Prestor Jon wrote:
Yes there are less jobs in some sectors but there are also more jobs in other sectors. Manufacturing/Industrial jobs have been declining in the US for decades. We don't have a market for buggy whips anymore but we do have a market for smart phone apps. Technology, employment sectors, the economy they all change as time goes by. The market will dictate where the jobs are much more efficiently and effectively than politicians.
That is a frankly, ridiculous statement/counterargument.
'It doesn't matter if you lose jobs, because there are always other jobs in other sectors'. If that were true, on any level, unemployment issues would be virtually non-existent. If a mine closes down in a town focused on mining, an equivalent number of phone shops and doctor positions with free training do not miraculously appear within the same town.
Quite simply, the above reasoning fails to take into account:
a) the distribution of jobs across specific geography,
b) the necessity for additional job training to switch career when your skill becomes obsolete,
c) the existence of towns/villages heavily dominated by a specific industry.
Yes, 'other jobs' do exist. But that does not mean they are anywhere near where the person lives, that the person is adequately trained for them, or that an equivalent number of jobs is magically created whenever mechanisation renders another batch of jobs obsolete. The job market is not self-replenishing at a set level.
Pushing children to only aspire for white collar jobs is a matter of personal preference but it's not a fault of the economy or the job sector,it's parenting.
No my friend, it's to do with realism. There aren't so many 'buggy whip' makers anymore, are there? So naturally, parents don't push for their kids to be Buggy Whip craftsmen. Likewise, parents no longer push their kids to be miners in towns with defunct mines, or work in non-existent factories. There's also the fact that white-collar professions have traditionally accrued the best pay and social status throughout the recent history of the world (the well paid plumber is a relatively recent innovation), so when there's a paucity of jobs in agriculture or industry, the natural way to try and make sure your kids are well off is to try and get a good education.
Ergo, you are correct that the parenting is the starting point for getting those kids moving in those directions, but the parents are driven to that decision
by the job market and economy.
There are plenty of people out there who are perfectly happy encouraging their children to get jobs in trades and other well paying blue collar jobs. We agree that the market only needs so many hedge fudge managers, lawyers, stockbrokers etc. but you seem to believe that there is only a binary choice, get the nice high paying job or get stuck making minimum wage.
Read what I wrote. More specifically, the bit where I said:
'Not all of them(the jobs),
but enough of them to have seriously hit the number of jobs available in those fields.
It's not 'white or nothing', but it has become, 'white collar jobs, minimum wage jobs, or a severely depleted pool of alternative jobs'.
There are plenty of opportunities beyond white collar jobs that are great jobs.
This is true. But not enough of them to accommodate every person who works in a minimum wage job or is unemployed. Hence the problem.
If you don't get a high paying job and your only alternative is a minimum wage job then you've made some serious errors in judgement in regards to your education and job skills. If you graduate college and can only find work in fast food or some similar service or retail sector job then the problem isn't the economy the problem is that you didn't do enough to better yourself while you were in college. A diploma doesn't guarantee a job. We agree that technology eliminates jobs but again that is true for job sectors not the overall economy. While some jobs are eliminated others are created and some, like trades, won't go away anytime soon.
I would firstly point to my first reply. 'Jobs' are not spread evenly across the country. Secondly, if (like my Uncle Ruben), you graduated with a degree in computing back in the days when computers were run with punch cards, your degree is now worthless. And your profession isn't exactly one that enables you to move sideways, or apply that knowledge somewhere else. You're basically someone who has no degree, in a nutshell. There are other examples of technical degrees becoming obsolete due to advancing technology. Thirdly, what about those who barely pass or fail or drop out of college? Debt? Check. No technical skills? Check. Worthless qualification? Check. For those people, it's minimum wage, or nothing.
The solution to the problem of only being able to get a minimum wage job is to better yourself not to get the govt to artificially inflate wages because you'd like more money.
The 'American Dream' is unrealistic and a big steaming pile of absolute rubbish.
I personally, am at the relative bottom end of the socio-economic scale. My family is exceedingly poor and I'm partially disabled. Through my own willpower and hard work, I'm currently putting myself through a PhD at one of the best Universities in the world whilst working full-time. I'm the perfect success story of
'bettering yourself', and you know something? I completely disagree with it. I look at my circumstances, and look at other people in the same position and worse, and realise that I got the lucky breaks many of them did not. I got a stable, loving family. I got a decent level of intelligence. I got born into a country where my university fees were subsidised, and I happen to live in a huge city with the job opportunities available to me that I use to pay my way.
Not everyone is so lucky as me.
That's demonstrably untrue, at least it is in the US. There are plenty of unfilled jobs they're just not jobs on Wall St. or in manufacturing etc.
That's grand. Are they unskilled jobs? Do they pay enough to allow people to do them whilst working to 'better' themselves? And most importantly, are there enough of them for everyone currently in a minimum wage job or unemployed to have one?
There's a difference between not getting the job you want and not being able to get a job.
You've clearly never lived in a deprived slum of an area where every minimum wage job has eighty applicants. Or even noticed that they exist.
I'm not working in a sector I had envisioned being in but after college I worked a lot of temp jobs, part time jobs and minimum wage jobs while I networked and got my foot in the door on a career path, got some additional certifications and education and got a good job.
Aren't you lucky to have gone to college, and lived in an area where those jobs were available, eh wot?
If too many people are setting unrealistic goals or making poor education choices that's not a fault of the economy.
Education? I'm presuming you got a decent one if you went to college. What about those kids who went to terrible schools? Or who never got to go to college or study, due to needing to support a relative? Or quite simply live in a town where
there aren't enough jobs to give a good blue collar training and job to everyone who needs one?
Artificially setting wages only exacerbates the problem. If minimum wage jobs pay more than employers raise standards for who they hire making it harder for unskilled people to get minimum wage jobs not easier.
Wait, what? A minimum wage means that someone who's hiring someone to flip burgers suddenly demands all of his employees need a degree? That's some pretty weird (and ludicrous) reasoning there.
The reason service and retail sector employers don't raise wages much is because the pool of qualified applicants has always been vast. Most people are already qualified to work in fast food, retail stores, wait staff, etc. so there is enough competition that employers can find people willing to work for the wages offered. That's always been the case, working at Walmart is always going to pay less than more skilled jobs because being a stockist or cashier is something most people can do, if you're overqualified you can get a better job and they can get somebody else to take your place.
You're leaving out a vital step in the above. The reason service and retail sector employers don't raise wages, is because they are businesses focused on extracting as much money as cheaply as possible. And due to that pool of candidates (who you just mentioned), they know they don't have to.
Funny though, that huge pool of unqualified candidates desperate for any kind of paid employment, just lurking around there, not going anywhere. Almost makes you wonder why they don't just don their cloaks made from the American Flag, step out the door and better themselves! Laziness probably. Amirite?
We agree that slow circulation of money is bad for the economy and contributes to recessions. I don't think it's a certainty that not buying enough luxury goods causes a recession and if you want to increase the purchase of luxury goods you're not going to get from increasing minimum wage.
Anything that isn't an ;'essential good' is by definition a ;luxury good'. Once people have enough money to buy 'essential goods', they spend the rest on 'luxury goods'. They don't just put the excess cash it in the bath at home, and roll around in it, Scrooge McDuck style.
If you're making minimum wage and it's debatable on whether or not it's a living wage, especially in urban areas like SanFran then increasing minimum wage isn't going to impact a person's discretionary income.
...that's exactly what it does. If you need £20 to survive, and you earn £20, you have no spare money. If you earn £30, but still only need £20, you get to spend the rest elsewhere. On things like courses that allow you to switch professions, or even (heaven forbid), things you enjoy.
If you're struggling to survive the last thing you want to do is squander a pay increase on eating out more or buying more Starbucks coffee or GW models.
Precisely. Which is why a good minimum wage takes them out of 'struggling to survive' zone, and into the 'living comfortably with enough to pay the essentials and a little bit left over to spend' zone. Not sure what you're not seeing here. Earning more money = spending more money.
Instead of having the govt raise minimum wage to encourage struggling people and families to buy stuff they don't need and can't afford in the name of stimulating the economy we'd be better off if a person on minimum wage took the initiate to be fiscally responsible.
Ah, I see, it's the poor people's fault for being poor. Because they spend all the money on blackjack, hookers, and
GW, right? That's why they're poor. Otherwise they'd have money! Foolish, silly, fiscally irresponsible poor people.
Buy a loaf of a bread, a jar of peanut butter and a half dozen apples, use that to make yourself lunch everyday instead of eating out, use other cost cutting habits to save up money, enroll in night classes at a community college or vocational school and try to acquire some job skills that will get him/her a better job. That way the person/family is actually better off in the end and not still working a minimum wage job but with a slightly higher paycheck.
But wait!
What if they're fiscally responsible
AND poor!
That would mean...well, they wouldn't have the money to go to community college! Or have the spare time to attend them even if they did have the money! Horror of horrors!
Well, I suppose those nasty poor people are to blame. Being poor and all. It's just their fault for not working hard enough to better themselves. If they REALLY wanted to escape poverty and minimum wage jobs that barely pay enough to meet the essentials, they'd take up farming at night instead of sleeping or something. Amirite?
Recessions come from the boom and bust cycle and the booms come from bubbles. The most recent real estate bubble came from people using money from loans banks shouldn't have made to buy homes they couldn't afford and then losing their homes and crashing the market. Increasing minimum wage for the purpose of using the govt to spur discretionary spending on luxury good isn't a sound economic policy.
Recessions come from multiple areas and causes. But generally speaking, a downward spiralling recession is caused by people not spending money, and if it all sits in rich peoples bank accounts. nobody has money to spend.
Healthy profitable businesses will help the economy more than govt interference.
Whelp. In that case, we should all go on minimum wage! Just think about it, if everyone earns barely enough to feed themselves, and works for the glory of their employers, every businesses profits will skyrocket! And that will fix the economy!
People working minimum wage jobs aren't victims of corporate greed they're just people working the best job they could get. They work a basic job for a basic level of pay. The govt doesn't need to make laws founded on emotion rather than reason. People have free will and are responsible for their own lives it's not the govt's job to save people from the consequences of their decisions.
'Corporate greed' is a stupid phrase. It's a stupid thing to rail against, and an equally stupid thing to defend. Why? Because businesses make money. It's why they exist. Railing against that is silly. The only alternative is communism, and that's not currently practical.
The flip side of the coin is that unbridled capitalism is also silly. We have regulations on food labelling, medicines, and many other things for a reason. That reason is because if you give business too much free rein, it becomes counterproductive. You end up with people dying from medicines that don't do what they claim (because it's cheaper to deceive people than invent new medicines), slavery (because its cheaper to oppress people and enslave them than pay them), hi-tech weapons systems sold to nutters (because hey, everybody needs to make a profit), and so on.
There's a pendulum between too much government interference, and too little. People working for peanuts is a bad thing. It causes social unrest, it causes poverty and hardship, and it encourages people to look for less than legal ways of making money. The ideal citizen is one who earns enough to meet his essentials, pay his taxes, splash out on something once or twice a month (helping the money move around) and generally be a productive member of society.
Business, alas, does not have the same goals. The ideal employee is someone who works for next to nothing, but is trapped so they cannot leave (saves on retraining costs).
And again, struggling people are going to use a pay increase to do things like keep the lights on, pay rent, buy groceries etc. they are not going to go out and buy luxury goods or nonessential items because they still won't have the fiscal resources to do so. If you want them to be better off then help them get a better job don't help them stay in a minimum wage job.
By making the minimum wage higher, you enable them to have the money needed to pursue those other opportunities. That's kind of the point.
So you agree that a govt imposed higher minimum wage hurts small businesses but it's ok to force bigger businesses to pay higher wages for the same level of work because why?
Because they can. In the same way we make richer people pay more tax than poor people. Because they can. It's called social responsibility.
The amount of skill and work required for a minimum wage job is the same. Why is it ok for somebody to make $10/hr working for Bob's Burgers but somebody doing the same job for McDonald's should be paid $15/hr?
Because if I just put up the wages for everyone, Bobs Burgers goes out of business. We end up with one unemployed man, and one man making a decent wage at McDonalds. If we do it the other way, you end up with one man making a decent wage, and one still making a crap wage. Which isn't perfect, but is still better the final alternative: i.e. two people making a crap wage.
The amount of profit McDonald's makes doesn't make sweeping the floor or making fries or taking out the trash any different than doing it for a mom and pop restaurant. Is your argument that we need to increase minimum wage in order to enact a punititive measure against big businesses? That's just another example of the govt arbitrarily picking winners and losers in the marketplace which is not a recipe for better economic health or stability.
No, it's the government ensuring that more people are ideal citizens, and less ideal employees, which is healthier for society as a whole. Not to mention morally preferable. Otherwise, a millionaire should be paying the same level of tax as someone who is unemployed.
We mess with markets all the time. The free market is an illusion. The Government sets rules and restrictions, and as long as they're not untenable, the market adapts and persists. In my suggestion above, everyone but McDonalds wins. But their loss just equals them making slightly less profit. As long as they are still reasonably profitable, no real harm has been done to them, and with the additional money moving around the economy, they actually benefit from a more robust economic situation.
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