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The American people overwhelmingly back President Obama’s call for increasing the federal minimum wage. According to a new Pew Research poll, 71 percent of Americans would favor raising the minimum wage to $9.00 an hour, while only 26 percent would oppose the move.
The idea is not only very popular with Democrats and Independents, but even a slim majority of Republicans think we need a higher minimum wage. 50 percent of Republicans support of the change while 47 percent are against it.
Even with strong popular support, Obama’s call for increasing the minimum wage is unlikely to get through the Republican controlled House though. Speaker Boehner has already publicly come out against it. Of course given the current ideological makeup of House Republicans, any proposal Obama makes is likely dead on arrival as well. So since no legislation is going to be approved, Obama might as well spend his time advocating for things that can be used as political weapons by Democrats. By basically closing the door on any hope of actual legislation, the Republicans inadvertently freed the President up to keep campaigning.
The minimum wage increase is both very popular and easy to understand. Expect it to feature prominently in Democrats 2014 strategy.
24 Comments
Should be double that $9.
Currently about 2% of married Americans work for minimum wage. Most min. wage earners are kids.
But about 25% of Americans earn less than $10 per hr. So increasing the minimum wage would move almost a quarter of the population to minimum wage earners. Progress.
By God, you’re right! Let’s do nothing and let poor people starve.
Wiki says 4.9% of all workers paid by the hour earn less than the minimum wage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States What is the source of your numbers?
Moreover, I don’t think that the % of people currently earning over $10 an hour when the minimum wage is currently well under $9 is especially relevant.
And abolish child labor laws, while we’re at it. Get those little fuckers back into sweatshops, as in other third world nations.
Progress.
Yeah, he’s always a “Delight”, I must say.
Minimum wage is not as relevant to workers as purchasing power.
The recently hardened cynic in me says that businesses will only use any increase in the minimum wage as an excuse to charge more.
The resulting increase in cost of living will probably even more than the increase in the minimum wage warranted. The net result will be that people who are not guarantied a cost of living increase we will wind up poorer in reality than ever.
Totally tone deaf statement about purchasing power:
Rejoice you baseless gloomy Gus’s. Your purchasing power did not go DOWN quite as much as you may think! http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-10/growing-paychecks-boost-americans-purchasing-power-economy.html
Of course the Bloomberg writer reprinted this without blinking or commenting on its utter tone deafness, especially considering that the source of the false cheer is a bankster.
Inasmuch as lack of demand is a huge problem now and the 1% has no desire to increase wages, the 1%, like Bloomberg and the joker quoted above, have every selfish motive to try to cheer us up about the sad state of our purchasing power.
Moreover, neither the write of the Bloomberg article linked above nor the bankster quoted make clear distinctions between purchasing power of the labor force as a whole–because we’ve added some jobs since 2009–and the purchasing power of any given individual’s wages.
Additionally, I wonder how much of our purchasing power has been falsely propped up by the crash in home prices. (Aka, “If you think you’re hurting now, wait until you try to sell your home.)
And, before rejoicing too much, please bear in mind that the Fair Labor Standards Act, of which the federal minimum wage requirement is part, has quite a few very significant exemptions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States
That means that this increase will do nothing at all for lots and lots of workers, unless some of exemptions are dropped from the FSLA.
Finally, will a Republican House ever vote for the increase, or is this proposal really intended only to give Democratic Congressional candidates something to campaign on in 2014?
Touche!!!! Another rapier thrust of rehtorical swordsmanship allan. Youve handcuffed us!! again!!!
I just came accross something that separated ‘all workers’ as you did at 4.9% to ‘married’ workers at 2%. Probably a cheap trick to suggest that the extra 3% aren’t ‘real’ workers who need to support a family.
Anyway, if 5% is the right number, raising the minimum wage will move 20% who have climbed above the bottom rung, back to the bottom rung. Unless, everyones wages grow by a similar amount. In that case the supervisor making $14 will get bumped to $20. The Chicago teacher and aerospace worker will go from $72 to $90. CEO’s will go from $140M to $200M. And as long as prices don’t go up, everyone will be better off.
It would be great if Obama and the Congress could just vote away economics and vote in 20% more wealth into the country. If they’d vote to reduce gravity I could quit my diet too.
I’d settle for $10-12(over a 4 year period instead of 2 years). Even at $9 a minimum wage earner is going to bring home less than $400 weekly for working a full time job. Even with sharing it’s hard to find housing for a budget that essentially allows for you to spend only $432(30%) for your housing. It’d be nice to give the bottom of the economic ladder a little more than they need to scrape by for a change. They tend to spend better than the I own 5 houses already set.
I believe this sums it up perfectly.
Where do you get that information from? Most “kids” are required to be schooled and are in school between the hours of 7AM to 4PM. You can’t work unless you are 16. They also have rules that don’t allow them to work past 10PM and more than 25 hours during the school year. That isn’t including the rules that prevent them from using some of the equipment(trash compactors, bagel slicers, etc) Who pray tell do you think is filling those jobs while the “kids” learn or during the evening hours after kids head home or doing the stuff that by law kids aren’t allowed to do? I’ll tell you. Adults that have bills to pay. Even if you posit that these are entry level positions filled by college students, that’d still be a reason to ensure they make enough to pay for college instead of going into hock(and most college students in my experience aren’t working a 40 hour work week while attending college full time.
I worked at several minimum wage jobs and I can assure you most of them were filled by adults. Walmart considered the rules too onerous to hire more than one or two of the under 18 set($10,000 fine every time an under 18 is not released by 10PM). My son is working full time at a Panera so that he doesn’t have a load of debt for school. He works with a grand total of 2 of the under 18 set. The idea of these jobs being filled by “kids” is a myth that conservatives made up to justify paying a low wage. Not that it should be justifiable to pay “kids” that will someday be expect to cover thousands of dollars in schooling so they don’t need to work minimum wage jobs forever. If anything these “kids” should be making $10 an hour as well. That way they could sock $100 away(allowing for taxes, car expenses, etc, etc) for schooling and pay for their first year up front without going into debt.
As much as folks may dislike it, consumption is what drives an economy. Money parked in a bank does little to nothing.
The BLS has the number of people paid at minimum wage or less as 5.2% of the economy(I’m guessing the or less is kids, wait staff etc). However, if you look at the quintiles at Brookings 20% of the population DOES make less than $20,800(or a $10 an hour full time job.) The admin was not smart to start it’s negotiating at $9 but I suspect as usual Obama was taking the path of least resistance(less likely to get fought by business interests). He figures that 5% of a change is better than nothing.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=330
My thought is if you are going to get one shot at doing it before indexing it then try to make it impact as many on the bottom as possible.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that prices are reliant on wages. Wages are just another line item. That’s why we’ve seen price hikes in some things despite the fact that there hasn’t been a wage increase since 2009. Furthermore, a smart business is only going to be able to charge will be willing to bear, so they might want to be careful with price increases. Ask Mcdonalds. They lost business when they tried to scrap the dollar menu in favor of higher ticket items. Third, businesses are sitting on profit. Essentially, that money does NOTHING for the economy while it sits.
Ponder this. Do you think it’s healthy for our economy that the Walton family owns more wealth than 30% of our population? Do you think hoarding that much money benefits the country? If money is not limitless as conservatives tend to shriek when mentioning deficits then you couldn’t possibly believe that this is even remotely healthy for an economy to be so top heavy. Go even further, 80% of the population owns 12.8% of the wealth. Is it any wonder that people who don’t have anything, can’t pay much?
Consumers have choices though. With very few exceptions they can choose to stay home rather than eat out if restaurants use this as an excuse to raise prices. They can decide not to buy things if prices increase too much. They will, if they’re smart. Businesses could eat the increases since most of them have been sitting on profit. They may not want to, but they could in many instances.
Hmm. You’ve perfectly (though I imagine unintentionally) summed up the argument FOR chained-CPI.
I won’t say consumption has nothing to do with it, but private investment drives the economy. Money parked in a bank (or the stock market) is called capital.
This link (which promotes cutting military spending by the way – I think you’ll like it) shows a nice relationship between Private Investment Contribution to Real U.S. GDP Growth, 2000–2011. See Figure 4.
http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/PA706.pdf
I don’t know about Walton, but Warren Buffet owns 200 million shares of Coke ($37/share). If he tried to sell it all off in order to convert the money into dollars and then go and buy Cokes with it, the company would collapse. It’s not just financial transactions, but also investments that keep companies in business.
How do you figure? The chained CPI impacts the BOTTOM of the economic ladder adversely by a large proportion(although I am more than well versed on substitution principles.) It’s a horrible idea. Furthermore, the chained CPI that they intend on using doesn’t even allow for the actual expenses of senior citizens. Once you put a person on generic blood pressure medication, there are no more substitutions to make. The person then has to choose between playing russian roulette by halving pills and forgoing doctor visits or paying for electricity. Guess how much more it costs the system to hospitalize a senior with out of control blood sugar or heart problems then simply having them go to the doctor regularly? Lots. You get to pay for the pharmacy staff and all the other professionals that go into hospitalizing an individual(Hello $300 blood pressure pills!)
Furthermore, it’s ridiculous to suggest that senior consumers should be FORCED to make substitutions involuntarily because the government does not want to lose the money that is meant for retirement as its own personal slush fund. They aren’t fooling anybody. They introduced this so they could slow down the Social Security fund from cashing in bonds meant for people’s retirement and instead have the fund continue to reinvest ad nauseaum into the pet projects that Congress wants to fund that have absolutely nothing to do with what those funds were intended for.
Bull. The average “investor” holds stock for less than a minute. Rather hard to do anything with money when you only get it for that long. I’d also posit that the “investment” class is largely responsible for the predictament we are in. All of a sudden it’s no longer prudent to look at the long term and what using inferior materials or cheap labor does to your bottom line. It’s whatever it takes to make a quick buck.
Walton is dead. It’s his kids that reaped the reward of his labor though rather than the millions who contribute to the profit of the present billion dollar organization. As for Buffet, Coca Cola earned 8.6 BILLION dollars in profit last year. Are you saying the company couldn’t have “reinvested” that themselves without Warren? Heck, most companies aren’t even publically traded. Joe Schmoe small business goes to a bank and takes out a loan to get his business started. He’s the investor. The bank is his mediary that charges him a fee. If he’s lucky he gets the mean ol’ horrible government to help him. That’s 80% of our economy.
Money parked in a bank can be called anything it wants but when it is parked it does nothing. It isn’t until that money is utilized to fund things or CONSUMED that it does anything for the economy. It doesn’t matter if that consumption is for a business that needs widgets or for a person who wants to buy a car.
The “average” invester. Hmmm. As I said before, this sums it up perfectly.
Address the point. If I give you a thousand dollars for 30 seconds do you even have enough time to spend that investment money?
The stock market is the equivalent of a rich person scratcher. The difference being that if I win the lottery I’d be expected to pony up 40% of my winnings to the government.
But that is exactly what happens when you raise the minimum wage, to an extent. People who make $1 over the minimum wage see their incomes increased as well, and so forth up the payscale, diminishing in effect as you go higher.
Which is why Boehner and crew are are *really* against it, because it pushes wealth downward. The positive effects of raising the minimum wage go beyond helping those who who are paid it. The problem with Obama’s plan is that it’s not enough (either by the inflation standard, where it should be about $11/hr, or by the productivity standard, where it should be over $15/hr).
-stewartm
http://topforeignstocks.com/2010/09/06/duration-of-stock-holding-period-continues-to-fall-globally/
Stock holding has fallen to months/years, not seconds. But even so, every stock that is sold – is bought by someone else. So the stock investment remains, even if it’s bought and sold by different people.
To believe that the bottom of the economic ladder tends to spend better than the “I own 5 houses already set”, to believe that the average investor holds a stock for less than a minute, and to believe that stock transactions are like light switches that turn on and off and provide capital and then take it all away instantly shows a worldview that is not easily penetrated.