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McJobs and the Minimum Wage[W:123,226]

"If they need to pay workers 7$/hour to make a profit there would be no McDonald's outside the U.S." Your words, not mine. I see no distinction in your claim between the developed world and developing countries. Would you like to change your claim?

There I changed it, happy now?
 
Choice: government bureaucracy to subsidize low-wage employers and supplement minimum-wage salaries or firms paying a wage which does not require such subsidies in order to survive. Saying these firms make plenty in profit, it's a no brainer. It's not up to the taxpayer to pay McDonald's workers what McDonald refuses to pay.
 
I'm glad you are so against accusing people of things.

I gave you a bit of your own medicine. And the facts remain that only a small portion of America produces something. There are plenty of Americans in support roles or in a services role. If you believe this guy's assertion is correct then you have the same issues he has - the lack of understanding that not everyone produces something, and yet still has a wage value. "To achieve that minimum wage, how much value do you calculate the worker must produce for his employer? Wages aren't based on need. They are based on production.". -- SAWDUST
 
Choice: government bureaucracy to subsidize low-wage employers and supplement minimum-wage salaries or firms paying a wage which does not require such subsidies in order to survive. Saying these firms make plenty in profit, it's a no brainer. It's not up to the taxpayer to pay McDonald's workers what McDonald refuses to pay.

The Federal Government picked a wage they felt all Americans should minimally earn. States and counties have gone beyond that with higher minimum wages. If McDonald's cannot make a product that consumers want AND be able to meet a reasonable minimum wage for their unskilled labor; then they should go out of business. I candidly think their product is garbage, and I feel Americans should avoid eating there; thus driving them out of business anyway. While fast food may taste great; it is very unhealthy and the medical conditions it causes are a burden on taxpayers. I don't view McDonald's as any different than RJR Tobacco Company, candidly.
 
Choice: government bureaucracy to subsidize low-wage employers and supplement minimum-wage salaries or firms paying a wage which does not require such subsidies in order to survive. Saying these firms make plenty in profit, it's a no brainer. It's not up to the taxpayer to pay McDonald's workers what McDonald refuses to pay.

Well the difference is who pays for the price hike to benefit its low wage worker. If it's the taxpayer via federal programs, the burden is weighted according to tax rates (disproportionately the middle class and higher). If it's the company, the burden is weighted out according to who actually eats at McDonald's (disproportionately, the poor).

So the liberal solution to "make the company pay" actually is advising that the poor be taxed to help the poor.

(And this ignores the erroneous claim that we "must" have welfare just because a company or industry pays its workers low wages. Our government is not required to subsidize every moneyless low wage person, they choose to though, for their own reasons.)
 
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The Federal Government picked a wage they felt all Americans should minimally earn. States and counties have gone beyond that with higher minimum wages. If McDonald's cannot make a product that consumers want AND be able to meet a reasonable minimum wage for their unskilled labor; then they should go out of business. I candidly think their product is garbage, and I feel Americans should avoid eating there; thus driving them out of business anyway. While fast food may taste great; it is very unhealthy and the medical conditions it causes are a burden on taxpayers. I don't view McDonald's as any different than RJR Tobacco Company, candidly.

Evidence?:peace
 
Evidence?:peace

Segen's Medical Dictionary. © 2012 Farlex, Inc. All rights reserved.

Healthy Food
Any food believed to be ‘good for you’, especially if high in fiber, natural vitamins, fructose, etc. Healthy foods may reduce cholesterol, reduce atherosclerosis and risk of stroke, help control glucose, halt progression of osteoporosis, and reduce the risk of infections, cancer
Examples Apples, beans, carrots, cranberry juice, fish, garlic, ginger, nuts, oats, olive oil, soy foods, tea, yogurt

Unhealthy Food
Any food that is not regarded as being conducive to maintaining health; UFs include fats, in particular of animal origin, 'fast' foods–low in fiber and vitamins; 'junk food'–eg, potato and corn chips, pretzels, crackers–high in salt and tropical oils; 'white sauces'–northern Italian cuisine, high in fat. See Junk food.


McDonalds Fast Food: Toxic Ingredients Include Putty and Cosmetic PetrochemicalsEndAllDisease.com
McDonalds Fast Food: Toxic Ingredients Include Putty and Cosmetic Petrochemicals
Every mouthful of McDonalds meal contains a handful of chemicals that raise ‘bad’ cholesterol levels, increase diabetes risk, lower immunity, and damage DNA.
Chicken nuggets include:
sodium phosphates;
bleached wheat flour (nutrients removed);
food starch-modified (likely genetically-modified);
dextrose (sugar);
partially hydrogenated soybean oil and cottonseed oil with mono-and diglycerides, (trans fats);
Prepared in vegetable oil (Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil) (trans fats);
TBHQ, tertiary butylhydroquinone, a petroleum derived product;
Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent (a form of silicone used in cosmetics, and Silly Putty).
 
So the liberal solution to "make the company pay" actually is advising that the poor be taxed to help the poor.

How so? Let's look at this outcome-prices go up some so that workers at McDonalds get a higher wage paid through the company. In turn, government subsidies go down so the consumer who eats at McDonalds pays rather than all taxpayers. Isn't that how capitalism is suppose to work? If the poor can't afford McDonalds anymore, maybe they could eat healthier food rather than a dollar burger filled with sodium, fat and crap du jour and not require future medical costs (also through the taxpayer). How can this not be a win-win situation?
 
Segen's Medical Dictionary. © 2012 Farlex, Inc. All rights reserved.

Healthy Food
Any food believed to be ‘good for you’, especially if high in fiber, natural vitamins, fructose, etc. Healthy foods may reduce cholesterol, reduce atherosclerosis and risk of stroke, help control glucose, halt progression of osteoporosis, and reduce the risk of infections, cancer
Examples Apples, beans, carrots, cranberry juice, fish, garlic, ginger, nuts, oats, olive oil, soy foods, tea, yogurt

Unhealthy Food
Any food that is not regarded as being conducive to maintaining health; UFs include fats, in particular of animal origin, 'fast' foods–low in fiber and vitamins; 'junk food'–eg, potato and corn chips, pretzels, crackers–high in salt and tropical oils; 'white sauces'–northern Italian cuisine, high in fat. See Junk food.


McDonalds Fast Food: Toxic Ingredients Include Putty and Cosmetic PetrochemicalsEndAllDisease.com
McDonalds Fast Food: Toxic Ingredients Include Putty and Cosmetic Petrochemicals
Every mouthful of McDonalds meal contains a handful of chemicals that raise ‘bad’ cholesterol levels, increase diabetes risk, lower immunity, and damage DNA.
Chicken nuggets include:
sodium phosphates;
bleached wheat flour (nutrients removed);
food starch-modified (likely genetically-modified);
dextrose (sugar);
partially hydrogenated soybean oil and cottonseed oil with mono-and diglycerides, (trans fats);
Prepared in vegetable oil (Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil) (trans fats);
TBHQ, tertiary butylhydroquinone, a petroleum derived product;
Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent (a form of silicone used in cosmetics, and Silly Putty).

From EndAllDisease.com? That crackpot website?:lamo:lamo
 
Our government is not required to subsidize every moneyless low wage person, they choose to though, for their own reasons.

The Fair Labor Standards Act was drafted by Senator Hugo Black. Hugo Black went on to be a Supreme Court Justice. SCOTUS upheld the FLSA in cases including Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. and upheld Equal Pay Act of 1963, Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Workers Protection Act, and the Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996. I believe that the SCOTUS rulings would indicate that the government felt either compelled or required to create a minimum wage and to protect a minimum lifestyle when they created entitlements for those below a certain poverty limit. I do not feel repealing entitlement programs will fly with the SCOTUS, and I prefer that the Federal Government increase the minimum wage to a level where the entitlement programs are no longer necessary.
 
From EndAllDisease.com? That crackpot website?:lamo:lamo

Do you think you know more than the MD authors of Segen's Medical Dictionary and more than the American Medical Association? Or are the AMA doctors a bunch of crackpots to you? I have learned over the years that there are a group of people on the Internet that just like to be contrary. Irrespective of irrefutable proof or commonly accepted fact, they argue for the sake of arguing. This behavior is actually identified and diagnosed as a psychological defect. You are exhibiting this behavior.

From the AMA.

Related Conditions: Obesity

Obesity is a major public health problem contributing to 112,000 preventable deaths each year. The prevalence of obesity has increased dramatically in recent decades, from 13 percent of adults in 1980 to 34 percent of adults in 2008. Among children, the prevalence increased from 5 percent to 17 percent during the same time period.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the following are health consequences of obesity:

Coronary heart disease
Type 2 diabetes
Cancers (endometrial, breast, and colon)
Hypertension
Dyslipidemia
Stroke
Liver and gallbladder disease
Sleep apnea and respiratory problems
Osteoarthritis
Gynecological problems (abnormal menses, infertility)

Risks for these conditions increase as weight increases. Obesity also affects various racial and ethnic groups disproportionately. Further, obesity and its associated problems have a large economic impact on our health care system, with the costs in 2008 equating to $147 billion.

The current Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, MD, MBA, recently addressed this issue in her report, The Surgeon General's Vision for a Healthy and Fit Nation 2010 PDF FIle: "Today's epidemic of overweight and obesity threatens the historic progress we have made in increasing America's quality and years of healthy life."

The AMA is committed to obesity prevention and reduction through its established efforts, as well as by advancing new projects and initiatives which will provide up-to-date patient and physician resources.
 
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I doubt you know much. My company was 100 employees, and we were recently purchased by a Fortune 500 and I am now an officer in that firm with voting stock. So now we have right around 165,000 employees. A small portion of my company produces software - the rest supply consulting services or are internal support staff for the organization. Our wages for the consultants are determined by the market. When my partners and I owned the smaller company it was the same way - software and services with a small support staff. And if you had any kind of balls you would stand to what you said and justify it. Be a man. "Wages aren't based on need. They are based on production.". -- SAWDUST

Congratulations. I owned a restaurant furniture manufacturing company that serviced some international chain restaurants. You've already answered your own question when you said wages were set by the market. That's what happens in all capitalist societies. Supply and demand sets wages. If every person who went to school became a good programmer then a dime a dozen would be an approbate meme. Plentiful programmers would drive down the price for programmers. The ability of a programmer to spend money would have no correlation to ability to earn it.

Earning potential of workers is always a function of supply and demand in the labor market as you've acknowledged. The low end of the labor market has more supply than demand because of entry level and unskilled workers. Their wages are determined by their ability to turn their time and labor into profit for a company. Without that ability their jobs would not exist. Turning time and labor into profit is called production.

Eases are determined by production, not the ability of an employee to spend money. Programmers are paid more than burger flippers because programmers produce more value for their companies.

Firemen are public servants. They fulfill a valuable need in society but they are paid by the government and don't have to make a profit

If you get tha fine. If you don't I've got nothing else for you and I'm done typing on my phone while driving.
 
Do you think you know more than the MD authors of Segen's Medical Dictionary and more than the American Medical Association? Or are the AMA doctors a bunch of crackpots to you? I have learned over the years that there are a group of people on the Internet that just like to be contrary. Irrespective of irrefutable proof or commonly accepted fact, they argue for the sake of arguing. This behavior is actually identified and diagnosed as a psychological defect. You are exhibiting this behavior.

From the AMA.

Related Conditions: Obesity

Obesity is a major public health problem contributing to 112,000 preventable deaths each year. The prevalence of obesity has increased dramatically in recent decades, from 13 percent of adults in 1980 to 34 percent of adults in 2008. Among children, the prevalence increased from 5 percent to 17 percent during the same time period.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the following are health consequences of obesity:

Coronary heart disease
Type 2 diabetes
Cancers (endometrial, breast, and colon)
Hypertension
Dyslipidemia
Stroke
Liver and gallbladder disease
Sleep apnea and respiratory problems
Osteoarthritis
Gynecological problems (abnormal menses, infertility)

Risks for these conditions increase as weight increases. Obesity also affects various racial and ethnic groups disproportionately. Further, obesity and its associated problems have a large economic impact on our health care system, with the costs in 2008 equating to $147 billion.

The current Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, MD, MBA, recently addressed this issue in her report, The Surgeon General's Vision for a Healthy and Fit Nation 2010 PDF FIle: "Today's epidemic of overweight and obesity threatens the historic progress we have made in increasing America's quality and years of healthy life."

The AMA is committed to obesity prevention and reduction through its established efforts, as well as by advancing new projects and initiatives which will provide up-to-date patient and physician resources.

We can all agree obesity is bad. Glad the AMA is on board. Your challenge (unmet thus far) is to tie obesity to McDonald's.:peace
 
Congratulations. I owned a restaurant furniture manufacturing company that serviced some international chain restaurants. You've already answered your own question when you said wages were set by the market. That's what happens in all capitalist societies. Supply and demand sets wages. If every person who went to school became a good programmer then a dime a dozen would be an approbate meme. Plentiful programmers would drive down the price for programmers. The ability of a programmer to spend money would have no correlation to ability to earn it.

Earning potential of workers is always a function of supply and demand in the labor market as you've acknowledged. The low end of the labor market has more supply than demand because of entry level and unskilled workers. Their wages are determined by their ability to turn their time and labor into profit for a company. Without that ability their jobs would not exist. Turning time and labor into profit is called production.

Eases are determined by production, not the ability of an employee to spend money. Programmers are paid more than burger flippers because programmers produce more value for their companies.

Firemen are public servants. They fulfill a valuable need in society but they are paid by the government and don't have to make a profit

If you get tha fine. If you don't I've got nothing else for you and I'm done typing on my phone while driving.

Prices are not fairly set by the market when the government has to subsidies the workers wages so they can survive.
 
I find a lot of the arguments interesting and informative (although sometimes overly emotional).

As a liberal it helps to get the conservative viewpoint, especially those that come from direct experience and not just on impulse ideology.

Obviously the question is broader than just the minimum wage. The entire economy has been affected for years now by forces like automation, globalization, and the growth of the income gap, so I think just raising the minimum wage and expecting everything to self-correct and restore the American economy is not going to happen without addressing the underlying problems.

I think, though, that ending the issue as a question of personal responsibility is not exactly intellectually sound. Limiting the answer to personal responsibility implies that you believe everyone should be able to start at a low paying job, educate themselves or learn a skill, work their way up the ladder, and arrive at a position at a high-paying job, and if they fail to do that it is none of society's concern.

Therefore, that seems to suggest that the perfect society would be one where all 16-21 year olds start in a low paying job, work their way to ever higher positions, and by the time they reach middle age or so they have a high paying job. Only those that lack personal responsibility or are otherwise unworthy of advancement stay behind.

It seems, though, that there will always be an inherent imbalance of demand for highly skilled workers as there will be for low-skill workers. We probably all experience this all the time: we might depend on seeing a doctor or dentist a few times a year, a skilled mechanic a couple times a year, perhaps a lawyer or real estate agent occasionally, and a number of other highly skilled people. Obviously there are the people that work for them, and our own coworkers and business associates. But it seems to me they will always be outnumbered by the amount of people we depend on to serve and cook our food, man the cash registers at every store and restaurant we visit, who clean up after we leave, who picked the food we ate, all of this regularly.

That seems to me to be the reality: sheer numbers. There are only so many jobs for skilled people, there are a lot more jobs that require no skill. That's the same even if you account for a person aging and having a chance at the job that someone was retiring out of; there are still several more people like you equally qualified to take it.

If we accept that as reality, then we must therefore accept that there are outside forces that matter on top of personal responsibility. In other words, being responsible for your own life is not enough if there is not enough places for you to take in society. If we accept that, then we must also accept that society has a responsibility as much as individuals have personal responsibility.

This would not by itself demand that society treat everyone equally. If there was a real scarcity in wealth in this country, I think that it would be inappropriate to redistribute wealth from the skilled to the unskilled. That would be unfair to those who worked their way up, and dis-incentivize those at the bottom from bettering themselves. That seems to be the prevailing conservative viewpoint.

However, we know that there is not really a scarcity in wealth in the US. The disparity of wealth is well documented, with the top 1% earning as much as the bottom 40% or somewhere around that. We also know that minimum wage does not automatically rise with inflation, and in fact has not caught up with this.

Therefore, we have less high-paying jobs than low-paying jobs, and the jobs at the top are paying way more than those at the bottom. Liberals aren't angered by that itself, we are angered by the degree of the disparity.

If a person cannot be guaranteed to rise out of a low-skilled job, but still works a job nonetheless, we feel they should at least be guaranteed that they can survive on that wage. I don't think many people actually are against the minimal wage in principle, just have an opinion on where it should be.

Should it be at $15? I don't know. But I'm pretty sure it should be high enough so that you could reasonably live off of 40 or 50 hours of wages a week, again with the acceptance that society doesn't have enough room or want everyone to be more skilled. After all, if a person can only survive off two low-skill, minimum wage jobs at 80+ hours a week, where will they have the time to learn a useful skill and still function as a human being?

Again, just a minimum wage hike alone will not fix the economy. We still have to work to do that right. But in the meantime there are human lives to consider.

As for the domino theory, that occurred to me and it sounds interesting. Say we raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10/hr. Automatically people on the bottom are making more. Those that have put in a couple years or are more skilled, and already are making $10, will rightfully demand to be paid more than the new 15-year old kid. That would raise everyone's wages up the line. But wouldn't that cause inflation of goods and services to rise as much? I'm sure that prices will rise, and maybe my math is wrong, but wouldn't the cost of goods and services have to be 100% labor costs to go up the same amount? If it were less than that, then prices would have to rise at slightly lower a cost of the price of labor. So no matter what, people are better off (unless you have no income whatsoever, that's a whole other story).
 
"If we all did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves."
Thomas Edison

There's been a lot of talk about strikes in the fast food industry. Who among you can blame them? They're only getting paid minimum wage? You call that some standard of living? Can anyone here honestly say the standard of living for the average employee of the fast food industry?

mcds-protest-3-14-13-042.jpg


McDonalds makes a fortune in sales every day, but it treats its workers like lint. Would it go bankrupt over paying each employee, say, 10 bucks an hour? Do those employees deserve that money. Well they worked for it so they're entitled to it. It's their money, not McDonalds. McDonalds makes so much money it could be considered its own economy? Where did you get that fact?

The definition of a Mcjob is:
a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement
Says who?

Its not just McDonalds, whether you work and Taco Bell or Arbys, you can expect your wages to be VERY low. Will the wages go on strike if the minimum wage isn't rise? A rise man once said.

Personally I don't even blame for these workers for going on strike because 7 bucks is too low for minimum wage because there's lots of mandatory payments these days, like smartphone payments. Not only do people have bills, like utilities, electricity, water, vehicle, insurance, but there's also, like nice threads and looking good.

Finally there's the objectification issue because let's face it Wendys has not had a good track record lately when in comes to its portrayal of men lately. GUTS Headquarters' Jeffery Tolman found this interesting bit of concept art from Wendy's Cheeseburger Pretzel Burger commercial and posted it on Wendy's Facebook page. Take a look at this side by side comparison:

t857vs.jpg


In the finished commercial, the actress playing Wendy is sitting on some sort of bean bag, but in the original conception, she is sitting on the back of a man, whose on his hands and knees. So men are suppose to be furniture?

Now I see fast food workers are striking.
 
McJobs and the Minimum Wage[W:123]

There are people who are not smart enough to go to college. Some of them were not smart enough to make it out of high school. Congress felt they should not be executed like a sack puppy or forced to live in an old refrigerator box in an alley somewhere. So they came up with a minimum wage. Roosevelt said that was the most important thing ever done since the New Deal. The odds of a young man living in a ghetto finding his way to a college and a decent job is very slim. The odds of a young woman living in a ghetto that had 4 babies by the time she was 21 and has no man living with her is equally not very promising. If these very poor people cannot get a reasonable wage for non-skilled labor; then taxpayers like me are going to have to pay for their welfare, section-8 home, food stamps, medical care, and WIC cheese and milk. I would rather see them get a wage they can survive on.

I get the premise of "minimum wage" and even agree with the concept to a point. But do you expect me to feel sympathy for someone who couldn't work a condom? Sure. The odds are low, but do you know what doesn't help? Raising minimum wages constantly so that employers reduce the number of jobs to account for the loss of profit due to increased labor cost. If they minimize their work force, the only other choice is to raise prices. Catch 22. You wonder why industry doesn't exist here anymore?

The left keeps pushing this idea of "business owners are bad." Sound like a good plan? Make the country an enemy of business? Come on man. Free Market economy needs competition to work, and we keep making ourselves less competitive.
 
I find a lot of the arguments interesting and informative (although sometimes overly emotional).

As a liberal it helps to get the conservative viewpoint, especially those that come from direct experience and not just on impulse ideology.

Obviously the question is broader than just the minimum wage. The entire economy has been affected for years now by forces like automation, globalization, and the growth of the income gap, so I think just raising the minimum wage and expecting everything to self-correct and restore the American economy is not going to happen without addressing the underlying problems.

I think, though, that ending the issue as a question of personal responsibility is not exactly intellectually sound. Limiting the answer to personal responsibility implies that you believe everyone should be able to start at a low paying job, educate themselves or learn a skill, work their way up the ladder, and arrive at a position at a high-paying job, and if they fail to do that it is none of society's concern.

Therefore, that seems to suggest that the perfect society would be one where all 16-21 year olds start in a low paying job, work their way to ever higher positions, and by the time they reach middle age or so they have a high paying job. Only those that lack personal responsibility or are otherwise unworthy of advancement stay behind.

It seems, though, that there will always be an inherent imbalance of demand for highly skilled workers as there will be for low-skill workers. We probably all experience this all the time: we might depend on seeing a doctor or dentist a few times a year, a skilled mechanic a couple times a year, perhaps a lawyer or real estate agent occasionally, and a number of other highly skilled people. Obviously there are the people that work for them, and our own coworkers and business associates. But it seems to me they will always be outnumbered by the amount of people we depend on to serve and cook our food, man the cash registers at every store and restaurant we visit, who clean up after we leave, who picked the food we ate, all of this regularly.

That seems to me to be the reality: sheer numbers. There are only so many jobs for skilled people, there are a lot more jobs that require no skill. That's the same even if you account for a person aging and having a chance at the job that someone was retiring out of; there are still several more people like you equally qualified to take it.

If we accept that as reality, then we must therefore accept that there are outside forces that matter on top of personal responsibility. In other words, being responsible for your own life is not enough if there is not enough places for you to take in society. If we accept that, then we must also accept that society has a responsibility as much as individuals have personal responsibility.

This would not by itself demand that society treat everyone equally. If there was a real scarcity in wealth in this country, I think that it would be inappropriate to redistribute wealth from the skilled to the unskilled. That would be unfair to those who worked their way up, and dis-incentivize those at the bottom from bettering themselves. That seems to be the prevailing conservative viewpoint.

However, we know that there is not really a scarcity in wealth in the US. The disparity of wealth is well documented, with the top 1% earning as much as the bottom 40% or somewhere around that. We also know that minimum wage does not automatically rise with inflation, and in fact has not caught up with this.

Therefore, we have less high-paying jobs than low-paying jobs, and the jobs at the top are paying way more than those at the bottom. Liberals aren't angered by that itself, we are angered by the degree of the disparity.

If a person cannot be guaranteed to rise out of a low-skilled job, but still works a job nonetheless, we feel they should at least be guaranteed that they can survive on that wage. I don't think many people actually are against the minimal wage in principle, just have an opinion on where it should be.

Should it be at $15? I don't know. But I'm pretty sure it should be high enough so that you could reasonably live off of 40 or 50 hours of wages a week, again with the acceptance that society doesn't have enough room or want everyone to be more skilled. After all, if a person can only survive off two low-skill, minimum wage jobs at 80+ hours a week, where will they have the time to learn a useful skill and still function as a human being?

Again, just a minimum wage hike alone will not fix the economy. We still have to work to do that right. But in the meantime there are human lives to consider.

As for the domino theory, that occurred to me and it sounds interesting. Say we raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10/hr. Automatically people on the bottom are making more. Those that have put in a couple years or are more skilled, and already are making $10, will rightfully demand to be paid more than the new 15-year old kid. That would raise everyone's wages up the line. But wouldn't that cause inflation of goods and services to rise as much? I'm sure that prices will rise, and maybe my math is wrong, but wouldn't the cost of goods and services have to be 100% labor costs to go up the same amount? If it were less than that, then prices would have to rise at slightly lower a cost of the price of labor. So no matter what, people are better off (unless you have no income whatsoever, that's a whole other story).

I will try to keep this short. Your underling premise is flawed. Life will never be fair you can't legislate it social justice will never trump the laws of economics.

Here is your solution. Pro growth economic,tax and regulatory policies that create full employment. Competion for employees dries wages up for all workers.
 
How so? Let's look at this outcome-prices go up some so that workers at McDonalds get a higher wage paid through the company. In turn, government subsidies go down so the consumer who eats at McDonalds pays rather than all taxpayers. Isn't that how capitalism is suppose to work?

No, not even close.

If the poor can't afford McDonalds anymore, maybe they could eat healthier food rather than a dollar burger filled with sodium, fat and crap du jour and not require future medical costs (also through the taxpayer). How can this not be a win-win situation?

If that's really your agenda -- to promote this wage hike as a veiled, de facto sin tax, negatively impact the company and further constrain the job options for people who would likely otherwise be unemployed, then just admit that's your agenda from the get-go. It wouldn't have quite as nice of a ring to it, but at least it'd show a little more awareness of the real world consequences of these policy ideas.

It's not really that they "couldn't afford" it anymore. Arguably, they can't even afford it right now. What they can better afford, and should be eating, is bulk rice and grains that they prepare themselves. But (insert excuse here).
 
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No, not even close.




If that's really your agenda -- to promote this wage hike as a veiled, de facto sin tax, negatively impact the company and further constrain the job options for people who would likely otherwise be unemployed, then just admit that's your agenda from the get-go. It wouldn't have quite as nice of a ring to it, but at least it'd show a little more awareness of the real world consequences of these policy ideas.

It's not really that they "can't afford" it anymore. Arguably, they can't afford it right now. What they should be eating is bulk rice and grains that they prepare themselves. But (insert excuse here).

Why isn't it close? Do you believe it should work by government subsidies vs higher paying wages by the company?


Maybe it is you that needs to show a little more awareness of policy ideas. If they are paid below the poverty line, someone has to pick up the costs to allow them to survive and I will repeat it is not the responsibility of the taxpayer. It is the responsibility of the company. If the consequence is less low wage workers so be it.
 
Why isn't it close? Do you believe it should work by government subsidies vs higher paying wages by the company?

That is a false dichotomy, and further I don't think it's worth either of our time for me to explain to you why government providing for any unmet individual needs is not conducive to capitalism.

Maybe it is you that needs to show a little more awareness of policy ideas. If they are paid below the poverty line, someone has to pick up the costs to allow them to survive and I will repeat it is not the responsibility of the taxpayer. It is the responsibility of the company. If the consequence is less low wage workers so be it.

You have it perfectly backwards, and there is no disputing it. It indeed is the responsibility of the elected government now, thanks to our burgeoning welfare system, to administer these benefits. The laws have been passed and the government departments have been created.

On the other hand, employers have zero responsibility to pay a wage that meets the particular individual needs or budgetary concerns of the worker. The only wage responsibility ANY employer has (whether you're the employer of someone remodeling your bathroom or a corporation is the employer of you to perform a set of tasks) is to uphold the terms of the employment contract that is developed and signed by both parties.
 
I will try to keep this short. Your underling premise is flawed. Life will never be fair you can't legislate it social justice will never trump the laws of economics.

Here is your solution. Pro growth economic,tax and regulatory policies that create full employment. Competion for employees dries wages up for all workers.

All you've done is taken an adage, "life isn't fair," and accepted that as fact. Why isn't it fair? For whom? Does it have to be?

Governments pass laws addressing fairness all the time. It's kind of what they do.
 
All you've done is taken an adage, "life isn't fair," and accepted that as fact. Why isn't it fair? For whom? Does it have to be?

Governments pass laws addressing fairness all the time. It's kind of what they do.
It's an adage for a reason. I'm not a utopian. If someone accumulates wealth and the government takes a good chunk of it and gives it to someone else in the name of fairness, who are they being fair to?
 
All you've done is taken an adage, "life isn't fair," and accepted that as fact. Why isn't it fair? For whom? Does it have to be?

Governments pass laws addressing fairness all the time. It's kind of what they do.

:lamo Addressing fairness? Really? The US Tax Code? US Tariffs and Customs Duties? Really? I'll grant you that at its best government can act to promote fairness. But at least as often it acts to promote the interests of the most powerful lobby at the moment.:shock:
 
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