Raising minimum wage increases unemployment

[_EAllusion]

CATO is guilty of shilling for the tobacco industry in the past. It's one of its biggest black eyes. On the upside for the present, it gets it right on some tobacco health and safety issues that incautious liberal groups do not. It has faults, but CATO puts out a high volume of solid material. It's not such a corrupt source that you can dismiss anything it produces as unreliable. CATO is ideological, but that influence is most obvious in simply the areas it chooses to make its arguments. Pick the fights you know you can win, in other words. It has no mainstream partisan associations, so it's not apt to get caught up in hacky party biases.

Heritage is a think tank derived from principally from the evangelical religious right. It shares their endemic problems with honest discourse and preference for predetermined polemic over cautiously researched conclusions.

[_beastie]

I actually am in a business that faces living wage hikes every single year. We're supposed to be funded by the government for the COLA increase, but we aren't always, and often when we are our budget is slashed elsewhere by the same governmental body to compensate. I'm not in accounting, but I am the head of a few million dollars worth of revenue on the operations side. That requires me to have some level of sophisticated budgetary training. I can say without a doubt that this absolutely kills us. We haven't ever just fired people in light of the budgetary pressure, but we do all sorts of other things to eat the increase. Most notably, when we lose employees through natural turnover, we don't necessarily backfill the position. We are absolute sticklers with intelligent scheduling to avoid overtime because it's an area we can actually affect. We also cut services, which in this case means support systems for vulnerable adults, but we fiddle with employment to the best it can be managed.

I can see how this would be an issue for non-profits. But you're not talking about minimum wage in this instance, it seems to me.

Two-thirds of the workers paid minimum wage work for large corporations that have more than one hundred employees, like Walmart and McDonald's.

Two-thirds of low-wage workers — those that are paid less than $10 an hour — are employed by large corporations with at least 100 employees reports NELP. All of the largest companies in low-wage industries, including McDonald’s, Walmart, and Starbucks own hundreds, even thousands, of stores across the country. Based on NELP’s July 2012 report, “Big Business, Corporate Profits, and the Minimum Wage,” 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the 12 American companies that pay the least.

These employers fall into one of two categories. They are are either large national restaurant chains such as McDonald’s, Burger King, and Starbucks, employing tens of thousands of cashiers and cooks. Seven of the 12 companies fall into this category. The others are large national retailers, employing tens of thousands of cashiers and salespeople, like Walmart, Target, and Sears.

In addition to low wages, many of these companies have a history of poor labor relations that extends beyond underpaying their employees. Long hours, unsafe or unpleasant working conditions, limited benefits and restricting access to full-time work, often accompany minimum wage jobs in many of these companies.

The recession has affected every company on this list. Many used the downturn to explain reductions in employee benefits, long hours, and continued low pay. However, the recession is over for a majority of minimum-wage employers. Nine of the 12 companies on this list have been profitable for the past three years. Of these 12 companies, a full ten had higher revenue compared to 2010.

Despite this fact, improvements in employee benefits or an increase in pay have not materialized for workers at most of the companies on the list.

Read more: The 12 Companies Paying Americans the Least - 24/7 Wall St. http://247wallst.com/2012/11/21/the-12- ... z2LAKiaHb3

[_EAllusion]

I work for a for-profit, but we are capped at 4% profit margin by law. We tend not to make that, though. Madison has a living wage ordinance that our business is included in. Right now, it's $11.07 per hour, which is what our front-line residential support people make.

The annual increase in living wage really, really hurts us. But we aren't a business like McDonald's where we can compensate by charging more for a value meal. Our principle funding source is medicade. Since the early 2000's we've either received a cut in our funding or no increase every single year. Over the past decade we've lost about a 3rd of our funding. So we're losing revenue while facing ever increasing labor costs.

The result of this is a rapid decline in services for disabled adults. But those services haven't really declined as much as they should have - the system is run by bleeding heart types after all - and you can really feel the impact. It's like being on a creaky submarine that has dived too deep.

[_EAllusion]

It should be noted that when hourly wages increase for a business, it increases other ancillary costs to that wage as well, such as the FICA match. For a business, a $1 an hour increase is actually more than $1 increase. It's a minor point, but I've seen some posts that might not be aware of that.

[_Droopy]

CATO is guilty of shilling for the tobacco industry in the past. It's one of its biggest black eyes. On the upside for the present, it gets it right on some tobacco health and safety issues that incautious liberal groups do not. It has faults, but CATO puts out a high volume of solid material. It's not such a corrupt source that you can dismiss anything it produces as unreliable. CATO is ideological, but that influence is most obvious in simply the areas it chooses to make its arguments. Pick the fights you know you can win, in other words. It has no mainstream partisan associations, so it's not apt to get caught up in hacky party biases.

Heritage is a think tank derived from principally from the evangelical religious right. It shares their endemic problems with honest discourse and preference for predetermined polemic over cautiously researched conclusions.

A nice ad hominem circumstantial hit post empty of logical argument, empirical evidence, or anything more than baseless argument by assertion.

Graham's influence is spreading (but his style is, after all, the lowest common denominator style of the activist-polemicist, and therefore the easiest and most tempting to imitate).

[_EAllusion]

A nice ad hominem circumstantial hit post empty of logical argument, empirical evidence, or anything more than baseless argument by assertion.

I'm not making an argument. I'm asserting the state of affairs. You probably should take Logic 101.

[_Droopy]

A nice ad hominem circumstantial hit post empty of logical argument, empirical evidence, or anything more than baseless argument by assertion.

I'm not making an argument. I'm asserting the state of affairs. You probably should take Logic 101.

Your entire post was an ad hominem circumstantial attack on CATO and the Heritage Foundation, CATO because it has, in the past, opposed anti-smoking second-hand smoke junk science and leftist lifestyle fascism, and because Heritage is conservative, which is enough, by itself, to utterly delegitimate it in your mind.

Ad homimen circumstantial arguments are not arguments, correct; they are fallacies of relevance because they argue that some entity or some person is illegitimate as a source and who's arguments should be ignored because they are associated with something the arguer doesn't like (conservatism, conservative Christianity, criticism of poor research and anti-smoking fanaticism, LDS apologetics etc.). Since being a conservative, liberal, Christian, or LDS has no relevance to the quality of an argument, there is no evidential content to a body of naked assertions of bias such as this.

Ad hominem circumstantial claims are circumventions of logical argument, which is precisely the point. CATO has never been a "shill" for the tobacco industry. They have criticized the poor science behind heavily exaggerated claims about the dangers of second hand smoke and what they would consider dangerously coercive government intrusion into the personal lifestyle choices of adults who choose to use a legal product in their own homes.

This is the same old "Exxon Gambit" argument AGW ideologues have used for 20 years to try to smear anyone who questions their own pseudoscience. When cornered, they can never produce evidence of their assertions, but they keep on making them anyway.


Same bat time, same bat channel.

[_EAllusion]

Your entire post was an ad hominem circumstantial attack on CATO

My post defended CATO. You probably should learn to read better.

and the Heritage Foundation, CATO because it has, in the past, opposed anti-smoking second-hand smoke junk science and leftist lifestyle fascism,

I was referring to earlier activity that misrepresented the health risk of first-hand smoking and the addictiveness of nicotine while being funded by the tobacco industry for that work. That's a black eye. You seem completely unaware of this, which is par for the course, I guess.

Arguing that a source is less trustworthy because prior poor performance is not an ad hominem fallacy. That's an important part of reasoning well with sources. To the extent you have to simply trust a source, which is always necessary to some degree, you have to evaluate its credibility based on factors like previous performance. You have a sophomoric understanding of logical fallacies. And I was actually arguing against viewing CATO as generally untrustworthy in any case. Again, reading is your friend.

Stating one's opinions on the quality of an organization's material is not ad hominem. Ad hominem is arguing that an argument is wrong because of the source it comes from. At no point did I do that. I didn't even address a particular argument.

Finally, there is an additional issue here in that you are notorious for flipping out and dismissing anything from a source that is even vaguely associated with liberals. You string together the purplest of purple prose that functions as hand-waving whenever that happens. At this point, I'd normally think you're trolling, but I've seen the stuff you publish under your own name to know that you are just incredibly unreflective.

P.S. I'm strongly opposed to smoking bans/restrictions. But hey, tell us why heroin should be illegal if "leftist lifestyle fascism" gives you the vapors.

[_EAllusion]

Incidentally, the phrase "junk science" as it is used on the right specifically comes from attempts to discredit smoking's risks.Steven Milloy of Junkscience.com, at one time an adjunct scholar of CATO, is the popularizer of the term. He first starting using it in reference to his efforts as head of a Philip Morris PR front group designed to sew the seeds of doubt over the detrimental effects of smoking, though that later expanded to other issues like global warming. At that time, the debate had shifted to second hand smoke, though Milloy misrepresented that as well. Second-hand smoke dangers do get overstated - and CATO's been pretty good about being on the right side of that lately - but there are real dangers that have been misrepresented in past at CATO by Milloy et. al.

[_Res Ipsa]

Incidentally, the phrase "junk science" as it is used on the right specifically comes from attempts to discredit smoking's risks.Steven Milloy of Junkscience.com, at one time an adjunct scholar of CATO, is the popularizer of the term. He first starting using it in reference to his efforts as head of a Philip Morris PR front group designed to sew the seeds of doubt over the detrimental effects of smoking, though that later expanded to other issues like global warming. At that time, the debate had shifted to second hand smoke, though Milloy misrepresented that as well. Second-hand smoke dangers do get overstated - and CATO's been pretty good about being on the right side of that lately - but there are real dangers that have been misrepresented in past at CATO by Milloy et. al.

Yep, "junk science" is a political term that has no relation to the validity of scientific research. It is a political term that roughly translate as "any scientific result that could be construed to indicate a need for governmental regulation of any sort."