Quote :

"Is the multiplier too high? I think not. The housekeepers CAN move up if they take night classes at Wake Tech to gain a new skill that would land them a better job."

The multiplier is too high as a social and macroeconomic statement.

Too large of a workforce that produces little value added is unsustainable, and will bring the downfall of our society. Yes, they should be taking classes. What's preventing that? That's the problem.

Then on the other side of the equation, depreciation tax law fucks innovators and people who invest in long-term replacements for our inefficient uses of labor. At the same time, demand is weak, and even when we have the demand, profits don't turn into investment.

It's too easy to solve problems by throwing cheap labor at it - mainly due to globalization. On the other hand, actual innovation has a huge amount of knockoff effects that improve welfare overall. Cheap labor is a very big problem in the world today.

1/30/2014 12:14:00 PM

min wage is lower now than it was from 1950 to 1980s. It wasn't until the madness of trickle down economics, and the growth of the financial sector business (manipulating numbers to make money vs. creating actual products and value), that it started to drop again.

This may not have necessarily been a malicious move by corporations, but pushing for a higher minimum wage, whatever the mechanism, isn't going to turn our society into some weird socialist nightmare. It will, at worse, take us back to the good ol' days (as the Republicans call it).

It's funny back then, the minimum wage would have been viewed as more of a true living wage for hard working americans trying to earn the American dream. Now, it's viewed as degenerate poor people, probably black and hispanic, wanting to suck at the government teat, paid for by hard-working business owners.



But, that being said, in the absence of "real" reform for our problems with income inequality (expanded EITC, or basic income type programs), requiring companies to pay their workers from their own profits instead of relying on public assistance to fill the gap for their workers isn't a bad idea.

1/30/2014 1:12:41 PM

Quote :

"This may not have necessarily been a malicious move by corporations, but pushing for a higher minimum wage, whatever the mechanism, isn't going to turn our society into some weird socialist nightmare. It will, at worse, take us back to the good ol' days (as the Republicans call it)."

The concern is unemployment. Not a socialism strawman.

1/30/2014 2:30:36 PM