Sir Xsarus wrote:
The point is that people near minimum wage are affected by minimum wage increases. The closer you are to this, the more you are affected. Your argument was saying that only people making exactly minimum wage are affected, which is ridiculous. Employers aren't paying people slightly over minimum wage to make a statistical point either, they pay slightly over minimum wage to try and keep employees slightly longer at sub standard wages. Amusing straw man though.
Huh? I never said that only those "at minimum wage" are affected. In fact, I've argued repeatedly that everyone is affected to some degree, and those most affected are those closest to minimum wage. I've said repeatedly that everyone earning a wage between the initial minimum and the new one is affected. I just disagree that this is necessarily "good" for all of them. I've also said that those earning just over the new minimum will be affected as well (and for them *always* in the negative).
And no. Employers aren't paying people "slightly over minimum wage" for any specific reason at all. As I just pointed out, there is no massive clumping of wages at any specific level like we'd expect to see if the "pay them just a bit over the minimum" was such a common occurrence. People tend to start at low waged, and then improve over time. And the statistics bear that out. The case of some poor guy never earning more than a tiny bit over minimum wage for his entire life is exceptionally rare, and generally has nothing to do with evil bosses and a lot more to do with bad work habits (and often criminal habits) of the employee.
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that's fair, lets say full time then. 40-60 hours a week. The rest of your sentence is correct, except that you're painting the line where someone gets food stamps as arbitrary which it's not.
Ok. Then I'm not sure what the point is. And I didn't say it's always arbitrary, but it can be arbitrary. In theory, the dollar values at which we decide that a family of X requires Y amount of food stamps is based on calculations of spending/costs/etc. But there's nothing to prevent those in charge from simply deciding to raise the dollar amounts. And if you make the justification circular, then there's even less reason not to. If your definition of "poor" is "anyone who receives food stamps", then if I want to make it seem like more people are poor in order to justify whatever socio-economic policy I want to implement (like raising minimum wage, increasing welfare levels, or whatever), then all I have to do is raise the dollar level at which food stamps are granted, right?
That's what I was talking about.
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It's not circular at all. No one is picking a number for food stamps in order to somehow justify food stamps, that's another straw man.
They aren't *now*. If we implemented the proposed system of determining "poverty" based on the dollar value of food stamp eligibility, then that would change. Increase the dollar value, and you increase the number of poor people. And if you tie other welfare systems to this, you increase the number of people "in need", even if they aren't really in need.
Do I need to go dig out all those food stamp studies which more or less concluded that food insecurity not only wasn't correlated with whether food stamps were received, but in fact had a negative correlation (ie: people in the same income ranges who received food stamps were more likely to suffer food insecurity than those who weren't)? Cause that's always a hoot! And that's with the current, non-circular method.
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The number is picked using the standard of how much money is needed to support yourself and your dependents with lodging and food.
Yes. Now. You apparently missed the part where I said "if we make this change, then this result will occur".
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If you come up short, food stamps are there to help compensate. This criteria is also a good point at which to say, if you're working full time, you shouldn't be below this number. There is no circularity at all, you determine a number that people need to live, and move forward to multiple conclusions, one is that people who make less need food stamps. The other is that someone working full time should be over this line.
Sure, sure. But that's missing the whole point. I responded to a proposal that we tie minimum wage to qualification for food stamps. So if you "worked as much as you could" and still qualified for food stamps, then whatever wage you earned wasn't enough, so minimum wage should be raised.
The problem is that this gives those who want to raise the minimum wage a reason to do so by raising the dollar amount at which you qualify for food stamps. It'll no longer be based on some assessment of the financial needs with regard to food security, but subject to political manipulation. Best not to do that in the first place.
Um... And it also misses a whole chunk of the issue. Not everyone who earns a given hourly wage is supporting the same number of mouths. So while $7.50/hour is certainly not enough to raise a family of four on, it's probably more than enough for a high school kid still living at home. You're conflating two very different things by trying to tie hourly wages to food stamp need. And IMO, you're going to cause counter productive results if you try. As I've stated repeatedly, raising minimum wage overwhelmingly increases the wages for those who need them least (high school and college kids who are receiving financial support and don't need high wages), at the expense overwhelmingly of those who most need their wages (single working class parents).
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The rest of your rhetoric is just that. I think a company needs to be responsible to it's employees. Taking advantage of them to squeeze out the maximum profit is unethical. Profit is fine, but there should be a responsibility to ensure that someone who works for you full time, especially for an extended period of time is able to take care of themselves, which is in the lower tier of our economy, often not the case. Your argument has merit, but falls apart when a company has too much power and unbalances the relationship. At such a point, when they can start taking advantage of the employees, there needs to be laws that step in and prevent this from happening. This has been so clearly illustrated over and over again, that the concept that labour laws somehow hurt the workers in the long run is ludicrous.
I disagree. I think that trying to impose a system where employers are forced to pay people more than their labor is actually worth is unethical. I think it not only is unfair to the employers, but also hurts the employees in the long run. It creates a false 'floor' for labor that is higher than it should be, which in turn eliminates what should be a smooth gradual upward mobility slope and turns it into a hard wall. The result is a lot of earnings bang for little labor buck at the bottom end, with a hard and steep climb past that point which most people wont bother doing.
If you start at say $5/hour, and then you earn every dollar above that, you will tend to expend the effort to improve the value of your labor as you go along. This will tend to continue for most people well past the point of whatever minimum "living wage" we might have our government set (let's say $15/hour). You gain something every step of the way, so you continue to work hard all the way through your career.
if instead, you just set the minimum at $15/hour, one of two things happen. Either inflation occurs, and $15/hour becomes the new $5/hour, and there's no benefit at all except some disruption of prices and elimination of wealth *or* it doesn't occur (which is the entire assumption behind even attempting it), and you end out with people earning $15/hour just for showing up to work. But, assuming no inflation, employers are not going to pay anything above that except for employees who's labor actually justifies the higher wage. So you're now earning $15/hour while only providing $5/hour worth of labor. You have to increase the value of your labor by $10/hour before you'll see one cent of a raise.
It creates a wall blocking upward mobility at/from the low end. Most people in a "living wage" economy will simply sit at that minimum living wage level and never advance. It's a trap. And it's unfair.