I'm not a constitutional scholar, but I do know that spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, and this is a spending decision, is it not?
To reiterate something I've found occasion to assert fairly often here at LITD, the minimum wage is bad and wrong for the following reasons:
- It is government telling a private organization how to conduct its affairs.
- It distorts the true market value of an hour of a given type of labor
- It elbows those who are in most need of a way to enter the world of work - young, unskilled people, particularly minorities - out of the job market
Then there is the Freedom-Haters' understanding that the minimum wage issue is a tailor-made focal point for their overall class warfare. It is essential to their propaganda that the cattle-masses never consider the fluidity of income brackets or the effect of ambition on an individual's upward mobility. The FHers must paint a scenario of fixed groups within society: some kind of mythic " the man"-type stratum that has all the power and prestige and holds the fates of various victim groups in its hands.
The Most Equal Comrade will play this to the hilt tonight. We must make sure our weapons - clear, reasoned explanations of how freedom actually works and how prosperity happens - are cleaned and loaded. This is a particularly intense battle in the war for America's soul.
The constitutionality of this planned presidential action is as debatable as the issue itself. Who are these 75 economists, rogue idiots?
ReplyDeleteSee 75 economists back minimum wage hike at 75 economists back minimum wage hike
Read more re: the above at http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/14/news/economy/raising-minimum-wage/index.html
ReplyDeleteWhere does government get off telling a privately owned organization what to pay anybody in its employ?
ReplyDeleteIn the United States, statutory minimum wages were first introduced nationally in 1938;some states enacted them as protective laws starting in 1912 until they were ruled illegal but they applied only to women and children. For example, Massachusetts was the first and its laws "had the power only to investigate conditions and recommend changes".
ReplyDeleteRead more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage
Also from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage:
ReplyDeleteSupporters of minimum wage in the business journal Bloomberg Businessweek point out that the country of Denmark has a minimum pay rate of the equivalent of about $20 an hour, but its business climate is sufficiently healthy for the World Bank to ranked it as the easiest place in Europe to do business in 2011, 2012, and 2013. Denmark is also "among the leading countries in income equality and national happiness."Denmark also had a lower unemployment rate (6.8%) and higher labor participation rate (64.4%) than the United States (7.4%, 63.6% as of September 2013) where the minimum wage is far lower ($7.25).
All the shit you have posted since my question notwithstanding, where does government get off telling a private organization what to pay anybody?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cato.org/blog/are-living-standards-higher-denmark-or-united-states
ReplyDeleteStatists admire Scandinavian nations. Matthew Yglesias, for instance, recently expressed his great admiration for Denmark. And I suppose I would agree with him if asked to pick the world’s best welfare state. I’ve been to the country several times and there is no question that laissez-faire policies in areas other than fiscal policy have helped the nation remain relatively prosperous.
But Yglesias is a bit lovestruck about the Danes (an understandable impulse for non-economic reasons), and it leads him to make some rather strange assertion — presumably because he wants us to believe that Denmark’s good points are because of (rather than in spite of) an onerous fiscal burden. What jumped out at me was his claim that Danes enjoy a “higher average material standard of living” than Americans. I’m not sure where he gets that, since the World Bank, CIA, United Nations, and IMF all show that the United States has more per-capita economic output.
http://www.cato.org/blog/minimum-wage-unemployment-0
ReplyDeleteIt is not hard to explain to the noneconomist why some studies suggest no effect of the minimum wage on employment. In the past, changes in the minimum wage have been relatively small. Trying to sort out the effects of the increase from everything else going on requires high-powered statistics, and even then the effects can be buried by a host of other simultaneous disturbances and influences.
So, consider the following common-sense thought experiment: Suppose Congress were to enact a minimum wage $50 higher than the current one of $7.25 per hour. Would a minimum of $57.25 reduce employment? I know of no economist who would assert a zero effect in this case, and recommend that readers ask their economist friends about this thought experiment. Assume that the estimate is that a minimum of $57.25 would reduce employment by 100,000. The actual number would be far higher but 100,000 will do for this thought experiment. Now, consider several other possible increases of less than $50. The larger of these increases would have substantial effects, the smaller ones smaller effects.
But is there reason to believe that a minimum of $10 would have no effect? I have never seen a convincing argument to justify that belief. If you accept as a fact that a minimum wage of $57.25 would reduce employment, and you accept as a fact that some workers are currently paid $7.25 per hour, then logic compels you to believe that a small increase in the minimum wage above $7.25 will have at least a small negative effect on employment.
The only escape from this logic is to believe that there is a discontinuity in the relationship between the minimum wage and employment. No one has offered evidence that there is a discontinuity at a certain minimum wage such that a minimum above that has an effect and one below does not.
I answered your question immediately. Government got off to telling private employers what to pay their personnel in the US in 1938. Some other countries started much earlier. We fought a terrible war partially over whether government could at least prohibit private employers from paying people nothing. You asked, I answered. This is one of those issues on which opinion is split. I merely asked you to help me understand why 75 economists say it is OK, nay helpful to raise the minimum wage. Never got an answer, just that you are right and they are wrong because this is not the purview of government. You surely realize the man in the street's head often reels at these debates amongst the so-called experts.
ReplyDeleteDenmark came in at #10 to US's #12 in that index of economic freedom you railed about here a few weeks ago.
ReplyDeleteNow, a new paper argues, inequality is not only bad for those at the bottom. It is also bad for economic growth as a whole and a major reason why the recovery from the Great Recession has been so weak.
ReplyDeleteRead more at http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/income-inequality-hurts-economic-growth-researchers-say/2014/01/24/cb6e02a0-83b0-11e3-9dd4-e7278db80d86_story.html
According to the CNN link, most of those 75 economists have some link to either the MEC regime or the Billy Jeff the Zipper administration. And they are basing it on "adults in working families, disproportionately women, who work at least 20 hours a week and depend on these earnings to make ends meet," which is disingenuous. By far, most of those earning a minimum wage are teenagers still living with their parents.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/02/who-earns-the-minimum-wage-suburban-teenagers-not-single-parents
And anybody with a lick of sense knows that one doesn't take a minimum wage job to support a family. That's not what the line-cook-at-McDonalds or checkout-clerk-at-TJ-Maxx positions are for. You take such jobs to begin your way up through the world of work.
And your new paper by the researchers assumes a fixed, static 95 percent. People move in and out of income brackets all the time. Then there is the matter of their going into debt since the increasing spread in inequality. Just who is responsible for that debt in each of those individual households?
ReplyDelete