Touche. Okay: I'm republican. I think seven dollars and odd cents is a good wage. You can live off minimum wage nowadays, but if you want more than just the basic needs or are supporting a family you need more. So maybe minimum wage should be different if the employee is in a family support situation. Otherwise its fine. Sent from my MID using Tapatalk 2
Following that line of thought: If a person works to support a family of four people, including herself, and she is paid $8 an hour (slightly more than minimum wage) and works 40 hours a week every week of the year, she will still only make $16,640 annually. The poverty level in 2012 for a family of four is $23,050, so she's under the poverty level by quite a bit. One might argue that if her husband or wife worked as well, the family might not be under the poverty level but if she has none and must support herself an three children or elderly people, then she's out of luck.
For the record, people in the 1970s made the equivalent of 22 dollars (in 2013 currency) per hour as their minimum wage. So yes, I think it should be way higher than what it is now. The Idea that minimum wage should be an arbitrary number that the government has to manually adjust whenever it feels like getting around to it is stupid. I think that it should automatically change based on something more meaningful like the cost of living in a given state or something like that.
I'm going to take an unpopular viewpoint on this. Raising the minimum wage will increase inflation. The dollar already is in dire straits and worth less than it has in years. Raising the minimum wage will have the effect of making that $9 per hour you are now making the equivalent of the $7.25 you were making before. Price will go up. The people who make more than minimum wage will in effect have their salaries lowered since the money they make is going to be worth less. Do you think that everyone's salary is going to be increased by $1.25 an hour? Not likely. In all honesty, those minimum wage jobs are not meant for people to live on. They are meant to be a lower threshold for jobs teenager usually take and to try to slow down the ever increasing inflation issue. There are lots more things being discussed about this topic, but this seems to have been missed. This would not just affect those people earning the minimum wage. It would affect every job across the nation.
This is not how inflation works afaik Inflation is caused by printing more money and banks pushing that money into circulation, it is not caused by poor people becoming less poor. Also, inflation has been at like 0 to 1 percent for about a decade now - we don't have an inflation problem.
The US is not exactly threatened by an inflation crisis, but a wage distribution one. Printing more money to give to the poor will of course cause inflation, but that's not what needs to happen to raise the minimum wage. Redistributing money away from rich and pushed toward poor is what needs to happen. I point you to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPKKQnijnsM Corporate America pretty much owns the government. They've been buying their way into the politics and using their money to influence lobbyists in their favor to gain invulnerability to every attempted fiscal "reform" passed since the Clinton administration. And it doesn't look like it's gonna be changing anytime soon.
If corporate executives would take a few million out of their yearly billions in bonuses, the lowly workers could live much more comfortably.
Hold up yami. If they do that, then they wouldn't be able to have the 28 diamond encrusted luxury boats.
Ok, inflation was probably the wrong word. What it will do is make the value of the dollar weaker vs. currency in the rest of the world. And it's already at a pretty low point as is. Anyways, if we're going to do a videos about what is wrong with money and the government here are a couple for your viewing pleasure. [video=youtube_share;eGOA2WedIQo]http://youtu.be/eGOA2WedIQo[/video] [video=youtube_share;KIbkoop4AYE]http://youtu.be/KIbkoop4AYE[/video]
Being non American I don't know much about your economy but what I do know is that the British minimum wage is currently £6.19 so in dollars that would be $9.50 and it's only going to increase as of 1st of October to £6.31 Aka $9.61 but over here we have multiple minimum wages depending on age so I'll just plop the rest of the money down here so you can compare it: 18-20 year olds: Current- £4.98 ($7.68) October- £5.03 ($7.72) under 18: Current- £3.68 ($5.65) October- £3.72 ($5.72)
Any suggestions for a replacement? And how would you convince everybody to implement it? Everybody wants to point out what's wrong, but seemingly nobody wants to do anything. In the future, I intend on giving my vote to someone who does, with no exceptions.
Lowering value relative to other currencies is the definition of inflation, so my previous response still applies. Also, what is your definition of a low point. It's in the top 5 most valued currencies on earth, and only 2 currencies are significantly higher than the dollar; the Pound and Euro. And even disregarding the value per unit side of things, it's the world's most trusted and circulated currency. Everyone accepts dollars because they are so stable and backed up by such a strong economy and government. Those were interesting videos you linked to - they have nothing to do with money - but they are interesting. The debt limit video is about how the government is stupidly limiting it's own budget for no reason. The other video was cool, it was about how the upper class is exploiting people and basically squeezing money out of the working class. This is what the point of this thread was discussing - forcing companies to pay people enough money to live on. I'm not sure what you are referring to - do you mean the wage rate? If so, yes I agree. I think a good short term fix is to tie minimum wage to living wage - ie, how much it costs to live (food, rent, insurance, healthcare), and no less.
We don't need more money, we need it displaced differently. But the risk still exists since there will then be an inclination to raise prices anyway to give that money "lost" back to business. So in effect, yes either way you cut it the dollar's value can be lowered.
While not the same thing as inflation in the usual sense, I think you bring up a good point that corporations may try to exploit a wealthier lower class to try to keep them down and retain their own status... I'm not sure there is an easy way to address this; This is one of the reasons why minimum wage needs to be tied to a dynamic factor like cost of living instead of a fixed arbitrary number that means nothing and doesn't keep up with reality. But as to the other problem of the tendency of higher ups to just keep raising prices, that may need to be separately addressed.
