Minimum wage

Do you disagree that raising MW increases unemployment? You think that companies are going to just set aside more money for salaries? To me it seems like simple arithmetic.

 

Yet, on the other hand, if people actually make enough money to buy goods and services everyone benefits.

 

Ross.....sorry, but if you actually believe that people can't keep turning down jobs because of unemployment or welfare you're very naive.

If I were in charge, people could collect their deserved unemployment benefits for the 20+ weeks they've earned and have paid into the system. At that point if they haven't found a job, and file for unemployment/welfare I would require at least 30 hours a week volunteering at a registered shelter, food pantry, etc.

Also, if a family is on welfare for 2+ generations, they're cut off.

 

Except the people laid off to pay for it.

 

Raising some guy's pay to 8 bucks an hour will crash the economy.

But executives making upwards of $5-$10 million a year, plus bonuses and stock options, is good business, because it enables us to keep quality people.

Right.

Why are you picking on the families of sugar producers, defense contractors and oil companies, who have sucked off the teat of government corporate welfare for far more than two generations through specially legislated tax breaks and loopholes?

 

So what do we do? Do we have no minimum wage at all? If someone's willing to work for a buck oh five, do we allow them to do that? (You can get some freedom for that, from what I hear.)

Worse yet, if someone loses a job and begins collecting unemployment, do we force them to work for a buck oh five?

 

I'll let the straw man you created field this one.

 

So no executives make $5-10 million a year, you're saying?

 

I don't remember saying that. Just that that is not where the money for the MW raise is going to come from. It will come from layoffs.

 

I just didn't think you were allowed to turn down jobs. My mom made it sound like they made her take the first job she got offered. Maybe that does make me naive.

 

I think the point is that there is always hand-wringing over some schlub getting an extra 50 cents an hour but executives earning millions and millions is cool and apparently doesn't cost anyone any jobs.

 

The notion that raising the minimum wage automatically leads to more unemployment etc. is simply not telling the entire story. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't and the data is far from conclusive.

I was going to type up something using my old Intermediate Macro text (written by Greg Mankiw, a conservative), but I found this clip from a piece done by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman that sums up what I was taught while getting my Econ degree.

"So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment. This theoretical prediction has, however, been hard to confirm with actual data. Indeed, much-cited studies by two well-regarded labor economists, David Card and Alan Krueger, find that where there have been more or less controlled experiments, for example when New Jersey raised minimum wages but Pennsylvania did not, the effects of the increase on employment have been negligible or even positive. Exactly what to make of this result is a source of great dispute. Card and Krueger offered some complex theoretical rationales, but most of their colleagues are unconvinced; the centrist view is probably that minimum wages "do," in fact, reduce employment, but that the effects are small and swamped by other forces."