that the farm owner has to pass on.
Texas.
According to Martin Ford, many jobs will be taken over by automation. Then what happens? It won't matter what the wage rate is because the job won't be available; a robot will be doing it.
I'm starting to think that it's by design because every misconception is in favor of 'government' and people being ruled by force.
Watch Tom Woods dispel these myths
and one more
Liberty.
If a person is already making 15 bucks in a stressful job time to dump it for something less stressful..... yay!!
What happens to those who were making $15/hr or $16/hr? They're likely frequenting places full of minimum wage workers and their costs will now rise - inevitably - to at least some degree because of this. Further, they've all now been reduced to minimum wage (or close thereto) by the stroke of a pen.
Beyond that, how many jobs will now cost enough that automating them starts to make good financial sense? How many people with little to no skills - especially those without a good education who are most in need of steady legal employment - will find that their lack of marketable skills make them not worth hiring at this higher price point?
This is the kind of feel-good thing that bring down the middle class, raises some in the lower class (those lucky enough to ride the wave), and leaves behind large swaths of the most vulnerable people. What's going to happen is that people with little to no marketable skills in surrounding areas will get hired at the state or Federal minimum wage, gain some valuable experience, become more valuable employees, and then move or commute into LA to take jobs from poor, undereducated residents. This is an anti-poor measure masquerading as a hand-up. It will drive the middle class further down the chain (by negatively impacting their purchasing power), reduce the number of available jobs for everyone (and especially for residents), and drive many of the poor right into the ground.
Mark my words, within 5 years of this taking effect, all or nearly all indicators of poverty will worsen in LA.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Um...Hitler's party and ideology was one of national socialism. The equation of conservatives=Nazis came from the Marxists/leftists' own (academically journal-ized) ideas about subversion of ideas and for causing chaos in order to promote their own "analyses" and power to reign-in the disorder.
(Source: I find this stuff fascinating--I'm writing from a country run by a government that took over through these methods right now--though /. will see "LA" given I cannot reach much of the web without...certain techniques.)
One item not discussed is how this is a benefit for tax collectors and a much larger hit on employers than just the hourly wage difference. Wages account for about 70% of employers labor costs (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm).
Consider just payroll taxes. A person making $8/hour working costs their employer $8.61 after the 7.65% FICA taxes ($0.61 goes to the taxman). Raise that wage to $15 and the cost to the employer is $16.15 ($1.15 goes to the taxman).
Then there's additional costs pegged to wages, such as UI insurance "premiums" and workers comp. In California UI insurance has a maximum cost, but runs up to 6.2% on first $7000 of wages before maxing out. In California, employers spend $3.48 in workers comp cost per $100 in wages paid.
Benefits employers paid (vacation, sick days) account for about $2.16 per hour worked on average (about 6.9% of average hourly wage).
Raising the minimum wage entails all those additional costs too, so jumping someone from $8/hr to $15/hr changes the costs to the employer from about $10.40 to about $19.50 (assuming 30% of labor costs are non-wage). It's not a $7 additional cost, but a $9.10 additional cost (of which the majority of the difference goes into the state tax coffers *before* the wages are subjected to the income tax and sales taxes).
meanwhile the government keeps paying for the meals of walmart employees
Maybe, if it stopped, Walmart would have to pay their employees enough to eat.
Just a thought.
Would a dose of common sense do?
Consider for a moment if LA were to increase the minimum wage to $1,000/hr for all workers. What do you suppose would be the impact of that on jobs and the local economy?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Such a person is *not* living in poverty, according to the official poverty designation. Of course, we give foodstamps to people earning 130% of poverty line. And the $194 in monthly foodstamps for a single person works out to about $1.21 per hour of full-time work. So we ought to be able to increase the minimum wage by $1.21/hour and eliminate foodstamps for minimum wage earners.
Of course, in California you can use your foodstamps at fast food places, so the circle is complete!
Except Hitler Youth life would be a socialist, and thus liberal, propaganda site. Perhaps a dose of history is important. Nazi comes from National Socialist. But yes, Red Alert is a heavily biased source. So is MSNBC, NBC, CNBC, the BBC (although in a different set of directions), Fox, Sky, and every other news source, excepting perhaps the Onion. Don't attack something with a Hitler comparison until you know enough history to not look like an idiot.
When minimum labor costs get too high for valuable or popular work, we end up with a lot of "volunteers." This happens all the time in science and medicine. In general, minimum wage hasn't had an impact on this (yet). Young scientists understand that working on a high profile project or in a "real world" clinic is good for your career. There's already enough downward pressure on scientific wages to prevent even the most jaded PI from offering a minimum wage position to paid technical staff. That all said, the average (non-graduate, but paid) student lab worker at UCLA makes $14/hr, with a $9/hr minimum. $15/hr is above the minimum salary for graduate researchers on campus. (Not picking on UCLA, their salary info is public and easy to search.)
So, we're getting into territory where minimum wage laws are putting cost pressure on scientific work. Interesting and a bit sad.
Will this even apply to schools? The federal and state governments usually don't apply all labor laws to universities.
I suppose University of Washington has the same issues. It would be nice to think that some of the more bloated administrative budgets would take a haircut to pay the student workers a bit more. It would be very sad if it simply became normal for young scientists to "work" for free their first few years.
Surely can't be worse service than we get now.
How was Hitler conservative? He was a socialist - that's very much on the liberal side of things. Go back to school and learn something.
Thanks for posting propaganda as "news".
From the website:
Know a young conservative who should be on Red Alert's 2015 '30 Under 30' List? Nominate them by May 29. Read more at http://redalertpolitics.com/20...
The only way this could be a more blatant "Conservative" Propaganda site is if they named it Hitler Youth Life
You may want to read up on ad hominem attacks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem).
Unless you want to prove that "Z Pizza" in Seattle isn't closing or that the owner isn't attributing it to the new minimum wage laws.
Thanks for posting propaganda as "news".
Yes, it's propaganda, but it doesn't mean there isn't a grain of truth somewhere in there.
As a young French person who had the option to work in either France, or the United States, I can tell you that it's damn difficult for young people to find jobs in France (precisely because it's so expensive to hire workers, or even fire them). I can't tell you how humiliating it can be to look for a job in France for a young person. It's like they're doing you a favor (the risk is so high to them, so they might as well make you grovel for the opportunity).
So then, since there are so many jobless because of the high minimum wages (and other government programs), the government invents government internship programs to get around the minimum wage. So you end up getting paid less than the minimum wage, you still end up working for a private company, but this way the pay check comes from the government and the money you receive is called a stipend which is technically not a wage since you're in an internship (never mind that 40 years olds and 50 years olds can still be stuck in rotating internships all their lives of course).
or fire those employees...and then we still end up paying for them.....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Even if the surrounding cities don't raise their minimum wage levels, businesses in those cities will have to start paying their hourly employees more because of increased hourly wages in nearby Los Angeles. Why would I work at McDonald's for $8/hr in a suburb when I could drive an extra 10 minutes and make $15/hr at a McDonald's in L.A.? Answer: I wouldn't. Ergo the McDonald's in the burbs will have to offer a wage that at least approaches the current L.A. wage or it will struggle to hire staff.
I predict new L.A. riots in six months. That should be how long it takes for everyone to get fired and not get these $15/hour jobs. Businesses will close. A lot more homeless in L.A. Then they get violent.
Since apparently there is no downside to raising the minimum wage some, why not raise it a bunch?
If some is good, more is better, and much more is much more better, right?
Why not a minimum wage of $500/hr, and make almost everyone rich? (Except for the people who are already pulling in a megabuck per year.)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
A lot of people have strong opinions on raising the minimum wage, but that's all they are: opinions. Yes, there may be logic behind the arguments, but there is only one way to find out the effect of raising the minimum wage, and that's to try it and see what happens. Analysis may be difficult, but some data is better than blowing hot air.
In short: hooray for experiments! Let's see what happens!
Try to be a rational human being: make a prediction based on logic, wait for the data and analysis, and then update your beliefs! (I know, easier said than done.)
My prediction: it'll more-or-less be wash. Some good from increased wages, some people fired, somewhat higher prices to pay for labor. At the end of the day, low-wage workers will get displaced by automation anyway. In short, raising the minimum wage is nothing to get your undies in a bunch about.
Is where they indicated that neighboring cities must do the same or businesses will migrate away.
That, in a nutshell, just described democratic federal policy. It only works if there's no escape.
Bullshit article...
The minimum wage for Seattle isn't $15, it's $10 or $11.
It won't be $15 for several more years (between 2017 to 2021 depending on various thing like size of the company, type of compensation, medical benefits, etc.).
Source: http://murray.seattle.gov/minimumwage/
Hitler was a socialist.
because countries like Denmark's minimum wage is $22 an hour, even at Burger King.
so I don't believe this shit that, "companies" are going to fold.
I think that's a farce story being seeded by republicans and rich fuckers / wage enslavers.
they want us to think, the money going to individuals versus to corporations and investors is going to lead to businesses that cannot sustain themselves. but it's simply not true, the money simply diverts from some rich chumps bank account and ends up in the streets circulated to everyone else instead.
and we've looked at things like costs of items and whatnot, they're about the same.
ie, big mac in Australia costs less than the Big Macs in American yet the minimum wage and benefits are significantly worse in America, meaning they aren't paying their employees nearly the same.
this is because, every dollar a corporation saves, and every extra dollar they take in, goes to the corporation and rich investors instead of the employees and society who need it.
cut funding from social security, food stamps, health care, wages, or increase cost to take more from people's resources, all it does is go into the bank of some rich bitch to hoard and never see the light of day again.
the reason: money in the bank creates class separation, so poor become poorer and rich become richer, and rich get what they need in abundance while the poor get nothing. no education, no housing, no health care, excessively overworked, nada. money equates to power politically, whoever has money is on top and whoever doesn't have money is on the bottom enslaved to who does have it. so there's a huge incentive to keep money and prevent others from getting it, the same as they like to buy all the senate and congressional seats to control the laws that re-enforce their power letting them dominate the entire planet in safety with militaries and police there to back and protect them. ;)
obamasweapon.com
All government laws are ultimately enforced by violence or threat of violence, often referred to as "at gunpoint".
No voluntary, honest, harmless transaction between mentally competent adults should be prohibited by law.
No single person has the right to point a gun at me and say "you must pay him at least $15.00 an hour." A group does not gain new rights by adding members, so no group, howsoever formed, even if it calls itself a government, has the right to point a gun at me and say "you must pay him at least $15.00 an hour."
Minimum wages laws are a moral obscenity, and have no place in a civil society.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Public sector unions are trying this all over. They don't give a damn how many minimum wage workers lose their jobs. All they want is an increase in the minimum wage because their wages are tied to it and they get an automatic pay increase. Which they want because their automatic inflation adjustments are not as much fun since the administration decided that there isn't any inflation. And the voters won't approve regular raises based on their performance. And when the worker bees get a raise, management always gets a bigger one for themselves. 'Cause the taxpayers never run out of money...
if you are very, very lucky. If _anything_ goes wrong your whole life collapses like a house of cards.
Oh, and Jobs won't migrate away. This is the first thing everyone who perpetuates the race to the bottom (tm) likes to quote. It doesn't happen because California is a _nice_ place to live and the rich like having services. But don't take my word for it, go look at Kansas' unemployment. It's twice the national average after all their "free market" reforms.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
it's the rate businesses close after 5 years. There's no wave, just more of the same with something new to blame it on.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
then your fiends and family are probably making less. Odds are you couldn't give two shits about this "devaluing" your salary. OTOH it INCREASES the value of your salary because now instead of being trapped in a shitty job because if you left you'd have to start all over you now have the option to jumping ship and a credible threat to your boss to demand raises with.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
no kids either (I'm on /. after all). I don't get a mortgage credit. It doesn't come close to my standard deduction. And there's more and more of me. Birth rates are dropping (after all, they don't pay me enough to start a family...)
I bought a house because I could, and when the economy crashed and the 1% started stealing homes from under folks apartment rent shot through the roof.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Nobody asked them to except the theives that took the real workers wages by force. (violence).
IF they really worked hard to get $15.50 and the business paid them that much because of hard work, then they have a very powerful tool to ask for an increase "are you going to pay me minimum wage for all the hard work ?".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
the government collects 30 times as much in taxes in CONSTANT DOLLARS as they did in 1940
Bullshit the inflation from 1940 is already ~15 times. In fact looking at your next sentences:
Now, they ran a deficit in 1940 as well, but let's think about this for a minute. If $135 Billion in 1940 would have been enough to make ends meet, then how come with three times the population now, it takes $3.2 trillion?
Because 135 billion alone in 1940 is 2.2 trillion to 2.3 trillion of today in constant dollar. Any CPI calculator will confirm that baring a few % +/-. The delta of 900 million is from federal programs which did NOT exists in 1940. From environmental protection, drug enforcement, NASA, EPA, etc...etc...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The only way this could be a more blatant "Conservative" Propaganda site is if they named it Hitler Youth Life
Funny that Nazi Germany had declared that they too wanted to abolish class struggle, played games with a minimum wage, and had the full financial support of the labor unions.
Look up "Labour Front" and you will find the Nazi's, with a high minimum wage, job security, etc..
Still want to call the conservatives Nazis?
"His name was James Damore."
When California falls completely apart and run out of water we'll see who was right....
Their water situation is going to turn out the same way their energy situation did... with someone outside the State in partnership with someone inside the State exploiting the fact that Californias water isnt priced correctly... Enron 2.0
"His name was James Damore."
If they named it "Hitler Youth Life", it would actually be a progressive propaganda site. Seriously, I'm not joking: German fascists came out of the progressive movement. German conservatives were more into Catholicism and monarchy.
When all those robots, replacing people at burger places start getting my order right.
Why not be next month! $15/hr is a perfectly acceptable and reasonable wage, how can anyone appose it? It does not take 5 years to give people a wage they can live on, this is a joke, sign it into law to be started by next month.
The responses to this problem can be boiled down to advocacy for one (or a combination) of three options:
1. Taxpayers pay the government who then gives minimum wage earners welfare (socialist)
2. Businesses give more money to the workers they keep (capitalist)
3. The people at the top deserve what they have as do the people at the bottom (Social Darwinism)
Currently the situation consists of mostly 3, some 2, and a little 1.
In my opinion the better balance would be: mostly 2, some 1, and a little 3.
Just the name "Red Alert Politics" says something about their strategy, and the strategy of many other similar outlets. They have to whip people into an emotional frenzy where reason is discarded, which is how they turn members of the working class against their own interests. Sometimes they trigger such a state using religion, or race, or an emotional appeal to the instinct to protect children. As some of these things have come to mean less to people, "invisible hand"/money-worshipping nonsense preached with an air of authority have taken a big place in the arsenal. Regardless of the specific methods used to invoke a state of blind "red alert"... the goal is always to obscure the vulnerable reader's chance of thinking about the issues critically. Bonus points if your material reinforces what the reader thinks he already knows. A consistent voice of garbage from many sources is highly effective.
Entry-level, minimum wage jobs aren't supposed to be careers.
There aren't that many high paying wage or wage that pay above 15$ an hour and there is already a fierce competition for them. What are you ? Are you one of those which think the poor are lazy ? Even if the people having the lowest wage were to try to educate themselves (how ? You need money for a proper education and far more importantly : time , which most people do not have) well even then what you make is more competition for the medium salary - depressing more the wages. Just like it happen for outsourcing. And in the mean time people which do not get the medium salary despite a better education would STILL have to do the low wage stuff.
Frankly your kind of thought are so short sighted , you should get glasses for your brain.
You're right, let's get ahead of the game now and make the minimum wage in LA $1,000/hr. Better yet, do it at the Federal level
You see often cited as conservative/republican mouth point. But this is an utter stupid viewpoint - why it is modded as insightful is beyond me. Interesting maybe at most.
The reason why this is stupid is as follow : when you rise minimum wage you rise slightly the living of people but you also partially rise inflation. Rise too much and the inflation will eat most of it. So the economic of it is to rise only slightly and try to minimize inflation. Rise it to 1000$ or 100000000$ and you got hyper inflation and your $ is worth as much as zimbabwe dollar. That type of stupid argument (1000$ hourly wage) by the way is the same slippery slope argument republican make for gay mariage "but then after that they will want to marry horse or multiple people or children"
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The only way this could be a more blatant "Conservative" Propaganda site is if they named it Hitler Youth Life
The irony is that you seem to not know what the actual name of the Nazi party really was:
We called them the Nazi Party in English, but their actual abbreviation was "NSDAP"
What does that stand for in German?
National Socialist German Workers' Party
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
Read up, you might learn something...
I don't think it will work, too much randomness in the data. Sofia Koutsouveli
Price floor higher than equlibrium price causes unemployment. Econ101.
If you want to claim otherwise, the burden is on you; and as claiming that demand curve for labour is not downward-sloping is quite an extraordinary claim, an extraordinary evidence would be quite welcome.
And if it is not clear: inflation, inequality, fairness, living expenses etc. have nothing to do with the claim "price floor causes unemployment".
... did you just self-censor the word "pissed"? Are you 8 years old?
Also, the largest period of economic growth in American history was accompanied by strong labor unions and rising wages for the middle and lower classes. This is how a capitalist economy works. Conservative policies like disempowering labor and increasing financial inequality have never had any documented positive effects on our economy and in fact have been responsible for every recession and economic downturn we've ever experienced.
But maybe a grasp of economic policy and history is too much to expect from someone who can't spell six-letter words.
Remember Ernest Rutherford, the arrogant physicist who was saying that all of science is either physics or stamp collecting?. Here on Slashdot, because many of us are self or well-employed developers and computer scientists, we think that we can easily figure out even the most vexing problems relating to the economy. In particular minimum wages are of course for slackers, never mind that first summer job we got ages ago.
How about some interesting myth busters?.
http://federal-budget.insidego...
"The U.S. government collected $80.9B in tax revenues and spent a total of $117B in its 1940 budget" So it was not 135 but 117, which is near enough but nowhere near the inflation adjusted number. I call BS on that because an inflation adjusted number for 135 would be around 10 billion 1940 dollar.
By the way the number is confirmed by government spend in % of GDP : it was 10% in 1940 a year which was *specially* suspiciously used, and it was between 16% and 22% ever since after WW2. The fact that in percentage GDP it stayed stable or had barely growth completely destroy the original argument.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
We need more of this around the world. It can't be that people work 3 jobs and barely get by why others buy a new car every year or a new cellphone or whatnot and do no more important stuff than the cleaning lady or the cook. ... And no, shoving around papers or hacking up the next bazillionth Twitter or IRC clone or setting up the next Wordpress installation that's going to be totally abandoned 15 months in is not more imporant than cleaning. Emphasis mine!
If it's not worth paying 15$ it's probably not worth being done by a human in the first place and should be left or automated. And if you're not ready to spend 15$ but insist you have cleaning personell you're an asocial *sshole and ought to clean up your own dirt.
My 3 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Minimum wage is the base rate for for most workers. If the minimum is 16K a year, entry level for skilled labor is 20-22K, 2 year 25K, 4 year, under 30K. My employer has been starting Bachelor Degree'd fresh outa college at 27K. If the minimum was 20-25K, they would have to pay college graduates better. The money is certainly there, we are making record sales & record profits.
Why have wages been flat for so long now? Holding the min wage down is part of the reason. The money is certainly there. Everyone deserves a cut.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
It's not about wages at all. It's about increasing the amount of tax collected by government. That's why there is a minimum wage in the first place.
Social Security and Medicare are insolvent in big ways looking forward. What better way to increase their income than to raise the amount of taxes collected from low-wage workers?
Increasing the minimum wage will lead to employers looking to ways to minimize the high cost of labor. Automation such as voice recognition for order taking is one such example. Robots, even as simple as Siri, will take the low end jobs and then more people will be out of jobs and competing for the lowest paid jobs. Look at what happened in Detroit and other areas like that which now have very high unemployment rates. Government price fixing produces problems.
I'm curious to see whether we will see a flood of immigration to cities with the high minimum wage, and a corresponding increase in cost of living that effectively negates the effects of the higher wage through reduced purchasing power.
Why not make it $100/hr? That would really make the bottom earners more equal with the top earners!
You're paying $5 for a burger because the burger costs $3, the labor $1, and $1 is extracted as profit (arbitrarily).
In this scenario, how is the $3 for a burger broken out into labor and non-labor costs?
Everybody posting comments on this article is required to add either the words "... in the long term", or "... in the short term".
If either of these phrases is omitted, the comment will be modded down.
You have been warned.
Wasn't it an economist who said something like "In the long term, we're all dead."?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
$15 really isn't that much, especially in LA. Why not make it, say, $25?
In this scenario, how is the $3 for a burger broken out into labor and non-labor costs?
The logic still applies. Almost no good or service has 100% of its cost in labor. You need raw materials, equipment, tools, land/space, etc.
In the cases where labor is near 100% of the costs, people don't usually charge anywhere near minimum wage. They may be celebrities and you pay them just for their presence. Or they're great thinkers, and you're paying them to think. Or they're great prostitutes, and you're just paying them for their body. Or they're a porn star who's also very smart, and you're paying for all three!
Names mean little. In Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory book series, the Nazi analogue was called the Freedom Party.
If you want to understand Hitler, just realize he would promise anything to get his goals, and even then, realize that his eating vegetables didn't make doing that evil.
If there is anything to learn from Godwin, it is that mentioning the Nazis is likely to be less than useful.
and he posted at 11:42PM he probably typed that in the nude, so no.
Imagine: you want to sell your car for $4000, and I want to buy it for $4000. Now imagine the government tells you can't sell the car for that price, so the deal is off.
What is the difference between that, and mandatory minimum wage?
Stop the flood of illegals, and stop the flood of visa workers, and wages would rise naturally from the laws of supply and demand.
Yes, it was Keynes, the declared darling of Democrats, and the secret darling of Republicans.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
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"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
So you stopped reading at the name, and trusted the Nazis to not lie to you?
And they were socialist in name only, essentially. Their blend of nationalism, military-industrial complex governing the country, etc. aren't at all socialist, and those were the driving forces behind their position. Hitler didn't instigate a single welfare program under his leadership, and in fact closed many, opting to send people to work camps or have them killed, or simply let them starve. Vanity and Nazi-favouring programs were instigated, but they were small in reach and designed to be propaganda from the very beginning. The genuine welfare systems which were in place during his rule were there before he gained power. They even privatised great swathes of the country's infrastructure & defense, including privatising 13 of the country's arsenals.
You might want to learn a thing or two yourself!
That's your argument? If you blow the numbers out to orders of magnitudes greater, it stops making sense? What a surprise! What are you going to do next? Refuse to fill your car's tank because if you tried to put 10,000 gallons in it it wouldn't fit? Not buy a single coffee because you can't drink 50 at a go? Amazing.
If they do, that is. And then only until they get new jobs at the newly-appearing competition. Without changing anything, you will be paying for Walmart's employees' food indefinitely.
Great, now illegals will come across the border by the millions.
Correction, I meant to say "bell-shaped" curve, not "bell curve". The second is a specific family of curves. (No Kardashian puns intended.)
Table-ized A.I.
A big problem with MW jobs isn't just the shitty per-hour rate, but the shitty number of hours. $15/h is nice but not so helpful if you only get 10h/week.
I wonder if anywhere has address a "minimum weekly pay" or something of the like, which would put pressure on businesses to actually provide regular staff with useful hours rather than just bringing in a ton of people all at unlivable hours. The latter tends to put people in situations where they're working multiple jobs to get enough pay-hours for bills, but go through hell trying to get their hours to line up (because generally they're also not consistent) and have no time for any personal life.
LOL! Wipes tear from eye. Wow. Just wow.
That is so wrong. This has been tried for the last number of decades. It absolutely does not work. This was justification for tax breaks for the rich. As it turns out the rich manage to pretty much stay rich by not spending their money. We see today more than ever before a disparity between the rich and poor. That whole 1% thing remember? They fact that you mention "Trickle Down Economics" and in the same breath call someone else "economic illiterate" is just marvelous. I bet you think that the invisible hand of the market solves all issues as well?
While you are right, in one sense, governments are pretty limited in what they can really achieve, they do have an important part to play in regulation, if only to try to prevent groups of people from gaming the system to further enriching themselves at the unfair cost of others. One can argue how successful they are in that, particularly in the USA, where the regulators are in bed with the industries they are supposed to be regulating, receiving monetary donations for favorable considerations.
As to the minimum wage increase. It has little to do with economics. It has more to do with the protection of the most vulnerable citizens. One might argue about the what the ultimate role of government really is, but generally speaking taking care of those people who make up the nation certainly qualifies. In a secondary way, it is also a cost saving measure if said government ends up having to pay for it one way or another, through welfare, or other programs. The whole story about the minimum wage workers at Walmart being the biggest food stamp users, where essentially Walmart is gaming the system for more profit at the expense of the general tax payer.
In summery: Trickle Down economics is complete BS, and you are either A) an idiot or, B) wealthy and it is in your best interests, and who cares about anyone else, the nation you belong to included.
How much of the cost of producing raw materials is labor? How much of the cost of producing equipment is labor?
Not 100%.
You aren't being Socratic here. You're just acting like a child, asking the why behind the why repeatedly.
Why not implement a negative tax rate instead of a higher minimum wage? We could have the same benefits as a minimum wage with these additional benefits:
* Tie the bonus to having a job
* Burden is on government instead of business
* Don't overpay high school kiddies who aren't heads of households
Republicans are against that because they don't want to help poor people. But why are Democrats against it? just because they specifically want to burden businesses?
The company is worth a lot of money because they pay their workers minimum wage, while using its disproportionate size advantage to force suppliers to very cheap prices, while selling said goods cheaper than their competition. That is pretty much their business model. What is being said is that the workers of said company deserve some fair compensation for the accumulation of that wealth, which in the form of shares, is owned by a very few.
It is a pretty basic argument that has been around for a long time. It is pretty much how unions got started, and why Walmart fights unionization so fervently.
I bet you're the type of person that thinks the CEO that pays themselves a 1$ salary but gets 60$ Million in stocks doesn't make any income either.
...people who are currently making less than $15 an hour - will they get bumped up by the same amount difference between the old and new minimum wage? Example, someone making $11 now. Will they get a raise to $18ish an hour, or just to 15?
if not 18ish, then they got fucked by bottomfeeders...
My roommate mentioned this morning that LA is raising the minimum wage, and that California should do the same thing so he could make more money. I pointed out that he already made more than minimum wage in Silicon Valley (~$10 per hour), not including the commissions he gets from selling cellphones. If he spent more time learning how to sell than bitch about his boss, he would make more money.
Like it or not, every business is the subject of politicians' experiments. For example, the minimum wage exists in the first place, and CA has a higher minimum wage than the federal minimum wage. Every law is an experiment because its unintended consequences are unknown. (Hell, even the intended consequences are sometimes unknown.) This experiment is getting more press than others, but the amount of press and the effect of the experiment are two very different things.
No matter how much you pay the bottom 10%, it will always be the bottom 10%. When someone does a job that can be done better by a machine, what kind of pay do they deserve?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
If you're flipping burgers in high school, or even while you're in your 20s going to college, you're doing the right thing. Just about every successful person I know started out doing menial jobs at a young age. Bonus points if you pay extra attention to how your boss does his/her job while you're doing yours.
Exactly! And if you're in your 30s and still working at McDonald's since high school or college, you're probably a manager by now making 60,000 a year with stock options, 401(k), paid vacation, health insurance (even before ACA), dental, vision, etc. Probably exploring opening your own franchise and netting a cool quarter million dollars a year.
The most successful franchise owners are former employees because they have the experience and the know-how. They know what makes a good boss, a good employee, and what makes a great location for a burger place. Flipping burgers isn't a joke, and it's actually a great career option.
allow anyone to buy anymore bread. If you put it into loaves of bread per hour and you used to be able to afford 8 loaves of bread an hour at 8.60 an hour or whatever then now you will still be able to buy 8 loaves of bread at 15 dollars an hour because the cost of the bread is going to go up. Raise minimum wage to 1000 dollars an hour and you still will then have workers making more, IE 26,000 an hour etc at that point bread would cost 165 dollars a loaf and everyone would wonder why they could still only buy 8 loafs of bread for their 1 hour of work. All other prices would rise in lock step, or LA if it was the only region that did this would lose thousands of jobs to states and cities that did not do this, thus turning LA into a bigger craphole than it already is.
Good luck with the higher wages when their are no jobs to pay them.
I am all for fair compensation, but am I truly frightened when U.S. workers make more in one hour than Mexican workers make in a day.
If jobs are to remain, our workforce must be far more productive than our global competition. We should be demanding more worker education, which would likely impact wages far more than legislative mandate. Simply making the workforce more expensive with no realistic improvements will only enlarge the class of the permanent unemployed.
Regardless of where minimum wage goes or does not go. Labour needs to be valued higher. Over the last few decades we have increased in efficiencies so that we need less labour to produce more, though we have not increased what we value labour at. So we have been able to produce more, from less (both labour and materials), but that trade off has not helped increase labour costs.
A re-balancing needs to happen where we value labour more than we do other costs of business, then maybe everything might slowly shift back into focus where Walmart employes can afford to shop at Walmart for the goods that cost very little to make in the first place.
It would be interesting to see the ratio of labour costs vs material costs it took to produce various types of objects in the past vs now... I realize its hard to compare on a quality perspective as many items we use day to day are much more productive than those in the past due to invention/inovation, but I'm sure there are some examples and I would think the ratio has moved towards more cost on the materials and less on labour than they did in the past.
The root of the problem is that low wage employees are often poor negotiators, and are not in a position of strength to begin with. They are easily taken advantage of by explotative employers, and landlords. Some checks and balances need to be in place to protect this class of workers, but there also needs to be incentives for the minimum wage worker to improve thier own marketability in the job market.
The biggest expense for a minimum wage worker is housing.
Just rasing the minimum wage will cause rents to rise as landlords will be in a position of strength. Some areas have rent control which would mitigate this,
but I would expect landlords would increase rents in the low end of the market to capture some of this money.
Minimum wage coupled with rent control might be workable if food and transportation costs are kept marginal.
All of this artifical control will mess with the markets, but markets can't be left to 100% capitalist control. There have to be limits.
Cause it means that a decent wage in southern VA equals minimum wage in LA, Cal. Yes, $15 an hour DOES suck, but the norm around this shit hole is about $7-8 an hour. I miss D.C.
since then the US has had several.
And US debt is much higher than the French one as a share of GDP.
Although I have become convinced that the income gap in this country has probably grown too large, these " top 7% of households earn more than the bottom 67%"-type comparisons really fundamentally bother me. I never, ever want to live in a country where the top X% earn exactly X% of the income.
Wrong. You can't consume what hasn't been produced. Production comes first; production is fundamental.
He's partly right, and you're both in left field.
Wars are great at both consumption and production.
Do wars raise or lower the standard of living?
It's a tricky question. On the one hand you have a lot of goods and services that are not improving the quality of life. On the other due to the patriotic impulse and desire to survive you have greatly increased productivity on All goods and services.
You need to look at:
- How efficiently does the Production/Consumption improve the quality of life.
- How efficiently is the Production/Consumption improving future quality of life? Like R&D and getting better tools.
The economics guys like to talk about these things in dollars. In dollar terms a hand grenade and a good steak dinner are about the same, however which one will improve the quality of life of the user?
Are you certain of that? Glancing at unemployment rates CA has been lowering their rate much faster than TX over the last 5 years. The gap is less than half what it was in 2010
If anything can be deduced from unemployment rates, CA is doing better than TX lately. I bet energy prices are going to cause some drag in the next couple years, too.
Man, you really need that seminar!
In the long term there have been some really intellegent users of /.
In the short term, we've had people like you.
Really? Ask the UAW folks who all lost their jobs when Detroit basically shut down. The Unions are greedy! I know what those UAW folks were making and getting for benefits. It was WAY out of line. Their greed helped in the $$$ losses of the auto makers.
Yes unions helped with decent working hours and such - but all that is GONE! When Obama, the Democrats and Republicans pass TPP - kiss ALL the jobs in the U.S. BYE BYE! Foreigners will move in and take them all.No union will be able to stop it.
Get a clue.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Ah, another idiot deceived by Nazi propaganda. Hint: any relationship between Nazi public announcements and reality was purely tactical, to make the propaganda more believable. The Nazis were tightly involved with private companies, which is the opposite of Socialism.
I can find many cases of Conservative totalitarianism, using Conservative as having something to do with conservation of current institutions. Ever heard of absolute monarchies? Was it the conservatives plotting to overthrow them or the left-wingers? Was Louis XVI a flaming leftist and were the revolutionaries conservatives?
If your answer is "yes" than you're using the word wildly differently from how most people use it, to the point of uselessness. If your answer is "no", you're directly contradicting your rules of thumb.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It appears you're reaching the end of your patience. So I'll try to sum up the rest of my questions in one final question: How would I go about finding costs for a particular good that can provably not be connected to labor?
Unlike Capitalism, Globalization is Zero-sum WITHOUT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Casteism
Now you only need 2 jobs to pay the rent