This has been an interesting early morning read. Thread begins with 'study' that most academics would consider suspect, if not outright invalid. Extrapolating findings from median values is folly.

35 years ago I was graduate student in economics at a well-known US university. My graduate assistant stipend, $175 per month, was mostly funded by two 'studies'. One study measured the impact of new navigable waterway system on rural unemployment in Mississippi & Alabama. The second one trained government workers on how to run 'Comprehensive Education & Training' programs. Both studies were funded through grants from US government.

Corps of Engineers wanted study that showed that new waterway system lowered unemployment. We delivered one. Carter Administration wanted to create new training & employment programs. We delivered training on how to startup & fund programs in rural South.

My point is give an academic a grant and you will get answer you want! Give these quasi-government think tank outfits money and they too will provide answer you want. And with today's technology, most anyone can mashup 'facts' from any number of 'studies' to support any argument or cause.

So find a study, start thread, and watch the fun begin!

Define ridiculously high.

As has been shown, repeatedly, had minimum wage continued to track as it used to, it would be 10.50/hour right now. The same time that the minimum wage started lagging behid is when all other wages started to falter. It also coincides with pay to the top earners growing like crazy. The money the corporations are paying out started skewing. Its common sense to accept the gap between employee and exec pay? It is common sense to say they cannot afford to pay their employees when you see the amazing increases to the tip execs? I could accept that wagez had a good reason to be lower, were it not for the fact they are not lower for everyone.
The money is there, the prioritizing is not.

I suppose one can disregard the particular study.
However, the point remains that wages have stagnated for most, and have risen quite dramatically for a few.
Theres also the pesky fact that corporations are rolling in profit, while taxpayers subsidize their low pay to the very people doing the work that makes them all that money.

The only difference is a government backed grant/study will give the answers the government wants while billing the taxpayer, while these quasi-think tanks get their money from either the Koch bros. or George Soros etc. etc. leaving the taxpayer out of it.

Of course they are used to validate views correct or not that the gullible digest without question gaining allies/voters to that particular view.

And it's amazing how they work on some people. Take for instance Michael Bloomberg's recent pledge of $50 million for the gun control movement. You'd think America is under siege, murder victims galore however when you consider in 1974 with a US population of 211.39 million we had 20,710 murders or 1/10,207 and in 2012 with a population 313.91 million we had 14,827 murders or 1/21,110 you realize it isn't so. And to the contrary the murder rate has been more than halved. Yet the Danzig's of the world use Slate, Huffington or FOX and Infowars as their bible never questioning their 'teachings'.

(US Murder Rates By Year) http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

Oh you'll never know the irony of you having your fingers in your ear continuously repeating yourself.

It's libertarding and brings back memories of our village board idiot!

Just realized if US Median Income had kept up with the raises in Welfare Benefits from 1974 it would be $151,164 and minimum wage would be $24.92....:wf

Also....what am i to take away from the 2011 cbo study that shows that since 1979, growth for the top 1% wage wise is over 275%, but for the next 60 % is about 40%? What about the finding that not only has income inequality risen in most developed coutnries, the change is greatest here?
and what am i to discern from the statistic that only 42% of americans believe that this inequality actually exists, regardless of all the findings?
In 2012, the wage gap was the largest since the 1920s...with the top 1% seeing a 20% gain, the other 99% saw a 1% increase.

What are we to do about the opportunities that once were here, and aren't any more? People say reward hard work, thats not happening. People discuss the good old days, but our economic landscape and job market isnt the same. We actually have more skilled workers.....and less jobs demanding skills.

Celebrate the fact the study you quote is dated, conveniently ending with 2007 stats, though published in 2011 and per the same CBO curiously from 2007-2009 the trend was quite different. Then again we must ask who initiated the 2011 study that stopped with 2007 stats?

http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43373

The new American Dream

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101597957
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...#ixzz2zXcacB4r

There are a lot of people with degrees that still have no education or marketable skills. College is not for everyone.

We call it "contract work" in both mine and the wife's fields. Lots of people are clamoring to get it.

true that not all degrees are useful. however, it isn't true that people don't have education, or that people are lazy, etc, etc.
we always told people if you work hard, you can get ahead. that's changing, and not for the better.

#1 on Amazon's best seller list


>>>...In Piketty's view, backed by centuries of data on wealth and economic growth, the typical outcome of unfettered capitalism is rising income inequality. Piketty says the world's biggest economies have to do something, like impose a global tax on capital, to stop it. As Piketty said in an interview with HuffPost Live last week, income inequality is only getting started, and this century could look a lot more like the deeply unequal 18th and 19th centuries than the more-egalitarian 20th....<<<


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...n_5191566.html

Oligarchy

We are becoming third world where a few in business are disgustingly wealthy and they buy the politicians to rig the rules to make themselves even more wealthy. Death Spiral if you ask me.

Exactly...And nothing new - from the 2012 Mitt Romney thread where Joey promised us how much better things would be with a Republitard in charge:

another take on the minimum wage, from a point of view i'd never considered-how it would level the playing field a bit between small business owners and large corporations.

http://www.slate.com/articles/busine...er_living.html


hubby and i talked about this more than once over the weekend...the walmartization of our economy, with the big fish gulping up the small.

i'm reading the slate article about the book now. need to get it along with my penman book i'm ordering. piketty was one i saw referenced in my thursday posts on this thread. wasn't able to copy/paste because i was on my new phone, and i haven't figured out all that crap yet!


'A 2013 study by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez et al., notes that the rise in the share of total annual income received by the top 1%, which has more than doubled since 1976, has had a significant effect on overall income inequality. It states: "It is tempting to dismiss the study of this group as a passing political fad due to the slogans of the Occupy movement or as the academic equivalent of reality TV. But the magnitudes are truly substantial."[46] Also in 2013, the Economic Policy Institute noted that even though corporate profits are at historic highs, the wage and benefit growth of the vast majority has stagnated. The fruits of overall growth have accrued disproportionately to the top 1%'.

Hey Chicken Little,

The other side.

We consider 'poor' for a single person at $11,670 or under and that comes out to $40/day.

Give me some stats on how close we're becoming a third world country, or even close to one.

P.S. the sky isn't falling!

As demonstrated earlier if only minimum wage and US median income had kept up with increases to welfare since 40 years ago we'd be at $24/hr. plus minimum wage and $150K plus US median income.

Then again we are the most generous country on earth despite the inability of 25% of our citizens being unable to graduate from high-school.

Take another bow America you deserve it!:tro::tro:

Truly amazing. Again my point goes flying over your head. rudeboy had no problems grasping it. Always debating an issue that no one is talking about.

http://gofrontrow.com/en/reading-com...FU4aOgodmCAAtg

Your point has no factual basis other than rude and some author trying to push a book. Kind of like the guy who says bet the grays.

Again show me a third world country's poverty threshold stats, any third world country and show me how close we are.

Which was your point, no?

No it wasn't my point and I am done with you. Waste of everyones time continually having to dumb down the conversation. You need to drop down the claiming latter of discussions. Let me guess, you've been drinking.

Yea stats and facts don't matter when there's a movement.

Put your fingers in your ears while you go blah, blah, blah

And resurrect Occupy :tro:

You need to come up with something, anything to substantiate your rants.

You start a post with “Oligarchy, We are becoming third world” yet that is not your point?

When I started my post, “Chicken Little” that was my point and it has been confirmed as correct by your inability to do anything but put your fingers in your ears and make believe my reasoning was achieved through a bottle instead of reality based facts.

http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wo...duces-poverty/


Hot dog, figured out gow to.cut/paste on.this thing...

Been there......:)

In what way are we becoming third world like? Certainly not the fuking tangent you went off on. Ask Rudeboy tomorrow when your head clears he may have the patience that i don't to explain it in a way even you can understand.:zz:

I'll try, but don't hold me to it.

My initial point was in response to the original post / Thread starter which contained a link to a Forbes Article the pronounced:

Report: Walmart Workers Cost Taxpayers $6.2 Billion In Public Assistance

To which led to an immediate discourse about how the culprit for all of this is that the minimum wage is too low, thus Walmart workers require 6.2 billion in public assistance to make ends meet. A fairly elementary conclusion, be it however ill-informed.

The conversation then took another turn into the abyss of wealth concentration and middle class wage stagnation, which is where I took chimed in. The issues with the top 1% getting exponentially more money than their counterparts even 15 years ago, and the way it has coincided with the exponential shrinking of the middle class, is due to a myriad of complex circumstances, none of which have a single thing to do with the minimum wage.

But that is the way the media has programmed it's viewership. Straw man - pit the have-nots against the have-alot-less-than-they-used-tos in the hopes of keeping the smokescreen veiling the continued thievery of our economy, at any and all cost.

So on one hand, I agree fully with Dell in that I do not believe that there is any value at all, and actually potential economic collapse, in artificially propping up the lower class by imposing huge increases in the minimum wage as it only serves 2 purposes:

1. to devalue the entire economy
2. impose even further degradation of what is left of the middle class by exponential hyper-inflation. People can cite "studies" that shows that increasing the cost of bringing products to market (from the Port intake to Distribution to Warehousing, to however many other steps it takes before your Greeter get's his /her 12.00 an hour) won't increase the cost to consumers, but that doesn't make is so. Common sense has to prevail at some point.


The other point which JMS made and cannot be argued, is the manner in which this untethered (to steal a phrase from Piketty) capitalism in a global economy has now subverted any manner in which to control it.
You have lawmakers who are influenced by corporate interests (though a variety of methods, most notably by going to work for them as lobbyists after their terms expire) - it is so pervasive that they don't even bother trying to hide it. Why else would someone spend 7 million dollars running for a Congressional seat - a job that pays $174,000 a year?
They make millions upon millions influencing laws that line the pockets of corporations through the very same tax breaks that the public pays for - to supposedly "offset the cost of employing Americans".

And the peons continue to blame each other for the mess, as they try to grab the diminishing crumbs.

It's mind-numbing.


So Dell is correct, and so is JMS - just about two completely different things.

minimum wage, and other wages stagnating, is a result of the changes that have occurred.
it's not a cure all, but is one of many things that needs changing. i know some are advocating a move to 15/hour, i advocate 10 tp 10.50, since that's what it should be currently.
as sen. warren said last night on the daily show, things have got to change, with much of the power in the hands of very few, very rich and powerful people. else the rest of us will continue to lose ground and slide further downhill.

and i still fail to understand how bringing people out of poverty would result in economic collapse. more money means more spending, not less.

also, rude, what parameters do you use to differentiate between a 'study' and a study?

Really awesome job with that. And again my comparison to why we are becoming like a third world countries is that in third world countries you have uber rich buying influence from the government to further their wealth. The winners are the uber rich and those that work in government. Not a hard concept to understand.

It's not - but you're trying to convince someone who also believes that global warming isn't taking place. ;)

Bring people out of poverty?

GUFFAW

This is about corporations wanting robots instead of humans.

Hook, line, and sinker.

Yep. Politicians, especially democrats, want to bring their sheeple out of poverty.

And the gubmint also really cares about a desert tortoise. The land grabs aren't about Agenda 21, solar companies, battery companies, etc.

With QE you don't necessarily need a working population. You can maintain the illusion for decades.

true, and many already only have robots. they use programmed fork trucks now out here, to go along with the remote vehicles that take stock from one part of the mill to another.