HonorNCourage57 Loc: Born in Louisiana!!!living in Burien, Washing

House v**es to raise minimum wage to $15 an hour

Yahoo Finance
Jessica Smith
Jul 21st 2019 11:40PM

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that would gradually raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, but the legislation is unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled Senate.

The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009 — that’s the longest stretch of time without an increase since the minimum wage was established in the 1930s.

“That's not America. We need to make sure that people who work full-time are not in poverty,” said Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA).

Scott introduced the Rase the Wage Act, which would incrementally raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025. After that, the federal minimum wage would be pegged to median wages.

The Raise the Wage Act would also eventually require employers to offer tipped workers the full minimum wage, and phase out the lower minimum wage for workers who receive tips.

Currently, 29 states and D.C. have minimum wages above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

“The people have already spoken on this,” said Scott.

Critics argue a $15 federal minimum wage would lead to job losses and would primarily hurt lower-wage workers the most.

“Good intentions are no excuse for imposing bad policy,” said Rachel Greszler with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “The Raise the Wage Act is a misguided attempt to increase incomes. In reality, it will eliminate jobs and decrease incomes for workers with the fewest sk**ls and least experience.”
Higher wages, job losses

A recent Congressional Budget Office report said raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would boost the wages of 17 million people, but could also cause a median 1.3 million employees to lose their jobs.

“Even if there's a little adverse effect on unemployment, the increase in the minimum wage will overwhelm that problem,” said Scott.

Several companies like Amazon, Target and Costco have raised their minimum wage or have called on Congress to raise federal federal minimum wage. Earlier this year, McDonald’s stopped lobbying against a federal minimum wage increase.

“Many people point out that McDonald's (MCD) may have to pay their workers a little more, but more people can buy hamburgers, and so they'll be all right. Many corporations have come out in favor, or at least they're not opposing the minimum wage because the minimum wage has been shown to stimulate the economy so much that the corporations will do well,” Scott said.
$15 is ‘not workable’

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has said the Raise the Wage Act would lead to millions of job losses and primarily hurt small businesses.

“The Chamber continues to believe that there is a path forward on a legislative package that includes a meaningful, but reasonable increase in the minimum wage. We stand ready to work with Congress on such legislation. However, $15 per hour is not a workable federal minimum wage,” Suzanne Clark, president of the chamber, wrote in a letter to Congress.

Opponents also insist raising the federal wage ignores cost-of-living differences around the country, and would hurt states with lower living costs.

“There's some that just don't want to pay people fair wages,” said Scott.

In order to address some of those concerns, moderate Democratic lawmakers introduced an amendment to the bill that would require the Government Accountability Office to to study the impact on job creation after the first two wage increases.

The Senate is unlikely to take up the Raise the Wage Act as it stands now. Scott told Yahoo Finance he thinks some Republican senators may pressure party leaders to at least negotiate.

“The people have already decided what they want, and if the Republicans in the Senate want to block the minimum wage and tell the people that they should continue working at a wage where they can't even rent a two-bedroom apartment if they worked full-time, let them say that,” he said.

“Maybe not $15, but we can talk,” Scott said. “But you first have to agree that you want an increase.”

Jessica Smith is a reporter for Yahoo Finance based in Washington, D.C. Follow her on Twitter at @JessicaASmith8.

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Tags $ 15 dollars is not enough. Our hard working Folks deserve the Top Wages, They need to Survive!!!!! and not live in Poverty!!!! Now what do Y'all Think?

no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun

What people get paid to do a job should be between the employer and the employee. That is what free enterprise is all about. The employer does not owe the employee more than he/she is worth on the market, the the employee is due what he can get based on his worth to the market place.

Liberty Tree

I can see an increase in the minimum wage but not $15 an hour. It will cost jobs and cause price increases at places like fast food restaurants. Prices many will not pay. It will fail in the Senate.

proud republican Loc: RED CALIFORNIA

$15.00 for McDonalds is a bit too much in my opinion....If you raise minimum wage,you will have to raise price of hamburgers...Not good for ordinary folks...

The Critical Critic Loc: Turtle Island

Increased minimum wages don't always mean fewer jobs and fewer hours, sometimes they mean few benefits instead.

A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by the economists Jeffrey Clemens, Lisa B. Kahn, and Jonathan Meer should make us pause and question the wisdom of higher minimum wages. https://www.nber.org/papers/w24635.pdf

The economists explore how minimum wages affect the probability of employer-provided health coverage and find that a chunk of the increased earnings for workers who get higher wages will be offset by a reduction in employer-provided health coverage.

There are a lot of ways minimum wages can hurt the people they’re supposed to help. By raising the price of something in a competitive market, people will demand less of it. And while there is some mixed evidence, it does appear to be the case that minimum wages reduce employment.

In the simplest versions of the labor market, we assume that workers work for one thing and one thing only: wages. We know this isn’t strictly true, but it’s a good enough approximation that brings us some important insights into how labor markets work.

Of course, there’s a lot more to a job than wages. People want work that is meaningful or enjoyable. They might especially value safety, comfort, or flexibility. People can also get a lot of non-wage benefits like health coverage, scholarship opportunities, and paid vacation. Workers can (and do) “buy” these perks by accepting lower wages than they would require if the job weren’t as pleasant, meaningful, or safe or if the fringe benefits weren’t as good.

In short, workers don’t live on wages alone, and minimum wages might not change what workers get paid but rather how they get paid. Minimum wages mandate that cash wages take up a bigger part of employee compensation.

The mandated higher wages won’t be a free lunch. Consider someone who earns $12 per hour in total compensation but only $8 per hour in wages (the rest is things like health benefits and things like pleasantness of the job, the safety of the workplace, flexibility, and so on). A minimum wage of $10 per hour doesn’t cost her her job, but it changes how she is compensated: instead of $8 in cash wages and $4 in benefits, she gets $10 in cash wages and $2 in benefits.

The effect doesn’t show up in fewer hours worked or a lost job, but she is worse off. It goes in other directions, too: if she is required to take part of her compensation in health insurance, she then gets lower wages or adjustment on some other margin.


Clemens, Kahn, and Meer are limited by available data, so they can’t measure everything comprehensively. They narrow their focus to the relationship between minimum wages and employer-provided health coverage and find that for Very Low wage workers (e.g. food service), about 9 percent of the increase in earnings due to a $1-per-hour increase in the minimum wage is offset by the lower probability of employer-provided health coverage. For Low Wage workers (e.g. retail sales), it's 16 percent. For Modest Wage workers (clerks and food service supervisors), it’s 57 percent—which is unsurprising since workers with higher wages get a smaller bump from minimum wage increases.

Henry Hazlitt, author of Economics in One Lesson, wrote that:

”The art of economics consists in not merely looking at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

In the case of the minimum wage, the art of economics also consists in identifying all of the important effects and not just those that are most politically salient. In this case, we would do well to try to measure all of the important effects on things like insurance coverage, job quality, fringe benefits, schedule flexibility, and so on before we decide that it’s wise to “#FightFor15.”

By: Art Carden

(He is an Associate Professor of Economics at Samford University’s Brock School of Business. In addition, he is a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics, a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute.)

Lonewolf

I think if someone works 40 hours a week they should be able to have. A roof over their head and food on the table and basic health care!

Lonewolf

What good is an employee who sleeps in his car!!
How does a mother pay for child care and work and face the shame of buying food with food stamps!
When the minimum wage was enacted it was a living wage which can very from state to state city to city. 15 buckes a hour in seattle.wa and your homeless.
When Roosevelt signed it he said any company who needed to pay less than a livening wage
In order to survive had no business being in America!!

The Critical Critic Loc: Turtle Island

The people that are wise enough not to live beyond their means, do. If they want a bigger house, more food, or better health insurance, educate yourself so you’re worth more to a potential employer. Be one that stands out, not one that stands in line.

working class stiff Loc: N. Carolina

You and the article make some good points, especially about the trade off between benefits and wages.

However, there is another side of the story. Prices have been raised regardless of the minimum wage. US labor productivity per hour has doubled in the past 40 yrs., but real wages have actually fallen slightly for those at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45090.pdf

Even with the economic recovery from the great recession...some labeling it the greatest economy ever...a large segment of the US working population is being left behind. The $15/ hr buys no more today than the minimum wage did in the 1970s.

http://amhill.net/2016/08/04/minimum-wage-vs-cost-of-living/

Here in N. Carolina recently, the General Assembly passed a bill quashing attempts by cities and counties to set local minimum wages, then proceeded to pass a minimum wage rate of $15 for newly hired state workers because they could not find enough workers to fill the open positions. Kind of strange, if you ask me.

God must have loved us poor slobs....he made so many of us.

The Critical Critic Loc: Turtle Island

Some fair points by you as usual, WCS. Though the minimum wage is bad at reducing poverty, and I don’t believe it was ever intended to be a level at which one aspires to maintain. I think I read somewhere in here that you believe the same. At any rate, I tried to address here, the several different things you mentioned in your post, not sure I covered all, if not let me know, I’ll try again. Two links I couldn’t get to load, I just didn’t want to break your post down by separating each issue like I usually do with posts, because I believe you’re an intelligent guy whose comprehension sk**ls excel.

Hiking the minimum wage k**led almost as many low-end jobs as did the economic collapse.

This is University of California-San Diego Professor Jeffrey Clemens’ conclusion from his just published supplement https://www.nber.org/papers/w21830

to his landmark 2014 study. https://www.nber.org/papers/w20724

He says that federal minimum wage hikes from 2006 to 2009 accounted for 43 percent of the decline in employment among young, low-sk**led workers during the Great Recession.

Young, low-sk**led workers — defined as individuals between 16 and 30 without a high school degree — are the most likely to be hurt by minimum wage hikes because they are the least likely to have sk**ls that employers consider valuable. Businesses might be willing to take on these individuals at low wages in order to train them before moving them up to higher-paying work. But when the government sets a high minimum wage, that first step on the career path might disappear. https://economics21.org/html/exemption-minimum-wages-would-help-younger-workers-1201.html

Clemens’ new study confirms this longstanding theory. Young, low-sk**led workers were hit hard by the minimum wage, while most other groups were relatively unaffected.

Several strengths set the Clemens study and its predecessor (coauthored by Michael Wither) apart from a large body of research on the minimum wage. Not least among them is its time frame. The paper covers a seven-year period from 2006 to 2012, unlike other studies such as the oft-cited 1994 paper by David Card and Alan Krueger. http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/njmin-aer.pdf

That paper, which found no negative effect of the minimum wage, only looked at a period of eleven months. https://economics21.org/html/despite-studies-minimum-wage-hikes-reduce-employment-1527.html

The time frame is critical because the damaging effects of minimum wage increases are often delayed. Immediately after a wage hike, businesses usually do not wish to significantly alter their business plans. Instead of laying off workers, they might raise prices or cut back on fringe benefits. But after one or two years, fewer businesses will open, existing businesses will close faster, and fewer jobs will be available.

Clemens’ study is unique in that it separates out workers by both age and sk**l level, to isolate where the worst effects of the minimum wage occur. The finding that young people without a high school degree are hurt the most does not bode well for minority communities: high school graduation rates are lower for black (68 percent) and Hispanic (76 percent) students than for white (85 percent) and Asian (93 percent) students.

This may be one of the reasons that the white teen unemployment rate, at 14 percent, is so much lower than the black teen unemployment rateof 24 percent. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm

Rather than proposing blanket increases in the minimum wage to $10 or even $15 per hour, policymakers should look for ways to ensure that vulnerable individuals are spared. One solution is to allow anyone under 25 to work for a special sub-minimum wage, thus increasing their employment opportunities while still satisfying the political need to maintain higher standard minimum wages.

The new evidence presented in Clemens’ paper is an important reminder that well-intentioned policies such as the minimum wage have costs. The minimum wage tends to benefit older, established workers at the expense of the young and the unsk**led. As we move into 2016, policymakers should resolve to find more innovative solutions to poverty than the minimum wage.

This post originally appeared at CapX.

By: Preston Cooper

(He is a Policy Analyst at Economics21.)



Also additional reading:

https://economics21.org/how-defuse-fight-15

You doing ok in this heat?

working class stiff Loc: N. Carolina

It'll take me a while to go through your points...soI might have to answer tomorrow, as I'm about to be obliged to spend time elsewhere.

As for the heat....yeah, I'm doing well. Had to look up where Turtle Island is located. Didn't know you were a fellow N. Carolinian (or are you a native American who called the whole continent 'Turtle Island'?). So you must be getting some of the heat, though you probably have a cool breeze also.

Take care and talk to you later.

The Critical Critic Loc: Turtle Island

I totally understand. I rushed my post to you as well, for the same reason. I don’t want to go out there, thank goodness for A/C lol

I’m not Native American, but I did choose my location for the latter reason.

Take it slow out there my friend. TTYL.

(Almost forgot, I don’t expect you to read all those links, they’re just supportive of the commentary.)

Lonewolf

At the same time you want your waitress to work for peanuts so your food costs is low how do you expect her to live!
There's always people at the bottom they have right to life!

The Critical Critic Loc: Turtle Island

Your misunderstandings are adorable, especially when you’re so emphatic.

I want my waitress to be compensated for the work she performs. Taking an order, and bringing food to a table doesn’t require a college degree, most times not even a high school diploma, a GED would suffice. I don’t want her to work for peanuts because I want my food costs to be low either, food costs have no bearing on what I pay my waitresses or waiters, my food costs are determined by the market prices placed on them by the distributors from where I purchase the food. The more I save, the cheaper I can sell a plate of food, while simultaneously making a profit to offset the other incurred expenses of running my restaurant.

How do I expect her to live? Let’s see... how about, within her means? More often than not, waitressing is a part time job, while going to school, or for additional income (after retirement), or an in between job while looking for another closer to ones’ expertise or equivalent experience. All this without having yet mentioned tips, which in most places waitresses keep almost the entire amount.

Now, the right to life? What you seem to be misunderstanding is, the right to life means that one has the right not to be k**led by another. Not, to be taken care of financially by government decree. However, one has the right to the “pursuit of happiness” - if the waitress is unhappy with her situation, she has the right to pursue avenues which would better her situation, take a course in mixology perhaps, maybe cooking school to become a chef, or attend business courses perhaps to manage a restaurant or start her own. You see, for the most part, in this exceptional country, the waitress is only limited by her desire, work ethic, and personal responsibility; nobody owes to the waitress, anything.

Lonewolf

The real point is if you work 40 hours a week you should be able to have a roof over your head and basic health care! I don't know were you live but I know many places ware 15 bucks an hour would make you homeless and its not about living with in your means.
If your rent payment is more than your take home pay and that's the problem for far to many people! In NYC a room the size of a decent walk in closet rents for 2,500 or more.