That seems like a good way to minimize the ill effects of minimum wage laws. I don't believe we have anything like that in my state. Peter

And that's what happens. If an employer decides that mopping sweat is worth $6/hr then that employer will happily hire someone at $5/hr but hire no one at $8/hr and leave the job undone. The person who is hurt here is the invisible person who would have been happily working for this employer if it was legal to do so.

No, I'm not stupid; jury's still out on you though. I didn't think it was a very complex thought experiment. See, there's this range of possible minimum wages from $0/hr which is no minimum wage to stupidly high numbers like $10,000/hr. I could have made the Stupidly High Number anywhere from $100/hr to $10^29 / hr. I settled on $10,000/hr because it has a pretty number of zeroes in it. At any rate, at the Stupidly High Number end of the range there are Obvious Problems. These Obvious Problems are that no one can legally work because they are prohibited by law from entering into an employment agreement at rates acceptable to both the worker and the employer. Everyone goes hungry.
Now, here's the part that you failed to grasp. As you move down from the Stupidly High Number you are forcing fewer and fewer people into the "Would Work, But Legally Can't" category. Easily most of the population is in the WWBLC category until you get below, say, $30/hr. Now not everyone is going hungry, but many still are.
The WWBLC category gets smaller and smaller the closer the minimum wage gets to $0/hr.
I assert that the people in that WWBLC category are harmed by minimum wage laws. They're unjustly made into criminals by taking work. It is difficult to see or quantify them at "normal" minimum wages. The sweat mopper job that didn't ever exist because it wasn't worth doing doesn't get added onto some list and counted like a job that moved to China is counted. You never say that Timmy lost his sweat mopper job because the job never existed. Timmy is just sitting on his ass wishing he could find someone to give him a job for his $5/hr skill. Or, more likely, rather than going hungry Timmy is working in the grey market and getting paid his $5 in cash under the table. Now Timmy's a criminal, but at least he's working.

I'm not suggesting that people go hungry.
I'm suggesting that people be allowed to work at a wage that is mutually beneficial to both the worker and the employer. Why do you think you should have a veto power over their employment decision?

Peter

Why wouldn't they? My first job (coincidentally around age 13) was picking potatoes for fifty cents per barrel. I made enough to buy an Intellivision cartridge with a weekend afternoon of work. It was probably about $3.00 per hour for me.
Day laborers with no skills besides a willingness to work, many not even able to speak English, are in the same boat today. They are below your base line for education. Rather than allow them to improve their position in life by legal but low paying work, which gains them access to better skills and education, you suggest that they should become criminals by working at a wage that they can earn or become a burden upon society. What kind of trade is that? What is society getting in that trade?

I see that I managed to wing you with my point in the case of the $10,000/hr minimum wage. You can see how that minimum wage eliminates legal jobs. My assertion is that to a lesser degree this job destroying characteristic is inherent in lesser minimum wages. Minimum wages don't help people with educations and skills who are above that wage point. They hurt the weakest, poorest, least capable members of our society.

As you rightly observe, it doesn't take a lot of education or skills to lift yourself above minimum wage. Most of us manage to do it while we're still teenagers. But if you made the minimum wage a higher living wage then getting that critical First Real Job just got a lot harder for a lot of young people.

Peter

I think you're unfairly moderated as Troll here, so I'll reply and have you bumped up to insightful in just a few moments... :)

Here's how I've always attempted to communicate this idea that you're sharing.
When you impose a minimum wage there are, almost by definition, jobs that are no longer worth hiring someone to do.
Is it worth $8/hr for a gym to hire a kid to wipe sweat off the equipment in the afternoons? Probably not. Wipe your own sweat.
Is it worth $8/hr for the mechanic to figure out why your BMW's heated cupholder isn't working? Probably so. The shop is going to bill $150/hr for the repair, so the mechanic has plenty of room between $8/hr and $150/hr to carve out a reasonable salary, while the owner still gets paid too.

Now, to run the "decent wage" and minimum wage ideas to their absurd extreme. If a $0 minimum wage is bad, and a $10 minimum wage is little better, why not make the minimum wage $10,000/hr! We'll All Be Rich! I'll have two new cars by lunchtime! Obviously, "We'll all be rich!" is the wrong answer. We'll all be criminals and working for whatever we're worth is the correct answer. If you insist on being law abiding, you'll be unemployed. No one on /. is worth $10K/hr (I'm sorry if this is a shock to some). Obviously, $10K/hr minimum is extreme, but the effects of raising the minimum wage to a "living wage" of $20/hr would be similar. Now everyone is getting paid at least $40K/year for their full time jobs. Great! But your Papa John's pizza is going to go up by a bit more than $0.15 to make it worth selling crappy pizzas.

You've just cut the bottom four rungs off of the economic ladder. It is no longer possible to go from sweeping the floors at the auto shop, to doing oil changes, to changing brakes, to being a highly skilled mechanic working on high end cars. The only job in that chain that is worth hiring an employee for is the last one. Everyone below that point gets the shaft and becomes a criminal.

The simple fact is that minimum wage laws hurt the very ones they are supposed to be helping, either by eliminating their jobs or by forcing them into "under the table" working arrangements where they can be paid what they are worth.

Peter

You're wearing a space suit so that you can operate in a ship that you have depressurized before combat begins. A breathable atmosphere in a combat spaceship would be a hazard.

After combat, you can re-pressurize your ship and resume floating around in your jumpsuit.

Peter

Then in another year you'll be going back in time to today to tell yourself to not go back 11 months, because it turns out that you really are better off.

We finally have a winner. NO amount of tax revenue will EVER be enough to satisfy the appetite for money and power that surrounds Washington DC. Republicans and Democrats are on the same team even though they're wearing different jerseys. They want power and control. They want to make their friends rich and powerful. You're not their friend.

Peter

It suggests no such thing. If anything, it suggests the opposite. As the economy grows the percentage of GDP required to maintain 2001 levels of spending will drop.

This graph also clearly indicates that the ratio of spending to revenue has been greater than 1 for a generation (with a few anomalous years during Clinton's term, which weren't really surpluses when Social Security accounting gimmicks are accounted for) . This is a systemic problem, and not limited to one party or the other. The only surprising thing to me is how each party seems to be committed to making the problem worse than the party that was in power immediately before.

When I write my congressmen (may Sen. James Inhofe burn in Hell for 7,000 years) I like to make the following analogy.

If I managed my finances the way Congress manages the Nation's then I would be in jail. It is literally criminal.
I have been in situations where my expenses exceeded my current income. I understand the desire to raise my income to the point where I can buy everything that I want, without priorities, forever. However, my income is finite and always will be. I have to prioritize my spending and, most importantly, cut spending on the unessential things that break my budget. This is how responsible adults work.
The only people who don't make spending priorities or care about maintaining a sustainable budget are young children and criminals.

I will assert that if Congress magically managed to extract 50% of the GDP of the US in tax revenue that there would still be a budget shortfall. Congress has a huge spending problem that raising taxes will not fix. Look at that chart again. Look at a similar one that goes back to the Korean War. At no point in recent history has Congress ever thought "Times are good. We should save some for a rainy day." It is always "Put it on my Card. I'll be even fucking richer next year and then I'll pay all this shit off."

Peter

Hi. Dumbfuck here.

Our spending would match our current tax revenue if we cut our spending levels back to the Dark Dark Days of... 2001. Surely you remember back then, there were no roads. The military was holding bake sales just to buy fuel for the B2 bombers. Senior citizens were starving in the ditches (they couldn't starve in the streets; there weren't any in 2001. Remember?) It was FUCKING ANARCHY!

The federal budget needs to be gone through with an axe, not with a scalpel. DoD, DoE, the other DoE, HUD, Medicare, Medicaid, SS, DEA not a one of them should be off the budget cutting table. There is No federal agency that couldn't operate today at 2001 budget levels and still have plenty of fat that could be trimmed.

If we go back into Ancient American History (the late 1990's) we even had a modest budget surplus (discounting the looming implicit debts of the soon to be retiring Baby Boomers).

Why do you believe this is an undesirable goal?
Was the Federal Government emaciated then?
Were American citizens getting good value for their tax dollars then? Are they now?

Peter

I guess your imagination isn't very good.

Sometimes protecting your stuff is the same as protecting people.

Generators sprout legs and walk away around here when the power goes out. Should I let someone carry off my generator that powers my water well and my refrigerator? I know! I'll feed my kids with my Moral Superiority!

When you're stealing my property, you're stealing the fraction of my life that I worked to acquire that property.

Peter

Because the author of the article wasn't terribly imaginative.
Your bank, Walmart, MS, or Apple could issue a currency backed by stock in their company, products, or nothing at all. It would be just as valid as any of the other fiat currencies in the world today. Would you be interested in an Oklahoma State Bank Dollar, or a Wal-buck, or a real M$, or iCent? Probably not, but you wouldn't be required to. US Dollars, backed by nothing but promises that they're worth something, are a similar financial fiction that only works because we agree to pretend like they're worth something. Hell, company gift cards are damned close to being corporate currencies already. Currencies backed by ounces of gold, gallons of gasoline, cups of coffee, kilowatt/hours of electricity, M&Ms, would be possible.
There would likely be some very bad currencies created. (Stay away from Pyro_Peter's_Pesos, for example) But other currencies might be very good. Some might be better than the US Dollar and maybe our government and the Fed would work to keep the Dollar good too.

Peter

touché

Peter

The Free Competition in Currency Act is not about returning to the gold standard. It is about putting some more competition into the currency market with the expected result that good currency will drive out the bad. By not allowing competing currencies people are forced to do business with dollars backed by nothing but the full faith and credit of the US. (Which, ain't what it used to be) Ideally, the Dollar would be the good currency and be made better by the competition.

True. But what are the odds of a 5,000,000 kilo gold asteroid falling into Lake Michigan or the sudden invention of a machine that cheaply transmutes aluminum into gold compared to the Fed cranking out another few trillion of paper money?

Fewer per period of time or just fewer? We haven't been off the gold standard that long and we've had a few whoppers. But, once again, the Free Competition In Currency Act isn't about returning to a gold standard.

Nothing except the Secret Service

Less than 5% inflation is HUGE. Over your lifetime it is crippling to anyone who saves money. Small percentages compounded over decades grow to large percentages very quickly.

Never said it was. Frankly, from an investing point of view I think gold is a terrible investment, little better than hiding a stack of dollars in a shoebox. However, the dollar could be made better. Which would benefit many of us.
Peter

Troll? Really? Asking your congressmen to act responsibly with your money is a Troll?

Peter