Minimum wage goes up -> Prices go up
The gap between wage and costs isn’t changing.
You just blow in from stupid town or what?
Not everyone is min wage, so the price increase will never be as high as the wage increase. Unless a products entire supply chain is only min wage workers.
What’s actually driving the price increase? Employees or corporate profit?
Suppliers will charge whatever gives them the highest profit, and if their costs go up by x, said optimal pricepoint goes up by x/2, assuming a linear correlation between price and demand.
I also repeat conservative talking points when I have no idea what I’m talking about.
Wait wait, I’m wrong. I’m not an idiot.
People are bad at saving money, increase minimum wage and they’ll just spend the extra, increasing companies revenues, allowing them to pay the higher minimum wage.
Or the working class can’t afford everything it needs. So a raise goes towards buying more necessities.
It’s kind of hard to save when every dollar is accounted for in food, shelter, and utilities.
And these necessities are very often procured from stores that pay their employees minimum wage, so it all comes back to what I was saying… But even for people who get paid way more than minimum wage, a significant proportion is living paycheque to paycheque or close to it.
People are coming at you because it sounded like you were saying the poor were poor because of bad financial skills.
well the best way to make money in America seems to be to have money. The more money you already have now the more you can use it to make more money.
Thats probably why poor people stay poor. Not enough to snowball, its all gone ever day.
If you look at my message I’m clearly painting a broad picture, “people are bad at saving money”, I never said it only applied to people with lower income. I’ve known of engineers making 300k/year panicking because 200$ were missing from their paycheque and they wouldn’t be able to make their payments… They just own a bigger house and a Porsche instead of renting an apartment and driving a Civic, in the end they have 0$ set aside and if their income goes up they just find more stuff to purchase…
Even the most skilled money saver in the world, when their income is barely above their necessary life expenses, will fail to save much. Savings is a luxury only the rich can afford much of.
But you’re right, putting money into the hands of people living paycheck to paycheck, or barely able to save is great for the economy as well as those people personally. Even if they save 10% and spend 90%, it’s tremendously more beneficial than that money going to a wealthy multimillionaire who won’t even notice saving it. For everyone except the multimillionaire, who really isn’t negatively impacted.
Even when putting more money in the hands of people who make way more than what they need to afford the basics will result, in most cases, in them spending it instead of saving. You see it very clearly in regions that rely on industries like mine, people’s personal finances boom and burn… Them have jobs making 150k/year and but a big house, a truck, a quad, a snowmobile, a sports cars, motorcycles, name it, the second things slow down they can’t afford to make payments on any of that because they never saved a cent.
If its a real business and not a grift or privtization of gains/socialization of losses, they will pay closer to the right wage to have the right people fill the chair
The economic models that claim that increasing wages will reduces jobs, keep corporate profits fixed while doing their math
Economists are also very aware of what they choose to keep fixed and what they choose to allow as a variable. It’s a science that’s incredibly easy to corrupt the results in. Which is why people really need to pay attention to who it’s giving the results.
Right. The problem is, CEOs maintain that as “responsibility to their shareholders” to ensure their Q4 earnings reports prove continuous growth. So prices will inevitably increase, or overhead will be reduced to maintain those margins.
Profits can go down slightly as long as it’s expected. The stock market is weird and the thing nobody likes is unexpected falling numbers. Stocks can maintain or even increase in value if the report matches the predictions and expectations. Even if that prediction is a slight lowering in profits.
Because people make money on businesses doing poorly as well by short selling
Well that’s a different case. That’s when the stock price goes down. Not necessarily when profits go down.
The price of progress is oppression, and the outcome of progress is that those who oppress get to enrich their own descendants so they can continue to oppress.
Nah, fuck all that.
The price of progress is not oppression as oppression is the opposite of progress.
You are confusing corporate profit with progress.
If the world defines poop as food, that’s what we get to eat.
This has been studied over and over and always with the same results. The economy isn’t hampered, jobs aren’t replaced by machines and overseas workers, the cost of goods doesn’t go up, and factories don’t close. The main impact is that quality of life increases, health spending increases (now that people can afford to take their kids to the doctor), and corporate profits decrease very slightly.
Especially in this economy of runaway corporate greed, we need a meaningful increase in wages
Oh jobs are replaced by machines, it just has almost nothing to do with minimum wage. Machines cost pennies on the dollar for production value compared to humans. The human wage is pretty meaningless at that point, even forced labor is less profitable.
I think part of the issue is how business accounting practices work. When you buy a machine, you can call it a capital investment and count its value as an asset. When you hire a person and cultivate them for years, from an accounting perspective their salary is strictly a liability / expense. Even though that person is an asset in every other way, our standard accounting practices don’t reflect that.
All of those things do happen, they just happen irregardless of minimum wage being raised. Like, the machines are coming for all jobs eventually, that’s not a reason to not raise the wage for living workers.
IrregardlessregardlessLike it or not, it’s in the dictionary. =p
It’s also in Mean Girls 🤭
Remember that a definition is not an endorsement of a word’s use.
What’s your point? Because it sounds like you are saying people don’t deserve a living wage.
That’s not at all what I said. Everyone deserves a living wage and the US min wage is insultingly low.
So again, what’s your point.
I was agreeing with the person I was replying to, but reframing it. Automated jobs and outsourced jobs are not caused by increases to minimum wage.
corporate profits decrease very slightly
This is the thing that people will reflexively point to, but this:
quality of life increases
This is the real issue. If quality of life increases, workers are less desperate, and are less willing to put up with their employers BS. Moreover, if other jobs are also paying a living wage, it’s much easier to quit.
We have seen, over and over, that businesses are willing to spend money to exert control over workers. They’ll do it even if it means a decline in profits, or even in revenue. Because at the end of the day, if you have your needs met, any money left over is just power, and power is meant to be used to control others.
But, the line must go up…
Especially in this economy of runaway corporate greed, we need a meaningful
increase in wagesrevolution to eliminate those corporations and the systemic rewarding of greed.The fact that they could increase wages and still make money while improving society but don’t, is why they don’t deserve any more benefit of the doubt, or room to continue hoarding wealth and power as they are, because a system that craves constant growth at any cost will never stop on its own (nor provide paths for reform).
The only thing increasing mimu wage must do is take money out of the wealthiest pockets.
And that’s why wages stay stagnant.
Every other argument is a red herring.
Card and Kreuger found this out when they did a large study back in the 90s when each state could finally set its own minimum wage.
Increasing minimum wage puts more money in the economy which people will spend which puts more money in businesses so they can pay their people more putting more money in the economy.
The only reason the wealthy don’t like this is because their money passes through the hands of the unclean masses instead of going directly into their offshore tax haven accounts.
The only reason the wealthy don’t like this is because
theirour money passes through the hands of the unclean masses instead of going directly into their offshore tax haven accounts.Ftfy
Well corrected.
Yep.
Give a rich man a dollar and all you’ve done societally is remove a dollar from the economy. If you instead make him give that money to his employees things change, but cause poor people actually need money and will spend it.
You give a poor person that dollar through increased minimum wage and they spend it at a business. That business now makes more money, which is passed on to its employees through the increased minimum wage, and they spend that dollar again.
And again.
And again.
That dollar you took from the rich and gave to the poor drove a lot more than a dollar’s economic activity.
OH - and it’s also taxed every time it changes hands, so it also brings in more than its initial value in tax revenue.
In Brazil, a LinkedIn “influencer” was roasted because he said the if you a 100 to a rich person they would invest it and “make it” into 120 in a year, while of you give the same 100 to a poor person, that money is “lost” immediately.
The dollars are soiled by passing through the hands of the poor, though.
Don’t worry, the rich are here to laundry the money until it is clean again.
Maybe an analogy makes it clearer: the economy is the blood flow, formed by services and products. Money if the fat in the blood. It’s necessary for the system and without it it doesn’t work right. But if it forms a clot then there a problem.
I’m not sure how true this is, the rich still invest huge amounts of their money in businesses, while they shouldn’t have that much to begin with it’s still in the economy for the most part
Well, there are three points on that:
- Business investment doesn’t need money from the rich, it just needs any money, resources and manpower. Shareholding means lots of non-rich can supply the money (it’s not the rich that are needed, it’s the money) and structures like Cooperatives mean that many businesses can be made by people just pooling their work and resources. Theoretically at least mass Shareholding should make for a more robust business environments because many people investing should have a lot more variety (hence making the whole more resilience to the kind of unforeseen changes that cause Crashes) in terms of what’s invested in and the investment objectives than just a few people.
- The money being too concentrated together with the current Ownership Laws (mainly Land Ownership, though in some areas also Intelectual Property) actually crowd out most news businesses because of how expensive it is to launch most business ventures, not just directly but even in terms of the founders themselves being able to afford being out of work whilst they launch a business. Notice how even in big cities but especially in smaller cities and even towns, stores are closing and those spaces remain closed for months or even years. The money and property concentrated in fewer hand has the leverage to demand huge rents from the rest of Society to be able to use those thing they’ve locked-in through ownership and that’s killing lots of business at the start stage and even stopping the business ideas themselves from ever being put in practice. It’s “funny” that the rich having all the money creates a situation were so much money is needed to launch a successful business that it can only work with funding from the rich - nobody is going to create, say, a large restaurant chain from the humble beginning of a single venue in a small town when the necessary realestate to expand or even just start costs many times more to rent or buy than it did back in the 60s and 70s when so many of todays big name such chains started just like that.
- The actual value of more investment depends on were the bottleneck is in the Economy: supply side or consumer side. There is no point in adding more businesses (i.e. Production) if there’s a lack of demand (i.e. Consumption) because median incomes are too low. If you look around (just notice companies nickel & diming customers) we currently have a lack of demand, not of supply, so money going into investment just makes the problem worse whilst money going (via better wages) into consumption would help.
This was not at all my point though, I’m not saying billionaires are needed I’m saying they do actually put their money into the economy, most are not just sitting on a dragon horde
From the abstract of the actual study
We find that most studies to date suggest a fairly modest impact of minimum wages on jobs: the median OWE estimate of 72 studies published in academic journals is -0.13, which suggests that only around 13 percent of the potential earnings gains from minimum wage increases are offset due to associated job losses. Estimates published since 2010 tend to be closer to zero.
That “Adobe Stock” photo from the article is just some generic AI crap.
The door is wide open for a stock photo business right now, I guess.
Isn’t that kinda what AI images should be used for? Meaningless stock images? Like, if the article was about a specific person, or an interesting activity or place, then yea that’s not for AI. But a generic article about “jobs” seems fine.
No?
People are paying for those pictures, either as a subscription or per-use basis. They’re paying a rate to reflects work; photographers, models, rights - all kinds of different costs up front. None of that exists with AI.
It’s sort of like sitting down to a restaurant, ordering and paying, and then getting served food from your own home. Some horseshit Kraft mac and cheese and fish sticks.
A better comparison would be if the menu at the restaurant had AI art on it. It doesn’t matter, I’m not there for the menu art. The menu is not the main product I’m there to consume. It’s the food. The menu art is there to give a quick visual and because it looks marginally better than a blank piece of paper, nothing more. Whether it was painted by an artist or created in 2 minutes by someone with Stable Diffusion makes no difference in the food quality.
If people are really losing money because others no longer want to use their work for meaningless article headers, I don’t know what to say. Maybe get in line with phone operators and VCR repair men?
Hop on Adobe stock right now and search for something. Half of the results will be AI-generated. There’s a search filter that can exclude them.
The study is talking about overall numbers of jobs, not specific companies. Get fired from McDonalds closing a location, get a job with higher pay somewhere else that’s paying the new minimum wage, is a net zero result.
McDonalds is gutted that their 2024 earnings are on track for only a 5% increase over 2023, which saw a 10% gross profit increase for the year.
Remember when there was a “shoplifting crime wave” that it turned out was just profits were down so they had to blame something?
Ff is down because they got greedy and raised prices so that their food wasn’t exceptionally cheaper than the other options anymore which is the main reason people eat there. If people can’t afford the food anymore, that’s not the employee compensation, that’s bad business decisions. There was plenty of profit to cover the wage increases and still have huge profits if sales had stayed the same.
Fast food realized humans could be replaced by screens so the worker reduction trend was there long ago.
We’ve been having fewer and fewer cashiers at McD in my country for the past 5-10 years. Minimum wage HAS been increasing, but McD costs about the same as a real meal at a real restaurant anyway, and they’re constantly full.
No, but it makes business owners more likely to outsource or replace with AI.
No. They’re aiming for that regardless.
“More likely”
If these people could be replaced with AI already, they would be. It doesn’t matter how much or little they make.
Guess we need to get rid of business owners then.
So if you owned a business, you’d like to be removed from that position?
I do own a business. I’m the sole and only employee, as it should be unless I want to establish a partnership.
So you’re self employed. This study doesn’t apply to you.
It’s going to blow your mind once you find out about cooperatives.
It’s going to blow your mind to find out how often new businesses fail.
???
What, exactly, do you think your point is?
How many new business fail?
Are you just spouting our random things thinking it makes your earlier point more valid?
Raise minimum wage? No, tax cuts for only certain low wage jobs instead. What are you gonna do, vote for the other parties we’ve forced off the ballots?
Who even gets paid minimum wage? My kids started at fast food for several dollars above minimum, to where I’m not even sure what the point is.
I got paid minimum wage when I was a supermarket cashier.
Makes sense. Like fast food, it’s a job that doesn’t require experience or any particular skill set.
No it does, I still remember all the produce codes and find myself tetrising my own grocery bags. A good cashier is faster, cleaner, and saves you money.
You’re observing a snapshot period and confusing it for the whole.
Basically every “tipped” job gets paid minimum wage (or below).
None of the people uttering that lie will care about this news.
