If you raise minimum wage, then all those whose current work is below new minimum wage won't be able to find legal work.
I understand you and how hard it can be, but you need to find another work or better clients willing to pay more.
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I understand you and how hard it can be, but you need to find another work or better clients willing to pay more.
What kind of Christian do you see yourself as?
The issue is that the cost of living in republican states is no longer cheap yet the minimum wage has not increased a dime since I was teenager. Meanwhile the price of everything around us has quadrupled. It's not as easy as "find another job that pays more" because "more" still isn't enough.
Democratic states at least attempt to counter this issue by raising the minimum wage. It may not be the root of the problem but at least they acknowledge it's a problem. Republicans won't...and the red states poverty levels reflect this.
You'd be FAR better off if there WAS no 'minimum wage.'
The problem is far bigger, I touched on a bit above, and it now involves the destruction of a vast number of small businesses. In many cases because they can't find reliable workers at ANY wage that would let them stay in that business.
PS> The official "poverty rates" reflect manipulation. They're a lie. As are the inflation and job numbers...
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That sounds similar to what some cults i've learned about do.
I decided to compare the states. For instance, I make $22 per hour at my current job, if I decided to rent instead of own, i'd pay a minimum of $1,200 per month where I live. If I moved to "most" of the democratic states, I could easily make $27 per hour doing the same job, and rent would be even cheaper if not the same. Food prices are similar, health insurance is cheaper, and gas prices are a dollar more per gallon. A dollar compared to making $5 more per hour. That's not a bad trade off.
It's not about "whining" or not wanting to work, it's forcing people who do not adhere to democratic beliefs to vote for them because republicans refuse to acknowledge how much they absolutely screw over the working class. This makes the companies richer, and they exploit the "burger flippers" to death for minimum pay. These places can barely run with adults; imagine if they only consisted of teenagers. So many businesses are understaffed in the republican states as it is.
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Oh my. Do you have a trade? How old are you? It might be advantageous to partner with someone who also makes 22 hour and split rent. Republicans dont despise the working poor at all. I was there once and needed help for a short time. But i worked hard to better myself. I am a degreed professional now with 37 years experience. I am married AND support a single mom with 4 children, plus another grandma with a disabled husband. Tradesmen make bank.
So why not move to a socialist hellhole?
Ask those who are fleeing...
Note: Not that the intent isn't to take 'em ALL down, from Big Brother on high.
Family
Because @theleastofthese, when there is a minimum wage, that becomes the standard starting wage. So if you have a low minimum wage, people have low wages - because the government has officially said low wages are acceptable. If you have NO minimum wage though, the state has provided no guidance on what the "starting wage" should be, and starting wages will be defined solely by the market.
Another major problem with high minimum wages, which we have where I live (New Zealand), is that if the starting wage is high, a company cannot afford to promote people to higher wages. So someone who has worked in the company for 20 years can still only be paid a pittance more than someone who has just started out and knows nothing, because the company simply cannot afford to do otherwise. The entire wagescale gets flattened out, and there is little incentive to pursue personal improvement or have loyalty to the company. Of course this is the goal of communism, making everyone equally poor.
This also means that the starting wage has to be so high that a company cannot afford to hire low skilled workers - because they simply will not make enough money from their work to be worth paying them. That makes it difficult for school leavers or anyone else in that situation to get a job at all. It also cripples industry - New Zealand has very little manufacturing any more, it's all moved to Asia, as industry here is forced to pay such high wages that they simply cannot compete.
The problem with inflation cannot be solved by paying people more money - putting more money into the economy just makes inflation accelerate even faster. It can only be solved by directly tackling the things that make prices high. Often it is government regulations that made prices high in the first place - for instance onerous food safety or environmental regulations that were so expensive to comply with that they drove up the cost of the product. Laws that prevent farmers from selling basic products like raw milk, and force everyone to buy processed food and pay for all the processing and transport costs. Not to mention taxes, government licensing and permitting fees and so forth.
So the solution isn't to try and get the government to force a business to pay you more. The individual solution is to find a way to circumvent the government rules that are making your life expensive and find a way to get everything you need to live more cheaply. The collective solution is to change the rules.
I mean no offense by this but we've been hearing that for 20 years and nothing has changed. That doesn't mean your way is wrong. It just doesn't help most people right now and obviously it's easier said than done because no one has done it.
I've also heard (usually from the republican party) that increasing minimum wage will only cause prices to go up. The prices have went up every single year for as long as I can remember yet pay has stayed the same.
I've also heard that businesses won't be able to afford to pay employees if wages are too high. Yet businesses many years ago in many of the red states took it upon themselves to pay people higher than minimum wage because they were so understaffed in these states. Come to poor areas of the US. There's literally one or two people running the entire store.
I've also heard (usually from the republican party) that increasing minimum wage will only cause prices to go up. The prices have went up every single year for as long as I can remember yet pay has stayed the same.
I've also heard that businesses won't be able to afford to pay employees if wages are too high. Yet businesses many years ago in many of the red states took it upon themselves to pay people higher than minimum wage because they were so understaffed in these states. Come to poor areas of the US. There's literally one or two people running the entire store.
Which shows you don't need a high minimum wage. You are describing market forces setting wages high enough to attract people to work there - that's exactly what @Mark C and I are also stating.
But you're right that all this sounds great in theory and doesn't always seem to work in reality. The reason it isn't working in reality is that it's not actually being done. Government just keeps growing much faster than the rate of inflation, all the money to support that government must come from the public somehow in a wide range of different ways, all of which add to the cost of everything. So government grows first -> causing price inflation -> wages follow to try and keep up, but never grow fast enough and just keep falling behind. To solve it you need government to shrink, and that happens nowhere - the system instead grows and grows until it collapses under its own weight.
I actually agree with you that minimum wage laws can provide people with a temporary band-aid to help cope with this. So can government benefits and so forth. For a particular individual all these things can be helpful. They are however still destructive at the level of society.
It's not an issue in democratic states; it's an issue in states where people don't want to work for even a few bucks over the minimum wage of $7 per hour because it doesn't put a dent in the cost of living in these states. I don't agree with that theory, but it's happening. I've always said i'd rather work for low wages than sit around doing nothing, but to say it's really benefited me in any way would be a lie. When people work for low wages, they have no way of getting out of that situation because it costs money to do so. It takes time to get experience, time spent working for low wages to get that experience costs money. Education costs money, and even developing a trade costs money. Also, poor people are also forced to buy cheaper, lower-quality products to band-aid their needs in the short term, causing them to remain poor in the long term, which only encourages terrible financial decisions due to being desperate and impulsive.
I agree with you somewhat, as stated here.
Though, as I said, it's easier said than done. Unfortunately, the people in our country love having the government involved in everything.
Same here. Same in the entire West - everywhere there is democracy.
Did you know that Karl Marx was a proponent of democracy? He openly stated that communists should support democracy, because democracy would inevitably lead to communism. He was a smart man in some ways, as he knew how to achieve his goals.
Vladimir Lenin put it this way:
"Democracy and socialism are inseparable."
But NONE of the American Founders were proponents!
Ben Franklin: Democracy is "two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner."
Dr. Benjamin Rush: Democracy "is the Devil's own government."
James Madison: "...Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths." (Federalist X)
John Adams: "Remember, democracy never lasts. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide."
There are MANY more. Even the manual for US soldiers in the WW I era noted that democracy is really "mob-ocracy". Again, it is the same far-left (that took over Russia in 1917, AmeriKa by 2000) that worships a form of government that is ANTITHETICAL to the Constitution for these united States.
And even the very word (or even root, as in 'demo-) is NOWHERE in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, or Bill of Rights whatsoever.
There's an old truism that says, "Democracy is doomed when people learn they can vote themselves the dole." Fake money makes that all the more true, and deadly.
(I do a show on the fallacy of the great god 'democracy' every year or so. There is MUCH more.)
The late great Professor (Economics) Walter Williams (who himself was black) used to call it the "black teenage unemployment" law. Because it encouraged every evil he fought against.
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Big Brother wants you to be a slave. Or better still, dead. (Are the examples not undeniable by now?)
"Come out of her," is both the explicitly Scriptural answer, and the only practical one that will enable survival in the times to come. You can NOT WORK for a 'wage'. You must find a way to exchange your time and skills for real value (not paper printed from nothing, or worse - a CBDC/aka 'mark' ) that will allow you to eat, love, laugh, and live.
@theleastofthese
Minimum wage laws worldwide have their roots in racism. That's not a term I use loosely.
The socialists in the US and elsewhere advocated for minimum wage laws as a means of eradicating child labor and garment industry 'sweatshop' labor where (usually women) were paid by each piece they produced while also being required to work ten to sixteen hours per day.
The sweatshops were abusive with workers being denied bathroom breaks, lunch breaks, fresh air, and in many cases they were held as prisoners during the workday. Rape and murder were not uncommon in the sweatshops.
But what got minimum wage laws rolling in the US were the migrations of Southern blacks to the North where black people would accept lower wages than white workers.
Black workers were then more desirable for employers and black workers made significant inroads into market segments previously dominated by low-wage white workers and especially Irish immigrants.
In the period 1860-1920 Irish workers dominated manual labor industries like steel and coal mining, they dominated domestic help such as maids and chauffeurs, and they dominated railroad positions especially as staff on passenger rail.
The Great Migration of black people from the South started in about 1910 with the penetration of railroads into the rural south. Black people who were entrapped as sharecroppers (virtual slaves) were suddenly able to board a train and be out of state within hours where they were out of the reach of their former masters.
After World War One many Southern black troops returning from Europe where they were treated well left the South for the North and the West.
By the 1920's minimum wage laws were being advanced by Irish-American Democrats in order to price the growing black population out of the Northern and Western labor market.
In the American West and again in Australia the Chinese and Japanese were also targets of the minimum wage laws. The intent being to price them out of the labor market.
The result was the collapse of the American garment industry. The vast knitting mills of New England fell silent as imports from outside of the US were suddenly competitive despite import duties.
A century later many of the New England cities that had once been powerhouses of the garment trade have yet to recover from the economic damage caused by the minimum wage.
Even with the minimum wage the black workers still outcompeted Irish-Americans for low wage labor intensive work. This is reflected especially in the movies of the 1940's where black porters on trains, black domestic workers, black waiters, and more became standard background actors. Because art was a reflection of life.
The worst aspect of high minimum wage is that it prices low skill workers out of the labor market.
This is reflected in the disappearance of many entry-level jobs since the advent of minimum wage.
It used to be that young people would take a low paying apprentice position to learn a trade such as steel working or glazing. They'd start out sweeping and cleaning and eventually moving into the trade as they acquired skills.
The low pay for the apprentice position was offset by the trade skills the person would learn.
Now the apprentice positions do not exist and the young people have to pay for trade school to get an education they used to get for free. This is good news for the banks who make student loans.
People with low function used to be able to find work sweeping sidewalks, doing gardening, and things like that. Those jobs don't exist anymore and those people are all on welfare of some kind or another.
Finally, minimum wage causes inflation.
Remember just a couple years ago when the unions were "Fighting for Fifteen!" ?
They got it. And now less than four years later it's not enough.
But why are unions with high paid union members agitating for higher minimum wages?
It's because most union contracts are indexed to the minimum wage either outright or through constructs where minimum wage is an indicator for the Consumer Price Index.
Minimum wage increases then cause payroll increases for union members which in turn causes the amount of dues received by the unions to increase. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Just my own observation here but two hours of minimum wage after taxes/deductions is what it costs for a meal at McDonald's.
In 1970 US minimum wage was $1.60 and two hours of minimum wage after taxes/deductions was about $2.00
A Big Mac meal at McDonald's would have run .65 for the Big Mac, .26 for the fries, .26 for an apple pie, and .35 for a shake. Or $1.52 before taxes.
Now that the minimum wage is $16 per hour in California the price for the same meal is actually a little low and can be expected to rise to where it about equals two hours of employee labor. Which totally erases any gains made with the increase.
This is the thing. If we make the minimum wage $100 per hour then the meal at McDonald's will either rise to around $150 or else McDonald's will fully automate or go out of business.
And then the workers get nothing.
Example:
The front counter at a McDonald's in 1990:
And the front counter at a McDonald's in 2024:
Minimum wage laws worldwide have their roots in racism. That's not a term I use loosely.
The socialists in the US and elsewhere advocated for minimum wage laws as a means of eradicating child labor and garment industry 'sweatshop' labor where (usually women) were paid by each piece they produced while also being required to work ten to sixteen hours per day.
The sweatshops were abusive with workers being denied bathroom breaks, lunch breaks, fresh air, and in many cases they were held as prisoners during the workday. Rape and murder were not uncommon in the sweatshops.
But what got minimum wage laws rolling in the US were the migrations of Southern blacks to the North where black people would accept lower wages than white workers.
Black workers were then more desirable for employers and black workers made significant inroads into market segments previously dominated by low-wage white workers and especially Irish immigrants.
In the period 1860-1920 Irish workers dominated manual labor industries like steel and coal mining, they dominated domestic help such as maids and chauffeurs, and they dominated railroad positions especially as staff on passenger rail.
The Great Migration of black people from the South started in about 1910 with the penetration of railroads into the rural south. Black people who were entrapped as sharecroppers (virtual slaves) were suddenly able to board a train and be out of state within hours where they were out of the reach of their former masters.
After World War One many Southern black troops returning from Europe where they were treated well left the South for the North and the West.
By the 1920's minimum wage laws were being advanced by Irish-American Democrats in order to price the growing black population out of the Northern and Western labor market.
In the American West and again in Australia the Chinese and Japanese were also targets of the minimum wage laws. The intent being to price them out of the labor market.
The result was the collapse of the American garment industry. The vast knitting mills of New England fell silent as imports from outside of the US were suddenly competitive despite import duties.
A century later many of the New England cities that had once been powerhouses of the garment trade have yet to recover from the economic damage caused by the minimum wage.
Even with the minimum wage the black workers still outcompeted Irish-Americans for low wage labor intensive work. This is reflected especially in the movies of the 1940's where black porters on trains, black domestic workers, black waiters, and more became standard background actors. Because art was a reflection of life.
The worst aspect of high minimum wage is that it prices low skill workers out of the labor market.
This is reflected in the disappearance of many entry-level jobs since the advent of minimum wage.
It used to be that young people would take a low paying apprentice position to learn a trade such as steel working or glazing. They'd start out sweeping and cleaning and eventually moving into the trade as they acquired skills.
The low pay for the apprentice position was offset by the trade skills the person would learn.
Now the apprentice positions do not exist and the young people have to pay for trade school to get an education they used to get for free. This is good news for the banks who make student loans.
People with low function used to be able to find work sweeping sidewalks, doing gardening, and things like that. Those jobs don't exist anymore and those people are all on welfare of some kind or another.
Finally, minimum wage causes inflation.
Remember just a couple years ago when the unions were "Fighting for Fifteen!" ?
They got it. And now less than four years later it's not enough.
But why are unions with high paid union members agitating for higher minimum wages?
It's because most union contracts are indexed to the minimum wage either outright or through constructs where minimum wage is an indicator for the Consumer Price Index.
Minimum wage increases then cause payroll increases for union members which in turn causes the amount of dues received by the unions to increase. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Just my own observation here but two hours of minimum wage after taxes/deductions is what it costs for a meal at McDonald's.
In 1970 US minimum wage was $1.60 and two hours of minimum wage after taxes/deductions was about $2.00
A Big Mac meal at McDonald's would have run .65 for the Big Mac, .26 for the fries, .26 for an apple pie, and .35 for a shake. Or $1.52 before taxes.
Now that the minimum wage is $16 per hour in California the price for the same meal is actually a little low and can be expected to rise to where it about equals two hours of employee labor. Which totally erases any gains made with the increase.
This is the thing. If we make the minimum wage $100 per hour then the meal at McDonald's will either rise to around $150 or else McDonald's will fully automate or go out of business.
And then the workers get nothing.
Example:
The front counter at a McDonald's in 1990:
And the front counter at a McDonald's in 2024:
What becomes clearer to me by the day is that YHWH authorized a patriarchal theocracy. Anything else is a usurpation of legitimate authority.
The ONLY system of government with actual checks and balances is one from the bottom up where accountability exists because the locals call someone out that is going beyond what YHWH authorized.
There is no secular or religious authority over marriage but YHWH. He gave fathers responsibility. The church wants to claim it....but it was NEVER given.