Here in Ontario, Canada, we raised the minimum wage from $10.25 to $11.00, and unemployment went down in the following months and year, from around 7.5 %to 6.75% (source). While that doesn't prove that minimum wage increases never result in unemployment rises, it does disprove that they always result in unemployment rises.
As others have pointed out, Canada made a small change and saw small changes in unemployment. It would be quite hard to measure the effect because so many other things changed at the same time. As a counter-example, Seattle seems to be losing jobs as Washington state gains them. It's still early so we don't know if this trend will hold.
Finally, I don't know any economist who asserts raising the minimum wage will always raise unemployment. At most they'll say that holding all else equal, that's a likely outcome. Problem is, it's virtually impossible to hold all else equal. It's also entirely possible employers adjust in other ways, such as cutting overtime, reducing benefits, reducing staffing, or increasing automation. Or they may raise prices or cut their profit margins. As it turns out, those last two are very hard to do in highly competitive markets (and many low-wage markets are also highly competitive).
The rich are people who pay only capital gains taxes at roughly 35% percent
Interesting definition, not one I've ever heard before. Typically "rich" is defined as an income percentile, i.e. someone who's earnings are greater than 90%, 95%, 99% of the population. Virtually all of them have earnings in addition to capital gains.
...which is far lower then normal humans pay. They are also those like Mitt Romney who have hundred of million of dollars in an IRA, which is impossible for normal humans as well.
For perspective, from Wikipedia, the top federal effective tax rate (income plus payroll) is around 30%. Paying 35% on capital gains is pretty steep in comparison. You might want to research your facts. Just sayin'.
(Yes, yes, this is Slashdot. Why would I expect accurate facts?)
Tax breaks are free money, and they invariably go to the rich.
Wrong. they need everyone to pay more so that they can contribute more without giving their competition an advantage. They want to pay more AND they want to maintain a level playing field AND they don't want to be sued by stock holders.
Oh, this is a corporate tax? The article sure seemed to be talking about an individual income tax.
It seems pretty plausible they want everyone to contribute out of "fairness", whatever that means.However, I think they'd have a much stronger case if they lead by example. It's cheap talk to say you're willing to pay more knowing it's unlikely you'll actually need to do it. Of as an old boss put it, "money talks, bulls*** walks."
Competition is why. Think about it. If `everyone` has to pay, the playing field is level.
I haven't followed Buffet's argument. Could you summarize or reference it? I don't understand what competition or playing field you're talking about. If I'm paying income tax, I've already earned the money and I'm no longer competing with anyone.
Knocking yet another entire class of labor (taxi drivers, truck drivers, bus drivers, delivery drivers, and so on) out of the ranks of the employed. No one wants to address this fact, but the reality is that driving is often a "job of last resort" for some people, and often the only job paying a decent wage that the holder is qualified to do.
Here's the thing. The world is complicated. It's very, very hard, (read: "impossible") to figure out a net utility for any new idea. That is to say, it's impossible to decide whether society is, on a whole, better off with X or without X. I have no idea how to balance the benefit I get being able to play Angry Birds while commuting against the immigrants who no longer have a starting rung toward the American Dream.
But actually, I do. While I'm glad low-skilled people have a way to earn a living now, you need to remember their job is a net cost. It's using up their limited time on the planet for no actual productive end. I mean, seriously, if we had replicators, transporters, and didn't need cash, I'd much rather they wrote poetry than drive me around. There's no need to waste people's precious time doing drudge work which can be automated. The only question is how to help them find something else they can do, given their limited skills and/or experience.
The vast majority of road pollution today comes from semi trucks.
A surprising amount of congestion and pollution also comes from cars circling the block looking for parking. One hope is that autonomous cars could self-park somewhere else, reducing congestion around popular destinations. Any system which avoided you needing to park near your destination (mass transit, Uber, taxis, robocars) has the same effect.
Back to TFA, the world is complicated. It's hard to say whether robocars will increase, decrease, or leave unchanged emissions. I expect they'll change too much other stuff for anyone to accurately predict the new equilibrium.
We don't need pennies or nickles. Dimes are pretty marginal. Just round all prices to the nearest quarter and be done with it.
ObCorruptionTheory: Blanks for pennies and nickles are only made by one company, Jarden Zinc Products. There's a story that this company lobbied hard enough to keep the penny around. Looking at their web site, they have enough other irons in the fire that they'd get by if they had to.
And in more context, the US Mint uses something like 23,000 tonnes of zinc on pennies each year, compared to worldwide zinc production of 11 million tonnes. That means pennies use something like 0.2% of the zinc produced each year.
Without that demand, nobody would have had a job and no economic growth would have happened.
But take the premise in TFA seriously for a second. Keynes's prediction should have the average work-week around 20 hours by now. To have our current productivity, we would therefore need twice as many jobs as we currently have. But we were reach full employment long before that, so we would have to have significantly lower productivity and consumption while still having enough jobs to go around.
Wait, are you observing that if productivity stayed constant and people worked 20-hour weeks, we'd need twice as many jobs? Yeah, that's kinda exactly not the point. Keynes' obervation was productivity is increasing and so with a 20 hour week, we could produce the same amount of stuff with the same number of workers and have the same standard of living. It's that last part which didn't hold, we don't have the same standard of living, we have a way more expensive one.
And of course the objection is -- "But don't people who work 20-hour weeks get paid less?" And the point of TFA is that NO -- they still get paid a living wage. The difference in the Keynes future prediction and what we actually got is that that extra money has been siphoned off to the richest folks, rather than rewarding average workers, who might then have to work less hours to still live comfortably.
I don't see that. Even the very poor today live better than the middle class of the '30s. Wealth has spread around and lifted almost all boats. Yes, there still are desperately poor people living under viaducts. But almost anyone who has a job can afford a home, electricity, phone service, a car, air conditioning, refrigeration, plenty of food, good clothes, a TV, etc. etc. How is that not spreading the wealth?>/P?
...an elitist lock-out culture of Harvards and Yale's only the wealthy can afford, it stays that way.
Sorry, no.
Have you looked at the actual costs of the Ivys once you take financial aid into account? List price is something like $65k but the typical financial aid package is something like $40k. I just took a look at the Yale financial aid page and there are many, many students from all income ranges. The poorer students pay basically nothing. Harvard is the same way. Near as I can tell, the easiest way to finance an Ivy League education is to be dirt poor.
(Disclosure: my daughter just applied to Yale and I have no idea how I'm going to afford it if she gets in. I'm not paying list price, it's too much.)
For example, say I have 100k and am looking for a place to live. In one scenario I put 20% down on a 400k home, pay a bunch of closing costs and such. I'm left with a little leftover. I get a mortgage, build equity. Five or ten years alter I need to sell the house, but the value has fallen 20%. I pay more costs to get the place sold, and if I'm lucky, get 80-100k back.
Other scenario. I pay rent approximate to my mortgage. My 100k is invested, pretty conservatively, let's say it does 4% a year. At the end of the five years I have around 120k.
Clearly there are cases where renting would have turned out better than buying. For most of the 20th and 21st century, housing prices have gone up over the long term. If you held on for at least 7 years, you were very likely to get a positive return. Not always and not everywhere, for sure, but generally a good bet. Similarly, investing our 100k over 7 years in the stock market is almost always a good bet. It's quite rare for the market to be down seven years after you buy even if you buy at a peak.
Here's the thing: if one turns out to be a generally better bet than the other, lots of people will notice, money will slosh around, returns will change, and it'll turn out to be an even bet again. There's never such a thing as easy money just like there aren't $20 bills lying on sidewalks.
...but if we stopped subsidizing the first scenario (mortgage interest deduction, capital gains exeptions, etc) there would be even more scenarios where the renter builds a lot more wealth.
The market corrects for this so it'll mostly be a crap shoot. If we stopped subsidizing home ownership (and as a home owner, I support this idea), home prices would go down (since people can't afford to pay as much). Around here in a normal market, rental prices generally more or less equal the price of owning. When they don't, people flock from the expensive one to the cheap one. I expect the same would happen.
I can't decide that I want a smaller loan and just move out of my old big one.
Depends on what you used the loan for, doesn't it? If you borrowed to finance consumption (vacation, big screen TV, bling) you're probably stuck. I assume that's what the grandposter and you had in mind.
If you borrowed to invest in a productive asset (e.g. a house which appreciated or a business), you probably can get out. College loans are an interesting corner case. You borrowed to invest in yourself. Hopefully your degree pays a dividend but it's not like you can sell the education and pay off the loan.
But I first need one answer: What are we going to do with the waste?
Of course. My understanding is many of the new reactor designs either burn their own waste (travelling wave reactors), don't generate the "traditional" waste (thorium reactors), or have safer ways of dealing with it (pebble bed or on-site breeder reactors). I'm not a nuclear scientist but I guarantee any new designs will address the two technical stumbling blocks of fail-safe design and waste processing.
The real issue is the quality of the tests. There should be an actual tailpipe sensor and a standard driving course rather than a dynamo test.
I'm sure the EPA and EU are feverishly specifying those tests right now. It's a hard job, just like specifying any benchmark or performance test. The test needs to be realistic but it also needs to be repeatable, and you need to be able to complete it in a reasonable amount of time. Just what is a "standard" driving course? City stop-and-go? Hills? Mountains? Freeway (US Interstate at 65 MPH or Autobahn at 95)? How many passengers and how much cargo? What temperature, humidity, and wind? AC, headlights, and blasting stereo? Leadfoot driver, cruise control, or someone nursing every MPG they can get?
You have to have a pre-specified test so the car companies know what to design for and so they can prepare. But if you try to include all those factors, it becomes really hard to execute the test without some human judgement and wiggle room.
Anyone with a working brain knows thats a load of arse covering BS by a boss lined up against the wall. There is simply no way a "couple of engineers" could so radically fool the rest of their colleagues and alter the code without anyone noticing the changes. Not only that we're supposed to believe none of the test engineers noticed the major discrepancy in emissions pre-release and no one in the heirachy asked how such amazing emissions AND performane were being achieved? Pul-lease.
You've never developed software in a large company, have you?
No one past a first level manager has much clue how the code works. Not even the grunts writing the code understand all the implications of the code. I can imagine one group was tasked with optimizing the code to pass the tests and never bothered to test the emissions in the real world. Why would they, that's not their job and they're very busy. I can also imagine another group optimizing for driving power and also never bothering to test for emissions. Why would they, that's covered by Hans and Jurgen in the emissions test group. And I can totally imagine that upper management never thought about the implications of each group on each other.
Slashdot Mirror
But then again, it may not...
Here in Ontario, Canada, we raised the minimum wage from $10.25 to $11.00, and unemployment went down in the following months and year, from around 7.5 %to 6.75% (source). While that doesn't prove that minimum wage increases never result in unemployment rises, it does disprove that they always result in unemployment rises.
As others have pointed out, Canada made a small change and saw small changes in unemployment. It would be quite hard to measure the effect because so many other things changed at the same time. As a counter-example, Seattle seems to be losing jobs as Washington state gains them. It's still early so we don't know if this trend will hold.
Finally, I don't know any economist who asserts raising the minimum wage will always raise unemployment. At most they'll say that holding all else equal, that's a likely outcome. Problem is, it's virtually impossible to hold all else equal. It's also entirely possible employers adjust in other ways, such as cutting overtime, reducing benefits, reducing staffing, or increasing automation. Or they may raise prices or cut their profit margins. As it turns out, those last two are very hard to do in highly competitive markets (and many low-wage markets are also highly competitive).
This is Business as usual in the Corporate States of America.
Yes, it is. You'd be irresponsible not to at least ask. The ROI seems fabulous.
Doesn't mean we need to say yes. I'm at "yeah, no."
The rich are people who pay only capital gains taxes at roughly 35% percent
Interesting definition, not one I've ever heard before. Typically "rich" is defined as an income percentile, i.e. someone who's earnings are greater than 90%, 95%, 99% of the population. Virtually all of them have earnings in addition to capital gains.
...which is far lower then normal humans pay. They are also those like Mitt Romney who have hundred of million of dollars in an IRA, which is impossible for normal humans as well.
For perspective, from Wikipedia, the top federal effective tax rate (income plus payroll) is around 30%. Paying 35% on capital gains is pretty steep in comparison. You might want to research your facts. Just sayin'.
(Yes, yes, this is Slashdot. Why would I expect accurate facts?)
Tax breaks are free money, and they invariably go to the rich.
*caugh*EITC*caugh*standard deduction*caugh*dependent exemption*caugh*mortgage interest deduction*caugh*
Wrong. they need everyone to pay more so that they can contribute more without giving their competition an advantage. They want to pay more AND they want to maintain a level playing field AND they don't want to be sued by stock holders.
Oh, this is a corporate tax? The article sure seemed to be talking about an individual income tax.
It seems pretty plausible they want everyone to contribute out of "fairness", whatever that means.However, I think they'd have a much stronger case if they lead by example. It's cheap talk to say you're willing to pay more knowing it's unlikely you'll actually need to do it. Of as an old boss put it, "money talks, bulls*** walks."
Competition is why. Think about it. If `everyone` has to pay, the playing field is level.
I haven't followed Buffet's argument. Could you summarize or reference it? I don't understand what competition or playing field you're talking about. If I'm paying income tax, I've already earned the money and I'm no longer competing with anyone.
Of course, in the US the top 1% own 40% of the countries wealth, and the top 10% own somewhere around 80%.
We are talking about income tax, not wealth tax. Please stay on topic(-ish).
Knocking yet another entire class of labor (taxi drivers, truck drivers, bus drivers, delivery drivers, and so on) out of the ranks of the employed. No one wants to address this fact, but the reality is that driving is often a "job of last resort" for some people, and often the only job paying a decent wage that the holder is qualified to do.
Here's the thing. The world is complicated. It's very, very hard, (read: "impossible") to figure out a net utility for any new idea. That is to say, it's impossible to decide whether society is, on a whole, better off with X or without X. I have no idea how to balance the benefit I get being able to play Angry Birds while commuting against the immigrants who no longer have a starting rung toward the American Dream.
But actually, I do. While I'm glad low-skilled people have a way to earn a living now, you need to remember their job is a net cost. It's using up their limited time on the planet for no actual productive end. I mean, seriously, if we had replicators, transporters, and didn't need cash, I'd much rather they wrote poetry than drive me around. There's no need to waste people's precious time doing drudge work which can be automated. The only question is how to help them find something else they can do, given their limited skills and/or experience.
The vast majority of road pollution today comes from semi trucks.
A surprising amount of congestion and pollution also comes from cars circling the block looking for parking. One hope is that autonomous cars could self-park somewhere else, reducing congestion around popular destinations. Any system which avoided you needing to park near your destination (mass transit, Uber, taxis, robocars) has the same effect.
Back to TFA, the world is complicated. It's hard to say whether robocars will increase, decrease, or leave unchanged emissions. I expect they'll change too much other stuff for anyone to accurately predict the new equilibrium.
We don't need pennies or nickles. Dimes are pretty marginal. Just round all prices to the nearest quarter and be done with it.
ObCorruptionTheory: Blanks for pennies and nickles are only made by one company, Jarden Zinc Products. There's a story that this company lobbied hard enough to keep the penny around. Looking at their web site, they have enough other irons in the fire that they'd get by if they had to.
And in more context, the US Mint uses something like 23,000 tonnes of zinc on pennies each year, compared to worldwide zinc production of 11 million tonnes. That means pennies use something like 0.2% of the zinc produced each year.
Without that demand, nobody would have had a job and no economic growth would have happened.
But take the premise in TFA seriously for a second. Keynes's prediction should have the average work-week around 20 hours by now. To have our current productivity, we would therefore need twice as many jobs as we currently have. But we were reach full employment long before that, so we would have to have significantly lower productivity and consumption while still having enough jobs to go around.
Wait, are you observing that if productivity stayed constant and people worked 20-hour weeks, we'd need twice as many jobs? Yeah, that's kinda exactly not the point. Keynes' obervation was productivity is increasing and so with a 20 hour week, we could produce the same amount of stuff with the same number of workers and have the same standard of living. It's that last part which didn't hold, we don't have the same standard of living, we have a way more expensive one.
And of course the objection is -- "But don't people who work 20-hour weeks get paid less?" And the point of TFA is that NO -- they still get paid a living wage. The difference in the Keynes future prediction and what we actually got is that that extra money has been siphoned off to the richest folks, rather than rewarding average workers, who might then have to work less hours to still live comfortably.
I don't see that. Even the very poor today live better than the middle class of the '30s. Wealth has spread around and lifted almost all boats. Yes, there still are desperately poor people living under viaducts. But almost anyone who has a job can afford a home, electricity, phone service, a car, air conditioning, refrigeration, plenty of food, good clothes, a TV, etc. etc. How is that not spreading the wealth?>/P?
...an elitist lock-out culture of Harvards and Yale's only the wealthy can afford, it stays that way.
Sorry, no.
Have you looked at the actual costs of the Ivys once you take financial aid into account? List price is something like $65k but the typical financial aid package is something like $40k. I just took a look at the Yale financial aid page and there are many, many students from all income ranges. The poorer students pay basically nothing. Harvard is the same way. Near as I can tell, the easiest way to finance an Ivy League education is to be dirt poor.
(Disclosure: my daughter just applied to Yale and I have no idea how I'm going to afford it if she gets in. I'm not paying list price, it's too much.)
For example, say I have 100k and am looking for a place to live. In one scenario I put 20% down on a 400k home, pay a bunch of closing costs and such. I'm left with a little leftover. I get a mortgage, build equity. Five or ten years alter I need to sell the house, but the value has fallen 20%. I pay more costs to get the place sold, and if I'm lucky, get 80-100k back.
Other scenario. I pay rent approximate to my mortgage. My 100k is invested, pretty conservatively, let's say it does 4% a year. At the end of the five years I have around 120k.
Clearly there are cases where renting would have turned out better than buying. For most of the 20th and 21st century, housing prices have gone up over the long term. If you held on for at least 7 years, you were very likely to get a positive return. Not always and not everywhere, for sure, but generally a good bet. Similarly, investing our 100k over 7 years in the stock market is almost always a good bet. It's quite rare for the market to be down seven years after you buy even if you buy at a peak.
Here's the thing: if one turns out to be a generally better bet than the other, lots of people will notice, money will slosh around, returns will change, and it'll turn out to be an even bet again. There's never such a thing as easy money just like there aren't $20 bills lying on sidewalks.
...but if we stopped subsidizing the first scenario (mortgage interest deduction, capital gains exeptions, etc) there would be even more scenarios where the renter builds a lot more wealth.
The market corrects for this so it'll mostly be a crap shoot. If we stopped subsidizing home ownership (and as a home owner, I support this idea), home prices would go down (since people can't afford to pay as much). Around here in a normal market, rental prices generally more or less equal the price of owning. When they don't, people flock from the expensive one to the cheap one. I expect the same would happen.
I can't decide that I want a smaller loan and just move out of my old big one.
Depends on what you used the loan for, doesn't it? If you borrowed to finance consumption (vacation, big screen TV, bling) you're probably stuck. I assume that's what the grandposter and you had in mind.
If you borrowed to invest in a productive asset (e.g. a house which appreciated or a business), you probably can get out. College loans are an interesting corner case. You borrowed to invest in yourself. Hopefully your degree pays a dividend but it's not like you can sell the education and pay off the loan.
But I first need one answer: What are we going to do with the waste?
Of course. My understanding is many of the new reactor designs either burn their own waste (travelling wave reactors), don't generate the "traditional" waste (thorium reactors), or have safer ways of dealing with it (pebble bed or on-site breeder reactors). I'm not a nuclear scientist but I guarantee any new designs will address the two technical stumbling blocks of fail-safe design and waste processing.
The real issue is the quality of the tests. There should be an actual tailpipe sensor and a standard driving course rather than a dynamo test.
I'm sure the EPA and EU are feverishly specifying those tests right now. It's a hard job, just like specifying any benchmark or performance test. The test needs to be realistic but it also needs to be repeatable, and you need to be able to complete it in a reasonable amount of time. Just what is a "standard" driving course? City stop-and-go? Hills? Mountains? Freeway (US Interstate at 65 MPH or Autobahn at 95)? How many passengers and how much cargo? What temperature, humidity, and wind? AC, headlights, and blasting stereo? Leadfoot driver, cruise control, or someone nursing every MPG they can get?
You have to have a pre-specified test so the car companies know what to design for and so they can prepare. But if you try to include all those factors, it becomes really hard to execute the test without some human judgement and wiggle room.
Anyone with a working brain knows thats a load of arse covering BS by a boss lined up against the wall. There is simply no way a "couple of engineers" could so radically fool the rest of their colleagues and alter the code without anyone noticing the changes. Not only that we're supposed to believe none of the test engineers noticed the major discrepancy in emissions pre-release and no one in the heirachy asked how such amazing emissions AND performane were being achieved? Pul-lease.
You've never developed software in a large company, have you?
No one past a first level manager has much clue how the code works. Not even the grunts writing the code understand all the implications of the code. I can imagine one group was tasked with optimizing the code to pass the tests and never bothered to test the emissions in the real world. Why would they, that's not their job and they're very busy. I can also imagine another group optimizing for driving power and also never bothering to test for emissions. Why would they, that's covered by Hans and Jurgen in the emissions test group. And I can totally imagine that upper management never thought about the implications of each group on each other.