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And once again, you miss the point. The solution you propose for someone in that situation is precisely why a minimum wage increase doesn't work. If everyone asks for that increase, and everyone gets it, then we're right back where we were before relatively speaking, right? The minimum wage increase only helps some people if not everyone else gets an equivalent relative increase in their wages as well. Which means that they are harmed by the increase. The more people who were previously earning over minimum wage who gain a relative wage increase to offset the increase in minimum, the more the costs of goods and services increases relative to that same increase, eliminating the benefits of the increase itself.

Again. Pick one. Either everyone's wages increase by the same relative amount, or they don't. Which is it? If the former, then you gain nothing by raising minimum wage. If the latter, then any benefit for the smallish number of people whose wages increased (mostly teens and students) is directly offset by losses in relative wages by a much larger number of people in the ranges just above that minimum (mostly single parents and struggling working class earners).

So for your minimum wage hike to "work", it must result in net harm to those who are actually struggling the most in our economy. Which is why it's a terrible idea.

The point was that you either lacked the balls to go ask for a raise or else your labor/skills wasn't worth paying you more than minimum wage. When I was in the same position, I went to my employer and said "Hey, it's wrong that I'm making as much as someone just starting so either up my pay or I'm gonna have to cruise." Since I actually possessed skills beyond that of the average starting employee, I got a raise.

What would have really sucked is if they hadn't raised minimum wage because some other loser couldn't sack up and might be sad. That would have been the greatest loss to me financially. Instead, minimum raise went up, I showed some spine (and skills) and came out doubly ahead. But you keep on saying how that's not possible and I could have only suffered for it.

The raise in question would have been in 1991-1992 when IL state minimum went from $3.80 to $4.25

According to the cost of living calculator, if I had $100 in 1991, I would have needed to have $102.94 to stay even in 1992. However, for every $100 I was making in 1991, I* was now making $111.84 in 1992 or an extra $8.90 not taken by inflation. In 1995 I would have hit parity (give or take a dime) and in 1996 been slightly behind (need $114.71 in 1991 dollars). But in 1997 the minimum wage went up again. Amazing, that.

* Well, a generic minimum wage worker since I was making a little more.

Edited, Jan 5th 2016 9:14pm by Jophiel

Uh huh. So what you're saying is that each time minimum wage was increased, costs of living increased along with it, resulting in the new minimum being no better than the old minimum just a few years later. Got it. Wait! Wasn't that what I was saying all along?

The point being that the route to economic prosperity is to improve your skills so that you can command a higher than minimum wage wage, not sit in an unskilled job thinking that the government will just raise minimum wage high enough to allow you to raise your future family on. That's a really really really dumb approach, right? Yet, that's the myth that lies behind the "living wage" argument.

It's that myth I'm attempting to debunk here. Not sure what you're trying to do though.

Because repeating the same incorrect information often enough and a Truth Fairy appears and makes it a real boy!

And again, you're missing the point. The benefit to those who had their wages increased by a minimum wage hike lasts exactly as long as the harm done to all of those who were previously above the minimum wage and had their wages relatively decreased. Once that adjusts, the "benefit" to the first group disappears. The faster employers react to the increase in minimum wage by increasing all other wages by the same relative amount (and their product prices of course), the faster the benefit to that first group disappears. But until that happens, everyone else is effectively harmed to some degree by the wage increase.

You're also missing the larger point that almost no one actually sits in a minimum wage job their entire lives. Your entire argument about having your wage improved for 5 years, but then back to the same on year 6 only matters at all if that same single person never improves their personal wage during that period of time, regardless of minimum wage level. Which very very few people will do. So you're not actually helping a "person", but simply changing the relative wage which a random set of people happen to receive based on the semi-arbitrary point in the cycle at which they first enter the workforce.

So someone who starts working in year 0, or year 6, earns the least relatively, while those who start working in year 1 earn the most, gradually dwindling to year 5, which gets just a slight bonus. None of this really affects the fates of those who's earnings outpace the increase in minimum wage, except to the degree that such increases may actually increase the rate of inflation. So basically, once again, you're harming those with the slowest lifetime wage increases, and not affecting much at all those who have a fast increase. So the struggling working class mom, with a high school degree is harmed. The college graduate who rapidly moves from near minimum wage part time work at the local coffee house to a $60k job in their chosen profession (and continually increasing wage from there), doesn't feel any pain at all.


I'll ask again: What is the objective of a minimum wage increase? Who are you trying to help? And does what you're doing actually help those people? I suspect that if you actually stop and think about those questions, you'll find that there's very very little reason for minimum wage laws at all, much less the continual fight for increasing them every freaking year. And there's certainly no merit at all in the pursuit of a so called "living wage" minimum.

Edited, Jan 7th 2016 5:22pm by gbaji

I thought I already did. Ok. Here's a really simple example:

Minimum wage goes up. To pay for workers earning minimum wage at a fast food restaurant, the owner has to increase the cost of a meal by $1. Everyone whose wage didn't increase as a result of the minimum wage hike now has higher food costs and the same earnings. Thus, they lose.

Is this really a hard concept to grasp? We can sit here and argue about how much that affects them, or whether they can march to their employer and demand a commiserate raise, but at the end of the day, anyone whose wage does *not* increase will be harmed to some degree. And, at least initially, that's going to be most people. Now those of us earning significantly more than minimum wage aren't terribly harmed by this. If a burger and fries costs a bit more, it's not going to affect me at all. But to a struggling single parent? It can be.

I guess what I find odd here is that earlier in this thread, someone made a post mentioning just how many things are done by minimum wage workers, expressing the idea that we should value what they do more because it affects us so much all the time, even if we're not directly aware of it. I recall that no one challenged this assertion when it was expressed in terms of needing to compensate these people more. But the same logic applies to what I'm talking about. To the degree that we do interact economically with minimum wage workers we are also affected by an increase in their labor cost. Directly. You can't agree with it on the one hand, but the dismiss the effect on the other. If so much of what we do is handled by minimum, or near minimum wage workers, then we are adversely affected to the same degree by an increase in pay.


Your argument, if it were expressed honestly, isn't that no harm is done to others by a minimum wage increase, but that those others can afford to absorb that harm. Which we can discuss if you wish, but we kinda have to first get you to acknowledge that there is (must be!) harm done to others when minimum wage increases. You, and many others, seem doggedly unwilling to admit this. And it's hard to carry on a discussion on this topic if you can't even acknowledge that first and most basic fact.

The money to pay those extra wages don't just materialize out of nowhere. They don't come directly from the pockets of "the rich". They will always be made up in an increase in the costs of the goods and services performed by those workers and born by the consumers of those products. Which is all of us. Not just some. All. And all includes minimum wage workers, near minimum wage workers, and people earning any range of earnings over that level. Which, guess what, is going to include some single moms, and struggling working class folks. We can debate the degree to which they are harmed, and then argue over whether their harm is outweighed by the help done to those directly benefited by the wage increase, but we can't get there if you can't admit that there is a cost increase across many industries when minimum wage goes up, and that this does negatively impact many many people.




I'm sorry. What math is required here? My argument is the equivalent of saying that if you stand out in the rain, you'll get wet. If minimum wage increases, then every product you buy that is handled by anyone whose wage increased as a result will be more expensive. If your wage *didn't* increase, then you are at a disadvantage. If *everyone's* wage increases, then the cost increases will offset the increase in wages. The increase only benefits some in the economy if it harms others. Someone has to be paying more than they earn relatively speaking in order for others to earn more than they pay, right?

It's a math concept. I don't need specific numbers to prove it. If the cost of living relative to wages for x% of the workers in your economy decreased by some amount, then the cost of living relative to wages for 100-x% of the workers in that same economy must have increased. How much depends on the value of x and the amount and distribution of relative cost decrease for x, but there must be an increase in that ratio for one portion of the workers if there's a decrease for the other. If X+Y=1, then any increase in X must result in a matching decrease in Y. This is true for all values of X and Y.

You can't get something for nothing. That's my point. People seem to think that if you just raise the wages for one group of people artificially, that this just has a positive effect for them and no negative for anyone else. But that's just not true. It can't be true.

The only thing that increases prosperity across the board is if the total productivity of the workforce increases for some reason. That's the only thing that increases the relative value of the entire economic basket. And that's most likely to occur when workers are operating under maximum incentive to increase the actual value of the output of their labor. A workforce consisting of a large number of people doing minimum wage (low skill) jobs and counting on the government to force that wage to be higher is counterproductive. You will get a less productive workforce over time doing that, which will hurt everyone in the long run.

Which is why it's a bad idea. Occasional minimum wage increases that just keep up with inflation? Not a big deal, but frankly also most likely unnecessary. Big increases designed to create a "living wage"? Terrible idea.

Edited, Jan 7th 2016 7:04pm by gbaji

Just for extra fun with math...
A fast food joint owner is hit with a minimum wage increase of 45¢ an hour (still using my previous example). The average number of employees at a fast food establishment is fifteen. In reality, you have managers and other staff making over minimum who wouldn't be affected and employees making near-minimum who aren't as affected but let's just pretend that all fifteen are bare-minimum wage employees for maximum impact. Each employee works an average of 20 hours a week (again, probably a bit high for fast food but why not)

15 x 20 x 0.45 = $135 extra a week. The only way he's increasing his labor costs by a "buck a meal" is if he only sells 135 burgers a week. In which case he should probably fire thirteen of his employees and move from a restaurant to a wooden crate next to the sidewalk. Maybe he can sell lemonade there along with his burgers. In reality, the average McD's sells around 250 burgers per day. Granted, "burgers" aren't specifically "meals" but we're also leaving out the egg sandwiches and salads and people who just want a soda and whatnot.

250 x 7 days = 1,750 burgers per week. $135 / 1,750 = 7.7¢ added to each burger. Again, this isn't actually where the cost would be applied on the menu board (you'd spread it among the burgers and fries and rest of the items) but we'll pretend that every meal has a burger so each meal goes up 7.7¢. We'll be generous and round it up to an even eight cents.

Again, the concept of "harm" probably fails to carry the same emotional punch if you're talking about 8¢ added to your meal (under the worst conditions) and it might actually make you sound exceedingly petty to deny someone a raise because God forbid you pay eight pennies extra for your burger and fries once a week but... well... some people are just exceedingly petty, I suppose.

Edited, Jan 7th 2016 11:55pm by Jophiel

Well, you're not paying 8¢ extra on a gumball or a mink coat. You're paying something extra but my example was intentionally exaggerated to show that, even under the worst possible scenario, you weren't adding a dollar. From 1991-1992, you paid an extra 3¢ on the dollar for things on average (from 1991-1997, the average increase per year was around 2.7¢ on the dollar). Of course, in the couple years leading up to the minimum wage increase, you were paying 5¢ extra on the dollar year over year. It's not really minimum wage, it's just general inflation and while a minimum wage increase contributes, it's hardly the principle factor. The main driver of the cost of a hamburger, for example, would be beef prices which are more affected by weather and demand considerations than by the labor cost some minimum wage worker along the chain.

I realize you know all of this but still figured I'd spell it out for select people who don't seem to understand it

In any event, "buck a meal" is an extreme over exaggeration that occurs because the writer either (a) wants to scare people with a false point or (b) doesn't understand math.

Edited, Jan 8th 2016 7:55am by Jophiel

You asked for an example. I gave you one. In my example, the owner increases the cost of a meal by $1 to offset the increased labor cost. Does it really matter what the price increase is? If it's *any* increase than anyone who didn't get an accompanying wage increase is harmed. If we assume that this hypothetical McDonalds has 10 minimum wage employees on shift, each of them just having gotten a $5/hour raise, that's $50/hour that the store has to increase its sales by. Assuming just a slightly less than one meal per minute sales rate, gives us that $1/meal increase.

Again though, you're free to make up your own numbers if you want, but the number wont be zero. It can't be. I'll also point out that this assumes that the fast food product cost doesn't go up either. Which is unlikely unless there are no minimum wage earners at any point in the chain in which any of the ground beef, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, oil, soda, wrappers, paper bags, etc goes from raw materials to a packaged item in a bin ready to be assembled into a burger, fries, and coke by the worker in the restaurant itself.

Which is pretty unlikely. I think when most people dismiss the product cost increase from a minimum wage increase, they do so because they aren't considering that entire chain. It's not just the direct effect of the retail outlets wage increase. It's the effect of the wage increase for every business along the way to getting that product to the retail outlet itself as well. Each of those may only experience a smallish increase in their costs, but each of those increases adds to the next step and the next and the next. The retail outlet is the last step in that chain, and you'll see the greatest increase there. And that increase will be far more than you might think if all look at is the direct wage increase on the business.

When you do this sort of thing, everything gets more expensive.



No. My argument is that some people will only be marginally less poor in relation, and some other people will be marginally more poor in relation, and that these will tend to wash out with the net effect that you didn't actually help anyone at all. My conclusion to all of this is that no amount of those sorts of wage increases amounts to much more than re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. You're never going to support a household on a minimum wage job, no matter how many such manipulations or adjustments are put in place. They're always going to be too small and too transitory to have any real effect over time. So instead of obsessing over how much we pay the minimum skill workers in our society, we should be focusing on maximizing their odds of gaining skills that allow them to command a higher real wage.



Saying that $15/hour still isn't enough to support a household on, and thus doesn't satisfy the "living wage" claim? That's strong "evidence" that this isn't about accomplishing that, right? I think we can all agree that even absent any sort of price affect such a wage increase would have, it wouldn't be enough. I would hope we can also all agree that the bigger the increase, the faster and more severe the price increase effect will be, which will eat away at any real economic gains for those affected. I'm not sure what would qualify as "evidence" for you here, but that certainly seems like good evidence that minimum wage increases are less about sound economic policy, and less about "helping the poor", and much more about empty political rhetoric designed to garner support while never actually providing any real solution.

But hey. Why don't you tell me why you think raising the minimum wage will help people out of poverty? I'd love to hear it. Because I'm reasonably certain that there's no evidence doing so actually helps people's economic outcomes over any reasonable period of time. You'd have a much better time arguing for food stamps and welfare programs. Those at least actually contribute directly to recipient's standard of living without having too much direct cost increase eating it back, and can actually be focused at those in need rather than handed out to a group mostly consisting of students and dependents. But raising minimum wage across the board? Doesn't make a lick of sense.




When your arguments, up to this point, have consisted of denying that anyone is harmed by a minimum wage increase, yes. At least you're finally acknowledging that, yes, some people do actually get directly harmed by a minimum wage increase. That's progress at least.



Lol! Says the guy who just dismissed harm because it's not "significant" harm. Whose playing word games now? Look. If raising someone's wage by a few dozen dollars a week is such a huge deal, than increasing their cost of living by a few percent should be a huge deal too, right? I'm just trying to get you to realize that you're placing an enormous weight on one of these factors, and nearly none on the other. And if using one of the pillars that will actually catch your eye is the way to do this, then I'll do so.



It's harm vs help though. From a macro-economic point of view, every single dollar you "help" one group of people with by increasing their wages relative to their cost of living, you "hurt" another group of people by doing the opposite. And no, I don't need exact numbers to say that if X+Y=1, then any increase in X must result in an exactly corresponding and equal decrease in Y. That's how people who understand math at a level higher than simple arithmetic approach things. We don't think in terms of specific numbers, but formulas. And in this case, the formula, while quite complex itself, somewhat requires that, the total number of resources in the economy remains unchanged by a minimum wage increase. You have not increased the total number of "stuff" contained within. Therefore, if the amount of that "stuff" shifts such that one group has relatively more of it, then it must have decreased relatively for some other group.

The only question is identifying which group(s) are most likely to be negatively impacted by this. And I've already spent quite a bit of time arguing who that will be. Employers aren't just going to take the labor cost on the chin. They're going to raise their prices to cover not just wage increases by their own employees (if any), but the price increase to all goods and services their business pays for in the process of generating a bottom line. And they're going to make sure that bottom line stays the same for them relatively speaking. I think it's quite obvious that those most negatively impacted by a minimum wage increase are those wage earners earning some amount above the new minimum, but who do not themselves immediately gain a wage increase themselves. And the relative "harm" of that effect will be born most by those closest to that new minimum. Those earning much higher salaries can manage. Those living paycheck to paycheck in a working class job will be least able to do so.

The irony being that it's this precise group that most people think they're helping with this process.



Huh? I'm talking about the person who was making a dime over the new minimum wage before it was increased to become the new minimum. They are not making any more money, but the cost of living will jump as a result of others earning a bit more. Now yes, if they manage to secure an equivalent raise for themselves, they can offset this, but there's no guarantee that will happen. I mean, the entire argument *for* minimum wage in the first place rests on the assumption that employers will pay their employees the minimum they can, and wont increase it absent some external force compelling them. So it seems bizarre to me that anyone advocating for a minimum wage would downplay this negative effect on the assumption that all of these employer will also raise the wages of those not in the range between old and new minimum just out of the kindness of their hearts or something.

That's a completely incompatible set of assumptions. Your assumption should be that very few employers will do this. Thus, very many people will be harmed. Unless you are arguing that employers will all raise their workers wages to be a "fair wage" in proportion to cost increases in the economy. But... Um... If you actually believed that then there would be no reason to argue for a minimum age increase.

Catch-22, right? Which one is it? Employers always quickly raise their workers wages in proportion to COL increases? Or they don't? Because if they do, then there's no need for minimum wage increases (or laws at all), and if they don't then raising minimum wage hurts a lot of people. Pick one.

You asked for an example.

ill make an example of you you reprobate

hang him from the focsle boys

No, you gave me nonsense you just made up.

Oh, the reality doesn't matter? Well, shit... ok, in my example, all the minimum wage employees use their extra money to build a super-robot that cures cancer and hunts ISIS members for sport. So obviously we can see what an awesome benefit it is to raise the minimum wage.

If my people spend ANY money, there's benefit so we're going to stay with my super-robot example.

Get back to me when you have real numbers showing real harm so we can compare. I've offered numbers for a known period, why can't you? I guess it's just easier to make shit up and pretend that's the same thing.

Really? Because I was talking about real things that have happened, not just creating imaginary scenarios. I have ALWAYS framed it as such. Again, I imagine it's easier to make up stuff and pretend it's relevant than it is to make the real data prove your point. But regarding the hours, sure, make everyone a strict minimum wage 40hr employee and you're still only at 16¢. Sounds like you're a lot more "way off" than I was.

Then you're literally too poor at math to hold a conversation with on the topic. We have the answer for previous minimum wage increases -- they didn't even tweak the scale for year-to-year overall cost of living increases. That seems to matter much more than pouting over pennies for your hamburger and saying "But it's harm!"

Edited, Jan 9th 2016 9:33am by Jophiel

If fast food workers gets a $5 raise and I have to pay $0.15 more for a Big Mac it is terrible, terrible loss for me and the rest of the world.


Edited, Jan 9th 2016 7:36am by Kuwoobie