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

To: TimF who wrote (760974)	1/2/2014 8:46:54 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574483

Tim, there are 29400 and change Walmart employees in the state of Wisconsin. That is where the figure of 11% comes from. For other states, the claims are somewhere between 10% and 15%. Not sure where they got their numbers so I didn't use them. But they do seem consistent. 1 - Walmart reduces the public assistance they receive by employing and paying them. Other businesses in that sector don't have a high of percentage of their employees that need aid. What Walmart does is limit hours so those employees don't qualify for benefits. In other words, Walmart is gaming the system. Sam had a habit of that. At first, he was paying employees about half minimum wage because no store had 50 or more employees. It took years for the labor department to finally get him to change that. 2 - Walmart isn't making anyone pay the assistance. Its the state and federal government's decision to do so. There decision to do so, doesn't justify control over wages. Walmart is gaming the system and shifting the support of its employees to the taxpayer. Period. 3 - Raising the minimum wage significantly would make Walmart, and probably to a greater extent other employers, hire fewer people. I suppose that depends on what you mean by "significantly". There is no proof that any of the minimum wage increases that have been instituted have resulted in fewer people being hired. Especially for a company like Walmart who is always chronically under-staffed. Just try to find an employee if you are looking for something... A typical store can't operate with fewer employees without negatively impacting sales. Again, if everyone is facing the same increase in labor costs, then raising prices is viable. You like to pretend that things like a minimum wage increase only affects a few companies, putting them at a disadvantage. But it doesn't. So your handwaving isn't productive. A clear case of garbage in, garbage out. All your theorizing flies in the face of reality. Despite the cries of conservatives, raising the minimum wage by small amounts, something that is always done, has no measurable negative effects, aside from a slight increase in inflation. It does provide a boost to the economy because it puts more money in the hands of those who spend their entire paycheck.

To: TimF who wrote (760974)	1/2/2014 10:57:08 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1574483

Sperling on the Minimum Wage Gene Sperling, former economic adviser to Bill Clinton, tries to get President Bush to endorse a minimum-wage increase. Gene dismisses worries about adverse effects on employment. He writes: No one has yet rebutted convincingly David Card and Alan Krueger's study that compared fast-food jobs on the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and found no decrease in lower-wage jobs after New Jersey raised its state minimum wage. The key word here is "convincingly." Gene is, apparently, not convinced by the Neumark-Wascher study that reevaluated the Card-Krueger work: estimates of the employment effect of the New Jersey minimum wage increase from the payroll data lead to the opposite conclusion from that reached by CK. Nor is he convinced by another Neumark-Wascher study that found "no compelling evidence" that minimum wages help in the fight against poverty. A higher minimum wage...generates tradeoffs with respect to the incomes of poor and low-income families. Some families gain and others lose. Nor is he convinced by the Neumark-Nizalova study that found adverse long-run effects of the minimum wage: The evidence indicates that even as individuals reach their late 20's, they work less and earn less the longer they were exposed to a higher minimum wage, especially as a teenager. Nor is he convinced by the Abowd-Kramarz-Margolis study that reported movements in both French and American real minimum wages are associated with mild employment effects in general and very strong effects on workers employed at the minimum wage. To me, Gene looks like a doctor prescribing a drug relying on a single controversial study that finds no adverse side effects, while ignoring the many reports of debilitating results. gregmankiw.blogspot.com