15$ minimum wage

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If the idea is to help people that are not financially privileged enough to afford an education which would allow them to obtain a higher paying job then I don't really see the need.

As it stands now it is relatively easy in many places to get a $18-20 per hour job - more than sufficient in most places for a decent living standard - with nothing more than a GED without even going through an interview process. Such jobs tend to require more actual work than jobs that are just a few dollars above the minimum wage, however, which seems fair.

There are a few exceptions to this where the cost of living is such that $20 an hour would not easily cut it, but these are the exception currently and local minimum wages in those areas would do a more efficient job of covering for those exceptions than a simple-minded doubling of the federal minimum.
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@Intelligence_06
The minimum wage kills worker's ambition.  If workers want a higher salary, they should get a better paying job.  The university of Georgetown found 13 million jobs that you can get out of highschool that pay over $55K/year and there are only 1.6 million minimum wage workers.  Minimum wage workers want $15/hour.  I'd say they can earn more than that if they do different work.  Such people should get into contact with a job that is not tied to the minimum wage so they can earn higher wages without a government mandate.
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@TheUnderdog
For minorities are heavily discriminated against in the job market that isn't quite so easy, let's use black people specifically shall we? Wealth is primarily built through home value and inheritance - typically called generational wealth. You see, when families has less generational wealth, the neighborhoods they live in are inherently worth less, and the schools they have in those neighborhoods to be less effective at educating. So when during the 30s, 40s, and 50s, subsidizing, and redlining occurred that would allow white people to have cheap ways to increase wealth by buying homes in specific areas - not allowing black people too. To the degree - that white people paid less to buy, then black people did to rent for much less valuable homes. 

So then, today, those people do less well in school because of generational poverty, then able to get less well-paying jobs - so you know - for the people who actually need those jobs need to be paid the minimum wage.  Regardless, the principle that the lowest we can pay is so low beneath the living wage is disgusting and a country that supposedly cares for it's people should be ashamed for ever considering having a 7.50 minimum wage. 
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@Discipulus_Didicit
Do you have evidence for all of those claims? Are you considering that wealth and education isn't equal depending on demographics? Are you considering that their is job discrimination even regardless of those education and wealth issues by the job market for certain demographics? Have you considered a single variable? 
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@Theweakeredge
Why are a lot of things about race with you?  This is about the minimum wage, not about race relations.  Why bring black people into this?  Not everything is about race.

Wealth is primarily built through home value and inheritance - typically called generational wealth
Wealth is obtained through the stock market primarily, at least for me.  Very little wealth is built through inheritance out of the millions one earns in their lifetime and I don't get to collect my inheritance until both of my parents die, which by the time that happens, I would be in my 50s and my career would be pretty established.

So then, today, those people do less well in school because of generational poverty, then able to get less well-paying jobs - so you know - for the people who actually need those jobs need to be paid the minimum wage.
Your assuming a significant portion of minorities work minimum wage jobs.  Only 1.6 million workers work minimum wage jobs and the majority are either in highschool or in college (Characteristics of minimum wage workers, 2019 : BLS Reports: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) so they don't need the money as much as someone who is done with school.  There are about 100 million minorities in the US.  If every single adult working a minimum wage job was a minority (this isn't the case), then around 1% of minorities work minimum wage jobs.  Since that's not the case, the proportion of minorities that work minimum wage jobs is even less.

Regardless, the principle that the lowest we can pay is so low beneath the living wage is disgusting and a country that supposedly cares for it's people should be ashamed for ever considering having a 7.50 minimum wage. 
You didn't address my alternative to the minimum wage, which was any person perminately out of college that works a minimum wage job gets hooked up to a better paying job that isn't tied to a government mandated salary, which both gets the government out of the situation and allows the worker to earn a higher salary by doing more valuable work.
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@David
This is a politics thread.  Can you move it to the politics section?
Vader
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A 10-12 dollar minimum wage is suffice. 15 will collapse the economy
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@Vader
I would like it if people who need the money to survive didn't become dependent on a minimum wage job.  Have them find a different job that pays more.
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@TheUnderdog

Wealth is primarily built through home value and inheritance - typically called generational wealth
Wealth is obtained through the stock market primarily, at least for me.  Very little wealth is built through inheritance out of the millions one earns in their lifetime and I don't get to collect my inheritance until both of my parents die, which by the time that happens, I would be in my 50s and my career would be pretty established.
Cool - you are factually incorrect - you have not studied this nor even investigated the link I sent. Most Americans and American families generate wealth via home value and inheritance. Also... wrong - most do get their inheritance, we're talking about net-worth, and that net-worth increases regardless of your parents living or dying, regardless - we're also talking about generational wealth - so yes - their parents have died. 


So then, today, those people do less well in school because of generational poverty, then able to get less well-paying jobs - so you know - for the people who actually need those jobs need to be paid the minimum wage.
Your assuming a significant portion of minorities work minimum wage jobs.  Only 1.6 million workers work minimum wage jobs and the majority are either in highschool or in college (Characteristics of minimum wage workers, 2019 : BLS Reports: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) so they don't need the money as much as someone who is done with school.  There are about 100 million minorities in the US.  If every single adult working a minimum wage job was a minority (this isn't the case), then around 1% of minorities work minimum wage jobs.  Since that's not the case, the proportion of minorities that work minimum wage jobs is even less.
No.... what? You need MORE MONEY when you are in college, do you have any idea what you're talking about?? I forget you don't know what your talking about a lot - so there are about 1.6 million workers working at or below the minnimum wage - for the entire nation, yes relatively, small - considering that there are over 300 million fucking people in the United States? Even small percentages are HUGE numbers - 1,600,000 is a large number. For every 295 white citizens, 1 is working minnimum wage, whereas for every 185 black people, 1 person is working minimum wage - or about 40% more. 

To give you another measuement, there are 6 times more white people in America than Black people give or take, where as the disparity in Minnimum wage jobs is only 4 times - that means black people are overrepresented - and that number only grew in Covid times. After the recession of 2008, we've been slowly been decreasing the amount of people working min wage, but that number jumped again. For this mean people, generationally, to be making this little is a problem, whether you like it or not. You are looking at things in an extremely naive way, one that ignores the massive numbers of people in the US. 

 You also ignore what the living wage actually is in the, around 40,000 a year, much less than minnimum wage. 


Regardless, the principle that the lowest we can pay is so low beneath the living wage is disgusting and a country that supposedly cares for it's people should be ashamed for ever considering having a 7.50 minimum wage. 
You didn't address my alternative to the minimum wage, which was any person perminately out of college that works a minimum wage job gets hooked up to a better paying job that isn't tied to a government mandated salary, which both gets the government out of the situation and allows the worker to earn a higher salary by doing more valuable work.
That couldn't happen - and it wouldn't happen - you essentially are trying to get thousands and millions of corporations to higher millions of people - after they don't need it as much - instead of just increasing the wage that they have to pay people? What the fuck? At that instance just get rid of all the jobs that are minnimum wage! Oh wait, you can't do that, most minimum wage are actually essential! No - you see - the less stupid alternative is just to increase the wage they make. You legitmately have no idea what you're talking about. 
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@Theweakeredge
 Most Americans and American families generate wealth via home value and inheritance.
They generate some level of wealth from home value, but there are bigger sources of wealth for people.  Inheritance is received by a small percentage of Americans (How Many Americans Receive an Inheritance? (wise-geek.com)) and less than 2% of Americans receive $100,000 in inheritance or more.  Whereas with the typical job in the US, I can earn $100,000 in under 2 years.  But most people don't even get inheritence.

 For every 295 white citizens, 1 is working minnimum wage, whereas for every 185 black people, 1 person is working minimum wage - or about 40% more. 
So your saying that less than 1% of white workers and less than 1% of black workers work a minimum wage job and this is somehow racist?  I could say that blacks are 10x more likely to go into the NBA as whites are(and the real figure is close to this), but this doesn't mean your typical black American has a good shot of ending up in the NBA because the vast majority of people, white or black don't work minimum wage jobs or end up in the NBA.

 You also ignore what the living wage actually is in the, around 40,000 a year, much less than minnimum wage. 
The "living wage" varies from place to place.  But hooking up low income people with better paying jobs would pay a good wage for them regardless of their location and get the government out of business by making the minimum wage useless.

you essentially are trying to get thousands and millions of corporations to higher millions of people
The companies that are paying higher wages want workers to do their work so they pay them more.  It just so happens that the workers are only interested in minimum wage jobs.  There are 13 million such jobs available according to the university of Georgetown and only 1.6 million minimum wage workers, the majority of whom don't need the money because they are living at home.

 Oh wait, you can't do that, most minimum wage are actually essential!

Every job is essential for an economy.  How essential is a better question.  One's salary in the free market gets measured by how essential or productive their job is to society.  A minimum wage job working at McDonalds is less productive than being a construction worker and construction workers get paid more.  If minimum wage earners want to earn more, they need to pick a more productive job.  There are millions of them.  If minimum wage jobs end up going empty, the company has some choices.  they can:

1) They can hire people for more.  This is a wage the company consents to pay, so it's fine.
2) They can invest in automation, and since all the workers that worked for them found better paying jobs, no jobs would be lost.

 You legitmately have no idea what you're talking about. 
This is an ad hommin attack.  Get some sleep; you need it.
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@Theweakeredge
Do you have evidence for all of those claims?
Claim one: "As it stands now it is relatively easy in many places to get a $18-20 per hour job - more than sufficient in most places for a decent living standard - with nothing more than a GED without even going through an interview process."

Evidence: I have such a job at a company with around 18000 employees, myself and the majority of my coworkers have no educational history beyond the high school level. I didn't even need to know anyone at the company, I literally found an ad on indeed and joined the company with a group of ten people where the hiring process was for us to walk into the building on the appointed time and get told "congrats, you're hired. Please fill out your I-9's now".

Claim two: "Such jobs tend to require more actual work than jobs that are just a few dollars above the minimum wage, however, which seems fair."

Evidence: I have had jobs that pay just a few dollars above the minimum wage (one that pays $11 an hour and another that pays $12 an hour where the minimum in my state is $9.50) and they definitely required much less work than my current job. They were retail jobs and I hardly did any work, the idea that it is fair for these lazier jobs to pay less is of course subjective.

Claim three: "There are a few exceptions to this where the cost of living is such that $20 an hour would not easily cut it"

Evidence: I am referring to places such as New York City where a one bedroom apartment can easily cost several thousand dollars per month. It would be a lot more difficult for me to budget that with my current job as opposed to my $700 per month mortgage I currently pay.

Are you considering that their is job discrimination even regardless of those education and wealth issues by the job market for certain demographics?
I work in a community where about 40% of the population is African American and about 50% are white so naturally a lot of my coworkers are minority demographics (6 of the 10 people I came in with though it is too large of a building for me to give an exact count on those already here it is about half or so). Not sure how that would look in a community with a higher proportion of whiteys because I have always lived in this community for the entirety of my adult civilian life.
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@Discipulus_Didicit
So your evidence is your, uncertified, experience - regarding certain experiences. I want empirical evidence bud. 
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@TheUnderdog
@Theweakeredge
You Guys should do a debate on whether the us should change federal minimum wage to 15$
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@drlebronski
I don't debate anymore - not enough time. 

Today my schedule's been really open. I take a lot of summer college classes, so, yeah - way to busy most days. 
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@drlebronski
I tried to debate a few times and I've rediscovered why I don't like it anymore.  Too many ad hommin attacks; both sides are too focused on winning even in an unrated debate.  I also have a hard summer class, so I don't have the time to debate either.
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@TheUnderdog
Life isn't as easy as you think. Some people are not blessed with the circumstances that others are and rely on those minimum wage jobs to help them. 
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@Theweakeredge
So your evidence is your, uncertified, experience - regarding certain experiences. I want empirical evidence bud. 
I mean, maybe me and all the minorities in my neighborhood just got lucky... I kinda doubt it though. Also my job is to move food items around a warehouse, loading onto and off of trucks so that grocery stores can stay in stock with food, so if there aren't jobs like that available in a location near you then you probably have bigger problems such as famine... which I hear is pretty bad but luckily have never had to experience firsthand.

Anyway what is your argument in favor of increasing the federal minimum wage? I would like to hear it.
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surprised no one has given the "companies don't have a pool of money lying around" usually when i debate stuff like this con would either say small businesses would close, inflation or what i said earlier
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I think just saying where you live there's a good paying job doesn't mean everyone's gonna get a good paying job. a company cant overhire or underhire there has to be a balance.
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Skimmed through this post (it's very late where I live), but I just wanted to say that the argument "if you want to be paid more, then just get a higher paying job" isn't a very good one. Minimum wage jobs need to be done for society to function, if workers could be replaced with robots that are cheaper, they already would've been.

Minimum wage jobs need to be done, or else I have bad news about the trash we all hope will be picked up once a week, and if they need to be done, we can't dodge the question of "what is the bare minimum wage a worker should rightfully earn" by saying they should get another job if they want to make more.
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good point
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@TheUnderdog
The minimum wage kills worker's ambition.  If workers want a higher salary, they should get a better paying job.
And you are not arguing raising the minimum wage, but against minimum wages IN GENERAL? Oh, I would love to see someone working for free in all kinds of circumstances.

It would be nice if they earn something, versus nothing. I still can't think of a single reason why a higher minimum wage would kill their ambition, instead of fuel it or just make it the same.

If some jobs have higher salaries, everyone would want to go there. There will 100% be people that won't be chosen for any high-paying jobs, and they have a life too, they can't just die of poverty.

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@drlebronski
surprised no one has given the "companies don't have a pool of money lying around" usually when i debate stuff like this con would either say small businesses would close, inflation or what i said earlier
I am not convinced that raising the minimum wage would collapse small businesses as dramatically as some claim, they would just raise their prices to compensate, though that argument would by definition validate your inflation concern. Hard to say how much it would contribute to inflation though as there are many other factors at play.

My main worry would not be the individual businesses but the effects on the bigger picture overall. Having a flat minimum wage across the entire country puts people in higher cost of living areas such as cities at a severe disadvantage compared to those in lower cost of living areas, which has a number of potential implications on its own including encouraging the dispersement of city populations to the countryside among other things.
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@Theweakeredge
For minorities are heavily discriminated against in the job market that isn't quite so easy, let's use black people specifically shall we? Wealth is primarily built through home value and inheritance - typically called generational wealth.
Not exactly. Whites are indeed substantially more likely than black people to receive an inheritance (around 30% vs. 10%), and the median amount received is about the same for both groups, a little under $90k. If you make inheritance equal, an additional 20% of black families would get a median of ~$90k. The black-white household wealth gap is $164k so this accounts for around 10% of the wealth gap (90k x 0.2)/164k. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-2019-survey-of-consumer-finances-20200928.htm 

As far as I can tell, very little housing wealth from the 1950s and 1960s remains in private hands. It's plausible to me that redlining is responsible for a small portion of the black-white inheritance gap (which itself is a small portion of the black-white wealth gap), but puzzling out exactly how much is beyond my pay-grade. Considering reported median net worth and reported inheritances, it doesn't seem plausible at all that the majority of household wealth in the US comes from inheritance. What do you think? 


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@TheUnderdog
Done
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@Intelligence_06
 I still can't think of a single reason why a higher minimum wage would kill their ambition
Because many minimum wage workers (those perminately out of school) don't search for better paying jobs on their own.  They are satisfied with their current job.

If some jobs have higher salaries, everyone would want to go there.
In theory you see this, but in practice people stick with their own jobs.  I want minimum wage workers to be more willing to switch jobs to earn more.

There will 100% be people that won't be chosen for any high-paying jobs, and they have a life too, they can't just die of poverty.

You sure about this?  The university of Georgetown found 13 million jobs in the US that only require a HS degree to do that pay $55K/year or more.  This is roughly $27/hour.  There are only 1.6 million minimum wage workers, the majority of whom are in highschool or college.  There are enough jobs for everyone.  People in these positions just need to search for them.
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@Vader
I think the vast majority of people can find better paying jobs if their job is a minimum wage job.  Then companies have to compete for workers instead of the other way around.  This causes wages to rise.