I’m just going to key in on one of your comments, since I don’t have the desire to discuss the rest. Raising the minimum wage will have no positive effect on demand or supply, and it will only cost jobs. It’s basic economy principles, especially in a job market as soft as this one. And it will only spur inflation. It will not have the positive effects that liberals seem to think it will.An independent firm has indicated raising the minimum wage to $15/hour will cost my state 90,000 jobs. You will also see businesses switch to more automation. And what about those who make $16/hour now? How are you going to help them? They switch from being paid more because they have more tenure, more skills, and spent time developing their careers to now being paid only slightly more than a high school student with no work experience and no marketable skills. You talk about fair? That SCREWS the person who had spent the last 5-7 years of their adult careers working to make that wage, only to have it flushed down the toilet because of some pear-shaped sense of social justice.And people always argue about how minimum wage has fallen behind the growth curve of inflation. Those people are wrong. You can go here if you don’t believe me. You plug in 25 cents (which was minimum wage in 1913 when it was first created, and bring that to 2014, that inflation brings it to $6.01 in current spending power. Google has it as $4.13, but the BLS says otherwise. We provide over a dollar more an hour than inflation has grown… a 20.6% difference. All this noise about how the bottom rung of the economic ladder needs so much help, but no one ever bothers to look at the impact it will have on middle class people. The reason no one is spending in the middle class is because we are afraid of what is going to happen next. What are taxes going to do? What’s going to happen with our job? How much is health insurance going to cost us (because we don’t qualify for Obamacare Subsidies)? How much do we have to save to provide college for our kids? Braces? Kids’ doctor bills? A lot of these things aren’t a concern of those earning minimum wage, mostly because they aren’t at that stage in their lives! What we should be doing, instead of artificially lifting the minimum wage, is find out why there aren’t more MIDDLE CLASS jobs. If you provide upward mobility for workers, you will see wages improve all on their own.
Your theory has been proven patently false, and I find it amusing how you believe your microcosm applies to all industries, all employers, across the entire country. My current employer trains all new hires. Most employers in my industry trains all new hires. The financial sector (a very large part of our country’s employment) provides a great deal of training and licensing (which costs thousands per year per employee), and they aren’t about to diminish their capacity by firing the best and brightest. Do people get terminated? Yes, of course. But it’s likely of their own making.And you made the comment about employees being looked at as expenses rather than assets. What piece of legislation that passed within the past 6 years could have possibly encouraged that outlook? Oh, I don’t know… something to do with employer mandates, and penalties per employee, and mandatory offerings. The government has tinkered with our economy so much that employers aren’t sure what to expect next. If you want to look at why they aren’t expanding, that’s a big part of it: Uncertainty. Why add 5 more employees to your roles when those 5 employees are going to push you up over this magical threshold of having to pay a fine because you can’t afford to pay for their insurance? Or why would a massive corporation invest in a new product when the regulations or taxes are going to become so burdensome that it wipes out whatever potential profits you would have made from that investment?Our liberal members of society think that the government is the solution to all our woes. What they fail to see is that the government is frequently the cause of those very same woes.
As to your argument about the minimum wage piece… it’s funny how you cherry pick the applicable years that suit your argument instead of looking at the unbiased historical average. 1913 wasn’t exactly an economic slump year. If you want it indexed against the median wage and employment conditions, then by all means, let’s to that instead. That way it rises and falls on how everyone else is doing. How does that sound?
It is worth noting that I do believe ALL members of congress should be paid the median wage of the country, and have a government-provided housing much like our military members get. This way, they can’t vote a raise for themselves, and they don’t live any better than their average constituents.
“You plug in 25 cents (which was minimum wage in 1913 when it was first created, and bring that to 2014, that inflation brings it to $6.01 in current spending power. "
Wow. It all becomes clear to me now. Current minimum wage earners really are wealthy! I’ll be they’ll be surprised.
I never claimed they are wealthy. I said their growth in wages has outstripped that of inflation. Stop putting words in my … keyboard.To the point of the middle class, there actually is a pretty robust middle class. These wage earners usually make between 15-30/hour individually, and 25-60/hour as a family of 4. These are the people that make too much money to receive any government assistance, but to little to be considered wealthy. But if you bump up minimum wage to $15/hour, you now have enveloped the middle class into the lower class. The poverty level will shift upwards, as cost of goods and services rise, a result of artificially-created inflation. I’m not saying that we should keep those in poverty in poverty; I’m just saying it’s not the government’s job to change that. Any time the government involves itself in the affairs of businesses and individuals’ lives, there are always unintended consequences. Compressing the middle class into the minimum wage band is going to hurt those in the middle class. It won’t hurt the wealthy, and it won’t help the poor, as eventually it will all equalize again. Here’s an illustration. Back in 1995, when I worked at a fast food joint slinging burgers, a burger was 59 cents. Minimum wage was 4.25 an hour. Gasoline was $1.35/gallon. Median house price: 133,900 Etc.Fast forward, and we now have minimum wage at 7.25 an hour (a 70.6% jump). Burgers are now on the dollar menu (a 41% jump, but arguably more disgusting), and gasoline (excluding the recent bottoming out of commodities) averaged around $3.50 a gallon (cutting the top off of 3.71in April this year), or a 159% jump. Housing? Median is up to 221,800 – a 65% change. So as you can see, the push on artificial increases in wages has spurred growth in the cost of other commodities. Why can’t you guys see that will just repeat itself if you push the minimum wage that far above the historical growth of inflation?
And frankly, I’m okay with tying it to inflation. That means between 1995 and now, they would have had a 47% raise in income, instead of the 70% we have now. But that means today they would be making $6.01 an hour. I’m simply saying that a government-mandated amount never works well, because each individual community makes different amounts. $15/hour here in my state is good money. 15/hour in Manhattan is garbage. That’s why I hate flat mandates by talking bobbleheads. It should be based on the same calculations that military members get for BAH.
Capital gains has been designed so it encourages investments in future business ventures. Unless you want to jack with people’s retirements, because while these CEO’s make tens of millions in stocks and whatnot, the mutual funds and money market accounts that are the retirement vehicles for average Americans are in the trillions. Messing with Cap Gains is only going to hurt middle America that is trying to save for retirement.The CEO pay, while I think is frequently obscenely high, is not going to change the impact of wages in a company as much as it’s touted. Let’s pick on everyone’s favorite enemy: Walmart. The CEO makes 20.7 million in 2013 (since 2014 isn’t done yet). How many FTE Equivs do you think Walmart has? 500k? Just to be conservative. If we eliminated his entire wage and gave it to all the employees in the company, that means everyone gets a $41.40 annual raise, or a 2 cent per hour raise. That’s a life changing amount. sarcYes, the CEO’s get paid a lot. But it is nothing compared to the overall labor force cost to that company. The accrued payroll for Walmart in 2013 was 5.06 Billion dollars. As you can see, 20 million is not a significant portion of that payroll. Yes, it’s a lot. But from a balance sheet perspective, it’s not.
Capital gains has been designed so it encourages investments in future business ventures. Unless you want to jack with people’s retirements, because while these CEO’s make tens of millions in stocks and whatnot, the mutual funds and money market accounts that are the retirement vehicles for average Americans are in the trillions. Messing with Cap Gains is only going to hurt middle America that is trying to save for retirement.The CEO pay, while I think is frequently obscenely high, is not going to change the impact of wages in a company as much as it’s touted. Let’s pick on everyone’s favorite enemy: Walmart. The CEO makes 20.7 million in 2013 (since 2014 isn’t done yet). How many FTE Equivs do you think Walmart has? 500k? Just to be conservative. If we eliminated his entire wage and gave it to all the employees in the company, that means everyone gets a $41.40 annual raise, or a 2 cent per hour raise. That’s a life changing amount. sarcYes, the CEO’s get paid a lot. But it is nothing compared to the overall labor force cost to that company. The accrued payroll for Walmart in 2013 was 5.06 Billion dollars. As you can see, 20 million is not a significant portion of that payroll. Yes, it’s a lot. But from a balance sheet perspective, it’s not.
to solve ALL political problems – have every political representative at every level be subject to and not allowed to opt out of ANY law they pass. Have every political representative at every level have term limits(by that I mean that they would have to step down for at least one term after reaching the ‘limit’ before they could attempt to run for more) Have every political representative at every level be responsible for their own income and benefits AFTER they are done serving and not have a ‘free ride’ on the tax payers for everything for life as most in our national offices do. In other words bring them back to less than a ‘ruling class’ set for life status that they have now if they get elected. And make that permanent with NO exceptions – and I can almost guarantee you at least 80% or more would not want their ‘jobs’. We have accountability in every job in America except that of a political representative. It is time we the people/peons quit shooting ourselves in the foot in the name of convenience, greed, entitlement, etc. and fixed our country. Of course this is a useless rant in as much as everyone believes it is the other person’s/party’s fault or responsibility to do something other than name call and make snide remarks in comments on political cartoons and no one wishes to lose anything they now get for nothing and since FEAR rules most changes instead of not so common common sense – BIG HUMONGOUS SIGH – it isn’t gonna happen. Maybe America does deserve what it is getting since what it is getting is the result of envy, greed, lies, misunderstandings, finger pointing, laziness, entitlement thinking, and the unwillingness to work together from ALL sides – maybe it should be said the unwillingness to work at all. ‘bread lines and circuses the way the Romans were ruled by tyrants’
I actually do NOT want to see Hillary run, but, as just one example of the BS brigades attacks, there WERE demonstrations goiing on outside the U.S. actual EMBASSY in TRIPOLI directly because of the video-Benghazi was only slightly different, and aid was sent from Tripolli, like the two mercenaries (not SEALs) killed on the roof of the CIA complex where ALL the employees inside were safely evacuated, though two guys on the roof were killed by mortar fire.
Yep, businesses, like oil and gas, transportation, communications, and thousands of others DO indeed create jobs, counting on government subsidies to get them, or keep them, afloat, along with the CEO’s yachts.
Observer fo Irony over 9 years ago
Most American politicians try to land under sniper fire; every time they run a campaign they get sniped at.
Wraithkin over 9 years ago
I’m just going to key in on one of your comments, since I don’t have the desire to discuss the rest. Raising the minimum wage will have no positive effect on demand or supply, and it will only cost jobs. It’s basic economy principles, especially in a job market as soft as this one. And it will only spur inflation. It will not have the positive effects that liberals seem to think it will.An independent firm has indicated raising the minimum wage to $15/hour will cost my state 90,000 jobs. You will also see businesses switch to more automation. And what about those who make $16/hour now? How are you going to help them? They switch from being paid more because they have more tenure, more skills, and spent time developing their careers to now being paid only slightly more than a high school student with no work experience and no marketable skills. You talk about fair? That SCREWS the person who had spent the last 5-7 years of their adult careers working to make that wage, only to have it flushed down the toilet because of some pear-shaped sense of social justice.And people always argue about how minimum wage has fallen behind the growth curve of inflation. Those people are wrong. You can go here if you don’t believe me. You plug in 25 cents (which was minimum wage in 1913 when it was first created, and bring that to 2014, that inflation brings it to $6.01 in current spending power. Google has it as $4.13, but the BLS says otherwise. We provide over a dollar more an hour than inflation has grown… a 20.6% difference. All this noise about how the bottom rung of the economic ladder needs so much help, but no one ever bothers to look at the impact it will have on middle class people. The reason no one is spending in the middle class is because we are afraid of what is going to happen next. What are taxes going to do? What’s going to happen with our job? How much is health insurance going to cost us (because we don’t qualify for Obamacare Subsidies)? How much do we have to save to provide college for our kids? Braces? Kids’ doctor bills? A lot of these things aren’t a concern of those earning minimum wage, mostly because they aren’t at that stage in their lives! What we should be doing, instead of artificially lifting the minimum wage, is find out why there aren’t more MIDDLE CLASS jobs. If you provide upward mobility for workers, you will see wages improve all on their own.
Wraithkin over 9 years ago
Your theory has been proven patently false, and I find it amusing how you believe your microcosm applies to all industries, all employers, across the entire country. My current employer trains all new hires. Most employers in my industry trains all new hires. The financial sector (a very large part of our country’s employment) provides a great deal of training and licensing (which costs thousands per year per employee), and they aren’t about to diminish their capacity by firing the best and brightest. Do people get terminated? Yes, of course. But it’s likely of their own making.And you made the comment about employees being looked at as expenses rather than assets. What piece of legislation that passed within the past 6 years could have possibly encouraged that outlook? Oh, I don’t know… something to do with employer mandates, and penalties per employee, and mandatory offerings. The government has tinkered with our economy so much that employers aren’t sure what to expect next. If you want to look at why they aren’t expanding, that’s a big part of it: Uncertainty. Why add 5 more employees to your roles when those 5 employees are going to push you up over this magical threshold of having to pay a fine because you can’t afford to pay for their insurance? Or why would a massive corporation invest in a new product when the regulations or taxes are going to become so burdensome that it wipes out whatever potential profits you would have made from that investment?Our liberal members of society think that the government is the solution to all our woes. What they fail to see is that the government is frequently the cause of those very same woes.
Wraithkin over 9 years ago
As to your argument about the minimum wage piece… it’s funny how you cherry pick the applicable years that suit your argument instead of looking at the unbiased historical average. 1913 wasn’t exactly an economic slump year. If you want it indexed against the median wage and employment conditions, then by all means, let’s to that instead. That way it rises and falls on how everyone else is doing. How does that sound?
Wraithkin over 9 years ago
It is worth noting that I do believe ALL members of congress should be paid the median wage of the country, and have a government-provided housing much like our military members get. This way, they can’t vote a raise for themselves, and they don’t live any better than their average constituents.
I Play One On TV over 9 years ago
“You plug in 25 cents (which was minimum wage in 1913 when it was first created, and bring that to 2014, that inflation brings it to $6.01 in current spending power. "
Wow. It all becomes clear to me now. Current minimum wage earners really are wealthy! I’ll be they’ll be surprised.
Wraithkin over 9 years ago
I never claimed they are wealthy. I said their growth in wages has outstripped that of inflation. Stop putting words in my … keyboard.To the point of the middle class, there actually is a pretty robust middle class. These wage earners usually make between 15-30/hour individually, and 25-60/hour as a family of 4. These are the people that make too much money to receive any government assistance, but to little to be considered wealthy. But if you bump up minimum wage to $15/hour, you now have enveloped the middle class into the lower class. The poverty level will shift upwards, as cost of goods and services rise, a result of artificially-created inflation. I’m not saying that we should keep those in poverty in poverty; I’m just saying it’s not the government’s job to change that. Any time the government involves itself in the affairs of businesses and individuals’ lives, there are always unintended consequences. Compressing the middle class into the minimum wage band is going to hurt those in the middle class. It won’t hurt the wealthy, and it won’t help the poor, as eventually it will all equalize again. Here’s an illustration. Back in 1995, when I worked at a fast food joint slinging burgers, a burger was 59 cents. Minimum wage was 4.25 an hour. Gasoline was $1.35/gallon. Median house price: 133,900 Etc.Fast forward, and we now have minimum wage at 7.25 an hour (a 70.6% jump). Burgers are now on the dollar menu (a 41% jump, but arguably more disgusting), and gasoline (excluding the recent bottoming out of commodities) averaged around $3.50 a gallon (cutting the top off of 3.71in April this year), or a 159% jump. Housing? Median is up to 221,800 – a 65% change. So as you can see, the push on artificial increases in wages has spurred growth in the cost of other commodities. Why can’t you guys see that will just repeat itself if you push the minimum wage that far above the historical growth of inflation?
Wraithkin over 9 years ago
And frankly, I’m okay with tying it to inflation. That means between 1995 and now, they would have had a 47% raise in income, instead of the 70% we have now. But that means today they would be making $6.01 an hour. I’m simply saying that a government-mandated amount never works well, because each individual community makes different amounts. $15/hour here in my state is good money. 15/hour in Manhattan is garbage. That’s why I hate flat mandates by talking bobbleheads. It should be based on the same calculations that military members get for BAH.
Wraithkin over 9 years ago
Capital gains has been designed so it encourages investments in future business ventures. Unless you want to jack with people’s retirements, because while these CEO’s make tens of millions in stocks and whatnot, the mutual funds and money market accounts that are the retirement vehicles for average Americans are in the trillions. Messing with Cap Gains is only going to hurt middle America that is trying to save for retirement.The CEO pay, while I think is frequently obscenely high, is not going to change the impact of wages in a company as much as it’s touted. Let’s pick on everyone’s favorite enemy: Walmart. The CEO makes 20.7 million in 2013 (since 2014 isn’t done yet). How many FTE Equivs do you think Walmart has? 500k? Just to be conservative. If we eliminated his entire wage and gave it to all the employees in the company, that means everyone gets a $41.40 annual raise, or a 2 cent per hour raise. That’s a life changing amount. sarcYes, the CEO’s get paid a lot. But it is nothing compared to the overall labor force cost to that company. The accrued payroll for Walmart in 2013 was 5.06 Billion dollars. As you can see, 20 million is not a significant portion of that payroll. Yes, it’s a lot. But from a balance sheet perspective, it’s not.
Wraithkin over 9 years ago
Capital gains has been designed so it encourages investments in future business ventures. Unless you want to jack with people’s retirements, because while these CEO’s make tens of millions in stocks and whatnot, the mutual funds and money market accounts that are the retirement vehicles for average Americans are in the trillions. Messing with Cap Gains is only going to hurt middle America that is trying to save for retirement.The CEO pay, while I think is frequently obscenely high, is not going to change the impact of wages in a company as much as it’s touted. Let’s pick on everyone’s favorite enemy: Walmart. The CEO makes 20.7 million in 2013 (since 2014 isn’t done yet). How many FTE Equivs do you think Walmart has? 500k? Just to be conservative. If we eliminated his entire wage and gave it to all the employees in the company, that means everyone gets a $41.40 annual raise, or a 2 cent per hour raise. That’s a life changing amount. sarcYes, the CEO’s get paid a lot. But it is nothing compared to the overall labor force cost to that company. The accrued payroll for Walmart in 2013 was 5.06 Billion dollars. As you can see, 20 million is not a significant portion of that payroll. Yes, it’s a lot. But from a balance sheet perspective, it’s not.
Saddenedby Premium Member over 9 years ago
to solve ALL political problems – have every political representative at every level be subject to and not allowed to opt out of ANY law they pass. Have every political representative at every level have term limits(by that I mean that they would have to step down for at least one term after reaching the ‘limit’ before they could attempt to run for more) Have every political representative at every level be responsible for their own income and benefits AFTER they are done serving and not have a ‘free ride’ on the tax payers for everything for life as most in our national offices do. In other words bring them back to less than a ‘ruling class’ set for life status that they have now if they get elected. And make that permanent with NO exceptions – and I can almost guarantee you at least 80% or more would not want their ‘jobs’. We have accountability in every job in America except that of a political representative. It is time we the people/peons quit shooting ourselves in the foot in the name of convenience, greed, entitlement, etc. and fixed our country. Of course this is a useless rant in as much as everyone believes it is the other person’s/party’s fault or responsibility to do something other than name call and make snide remarks in comments on political cartoons and no one wishes to lose anything they now get for nothing and since FEAR rules most changes instead of not so common common sense – BIG HUMONGOUS SIGH – it isn’t gonna happen. Maybe America does deserve what it is getting since what it is getting is the result of envy, greed, lies, misunderstandings, finger pointing, laziness, entitlement thinking, and the unwillingness to work together from ALL sides – maybe it should be said the unwillingness to work at all. ‘bread lines and circuses the way the Romans were ruled by tyrants’
moosemin over 9 years ago
“What difference does it make at this point?”True.No matter who our next President is, Goldman Sachs will still be in the driver’s seat.
Dtroutma over 9 years ago
I actually do NOT want to see Hillary run, but, as just one example of the BS brigades attacks, there WERE demonstrations goiing on outside the U.S. actual EMBASSY in TRIPOLI directly because of the video-Benghazi was only slightly different, and aid was sent from Tripolli, like the two mercenaries (not SEALs) killed on the roof of the CIA complex where ALL the employees inside were safely evacuated, though two guys on the roof were killed by mortar fire.
Yep, businesses, like oil and gas, transportation, communications, and thousands of others DO indeed create jobs, counting on government subsidies to get them, or keep them, afloat, along with the CEO’s yachts.