It's not really a starting wage though. That's going to be different every where.
OT: Should Mississippi follow California’s lead?
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Am I though?
I pointed out the state's per capita GDP(a positive to me), listed a bunch of the climate and natural disasters that constantly happen out there(a negative to me), and then recognized the housing costs are crazy high(a negative to me).
Thats hyping CA up?
No it's people doing the bare minimum expect to be paid more to a premium. Of course that's in every industry. The person making 12 bucks thinks they should make 20. 50k thinks they should make 70. The person thanks 80k thinks they should make 120k. Unfortunately we can't all be paid what we think we should or what we want. If that was the case everyone would want the ceo pay and they trickle down everything would cost out asss. It already. There is a good bit of corporate greed but raising the minimum wage isn't going to fix anything. The poor will still be the poor unless they raise their status. Raising minimum wage just means everything else raises with it including cost of living. Getting paid 5 bucks more but less hours and now your rent will go up 200-300 a month
The way that GDP is calculated is State(govt) Spending. They are in the red, spending money they don’t have and California is technically bankrupt.
We've had minimum wage increases in the past without "everything else" going up in price and without rent going up that much. Build more houses and apartments. Supply is what's causing rent to increase the most. Instead of hypotheticals, how about actual results? For instance, I suspect you just made this up because it sounds right to you: "The person thanks 80k thinks they should make 120k." Where's the evidence that most people think this way? And you really think it's true that if you raise the minimum wage by $5, your hours will be cut and your rent really will really go up by $300? "Getting paid 5 bucks more but less hours and now your rent will go up 200-300 a month"
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All of my kids worked through high school and college. When my oldest was still in high school, he was a manager at the local Sonic. That's when the $15/hour min. wage conversations started out west. It took him about 30 seconds after he heard about it to look at me and say, "We'd have to charge $20 for a burger combo". If a teenager can see it, why can't the rest of the world.
As an addition, most business base their profit margin on percentages and not actual $. So if minimum wage goes up $5, then the cost will go up $5 plus margin on that $5. It will always hurt the folks at the bottom.
As Syndrome said in the Incredibles, "When everyone is super, no one is."
The median mortgage payment in the U.S. is $2600 a month now. In Cali it's well above that. Anyone without a 6 figure income is struggling to find housing. If MS had jobs, education, & healthcare people would be flocking here. Of course, cost of living would be higher with those things.
If Vape shops, Dollar Generals, and Jr Food Marts attracted people, MS would be rolling.
If Vape shops, Dollar Generals, and Jr Food Marts attracted people, MS would be rolling.
"We'd have to charge $20 for a burger combo". If a teenager can see it, why can't the rest of the world.
It doesn't work that way. In-N-Out just raised the price of their burgers about 40 cents in response to the minimum wage increase in Cali. $1.20 for a combo. The milkshake is just 5 cents more (the horror). Other businesses might have to raise prices more. Maybe $20 is too much, it would be for MS, but raising the minimum wage a bit hasn't led to these apocalyptic scenarios anywhere.
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It's a tough job and should be weighted accordingly relative to other corporate rolls. With that said, their compensation is mainly driven by Stock grants, Stock options and performance based bonuses. Salary is like Social Security to them.
Counterpoint: over the last few decades we've had a significant chunk of income shift from the poor to the rich. That was a result of policy. We could switch it back.
First relevant source found, I'm sure there's better:
Household Income Quintiles
Income limits and mean income for each quintile of household income, 1967 through 2022.
www.taxpolicycenter.org
TLDR: top 5% used to make ~6x the poor (bottom quintile). Now they make 10x.
I don't want them to build there either. I'd prefer to see it in MS. Construction is about all that's happening in the housing market right now. But condos in FL are going to be a solid buy if you can afford the insurance now.
1. Price/volume trade off. Price has a 100% margin and volume carries a cost that makes the volume margin a fraction of 100%. So, you just add price to a point where sales are still greater than before the labor cost change. This assumes price elasticity. Some goods are inelastic so price/volume trade offs don't really exist.Sure, if they can do so without losing profit. Basic econ says they cant, due to profit loss and competition.
Mostly BS pushed by Big Tech. Amazon is closing their "staff-less" groceries, which it turns out was really just Indians watching remote feeds, and even that couldn't do the job as well as a decently paid employee.
(I wanted Blade for this quote, but gif search is garbage.)
Take no profit over less profit?
Very interesting that the "pro-market" view is that business owners are idiots who either are already running inefficiently for no reason or will sacrifice profit out of spite or idiocy. Not that I disagree with that view of business, just interesting that others combine those two things.
2. Uh, have you been in a McDonald's lately. You can't even order from the front counter. I repeat we have plenty in TX where they will not take your order and point you to a dang kiosk. A lot of fast food restaurants are also linking discounts to online ordering. Lastly, grocery stores and Home Depot/Lowes basically have no checkout lanes that aren't self checkout.
3. Agree, if you can't figure out a counter to increasing costs you probably shouldn't be in business.
Let's not forget that Bush 1 carried CA in 88. Lots of change since but they haven't always been the State they are today.
That's good and I'm sure they've done some analysis, but it is day one of the change.
Basically everything. Certainly taxing was part of it, but again, most Mississippians (and US voters in general) don't have a problem with government spending. They strongly object to wasteful spending that doesn't benefit them and that they think they pay for. They strongly favor spending that benefits them that other people pay for. They're lukewarmish on spending in between, but they really care about taxes that they see.
Outside of taxes, I'd say most of the hotbutton culture issues were relevant. Gay marriage was probably a big one for Mississippi, being soft on crime, perceived lack of patriotism, gun control, anti-church/religious positions (RFRA passed almost unanimously in 1993 and national democrats generally trashed it by 2014), environmentalism as religion instead of conservation, etc.
Not following why you think a seller can increase price and see more sales? Did you mean revenue and not units? If so, yes, econ says the max profit point will adjust at a point with a higher price, less units sold, and less profit.
I did say mostly. Many stores are scaling back on the self checkout stuff. It just hasn't worked as well as it was sold on.
Maybe. It's hard to say because these are the voters that say they believe things they clearly don't believe (see taxing/spending). These are the peeps that say they demand free speech, then that they support banning the burning of the flag or kneeling during the national anthem. And of course now they have a standard bearer that blows most of these supposed beliefs out of the water and they don't seem to care AT ALL. who knows? But if you look at what they said at the time and how they voted at the time.....it sure seems to be the Dems passing the VRA.
You left out abortion.
Because minimum wage increases are calculated to hide the harm. For most people, a small increase in minimum wage isn't going to move the needle in comparison to general inflation. Not many people make minimum wage across the country, most of the ones that do are not primary earners for their family. It's just not relevant for most people provided it's small. It's hugely relevant for the people that lose their job, have hours cut, or lose their business.
Right now, even in Mississippi, we could probably double the minimum wage to $14.50 in most areas (or probably more accurately, the areas where the most people live) and it wouldn't impact that many people. It would be devastating for the ones it did impact, and it would certainly cause some price increases for businesses using low skill labor, and some businesses would no longer be viable, but outside of the ones that it was devastating to, it wouldn't be that big of a deal to most people. But "we're only devestating a small number of people and it gives us the warm and fuzzies" is just a bad justification for public policy. Even if you knew for certain that the impacts were a net positive somehow, that still doesn't justify it when the vast majority of the harms fall on the most vulnerable people in the population.
Yes, Revenue and Sales are usually synonymous. Units can decrease while Revenue/Sales increase if price goes up and since price has zero cost profit increases without an associated unit cost.
Yes but back around to if you could increase price and see more profit, why weren't you doing that already?
You are assuming that the lack of a minimum wage is not itself a policy decision that would be devastating to some segment of the population.
Like every policy, there are winners and losers. A good policy has more of the former.
IMO, a well functioning free market is always good policy. Wages suffer from market distortions and needs a nudge to result in a well functioning free market.
Free speech is not popular at all. The only reason it has remained mostly viable is that it has a pretty significant minority support to go along with the party out of power and the courts thankfully have refrained from amending it out of the constitution. Law schools used to more or less indoctrinate their students on the value of free speech and the rule of law in general. I don't think that happens nearly as much now so I think there are legitimate concerns about how it survives going forward.
I think the people that genuinely like trump are the ones that were tired of candidates that more effectively pretended to match up with conservative beliefs be insincere and ineffective. I think he also gets some support out of loyalty for revealing just how corrupt and inept the vast majority of our institutions are, as well as a lot of politicians that pretty effectively pretended to be conservative when they were anything but. Trump's not conservative, and generally wasn't particularly effective even on areas where his beliefs did match up with conservative beliefs, but he still produced some wins and gets credited for delivering good economic conditions until COVID (although a lot of that even then was just growth juiced by unsustainable government spending). But mostly primaries have just evolved into weird things. We've had Hillary, Biden, Romney, and Trump as recent nominees. A good number of people would consider three of those genuinely horrible human beings if you took the politics out. Romney is just somebody nobody likes regardless of politics. Certainly the republicans had a pretty good bench in 2016 and 2024, whereas the democrats were generally picking from bad candidates, so it's a little more inexplicable how the republicans got here.
I thought about abortion but was drawing a blank on any state specific abortion memories. I think that's because it was always an issue and just became noise to me. Now that I've had a second, I think there was an attempt at a federal partial birth abortion ban under Bush II that federal democrats fought? It's also hard to tell what public opinion on abortion really was because it was a costless way to signal loyalty to political party or to moral virtue as long as the judiciary improperly kept it out of the political process. I think we're going to find out (and really already are finding out) that even in states that were purportedly very strongly pro-life, the general political consensus is closer to European sensibilities. Easy if early, hard if late. I think you'll see the same consensus emerge in more hard left states once the issue dies down and it becomes less relevant for showing political loyalty.
We do. Every year. Some more years than others and especially when you have sensationalized cover like inflation or wage increases. Not my decision but maximizing shareholder value is the name of the game and everything else is secondary.
I'm fiscally conservative, generally speaking. My struggle is understanding a solution that would address the nuance involved. I can't envision a single rule that would fix the issue. Here are a few things that I think are true (or maybe resonate with me is a better term):
- Founder/CEO - likely took a ton of risk on to form and grow the business that employees many people. How much is too much for him/her to make, assuming that the business would not have existed had he not founded it, and the employees have as much mobility as their skillset will allow?
- Caveat: If there was some proof of overt collusion among business owners to artificially depress wages by limiting competition, I'd be against that. Perhaps that, to some extent, is what all these special interest lobbyists accomplish via favorable legislation?
- Appointed CEO - may or may not have taken on any personal risk; should be rewarded for the responsibility of leading the entire organization, but to what extent? I suppose that it is up to the company. I think that a lot of these guys are paid way more than they are worth based on what the market sets pay at.
- Thoughts: In industries dependent upon unskilled labor, it is unlikely that out of any sense of benevolence they are going to just randomly decide to pay more for unskilled labor, particularly if they are publicly traded and focused on "shareholder value"
- Basically, it seems to me that it's a pretty fuzzy line to declare for how you determine the value of unskilled labor.
- I don't think that anyone disagrees that you can't live off of minimum wage, the question is should that be a goal?
- If the government decides that minimum wage is not really a starting wage, like I considered my first job at $3.35/hr, but should be enough for someone to live on, do they set it at NYC levels or MS levels? National average cost of living? Should it be tied to inflation? Seems at least academically that such a step could induce inflation.
- Should they force all unskilled labor to relocate to lower cost areas to make minimum wage more sustaining for them?
- Would that then drive up the cost of living in those areas?
From a general societal issues perspective there are some uncomfortable issues that we need to wrestle with as well:
- Inherent issues: not everyone is capable of working at all, many will not be capable of learning a skilled trade. Some, who might have been capable of doing one or the other get caught up in substance abuse, or lifestyles that eventually limit their potential.
- A question: So do we care about those that through either no fault of their own, or possibly, related to their life choices, cannot earn enough money to make a living in our economy? If the answer is no, we don't care if they starve, then the easy solution is do nothing. Ideally, we would recognize through our concern for others that we really should care if people are able to have a place to live and eat. It seems that our society would be better off overall if housing and food security were more prevalent, but nobody is articulating it in a way that conveys that to the masses.
- A tougher question: Given that at least some people who could do better, won't and might game the system to get a benefit that they should not, do we want to be the in the crowd of I'd rather 99 starve if I can make sure that the 1 guys doesn't get over on me, or in the camp of I'd rather feed 99 people who are not starving if it means that I can help the 1 who is?
2. Uh, have you been in a McDonald's lately. You can't even order from the front counter.
Yes. In France. Got a croissant and coffee for breakfast using the self-order thing (bad choice, croissant was m'eh but I was in a rush). Then again my French is about as good as the English of some workers at McDonald's in America so it was easy to order. I might take my chance ordering online or at kiosk instead of the at the counter in America but I don't remember the last time I walked in a McD's in America.
Economists are split on the minimum wage. it's a tradeoff. Don't got too high. I don't find states or countries that have a minimum wage to be horrible places to visit or live in.
Which is generally why there's a minimum wage and not a hodge podge of other fixes instead. Less efficient but simple. People who say they want a simple tax code, take note.
Probably more accurate to say risked opportunity cost. I don't think most "true" business startups (neglecting small business here like restaurants etc) are risking much actual capital. Most get loans, etc. But the time spent on them is lost.
The problem here is most businesses are just the first movers. Most are not inventing the light bulb, someone else would have come along right behind them.
There is plenty of such proof.
Usually, there is a non-competitive mutual system of compensation between the CEO and the Board. They pat each others backs.
The market price of unskilled labor is essentially subsistence. Somewhere there is someone who will starve without the work, thus will work for enough to not stave. Only govt interference drives it higher.
LOL and right on cue .
www.latimes.com
Want the right to ignore your boss' calls after hours? California could make that happen
A San Francisco lawmaker is proposing a bill that would give workers the right to ignore calls and messages after work hours.
www.latimes.com
Admittedly, I have more questions than answers. My perspective on founder risk is from seeing many who quit good paying gigs to make a go of something, often risking their own retirement and financial well-being. For some it paid off. For others, it basically extended their working years because it did not work out. I've seen both the positives of the company President who makes millions and the company President who returns to working for another company, having lost his retirement nest egg in the process.
Well, as an out and proud Lawrencexual, I am a clear loser in the states policy decision to not pass the "2 chicks at the same time benefit for Johnson85" bill that I have presented to my local legislators every year since Office space came out in 1999. And even though that is devestating to me personally and I think my local representatives are bigoted *** holes, I can kind of sort of see the argument that letting people make their own decisions about who they do and how many chicks, if any, are involved or how much money they require to do a job is very different from making a decision to interfere with people's personal decisions.
I don't think this is generally true. We could pass a policy where we euthanized the least healthy and most costly medicare patients, and there would be more winners than losers, but very few people would agree that's good policy. Certainly the harm from being told you aren't productive enough to work legally is not as extreme as being euthanized, but it's still pretty devestating.
The theory of free speech is as popular as it ever was. In practice, it is only disliked more among the far left as they have partially adopted a modern conservative view of being less favorable of speech they don't agree with. And even this is still weaker than the right has promoted for decades. The traditional liberal view has always been "I may disagree with what you day but I will fight to the death your right to say it". Conservatives have never agreed.
This is gobbledygook. You could plausibly say that in 2016, but not 2024. He has a record, and they like it. He didnt reduce corruption, he increased it, for him and his side, and they want more of that.
he is the epitome of the modern conservative.
well that says a lot about conservative beliefs
he does get credit from people who can't read a graph, or have no care for consistency. The people that think the economy completely turned around by Feb 2017 and completely turned back on Jan 7, 2021.
Always were
bias showing. Hillary was widely unliked, but only the far right thinks she was a horrible human. Biden is widely recognized as a good human being. I think Romeny isn't popular but most people saw him as a good person.
It's not if you understand modern conservatism.
Abortion drove a lot of "soccer moms" that saw it only as killing babies and otherwise were not staunchly conservatives. Now that the truth is understood, that abortion rights protects healthcare for all women, you see a major effect. It's not hard to understand, you either cast a loose net so that urgent decisions can be made with minimal govt interference, or you cast a tight one to prevent the maximum number of elective abortions but sweep in some cases of just medical problems and force "normal" Americans to get MTGs approval of their urgent medical care. Soccer moms are recoilling at the latter. The GOP is in a pickle because their base believes in a total ban and are not the type that will get the political problems with that. Trump himself will have to walk this mine field. He already doesn't know how to square that circle.
There's a lot of people who need to understand that working at McDonalds should never be a long term deal. Wages are typically based on skill and sometimes the risks involved. The most accomplished fry cook McDonald's has ever known is still doing a job that requires no life skills whatsoever.
^^^Clearly never heard the words "Bus on the lot!!!", or worse "Bus on the lot and it looks like senior citizens!!!!!!!!!!"
Mississippi should never follow California's lead in anything.
I'd call that opportunity cost. If they are putting up their savings, then obviously that's risk. Both deserve some govt incentives for the benefit of us all. I just don't think we do it right.
I tend to view it as entitlement. If someone learned a skill and now that skill is in demand and he can name his price, that's earned value and they deserve every penny. If someone cornered a market first but isn't currently adding value that millions of others couldn't do (Bezos, Facebook guy whos name escapes me for some reason, generic CEO), has a multitude of employees they don't share profit with, has the govt protecting their patent/market share/assets, etc. To me, that's not earned. I don't begrudge them the money, but I don't agree that they are "job creators", currently, who should pay less tax at my expense.
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