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Minimum Wage Business Realities
Why do some employers favor a raise in the minimum wage? Profit per employee plays a major role.
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Costco is doing what Amazon just did, trying to play an ignorant public to help make the market more hostile for their own competitors.
Costco would love for the minimum wage to go up to a point that’s higher than the average starting pay of their competitors but below the starting pay at Costco. It has zero impact on Costco’s business model but will severely hurt the bottom line of others, like Walmart or Target.
Costco plays this off as if they are trying to help the people, in reality, they are aiming to hurt or even shutdown their competition, and they want to do this not through better business models but through legislation that comes from misguided economical theory based solely on emotions.
Amazon did the same thing when it lobbied for an internet sales tax. Many people thought that, “Oh, it must be a legitimate tax if the biggest online retailer is lobbying for it!”. What these people didn’t realize is that Amazon is building local warehouses and would now have to pay local and state sales tax and they wanted the government to levy an Internet Sales Tax so that they could ensure that their competition, who don’t have local warehouses, would have to pay taxes just like Amazon.
No one is better at playing politics than the CEOs of giant corporations. Always remember that and take what they say with a cargo container of salt.
The minimum wage in 1955 was $1.00/hr.
That would be four quarters, back when quarters were made with silver. The melt value of those four quarters (in today’s money) is about $20.
gee I wish this had a source..you can literally google every aspect of this post.
1995 minimum wage, silver content in US quarters pre-1964, spot price of silver
These are not hard pieces of information to find. Not everything needs to be injected directly into your thick skull from somebody else in order for you to know about it.
I mean honestly. Are you that fucking dumb?
I hate lazy people who want a source for everything as if Google doesn’t exist on your computer, phone, playstation and tv.
All of the info in the world, right there at your fingertips and you are too lazy to search or to comfortable with your skepticism that you refuse to do so.
Someone yesterday asked me “If IP law hurts individuals, why isn’t there anything written about it?” I wanted to cut my neck with a pencil, pull my brains out with a toothpick and jam them down my throat so I could suffocate to death.
Minimum Wage in 1955 to 1956: $1/hour (via Dept of Labor)
Price of an ounce of Silver in 1955: $0.95/ounce (via The Silver Institute)
What $1 in 1955 is worth in 2013 dollars: $8.23 (via Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Price of an ounce of Silver in 2013 (3/28/13): $28.82 (via MonEx)
The US dollar literally lost $20.59 or 71.4% of it’s value since 1955 due to inflation.
Next time don’t be so damn lazy.
You’re welcome,
Sha
After doing a lot of made-up math, I’ve come to the conclusion that we should raise the minimum wage to $317.43 an hour. We’d have world peace and everyone would own 12 Ferraris.
Spot on comparison of Evolution Theory and Economic Theory and how miseducation destroys progress.
Armen A. Alchian - The Collected Works of Armen A. Alchian(2006), 1977 essay “Economic Laws and Political Legislation
Rest in Peace, Armen Alchian (1914-2013)
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The Truth About The Minimum Wage
FEE:
People don’t like to think that anyone’s labor is worth less than the minimum wage. Someone might end up flipping burgers for $5.00 an hour. You might think the minimum wage is a way of paying some sort of dignity premium—hence language like “living wage.” People with such good intentions look at the direct beneficiaries of these policies, say, burger flippers now making $7.50 an hour. They pat themselves on the back. But they rarely count the invisible costs: willing human beings who never get hired in the first place.
“But $5.00 an hour is not enough to live on!,” they’ll say. For whom? A teenager living at home with his parents? An elderly person who wants simply to stay active? A single mom with three kids? A single woman sharing an apartment with 2 roommates? Of course, not all of these people could live off of $5.00 an hour. But some of them could given the opportunity. Concerns about those who couldn’t don’t justify minimum wages even if we ignored the invisible costs of the policy, which include reduced margins to businesses that might otherwise grow (and hire more people).
In other words, if you take off the bottom two rungs of the income ladder, many will never climb it. That’s the effect of the minimum wage. The more cynical side of me says that’s how many politicians and the overpaid teamsters want it.
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What people forget is that there are plenty of people who work that don’t need to support anyone, not even themselves. Many of these people work because sitting at home is boring or because they would like some extra spending money or because they want to help make a difference in someone’s life and don’t necessarily need the money.
A lot of these people live in a household that has other income earners that completely support and help sustain their lifestyles regardless if they work and contribute or not.
The minimum wage already requires us to pay them a minimum wage determined by the price floor, increasing the minimum wage for others would also require us to pay these people more.
The minimum wage isn’t for someone who is trying to support a family, it’s this grand illusion that politicians and union reps have constructed so that they can claim that they are doing something to help the people.
I’ll save my stark commentary about unskilled low wage workers and starting a family for another time.
(via anarcho-alowisney)
The Real “Truth About the Economy:” Have Wages Stagnated? (by LearnLiberty)
The fallacy of a minimum wage.
I was reading Truthout’s facebook page and I noticed that they’ve been pushing for a higher minimum wage. I had to dive in:
The idea of a price floor for labor (minimum wage) is flawed. You know what happens when you raise the cost of production? You raise the price of goods. In turn the wage you had earned no longer buys you what you need to survive, so again, we think that we need to raise the minimum wage and again, it drives up the cost of goods.
What does this do? It sends us into a never ending cycle.
Minimum Wage laws aren’t the solution to our problems. They are a band-aid trying to stop cancer. In fact, they might be worse. They might be a driving force.
The problem right now is that business has trouble finding profits while working within the states. This is why they’ve moved overseas with a lot of production and seen profits skyrocket.
The American labor force has to stay competitive or get pushed aside. This is the reality of the situation. So how do we stay competitive? There are a few ways. Offering cheaper labor is one. Offering higher quality is another. Offering more efficient markets is another.
But we don’t address these problems. We just try to hand people more money via legislation and we think that will solve the problem.
Imagine a small store with employees 6 employees all at or just above minimum wage. If we’d have to pay these employees $11 an hour as opposed to $9, that’s nearly $30,000 more a year in labor and tax costs. For many store owners, that can mean a large portion of their own income. So what do you think they are going to do? Earn less than their employees or hire less and make the rest work harder?
The other issue is that why are people who need to support a family still working a low income job? Those types of positions are usually reserved for youth, students, elderly or the unskilled. But we have many skilled people working below their abilities.
WHY?
Because legislation and and competitive markets have driven business out of this country. And left many of us with no other choice. real unemployment rate is near 15%, factor in part time and underpaid employment and we’re even higher.
