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Originally posted by 6STRINGJOKER:
Even though I believe what you said is the absolute truth here (I've said it many times myself over the years here), something needs to be done about it.

Back when minimum wage was 5.25 back around 1996 or so gas was less than a buck a gallon most of the time and we hadn't even seen the large spike in prices of everything that $2.00/gal gas brought in the early 2000's. Since then, there have been quite a few times where the price of gas has gone over $4.00 per gallon.

Since then, the minimum wage has only increased twice and now sits at $7.25/gal.

I know nobody is supposed to be able to make a living wage off of the minimum, but at this point it's almost not even worth working for minimum unless you are a single mother with 3 or more kids (in which case the EIC will double your pay at the end of the year).


My last good job paid me in a single day what takes more than a week to make at a part time minimum wage job. What's worse is that after Obamacare was passed, no business will give you more than 29 hours a week if they don't want to pay for your healthcare, so MANY people are working 2 or even 3 crappy part time minimum wage jobs now. Have you ever had the added nightmare of trying to balance life with that, or tried to find employers who were thrilled about having to work around your work schedule?


Then consider that the employment numbers are, and have been, a lie for a very long time. When somebody is working 2 or 3 crap minimum wage jobs, that counts as 2 or 3 jobs that are being worked even though it's only one person working them. Close to 50% of jobs in America now are minimum wage jobs.


I don't know what the answer to this is. I'm just saying that it does need to be increased.

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Originally posted by 6STRINGJOKER:
One way or another you're paying for it anyway. I could get a job tomorrow and in 3 months I will be receiving $2,400/yr tax free food stamps. Being a single male, my EIC will only be around $200/yr, but many of the women I worked with at my last job were getting between $400-$600/month in food stamps and $6,000-$12,000/yr in EIC. That means while I'm paying a modest sum on taxes, they're working the same job as I do and paying no taxes and being paid twice as much as I make.

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8 years of Obama and the average American worker is making 3% more than they were when he got into office. Even with the modest increases in inflation that J0 provided the compounded inflation rate over the same 8 years was over 18%... Meanwhile, corporations are now making more than 60% more than when Obama first took office.

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This is exactly how the dollar gets devalued. It's not from the Chinese worker getting 2 rice balls per day instead of one - it is from the American Minimum Wage increases.

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EIC overpayment is all hocus pocus from Obama, the foundation of his plan to destroy America and the economy. If this ws based upon economic principles and value or productivity, this EIC overpayment garbage would not exist.

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HELLOOOOOO!!!!! Increase in Minimum Wage requires by Law that UNION TEACHERS get paid more for doing less. This is exactly why they want to raise the Minimum Wage!! - so they have an excuse to raise your taxes to pay for their McMansions. In my neighboring Florence County, the High School Math teacher bought his first Island some years ago - and his wife does not work.

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Sure, but you are supposed to believe all of the lies that he told you, so you'll be happy. Aren't you a BELIEVER?

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Originally posted by JO753:
I agree with alot uv wut they are saying!

About the numberz, tho, I'm wundering if he iz uzing the old British 'billion' wich I believ iz actually trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:

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This is exactly how the dollar gets devalued. It's not from the Chinese worker getting 2 rice balls per day instead of one - it is from the American Minimum Wage increases.

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Wrong. The US dollar loses value through quantitative easing.

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This ends up hurting everybody, but is especially hard on those who make next to nothing. The only reason that we're not seeing riots on the street and people eating the rich right now is because of the Government subsidies propping up the ever increasing lower class.

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EIC overpayment is all hocus pocus from Obama, the foundation of his plan to destroy America and the economy. If this ws based upon economic principles and value or productivity, this EIC overpayment garbage would not exist.

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There is no "overpayment" in EIC. These women aren't breaking any tax laws. It wasn't all Obama either. The Feminists want to bitch about the gender wage gap, but with nearly 50% of Americans making below poverty almost half of American Women get paid more than men for the same job because of the EIC.

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Are you trying to claim that the dollar has never been devalued prior to the creation of Quantitative Easing?

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I did not intend to imply that this overpayment of EIC was not legal, or codified into the tax code, and I am sorry if your inferred I did.
This is an intentional overpayment of EIC, which means it is not based upon productivity or value, but based upon Obama's social dementia and goals - the same Obama who freely admits that "math does not work out the way we think it should" - because math is not delusional and partisan.

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Are you trying to claim that the dollar has never been devalued prior to the creation of Quantitative Easing?

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Absolutely not. What I am saying though is nothing else matters anymore. Not one single thing that is or has ever happened to the US economy even puts a dent into how destructive quantitative easing is. Quantitative easing was the death knell to the US economy. Raising the minimum wage now would do almost no damage, relatively speaking.

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Relatively, yes. But any damage is still damage, and unneeded. Reducing or eliminating illegal or undocumented workers, requiring (able-bodied) people to perform work (and/or pass drug tests) for their government subsistence are the types of policies which will produce major corrections in the fair market value of workers, and render the Minumum Wage meaningless.
Your insistence of raising the Minimum Wage, thereby doubling the expense increase to employers, which must then raise prices (or go out of business, or fire the minimum wage worker), will still put the Minimum Wage Worker TWICE as far behind - which is not your stated goal.
Also your insistence of raising the Minimum Wage in order to require Teachers Unions to get even more overpaid and therefor increase your property taxes will also have the opposite effect by increasing your expenses far more than your increase in income, which was not your stated goal.

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MGTOW? Elaborate or expand that acronym?

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:

I'm not sure that I'm insisting on a minimum wage increase. I'm only stating that I'm not adamantly against it like I used to be and that something needs to be done. What we have now is nearly half of the country making minimum wage and it's almost not even worth working for that amount of money anymore. I don't claim to have the answer, and I agree that if a minimum wage increase were to happen and nothing else happened along with it that it would probably cause more problems.

I guess the problem is that nothing is being done. The only two options I ever see being discussed is either doing nothing, or just raising the minimum wage and nothing else. Both of those options are not good.

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
Relatively, yes. But any damage is still damage, and unneeded. Reducing or eliminating illegal or undocumented workers, requiring (able-bodied) people to perform work (and/or pass drug tests) for their government subsistence are the types of policies which will produce major corrections in the fair market value of workers, and render the Minumum Wage meaningless.
Your insistence of raising the Minimum Wage, thereby doubling the expense increase to employers, which must then raise prices (or go out of business, or fire the minimum wage worker), will still put the Minimum Wage Worker TWICE as far behind - which is not your stated goal.
Also your insistence of raising the Minimum Wage in order to require Teachers Unions to get even more overpaid and therefor increase your property taxes will also have the opposite effect by increasing your expenses far more than your increase in income, which was not your stated goal.

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I'm not sure that I'm insisting on a minimum wage increase.

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I don't claim to have the answer, and I agree that if a minimum wage increase were to happen and nothing else happened along with it that it would probably cause more problems.

I guess the problem is that nothing is being done. The only two options I ever see being discussed is either doing nothing, or just raising the minimum wage and nothing else. Both of those options are not good.

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

The rising economy will help, and maybe fix all that. When businesses are allow to prosper, they will need to hire, and the most talented or skilled will be the first to be plucked off the Minimum Wage level, and eventually even the lowest skill level will be paid more than Minimum Wage - which will upset the Unions greatly, with their members earning comparatively less than everybody else (who got increased pay). So the Unions will demand an increase to the Minimum Wage (funny how their ony answer is raise the Minimum Wage, no matter if the economy is a juggernaut or in depression or recession) so their wages will be forced higher, without increase in productivity.

Last couple years I was doing some day-labor work just manual stuff which needed people to show up on time and do some simple, non-strenuous work. For a few years they were paying $10/hour, while other temp jobs were still doing 9 or 8 or less, I think. Trump was elected in November. Trump took office January 20. At the end of Jan, i got a text letting me know that the same temp work was now paying $11/hr, and could I come work for them? One week later, another text letting me know the rate was up to $12/hr.

When the demand for the workforce (businesses, employers needing more workers) grows more than the supply of the workforce (unemployed, illegal, underpaid, and just lazy), then the pay rates will continue to rise, rendering the Minimum Wage meaningless, except for the Unions who demand increases to their pay.

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

The rising economy will help, and maybe fix all that. When businesses are allow to prosper, they will need to hire, and the most talented or skilled will be the first to be plucked off the Minimum Wage level, and eventually even the lowest skill level will be paid more than Minimum Wage - which will upset the Unions greatly, with their members earning comparatively less than everybody else (who got increased pay). So the Unions will demand an increase to the Minimum Wage (funny how their ony answer is raise the Minimum Wage, no matter if the economy is a juggernaut or in depression or recession) so their wages will be forced higher, without increase in productivity.

Last couple years I was doing some day-labor work just manual stuff which needed people to show up on time and do some simple, non-strenuous work. For a few years they were paying $10/hour, while other temp jobs were still doing 9 or 8 or less, I think. Trump was elected in November. Trump took office January 20. At the end of Jan, i got a text letting me know that the same temp work was now paying $11/hr, and could I come work for them? One week later, another text letting me know the rate was up to $12/hr.

When the demand for the workforce (businesses, employers needing more workers) grows more than the supply of the workforce (unemployed, illegal, underpaid, and just lazy), then the pay rates will continue to rise, rendering the Minimum Wage meaningless, except for the Unions who demand increases to their pay.

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Your rosy projections are not going to happen because the USA does not work the way you think it does. America is not one country anymore. It is becoming two, each with vastly different resources, expectations, and fates.
www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/america-is-regressing-into-a-d
eveloping-nation-for-most-people

In a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, draws a portrait of the new reality in a way that is frighteningly, indelibly clear: America is regressing into a developing nation for most people.

In one of these countries live members of what Temin calls the “FTE sector” (named for finance, technology, and electronics, the industries which largely support its growth). These are the 20 percent of Americans who enjoy college educations, have good jobs, and sleep soundly knowing that they have not only enough money to meet life’s challenges, but also social networks to bolster their success. They grow up with parents who read books to them, tutors to help with homework, and plenty of stimulating things to do and places to go. They travel in planes and drive new cars. The citizens of this country see economic growth all around them and exciting possibilities for the future. They make plans, influence policies, and count themselves as lucky to be Americans.

The FTE citizens rarely visit the country where the other 80 percent of Americans live: the low-wage sector.

The richest large economy in the world, says Temin, is coming to have an economic and political structure more like a developing nation. We have entered a phase of regression, and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics. For the first time, this model is applied with systematic precision to the U.S.

The result is profoundly disturbing.

In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check. The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check. Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration - Check. The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check. Social and economic mobility is low. Check.

Temin’s book has provided a giant red flag, illustrating a trajectory that will continue to accelerate as long as the 20 percent in the FTE sector are permitted to operate a country within America’s borders solely for themselves at the expense of the majority.


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

If human history is any indication, those in your proclaimed class are going to need to build a wall around their country, and hire their own Army to protect them and their possessions.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
jsf

I'm not seeing DATA that links higher minimum wage to reduced economic growth.
The other thing I dispute is that everyone was thriving under Reagan. I personally knew a lot of people working minimum wage back then. And figures bear me out:

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You seem to be talking about some imaginary world that runs by how you fantasize things should run, rather than the real world everyone else inhabits.

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
When the demand for the workforce (businesses, employers needing more workers) grows more than the supply of the workforce (unemployed, illegal, underpaid, and just lazy), then the pay rates will continue to rise, rendering the Minimum Wage meaningless, except for the Unions who demand increases to their pay.

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IIRC at the end of the Reagan years, I did not know anybody who wasn't making more than the Minimum Wage - nobody even knew what the Min Wage was. And these were simple jobs after I moved States - restaurant and such.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

The facts show otherwise.

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
Raising the minimum wage to $15 would almost immediately put my parents out of business.

One of the only reasons that I'm beginning to entertain the idea is that . . .

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
I get it Second.

So go ahead and raise it. I'll hope for the best, but I won't be surprised if milk goes up to $6/gal shortly afterward.

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
Jesus Christ...

Whatever second.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
When the demand for the workforce (businesses, employers needing more workers) grows more than the supply of the workforce (unemployed, illegal, underpaid, and just lazy), then the pay rates will continue to rise, rendering the Minimum Wage meaningless, except for the Unions who demand increases to their pay.

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During the Reagan years (1/81 - 1/89) wages FELL - they didn't rise. And the graphic clearly shows the split between INCOME - which is not necessarily related to work, and WAGES which are earned through work. INCOME stayed flat, while - let me point this out again - WAGES fell.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
During the Reagan years (1/81 - 1/89) wages FELL - they didn't rise. And the graphic clearly shows the split between INCOME - which is not necessarily related to work, and WAGES which are earned through work. INCOME stayed flat, while - let me point this out again - WAGES fell.

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Originally posted by jsf:
This is a fairly blatant lie. I'll get to this another time.
Income Revenue to the IRS practically doubled, IIRC during Reagan's terms. How can the collected Income Taxes double if the Incomes felL? That sounds quite preposterous, and it is such a claim.

After looking at the other posts, it seems this thread has derailed from the tracks of facts.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
You didn't account for the fact that women entered the workforce to augment household finances.

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
You didn't account for the fact that women entered the workforce to augment household finances.

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Maybe originally that is what happened, but in the grand scheme what actually happened was that the American labor pool doubled nearly overnight and reduced demand for labor greatly.

I'm not saying that women should stay in the kitchen and make babies. I'm just stating the harsh reality that I never hear anybody talking about. The amount of illegal Mexicans or H1B visas out there is a drop in the bucket compared to females entering the work force when it came to job competition.

What started as a way to augment finances has now become a necessity in most cases. I know some of you guys and gals run with more affluent circles than I ever did . . .

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
The employment problems in the US don't look to be about women in the workforce.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
The employment problems in the US don't look to be about women in the workforce.

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
I didn't say they were.

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
I'm not saying that women should stay in the kitchen and make babies. I'm just stating the harsh reality that I never hear anybody talking about. The amount of illegal Mexicans or H1B visas out there is a drop in the bucket compared to females entering the work force when it came to job competition.

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
It's a lot of factors.

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Do you really think that showing a graph about anything in France is a good indicator of what is happening in America?

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The most obvious reason why any comparison isn't' going to work is that they have a 35 hour work week in France and anything over that is considered overtime.

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From wiki:
The main stated objectives of the law were twofold:
1. To reduce unemployment and yield a better division of labor, in a context where some people work long hours while some others are unemployed. A 10.2% decrease in the hours extracted from each worker would, theoretically, require firms to hire correspondingly more workers, a remedy for unemployment.
2. To take advantage of improvements in productivity of modern society to give workers some more personal time to enhance quality of life.

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This isn't even an argument about sex. It's strictly a numbers game.
For argument's sake, let's say that 50% of all working people in the country, regardless of sex, decided that they weren't going to work anymore starting tomorrow.
What do you think would happen?

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
lol... You would basically be Second if you agreed on politics.

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