The minimum wage hike has driven the wages of teen employees down to $0.00.

reply to post by Wimbly

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Seems like a fair want. How much money was spent on the bailouts for incompetent people that did not do their job properly in the first place? And still did not do what was supposed to be done.

Can't give $20 to a crack addict and not expect them to not go out and buy more crack. Bailouts were the same thing from my point of view.

And for the record, I am 38 and have worked since I was 13 washing cars and mowing lawns. I have had good paying jobs that were crappy and low paying jobs that were crappy. And guess what, I make minimum wage now and have more money than when I worked in a factory for $12.65/hr. The difference is that it is a good job and I am free to work all the overtime I want. The best part is that I completely enjoy this job. Even more than when I was paid $40K/yr setting up networks nationwide in 2001. Or when I was making an average of $35K driving a semi over the road.

I still say that there is a problem and recognize that not everyone is as fortunate as I am. Turning a blind eye fixes nothing.

I don't understand. Why does a minimum wage effect youth employment? The only reason I can see is that it prevents employers from employing young people at less than the minimum wage. If there were more people working for less than the minimum wage there would be more people in employment but still living below the poverty line. That means that removing the minimum wage might solve an employment problem but doesn't actually make any sense as you'd just have a load of young people working 40 hours a week who would still not be earning enough to make ends meet. How can replacing unemployed poverty with employed poverty be the solution?

This must be part of the long term plan.

Out of work, desperate and underprivileged teens make the perfect "volunteers" for Obama's new Civil Defense Force under the guise of Americorps. The funding is there with the passage of HR 1388 "The Serve America" or GIVE Act.

The teen's parents will have no problem signing a "permission slip" for these kids after they have been unable to find jobs for a measurable amount of time. The kids will be shipped off to a variety of "campuses" and will earn a meager stipend, shelter, 3 squares and a cot in exchange for their service.

Wow talk about the article going right OVER YOUR HEAD. He stated clearly in the OP that 98% of people working over 40 hours a week make more than minimum wage. Minimum wage is teenagers and part time people, not head of households trying to support a family. Look at the numbers.

reply to post by quackers

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From source:
"in 2008 only 1.1% of Americans who work 40 hours a week or more even earned the minimum wage. In other words, 98.9% of 40-hour-a-week workers earn more than the minimum. The data also show that teenagers are five times more likely to earn the minimum wage than adults."

Minimum wage owners are teenagers. This economy has put them out of work, nobody will hire them. No money.

And:

"Congress and the Obama Administration simply ignore the economic consensus that has long linked higher minimum wages with higher unemployment. Two years ago Mr. Neumark and William Wascher, a Federal Reserve economist, reviewed more than 100 academic studies on the impact of the minimum wage. They found "overwhelming" evidence that the least skilled and the young suffer a loss of employment when the minimum wage is increased. Whatever happened to President Obama's pledge to follow the science?"

[edit on 12/10/09 by plumranch]

I would work for $0 an hour unless if I get a $5,000 guaranteed bonus for every month.

reply to post by plumranch

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Then this brings me to my previous point. What you are saying is that it is better for teenagers to work for less than minimum wage than to not work at all. I still fail to see how the minimum wage is to blame. If there is no money to hire them then there is no money whether they are making $3 or $8 an hour.

If what is being said is true then employers will hire less people as they must pay them more. This means employers are likely to look for those with the most experience or who are the most efficient, or, the most qualified for the job. That has nothing to do with the minimum wage really as any employer would seek those individuals anyway.

This is just a ploy for cheap labour. The minimum wage is there to ensure at least a fair wage for those in less skilled jobs. If you lower or remove the minimum wage then suddenly everyone must work for peanuts, and that's just backwards thinking. May as well just advocate sweatshops.

Less people earning more or everybody working for nothing, its a no brainer.


[edit on 12-10-2009 by quackers]

What an ignorant post. The same dollar that you would earn ten years ago is not the same dollar that you earn today. Looking at this graph, you can see that right now the minimum wage, adjusted to inflation, it is the lowest it has been since the mid 1950's. So the whole premise of this thread is flawed from the onset because when you adjust it for inflation, the MINIMUM WAGE IS NOT GOING UP. THE MINIMUM WAGE IS GOING DOWN.

If you lower the minimum wage then people will get paid less across ALL jobs, even jobs that require skill. I got stuck getting paid 8 dollars an hour for doing IT/Search Engine Optimization, which is actually difficult, and requires computer programming ability, but I got paid as much as if I were mowing someone's lawn. I know that if the minimum wage were even lower now, and it is ridiculously low, that I would have been paid LESS.

I am trying to save up so eventually I can buy my own house. However, with rent, food, insurance, gas, and everything getting more and more expensive, I have to live with my parents to be able to put away any money at all. My dreams of owning my property are years away if I'm lucky, and I still am going for it. Even if some young people are FORCED into living with their parents it doesn't mean they are lazy... in fact they probably work just as many hours as you, or would be if their weren't hundreds of fellow applicants for every single job opening.

These young people aren't lazy, they just don't own their own property yet. They make easy targets for people like Rush who want to blame the worlds problems on anyone except themselves and people who share their same flawed ideologies.

If you are a young person, on top of working hard (some of my friends work up to seventy hours a week) you can usually forget about benefits or healthcare, or ever seeing any of the money we put into social security for you old farts that want to push us into slavery. Seriously, how disconnected from reality are you to suggest such rubbish? I think of this forum as a serious place. How can some of you people be serious? Please think about what you are really saying here. The position that you are advocating is un-American, and I can't believe you are so deluded that you can't see that slavery is a bad thing anymore. Your lack of clarity is disturbing to the point that I question your sobriety.

Many of my friends who CAN'T get jobs no matter how hard they are trying, and have no alternative, have to join military service to get work. Or, they have to take jobs that are high paying, but nobody would want to take. I hope my girl friends who are 'models' 'dancers' or 'strippers' get better jobs one day that they can be truly happy with, but for now at least they can make a living. That is what truly matters, right? I really hope that my friends who couldn't get jobs, that you are calling 'lazy', don't die or get their arms/legs blown off in Iraq. Hopefully they will come home in one piece to a country that doesn't call them LAZY and TRIES TO ENSLAVE THEM WITH UNFAIR WAGES AND EMPLOYMENT PRACTICES.

honestly f*** the vast majority of you people, I am dumbfounded by some of the pure bulls*** that you put on this site without thinking.

Instead of blaming the youth as a huge group that you think you know and understand so intimately why don't you BLAME YOURSELVES FOR F***ING UP THIS COUNTRY.

If anyone is lazy, it is the blind, decrepit, hypnotized, ignorant, apathetic, over-medicated older generation of former hippies that has let this country get overrun by criminals without saying anything about it. I'm sure all the "teenagers" and "young adults" that you hate so much really appreciate the national decision to go into Iraq for NO F******* REASON. I wonder if that decision affected the economy at all? I wonder who made that decision?

OH BUT THATS OKAY, OUR PERSPECTIVE IS SO LIMITED THAT WE THINK WE SHOULD JUST ENSLAVE THE KIDS TO SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS, THEY DON'T KNOW ANY BETTER

Many of us were babies when these decisions were being made.

To those of you who are calling young people lazy or stupid, F*** you, maybe we should enslave and kill all the old people like you for being horrible burdens on the economy. To be honest I don't know why I waste my time posting here. Half of you people are INSANE... you have utterly no contact with reality remaining. Nothing that you say makes sense in the real world, and you should either seriously re-evaluate your life and the kinds of things you are saying, or just kill yourselves for being horrible people.

Economics 101.

For every cent an arbitrary "minimum wage" is raised, jobs are lost.

You really want to lose jobs?

Kick it up like Congress did the last time.

Labor, being a cost of production, will be reduced as labor costs increase.

Hell, if I own a business, and labor becomes too costly, I can just sit on my ass and make no money. Why even put forth the effort?

The identical, same situation with unions.

They raise the price of production too high for profit, and plants and businesses just shut down.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

And we wonder why the unemployment rate is so high.

And if you believe the government numbers - you're gullible.

what? you don't think indians, russians, and chinese people will be purged too? i think you have to get out more and do some traveling into these countries. you will see the brutal poverty associated with these 3 countries.

reply to post by dooper

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Economics is a field of science with theories, laws, and relationships that predict and control how an economy performs. It was required in my field of study and frankly needs to be required for all college students as they are unbelievably ignorant in economics. My wife is a prof so I get some great "you wouldn't believe" stories!

The trend in the Obama administration is to ignore economics entirely. As this article points out even the great leader himself "ignores the science"!

reply to post by Albastion

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The purpose of the thread is to EXPLAIN how minimum wage operates. Wage goes up, employment goes down. Wage goes down more teens get hired. AND having a job is GOOD for a teen.

Here's the deal. I employ 10 people. Non get minimum wage. Our total sales are down 10% this year. I'm not hiring anyone new, no minimum wage, nobody. If for example minimum wage was $4.50 or so an hour I might be hire one or 2 teens to do cleanup and aid work. Maybe, but I'd have to think long and hard. The bottom line is to pay all the bills, if I don't we close the doors and everyone goes on unemployment, end of story.

I'm 18 and put in a bunch of applications. I only got one call back and didn't end up getting the job.

The post is flawed. As an above poster stated, our "higher" minimum wage now is worth less than the "lower" minimum wage from the 70's. Further, the way the system is supposed to work is that as productivity is increased, the profit is supposed to be shared among all the workers, not just the owner. Originally one person for example could make say a car every 7 days (this is a for instance)....now a person can through technology, make a car in say 1 day... his pay is supposed to be compensated higher as the company is making more profit with less work.

Unfortunately, the true wages have totally stagnated since 1970, while innovations make people much more productive, all the profit has gone to the owners or shareholders, and none has gone to the workers. Wages stalled out and have been held at the same levels since then, even though our countries GDP has doubled. What is further adding difficulty now is the fact that since the dollar depreciated 30% under Bush, all the goods and groceries have gone up in price accordingly, as are our utilities and services, but our pay is actually descending now, with many people being asked to take pay cuts in order to keep a job at all. And further is the sky rocketing cost of healthcare.

If the minimum wage had increased at the same rate as our growth in production since 1970 the current minimum wage would be right under 20 dollars an hour. And as an above poster pointed out, people today are NOT making more money in easier jobs. Manufacturing used to be the true meat of american power, and in the 50's and 60's a single father could hold a manual labor factory type job and support a wife and multiple children. Now both parents must work for the vast majority of households in order to support even 1 or 2 children. Its not the hike in minimum wage that has cost us our jobs, its the massive exportation of industry and services.

Keeping minimum wage down is a tactic used by the business sector in order to secure higher profits for the massive corporate body.

Since when has minimum wage been a teenager and part time wage?

In what state do I make $20 an hour just because I have a child to support?

Or because I'm over twenty years old?

Please tell me because I really should move there.

Minimum wage is not a living wage.

In Florida it is $7.21 per hour.

That's around $1150 before taxes and roughly $1000 after income taxes working full time.

The federal poverty level is $10k

Source

After all the other taxes you have to pay anyone that makes minimum wage is living below the poverty level.

Spot on Blackmarketeer, spot on. That is exactly what is happening, and add to the fact immigration from mexico and other places where the workers are going into jobs also for the same pay. The older workforce and such are having to find jobs in places that would normally be for the teenagers. And employeers hire them because they know they have an adult working in that position at the wage of a teenager. It's not minimum wage, it's older workers/professionals that need that job to support a family or themselves.

reply to post by plumranch

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How else is Obama going to recruit for his Civilian Force?

Give them no other choice.

S&F for bringing this issue to the fore.

reply to post by jibeho

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OOPS, sorry, didn't mean to copy your post, was just replying to the OP.

reply to post by mikerussellus

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You're not the first to notice that Obama seems to be systematically doing all he can to tear the country down! It was being discussed on national talk shows today.

I'm guessing that 9/10 people in your position would hire nobody new, and might even reduce the pay of your other employees, while the company makes up the difference in profit. This translates into lower quality of life for all of your workers.

Claiming that the minimum wage is too high and hurting the economy, while not only being blatantly false, is a SIDE-ISSUE that is meant to distract from the REAL PROBLEMS that are bringing our economy down. These issues are war, and lack of regulation of the financial system.

Obviously then, by lowering the minimum wage you would be treating the symptoms:

1) The minimum wage, inflation-adjusted, is lower than ever.
2) The minimum wage gets lower and lower every year.
3) The economy is getting worse for unrelated reasons, for example, because we have 2 wars going on at the same time.
4) People want to make the minimum wage EVEN LOWER... WHY?

IF the economy is getting worse no matter what, by reducing wages you are making an unnatural change to the system that will only reduce quality of life for all workers without addressing the problems that caused our economy to go down in the first place. Reducing the minimum wage would be treating the symptom. Maybe instead of changing wages for workers we should change our government's imperialistic tendencies, and regulate the financial system.

Besides, at what point does the minimum wage become so low that it is slave labor to continue working? Following the trend of steps 1 through 4, eventually nobody will be getting paid anything anymore, unless we fix the real problems with this country.

Now all of you people who are so against the youth and want them to get paid crap money to work crap jobs, at what point did you lose sight of the real issues that face this country?