Ontario raising minimum wage to $15

[Crazy Eddie]

There are places where everyone makes more than minimum wage because that's what employers have to offer to get the labor they need.

"Places" meaning "businesses/employers", yes. Places meaning "geographical regions/cities," no.

You're assuming they combined them.

No, I'm assuming they had the second data set apart from the single-site firms and chose not to include it. The reason they chose not to include it would only be logically valid if they had to combine the two datasets. They DIDN'T have to, so excluding those sets is, along with some of their other choices, a bit of smoke and mirrors to tilt the conclusions.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

If we're going to be so loose with terms as to classify taxation as theft, then we might as well also classify property as theft. And if we do that, then taxation isn't exactly theft. It's more like rent we have to pay for our arbitrarily declaring ownership of the world's resources to benefit ourselves more than others, but the tax (or at least progressive tax) mitigates the unfair distribution of world resources back to citizens in general in some kind of approximately fair way of compensation that persons agree with. On the other hand, if we don't consider taxation as theft, then, well, taxation has pretty much the same fair outcome anyway. So unless a dictator is coming along and making you pay taxes to support his illegitimate conquests and glory, not giving you fair compensation through societal benefits, and/or increasing his domestic power to take away your civil liberties, then shut up, stop being a whiner, pay your taxes, and be a constructive member of civil society. And as to this last point, President Trump is showing some signs of being a dictator, removing benefits, etc, so complain all you want, but don't tell me either that President Obama was just as bad or that liberals are stealing your money. Nuff said. Thank you.

 

[SimpleDon]

I am trying to catch up with my responses to those who were gracious enough to respond to my posts. Please bear with me.

Corporate profits have doubled under our neoliberal economic policies since 1980, as a portion of GDP, to where they are more than five times the amount of corporate capital investment, up from twice in 1980. They continue to climb year after year. There is a lot of profits to convert into wages before we threaten to eliminate profits, don't you agree?

I assume from the brevity of your response that this is the only point I presented that you had a problem with?

False.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Pik

In 1980: 7.567%

Today (2015): 9.088%

Increase of 20% in relative terms.

I am sorry, this is a nugget of fact that has become outdated over time. I have not revisited it in a while. It is unavoidable that profits and wages both would go down under neoliberalism and its prodigy, supply side economics.

Neoliberalism is ultimately self-defeating. The profits gained from lowing wages have to diminish over time because lowering wages lowers demand, which will eventually begin lowering growth and lowering profits. It is too early to tell if this is what is happening or if it is just a short term cyclic loss in profits. This is always the problem with a single snapshot of just two variables.

I should listen to myself.

It is not correct to pretend that somehow the supply side economic policies of neoliberalism started impacting the economy in 1980 or that all of the policies took hold at the same time. What we can say without fear of being proved wrong by snapshots data is that,

1. Neoliberalism is the theory that we should ditch Keynesian economics and return to the economics of the classical liberals, the economics of the classical economists, Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Say, etc.
2. That is, we should embrace the free trade of Ricardo.
3. We should return to using the gold standard, because this is required to impose market discipline on nations under free trade.
4. We should turn not only all of the economy over to markets but even much of the operation of society, that competition would improve most of society such as education, jurisprudence, health care, etc. .
5. This includes treating labor as a true market with the supply and demand for labor setting wages.
6. That the fundamentals of the economy hasn't changed from the classical period.
7. The above means that the largely industrial economy of today is no different than the largely agrarian economy of the classical economists.
8. By extension, this means that the industrial economy is like the agricultural economy and is supply constrained, that supply determines growth.
9. This leads directly to supply side economics, that to grow the economy we should intentionally provide the economy with more supply, that is financial capital to invest, because the economy is short of investment. .
10. That in the case of the current industrial economy supply is financial capital, money.
11. That the policies of the federal government are suppressing the formation and distribution of capital.
12. That the policies of the government have to change to increase capital and investment in order to increase growth.
13. That the policies that should be changed include the re-distributive taxation that takes money in taxes and redistributes it to the recipients of government largess, that is largely unneeded, that encourages sloth and destroys incentives to work.
14. That the government has overburdened the economy with useless and job killing regulations, especially those that reduce profits and therefore investments by forcing industry to clean up the pollution that they create and to manufacture safe products in production facilities that are safe to work in.
15. That the government's support for unions artificially boosts wages and therefore reduces profits and investment.
16. That reducing duties and tariffs will reduce the costs of products for the consumer while forcing American workers to compete with foreign, low wage workers, further reducing costs for consumers while increasing profits.
17. That local government should provide tax incentives to attract industries from high tax locals, the competition created lowering the tax burden on manufacturers and increasing profits.
18. That corporations be allowed to combine into larger, more efficient and therefore more profitable corporations without regard to the outdated and overly burdensome anti-monopoly laws and regulations.
19. That it should be enshrined in corporate governance that the only obligation of a corporation is to make profits for its shareholders.
20. That the regulations against advertising by drug companies and professionals like lawyers where stifling competition that would lower the prices of their products and services.
21. That it was patently unfair to burden employers with confirming the legal status of the people that they hire, to the point of criminal prosecution of employers, it interfered with the proper operation of the labor market and the achieving of the market clearing wage.
22. ... ?

There maybe some tenets of neoliberalism and supply side economics that I missed. Also, I would appreciate if you believe that I have misrepresented any of the points that I presented that you provide your phasing of the points. I am tired of being accused of building a strawman argument and asking for what a non-strawman description would be, only to be answered with silence.

To varying degrees all of these were put into practice either by changes in the laws and regulations or by fiat, by neoliberal government regulators refusing to enforce the laws and regulations still on the books. That these are what shaped our current economy and to a large degree our current social order, especially taking into account the memes that the neoliberals floated to gain the votes needed to accumulate the political power necessary to change the Keynesian economic policies.

Memes like the cultural wars, the gun debate, abortion, the inflaming of the racial divide, etc., all problems that could have been solved by moderation and compromise, that instead were demonized by the neoliberals to guarantee that no compromise could be reached and that the natural opposition to the neoliberals' economic policies would stay divided against one another.

This was especially needed when it became obvious that the neoliberal, supply side economic policies were not working to increase investment and economic growth, that both were lower than under the Keynesian policies. That it appeared that the only reason for the policies was to make the already rich even richer at the expense of the poor and the middle class in the form of lower wages.

This was met with a fury of reasons from the neoliberals why investment and growth had declined under their policies. The writing of regulations had continued even under neoliberal governments. That the tax cuts weren't deep enough, that periodically taxes were raised and while the economy had increased in growth and investment after the tax increases it was only the result of the delay in the neoliberal policies working. That the economy that they had said wasn't fundamentally changed from the time of the classical economists had fundamentally changed to damage the benefits from the neoliberal policies. Even that the economy had changed in some unknown and completely unknowable way that decreased the investment and the growth of the economy under the neoliberal policies. That the neoliberal policies had not been enforced by the largely hostile government bureaucracy, the deep state in today's terms.

I find these arguments to be disingenuous, please go through the list above and tell me which ones weren't enacted, which ones were reduced by the fundamental anti-neoliberal changes in the economy and which ones were stymied by new regulations.

 

[SimpleDon]

This week's false dichotomy brought to you by:

Dismal: because compromise is for pussies.

Nope, it's a continuum. The more profit you destroy by raising the price of labor, the more jobs you kill.

Economics class should have told you.

Is this the same economics class that told you that the free market will self-regulate if only the government stops trying to regulate it? The same economic class that told you that this self-regulation comes from supply and demand forcing the price of a product or service down to the cost to produce the marginal product, the last product produced? And you still believe in that class? You are allowed to question and to move away from the economics that you learned in high school and college.

This economics from your class has served us poorly. It told us that we didn't need to regulate the financial sector and the big banks. That those regulations were nothing but job killing red tape and that we didn't need them. How did that turn out?

It isn't a continuum of reduced profits leading to proportional unemployment. As I have said, employers hire labor to do the work that they need to be done, not that the more profits that they make, and the lower wages are, the more people that they hire.

Not to mention that it makes no sense to lay off workers when their wages go up. If you do lay off workers you lose their marginal product and the overhead coverage and profit from selling these products or services. In most cases this will considerably more than the losses from paying the increased wages.

Employer originated increases in wages also reduce profits. Does your rule that "The more profit destroyed by reduced profits by raising the price of labor, the more jobs you kill" apply to employer originated wage increases?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

"Places" meaning "businesses/employers", yes. Places meaning "geographical regions/cities," no.

You're assuming they combined them.

No, I'm assuming they had the second data set apart from the single-site firms and chose not to include it. The reason they chose not to include it would only be logically valid if they had to combine the two datasets. They DIDN'T have to, so excluding those sets is, along with some of their other choices, a bit of smoke and mirrors to tilt the conclusions.

You've got it backwards.

The had only one dataset--employee wages/hours/employer.

They indexed this against the employer address to figure out if they were inside or outside the area in question. However, some companies were both--and thus they had no way to figure out where the employees worked. Thus they did the only thing they reasonably could--removed them from the dataset.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

"Places" meaning "businesses/employers", yes. Places meaning "geographical regions/cities," no.


No, I'm assuming they had the second data set apart from the single-site firms and chose not to include it. The reason they chose not to include it would only be logically valid if they had to combine the two datasets. They DIDN'T have to, so excluding those sets is, along with some of their other choices, a bit of smoke and mirrors to tilt the conclusions.

You've got it backwards.

The had only one dataset--employee wages/hours/employer.

If that's true, then their choice to exclude the multi-site firms -- or even their ability to do so -- is very puzzling.

However, some companies were both--and thus they had no way to figure out where the employees worked.

That's kind of my point: including that data as "multi-site firms" for comparison sake would give the data some context. It would either
1) Demonstrate that the overall trend for employment doesn't seem to be affected by geography (the job/hours changes even show up for firms that operate on multiple sites)
OR
2) Demonstrate that the trend IS consistent with geographical distribution (the job/hours changes only show up for single-site firms but not multi-site firms).

The only reasoning to remove the data is actually the desire to remove a confounding factor that would make a conclusion harder to draw. As I said, the only way you can know that the data would confound your conclusions is if you already HAD your conclusions before you started collecting the data.

 

[SimpleDon]

This maybe a double post. I have to write my posts in a separate text editing program and I have somewhat lost track of whether I have posted this one. If it is please read this one, I have added to it.

I'm guessing you didn't read the paper.

You guess wrong.

But somehow know it must be wrong.

I don't know that either. As far as the data they actually collected, it appears to be correct. But even with my own non-expert reading it was pretty obvious from the start that they were being very selective about what data they actually chose. This is a feature I have learned to notice in papers that are deliberately pushing a specific conclusion; if there is some sort of highly elaborate selection/weighting criteria for their data sets, it's because the researchers know or at least suspect that they won't get the conclusions they expect to get if they collect data from ALL sources unfiltered.

The better papers I've seen actually collect firsthand data from all possible sources and THEN filter the data in various ways to see what conclusions could be drawn from it. Most of the papers I read that use this approach are medical journals and computer science research; they give you the raw data in a big stack of figures and then the researchers walk the readers through the different ways of interpreting those numbers while eventually demonstrating which interpretation is the most likely.

they do not just willy-nilly decide to remove the data sets for employers with multiple establishments, they are excluded because of limitations in the data

Which means they assume a priori that the "limited" data will not be applicable to their conclusions. There's no way they can know that unless they already know what their conclusions are supposed to be.

Specifically:

The data identify business entities as UI account holders. Firms with multiple locations have the option of establishing a separate account for each location, or a common account.
Geographic identification in the data is at the account level. As such, we can uniquely identify business location only for single-site firms and those multi-site firms opting for separate accounts by location.13 We therefore exclude multi-site single-account businesses from the analysis, referring henceforth to the remaining firms as ?single-site? businesses.

Failing to collect multi-site data leaves it ambiguous whether or not the same effect would be consistent with the multi-site data sets. That being true would actually invalidate their conclusion, and their choice to exclude it implies that they KNOW this: a multi-site account having similar results as various single-site accounts despite not actually being in the Seattle area would suggest something other than the wage hike being involved in the effect.

The remaining data covers a large cross-section of minimum wage jobs

It covers a cross section of minimum wage jobs at a specific type of business. To wit, businesses that only have a single location. Common sense alone tells us that a large portion of minimum wage jobs are probably chain businesses like fast food restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations, temp agencies, chain restaurants (Dardan locations, among others) amusement parks, movie theaters, school districts, rental management companies, even housekeeping agencies with more than one office (quite a few of them do).

That data set would literally only include small businesses with extremely limited growth potential and may already be suffering from Seattle's pre-existing marketing conditions in the first place.

There's no particular reason to believe these businesses would behave differently than multi-site businesses

Survey evidence collected in Seattle at the time of the first minimum wage increase, and again one year later, increase suggests that
multi-location firms were in fact more likely to plan and implement staff reductions.

... but since they didn't bother to collect the data on multi-location firms, this is rather difficult to verify, innit?

And again, my reading comprehension may not be all it's cracked up to be, but it APPEARS that this paper is actually using "hours worked" as a proxy for employment and then extrapolating low-wage employment under poorly-defined terms specifically to connect "low wage" to "minimum wage." That would have the effect of attributing a reduction in low-wage hours to the wage hike without being able to rule out that reduction being the result in low wage workers no longer pulling a low wage.

In any case, it seems quite challenging to argue an economic theory for why the Law of Demand applies in single-site businesses but is magically suspended in multi-site businesses.

As I've said many times, the demand for labor isn't determined by employee wagers, it's determined by customer demand for services. You and many others have this relationship completely ass backwards: wages do not determine demand for labor, demand for labor determines wages. Demand for labor is always -- repeat, ALWAYS -- relatively low for unskilled workers (this should surprise exactly no one) but since automation and high-skilled labor cannot replace those jobs, it never actually reaches zero.

I repeat that this paper and its conclusions are not necessarily incorrect as far as it's worth. It's that the data used to support those conclusions is second hand, VERY incomplete, is very thin on context and depends on a lot of bad assumptions.

Yes, the demand for labor depends on the amount of work that the employers need to do and not on the wage rate. Employers won't hire more employees because the wage goes down and fewer if the wage goes up.

It is hard to talk to a true believer like dismal. It is hard for them to separate what they think is happening from what they wish was happening. The major tenets of neoliberalism include the wish that the labor market was a true market where the supply and demand for labor set the wages. But it just has never worked out in practice, people aren't made that way. They like when their wages go up but they hate it when their wages go down. Therefore wages go up easily and don't go down at all.

All of the wishing in the world can't change this, it is human nature.

Marxism failed as an economic system because it goes against basic human nature. They had to institute a totalitarian regime in order to force the first part of the transition to their economic system on their society, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and to provide the time required to use propaganda and indoctrination to change basic human nature to one that would make their economic system work. One where the individual would substitute his own interests and those of his family for the economic interests of the society as a whole, an abstract concept especially when your family is going hungry. But even after raising three generations under this heavy indoctrination they failed and human nature reasserted itself.

Free market libertarianism is likewise doomed to failure because it requires a change in human nature to subjugate the interests of society and to others to the interests of the individual. It is human nature to strike a balance between the competing interests of the individual and the group, to not accept the extremes of one over the other, that the interests of the individual often correspond to the interests of society as a whole, and to recognize that both are best served by a balance of interests.

Therefore, just like Marxism, the libertarian free market philosophy would have to establish a harsh regime to force the changes in human nature require through indoctrination. Not to mention the boatload of specialized knowledge that an individual would have to have without any of the support of what the free marketers deride as the nanny state. To buy a house our model free marketer would have to understand civil, mechanical, electrical engineering, material science, construction techniques, banking, real estate law, among others or be wealthy enough to be able to hire specialists in those areas to replace the building codes and government regulations that freedom will dictate must be done away with to be truly free™.

xx============== yet more ================xx​

These are some of the wrenches in the works of why the economy can't regulate itself as they wish that it would. There are many others that they get backwards,

1. governments have existed all through history and in every human collective of more than a single family because they are needed, not because evil people formed evil governments to purposely ruin the economy.
2. supply and demand don't set prices, the vast majority of prices are administered prices, also called markup prices, based on average costs plus a markup for overheads and profits.
3. the supply of savings and the demand for investment don't set the interest rates.
4. free trade is not in the interest of developed economies with high labor costs.
5. investments don't depend on the amount of savings, savings depend on the amount of investments.
6. prices don't tell a prospective investor all that he needs to know about a company.
7. therefore government corrupting prices by regulation can't force mal-appropriation of investment.
8. businesses spend a considerable amount of time, effort and money to prevent their business from being subjected to the market forces that free marketers wish upon them.
9. honest businesses welcome regulations that force competing businesses to compete on even terms.
10. the modern industrial economy is demand driven, no investment is made without the reasonable expectation that there will be demand for the product.
11. deflation is not just the benign counter to inflation, the economy has a much lower tolerance for deflation than it does inflation because real debt is discounted by inflation but increased by deflation.
12. deflation threatens the economy because deflation can spiral out of control to trap the economy in a well of debt deflation.
13. therefore the economy prefers inflation to deflation, not because the government wants to debase the currency.
14. the gold standard strangles the economy with deflation and is not a good regulating mechanism for free trade because of the extremes that nations go to to avoid its traps, things like colonialism and starting wars.
15. austerity is not ever advisable because the national debt of a country is also the national savings of a country and you can never reduce it except by running a trade surplus, that is by other nations financing your debt.
16. the national debt creates demand, money, investment and savings.
17. the national debt can't be paid off without destroying the money and the savings created by the debt.
18. a much greater threat to the economy than the national debt is personal debt.
19. personal debt destabilizes the economy because of debt deflation.
20. personal debt can only build for so long until it has to be reduced, either because individuals or institutions decide that it must.
21. debt is money, reducing debt destroys money, that results in deflation.
22. recessions result from paying off debt, because it reduces demand and reduces the amount of money in the economy, the fallacy of thrift.
23. in a recession people decide to reduce their debt further making the recession even worse, because the debt is paid off with deferred consumption.
24. destroying money is only good when you have high inflation, which is rare in a regulated economy.
25. this means that the best way to fight high inflation is to raise the taxes of the middle class and the poor,
26. raising the taxes of the rich will have little effect on inflation because the rich have a greater propensity to save and savings are deferred demand, and therefore don't impact the economy, and will not reduce inflation in the economy.
27. the so-called investment in the stock market is nothing but savings, it has no large impact on the economy.
28. profits above the amount of corporate investment are not needed and generally hurt the economy because they are diverted wages.
29. real growth in wages are needed for the economy to grow because wages are demand and the economy is demand, not supply driven.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You've got it backwards.

The had only one dataset--employee wages/hours/employer.

If that's true, then their choice to exclude the multi-site firms -- or even their ability to do so -- is very puzzling.

Ever hear of a phone book?

However, some companies were both--and thus they had no way to figure out where the employees worked.

That's kind of my point: including that data as "multi-site firms" for comparison sake would give the data some context. It would either
1) Demonstrate that the overall trend for employment doesn't seem to be affected by geography (the job/hours changes even show up for firms that operate on multiple sites)
OR
2) Demonstrate that the trend IS consistent with geographical distribution (the job/hours changes only show up for single-site firms but not multi-site firms).

Their objective was to compare workers where the minimum wage had increased with workers where they hadn't--the ones outside are basically controls to remove overall economic effects. Thus the multi-site firms should show up somewhere between the test data and the controls. Looking at it would be a waste. Since they didn't know the insideutside ratio for those employers there is no way to predict where on the line it should end up and thus no meaningful answers can be drawn.

The only reasoning to remove the data is actually the desire to remove a confounding factor that would make a conclusion harder to draw. As I said, the only way you can know that the data would confound your conclusions is if you already HAD your conclusions before you started collecting the data.

No. In neither case (is a difference/is not a difference) do you learn anything useful from the multi-site data that you didn't learn from the single site data.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Yes, the demand for labor depends on the amount of work that the employers need to do and not on the wage rate. Employers won't hire more employees because the wage goes down and fewer if the wage goes up.

And, once again, you built upon quicksand.

The demand for labor is not fixed. In reality all employers have multiple things they provide the customer. As labor gets more expensive the least productive of these will become uneconomic and will no longer be provided (or the quality of what is provided goes down)--thus the demand for labor goes down.

It is hard to talk to a true believer like dismal. It is hard for them to separate what they think is happening from what they wish was happening. The major tenets of neoliberalism include the wish that the labor market was a true market where the supply and demand for labor set the wages. But it just has never worked out in practice, people aren't made that way. They like when their wages go up but they hate it when their wages go down. Therefore wages go up easily and don't go down at all.

Half right. It's very hard to push wages down, but when economic times are bad enough they do go down. Witness 2008. However, even if wages ratchet it doesn't change the fact that it does respond as a market. Yes, if wages can't go down you can't shift back along the curve--but you can still drop now-unproductive endeavors and thus lower your consumption of labor.

But even after raising three generations under this heavy indoctrination they failed and human nature reasserted itself.

But you're trying to go against the basic laws of nature, also.

Therefore, just like Marxism, the libertarian free market philosophy would have to establish a harsh regime to force the changes in human nature require through indoctrination. Not to mention the boatload of specialized knowledge that an individual would have to have without any of the support of what the free marketers deride as the nanny state. To buy a house our model free marketer would have to understand civil, mechanical, electrical engineering, material science, construction techniques, banking, real estate law, among others or be wealthy enough to be able to hire specialists in those areas to replace the building codes and government regulations that freedom will dictate must be done away with to be truly free™.

Actually, you can make it work. You don't go hiring all those specialists, you buy a house that has a safety certification you trust.

 

[bilby]

Wealth has been accumulating in hands of a relatively small percentage of the worlds population for too long. This is not sustainable. This needs to be addressed and reversed and a fairer means of wealth distribution put into place.

Once again, eat the rich economics.

Once again, you fail to grasp the difference between shearing a sheep and eating mutton.

Are you perhaps a member of PETM? (People for the Ethical Treatment of Millionaires)

 

[bilby]

You need to explain thoroughly how asking for a fairer means of wealth distribution necessarily means "eating the rich" if you want anyone to take your response seriously.

And you assume using force to take from those who earned it and give to those who didn't is fair?

Who gives a crap whether it's 'fair'? Since when has any civilization been based on fairness? It is necessary, and it is beneficial if not taken to extremes. Zero taxation is anarchy; 100% taxation is communist totalitarianism. Neither makes for a pleasant society; The sweet spot is somewhere between the two extremes, and debates about exactly where are not advanced or helped by stupid false dichotomies; claims that taxation is "using force to take from those who earned it and give to those who didn't", as though it were tantamount to armed robbery; or for that matter the idea of the proletariat rising up and slaughtering the wealthy classes.

All extreme positions on this subject are fucking insane, and moderate taxation is not "using force to take from those who earned it and give to those who didn't", any more than requiring employers to pay a reasonable amount for the labour of others requires an infinite pool of profits. (Hint: That would only be an effective argument against a proposed infinite minimum wage, so save it until you see such a proposal, please).

Life is not now, nor is it ever likely to be, fair.

The question is, who is better placed to be the victim of unfairness without suffering unduly as a result: rich people, or poor people?

Life's not fair to poor people, they starve to death.

Life's not fair to rich people, they cry into their champagne on their second rate yacht, and whine to their supermodel masseuse about how much they really wanted the super-yacht instead. Sad.

 

[DBT]

Once again, eat the rich economics.

Once again, you fail to grasp the difference between shearing a sheep and eating mutton.

Are you perhaps a member of PETM? (People for the Ethical Treatment of Millionaires)

The lives of a rich person, according to that way of thinking, being worth far more than someone who is poor. So on that basis, presumably even greater benefits, tax breaks, bonuses, free lunches, should be offered to the rich because,...well, they work so hard. Unlike the poor, who apparently hardly work at all and are therefore of little value to the economy or society as a whole....being a burden on the wonderful hard working rich.

 

[SimpleDon]

"Places" meaning "businesses/employers", yes. Places meaning "geographical regions/cities," no.


No, I'm assuming they had the second data set apart from the single-site firms and chose not to include it. The reason they chose not to include it would only be logically valid if they had to combine the two datasets. They DIDN'T have to, so excluding those sets is, along with some of their other choices, a bit of smoke and mirrors to tilt the conclusions.

You've got it backwards.

The had only one dataset--employee wages/hours/employer.

They indexed this against the employer address to figure out if they were inside or outside the area in question. However, some companies were both--and thus they had no way to figure out where the employees worked. Thus they did the only thing they reasonably could--removed them from the dataset.

Quite right, they had to exclude multi-site businesses because the dataset didn't separate the data by areas. But it shouldn't be a problem, statistically there is enough examples to make certain statements about what happened. There was no large scale unemployment because of the minimum wage increase. This is consistent with other studies and inconsistent with the predictions of conservatives. The increase to eleven dollars an hour increased wages for the near minimum wage workers as well as the minimum wage workers. Over all hours worked increased but decreased for the $11 to $13 an hour workers.

The majority of this can be explained by this simple fact, the if you divide the low wage workers into categories based on how much they earn and you increase how much they earn, you will have workers who change categories. Since you have fewer workers in the under thirteen dollar an hour category, the number of hours worked by this category has to go down. This isn't rocket science.

If you believed in conspiracies you could say that this was intentional in order to give the non-rocket scientists among us a straw to grasp to continue to oppose the minimum wage increase. As it is, I believe that this stupid mistake is just that, a stupid mistake.

 

[ZiprHead]

 

[SimpleDon]

And, once again, you built upon quicksand.

The demand for labor is not fixed. In reality all employers have multiple things they provide the customer. As labor gets more expensive the least productive of these will become uneconomic and will no longer be provided (or the quality of what is provided goes down)--thus the demand for labor goes down.

What you are saying is that the more labor costs the fewer products will be produced or the quality of the products or services will be reduced in spite of the established consumer demand for the number of products at the level of quality that exists?

And I am the one who doesn't understand demand?

This is about the tenth argument that you have made to justify your opposition to increases in the minimum wage. And yet you don't seem to be capable of supporting any of the arguments that you have made. Rather than answering reasonable questions and discussion about your arguments, you offer yet another argument. Just to review,

You said that the pool of profits has to be infinite before increasing the minimum wage is justified.

You said that an increase in the minimum wage is not justified if even one employee is laid off or one business is bankrupted by it. And there is always going to be at least one employee laid off or one business bankrupted by an increase in the minimum wage hidden from view in the statistical noise, even if we raise the minimum wage by just ten cents an hour.

You said that all that we need to know about the horrors of the minimum wage is what happened in the Marshall Islands when the minimum wage was instituted there at the urging of the Republicans in Congress, but apparently it wasn't all that we needed to know, because of these other arguments. And yes, the Marshall Island cannery's product was all foreign trade and yes, Americans earn more than other Asians because we need to earn more than low wage countries because we want a better economy than the low wage countries have.

You said that an employer initiated wage increase doesn't cause the horrors of unemployment, bankruptcy, and now, I assume, of reduced production in spite of consumer demand, because it is voluntary and not forced by the government. Presumably because money has suddenly become sentient and behaves differently in the economy depending on how it is introduced into the economy, that now money has a memory.

You said that supply and demand determine the price of a product or service, except when the government requires an increase in the minimum wage, in which case supply and demand together no longer determines the price of a product or service, because bankruptcies among the marginal producers reduce the supply and for some reason that you can't quite articulate, no one other producer can fulfill that demand. But only for the unfulfilled demand created by an increase in the minimum wage, in all other situations of unfulfilled demand supply and demand creates the product needed to satisfy the demand or increases the price. You cannot tell us why this is but it has something to do with your furniture factory having tried to meet unfilled demand by adding a shift, but it just didn't work out, so obviously that means that no producer can do that. Or something like that.

You said that a company that doesn't make any profits can't stay in business indefinitely even if it is covering the costs of producing the products it sells because it can't attract investment. That, presumably, it has no value (capital) to protect.

Now you tell me that minimum wage workers aren't hired to do work that is needed to meet consumer demand. Presumably it is non-critical work that wasn't needed at all. I am curious if this hiring of non-essential employees extends to workers earning more than the minimum wage?​

So I have taken some liberties with your arguments, but you have to admit that they all more or less add up to you don't like the minimum wage and you really don't really have a good reason why, just this shotgun collection of unsupported and often contradictory slurs. On other questions and discussions here you are better than this.

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[Loren Pechtel]

And you assume using force to take from those who earned it and give to those who didn't is fair?

Who gives a crap whether it's 'fair'?

I was responding to a post that said it was fairer. Take it up with them, not me.

- - - Updated - - -

Quite right, they had to exclude multi-site businesses because the dataset didn't separate the data by areas. But it shouldn't be a problem, statistically there is enough examples to make certain statements about what happened. There was no large scale unemployment because of the minimum wage increase. This is consistent with other studies and inconsistent with the predictions of conservatives. The increase to eleven dollars an hour increased wages for the near minimum wage workers as well as the minimum wage workers. Over all hours worked increased but decreased for the $11 to $13 an hour workers.

What you are missing is that the study found their take-home went down.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What you are saying is that the more labor costs the fewer products will be produced or the quality of the products or services will be reduced in spite of the established consumer demand for the number of products at the level of quality that exists?

And I am the one who doesn't understand demand?

Apparently you think the company will fund the wage increase from the magical infinite pool of profit that funds all leftist dreams.

In reality the price increase gets passed through to the customer and they respond by buying less.

This is about the tenth argument that you have made to justify your opposition to increases in the minimum wage. And yet you don't seem to be capable of supporting any of the arguments that you have made. Rather than answering reasonable questions and discussion about your arguments, you offer yet another argument. Just to review,

It's the same basic argument. You are basing your position on the notion the cost increase won't be passed through--a laughable position.

Fundamentally, the market is good at finding the optimum point. Any attempt to push it away from that optimum point will make things worse.

 

[laughing dog]

Who gives a crap whether it's 'fair'?

I was responding to a post that said it was fairer.

Except the post to which you responded did not say anything about taking "by force". That nonsense was interjected by you.

 

[laughing dog]

Fundamentally, the market is good at finding the optimum point.

No reputable economist would say that. A market, under certain conditions, is a reasonably organized method for achieving the price where the amount people wish to purchase equals the amount sellers wish to sell.

Any attempt to push it away from that optimum point will make things worse.

No one who knows anything about economics would agree with that general statement. It is only true under certain condition. If there is any sort of market failure, then your statement is false.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If that's true, then their choice to exclude the multi-site firms -- or even their ability to do so -- is very puzzling.

Ever hear of a phone book?

However, some companies were both--and thus they had no way to figure out where the employees worked.

That's kind of my point: including that data as "multi-site firms" for comparison sake would give the data some context. It would either
1) Demonstrate that the overall trend for employment doesn't seem to be affected by geography (the job/hours changes even show up for firms that operate on multiple sites)
OR
2) Demonstrate that the trend IS consistent with geographical distribution (the job/hours changes only show up for single-site firms but not multi-site firms).

Their objective was to compare workers where the minimum wage had increased with workers where they hadn't--the ones outside are basically controls to remove overall economic effects. Thus the multi-site firms should show up somewhere between the test data and the controls. Looking at it would be a waste. Since they didn't know the insideutside ratio for those employers there is no way to predict where on the line it should end up and thus no meaningful answers can be drawn.

Exactly. They excluded the data because they could not predict what results they would get from it. That doesn't make the data irrelevant, especially since it potentially provides context. But it makes it irrelevant to what they were trying to find, which was a direct (negative) correlation between the minimum wage and employment.

In neither case (is a difference/is not a difference) do you learn anything useful from the multi-site data that you didn't learn from the single site data.

Irrelevant. A larger data set will always provide a more complete picture of a situation than a smaller one. Reducing the size of your data set to exclude data that "doesn't tell you anything more" is faulty logic; you can't know what the data tells you unless you analyze it.