Congressional GOP Are Scum!

[rah]

Originally posted by One_Mean_Rabbit
I do find that statement funny as well. My brother is 17 and is making more than minimum wage. He is nothing special, just a normal HS kid. The idea that someone who is not mentally or physically retarded cannot make more than minimum wage for an extended period of time is crazy. Sure, you may start there, but after 6 months, you will probably get a raise if you work hard. If not, add that to your resume/application and go apply. This is so simple, all of my brother's friends make at least $1.50 more than minimum wage. And this is at Smoothie Kings, via landscaping, working at golf courses, and Tanning places.

Just one question for my curiosity, is you brother and his friends all white males?

When I was young, I also made a ton of money at the golf course, schlepping bags, car hopping, locker room or in the dining room. No black males were given the same opportunity.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


No, I don't think the transfer of power will be peaceful. Obviously, when fighting in actual combat, some killing will be required. This is not something to which I look forward, cuz killing is bad. This doesn't mean we round people up and kill them for opposing the new society. When you talking about shooting, burning, or hanging people, you're talking about executions, not military combat. You can't build a society based on the sanctity of human life on a foundation of corpses.

Much more optimistic than some of your comrades

Originally posted by chegitz guevara

Yeah, like that's ever worked. Maybe if we wanted to create a kinder, less corrupt capitalist society. The only to overthrow capitalism is revolution. It cannot be reformed away.

Why is this necessary? A "capitalist" from 200 years ago would be shocked at the range of benefits and safeguards now available to the average Canadian worker . Democratic capitalism evolves . . . I'll grant that the rich have a disproportionate amount of power but then again, any interest group that gets organized will have more of a voice than their numbers warrant.

Originally posted by chegitz guevara

This doesn't mean the revolution has to be violent, but that's largely up to would be counter-revolutionaries. They likely will not respect the ballot should it turn against them. EVERY single time they have revolted and they've suceeded in destroying the would be reformers. I see no reason to think the future would be different. As for resentment, I don't care if the capitalists resent us. I resent them.

I don't understand this part. I accept democracy more than capitalism .. . If a communist government were elected, I would accept their rule for as long as they continued to allow free and fair elections. If that mean an 80% marginal tax rate for some, I would oppose that but accept its validity.

As a "capitalist", I don't resent communists at all. Why would I? Currently you seem to be politically irrelevant and merely make for some entertaining debate. Personally I always hope there is an active communist voice as I love diversity of opinion . . . I hope you keep advocating youe positions until the end of time and I also hope that the more mainstream parties can find the "pearls" among all the sand and adopt those idea that have merit.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Flubs - always the voice of reason.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
Flubs - always the voice of reason.

I think that some of the communists would disagree

[One_Mean_Rabbit]

Originally posted by rah


Just one question for my curiosity, is you brother and his friends all white males?

When I was young, I also made a ton of money at the golf course, schlepping bags, car hopping, locker room or in the dining room. No black males were given the same opportunity.

Well, he is Mexican. He has one black friend, and the rest are white. Please, this isn't 1850's. Black youths can get the same jobs as white youths. However, I am not sure if the stereotypical white friends would make fun of their white friend working that type of job, while a stereotypical black friend may.

One of my very good childhood friends is black. His father is a self-made man and understands the game. He taught his son the same traits that made him successful, and I don't think Reggie ever made minimum wage. And trust me, Daddy never pulled any strings, just taught his son what is needed to make money. His father is real ass-buster. Don't think to walk into his home with a hat on, don't dare cuss or wear hood-rat clothing. A very good role model for anyone.

If anything, this is a cultural issue, not a racial issue.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
In addition to Imran's point it was also posited that the majority were first time employees (i.e. kids in a first job) to refute the accusation that the vast majority of minimum wagers are single parent mothers trying to feed a family of 5 on minimum wage.

Read the Krugman article. He goes over this using satistics from the US labor department's own reports. Exact figures are given.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

/me does resurrect thread.




The Krugman article was in reference to the change in bankruptcy law. (which I for the most part agree with teh KRUGMAN *gasp*) unless I missed it somewhere in the massive thread.

OTOH there is more interesting info on effect of minimum wage or perhasp the desparate attempts of hackneyed researcher to attempt to prove raising minimium wage has no effect on employment.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial on the proposal to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.00 is, as might be expected, pitiful: "Minimum wage/Time for an increase." It is also, however, a perfect example of what passes for argument and analysis among the Star Tribune's lefties-only editorial board.

The proposal emanates from the Democrat-controlled Minnesota Senate. The source of the proposal is a kind of warrant of its good faith in the eyes of the Star Tribune. More importantly, however, the proposal reflects "an article of faith." The relevant article of faith here is one found in the High Church of Liberalism: "that someone who works full time should achieve a certain degree of economic dignity."

On the one hand, this is a frustratingly vague article of faith: What the heck is economic dignity? What degree of economic dignity should someone who works full time have? On the other hand, we may infer that it is an article of faith with an amazingly high degree of precision: "I believe in jobs that pay $5.15 an hour in 1997 dollars, or $7.00 an hour in 2006 dollars." Is there anyone out there in Strib land who wonders whether $7.00 an hour doesn't buy enough economic dignity to warrant credal status? Why so cheap an article of faith? Why not $14.00 an hour? Or $140.00 an hour? Perhaps this is where that "article of faith" point comes in handy. Credo quia absurdum.

But this is the kind of article of faith that has evidence to support it! Raising the minimum wage by law has no adverse economic consequences. Economists, who might be thought to know something about the subject, thought so once upon a time. (Actually, they still do.) Now, however, it is only fuddy-duddy "business lobbyists" who hold such troglodytic views:

There are principled arguments against a higher minimum wage, but they no longer hold up under scrutiny. Business lobbyists say that a higher wage will stifle job creation. The idea is plausible in principle, but a landmark study by Princeton economists David Card and Alan Krueger found the effects to be negligible in practice. In fact, of the 13 states that exceeded the federal minimum wage in 2003, seven outperformed the rest of the country in job creation.

What was that Card/Krueger study? Why bother with details when you're dealing with an article of faith, and of course the Star Tribune doesn't bother. The famous Card/Krueger study involved calling fast food outlets in New Jersey after New Jersey raised its minimum wage in 1992. The study found that raising the minimum wage had no impact on jobs at the fast food outlets.

Here is a good summary of the Card/Krueger study and its flaws by Benjamin Zycher:

The most frequently cited, and seemingly most convincing, new study takes advantage of a "natural experiment" created when New Jersey raised its minimum wage from $4.25 an hour to $5.05 in April 1992. David Card and Alan Krueger of Princeton reasoned that since economic conditions ought not vary greatly between southern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, which are essentially a single economy, looking at employment trends in the two states ought to reveal the effects of the minimum wage.

Card and Krueger conducted telephone surveys of about 400 fast-food restaurants in February-March 1992, and then again in November-December 1992. They asked questions about full- and part-time workers, wages, benefits, and prices. From their statistical analysis of those survey data, Card and Krueger not only "find no evidence that the rise in New Jersey's minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state," but "find that the increase in the minimum wage increased employment." Indeed, the Card/Krueger statistical analysis suggests that the 18.8-percent increase in the New Jersey minimum wage yielded a 20.8-percent increase in employment relative to the Pennsylvania sample.

One immediate problem is that the authors looked only at major fast-food chains: Elementary economic analysis does not say that if you increase the minimum wage, employment will go down in every business--or in any particular business. The higher minimum wage might have differing impacts across firms. Indeed, it is possible that the major fast-food chains might emerge better off if the increased minimum wage raises costs at such smaller competitors as mom-and-pop fast-food stands.

Moreover, the Card/Krueger study turns out to have a major flaw: The survey data upon which it depends are lousy.

Suspicious of the Card/Krueger data and findings, the Employment Policies Institute gathered the actual payroll records from the Burger King franchises in the Card/Krueger zip codes and compared them to franchises surveyed in those zip codes. The survey data were wildly inconsistent with the payroll records. (The payroll sample also includes some restaurants that Card and Krueger missed.)

Independently, David Neumark of Michigan State and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve noticed that the variation in employment changes across the surveyed restaurants in the Card/Krueger sample seemed implausibly large--some restaurants had supposedly added huge numbers of employees while others had supposedly cut large numbers. In relatively small businesses, this sort of fluctuation seemed odd.

So Neumark and Wascher reviewed the payroll employment data gathered by EPI. When they applied the payroll data to the same econometric model used by Card and Krueger, they got completely different results. The variation in employment changes declined markedly, and analysis of the new data yields an estimated 4.8-percent decline in New Jersey employment relative to the Pennsylvania sample as a result of the higher minimum wage. Where payroll data could be compared with survey data for specific restaurants, Neumark and Wascher also found numerous errors in the Card/ Krueger data.

Looking just at Burger King restaurants, for instance, the Card/Krueger survey data show employment declines in two of three Pennsylvania zip codes, while the payroll data show employment increases in all three zip codes. Neumark and Wascher conclude that the questions used by Card and Krueger were too vague to generate precise information. For example, the survey asked how many "full-time" and "part-time" employees a restaurant had. But it didn't define either those terms (40 hours a week? 30?) or the relevant time period (within the last week? month? year?), leaving different restaurant managers to define the question differently. In short, using the actual payroll data instead of the survey "guesstimates" effectively refutes the Card/Krueger findings yielded by the New Jersey/Pennsylvania "natural experiment."

Or perhaps the Star Tribune is referring to other Card/Krueger studies, or to the book that Card and Krueger subsequently published on the subject, Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage. The Star Tribune's reference to "a landmark study" makes it difficult to determine what is being cited. In any event, see Deer, Murphy and Welch, "Sense and Nonsense on the Minimum Wage." The Star Tribune editorial today falls into the category of "nonsense on the minimum wage."

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

and this as well

Yesterday's Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial supporting an increase in the minimum wage in Minnesota to $7.00 deserves much more attention. The Star Tribune editorial plays into a Democratic effort that seeks to use the Democratic majority in the Minnesota Senate to roll House Republicans (holding a tenuous majority) and present Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty with the unpalatable alternative of signing or vetoing the bill. I wrote about the editorial in "Faith and economics at the Star Tribune." The only thing the editorial gets right is the scent of weakness that it picks up on the Republican side.

Many readers wrote with excellent points on the subject. The Star Tribune editorial is extraordinarily misleading for such a short piece, but is otherwise par for course at the Star Tribune. Here are a couple of considerations overlooked in the editorial.

The editorial refers to fourteen other states including Oregon and Washington as having already raised their minimum wage. I took a look at Oregon. The minimum wage in Oregon is $7.25 as of January 1, 2004, and is adjusted annually for inflation by a calculation using the U.S. City Average Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers for All Items.

The current federal minimum wage is $5.15. Oregon's minimun wage was raised in stages beginning in January 1997. It was raised from $5.50 to $6.00 in 1998 and $6.50 in 1999. The raises in the minimum wage roughly coincided with a long period of stagnation in job growth. In 2004, job growth made a slight recovery after more than three years of stagnation. Before 2004, Oregon had held the highest or second highest unemployment rate in the country for 41 months. See the January 14, 2005 AP story "Oregon unemployment rate drops to 6.8 percent." It would be nice if the Star Tribune had provided some context to its encouragement of Minnesota's emulation of Oregon.

The Star Tribune editorial implies that raising the minimum wage is a good method of reducing destitution among the poorest workers. Put to one side the fact that the editorial passes over in silence the effect of the earned income tax credit, which by itself belies the point of the editorial. The Star Tribune fails to provide any information to substantiate the implication of its editorial, and in fact it appears to be erroneous.

The Employment Policies Institute has calculated the average family income of employees who would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage based on Census Bureau Data (click here). According to the EPI breakdown (based on 2003 data), the average family income of Minnesota's destitute minimum wage workers is...$57,421. Funny that the Star Tribune didn't get around to entertaining this consideration in its editorial either.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistic, eh Ogie? The Card/Krueger study has been attacked repeatedly for shoddy work. Shame that people still buy it.

[Jon Miller]

most states have the federal minimum wage (5.15)

some have none??? (how?)

some of more
CALIFORNIA 6.75
CONNECTICUT 7.10
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 6.60 (going up)
FLORIDA 6.15
HAWAII 6.25
ILLINOIS 6.50
MAINE 6.35
MASSACHUSETTS 6.75
NEW YORK 6 (going up)
OREGON 7.25 (this is what I remembered)
RHODE ISLAND 6.75
VERMONT 7
WASHINGTON 7.35

JM

http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/america.htm

[Dinner]

California needs to push it's minimium wage up to $8 per hour. The union of local economists studied the coast of living here in San Diego and they found that the poverty point starts at $11.50 per hour with benifets or $13.50 without benifets. Anything less and you will live in poverty in this city.

The minimium wage is the state mandated one of $6.75.

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by Oerdin
California needs to push it's minimium wage up to $8 per hour. The union of local economists studied the coast of living here in San Diego and they found that the poverty point starts at $11.50 per hour with benifets or $13.50 without benifets. Anything less and you will live in poverty in this city.

The minimium wage is the state mandated one of $6.75.

WORD

[Imran Siddiqui]

That's just San Diego. Why can't SD have a higher min wage without hurting the country where you don't need anywhere near that amount to live.

[Jon Miller]

actually, San Francisco has a higher minimum wage than the rest of california...

JM

[Imran Siddiqui]

SD can do the same thing... it just won't work for all of Cali is all.