Screw "Tax The Poor" Capitalism.

[The Derp]

A liberal will be illiterate there is no free lunch. A jet plane costs more than an apple because the costs are more. Cost determines price. 1+1=2

So let's get away from theory and deal in reality. The reality is that Seattle raised their MW and didn't see corresponding price increases as your theory would dictate. So does that mean Seattle is an outlier, or is your theory bullshit?

 

[The Derp]

Got it so in liberal idiot land the higher the wages the lower the prices!!

No one ever said that. But higher wages means more consumption, and more consumption means more demand, and more demand means more jobs.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

Got it so in liberal idiot land the higher the wages the lower the prices!!

No one ever said that. But higher wages means more consumption, and more consumption means more demand, and more demand means more jobs.

Totally illiterate of course perfectly typical of a liberal. Higher wages mean higher consumption by the people who get the higher wages and lower consumption by people who pay for the higher wages so no net benefit is possible No free lunch is possiblesee why we are positive that liberalism is based in pure ignorance

 

[The Derp]

Totally illiterate of course perfectly typical of a liberal. Higher wages mean higher consumption by the people who get the higher wages and lower consumption by people who pay for the higher wages so no net benefit is possible No free lunch is possiblesee why we are positive that liberalism is based in pure ignorance

Talk about illiterate! Wage raises are not a zero-sum game, and any economist will tell you that. There are more people at the low end of the income ladder than those at the top. And because there are more at the bottom, if you increase the amount those people have to spend by raising their wages, then they increase consumption, which increases demand, which increases jobs and increases wages.

You keep harping out "free lunch", but it doesn't sound like you know what that phrase actually means in this context.

Paying people more means they will spend more. Seattle's MW increase is proof. You all said that if Seattle raised their MW, there would be job loss and price increases. You were wrong on both counts. So does that mean Seattle is an exception to your theory, or does it mean your theory is complete bullshit?

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

Totally illiterate of course perfectly typical of a liberal. Higher wages mean higher consumption by the people who get the higher wages and lower consumption by people who pay for the higher wages so no net benefit is possible No free lunch is possiblesee why we are positive that liberalism is based in pure ignorance

Talk about illiterate! Wage raises are not a zero-sum game, and any economist will tell you that. There are more people at the low end of the income ladder than those at the top. And because there are more at the bottom, if you increase the amount those people have to spend by raising their wages, then they increase consumption, which increases demand, which increases jobs and increases wages.

You keep harping out "free lunch", but it doesn't sound like you know what that phrase actually means in this context.

Paying people more means they will spend more. Seattle's MW increase is proof. You all said that if Seattle raised their MW, there would be job loss and price increases. You were wrong on both counts. So does that mean Seattle is an exception to your theory, or does it mean your theory is complete bullshit?

The Theory that a jet plane costs more than an apple because the jet plane has higher costs to manufacture is not bullshit

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

Totally illiterate of course perfectly typical of a liberal. Higher wages mean higher consumption by the people who get the higher wages and lower consumption by people who pay for the higher wages so no net benefit is possible No free lunch is possiblesee why we are positive that liberalism is based in pure ignorance

Talk about illiterate! Wage raises are not a zero-sum game, and any economist will tell you that. There are more people at the low end of the income ladder than those at the top. And because there are more at the bottom, if you increase the amount those people have to spend by raising their wages, then they increase consumption, which increases demand, which increases jobs and increases wages.

You keep harping out "free lunch", but it doesn't sound like you know what that phrase actually means in this context.

Paying people more means they will spend more. Seattle's MW increase is proof. You all said that if Seattle raised their MW, there would be job loss and price increases. You were wrong on both counts. So does that mean Seattle is an exception to your theory, or does it mean your theory is complete bullshit?

Many of the people who work at say Walmart are similar to the people who shop at Walmart so when you raise the wages of Walmart employees you raise the wages of Walmart customers Who are as poor as Walmart workers.

 

[The Derp]

he Theory that a jet plane costs more than an apple because the jet plane has higher costs to manufacture is not bullshit

Your theory was that raising wages would lead to corresponding price increases. The empirical evidence from Seattle's MW hike says the opposite.

So either Seattle is an exception of immense proportions, or you're full of shit.

I'm inclined to believe the latter.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

he Theory that a jet plane costs more than an apple because the jet plane has higher costs to manufacture is not bullshit

Your theory was that raising wages would lead to corresponding price increases. The empirical evidence from Seattle's MW hike says the opposite.

So either Seattle is an exception of immense proportions, or you're full of shit.

I'm inclined to believe the latter.

Of course a jet plane costs more than apple and of course conservatives look at Seattle and say it cost jobs and liberals look at Seattle and say it didn't Econ 101 tells you who is correct

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

he Theory that a jet plane costs more than an apple because the jet plane has higher costs to manufacture is not bullshit

Your theory was that raising wages would lead to corresponding price increases. The empirical evidence from Seattle's MW hike says the opposite.

So either Seattle is an exception of immense proportions, or you're full of shit.

I'm inclined to believe the latter.

I am inclined to believe you're a communist and the minimum wage is just one of 1001 interventions in the capitalist system you want because you lack the IQ as a typical liberal to understand how capitalism works

 

[The Derp]

Of course a jet plane costs more than apple and of course conservatives look at Seattle and say it cost jobs and liberals look at Seattle and say it didn't Econ 101 tells you who is correct

Conservatives would be wrong. Seattle's unemployment rate today is nearly a full point lower than it was just one year ago, and two points lower than before the MW hike.

So your theory is bullshit, isn't it? If what you theorize is true, Seattle would have seen an increase in unemployment, but they didn't. They saw a decrease.

So that means your theory is bullshit.

 

[The Derp]

I am inclined to believe you're a communist and the minimum wage is just one of 1001 interventions in the capitalist system you want because you lack the IQ as a typical liberal to understand how capitalism works

Way to flame out, troll. You make a claim, that claim isn't supported by facts, so you pretend your claim is fact.

Conservatives are such snowflakes!

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

I am inclined to believe you're a communist and the minimum wage is just one of 1001 interventions in the capitalist system you want because you lack the IQ as a typical liberal to understand how capitalism works

Way to flame out, troll. You make a claim, that claim isn't supported by facts, so you pretend your claim is fact.

Conservatives are such snowflakes!

It's not a fact that a jet plane has a higher price than an apple because the jet plane his higher cost to manufacture????

 

[The Derp]

It's not a fact that a jet plane has a higher price than an apple because the jet plane his higher cost to manufacture????

We aren't talking about that. You made the claim that raising the minimum wage leads to increased prices. The empirical evidence from Seattle's MW hike shows the opposite.

So either the data is completely wrong on Seattle, or your theory is bullshit.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

It's not a fact that a jet plane has a higher price than an apple because the jet plane his higher cost to manufacture????

We aren't talking about that. You made the claim that raising the minimum wage leads to increased prices. The empirical evidence from Seattle's MW hike shows the opposite.

So either the data is completely wrong on Seattle, or your theory is bullshit.

As I said Liberals will look at Seattle one way in Conservatives will look at it another the truth can be found in economics 101 there is no free lunch when you raise cost imports you raise prices so no net benefit free lunch is possible.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

As I Predicted, Seattle's Minimum Wage Rise Is Reducing Employment



Tim Worstall ,

CONTRIBUTOR

I have opinions about economics, finance and public policy.

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We've been debating the effects of raising the minimum wage for some time now, and specifically there's been a back and forth between me and various acolytes of Nick Hanauer over what the minimum wage rise in Seattle will do to employment prospects there.

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My claim was, by the standards of basic and conventional economics, entirely uncontroversial. A rise in the price of something will lead to people purchasing less of that thing. So a rise in the price of low-skill labor will lead to employers purchasing less of low-skill labor.


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The claim is not (and never has been) that raising Seattle's minimum wage will cause the economy to become some howling wasteland of huddled masses desperately looking for a job. It is that with a higher minimum wage there will be less low-skill employment than without a raise in that minimum wage. And yes, of course the effects of a minimum wage are going to be marginal when laid against all the other things that can happen to a labor market. (But remember that all economics happens at the margins.)

This is, as I said, conventional economics. And yet I've been pilloried as "not getting it" by those who believe in some alternative universe where the simplicity of economics do not hold.

But now we have a report on exactly what has been happening in Seattle's labor market.

Seattle’s labor market has thrived since the city became the first major metropolis in the country to pass a law setting its minimum wage on a path to $15 per hour.

The city’s job-growth rate has been triple the national average, for example.

Much of that success, though, can be attributed to trends separate from the minimum-wage law itself, such as the growth of Seattle’s tech sector and its construction boom, according to a new report that University of Washington researchers presented to the City Council on Monday.

I have no problem with any of that. Employment is up, unemployment is down. But those other factors entirely swamp the effects of a minimum wage change. The report also notes:

Pay for low-wage workers climbed more in real Seattle than in synthetic Seattle, while their employment rate and hours climbed slightly less.

That's the important finding here. Employment rates and hours climbed because the economy is booming. But they climbed less in areas where the minimum wage was raised than they did in areas where it was not. The difference between those two is the employment lost to the higher minimum wage.



It's worth quoting from the report itself in detail and at length because they explain their points very well:

This report presents the short-run effects of the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance on the Seattle labor market. The Seattle Minimum Wage study team at the University of Washington analyzed administrative records on employment, hours, and earnings from the Washington Employment Security Department to address two fundamental questions:

1) How has Seattle’s labor market performed since the City passed the Minimum Wage Ordinance, and particularly since the first wage increase phased in on April 1, 2015?

2) What are the short-run effects of the Minimum Wage Ordinance on Seattle’s labor market?

While quite similar at first glance, these two questions address very different issues and require very different methods to answer. The first question can be studied with a simple before/after comparison. Although the comparison is simple, it risks conflating the impact of the minimum wage with other local trends. Many things have happened in Seattle’s labor market since June 2014, most of them having little or nothing to do with the minimum wage itself. The City has enjoyed steady expansion in tech sector employment, and a construction boom fueled by rising residential and commercial property prices. Even the weather – a key determinant of economic activity in the Puget Sound region – was favorable in 2015, with record-low precipitation in the early months of the $11 minimum wage. The before-after comparison can tell us the net impact of all these simultaneous trends, but this comparison cannot distinguish among them.

Our second question – the more important one for purposes of evaluating the policy – aims to isolate the impact of the minimum wage from all the other regional trends seen over the same time period. Whereas the first question asks “are we better off than we were when Seattle raised the minimum wage” and requires only a simple comparison of yesterday to today, the second asks “are we better off than we would have been if Seattle had not adopted a higher minimum wage?” To answer it requires imagining how the local economy would look in absence of a Minimum Wage Ordinance.

While it is impossible to directly observe what would have happened if no wage ordinance had been implemented, this report uses widely accepted statistical techniques to compare Seattle in its current state—with the presence of the Minimum Wage Ordinance—to an image of what Seattle might have looked like today if not for the Minimum Wage Ordinance. We take advantage of data going back to 2005 to build a model of the way Seattle’s labor market typically works. We also take advantage of data on nearby regions that did not increase the minimum wage to better understand how other factors might have influenced what we observe in the City itself.


That's exactly what we want to know and that's exactly how to find out. Of course we're interested in how the labor market has done overall. But when we want to consider the impact of the minimum wage rise then we want to try to isolate the impact of the minimum wage rise. This means trying to strip out all of the other things which have been happening in the labor market.

The way to do this is to look at broadly similar economies under broadly similar circumstances (at least as close to each other as we can manage), one with the minimum wage rise and one without. Fortunately Seattle's minimum wage rise applies only to Seattle, not the surrounding area. Thus by contrasting the outcomes in the two areas we can isolate the effect only of the minimum wage rise in Seattle.

So, the result is:

In a region where all low-wage workers, including those in Seattle, have enjoyed access to more jobs and more hours, Seattle’s low-wage workers show some preliminary signs of lagging behind similar workers in comparison regions.

The minimum wage appears to have slightly reduced the employment rate of low-wage workers by about one percentage point. It appears that the Minimum Wage Ordinance modestly held back Seattle’s employment of low-wage workers relative to the level we could have expected.

Hours worked among low-wage Seattle workers have lagged behind regional trends, by roughly four hours per quarter, on average.*

Low-wage individuals working in Seattle when the ordinance passed transitioned to jobs outside Seattle at an elevated rate compared to historical patterns.

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Which is absolutely fascinating, isn't it? And note that the reduction in employment growth accords very well with David Neumark's estimations of the elasticity of labor demand. The actual wage rise (so far) was about 10%. The employment drop was about 1%. So, an elasticity of about -0.1%. Neumark has teen minimum wage elasticity at about 0.15% (in other papers, as far up as -0.2%).

Finally, note what my prediction was:

No one at all has ever doubted that it is possible to increase employment and the minimum wage at the same time. The impact of the general economy is usually going to be larger than the impact of the minimum wage. The impact of that general economy could mean that employment rises, stays the same or falls, whatever happens to the minimum wage. But that’s not the interesting thing we’d like to know. Which is, what is the effect of raising the minimum wage on unemployment? Freed from the impacts of everything else happening in the economy? And there the standard answer is that it will raise unemployment and no, no one has managed to come up with a convincing case against this standard wisdom.

And the prediction in a simpler form:

Please do note though what is the prediction. Not that there’s going to be a wiping out of employment opportunities, nor that the economy of Seattle is going to become a howling wasteland. Rather, that less human labor will be employed at $15 an hour than would have been employed if the minimum wage had not risen to that amount.

That is a prediction about what will happen with the full-wage rise. Today's paper is a study of what has happened with the intermediate rise.

So it seems that I was right. The rise in the minimum wage is reducing the amount of employment compared to what would happen without the minimum wage rise. This is going to come as news to those acolytes of Nick Hanauer, but then there is a reason why fellow Forbes contributor Adam Ozimek calls Hanauer America's worst minimum wage pundit.


*The original report initially stated "Hours worked among low-wage Seattle workers have lagged behind regional trends, by roughly four hours per week, on average" but was later edited to say the average was per quarter, not per week. The text has been changed accordingly.



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[The Derp]

As I said Liberals will look at Seattle one way in Conservatives will look at it another the truth can be found in economics 101 there is no free lunch when you raise cost imports you raise prices so no net benefit free lunch is possible.

NO! There is only one way to look at Seattle, and that's within the facts like the unemployment rate. You can't look at the unemployment rate different ways. There is only the rate. Since Seattle's MW hike, the rate has declined, which would mean all the crowing from the right-wing about MW wage hikes is a load of bullshit.

Do you accept that Seattle's unemployment rate is lower now than before the MW hike, yes or no?

 

[The Derp]

As I Predicted, Seattle's Minimum Wage Rise Is Reducing Employment

LOL! Fucking hilarious that you use a link from February 2016, and not the most recent jobs data. You did that because you are a sophist. You make deliberately false or misleading arguments, and omit information that undermines your point. How do I know it's from February 2016? Because another Conservative on this thread tried to squeak this bullshit in. So I'm wondering why you left the date out of your post when you copied-and-pasted that trash? Did you do that because you knew it was outdated and thought you could slip it by? Because you knew the most recent employment information contradicted you but you have an ego to preserve?

 

[The Derp]

<Sophistry>

So this Conservative copied-and-pasted a Forbes article from February 2016 (it's June 2017, BTW) that supposedly claimed Seattle's MW increase killed jobs. However, if you look at the unemployment for Seattle from April 2016 to April 2017, you find unemployment declining by 0.7%. Which means the link the right-wing Russian troll posted was an attempt at sophistry. The data in your link ends at February 2016. But it's June 2017, so why did you omit all the employment data from March 2016 to May 2017?

The answer is obvious; you're a sophist.

 

[The Derp]

<Russian Active Measures>

I don't even think you fully read this thing you copied-and-pasted. Not that it matters, anyway. Seattle's MW hike has been in effect for a while now, covering the period in your copy-and-paste, plus another 16 months into the present.

Seattle's unemployment:

April, 2017: 2.6%
April, 2016: 3.3%
April, 2015: 3.2%

The minimum wage hike started April, 2015. Is unemployment lower or higher as of April 2017 than April 2015?

 

[danielpalos]

wrong of course if they were paid more prices would go up and they would be no better off.

WRONG! Seattle raised its MW and didn't see the corresponding increase in pricing you all predicted.

So we have a real-world, empirical evidence showing your prediction about rising prices is wrong. So we're back to the ongoing debate of Conservative fantasy vs. Reality. The fantasy is that raising wages leads to increased prices. The reality is that it doesn't. We know because we have empirical evidence from just one year ago.

Got it so in liberal idiot land the higher the wages the lower the prices!!

It worked for Henry Ford. Only lousy capitalists complain.