Should Minimum Wage Implementers be Jailed?

Via International Man

Wage

Notice the question posed above mentions implementers, not supporters. The latter consists of, what? 95% of the electorate? We can document that some 2/3 of the voters favor a minimum wage of $15. It is my estimate that virtually all voters favor this law at some level. That is, perhaps at most 5% of those who cast a ballot favor wiping this enactment entirely from the law books.

The former, in sharp contrast, consist of at most a few hundred people, perhaps 1000 at most. It would consist of all the senators and congressmen who passed this legislation, the judges who rule in its favor, the police who arrest those who violate it, and the jailers who incarcerate them.

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Minimum-Wage Blowback – Fast Food Burger-Flipping Robot Works For $3 An Hour

Via ZeroHedge

Over the years, we’ve documented the proliferation of artificial intelligence and robots in the workplace would lead to a tidal wave of job losses through 2030.

What peaked our attention several years ago was Miso Robotics, a Pasadena tech company with the focus of developing robots for fast-food restaurants, has seen the price of its burger-flipping robot drop from $100,000 to $10,000 in four years.

“Off-the-shelf robot arms had plunged in price in recent years, from more than $100,000 in 2016, when Miso Robotics first launched, to less than $10,000 today, with cheaper models coming in the near future,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

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The Costs & Consequences Of $15/Hour

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

In 2016, I first touched on the impacts of hiking the minimum wage.

“What’s the big ‘hub-bub’ over raising the minimum wage to $15/hr? After all, the last time the minimum wage was raised was in 2009.

According to the April 2015, BLS report the numbers were quite underwhelming:

‘In 2014, 77.2 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates,representing 58.7 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 1.3 million earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 1.7 million had wages below the federal minimum.

Together, these 3.0 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 3.9 percent of all hourly-paid workers. Of those 3 million workers, who were at or below the Federal minimum wage, 48.2% of that group were aged 16-24. Most importantly, the percentage of hourly paid workers earning the prevailing federal minimum wage or less declined from 4.3% in 2013 to 3.9% in 2014 and remains well below the 13.4% in 1979.’”

Hmm…3 million workers at minimum wage with roughly half aged 16-24. Where would that group of individuals most likely be found?

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Leaving for Las Vegas: California’s minimum wage law leaves businesses no choice

Guest Post by Houman Salem

California’s minimum wage jumped to $10.50 an hour at the start of the new year. As the founder of a small fashion design house and clothing manufacturer in San Fernando, I’m not a disinterested observer in this change.

After two years in business, my company now has more than 150 clients from all over the world and 18 employees. It’s what’s known as a cut-and-sew house, part of the garment industry that generates about $17 billion in annual economic activity in Los Angeles County, including $6.9 billion in payroll, according to a 2016 industry report by the California Fashion Assn. This is the epicenter of apparel design and manufacturing in the United States; domestically manufactured clothing is more expensive, but retail and wholesale customers who care about quality and working conditions have historically been willing to pay for it.

Unfortunately, the industry is on a downward trend. Los Angeles County used to have more than 5,000 apparel factories; today, my company is one of roughly 2,000 — and  many (e.g. American Apparel) are looking for a way out. One Los Angeles Times headline, quoting a California State University economist, warned that “the exodus has begun.”

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Even the NYTimes used to understand economics

Guest Post by Donald Sensing

 

The Right Minimum Wage – $0.00 – NYTimes.com

The idea of using a minimum wage to overcome poverty is old, honorable – and fundamentally flawed. It’s time to put this hoary debate behind us, and find a better way to improve the lives of people who work very hard for very little.

As I posted in 2003 in “Why planned economies cannot succeed,”

I am wondering whether the federal min-wage law actually keeps the poor down because it sets a legal wage ceiling, not a floor, above which employers don’t really have to pay.

Some states are mandating a min-wage of $15 per hour. Since we know, as Leftists do not, that money doesn’t grow on trees, where will the money come from to pay for the increase. Service industries will be hardest hit, especially food service and restaurants.

Say, for example, White Castle burgers.

“We’re disappointed. What this means for White Castle is we really have to evaluate how we manage our business,” [White Castle vice president Jamie] Richardson tells me. “About 30 percent of every sales dollar covers the pay of our hourly workers, and that doesn’t include management.”

“It’s our biggest investment, our biggest cost. And it’s one that if we see increase dramatically through fiat, and we don’t do anything — it’s unsustainable,” Richardson says. “We are in uncharted waters.”

“Is there any room to raise prices to cover costs?” Richardson muses. “We think we’d need to increase menu prices by something like 50 percent. It’s not something we’ve done before. It’d be catastrophic.”

The problem is that liberal politicians have almost never run a business or done anything but play politics, which for them is a never-ending game of mandating how you should spend your own money. Therefore, they do not understand the difference between elasticity and inelasticity in business costs and revenue.

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California Says To Hell With Economics, Will Hike Minimum Wage To $15/Hour

Tyler Durden's picture

Over the past 12 months, America has had front row seats for a real-life experiment with across-the-board wage hikes.

In January of last year, a grinning Doug McMillon appeared in a video message posted to Wal-Mart’s website to announce that the world’s biggest retailer was set to implement one of the “largest single-day, private-sector pay increases ever.”

Now first of all, McMillon and the rest of the executive suite probably should have reread the statement in quotes above and asked themselves whether that sounded like something that was likely to turn out well. Wal-Mart employs a whole lot of people, and giving everyone a raise is the kind of thing that can end up having unintended consequences – especially when your business runs on the thinnest of margins.

But Wal-Mart pressed ahead anyway and almost immediately, things started to unravel. First, Bentonville moved to squeeze suppliers by forcing them to plow their excess cash into savings rather than in-store advertising. Next came storage fees and eventually, Wal-Mart even tried to compel vendors to pass along any savings they might have recognized from the yuan devaluation.

But squeezing the supply chain proved inadequate to make up the money spent on higher wages and so, Wal-Mart did what anyone with any common sense knew they would end up doing: they fired thousands of people and closed hundreds of stores. Or, visually:

A valuable lesson was learned by all. Or maybe not, because over the weekend, California lawmakers and labor union reps struck a deal to raise the statewide minimum wage to $15/hour.

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The $15 Minimum Wage and the End of Teen Work

Guest Post by Jack Salmon

A new report from JP Morgan Chase & Co. finds that the summer employment rate for teenagers is nearing a record low at 34 percent. The report surveyed 15 US cities and found that despite an increase in summer positions available over a two year period, only 38 percent of teens and young adults found summer jobs.

This would be worrying by itself given the importance of work experience in entry-level career development, but it is also part of a long-term trend. Since 1995 the rate of seasonal teenage employment has declined by over a third from around 55 percent to 34 percent in 2015. The report does not attempt to examine why summer youth employment has fallen over the past two decades. If it had, it would probably find one answer in the minimum wage.

Most of the 15 cities studied in this report have minimum wage rates above the federal level, with cities such as Seattle having a rate more than double that. Recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics seen in the chart show exactly how a drastic rise in the minimum wage rate affects the rate of employment.

Seattle has experienced the largest 3 month job loss in its history last year, following the introduction of a $15 minimum wage. We can only imagine the impact such a change has had on the prospects of employment for the young and unskilled.

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Minimum Wage Dishonesty

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

Michael Hiltzik, a columnist and Los Angeles Times reporter, wrote an article titled “Does a minimum wage raise hurt workers? Economists say: We don’t know.” Uncertain was his conclusion from a poll conducted by the Initiative on Global Markets, at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, of 42 nationally ranked economists on the question of whether raising the federal minimum wage to $15 over the next five years would reduce employment opportunities for low-wage workers.

The Senate Budget Committee’s blog says, “Top Economists Are Backing Sen. Bernie Sanders on Establishing a $15 an Hour Minimum Wage.” It lists the names of 210 economists who call for increasing the federal minimum wage. The petition starts off, “We, the undersigned professional economists, favor an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour as of 2020.” The petition ends with this: “In short, raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour by 2020 will be an effective means of improving living standards for low-wage workers and their families and will help stabilize the economy. The costs to other groups in society will be modest and readily absorbed.”

The people who are harmed by an increase in the minimum wage are low-skilled workers. Try this question to economists who argue against the unemployment effect of raising the minimum wage: Is it likely that an employer would find it in his interests to pay a worker $15 an hour when that worker has skills that enable him to produce only $5 worth of value an hour to the employer’s output? Unlike my fellow economists who might argue to the contrary, I would say that most employers would view hiring such a worker as a losing economic proposition, but they might hire him at $5 an hour. Thus, one effect of the minimum wage law is that of discrimination against the employment of low-skilled workers.

In our society, the least skilled people are youths, who lack the skills, maturity and experience of adults.

Black youths not only share these handicaps but have attended grossly inferior schools and live in unstable household environments. That means higher minimum wages will have the greatest unemployment effect on youths, particularly black youths.

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FOURTH TURNING – POLITICIANS DRIVING THE WORLD TOWARDS WAR

In Part 1 of this article I discussed the catalyst spark which ignited this Fourth Turning and the seemingly delayed regeneracy. In Part 2 I pondered possible Grey Champion prophet generation leaders who could arise during the regeneracy. In Part 3 I focused on the economic channel of distress which is likely to be the primary driving force in the next phase of this Crisis. In Part 4 I assessed the social and cultural channels of distress dividing the nation. In Part 5 I’ll examine the technological, ecological, political, and military channels of distress likely to burst forth with the molten ingredients of this Fourth Turning, and finally in Part 6 our rendezvous with destiny, with potential climaxes to this Winter of our discontent.

Technological & Ecological Distress

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” Aldous Huxley – Ends and Means

The level of distress being produced by technology was probably underestimated by Strauss & Howe when they wrote their book in 1997. The internet, cell phones and e-commerce were still in their infancy, while cyber security was an unknown concept. Huxley would be shocked by how backwards we have “progressed” through the efficient distribution of iGadgets, creating millions of distracted, non-thinking, passive, easily pliable, willfully ignorant sheep who adore their technological servitude.

A vast swath of the populace never reads a book and can’t go more than a few minutes without checking their iGadget to view the latest funny cat video, the latest update on Kim Kardashian’s ass, Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner’s courage, or Lamar Odom’s latest whorehouse escapade. Our country is drowning in a sea of irrelevance as our infinite craving for diversions and triviality overwhelms any thoughts of confronting our oppressors. The adoration of technology has degraded our ability to think and allowed the Deep State to control the masses by amusing them to death.

The totalitarian Orwellian utilization of technology was exposed by a millennial with courage, intelligence, and love of his country – Edward Snowden. His revelations were very distressful to the felonious government apparatchiks who blatantly flaunt their disregard for the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The criminals at the NSA, fully supported by Obama and Congress, have made Big Brother look like an amateur, as they siphon up every phone call, text, email, and facebook entry made by each person in this country and for good measure the political leaders of our allies and enemies.

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