Comment Re:What's more obvious to me ... (Score 1) 295
What field?
What field?
You may have not seen this because it was posted below, but wind EROEI is 20.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014810900055X
Wages account for about 70% of employers labor costs
What percent of total costs is labor though? I was always under the assumption that for a company like McDonald's, labor was a small percentage of the cost to produce a burger. I seem to recall someone doing the math and figuring a burger would cost something like 10 cents more, and that would cover raising wages from 7 something to 15 per hour.
What's going to happen is....
No need to make stuff up. Check out any city that has already raised the wage. Or Obama's federal worker raise. Or other countries like Australia where the minimum wage is 17 dollars per hour.
Really. Stop speculating and take a look at the actual effects. Raising the minimum wage to a sensible amount, tied to inflation, so that a family with two full time workers can be out of poverty and off the government dole, is a good thing for the economy.
The government's "basket of goods" used to calculate inflation is blatantly false and misleading, as are its unemployment numbers
I'm just curious since you belief this above statement. Do you think the Government recently changed how they report jobs numbers, or do you realize that these numbers have been reported this way since at least the Reagan Presidency?
I thought people earning the minimum wage were about 5% of the workforce? http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2013.pdf
The progressives in the US have succeeded in turning the US into a European country
I don't think you understand just how far right (conservative) we are compared to European countries. We are by far the most conservative western first world nation.
And I'm not sure why anyone is speculating about what will happen if we raise the wage floor in this country. Cities in the US have already done it. We have the data, and last time I looked, it contained no evidence of negative outcomes.
So they will have to raise prices
Source? I have yet to see that happen. More likely, a place like Walmart will just net profit 99 Billion this year instead of 100 Billion.
I thought it was widely known that someone already worked out what this meant for a large company like McDonalds. And the result was doubling or tripling worker pay would only add pennies to the product cost, assuming McDonalds even chose to pass the cost on to the customer, rather than just making a smaller amount of net profit.
When I was 15 or 14 I worked at a McDonalds. I'm trying to remember how many hamburgers I made in a lunch service. It was in the hundreds for sure. Most are meals. 5 bucks for a meal, times say....200 meals I made during one lunch service. McD grossed 1000 dollars. Now how much does it really matter if I'm making 7.25 an hour or 15.00 for that lunch hour when I just made 1000 dollars worth of food?
Two important things to consider:
1. It will increase prices of products as well, so at the end of the day it's just a cycle where nothing really happens.
2. Do you actually think the same amount of employees will be employed if companies are mandated to pay them more? Many of them will lose jobs.
Minimum wage hikes tend to hurt two parties the most:
1. Small businesses, who are typically operating on rather small margins anyway. Unlike larger businesses, they can't easily move to places with lower minimum wage or offshore jobs.
2. Middle class, because they suffer the increase in costs incurred by minimum wage hikes, but don't benefit at all from it because they're already above the minimum wage.
Minimum wage increases try to tackle a real problem, but do nothing to actually solve it. Minimum wage should be adjusted in accordance with inflation and nothing else.
Isn't it widely known that doubling or tripling, say, McDonalds workers' pay, would mean that burgers cost something tiny like ten cents more? We don't really have to speculate though, do we? Look at the cities that have already raised the min. wage. They are just fine. and many of them reported an increase in the available jobs / decrease in unemployment. Whether that is correlation or causation I don't know.
But as far as I know, raising the minimum wage to a reasonable rate that allows a two member household to get out of poverty and off the State's welfare, has never resulted in an increase in unemployment, nor a noticeable cost to the middle class.
I don't know your politics, but it has never made sense to me why some conservatives feel that a higher minimum wage is a bad thing. If as a society we agree that letting someone starve to death is unacceptable, we have to accept the notion of food stamps/temporary assistance from the public in an emergency. And if we accept that, then a full time job should not qualify as a state of emergency for a family.....
I think there is this naive 1950's view that "Timmy mowing the lawns this Summer" is what a typical minimum wage job is like, but that isn't true. Only 50.4% of minimum wage workers are younger than 24.
50.4% are ages 16 to 24; 24% are teenagers (ages 16 to 19).
Mostly (77%) white; nearly half are white women.
Largely part-time workers (64% of the total).
Economists continue to debate the extent to which minimum-wage laws reduce poverty, income inequality and/or overall employment. What’s clear, though, is that after a three-step increase in 2007-09, today’s minimum wage buys more than it did recently, but its real purchasing power is about where it was in the early 1980s — and below its late-1960s peak.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/08/who-makes-minimum-wage/
You see causation, I just see correlation.
We've slowly moved into a global market over the last 50 years. That has meant lots of things: 'race to the bottom' in terms of wages, benefits, etc.. for practically all companies. Generous retirement packages didn't disappear because of wage hikes. Businesses, in general, have also become quarterly profit motivated. Everyone cuts costs as deeply as possible.
But all that aside, one of the largest issues that I think has cut out 'bag boys', and other service oriented jobs that used to make our experiences at stores better, is the conglomeration and near monopolies that the huge chains have become.
When you had a diversity of small businesses providing goods and services, those small businesses were competing with each other for customers. And that meant good customer service, like bag boy that would carry your groceries out for you.
After all those small businesses get run out of business by a Walmart, or bought up by a chain, that competition disappears. Walmart has no pressure to add service jobs to make your experience at the store better. And when racing to the bottom on a global scale, even less incentive.
I don't see how it would be difficult to argue to Fox News viewers that drug legalization is a conservative opinion. Cite William F. Buckley. Less 'big government nanny-state nonsense' telling you what you can and cannot do. And state's rights!
Except those are logical conclusions based on a framework rooted in reality. All bets are off when you happen to give equal weight to a faith-based religious framework when deciding stuff about the world. Which, according to self-reporting on the matter, is 100% of all Repulican House members. (I'm not sure if 100% of the Senate Republicans would also state that a faith based framework is used in their decision making methods or not, but if I had to bet, I'd guess 100% just like the House).
Another assumption it makes is that both parties are frozen in time. In fact, both parties shift left and right depending on what they think the voters want. After the 2008 elections everyone realized the Democrats under Pelosi and Obama were too far left and the balance shifted to the Republicans. Now the Democrats have moderated a bit; meanwhile the Republicans are marginalizing the Tea Party fringe element and trying to claim more of the center.
I'm sorry. That is not at all what happened. Republicans won a lot of state and governor positions in 2008. That allowed them to re-define (gerrymander) the voting districts because of the 2010 census. That gerrymandering is primary reason why, when polled, the US appears to lean far further left than the current congress.
Take a look at North Carolina for example. Over 50% of people voted democrat, yet their state congress ended up being something like 3/4 republican. There are a ton of examples like that.
You didn't address the AC's statements at all though: that certain select areas of the country have become basically abortion free zones (there have been several 60 minutes type news documentaries on Texas, for instance). Some percent of people with the means to travel out of those areas will still get safe abortions in a clinic or a hospital. But some percent who can't or won't travel long distances have been turning to 'back alley' type abortions, like morning after pills from Mexico.
I have no idea where your numbers come from or how they define abortion, but if you are implying that despite the newer draconian rules making abortion harder to get, that the abortions (safe and unsafe) are still taking place, you are correct.
That should be the most compelling point: you can outlaw abortion, but it is still going to happen. Would we rather have it happen safely or unsafely?
While it's a common theme in anti-drug control rhetoric to blame racism for drug bans, I think the race/drug tie-in is possibly something that happened later and not a prime mover for the origin of drug controls.
There may have been alternative motives, but the main ones expressed by the creators of the Act you reference were very explicit:
The drafters played on fears of “drug-crazed, sex-mad negroes” and made references to Negroes under the influence of drugs murdering whites, degenerate Mexicans smoking marijuana, and “Chinamen” seducing white women with drugs.[16][17] Dr. Hamilton Wright, testified at a hearing for the Harrison Act. Wright alleged that drugs made blacks uncontrollable, gave them superhuman powers and caused them to rebel against white authority. Dr. Christopher Koch of the State Pharmacy Board of Pennsylvania testified that "Most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain".[4]
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Narcotics_Tax_Act
While I'm proud of my Senator (Wyden) and Paul for attempting to shine a spotlight on the "USA Freedom Act", they accomplished very little. A symbolic gesture for the Congressional records at most. They weren't even filibustering the actual Act. They basically just held up the Senate for 10 hours knowing full well that nothing concrete was being accomplished.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
