I'm not sure you understand what's going on. A mandated minimum wage ensures that employers have to pay their employees a minimum amount of money. This way the creation of a job or employment guarantees a certain amount of wages will be given to the worker.

I'm sure you might be able to find people willing to work for a dollar an hour, but they would not be able to live off of it so that job would pretty much mean nothing to the overall employment rate.

I guess you'd be okay with new cars costing 0 each if we could just do away with those pesky seat belts, airbags, and quality control, right?

This would not be the issue it is if there were a strong negative income tax designed to protect people with very low paying jobs. It would take some of the drama out of the "everyone works for horrifying wages" versus "some people work for pretty goddamn low wages and other people are unemployed" decision.

Even if you had no income tax with an extremely low salary it will not enable you to support the cost of living. The minimum wage is designed so that getting a job ensures that (1) you are paid at least a certain amount and (2) that you are guaranteed a minimum standard of living.

It's like cena_mark got a new nickname.

Oh and renaming the problem doesn't fix the problem. We went from shell shock to post traumatic stress disorder and the problem hasn't magically gone away.

South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana are the only states yet to set a minimum wage law.

hmmmmmmm...

Poorest states by income:
40 South Carolina ,625
41 Louisiana ,733
43 Tennessee ,614
46 Alabama ,666
50 Mississippi ,790

mmm-hmmm...

A negative income tax is a entitlement program that hands out straight-up cash for people making less than a certain amount of income. In its pure form, people below the break point pay no tax and get some dough from the government toward the break point in proportion to how little they earned; people above the break point pay taxes according to how far above the break point, etc. etc. It implements a minimum income while attempting to avoid moral hazard as much as can be done while implementing a minimum income. Yes, championed by Friedman, but if you weren't faced with political constraints it would be a good idea. It's not like Friedman is Satan or something. The EITC is a sort of weak negative income tax.

Fox News genuinely has some economics here; their position sucks only because their alternative position is "work for peanuts you disgusting poors because you deserve it" rather than "man there has to be a better way to help poor people than a minimum wage." The minimum wage is a good policy in large part because various alternatives are off the table and because it has an intuitive appeal, making it comparatively easy to get into law.

Please stop yelling at me and shit.

i guess if the free market demands it we must obey

Sugah learned economics in HS from that same asshole econ teacher we all had. There are no other schools of thought on the subject thank you very much.

Here, let me lay down some knowledge for you (those who don't know it), Randroid touches on it.

I'm going to ignore the historical justifications associated with minimum wage laws: 8 hour days, child labor, and the countless other rights of the worker, since many of you here are ignorant of them and bringing them up would be as useful as talking to myself.

Arguments that insist on using the standard models of measuring profit, success, good/bad, efficiency, right/wrong, are limiting and only speak of issues in terms of economistic and mechanistic ways. That is to say, ways that commodify human beings, turning people into objects that exist solely for the "ecomomistic" definition of "success," et al.. By limiting the ways one can speak of things, in this case humans and quality of life to economistic language, one CANNOT fully solve problems in their entirety.

When Raindroid says "i guess if the free market demands it we must obey," s/he is touching on this problem, the problem of the current "common sense," as coined by Antonio Gramsci. For Gramsci "common sense" is the set of uncritically accepted ideas of a society, not necessarily a "good" or "bad" sense, and are at time contradictory. In this case, growing an economy as the singular priority of a society, is the "common sense" of the US.

My point is, if you find yourself particularly moved to argue the silliness of a minimum wage, I suggest you first look at what the purpose of the minimum wage is, and whether your "common sense" arguments actually address that purpose. I'll put forth the idea that the minimum wage is to guarantee a certain quality of life (as money relates to one providing this for oneself), because we have a moral sense that it is the right thing to do, and that speaking of minimum wage ONLY in terms of how it effects the greater economic machine necessarily detaches one from that moral principal.

5 stars for the evil of writing too much about an internet vid on poetv.

What do you suppose happens to sales when the minimum wage increases? Especially at the kind of basic goods stores that pay minimum wage?

And the talk that jobs will go up if wages are lower is the worst kind of "wishful thinking". Businesses cut costs everywhere they can. Do you think their payroll budget will stay the same if wages are lowered? They'll just employ the same number of people and pocket the savings.

Minimum wage works both ways. It provides a minimum standard of living for people willing to work 40-80 hours a week, and more people who can afford good & services to spend money on. The money paid to them is circulated back into the economy a lot more than if it went to some executive.

"South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana are the only states yet to set a minimum wage law."

Huh? Isn't it a federal law? I know for certain Mississippi and Tennessee has federal min. wage posters in the breakrooms of every employer.

This logic is flawed because jobs demanded are always basically infinite, since everyone wants a job. So, if there was no minimum wage, everyone would pay pennies, and people would take it.

Fuck you, biscuit.

Look, if you don't want to work for ten cents an hour, you can allways kill yourself or attempt to destroy capitalism. The choice has to be left in the hands of the individual worker. That's freedom.

Yes, and if people are willing to spend on an airline ticket with a pilot that is half asleep with a plane held together with duct tape then I guess that's just the free market deciding what's right, huh?

"The choice has to be left in the hands of the individual worker. That's freedom."

Because food, shelter, clothing, etc. are choices that we can live without. Because we can all instantly teleport at no cost to our jobs or whatever city we can find employment in.

I also find it darkly comic that people think tax cuts for corporations = more jobs. More jobs at corporations come from paying customers with money demanding goods and services, not from the board members getting to buy another golf junket next quarter.

Man, I'd like to clarify that I was being sarcastic at this point, but I just seems like such a lame thing to do :(

How dare you?

Causality does not infer correlation, at least when you're a Republican.

This.

I'm not saying that no idea that is presented on Fox News can possibly have any merit, I'm saying that if an idea has any merit, it'll show up somewhere else, somewhere that isn't a laughingstock..

ROOGLE PON GAUL

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