Posted on 01/19/2019 6:57:46 AM PST by lowbridge
On Jan. 1, the new minimum wage, set at $15 an hour, went into effect in New York City, and most companies employing more than 10 people have to pay it. The increase, considered a crucial step in the fight against poverty, is the result of a hard-fought grass-roots organizing effort begun seven years ago and championed as a great victory by liberal politicians, even those who were initially not liberal enough to embrace it. But how much will the new standard do to alleviate some of the most punishing aspects of the city’s affordability crisis?
Last year, San Francisco and Seattle enacted a $15 minimum wage. Though both cities are also fantastically expensive, it is too soon to to draw any comparison to New York, which presents its own challenges. (What we do know from a study examining the experiment in Seattle is that as wages increased on the path to $15 an hour, experienced workers benefited most from higher pay at the expense of reduced opportunities for workers with less experience.)
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
For the answer google "price elasticity of demand." Ultimately it works for wages too. They should have journalism students take Econ 101.
Your ignorance is astounding. Have you ever owned or run a business? Do you really believe that any private sector business would hire more people than it needs? Increasing overhead costs with a mandatory wage hike will force businesses to reduce staff, hours of operation, delay business expansion, etc.
Artificial government mandated wage increases is a liberal substitute for the marketplace. We have a surplus of labor, otherwise wages would be going up, not down or stagnating. Since1969, real wages have stagnated or declined, especially for unskilled labor. Yet we continue to bring in 1.1 million legal permanent immigrants a year, mostly unskilled, along with millions of guest workers on temporary work permits. And there are over 20 million illegal aliens in the country.
The liberals, RINOs, and their corporate paymasters don’t want to reduce legal immigration or stop the supply of illegal aliens. In fact they support a blanket amnesty for all of the illegal aliens. If we shut off the job magnet and reduce legal immigration, there would be no need for an increase in the minimum wage. The surplus of labor would decline and wages would go up.
Immigrants, legal and illegal, use the welfare system to a substantially higher degree than the native-born. Fewer immigrants would reduce welfare costs, along with healthcare, education, and incarceration costs.
A lot of people worked their way up to $15/hr.
Maybe not skilled labor but semi-skilled.
Then along comes these knuckle heads with no experience at anything and getting played the same.
And at $33 an hour, it will raise prices to the point that won’t be enough...along with really screwing us retired folks on fixed incomes....
just damn ... last time i ate there was as a preteen back in the '50s ... RIP Durgin Park
Make it $50/hour and we all can be rich!
Ginia Bellafante is lucky that there’s a NYT that would actually pay her for this drivel.
It is very, very important that we have this argument for the 7396th time.
This higher minimum wage will raise the ex-employees wage to $15/hour but with one small problem.
Notice I said "ex-employees" because they won't have jobs anymore when that higher wage forces businesses to lay off people or put them on part-time.
The alternative, of course, is to go out of business completely.
Government mandated price controls and wage levels always have the opposite effect from what the liberals think it will have.
Instead of solving the poverty problem, their ideas will just create more poor people who can't find work.
Competition determines wage levels, not some government bureaucrat.
I wonder if theyre paying her 33 dollars an hour.
$33 why stop there? Why not $444? Or $5555?
This is insane! Higher minimum wage only insures higher prices. Of course,when the gov’t. figures COLA for S.S. recipients, they won’t necessarily count this as inflation, so we would be automatically royally screwed. Instead, why not LOWER minimum wage as well as other wages. Then, when you manage to scrape a couple bucks together...at least it’s worth a little something. If minimum wage goes up, it will only make money worth less, & then if you are really on a fixed income you’ll have a very big problem.
>Does that mean that those above $15 also get an equal raise? It is >only fair.
Sounds fair.
I remember making less than 3 bucks/hour in college. I made due, because these minimum wage jobs were not aimed at maintaining a household. They were jobs populated by students, or those wanting to make a bit of extra money. Now these same jobs have become a career.
There should be absolutely no minimum wage laws. If a company wants to pay me five dollars per hour to sleep on a cot through the night and only react if an alarm goes off it could be a good way for me to make $40 for sleeping and provide extra security for the company. Why should the government get involved.
Back in the 1970s, Martin Theatres paid me, an usher, $4 per shift (averaged three hours) instead of an hourly wage. Then government bureaucrats jumped on them and it changed but there were less teens employed at the Green Hills Theatre in Nashville. $4 per shift wasn’t bad because we had fringe benefits: all the popcorn we could eat, all the soft drinks we could drink (as long as we did not use their cups or their popcorn boxes), and we cold flirt with the box office girl or the concession stand girls. Why should the government get involved?
Maybe healthy food will be cheaper than fast food? Nah...who am I kidding.
The left: Zero empathy for the poor, minorities and the elderly, which are the most affected by this idiotic policy.
A minimum wage is NOT a living wage, it is a starting wage or a supplemental wage.
The increase will cut the legs for employment of the inexperienced, the young, ose that want to get started ina. New job with no experience.
It will also remove opportunities for employment for the elderly as supplemental income.
POVERTY will increase.
“My guess is only illegals make less than $15/hr in the Big Apple. So let NYC do it’s NYC thing.”
I wonder how much does the hotels pay their housecleaning staffs?
I had a great uncle who went to work for a hardware distributor at the age of 17 as a stock picker in the warehouse.
He retired from that same company at age 65 as the company President.
No college, just a highschool education.
I remember him talking about making the princely sum of $40/month when he got married.
I’m glad he can’t see what the world has become.
It is really stupid to apply free market principles to a contrived, manipulated, corrupt and legal/illegal labor market.
why stop at 33?
NYT is guilty of false consciousness, they are standing in the way of progress.
Anyone who refuses to let our economy be run by magic pixie dust so that everyone can get lots of free stuff is just pure evil
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