Of course I am. Why wouldn't I be.
Because you adhere to conservative "policies" (attack unemployment insurance, attack unions, attack every assistance program known to help those in need, etc) that do not have their interests in mind. They are geared to serve primarily corporations seeking to screw both their employees and their customers, the wealthy looking to get a free lunch at every turn, etc. You're proving my point in this very thread while ignorantly attacking "liberal policies" even though you cannot seem to form a coherent argument why any of these programs are bad. I'm still waiting for you to explain to us why social security was a bad idea when it has saved millions of elderly folks from poverty. Fourteen million just last year, and more than a hundred million since it began. Go ahead and try to match up some cons that could outweigh those pros. When you're done, you will have further proved my point that you, being consistent with conservative values, don't really give a damn about the well being of any of these people.
It's called a "Price Floor", and if you can show that raising the price floor for labor doesn't effect demand, you would most certainly get a Nobel Prize in economics.
Of course, but how does this help business? You seem to presume that wages have nothing to do with quality of work. I can assure you that employees making $18/hour will outperform someone making $8/hour. Wages should rise as production rises, should it not? If not, then please explain how this is justified. The fact is
production in the US workforce has been increasing while wages have been falling. And you can thank the birth of modern-day Conservative values for that, beginning with Ronald Reagan.
The report, “The Sad But True Story Of Wages In America,” by economists Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz, finds that American workers across the board -- whether in the private or public sector, high school- or college-educated –- "have suffered from decades of stagnating wages despite large gains in productivity." The trend isn’t new, either. Between 1979 and 2009, EPI says, U.S. productivity increased by 80 percent, while the hourly wage of the median worker has only gone up by 10.1 percent.
But you think it is somehow a great idea to keep wages low that way a company can afford to screw multiple employees with low wages instead of just one. Well that's just brilliant!
If the price floor were adjusted too high (say, to $20/hr, or $40/hr), then it would wreak havoc on the regular employment market, and suddenly it would influence the larger unemployment figure as employers scrambled to find cheaper alternatives for labor, be it outsourcing or robots or something else.
Oh really, so you're telling me that fast food places cannot afford to pay $20/hour for all four employees they have running the place at any given time? The fact is these companies are already trying to squeeze profit from every crook and cranny by making these workers do more and more work. They've been screwing them for decades this way. Ever notice nowadays that when you go through a drive-thru at Burger King they tell you to drive around to the "second" window? That's because they closed the first window after they decided to make the worker who was once responsible for one job, take up the duties of the other guy for no extra pay. Oftentimes I see one person running back and forth from the grill to the cash register, to the window, doing three jobs at once. And you think this has to do with the raise in minimum wages over the years? Of course not. Companies are constantly trying out new ways to squeeze more productivity from workers while not paying them more. This is more a testament to unregulated capitalism than anything else. Your conservative "policies" benefit them while screwing the workers. For instance, it isn't a coincidence that Elizabeth Warren, our modern-day champion for consumer rights, is a Democrat. It isn't a coincidence that Unions tend to support Democrats.
If you want to argue that the societal benefit of raising minimum wage a small amount (say, $.50) is worth the cost to society, that's fine. But to argue that there is no cost is absurd.
Sure there is a cost. Nothing is free. But in these examples the one paying for the increase in minimum wage is the company who is doing the hiring, as it should. There is no reason to expect a rise in minimum wage to have a negative effect on overall employment.
A significant body of academic research has found that raising the minimum wage does not result in job losses even during hard economic times. There are at least five different academic studies focusing on increases to the minimum wage—including increases ranging from 7 percent to 12.3 percent made during periods of high unemployment—that find an increase in the minimum wage has no significant effect on employment levels. The results are likely because the boost in demand and reduction in turnover provided by a minimum wage counteracts the higher wage costs.
Similarly, a simple analysis of increases to the minimum wage on the state level, even during periods of state unemployment rates above 8 percent, shows that the minimum wage does not kill jobs. Indeed the states in our simple analysis had job growth slightly above the national average. [...]
All the studies came to the same conclusion—that raising the minimum wage had no effect on employment.
You cited a highly biased CATO study that has you up at night worried about those poor teenagers, but did this study control for conditions in the regional economy?
One recent study, for example, used the same methodology as earlier studies finding a small disemployment effect on teenagers, but the
newer study controlled for the condition of the regional economy, something previous studies had failed to do. Additionally, other recent studies have examined U. S. counties that border one another but had different minimum wages (because they are in different states). All the studies came to the same conclusion—that raising the minimum wage had no effect on employment. Moreover, all of the studies included cases where the minimum wage was raised during a period of high unemployment. These studies should go a long way in assuaging policymakers’ fears and boost their willingness to raise the minimum wage.
Now you turn your ridiculous quips towards Social Security:
Obviously taking money from workers and giving it to retirees makes the retirees richer. How could it not? .
You obviously do not understand Social Security or you're just being flat out dishonest in your misrepresentation. There is no "taking money from workers" and "giving" it to anyone else. The people who receive Social Security benefits are those who paid into it, but your propensity for conservative thinking keeps re-framing the situation as if it were one completely different group mooching off another.
The problem is that the system is unsustainable.
Idiots have been saying this for decades, and yet the system remains useful and there is yet to be Armageddon. The traditional Conservatives use gloom and doom predictions by the anti-Government nut jobs, basing their analysis on current pay roll deductions coupled with an exaggerated estimate of future beneficiaries, to come to their illicit conclusions about how the program is going to somehow cause the earth to explode.
If our only concern is making old people rich, then we could make social security payments much higher, say, $10k/month. Why not?
Because it was never designed to make anyone rich.
Then the program would be even more successful
There's no such thing as "more" successful when the goal is to keep people out of poverty. You're either out of poverty or you're not. It is either successful or it isn't. And it is. So where is your argument against Social Security? Leave it to the conservative mind to be obsessed with endless wealth while ignoring the fact that millions of lives have been saved/improved as a result of the program.
If only we had companies that provided health care and insurance that weren't focused on making a profit.
Exactly! And since that is impossible in free market capitalism, the only real option is a single payer system provided by the government.
We could even call them "un-profit" companies, or "zero-profit" companies, or maybe "non-profit" companies?
Or the National Health Care Program?
That's a great idea, and you should think about promoting it. You might even get another Nobel Prize for inventing the idea of a private company that isn't focused on profits. That's two prizes in one thread!
Why does it have to be a "private company"? Oh wait, because despite the obvious benefits that you unwittingly conceded above to taking the profit motive out of the equation, we can't let the government get involved in something like that because then the next step is Communism. Is that about right? Because if there were ever a country on the edge of Communism, it is those providing a universal health care system.
What countries are you thinking of that have a lower cost for health services while maintaining the quality and speed (i.e. length of time to schedule appointments and procedures) of the US system?
Seriously? There are currently 37 countries whose health care system ranks higher than ours:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Heal ... th_systemsI've enjoyed health care in several countries, including third world Brazil. I broke my knee playing football. Everything was paid for. Sure, the hospital didn't have the nicest walls, and the wait time was something like an hour, but just knowing it wouldn't cost me a dime, and I wouldn't have to worry about going bankrupt because of an accident (which happens every day in the USA), made that wait tolerable. And you exaggerate about the quality of US health care. The USA is good at providing millionaires around the world with the privatized "country club" health care, which is where most people get the idea of "top quality care" matched nowhere else in the world. But there is no evidence that people come from Canada for the sole purpose of getting health care because it isn't provided in their system back home.