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Australian minimum wage $16.43 in US dollars
Topic Started: Feb 22 2013, 11:54 PM (1,065 Views)
Pat
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Unemployment rate 5.3 percent.
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Brewster
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Thanks, Pat. Someone should tell the Republicans.

Typical Twaddle
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tomdrobin
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Another example that an economy and society functions better when everyone participates and benefits. This survival of the fattest, economic darwinism model only results in stagnation, with a few fat cats setting on huge sums of money while everyone else grovels for crumbs. We should have learned the lessons of the great depression and the prosperity of the progressive era, but somehow driven by near sighted greed we lost our way. Time for a new, New Deal.
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Neutral
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This isn't Australia to start with, second higher minimum wages will decrease jobs for the young and unqualified.
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tomdrobin
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Quote:
 
Raising the minimum wage
Trickle-up economics


The president proposes a hefty increase in the minimum wage
Feb 16th 2013

BARACK OBAMA has long made income inequality a central theme of his second-term agenda. He has already tackled inequality from the top by preserving tax cuts for everyone but the rich. In his address to Congress on February 12th, he dealt with it from below, proposing to raise the federal minimum wage by 24%, benefiting, so the White House claimed, 15m low-wage workers.

America’s minimum wage has long been low by international standards, equalling just 38% of the median wage in 2011, close to the lowest in the OECD (see chart). Congress changes it only occasionally, and in the interim inflation eats away its value. The wage was last raised, to $7.25 per hour, in 2009. Since then its real value has slipped back to where it was in 1998. Twenty states now have minimum wages above the federal rate, compared to 15 in 2010, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group.

Mr Obama’s proposal would boost the nominal wage to $9 per hour by 2015, restoring it, in real terms, to its 1979 level, though relative to median wages it would still be lower than in many other rich countries. Thereafter, it would be indexed to inflation. He would also raise the minimum wage for workers who receive tips for the first time in over 20 years.

The proposal drew the predicted response: labour and liberal groups said it would reduce poverty and raise the spending power of the poorest workers, while businesses and Republicans (whose co-operation is needed if the proposal is to become law) said it would cost low-skilled workers jobs.

The economic consequences are hard to predict. Economists historically frowned on minimum wages as distortionary price fixing that reduced demand for workers affected by the wage. But that assumption has come under fire from a growing body of research. The introduction of Britain’s minimum wage in 1999 had no notable impact on jobs, for example. In America, the White House approvingly cites research by Arindrajit Dube, William Lester and Michael Reich that compared counties where the minimum wage rate rose to neighbouring counties in states where it didn’t and found no negative effect on employment. The theory is that higher wages reduce costly turnover, reducing the incentive to lay workers off.

Some minimum-wage proponents go even further, arguing that a higher minimum boosts jobs by shifting income towards people who consume more of what they earn. The EPI, for example, last year claimed a minimum wage of $9.80 per hour would create 100,000 jobs.

But David Neumark and William Wascher, who have long studied, and been critical, of the minimum wage, maintain the evidence bears out basic economic intuition: a higher minimum wage costs some low-skilled workers their jobs while helping those who keep them. Mr Neumark is particularly dismissive of the notion that a higher minimum wage can boost the economy, and indeed that is not a claim the White House makes.

For Mr Obama, that may not matter. His speech contained many more effective means to boost growth and incomes of the poor, from increased infrastructure to early childhood education. Unlike the minimum wage, though, they cost the government money that it doesn’t have.


http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21571894-president-proposes-hefty-increase-minimum-wage-trickle-up-economics

Minimum wage employers do so because they can get people who are desperate to work for it, and it benefits their bottom line. Many would work people for $2 an hour if they could get away with it. Meanwhile their employees make so little they qualify for entitlement programs like food stamps and medicaid. Why in the hell should taxpayers be subsidizing their payroll! During periods of high employment many of these companies like McDonalds have paid more than the minimum wage when they had to, and didn't go broke or lay off people in the process. A higher minimum was aside from being fair, puts more money in the hands of people who will use it to pay rent and buy groceries etc. priming the demand side of the economy which is what we need. GOP backward thinking seems to be only about preserving the incomes and profits of those who are doing well, and making paupers out of the rest.
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Brewster
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I presume the last person to learn anything from all this will be Neut.
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Neutral
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I presume the snot is still on the window.
You lied again too Noclue, you said I was on permanent block. How many times is this now? lol
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Pat
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tomdrobin
Feb 23 2013, 12:28 AM
Another example that an economy and society functions better when everyone participates and benefits. This survival of the fattest, economic darwinism model only results in stagnation, with a few fat cats setting on huge sums of money while everyone else grovels for crumbs. We should have learned the lessons of the great depression and the prosperity of the progressive era, but somehow driven by near sighted greed we lost our way. Time for a new, New Deal.
It's really quite simple guys, high productivity, add a sprinkling of capitalism-supply and demand, pour in a gallon of workers, mix it all up and have an expanding business community, jobs and more jobs, and the synergistic affect of the formula. It is simply a matter of adjusting values to output. There is nothing conservative or liberal about this, just stupidity by those who in past centuries still believed the world was flat. And I'm not throwing theory out here, I'm using a modern western nation as an example. Keep your head in the sand and wallow in poverty is the other option.
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Neutral
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Wow, just raising the minimum wage will solve all our problems! Why not raise it to $50 per hour.
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colo_crawdad
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Feb 23 2013, 12:31 AM
This isn't Australia to start with, second higher minimum wages will decrease jobs for the young and unqualified.
That is what the Republican talking points that were linked earlier said. :smile:
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