If raising min-wage is so great, why not make it all the way to $100?

According to the more simple-minded, less economics-savvy people, there's a thing called "making changes to an economic system without having any negative consequence(s) whatsoever". Fine. Let's make it 100 bucks per hour. Why not? Everybody would be happy?

It's not like an economic system is a very intricate one with myriads of variables and no one can say for sure he has managed to explore all of them and a lot of the variables, wages for example, are decided by the market, not one or two single individual(s) and arbitrarily modify it may cause unexpected outcome?

 

Okay, let's try "trickle up " economy for a while. Probably better make it a law that no corporation or individual can raise prices or go out of business until their savings is the same as the average person, or it's just not going to work.

Hell, they just might compete with each other raising wages to get to the equilibrium sooner

 

The left has no answer for why the minimum wage shouldn't be raised to 100.00. When you ask them they get this foggy look in their eyes and start drooling a little. But according to them that should work better than 15.oo an hour.

 

According to who?

Of course, those who argue for higher minimum wages are aware of the arguments against it, and that is why they don't (or very few at least) argue for $100 minimum wages. However, there is no point in reiterating those parts of the arguments since their "enemies" already agree on those points. The entire disagreement lies in the ideas arguing for higher wages, and their balance with the ideas against minimum wages.

 

You're worth what someone is willing to pay you. As a lifelong salesman who worked on commission for 30 years and now a business owner, I understand this better than most.
Never once in 35 years has anyone ever asked me about my "need"...it was always about price and quality...looking for their best value for their hard earned dollar.

 

Drinking water is essential for human life.

By your reasoning we should advocate drowning.

It's a stupid premise used by the intellectually weak to appeal to the intellectually lazy

 

Reducing the discussion to the level of absurdity is usually the debating technique of the simple minded.

 

The left is avoiding this thread like the plague

 

Who? ^_- tons of people argue for the $15 min wage, especially at college. I've been out there (since I'm in college ) and there are MANY who think there's no downside.

For me, I think it's a mixed bag and is sometimes a good option locally. But basically for each 2 people raised out of poverty, 1 is put out of work (based on analysis for the $10.10 national min wage). It'd be worse for $15

 

Certainly true in the situation where an individual is selling his labor or skills to someone else. That is why it is in the interest of business to have a labor surplus. This may explain why neither party has made any serious effortbto control illegal immgration.

 

If oxygen is so good for you and necessary for your life, why not breathe 100% oxygen?

 

If raising the minimum wage is going to result in people being put out of work it has to mean that the work those people were performing wasn't really necessary in the first place. Somehow I find it hard to believe that those people were being employed out of the charity in their employers hearts.

 

The minimum wage increase should be balanced, so that it would still keep businesses (at least the overwhelming majority) viable and profitable while providing the workers with income sufficient to by and large make the ends meet and avoid any form of public assistance.

That said it's certainly an artificial intervention into the economy. A much better solution is the removal of cheap illegal labor and restrictions on outsourcing and offshoring. That will decrease the supply of labor, once americans don't need to compete with dirt cheap illegal labor and Chinese workers making $.5/hr the wages in the US will take care of themselves without any artificial mandatory minimums.

 

The left has better things to do than engage in silly hypothetical discssions. We leave that to the right.

 

The left sells the "increase minimum wage" issue to their sheep as "benevolent compassion for the working poor", when all it is really designed to do is generate more government dependence and move independence farther away from The People. Nearly everything democrat politicians do is designed to increase the number of government-dependent people and to move independence farther away from them, so they will remain locked in D voters.

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Please tell that to Chris Matthews. He, apparently, didn't get the memo.

 

I don't know who these people are, or how they argue, but it would be my guess that they mean the downsides are known, accounted for and/or weighed against the upsides. Of course, there're always people who don't know what they're talking about, but in my experience, failure to communicate finer nuances are more common than outright failure to think.

 

Why not have current min wage plus 1% of gross profits dispersed among all employees according to hours worked, and an additional bonus of 1% on gross quarterly increases.

The better your company does the better you do.

 

by the same measure....if "lower taxes mean more economic growth and thus more revenue for the Government"...

why not have zero taxes?

 

What an incredibly simple-minded stupid thread. You can't raise the minimum wage to $100.00 because employers couldn't afford to pay it. This should be obvious to anyone. I have to seriously question the intelligence of anyone who feels the need to ask this question.

 

Why not have wages be according to productivity, ie the value they actually contribute??

 

You mean like chris Matthews pressing Trump on "what if abortion were made illegal?"

 

Why not just raise the minimum wage according to inflation all along? Then we wouldn't be arguing about people making starvation wages and being on government assistance while working full time. Capitalism fails without raising wages with inflation. If you don't do this, you end up with everyone on government assistance. Yet, many Americans are dumb enough to argue against raising wages while complaining that too many people are on government assistance. Which is of course REAL stupid. You see years ago, you didn't need any government assistance to get by if you made minimum wage. There again, some Americans are dumb enough to think that the fact you do need help now is somehow not a problem.

 

Because a majority of the dem base does not have the skills to earn more than their value.

 

This isn't true, or at least, it's not true in isolation.

What wage you can get doesn't just depend on what your labor is worth, economically. It depends, for instance, on how many other people out there are willing to do the same labor for less.

Which is why wages fall when unemployment is high, while wages rise when unemployment is low. The value of the work hasn't changed -- just the supply of labor.

With the demise of unions, nearly all the bargaining power in setting wages belongs to employers. Certain industries in certain areas are exceptions -- the IT industry here in the Twin Cities, for instance, has an unemployment rate of around 1%, meaning workers can easily move companies, and thus have a lot of leverage when negotiating pay. But overall, a given job opening is more important to the worker applying for it than that worker is to the employer filling that job. The employer will usually have multiple applicants to choose from, so the downside of not hiring Applicant A is minimal -- while for Applicant A, the downside of not getting the job may be poverty or homelessness.

So by raising the minimum wage, you put a little bit of the wage-setting power back in the hands of workers, balancing the playing field. If the actual economic value of the work is at least $15 an hour, employers will pay it.

If the work isn't worth $15 an hour, it will change or go away. But that is a marginal effect. Studies have shown that raising the minimum wage increases unemployment slightly among low-wage workers -- but VASTLY increases the share of income taken home by low-wage workers as a group. In other words, the minimum wage makes low wage workers MUCH better off as a group, even though a few of them are made worse off.

The understanding that a job must have an economic value that is equal to or greater than the minimum wage also explains why nobody thinks we can instantly raise the minimum wage to $100 an hour. By raising the wage to $100 an hour, you would make any job whose economic value is not at least $100 an hour uneconomical -- and that would be a lot of jobs. The cost would outweigh the benefit.

$15 an hour is a pretty bold step -- even some supporters are crossing their fingers and hoping it goes well.

But the general case for raising the minimum wage -- and then keeping it indexed to inflation -- is very solid:
-- Ensures that anyone working full time actually earns a living wage.
-- Reduces the need for government assistance, by letting more people earn a livable wage on their own.
-- Would basically eliminate our current de facto subsidies for low-wage employers like Wal-Mart. Right now we basically are incentivizing low-wage business models, which harm the economy and the country in the long run.
-- Provides a huge incentive for work -- the benefit of working would outstrip the benefits of government assistance even more than they do now.
-- Is a highly effective way to help close the income gap, which is a huge and growing problem.
-- All of the above means a reduction in poverty.
-- Boosts the economy, by giving low-wage workers more money to spend. That means more jobs and businesses springing up to absorb that spending. There's a reason Henry Ford paid his workers well enough that they could buy his cars -- he recognized that creating a market requires people to have the disposable income to spend.

 

That is a ridiculous idea.