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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (206466)	10/14/2004 7:44:45 AM
From: Joe NYC	Respond to of 1574216

combjelly, My guess is that the macroeconomic models aren't very good, but... There are so many different variables at play that it is impossible to pin down any macro economic result on a single input. That's why the studies never seem very conclusive. One thing about the minimum wage increase is that it is generally wrongly percieved, and that leads to mostly wrong conclusions. The misunderstanding is that someone (a politician of all people) is giving minimum wage earners a raise. The correct definition of the minimum wage and its increase is ban on any labor that has market value below the threshold. Once you start thinking about it in terms of a ban on work, you can't help but wonder how it is beneficial to ban people from working for some meager wage, and what kind of alternative there is for the people who were banned from working. How is it better these people are no longer working. Joe

To: combjelly who wrote (206466)	10/14/2004 1:00:35 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1574216

CJ, However, when the minimum wage is actually raised, the beneficial effects are muted, but still exist, and the negative effects never seem to happen. As I hinted in one of my posts, it's all about perception when it comes to politics. Kerry could raise the minimum wage 5%/year over six years in order to get to his $7/hour figure, then blame any negative effects on the mess he inherited from Bush. Kind of like Bush inheriting the mess from Clinton, but that never seemed to impress the anti-Bush crowds. But still, if the overriding motivation behind raising minimum wage is the support of a family, then $7/hour isn't going to do squat, either. Well, actually it would have an effect of shifting the wage scales up for all workers earning by the hour, but where is that money going to come from? The rich? Fat chance. They'll lay off workers before they ever give themselves a pay cut. Hence the reason Bush brought up education in response to the minimum wage question, even though I suspect very few listeners actually got Bush's point. That's the only way to raise wages in America, by having a more educated work force and a job market that offers higher quality work. Tenchusatsu