Hoodieninja on 04 September 2014
| Shadow1980 said: Way to stereotype workers in low-wage jobs as lazy shiftless bums who made poor life choices. For the majority of Americans, these type of jobs are often the only thing that is available. Sometimes, it doesn't matter how hard you work or how good your life choices are. You can bust your ass your whole life and still be struggling, living paycheck to paycheck. There's only so many jobs that pay $50k a year ($50k being the median household income, meaning half of all households earn less that that; 30% of American households earn less than $30,000 a year, while 15% of the population lives below the poverty line). There's even fewer jobs that pay, say, $75k a year and even fewer than that with six-figure salaries. There are 144 million workers in the U.S. right now. 25% of them earn less than $10 an hour. The minimum wage in 1968 was $1.60 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, it's the equivalent of $10.95/hour in 2014 dollars. If the MW kept pace with productivity, then it would be over $16/hour by now. Real GDP per capita has steadily increased over the past 40+ years, yet household incomes for all but the top quintile have remained stagnant, and the MW has been trending downwards, with its 2006 worth being the lowest since 1949. Most income gains have gone to the top earners, and the U.S. has the higher income inequality than almost any other OECD nation (only Mexico, Turkey, and Chile have a higher Gini coefficient). Many of the dire warnings opponents of increasing the MW are issuing are based on a shaky foundation. The minimum wage correlates poorly with and has never been causally linked to significant increases in unemployment. Increases in unemployment are always correlated with economic recessions. Increases in the MW have not been demonstrated to be a causal factor in any recession. Increases in the MW have also never been demonstrated to cause spikes in the cost of consumer goods. If the economy and society could deal with the equivalent of an $11/hour MW 46 years ago, then they can now despite all protestations to the contrary from right-libertarians, supply-sider conservatives, Austrian schoolers, Objectivists, and anyone who's fallen prey to the Horatio Alger delusion. And that's all I have to say about that. |
Excellent post, I could be wrong about how the minimum wage bandaids the Economy. Anyways you're definately right about one thing. The Minimum Wage did not scale properly at all.
