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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (49056)	2/13/2008 12:42:51 PM
From: Travis_Bickle	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 543128

"in exchange the student would have to give back in the way of community service" I can't imagine what service the student would perform for my community ... mow our lawns? Doesn't seem like a real exchange to me, they get cash in exchange for what? I would rather just give them the $4k and call it charity.

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (49056)	2/13/2008 12:50:08 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 543128

You can keep people in poverty but who wins if you do? The alternative to a mandated "living" wage is not poverty. That's too binary. Mandating a living wage is not the work of a big picture guy.

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (49056)	2/13/2008 10:56:11 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 543128

Even the industrialist Henry Ford realized you have to pay people a living wage - if you don't they suck at the tit of the welfare state. A great industrialist is not necessarily a strong supporter of the free market and/or a decent economist. More generally the "even X agrees" arguments are pretty weak. They are sort of a reverse of the traditional pattern for an ad-hominem. Instead of thinking something is wrong because someone says it, we are supposed to think its right because of who says it. Very few workers make minium wage -- Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek says that his students typically think that about 20% of the American labor force is employed at the minimum wage, when the actual percentage of minimum wage workers (1.7 million) was only 2.2% of all hourly-paid workers (76.5 million) in 2006, according to the BLS. However, hourly-paid workers (76.5 million) in the 2006 BLS study are only about half of the total labor force of about 146 million, and therefore minimum wage workers represent fewer than 1.2% of all workers (not just hourly workers). In other words, only about 1 out of every 86 American workers receives the minimum wage. mjperry.blogspot.com -- And only a fraction of those minimum wages workers are adults who's minimum wage job is their sole income. They are teens, or college students, or retirees, or people with a 2nd job that pays less than their main job, or people who have a spouse that earns more than minimum wage. Also most people who work for minimum also have minimum skills. Push a $11/hour national wage, and esp. in lower income/price areas you don't increase these workers incomes you cost them their jobs. Now Obama hasn't directly called for $11 dollars, just a "living wage", but if he means $10 it really doesn't change the point, and if he means just a very slight increase in minimum wage than why call it "a living wage", and also it still can cause some problems. Last night listening to Obama's speech he suggested we should give every child $4.000 a year for college. One of the main effects of all the money the feds throw in to helping people afford college, is to increase the prices colleges charge. You can keep people in poverty but who wins if you do? Causing people to lose their jobs helps keep them in poverty. Minimum wages do little to keep people out of poverty. Some lose their jobs, others lose benefits so that they can get the wage without the labor cost being too high. And then to the extent you actually do raise compensation you increase costs and thus prices, and thus the cost of living.

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (49056)	2/14/2008 1:13:12 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543128

Case Studies on the Minimum Wage OK, I will begin this post with what I guess is, for some, a damning admision: My company pays many of its employees minimum wage. I believe that I have a very honorable relationship with my employees, but for many, particularly on the left, the fact that I pay minimum wage puts me at the approximate moral level of a forced labor camp gaurd. For those of you that feel that way, you might as well move on now because this post will just irritate you further. I want to present four case studies from my own business as to what happens to workers and consumers when minimum wages go up. For the purpose of this post, I will leave out the philosophical argument of why voters or politicians should even have the right to interfere in the free decision-making between employer and employee... coyoteblog.com