The true cost of Low Wages. Who is really to blame.

a reply to: lme7898354

Your under the impression that there is more than enough jobs to cater to low wage workers. These jobs make up 26+% of available jobs. And then you take the lack of jobs for all issue. Turn that 26% into atleast 30%. And it becomes quite clear no amount of college is going to get all the low wage workers a decent job and fair pay. maybe 10% of them if they were all trained for specific jobs so that every other job could be filled.

Your generalising that if everyone works hard everyone can get a good job. Just the idea is ridiculous because fast food joints, Giant stores etc would be empty.

People say you don't have to do that job, yet every statistic and fact says otherwise. So as these jobs are a permanenet fixture and account for over a 1/4 of jobs available I think its about time people started getting a living wage for their labour. Instead of struggling so that everyone else can have slightly lower prices and cheaper services.

a reply to: atrollstalker

How much education do you need to see that you don't bag the can of Hawaiian Punch on top of the loaf of bread?

You'd be very surprised, in my experience lately most don't have that much confidence. And that is usually because it is not expected of them. And that is because they make over minimum wage so it doesn't matter, used to they took pride because they were dependent upon earning tips from those they helped.

a reply to: WanderingNomadd

You just don't understand the concept do you?

Ok, back to Economics 101: If you increase the lowest wages (minimum wage), then the goods produced or service provided costs more. It takes more money to make the same product and thus the product costs more. Thus follows that the people who were making minimum wage and are now making a higher minimum wage have no more buying power than they did before. Therefore, the new 'living wage' is no longer a living wage because costs of living have risen as well. Simple 2+2=4 equation (if this then this). It cannot be made any simpler. And if you cannot understand this very simple concept then you need to start back over in primary school, which means you have no business earning minimum wage at this point, much less more.

a reply to: WanderingNomadd

lol I remember a dozen years ago when the definition of "manufacturing" was tossed about to perhaps include "manufacturing a burger", so

reclassifying fast food workers as manufacturing employees could have other advantages for the [Bush] administration.

It would offset somewhat the ongoing loss of manufacturing jobs in national employment statistics. Since the month President Bush was inaugurated, the economy has lost about 2.7 million manufacturing jobs, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. That continues a long-term trend.

Building Blue-Collar … Burgers?

What manufacturing job loss? We ain't got no stinkin' manufacturing job loss!! lol

a reply to: JDeLattre89

Look at the video in my OP. Your the one that does'nt understand the cost is spread. That video is'nt a perfect representation as economics is unpredictable in and off itself. But the maths is solid and the result can be trusted as a very base result.

Increasing the minimum wage of walmart produces a annual cost that can be negated by a 1.4% rise in prices. Saving the taxpayer welfare costs. Thats a high percentage increase in wages, over 50%, that produces 1.4% increase to products.

The fact you think it is 2+2=4 equation shows you have'nt even researched your just assuming because Bob gets a minimum wage increase of 30% Joe has to pay 30% more for his bread

It is more complicated than the video shows in my OP, don't get me wrong, but it is far from the idea in your head.

And if you cannot understand this very simple concept then you need to start back over in primary school, which means you have no business earning minimum wage at this point, much less more.

You need to do some research my friend instead of attacking people who have.

There is so many factors involved no one can claim a full understanding. But the current system does'nt work so it needs to change.

"Every day, I'm standing outside trying to sing my way in: We are hungry, please let us in We are hungry, please let us in. After about a week that song is gonna change to: We hungry, we need some food. After two, three weeks, it's like: Give me the food Or I'm breaking down the door. After a year you're just like: I'm picking the lock. Coming through the door blasting." — 2P

a reply to: JDeLattre89

Don't forget gains in productivity. These gains are not being "shared" with employees.

Please watch www.youtube.com... on you tube, or do 5 minutes of research to learn where the $ has been going since the mid 1980's. Or don't, but there is information that you won't get on AM radio. I was an AM junkie til I saw the video listed above, it pried my eyes open and made me look and learn.

Ok . . . since simple math isn't easy for you guys.

Yes saw the video, wasn't impressed. Beside the point.

Wandering Nomad: Your conclusion is based off the assumption that ALL jobs are provided by large corporations instead of small businesses (which comprise the vast majority of businesses and thus jobs). But then again, if you do raise minimum wage as such then the only jobs to be had will be at walmart anyway because as you said THEY can afford the hike. This means no fast food jobs to complain about min wage anyways, because they are franchises which are small businesses and cannot afford wage increases such as proposed..

originally posted by: atrollstalker
Here's the deal. Corporation are not necessarily greedy just keep the poor folks down. Corporation has shares of stock. Shares of stock are sold to individuals and companies. Those individuals have take their OWN money and invested in the corporations. The corporations use that money to make more money and then pay the investors for using their money. Those "evil" corporations are probably made of some of your mom and pop's money which is helping them to retire. Most retirement accounts in this country are funded by corporations returning money on people's investments. It is called investment in their future.

Gotta go.

A system based on greed. Thats what it is.

What amazes me the most is seeing people who have nothing but a low income and a bunch of loans defending a system made to suck everything out of them.

As Marx said, capitalism would free us from feudalism, socialism from capitalism and communism from socialism.

I always thought that this would take a few more hundred years but I´m starting to believe that this is closer than I ever imagined. It may very well happen thru the robots revolution that is going to take place in the next 10 years.

a reply to: JDeLattre89

You're oversimplifying # and showing that it's you not others lacking basic math.

If a person makes more money they spend more money. The burger's cost to make being increased is largely offset by more people being able to buy more burgers.

The burger flipper who goes from 8 dollars to 15 dollars an hour now has disposable income. Which means he leaves the house more, eats out more, goes to more places, does more shopping.

The only way that increasing minimum wage causes the effect you say is if business artificially raise the cost of their products before seeing what people do with their new disposable income.

In truth yes some costs will rise. But it won't be a 1:1 ratio like you seem to think it will be. Only the wealthy make enough money not to spend most most of it. That 15 dollar an hour burger flipper will be putting most of that money back into the economy.

The advantage of higher wages for companies is it means more of their product being bought.

Here's a SIMPLIFIED example: 5 dollar burger we'll say 3 get bought in a hour, for 15 dollars. It costs 8 dollars to pay a worker that hour and another 2 dollars for ingredients shipping ect, so 10 dollars total, 5 dollars profit.

Now the worker gets 15 dollars.

You seem to think this means.

5 dollar burger we'll say 3 get bought in a hour, for 15 dollars. It costs 15 dollars to pay a worker that hour and another 2 dollars for ingredients shipping ect, so 17 dollars total, 2 dollars lost.

What it actually means.

5 dollar burger we'll say 5 get bought in a hour as more can afford it and are out shopping now, for 25 dollars. It costs 15 dollars to pay a worker that hour and another 2 dollars for ingredients shipping ect, so 17 dollars total, 8 dollars profit.

If TWO more people buy burgers due to that raise in pay the company made 3 whole more dollars in profit, and they didn't even raise the cost of those burgers.

Now let's reduce that to 1 more person buys a burger per hour just to see what happens.

5 dollar burger we'll say 4 get bought in a hour as more can afford it but we want to be more cautious in our estimate, for 20 dollars. It costs 15 dollars to pay a worker that hour and another 2 dollars for ingredients shipping ect, so 17 dollars total, 3 dollars profit. We've just lost a bit a profit from before despite gaining more customers. So let's correct for this to get back to 5 dollars. We're two dollars less profit than we had before. So 2 dollars divided by 4 burgers = 50 cents.

So if we raise the cost of burgers to 5.50 we suddenly are making the same profit margins despite raising the employees hourly rate from 8 to 15 dollars, simply because it allowed for more people to buy our burgers.

You would have us believe that no one is buying more burgers now that they have more disposable income and that as a result that burger would have to be raised to over 9 dollars to compensate.

This would only be true if companies instantaneously raised prices to such, and gave the economy no time to stabilize by giving people an opportunity to start spending their new found finances.

originally posted by: avgguy
If you hike up one groups pay you have to hike up everybody's pay. That won't happen unless the economy dictates it.

false....the top 1% has hiked their pay enormously, and yet the middle class and poor have not had an equal, or close to it, hike in their own pay....
when over 50% of the entire wealth of America is controlled by approx. 33,000 families, the "economy" is dictated by them.....

a reply to: CrapAsUsual

lol I know that we can't go back to "the good old days", and I'm going to sound like an old fart.... or as my son says, an honored citizen.... but I grew up in the 1950-60s. My Dad worked for a family run distribution business. The owners were wealthy because the business was healthy. It was non-union, but my Dad always said that it was because of unions that he had good wages, retirement and health benefits. At the end of the year, the owners would distribute "profit sharing" checks to all the workers; even newly hired got a share, just not as much, as it was based on seniority, those who had been with the company longer to keep the business growing and healthy received more.

Now, mind you, the owners were wealthy Republicans (as back then, the GOP was considered the "party of big business", the country club set, not like now). They were good, decent people.... who just had more wealth than their workers, but they shared the profits. Nowadays, they would be derogatorily labeled marxists, communists, socialists!! Jeez. And we never begrudged them their wealth, as we understood that, as owners, they assumed risks that employees didn't. Although, due to family problems, they had to close their business, but my Dad found another comparable job within three months. No problem.

How times have changed. I just wanted to let people know that it wasn't always like it is nowadays. It really was a different, nicer economy, and "profit sharing" existed.

a reply to: desert

I think it should be repeated there were good pensions, jobs security/opportunity, and GOOD medical coverage. These were common.

When businesses/corps externalized these benefits, their profits shot up and the worker took it on the chin.

a reply to: desert

You are a baby boomer so you lived in a kind of conjuncture will never repeat. Many technological advances from the war, many babies, many construction both public and private... It´s impossible to hold such a growth rate for more than a few years like 10 - 20 and thats what you experienced.

Comparing the virtues of capitalism with the failures of socialism it´s useless, pointless. One will come after the other and the socialism or communism to come will not be the forced socialism we had in the USSR will be a necessity caused by the capitalism that will have exhausted its options.

It´s useless to be for or agains this because its evolution. A system based on greed had the merit to allow the creation of a middle class thus redistributing the resources, the next step is to end poverty and create an equalitarian society necessarily without the wealthy and this is what will happen. Then, when it becomes impossible to sustain the existence of private property a form of communism will emerge and become the dominant form of government.

Being a marxist is no more no less than recognising this. Has nothing to do with being socialist or communist. Marx was only an economist.

This right here tells you about all you need to know about wealth inequality in this country.

a reply to: JDeLattre89

Your thinking increase in wage = increase in prices = No outcome or benefits.

Actually it is increase in wage = increase in spending money = increase in spending = increase in customers = increase in profits = only minimal if any increase needed to goods.

Lets remove multiple customers and multiple business and start from scratch. 1 employee, 1 customer, 1 business.

Say a shop has one employee who earns 1 and one customer who spends 3, this equals 2 profit minus goods (say 0.5).

The employee' wage goes up to 2

The employee now has +1 to spend. Now this shop has two customers, one who spends 3 and one who spends 1.
the new system is customer earns 2, two customers who spend 3+1, profit = 2 minus goods 0.65ish = 1.35

This is how every business makes money through numbers of sales. So imagine that on a large scale.

Economic success comes from spending to create demand which in turn creates jobs and opportunities. The increase in customers ensures shops can meet the increase in wages without the same hike in prices. Business' securing these new customers works exactly how it does today.

originally posted by: jimmyx

originally posted by: avgguy
If you hike up one groups pay you have to hike up everybody's pay. That won't happen unless the economy dictates it.

false....the top 1% has hiked their pay enormously, and yet the middle class and poor have not had an equal, or close to it, hike in their own pay....
when over 50% of the entire wealth of America is controlled by approx. 33,000 families, the "economy" is dictated by them.....

The economy is FOR them. In other words, it´s THEIR economy.

We must understand this as a pyramid where larger companies/societies/funds hold smaller companies/businesses/individuals in some way that can be stock, debt, direct ownership, titles or other forms of control

From those 33000 families are a few, a hand full of entities that hold a larger number, these hold a larger number and so on. Its a control/debt chain.

This is possible ONLY because we accept that money can be multiplied without existing and then loaned for profit.

Someone with a license issued by the state, by us, creates money out of nothing, loans it for profit to us and if we don´t pay back for any reason we go to jail.

In other words, we the people, the stupid people, empower someone that is someone just like us to magically fabricate something that we need and exchange for work, our time and if for any reason we can´t pay back our life is ruined.

Its our life in exchange for their fabricated money.

What a great deal!

Worldwide it works like this:

www.forbes.com...

And

arxiv.org...

a reply to: CrapAsUsual

WOW, that Forbes article is amazing. Thank you for making me realize how screwed we are.

a reply to: Zanti Misfit

It's called inflation. Too many people with too much money causes a shortage of goods. A shortage of goods leads to higher prices because of more demand and less product.

Germany had people cashing in wheel barrels full of currency to buy bread. It literally took millions of German Marks to buy food.

a reply to: Puppylove

You are starting too high in the food chain.
You forgot about the farmer who raised the beef.
You forgot about the farmer who raised the corn to feed the beef.
You forgot about the seed company who sold the farmer the seeds to grow the corn to feed the beef.
You forgot about the fertilizer company who made the fertilizer to grow the corn
You forgot about the farmer who picked the corn.
You forgot about the oil worker who help make the gasoline to get the beef to the slaughterhouse.
You forgot about the employees in the slaughterhouse who process the beef.
You forgot about the truck driver who used more gas to get that beef to the wholesaler who distributed the beef.

There is more to the equation than the nasty employer and the highly motivated burger flipper.

a reply to: atrollstalker

There's a reason I bolded simplified.

I'm aware of all that, but I'm not writing a paper here professor.

The point was to show that there's more to increasing wages than a 1:1 ratio.

I even said prices would increase, but not at a 1:1 ratio, everyone down that chain has more spending power, so it affects the whole chain. It's a lot of math including everything. But to really know the effect it would need to actually be done, and business would have to fairly give the market a chance to stabilize before making it's adjustments.

A lot of belts would need to be tightened on the upper crust for once especially til things stabilize. Heaven forbid someone other than the lower class have to do that for once.

In the end the upper crust will have a bit less, and the lower class a bit more. Sorry we'd like the wealth gap to move a bit closer rather than further apart for once.

When the wealth gap grows bigger and bigger you all have no problem, but ask for a bit of the reverse and it's suddenly a panic.

Why is a growing wealth gap acceptable but wanting the reverse til we get something more reasonable such a monstrosity?

Do you guys honestly think an ever growing wealth gap is sustainable?