opebo was right about a $15/hour minimum wage

[AggregateDemand]

This is what governs min wage economics. Pretending otherwise is a waste of time.

Under-24 employment rates plummeting for decades. Senior citizen employment rates rising. What's the difference? One demographic is taxed/regulated out of the economy, and the other group is subsidized into the economy.

Robert Reich is irrelevant. He resigned as labor secretary right before full employment raised household income. If you want higher wages, you want full employment, not price floors

[AggregateDemand]

Sir, you want to start reading Update and realize the folly of your ways.

You need to realize that dumping social responsibility onto businesses is a fool's errand. Businesses are specialized organizations designed to earn profit or maximize salary (non-profit). The government is tasked with matters of socioeconomics, and we went to the trouble of outlining the government's responsibility in our founding documents.

Using min wage as a tool of social justice is doubly ridiculous, since the proposed models for consumer demand rarely overcome the economics of binding price floors.

You're trying to weld together the wood frame of a house, and you wonder why clear-thinking individuals accuse you of trying to burn everything down. It's a national embarrassment brought to us by the Democrats (and occasional Republicans) who are too lazy and fatalistic to do their jobs. Some of them are only interested in undermining the competitive labor advantage of certain states and economic areas who've contained the cost of living.

[AggregateDemand]

There is no shortage, but the jobs require very little skill or training, so it's cheaper for the employer to deal with the churn than to pay people more and have less turnover. My point, however, is that the turnover is so profound that everybody can catch a fish fairly quickly and easily even if there are technically more fishermen than fish. It's not that hard to understand, is hugely important to the low wage job market, and gets completely overlooked by AD's oversimplistic Econ 101 graph. The world is a lot more complicated than college makes it seem.

If labor markets are complex, why do you support simplistic min wage laws?

[obvious]The over-simplicity of price floor economics is caused the the installation of the simplistic price floor[/obvious]

If you don't like price-floor economics, don't install a price floor. Join the modern world by looking for new policy measures, rather than longing for the inferiority of the past.

[AggregateDemand]

I was refuting AD's preposterous claim and accompanying graph that the current minimum wage has led to unemployment. Raising the wage to a reasonable extent would almost certainly decrease churn, but also stimulate demand to a sufficient degree that unemployment would remain negligible for the lowest paying jobs. It's important to remember that low wage earners are also customers at supermarkets and fast food shacks. McDonalds would see an enormous rise in demand if poors could afford to eat there more often.

The economics of price floors are not absurd nor politically-motivated. Installing a price floor and then arguing that price-floor economics don't apply is absurd and political.

Furthermore, frictional unemployment is not a macroeconomic problem. On the contrary, the valid underlying assumption is that people leave their job because they have something better or they want something better. Job-lock is the macroeconomic problem, which is something Democrats cited to justify public options, universal care, or regulatory-definition for health insurance policies.

[AggregateDemand]

Something else I noticed. Reich says that the 1968 minimum wage adjusted for inflation would be "well above $10/hr", but a quick google shows that the real minimum wage peaked at just over $10 in '68. Where is he getting that data from?

I can only speculate that he's making some sort of adjustment for worker productivity. The % poverty numbers don't support his claim.

[AggregateDemand]

How exactly would you outsource or automate maid service at a hotel? Do you think that one superstar maid who "deserves" a living wage can service every room at the local Hilton? Or do you propose that hotel patrons will simply accept soiled sheets? Are you going to fry potatoes remotely from India? Your ideas, straight university orthodoxy though they may be, bear no relationship to reality. And you see this constantly on the Atlas Forum, where most posters have a lot of classroom education but very little experience with the outside world. Any suggestion that runs counter to what they heard from the man behind the podium, whether it was in Wowyns Studies 101 or Econ 101 yields an endless waterfall of "this thread gives me cancer" and gifs of middle aged men smoking cigarettes. Get over your cognitive dissonance already.

The nature of the product and its intended demographic changes based upon input costs. If the cost of labor rises, companies may ultimately choose to offer a more upscale product at lower volumes with higher margins. Less labor would be required. Dining at restaurants or staying at hotels could become an activity for the upper middle class only or perhaps the current trend will continue, and the products on offer will descend further towards Soviet-quality.

McDonald's isn't worried because the CEO apparently thinks that single-store order will rise enough to offset the cost of labor. Perhaps, McDonald's economies of scale will increase their competitive advantage over smaller chains and smaller restaurants if labor prices rise.

As DC Al Fine has pointed out, there are much better options. You should stop living in the 1960s.

[AggregateDemand]

The point is we need to offer the people SOMETHING because more of these jobs are going to disappear than appear in the private sector over the long run no matter how pro-business the policies can be. They are unfeasible on the margins, which means no tax breaks to business can make them economical.

In the long run, it will be good for us but short term livelihoods are always hurt in transition. We recovered our GDP loss from the 2008 crash by 2010 but still haven't recovered our family income and employment loss.

The minimum wage is a good way to make sure people can find a way to make good money when the bottom falls out. I fully support it but can see why some don't, but inaction has a dire consequence. At the very least, we need a plan involving free education for these people to get moving up in some way.

The retail crash is coming and only the government can do something positive to save it.

Automation and offshoring are heavily subsidized by the US tax burden and US regulatory burden (min wage, healthcare, etc). Regulatory reform could easily create more jobs than we have people to fill them. We could import more workers and/or export the jobs we couldn't fill. Consumer demand would surge with higher GDP and higher labor force participation. Strong USD deflates the price of imported goods and commodities, while suppressing the dollar value of the trade deficit. Unlike the dawn of the 21st century, suppressing tax/regulatory burden prevents the reckless outsourcing of labor as the USD rises against other currencies.

Min wage is a tool to prevent businesses from dumping their labor productivity costs on the public. We don't really have that problem, atm.

Min wage as a price-floor is politically-motivated brinksmanship, and a lazy solution for pols who'd rather shift more costs onto America's youth rather than unraveling the inexplicable things we've done to US workers. If min wage is raised to $10, it will have to accompany a comprehensive overhaul of the US tax code, including the addition of some sort of universal payment or refundable tax credit.

[AggregateDemand]

That's still just a temporary band aid. The jobs will stay here for 10 years before disappearing instead of going to China and disappearing from there in 10 years.

Global labor market is not a black hole for American workers. The long term trend is labor market equilibrium via rising wages in foreign countries. We're not prolonging the inevitable decline, we're accelerating the inevitable equilibrium, which will stop the net offshoring of American jobs.