The eminent economist and leading public intellectual Dr. Thomas Sowell has repeatedly explained the nefarious effects of a minimal wage. Is he wrong? Please use simple words so that I can follow. [I’ll also retweet.]
— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) March 3, 2021
This is why they want everyone banned. Frictionless propaganda is just so much more effective.
Note AOC’s technique, she claims the moral high ground and then makes you think past the sale. Saad drags the conversation back to reality.
Featured comment:
Progressivism is a religion. You can’t fight faith with facts and logic.
The demand curve for labour is downward sloping. The only way to make sure that working-class Westerners are paid better is to either:
1. Halt the importation of scabs from the Third World;
2. Increase their productivity, by reducing regulations that make it harder for employers both to improve workers’ performance and to remove employees who reduce productivity, either by being lazy or making trouble.
3. Preferably, both.
Halting the importation of Third Worlders would make it harder for Democrats to win elections.
Increasing American productivity would make it harder for China to take over the planet.
Neither will happen if Sandy has any say in the matter.
those who have never had to meet a pay roll………………….
Unless you’re a franchisee, since when did working at Mcdonalds become a career choice?
I would take a McDonald’s worker over a lot of other career folk the first one being a teacher and a long line of other socialists
burton, It’s one of the few career choices when you refuse to participate in the completion of your own basic education. Either that, or petty crime I guess. 🙁
The true minimum wage is $0.00 after a business goes under and lays off all of it’s workers when customers stop buying the product at the inflated price mandated by an increased wage.
Yeah, I bet those McD hamburgers in Denmark ain’t cheap.
Spent a week in Sweden about 30 yrs ago and stopped in a burger joint that we happened by. For a very small burger, small fries and coffee it cost almost $14 Cdn even back then. The real irony to us was that the place was called Big Burger.
have you not heard of the Big Mac Index?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/274326/big-mac-index-global-prices-for-a-big-mac/
“pay people enough to live”
Like we do on Indian reserves.
Of course any reference to a real world example of this failing would be racist and stuff.
Because they have no rational arguments.
Basic math has always shown how UBS only raises the poverty bar. How this former waitress / bartender can not know this after apparently studying economics is baffling.
AOC is a well funded and placed moron.
Crystal clear to me. Championing the poor will keep her economically satisfied for a good many years as she gets re-elected over and over again.
We love to say ” facts don’t care about your feelings” but the minimum wage debate, if you can even still call it that, has been consistently lost because the left has successfully used feelings to obliterate the facts. How many politicians can you think of that would publicly say we need to either roll it back or get rid of it all together? You can count them on one hand that’s been through some kind of farming accident.
Fransico, and that is my AMPUTATED hand:-)))
A O-C made her start in serving drinks. Knowing this fact will explain why she thinks like the inebriated.
“Pay people enough to live” doesn’t say anything about these people working. Minimum wage is a racist white colonialist social construct in that it implies you should have a job before you get a paycheck, and that’s just unacceptable. This is exactly why AOC fought so hard to keep Amazon from expanding into her jurisdiction and bringing jobs to her constituents – nobody should need a job to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle.
IMO the key reason to raise the minimum wage is to raise union pay.
All the union pay scales move up from the increased minimum wage.
Can’t have a union man earning less than minimum wage now can we.
Much easier for unions to demand pay increases for “skilled” labor the higher min wage is.
Seems quite obvious to me.
Not sure about the math in the U.S., but of course the minimum wage argument was raging in Alberta a few years ago. Having worked many years ago for the feds, I know a bit about payrolls.
So back in 2017, I did some math (arithmetic, really) and here are the facts according to the Alberta and federal government tax deduction tables at the time.
At $11.00 an hour, this is how it breaks out for someone who works 40 hours a week.
– The total cost to the employer rises by 36% from $440 per week to $600 per week.
– The NET to the employee rises from $384 to $495 per week, or 29%
Now here is where it gets really interesting…
– EI goes from $7.17 to $9.78 per week, an increase of 36%
– CPP goes from $18.45 to $26.37 per week, an increase of 43%
– Federal tax goes from $25.20 to $47.62 per week, an increase of 89% AND
– Provincial tax goes from $5.50 to $20.44 per week, an increase of 272%!
So when the government tells you that the minimum wage increase benefits the worker, take another look. It benefits the government FAR more than anyone…..and the employer and the consumer takes the hit. ALL of it.
Minimum wage is simply about gaining more tax revenue disguised as concern for the workers.
That is something that is not factored into these debate.
Imagine if the tax system was revamped and the government let people take home their money instead of binding it away in useless programs. This probably would not be a discussion.
Um…isn’t math (sorry, arithmetic) racist?
On a serious note, that’s an intriguing calculation. Having been a manager in the restaurant business, I am familiar with the impact of a minimum wage increase taxes on the bottom line BUT I never calculated the impact of the increase of taxes to the gubmint coffers. VERY enlightening.
Ward, and that is why the unions are behind the drive for this bullshit!
and Art, thanks for the heads up, I forgot about that shit
Everybody say WE.
The poverty industry mouth pieces always seem to take a cut for themselves.
I don’t mind a minimum wage so long as it’s below the threshold where it creates significant unemployment and an incentive to automate. It does prevent high school students (who are pretty naive and could use a little protection) from getting totally screwed over when they get their first job.
But a federal minimum wage for the U.S. is a poor idea. A minimum wage that doesn’t do much damage in Massachussetts might do significant damage in Mississippi. Setting minimum wages at the state level allows Americans to better accommodate local economic conditions.
Leftists refuse to acknowledge that a wage is payment for services rendered not a reward for showing up.
For a business to continue as a going concern, productivity must be three times the payroll. When that doesn’t happen prices go up or expenses must be trimmed; usually both end up taking place.
A Leftist doesn’t get it that even making the minimum $100/hour there will still be people living under bridges.
I used to work for a house cleaning company in Calgary. The women (most of whom only had a Grade 10 education) were very well paid for their work. But they were only well paid if they showed up to work consistently. This was all explained to them in the first interview, and they all agreed to the terms. But in actual practice, they would moan and whine when they would be knocked back to minimum wage ($ 11/hour at that time) if they missed any time at work. They had a difficult time realizing that the work scheduled for them, now had to be covered off by their teammates as the houses still had to be cleaned. They liked to bitch that they were being penalized for being sick (most of the sickness was “cocktail flu”).
Mike, if Min wage were a $100/hour, there would be a hell of a lot more people living in more crowded conditions under that bridge. Another thought, at least they would need to build more or bigger bridges, so there’s that.
Sandy-from-the-Bronx has little experience beyond serving drinks. The ‘Green New Deal’, which she promotes, demonstrates a very poor understanding of economics (and history and industry and manufacturing and ad infinitum).
I particularly enjoy her ‘rabbit in the headlights’ look when asked something about which she knows little.
But take advice from her? No
AOC needs to go to Denmark and pay for a McMeal, $12.60 USD.
Unions, MBW, taxes all add up.
A few months after I quit my teaching job at Armpit College, I spoke with a certain firm which I thought could make use of what I had to offer.
The discussion eventually shifted to money. Since I was in a good financial situation when I left AC, I said that I was flexible on pay. I added that I was willing to take a low salary if it meant that I could get my foot in the door and I could use that as an opportunity to move through the company. The personnel thingy I met with looked aghast that I would be willing to work for so little.
Evidently the concept of “opportunity” had totally escaped her. Then again, she was in no danger for qualifying for membership in Mensa.
A few days later, I received a reply by e-mail, advising me that I wasn’t qualified for the position because the “focus of the job had changed”….. over the course of a weekend. (Yeah, right.)
Speaking of working for peanuts in the hope of an opportunity, I went through my parents’ papers over the past few weeks. I came across an old pay stub from a car wash in Edmonton where my father worked for a short while. At the time, he was waiting for my mother and me to arrive from Berlin and he had to make a living because he had a family to support.
He was a journeyman machinist and he used that time to look for something more suitable. From what I’ve been able to piece together, his next job was with the company that became his career. Between it, and the firm that later took it over, he made a very good living for 50 years.
If people want higher wages, then we need to create productive jobs. The kind of jobs that governments have been destroying.
No fishing, no mining, no forestry, no oil and gas, no farming, no manufacturing ….
WTF does Canada do?
Live on printed money.
More like, “Borrowed Time”
I wonder if the $60. U.S. sweatshirts she sells on her website were made by workers paid $15./hr.
I would bet that if you raised the minimum wage, while at the same time banning escalator clauses in union contracts you would find that the support for the increased minimum wage would suddenly drop, as a goodly portion of government union contracts contain these clauses.
I would also bet that AOC had at least one professor who went to the “Scrooge McDuck School of economic Knowledge”….
The hilarious thing here is that Denmark has no minimum wage!
I’ll make a deal with AOC. Raise the minimum wage to $20/hr … after … we seal the borders, and reduce the number of LEGAL immigrants to 200k/year (down from 1M+/year).
Currently, you can’t hire a random Home Depot parking lot laborer herein the SF Bay Area for less than $20/hr. Offer them less, and they’ll curse you in “Mexican” and sit back down on the curb.
Once we PAY people *cough* *cough* … equitably … every white American will be happy to “do the jobs they say we just won’t do”. We won’t “need” cheap Mehikan labor … will we, US Chamber of Commerce?
“Frictionless propaganda” – I am so stealing that one!
As a very long term Austrian Economics hobbyist (Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, et al) I am very VERY familiar with the case against minimum wages which I don’t need to summarize here (and insult you).
HOWEVER, only very recently I’ve been engaged in a bit of a thought struggle on this. Theoretically, there is no ground to stand on for pro-minimum wage advocates. BUT in the real world, central bank policy of massive non-stop money-printing is redounding exclusively to the benefit of the the high net worth class. SO in the real world the pro-minimum wage people may have some kind of case.
No matter what laws are passed, the true minimum wage remains zero.