The Dirty Little Truth About the Minimum Wage

[Boss]

He compares CENSUS Data from 1930 to the actual unemployment data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Mid-1930's...

No, I didn't compare anything. You cannot compare something that doesn't yet exist. I presented the data we had available at the time, the US Census. There is no "methodology difference" to explain the dramatic swing in unemployment of blacks after passage of the MW. The numbers speak for themselves.

In 1930, the unemployment for blacks was lower than unemployment for whites. That's a fact and you've not refuted that fact.... so stop demagoguing and acting like you have. You're trying to sound like some slick criminal defense lawyer, which you ain't!

At the height of the depression, while unemployment among whites was up around 24%, it was 50% or more for blacks. But you want to blow this off as some difference in methodology... or the census got it wrong because they weren't very accurate... or.. or.. or something to explain away and apologize for abhorrently racist policy.

This is typical for your lily-white, guilty liberal ass. It's what you do. It gives you the chance to type deplorable terminology like "darkies" and eventually, you'll feel embolden enough to toss around the n-word. Go ahead and let your racism spew forth you damn bigot... you know you want to.

 

[Boss]

Go back and read the chart I posted in post #37. Then have someone who understands math explain it to you.

All your chart shows is the unemployment rate. It doesn't show the difference between black and white unemployment. Black unemployment was lower than white unemployment in 1930, by 1934 it was over 50%. It has never since been lower than white unemployment.

 

[JoeB131]

No, I didn't compare anything. You cannot compare something that doesn't yet exist. I presented the data we had available at the time, the US Census. There is no "methodology difference" to explain the dramatic swing in unemployment of blacks after passage of the MW. The numbers speak for themselves.

Different bureaus
Different methodolgies - the DOL wouldn't have started collecting data if what hte Census Bureau did every ten years was "good enough"
Different time periods with severely changed economic circumstances...

But you think this is a good measure to make a point.

In 1930, the unemployment for blacks was lower than unemployment for whites. That's a fact and you've not refuted that fact.... so stop demagoguing and acting like you have. You're trying to sound like some slick criminal defense lawyer, which you ain't!

Not really. In 1930, they didn't have an accurate method of gaguing WHAT unemployment was, and the Census Bureau data wasn't even about counting employment.

At the height of the depression, while unemployment among whites was up around 24%, it was 50% or more for blacks. But you want to blow this off as some difference in methodology... or the census got it wrong because they weren't very accurate... or.. or.. or something to explain away and apologize for abhorrently racist policy.

Um, yeah, here was the thing. You leave out all the other economic factors- like how the Dust bowl wrecked the national agricultural economy, or how mechanization had replaced the need for physical labor. Or how the population was in the process of shifting. The 1930's is also when a lot of blacks got away from the "Paradise" of the Jim Crow South you seem to claim they were living in and migrated to major cities where the industrial jobs that paid well were. it seems to me that if the South were so wonderful, people wouldn't have been trying to get the fuck away from it.

This is typical for your lily-white, guilty liberal ass. It's what you do. It gives you the chance to type deplorable terminology like "darkies" and eventually, you'll feel embolden enough to toss around the n-word. Go ahead and let your racism spew forth you damn bigot... you know you want to.

Guy here's the thing. The "Darkies" know what's what. They know who has tried to help them and who has tried to screw them... which is why they vote 90%+ Democrat.

 

[Boss]

I'm curious, if there is no minimum wage, what would the 'market' minimum wage be? Is there anyone actually arguing for doing away with it entirely?

Why shouldn't free market forces determine this on their own? Employment is a voluntary cooperative. People are not forced to accept employment and employers cannot force you to work for them.

I have a story I share sometimes about my daughter when she was 16. She worked for a friend of mine, actually he was our neighbor across the street. She made minimum wage at his store as a cashier, full time one summer.

Now, he and his wife had planned to go on a cruise. They were going to be gone for two weeks and needed someone to house-sit, keep their pets fed, and make sure no one messed with their property. He offered the job to my daughter and told her he would pay her $5 a day. She gladly accepted because they had a pool and a very nice home theater system. She was excited to have the opportunity and it didn't really matter about the money, she would have probably done it for free.

Turns out, his lawyer told him that he couldn't do this because she was an employee of his business and as such, she was entitled to minimum wage and overtime pay for such a thing. Now... why couldn't my daughter have the freedom and liberty to negotiate her own deal with him? Why did the federal government interfere with what two parties were mutually in agreement to?

Of course, in our situation, we got around the law... he hired ME as "contract labor" to watch his home and I delegated the task to my daughter. But still... the example is valid... why does the government have to be involved in private transactions between two consenting parties?

 

[JoeB131]

Why shouldn't free market forces determine this on their own? Employment is a voluntary cooperative. People are not forced to accept employment and employers cannot force you to work for them.

Again, I don't worship the market the way you do. The Market is a shit sandwich for most of us.

I have a story I share sometimes about my daughter when she was 16. She worked for a friend of mine, actually he was our neighbor across the street. She made minimum wage at his store as a cashier, full time one summer.

Now, he and his wife had planned to go on a cruise. They were going to be gone for two weeks and needed someone to house-sit, keep their pets fed, and make sure no one messed with their property. He offered the job to my daughter and told her he would pay her $5 a day. She gladly accepted because they had a pool and a very nice home theater system. She was excited to have the opportunity and it didn't really matter about the money, she would have probably done it for free.

Turns out, his lawyer told him that he couldn't do this because she was an employee of his business and as such, she was entitled to minimum wage and overtime pay for such a thing. Now... why couldn't my daughter have the freedom and liberty to negotiate her own deal with him? Why did the federal government interfere with what two parties were mutually in agreement to?

Of course, in our situation, we got around the law... he hired ME as "contract labor" to watch his home and I delegated the task to my daughter. But still... the example is valid... why does the government have to be involved in private transactions between two consenting parties?

The problem with that example is that your daughter was not going to be doing "house sitting" as a career. when the family came back,she would be going back to living with you.

The question is, does it make sense to have people trying to make ends meet on minimum wage or sub-minimum wage, only to turn to the government when they are too old to live with their parents anymore.

You see, you come on here and whine every day about h ow the mean old government is charging you too much in taxes and regulating too much and so on... but the reality is, you guys have created this.

If the government does more for me if I vote for a certain party once every two to four years than the guy who I slave away for 40 hours a week, where do you think my loyalties are going to lie?

I mean, you can try to guilt poor people all day, but that only gets you so far.

This is why I've concluded you "Conservatives" are incredibly stupid.

 

[Searcher44]

Most of you, like myself, have learned about the Great Depression through the prism of public education. We were taught that FDR came into office, implemented his New Deal policies and saved the day... Right? Or, at least that's the way it is portrayed. The actual reality is quite different. As we get older and go to college, we are able to read different accounts of what happened and we learn that many of his policies actually prolonged the Great Depression. In fact, many argue that it might not have ever been a "Great" depression if not for some of the things he did early on. Some have even speculated that if not for WWII, we may have never pulled ourselves out of the death spiral we were in. All of this stuff is highly debatable but I want to focus on just one policy that FDR enacted which is still with us today, and is still being paraded around by Progressives as something great and wonderful... The Federal Minimum Wage mandate.

It is interesting to note what FDR said on the day he signed this legislation into law. He said: "no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." That was June 16, 1933. Some 83 years later, we have Progressive politicians out there screaming the same line. So, why has this policy not effectively worked to produce what was promised 83 years ago? The Progressives will say that we just haven't raised it enough. So we ask them, how much do you think we need to raise it? They tell us and we raise it. A few years go by and we're once again having the debate and the Progressives are again claiming we didn't raise it enough. For 83 years, we've chased the carrot on the stick in hopes of attaining this elusive "living wage" that will finally solve all our problems. It never does.

In her book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, author Amity Shlaes makes a revealing and scathing discovery behind the idea of the minimum wage. This is the basis of what I want to talk about here today. While we have always been taught to believe the minimum wage was FDR's attempt to force companies to pay employees a decent wage, that's not the whole truth. Yes, there were some companies exploiting the conditions at the time to profit on the backs of desperate people. We've all watched Grapes of Wrath, we all know the horror stories... Progressives are good at emoting the worst case scenarios. But there were also people like Henry Ford who paid his employees well above the national average because he wanted them to be able to afford his product.

So what is the dirty little secret the Progressives fail to mention? Well, you have to remember, after the stock market crashed in 1929, millions and millions of people were laid off. Unemployment skyrocketed across the nation. This literally affected just about every family in the country. And if you weren't a laborer who earned a paycheck, you were probably a farmer and your plight was even worse. Because of the protectionist tariffs applied by Hoover, a tariff war had devastated agriculture and then came the droughts. So everyone was in bad shape across the board. Also keep in mind, we were not a very homogeneous society back then, there was a great deal of blatant racism and discrimination. Because of the lean financial situation, a lot of capitalists were looking for the cheapest way to provide labor and they found the black man was not afraid to work long hours for meager wages. They seemed to be much more productive for the low wages they demanded... more bang for the buck.

Now here is a trivia question for you... When was the last time black unemployment was lower than white unemployment in the US? Progressives are good at feeding you the propaganda that blacks have always had historically higher unemployment than whites, but that's not true. Shlaes points out, according to the 1930 census data, black unemployment was lower than white unemployment. The implementation of the Federal Minimum Wage was quite simply a measure to improve employment for whites at the expense of blacks. The year following the implementation of this law, we find black unemployment was double that of whites. Companies were not forced to hire black people, there were no laws protecting them from discrimination at the time. So when faced with the prospect of either hiring a black man or white man at the same mandated wage, they typically went with the white man. The Minimum Wage, so proudly promoted by Progressives to this day, was an abhorrently racist policy designed to improve employment opportunity for whites over blacks and minorities.

And just as in days past, the insistence on increasing the minimum wage is doing nothing for the unskilled worker, the low-education minorities, the working poor. When a capitalist is faced with having to hire people at a higher rate, they are going to naturally look at the more-skilled, higher-educated prospects first. And the first people to get the ax when they have to cut jobs are those who are lacking in those areas. So even though we now have all kinds of laws against discrimination based on race, the minimum wage continues to be a racist policy that ensures better job opportunity for skilled whites over lesser-skilled blacks and minorities. All the while, we are being pumped full of lies and propaganda from the Progressives.

Ok. so Roosevelt's plans didn't work. What happened to the Federal Reserve, who's power to control boom and bust through manipulation of the money supply was supposed to make these cycles impossible. That was the conservatives answer. It didn't work then and hasn't worked since. The Vietnamese have a 56 cent an hour minimum wage, their economy should be booming for the workers under you theory, yes?

 

[Boss]

Most of you, like myself, have learned about the Great Depression through the prism of public education. We were taught that FDR came into office, implemented his New Deal policies and saved the day... Right? Or, at least that's the way it is portrayed. The actual reality is quite different. As we get older and go to college, we are able to read different accounts of what happened and we learn that many of his policies actually prolonged the Great Depression. In fact, many argue that it might not have ever been a "Great" depression if not for some of the things he did early on. Some have even speculated that if not for WWII, we may have never pulled ourselves out of the death spiral we were in. All of this stuff is highly debatable but I want to focus on just one policy that FDR enacted which is still with us today, and is still being paraded around by Progressives as something great and wonderful... The Federal Minimum Wage mandate.

It is interesting to note what FDR said on the day he signed this legislation into law. He said: "no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." That was June 16, 1933. Some 83 years later, we have Progressive politicians out there screaming the same line. So, why has this policy not effectively worked to produce what was promised 83 years ago? The Progressives will say that we just haven't raised it enough. So we ask them, how much do you think we need to raise it? They tell us and we raise it. A few years go by and we're once again having the debate and the Progressives are again claiming we didn't raise it enough. For 83 years, we've chased the carrot on the stick in hopes of attaining this elusive "living wage" that will finally solve all our problems. It never does.

In her book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, author Amity Shlaes makes a revealing and scathing discovery behind the idea of the minimum wage. This is the basis of what I want to talk about here today. While we have always been taught to believe the minimum wage was FDR's attempt to force companies to pay employees a decent wage, that's not the whole truth. Yes, there were some companies exploiting the conditions at the time to profit on the backs of desperate people. We've all watched Grapes of Wrath, we all know the horror stories... Progressives are good at emoting the worst case scenarios. But there were also people like Henry Ford who paid his employees well above the national average because he wanted them to be able to afford his product.

So what is the dirty little secret the Progressives fail to mention? Well, you have to remember, after the stock market crashed in 1929, millions and millions of people were laid off. Unemployment skyrocketed across the nation. This literally affected just about every family in the country. And if you weren't a laborer who earned a paycheck, you were probably a farmer and your plight was even worse. Because of the protectionist tariffs applied by Hoover, a tariff war had devastated agriculture and then came the droughts. So everyone was in bad shape across the board. Also keep in mind, we were not a very homogeneous society back then, there was a great deal of blatant racism and discrimination. Because of the lean financial situation, a lot of capitalists were looking for the cheapest way to provide labor and they found the black man was not afraid to work long hours for meager wages. They seemed to be much more productive for the low wages they demanded... more bang for the buck.

Now here is a trivia question for you... When was the last time black unemployment was lower than white unemployment in the US? Progressives are good at feeding you the propaganda that blacks have always had historically higher unemployment than whites, but that's not true. Shlaes points out, according to the 1930 census data, black unemployment was lower than white unemployment. The implementation of the Federal Minimum Wage was quite simply a measure to improve employment for whites at the expense of blacks. The year following the implementation of this law, we find black unemployment was double that of whites. Companies were not forced to hire black people, there were no laws protecting them from discrimination at the time. So when faced with the prospect of either hiring a black man or white man at the same mandated wage, they typically went with the white man. The Minimum Wage, so proudly promoted by Progressives to this day, was an abhorrently racist policy designed to improve employment opportunity for whites over blacks and minorities.

And just as in days past, the insistence on increasing the minimum wage is doing nothing for the unskilled worker, the low-education minorities, the working poor. When a capitalist is faced with having to hire people at a higher rate, they are going to naturally look at the more-skilled, higher-educated prospects first. And the first people to get the ax when they have to cut jobs are those who are lacking in those areas. So even though we now have all kinds of laws against discrimination based on race, the minimum wage continues to be a racist policy that ensures better job opportunity for skilled whites over lesser-skilled blacks and minorities. All the while, we are being pumped full of lies and propaganda from the Progressives.

Ok. so Roosevelt's plans didn't work. What happened to the Federal Reserve, who's power to control boom and bust through manipulation of the money supply was supposed to make these cycles impossible. That was the conservatives answer. It didn't work then and hasn't worked since. The Vietnamese have a 56 cent an hour minimum wage, their economy should be booming for the workers under you theory, yes?

Last I checked, we're not Vietnam. So I don't think it's fair to compare. I disagree with the Fed. Reserve manipulating the money supply. That's contrary to free market principles regardless of who came up with it. Removing our currency from the gold standard was one of the worst mistakes we ever made. Our currency has no value, it isn't backed by anything.

Back on topic... Individuals should have the right and freedom to negotiate their own rate of pay based on the job and their ability to do the job. Having an arbitrary set minimum wage acts as a baseline on labor costs across the board. Your ability as an individual to negotiate is replaced by a mandate or a formula based on that mandate. You may have a stellar resume and background which would command a higher rate of pay than others but you're confronted with a human resource director who points to the minimum wage and says... this is what you will start at. Your liberty has been taken away from you and you are no longer able to negotiate your rate of pay. This isn't true in all cases but it is in many, particularly in manufacturing jobs.

 

[Boss]

Why shouldn't free market forces determine this on their own? Employment is a voluntary cooperative. People are not forced to accept employment and employers cannot force you to work for them.

Again, I don't worship the market the way you do. The Market is a shit sandwich for most of us.

I have a story I share sometimes about my daughter when she was 16. She worked for a friend of mine, actually he was our neighbor across the street. She made minimum wage at his store as a cashier, full time one summer.

Now, he and his wife had planned to go on a cruise. They were going to be gone for two weeks and needed someone to house-sit, keep their pets fed, and make sure no one messed with their property. He offered the job to my daughter and told her he would pay her $5 a day. She gladly accepted because they had a pool and a very nice home theater system. She was excited to have the opportunity and it didn't really matter about the money, she would have probably done it for free.

Turns out, his lawyer told him that he couldn't do this because she was an employee of his business and as such, she was entitled to minimum wage and overtime pay for such a thing. Now... why couldn't my daughter have the freedom and liberty to negotiate her own deal with him? Why did the federal government interfere with what two parties were mutually in agreement to?

Of course, in our situation, we got around the law... he hired ME as "contract labor" to watch his home and I delegated the task to my daughter. But still... the example is valid... why does the government have to be involved in private transactions between two consenting parties?

The problem with that example is that your daughter was not going to be doing "house sitting" as a career. when the family came back,she would be going back to living with you.

The question is, does it make sense to have people trying to make ends meet on minimum wage or sub-minimum wage, only to turn to the government when they are too old to live with their parents anymore.

You see, you come on here and whine every day about h ow the mean old government is charging you too much in taxes and regulating too much and so on... but the reality is, you guys have created this.

If the government does more for me if I vote for a certain party once every two to four years than the guy who I slave away for 40 hours a week, where do you think my loyalties are going to lie?

I mean, you can try to guilt poor people all day, but that only gets you so far.

This is why I've concluded you "Conservatives" are incredibly stupid.

The problem with you is you're a racist who sees people as a skin color before anything and everything else. You can't help it, that's just who you are as a person.

The other thing you can't help is droning on and on, flooding the threads with your stupidity and then repeating the same things over and over, as if they weren't heard the first 50 times. I think that might be more annoying to me than your closeted racism and bigotry... but it's really close.

 

[DGS49]

There is no dispute among reputable economists about the Minimum Wage. Even Paul Krugman - before he became a flack for the Democrat Party - wrote that it should be abolished.

Any time a supervening power (i.e., government) imposes a price for ANYTHING that exceeds its economic value, the results are the same: (1) the consumers of that commodity use less of it, (2) the consumers seek alternatives, and (3) if the difference between the mandatory price and the economic value is great enough, a "black market" will be formed, where the commodity is exchanged "under the table."

Consider: If the price of an 8 ounce bag of potato chips was mandated by Government to be no less than $10, (a) people would eat fewer potato chips, (b) they would look for alternative salty snacks, and (c) people would begin making potato chips in their basements, and selling them out of the trunks of their cars.

If Government mandates a wage for basic, unskilled, inexperienced labor to, say $15, (i) employers of minimum wage workers will strive to minimize headcount and hours, (ii) they will look to things like automation, "Self-serve," and outsourcing to minimize headcount, and (iii) there will be a tidal wave of "under the table," cash-only employment, to skirt the MW law.

Furthermore, at $15/hr, the basic job market will change markedly, as moderately-qualified retired people and non-working spouses will come back into the job market, because it would simply be a more desirable option than not working. Thus, the jobs available for school and college kids and young adults with no work experience will dramatically dry up. "Summer jobs" for high school and college kids will be much more difficult to come by. Retired people are already being hired as lifeguards, as reported recently by NPR. Give them $15/hr, and who would hire a young person who will likely spend all her time fucking around on her cellphone?

It all comes back to FREEDOM. If I have work that needs done and can afford to pay $5/hr, and I find someone who is happy to do it for that wage, Where in the Constitution does Government get the right to say we can't do it?

NOWHERE!

 

[NYcarbineer]

The minimum wage peaked in 1968. You lose.

Huih???

The minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has been falling for 48 years.

All of your complaints about a higher minimum wage are being made in the context of what has actually been a falling minimum wage for almost half a century.

 

[NYcarbineer]

There is no dispute among reputable economists about the Minimum Wage. Even Paul Krugman - before he became a flack for the Democrat Party - wrote that it should be abolished.

Any time a supervening power (i.e., government) imposes a price for ANYTHING that exceeds its economic value, the results are the same: (1) the consumers of that commodity use less of it, (2) the consumers seek alternatives, and (3) if the difference between the mandatory price and the economic value is great enough, a "black market" will be formed, where the commodity is exchanged "under the table."

Consider: If the price of an 8 ounce bag of potato chips was mandated by Government to be no less than $10, (a) people would eat fewer potato chips, (b) they would look for alternative salty snacks, and (c) people would begin making potato chips in their basements, and selling them out of the trunks of their cars.

If Government mandates a wage for basic, unskilled, inexperienced labor to, say $15, (i) employers of minimum wage workers will strive to minimize headcount and hours, (ii) they will look to things like automation, "Self-serve," and outsourcing to minimize headcount, and (iii) there will be a tidal wave of "under the table," cash-only employment, to skirt the MW law.

Furthermore, at $15/hr, the basic job market will change markedly, as moderately-qualified retired people and non-working spouses will come back into the job market, because it would simply be a more desirable option than not working. Thus, the jobs available for school and college kids and young adults with no work experience will dramatically dry up. "Summer jobs" for high school and college kids will be much more difficult to come by. Retired people are already being hired as lifeguards, as reported recently by NPR. Give them $15/hr, and who would hire a young person who will likely spend all her time fucking around on her cellphone?

It all comes back to FREEDOM. If I have work that needs done and can afford to pay $5/hr, and I find someone who is happy to do it for that wage, Where in the Constitution does Government get the right to say we can't do it?

NOWHERE!

The minimum wage has been falling for 48 years. Where is all the benefit we're supposed to get from a lower minimum wage?

 

[Boss]

The minimum wage peaked in 1968. You lose.

Huih???

The minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has been falling for 48 years.

All of your complaints about a higher minimum wage are being made in the context of what has actually been a falling minimum wage for almost half a century.

Mindless rhetoric.

 

[amrchaos]

Wait

Are we talking about skilled workers or unskilled workers?

I think unskilled workers need to train for a valuable skill, not paid a wage equal to a low skilled worker. Even so.....

Could it be argued that minorities willing to take lesser pay was detrimental to the nations standard of living? So, even though the policy effected the rate of employment by race, that it was not actually implemented to do so?

This is kind of like calling every time a white cop shooting a black suspect a racist incident when it is possible (and most likely, since I find it odd that a psychopath will argue to himself that he can escape for unjustified shooting. ) that when other factors such as stress from being overworked, an unfamiliar situation, other could have led to the shooting.

In other words, because you see a policy that hurt minorities, the reason for that policy may exist for other reason not intending to hurt minorities.

Possible correlation/causation problem?

 

[IsaacNewton]

I like how the price of all those other commodities I mentioned and how they always go up and are absorbed by business and the economy are ignored by people against a minimum wage.

There will always be far more people looking for jobs than employers need so they'd be able to pay nearly nothing as desperate people do desperate things. Conservatives seem to think theory = practice.

It doesn't and never will.

 

[amrchaos]

There is no dispute among reputable economists about the Minimum Wage. Even Paul Krugman - before he became a flack for the Democrat Party - wrote that it should be abolished.

Any time a supervening power (i.e., government) imposes a price for ANYTHING that exceeds its economic value, the results are the same: (1) the consumers of that commodity use less of it, (2) the consumers seek alternatives, and (3) if the difference between the mandatory price and the economic value is great enough, a "black market" will be formed, where the commodity is exchanged "under the table."

Consider: If the price of an 8 ounce bag of potato chips was mandated by Government to be no less than $10, (a) people would eat fewer potato chips, (b) they would look for alternative salty snacks, and (c) people would begin making potato chips in their basements, and selling them out of the trunks of their cars.

If Government mandates a wage for basic, unskilled, inexperienced labor to, say $15, (i) employers of minimum wage workers will strive to minimize headcount and hours, (ii) they will look to things like automation, "Self-serve," and outsourcing to minimize headcount, and (iii) there will be a tidal wave of "under the table," cash-only employment, to skirt the MW law.

Furthermore, at $15/hr, the basic job market will change markedly, as moderately-qualified retired people and non-working spouses will come back into the job market, because it would simply be a more desirable option than not working. Thus, the jobs available for school and college kids and young adults with no work experience will dramatically dry up. "Summer jobs" for high school and college kids will be much more difficult to come by. Retired people are already being hired as lifeguards, as reported recently by NPR. Give them $15/hr, and who would hire a young person who will likely spend all her time fucking around on her cellphone?

It all comes back to FREEDOM. If I have work that needs done and can afford to pay $5/hr, and I find someone who is happy to do it for that wage, Where in the Constitution does Government get the right to say we can't do it?

NOWHERE!

The minimum wage has been falling for 48 years. Where is all the benefit we're supposed to get from a lower minimum wage?

Clarify this

The stated amount has been rising. So are you talking about the buying power of the minimum wage in terms of inflation?

 

[Boss]

Wait

Are we talking about skilled workers or unskilled workers?

I think unskilled workers need to train for a valuable skill, not paid a wage equal to a low skilled worker. Even so.....

Could it be argued that minorities willing to take lesser pay was detrimental to the nations standard of living? So, even though the policy effected the rate of employment by race, that it was not actually implemented to do so?

This is kind of like calling every time a white cop shooting a black suspect a racist incident when it is possible (and most likely, since I find it odd that a psychopath will argue to himself that he can escape for unjustified shooting. ) that when other factors such as stress from being overworked, an unfamiliar situation, other could have led to the shooting.

In other words, because you see a policy that hurt minorities, the reason for that policy may exist for other reason not intending to hurt minorities.

Possible correlation/causation problem?

I think you can't analyze too much in this regard because we could also look at segregation and say, was it a policy intended to disparage blacks? It doesn't matter what the intentions were.

We see the modern democrats and progressives parading the MW around like it's some kind of glorious tribute to their commitment to help the poor and downtrodden. It was anything BUT.

It was no accident that when the Titanic sank, the poor Irish who were in the cargo-class below, didn't survive and the rich elite upper-class got first dibs on the lifeboats. Whenever the depression hit and white Americans began losing their jobs left and right, they demanded something be done and if it had to come at the expense of blacks, they didn't really care.

 

[Wyatt earp]

Most of you, like myself, have learned about the Great Depression through the prism of public education. We were taught that FDR came into office, implemented his New Deal policies and saved the day... Right? Or, at least that's the way it is portrayed. The actual reality is quite different. As we get older and go to college, we are able to read different accounts of what happened and we learn that many of his policies actually prolonged the Great Depression.

I know you done heard that on Hate Radio, Cleetus.

The problem is, no professional or accredited Historian subscribes to that view.

But I'm sure you learned that in the college you went to right after they told you about the Talking Snake.

Joe quit fibbing they were doing it all over the world, to screw minority from underbidding for jobs


On The Historically Racist Motivations Behind Minimum Wage

The business-friendly National Center for Policy Analysis points out “the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, requiring ‘prevailing’ wages on federally assisted construction projects, was supported by the idea that it would keep contractors from using ‘cheap colored labor’ to underbid contractors using white labor.”

African-American economist Thomas Sowell with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution gives an uncomfortable historical primer behind minimum wage laws:


“In 1925, a minimum-wage law was passed in the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the intent and effect of pricing Japanese immigrants out of jobs in the lumbering industry.

A Harvard professor of that era referred approvingly to Australia’s minimum wage law as a means to “protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese” who were willing to work for less.

In South Africa during the era of apartheid, white labor unions urged that a minimum-wage law be applied to all races, to keep black workers from taking jobs away from white unionized workers by working for less than the union pay scale.”

In today’s South Africa, The New York Times reported on poor workers, many of them black, angry at government leaders enforcing labor laws the price them out of a job

 

[NYcarbineer]

There is no dispute among reputable economists about the Minimum Wage. Even Paul Krugman - before he became a flack for the Democrat Party - wrote that it should be abolished.

Any time a supervening power (i.e., government) imposes a price for ANYTHING that exceeds its economic value, the results are the same: (1) the consumers of that commodity use less of it, (2) the consumers seek alternatives, and (3) if the difference between the mandatory price and the economic value is great enough, a "black market" will be formed, where the commodity is exchanged "under the table."

Consider: If the price of an 8 ounce bag of potato chips was mandated by Government to be no less than $10, (a) people would eat fewer potato chips, (b) they would look for alternative salty snacks, and (c) people would begin making potato chips in their basements, and selling them out of the trunks of their cars.

If Government mandates a wage for basic, unskilled, inexperienced labor to, say $15, (i) employers of minimum wage workers will strive to minimize headcount and hours, (ii) they will look to things like automation, "Self-serve," and outsourcing to minimize headcount, and (iii) there will be a tidal wave of "under the table," cash-only employment, to skirt the MW law.

Furthermore, at $15/hr, the basic job market will change markedly, as moderately-qualified retired people and non-working spouses will come back into the job market, because it would simply be a more desirable option than not working. Thus, the jobs available for school and college kids and young adults with no work experience will dramatically dry up. "Summer jobs" for high school and college kids will be much more difficult to come by. Retired people are already being hired as lifeguards, as reported recently by NPR. Give them $15/hr, and who would hire a young person who will likely spend all her time fucking around on her cellphone?

It all comes back to FREEDOM. If I have work that needs done and can afford to pay $5/hr, and I find someone who is happy to do it for that wage, Where in the Constitution does Government get the right to say we can't do it?

NOWHERE!

The minimum wage has been falling for 48 years. Where is all the benefit we're supposed to get from a lower minimum wage?

Clarify this

The stated amount has been rising. So are you talking about the buying power of the minimum wage in terms of inflation?

Why would anyone talk about it any other way? Wages are money. Money's value is directly connected to its buying power.
There's no other sensible way to talk about it.

 

[JoeB131]

The problem with you is you're a racist who sees people as a skin color before anything and everything else. You can't help it, that's just who you are as a person.

The other thing you can't help is droning on and on, flooding the threads with your stupidity and then repeating the same things over and over, as if they weren't heard the first 50 times. I think that might be more annoying to me than your closeted racism and bigotry... but it's really close.

The thing I've noticed is that when I absolutely CRUSH you with logic, you start whining about me personally... which I always take as a sign I've won.

 

[dblack]

The core delusion of minimum wage is that it will force employers to pay their employees more for the same work. But it doesn't. It just says that they can't pay them less. They can, however, just not pay them at all.

The value of that work isn't set by decree. It's set by us, by you and me. By consumers. Our estimation of how valuable a burger is worth won't change because the boneheads in DC pass a law.