Social Minimum Wage now at $20 an hour in California

[terrapin]

Are you serious? I'm starting to lose respect for you man. How are you still making this same dishonest point after I've refuted it a few times in a row now? I am not rooting for employers to short change employees so I can in turn subsidize them with my tax dollars. Stop with that nonsense. It's so ridiculously stupid that I clearly made myself perfectly clear in my last post and you STILL somehow went right back to it. If you can't read what I'm saying, then don't engage in conversation with me because you're entering Jack Savage levels of dishonesty right now.

its the DIRECT inevitable consequence of your position though and even YOU have said those people need to be subsidized. im just thinking through all the consequences of your position. your position requires taxpayers to subsidize low wages for businesses making lots of profits.

thats a terrible position and you have no way to refute it.

 

[RoastBeast]

its the DIRECT inevitable consequence of your position though and even YOU have said those people need to be subsidized. im just thinking through all the consequences of your position. your position requires taxpayers to subsidize low wages for businesses making lots of profits.

thats a terrible position and you have no way to refute it.

It's not my position. I gave you an example of what happens when your work output does not equal the things you need to buy to survive. You never refuted the example of me renting a room in your house because it's not refutable. You're confusing cause and effect examples with my own opinion on how things should be. Stop doing that.

 

[helltoupee]

Walmart employs 2.1 million associates. 27 mil divided by 2.1 mil is about $12.86 cents a year per associate if McCEO donated all of his salary to the employees.

I wasn't just talking about one person, the CEO. I was more trying to refer to all of the corporate officers taking reductions, although I admit maybe I was unclear.

Personally, I just think we are living in a backwards society when budget cuts are necessary, it's the single mom with 3 kids at home who can barely afford to put beans on the table, or it's the semi-retired senior citizen who can't live on social security and now has to decide to give up some of her monthly medications (due to cuts and low pay), rather than the type of people who rake in $500,000 a week and whose lives wouldn't be changed even a tiny bit should they be forced to absorb those reductions.

I mean, you wonder why America is so divided and fractured, and it starts with this hyper-selfish view that our fellow countrymen don't deserve a livable wage. Individualism is great, but to exist as a prosperous nation we need some semblance of collectivism as well, ie., respecting ourselves as a group, rather than 350 million individual components who all think they are the center of the universe (not referring to you, just saying in general).

 

[RoastBeast]

I wasn't just talking about one person, the CEO. I was more trying to refer to all of the corporate officers taking reductions, although I admit maybe I was unclear.

Personally, I just think we are living in a backwards society when budget cuts are necessary, it's the single mom with 3 kids at home who can barely afford to put beans on the table, or it's the semi-retired senior citizen who can't live on social security and now has to decide to give up some of her monthly medications (due to cuts and low pay), rather than the type of people who rake in $500,000 a week and whose lives wouldn't be changed even a tiny bit should they be forced to absorb those reductions.

I agree there. I don't think anyone other than other billionaires are rooting for billionaires to get one over on poor people. I just don't know what could be done to actually solve the issue. Our Government clearly doesn't care about it's citizens when it comes to actually punishing monopolies and powerful companies crushing others through litigation but even if those things were fixed, I think society would still be pretty similar to the way it is now.

 

[nostradumbass]

Obviously I was making an extremely simplistic example that would be applied to ALL officers in the company, not just the CEO. Further, Bob McCEO at Walmart, all by himself, made $27 million last year, which is $562,500 every single week of the year. I don't think people truly understand how much money that really is, having $500,000 deposited in to your bank account every week for an entire year. That's absolutely ridiculous when the min wage workers don't make enough to subsist, and Walmart relies on the American taxpayer to subsidize these people with food stamps, welfare, etc. Add in the ridiculous pay for all the other corporate officers, and at least it could represent some kind of meaningful increase to the lowest paid workers. By treating employees with a little value and respect would go a long way in employee productivity and employee retention, which are two very costly expenses for an employer.

Further, during times that reductions are necessary, I would fully expect that those corporate officers absorb the reductions, which is not going to have any impact on changing how they live their lives, rather than expecting the people who could least afford reductions to absorb the hit. It's ass backwards and is the reason things are so top heavy in the giant mega-corp world.

I think you have a few misunderstandings here. The Walmart CEO's salary was $1.5 million last year. That's less than $1 per employee for the entire year, which is the amount that goes into his bank account. The rest is stock shares, which isn't money he can just go and spend. There are lockout periods, you need approval to sell any of it, and its value fluctuates, so they do absorb loss of value.

It's also misleading to claim they rely on taxpayers to subsidize low wages with welfare and food stamps. They employ quite a lot of retirees who collect SS and can't work/earn more without digging into SS benefits, and they have some who work part time and collect public benefits, but that is from not working full time rather than because of their wages.

If you'd like to argue against companies trading publicly to raise investment money for expansion, you can do that, but it's a separate discussion.

 

[helltoupee]

I agree there. I don't think anyone other than other billionaires are rooting for billionaires to get one over on poor people. I just don't know what could be done to actually solve the issue. Our Government clearly doesn't care about it's citizens when it comes to actually punishing monopolies and powerful companies crushing others through litigation but even if those things were fixed, I think society would still be pretty similar to the way it is now.

I agree there are no easy answers, and I am not going to act like I have all the solutions. However I will state again that min wage earners do provide a very necessary value to the country, because if every min wage earner walked out on strike tomorrow, our entire country would shut down. I just think we should treat them with a little more dignity and not make them feel as if they are fully expendable. Employee retention and hiring/firing people is a huge cost, perhaps that could also be offset by providing people with a livable wage who take pride in their work and want to do a good job for their employer.

I say all of that recognizing that it's not easy to fix. But I also know that with things being so top heavy in most large corporations, we are on a pace that will not be sustainable indefinitely. It keeps skewing further and further to the top.

 

[helltoupee]

I think you have a few misunderstandings here. The Walmart CEO's salary was $1.5 million last year. That's less than $1 per employee for the entire year, which is the amount that goes into his bank account. The rest is stock shares, which isn't money he can just go and spend. There are lockout periods, you need approval to sell any of it, and its value fluctuates, so they do absorb loss of value.

It's also misleading to claim they rely on taxpayers to subsidize low wages with welfare and food stamps. They employ quite a lot of retirees who collect SS and can't work/earn more without digging into SS benefits, and they have some who work part time and collect public benefits, but that is from not working full time rather than because of their wages.

If you'd like to argue against companies trading publicly to raise investment money for expansion, you can do that, but it's a separate discussion.

You are simply stating the Walmart CEO's salary, not his entire compensation package, which is valued at $27 million a year.

Further, as I stated, I was speaking on all corporate officer pay being so far and above everyone else, that it's unsustainable. One single person does not need $562,000 a week. Even making 10% of that, which would be $56,000 a week, could still allow them to enjoy the exact same lifestyle. What to actually do about it? I don't know. But the answer is certainly not to keep giving more and more shares of the pie to those who don't even need it.

Imagine if you have 100 people sitting at a table with one loaf of bread to share amongst everyone. You can't tell me that a sustainable model would be to give 70% of the bread slices to just one guy, and have 99 people split just 30% of the loaf. And then next year the one guy now gets 71% and 99 people share 29% and so on and so forth. It wouldn't end well.

Regarding public subsidies of the working poor, some places, like Walmart, don't even offer full time positions for the very reason that it doesn't force them to provide health insurance, etc., so it's not always a 'choice' of working part-time or full-time. At least that's how Walmart used to be, maybe they've changed, I'm not sure, but point taken.

Further, by paying people a little more you have a trickle up effect. As people earn more money, they spend more, infusing money that would be otherwise simply sitting in some multi-millionaire's bank account, back in to the economy. We've tried trickle down over and over again, and it has been economically proven that it doesn't work - it simply results in the rich getting richer. Why not give trickle up a shot?

 

[nostradumbass]

You are simply stating the Walmart CEO's salary, not his entire compensation package, which is valued at $27 million a year.

Further, as I stated, I was speaking on all corporate officer pay being so far and above everyone else, that it's unsustainable. One single person does not need $562,000 a week. Even making 10% of that, which would be $56,000 a week, could still allow them to enjoy the exact same lifestyle. What to actually do about it? I don't know. But the answer is certainly not to keep giving more and more shares of the pie to those who don't even need it.

Imagine if you have 100 people sitting at a table with one loaf of bread to share amongst everyone. You can't tell me that a sustainable model would be to give 70% of the bread slices to just one guy, and have 99 people split just 30% of the loaf. And then next year the one guy now gets 71% and 99 people share 29% and so on and so forth. It wouldn't end well.

Regarding public subsidies of the working poor, some places, like Walmart, don't even offer full time positions for the very reason that it doesn't force them to provide health insurance, etc., so it's not always a 'choice' of working part-time or full-time. At least that's how Walmart used to be, maybe they've changed, I'm not sure, but point taken.

Further, by paying people a little more you have a trickle up effect. As people earn more money, they spend more, infusing money that would be otherwise simply sitting in some multi-millionaire's bank account, back in to the economy. We've tried trickle down over and over again, and it has been economically proven that it doesn't work - it simply results in the rich getting richer. Why not give trickle up a shot?

Right, because you said "$500k deposited into your account every week for an entire year", when that isn't the case. The amount deposited into the guy's account is $1.5 million/year. The rest is fluctuating theoretical money that he doesn't even have and needs board approval to even get a fraction of it.

We do have "trickle up" and have for quite a while, that's literally what our entire tax system is. The top 20% of taxpayers pay 100% of of the taxes after transfers.

Your bread analogy doesn't work either. If I make the loaf of bread, and 100 dudes show up, why is it unreasonable for me to eat more than them when I made the bread?

The real complaint that you and I can probably agree on isn't the pay discrepancy between CEO and entry level employee, because that entire problem is really just that individual companies have so many employees rather than the CEO scalping tons off each employee, because that isn't the case. The fix would be to have more businesses because of course the difference between a single shop owner and the employees really isn't all that much, it's only when you get into thousands of employees in multiple states and countries where you find the huge discrepancy because it's essentially 500 new businesses with the same owner.

 

[helltoupee]

@nostradumbass

We do have "trickle up" and have for quite a while, that's literally what our entire tax system is. The top 20% of taxpayers pay 100% of of the taxes after transfers.

They pay 100% of the tax while commanding what percentage of the wealth? If you and I eat at a restaurant and I order 70% of the food brought to the table, would you be expecting to still split the bill 50/50?

Your bread analogy doesn't work either. If I make the loaf of bread, and 100 dudes show up, why is it unreasonable for me to eat more than them when I made the bread?

The problem is you couldn't make that bread without the help of the other 99 people.

Unless you are going to argue that Amazon would be just as big and successful as they are today if Jeff Bezos had to go out and personally drive all the trucks and stock the warehouses, your analogy isn't congruent with what I said. Minimum wage workers are essential to their success, and without them, the business fails. I'm not saying they all deserve a salary or compensation package on par with Bezos, but if they are that important to whether the business succeeds or fails, I think they deserve a wage they can support themselves on.

 

[Two Crows]

Yes. Anyone willing to work 40 hours or more a week and not leech off the government should be able to afford basic living costs regardless of whether they are an uneducated fool or not. Do you disagree?

Depends, and a real policy examination requires analysis of societal and governmental standards of "basic living".

Ex.
What are you defining as "basic living costs"?, because that has changed a lot over the years. Are you including just food & housing? Any sort of daycare? Medical insurance? Savings? A vehicle with insurance? How many sets of clothes? These are all questions that would have been answered very differently when minimum wage was introduced.

Let's just look at housing for the example.

A "home", in this case I assume, means a dwelling that would pass occupancy approval by the relevant legal body. As we continue to demand more, those buildings become less plentiful and more expensive. Yes, they are safer and higher quality.
The key point here is the effectiveness of a wage to provide this good changes not only due to the wage itself, but also by how the good is altered within the market and the governmental regulations at work.

A poorly insulated large room with a coal stove for heat and no indoor plumbing would not pass an occupancy inspection in most of the USA today, and therefore, is not available on the market at all. People in the past who received a low income and could not afford more would now find themselves homeless instead, but might have the exact same job making the exact same (inflation-adjusted) pay.

Someone with the exact same job today, to meet the same standard of self-support, would literally have to be paid far more for the same work (in real terms, not just inflation-adjusted terms) that established this principle in 1938.

After we do this (determine what "basic living costs" EVERY job should pay), I'd be curious what you suggest employers do about low educated dangerous work. Tree cutting, for example, is among the deadliest jobs in the USA. What should they be paid if the person with the easiest, safest job in the nation gets a home, food, insurance, etc.? Pay them six figures or more?

How much do you think it would cost to have a tree cut down in that market?

 

[Two Crows]

Yes it is. Minimum wage was, at its inception, the minimum a person can be paid to be self-sustaining to meet their basic needs. Housing, food, clothing, transportation, utilities.

That isn't true.

The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act simply multiplied the expected cost of food for a family of 3 (the "poverty line" used at that time) to arrive at $0.25/hr. It did not take any of those other factors into consideration.

 

[Two Crows]

I think anyone that makes minimum wage would already qualify for all sorts of benefits to ensure they survive. Raising minimum wage is just going to make companies raise prices, which in turn basically nullifies the increase anyway. It won't be long before these entry level jobs are automated anyway which will put them out of work regardless.

No.

Anyone making minimum wage full-time will qualify for almost nothing beyond EBT (maybe) & College Assistance unless they have dependents.

 

[Two Crows]

People act like this also has not been studied to death by economists (actual economists not popular ones who aim for cable news spots). The evidence is pretty strongly in favor of the labor market and economy being able to absorb fairly large minimum wage increases without too much pain.

Yes, but that is because almost no jobs are paying the Federal Minimum wage anyway.

Many states have the vast majority earning $12/hr. +, so a $5/hr. increase would have nearly zero effect.

 

[Two Crows]

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism. Under capitalist competition, profits should be near zero.

I have no idea who told you that but it is completely false.

I think they were discussing where you find the point of equilibrium (theoretically where the return falls to zero) on a Marshallian Curve. The entire rest of the graph shows increasing profit as you move leftward along the curve, with the distance between the equilibrium point and the willingness to supply point showing the individual marginal profit.

 

[Two Crows]

Because profits are after salaries.

This isn’t about agreeing with me btw. This isn’t like my opinion or anything. It’s capitalist theory

It might be somebody's theory, but it sure as hell isn't mainstream, lol.

How do you think stocks pay dividends?

How do you imagine loans pay interest?

This is nonsense.

 

[Two Crows]

You are simply stating the Walmart CEO's salary, not his entire compensation package, which is valued at $27 million a year.

Further, as I stated, I was speaking on all corporate officer pay being so far and above everyone else, that it's unsustainable. One single person does not need $562,000 a week. Even making 10% of that, which would be $56,000 a week, could still allow them to enjoy the exact same lifestyle. What to actually do about it? I don't know. But the answer is certainly not to keep giving more and more shares of the pie to those who don't even need it.

Imagine if you have 100 people sitting at a table with one loaf of bread to share amongst everyone. You can't tell me that a sustainable model would be to give 70% of the bread slices to just one guy, and have 99 people split just 30% of the loaf. And then next year the one guy now gets 71% and 99 people share 29% and so on and so forth. It wouldn't end well.

Regarding public subsidies of the working poor, some places, like Walmart, don't even offer full time positions for the very reason that it doesn't force them to provide health insurance, etc., so it's not always a 'choice' of working part-time or full-time. At least that's how Walmart used to be, maybe they've changed, I'm not sure, but point taken.

Further, by paying people a little more you have a trickle up effect. As people earn more money, they spend more, infusing money that would be otherwise simply sitting in some multi-millionaire's bank account, back in to the economy. We've tried trickle down over and over again, and it has been economically proven that it doesn't work - it simply results in the rich getting richer. Why not give trickle up a shot?

I'm actually curious, do feel the same way about athletes, musicians, and actors?

Should the players take pay cuts so the ushers and ticket people get more? What about just taking cuts to make the tickets cheaper?

Same for bands; should we limit what they can make so the ticket prices stay low?

Actors stop getting paid what they do so the money flows to the rest of the staff, the staff of the movie theaters, cheaper tickets & popcorn?

It's not a trap. I'm wondering if you feel the same about everyone receiving a high wage, or it's just certain industries you have a problem with.

 

[UFCUCF]

I am a (very) small business owner. Nobody who works for me makes less than $20 per hour. That is a lot more than the min wage here in FL. My prices are competitive in the market. I made a bit less proft in short term but have maybe made it up in loyalty/retention.

The suggestions that a $20 min wage would wreck the economy is corporate shill speak.

 

[Blayt7hh]

It might be somebody's theory, but it sure as hell isn't mainstream, lol.

How do you think stocks pay dividends?

How do you imagine loans pay interest?

This is nonsense.

I don’t think the idea of stocks paying dividends even existed when Adam Smith. But that’s all besides the point as stuff like loans is wrapped up in the cost of doing business and profits are what’s left after everything is paid.

I’m sure he didn’t think that no one would ever make a profit and I’m sure he understand there would be outliers. But ideally under capitalism there is perfect competition where profit is near zero. These runaway profits we’ve been seeing are an indicator that our capitalist system is not working properly anymore

 

[nostradumbass]

@nostradumbass



They pay 100% of the tax while commanding what percentage of the wealth? If you and I eat at a restaurant and I order 70% of the food brought to the table, would you be expecting to still split the bill 50/50?


The problem is you couldn't make that bread without the help of the other 99 people.

Unless you are going to argue that Amazon would be just as big and successful as they are today if Jeff Bezos had to go out and personally drive all the trucks and stock the warehouses, your analogy isn't congruent with what I said. Minimum wage workers are essential to their success, and without them, the business fails. I'm not saying they all deserve a salary or compensation package on par with Bezos, but if they are that important to whether the business succeeds or fails, I think they deserve a wage they can support themselves on.

It's not 100% of the wealth. Using your restaurant analogy, if you order 70% of the food and I tell you to pay 100% of the bill, then that's me getting a free meal that I wouldn't have gotten if you weren't at the table.

Individually they really aren't that important to the success of the business. The minimum wage employees come and go, they no show for work, they quit, get fired, walk off, show up high or hung over. If we're going to estimate their importance AS A GROUP, then we would also estimate their pay as a group, and as a group, they are paid waaaay more than the CEO. The labor costs for amazon or walmart are deep into the billions every year.

You're trying to have it both ways by counting their contribution as a group, but their pay individually. You can either count their contribution as a group and their pay as a group, or their contribution individually and their pay individually. Your work is the same whether it's for a big company or a small one, and the difference is how many of you there are. If I own a small hardware store, I may only have 3 or 4 employees, so you doing the same work is a bigger portion of a smaller amount. If I have a million employees, you're only doing 1/1,000,000th of "the labor".

 

[Sinister]

That isn't true.

The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act simply multiplied the expected cost of food for a family of 3 (the "poverty line" used at that time) to arrive at $0.25/hr. It did not take any of those other factors into consideration.

Yes it is true.

The FLSA wasnt the first inception of the minimum wage. The entire premise behind the need for it was ending sweatshops that didnt pay a living wage. That's why there's a provision in the FSLA for outlawing child labor as well. The entire idea was creation of a living wage. I'm not saying that was necessarily spelled out in the laws themselves, but the idea behind them was absolutely to create a living wage, which includes all those basic necessities.

FDR was very clear that his intention was never to merely establish a standard of wages that prevented starvation, but enabled purchasing power of the working class:

"In my Inaugural, I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living. Throughout industry, the change from starvation wages and starvation employment to living wages and sustained employment can, in large part, be made by an industrial covenant to which all employers shall subscribe."

"Today, you and I are pledged to take further steps to reduce the lag in the purchasing power of industrial workers and to strengthen and stabilize the markets for the farmers' products... Our nation so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied working men and women a fair day's pay for a fair day's work... All but the hopelessly reactionary will agree that to conserve our primary resources of manpower, government must have some control over maximum hours, minimum wages, the evil of child labor and the exploitation of unorganized labor."

He was not ever merely intending to create a poverty wage, despite the Lochner-era SCOTUS's best efforts to keep negotiating power in the hands of the capitalists.