I just don't see this fast food worker being worth $15/hr(non-Vegas)

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS FACTS.
PLEASE DO NOT READ IF YOUR POLITICAL BIASES HAVE METASTASIZED INTO FACT INTOLERANCE!!!



In the 13 states that have raised their minimum wage at the beginning of 2014, jobs grew by 0.85 percent on average.
In the 37 states in which the minimum wage remained unchanged jobs grew by 0.61 percent on average.

Associated Press

Wow. When I need irrelevant comparisons, I will go to Chilly. What's next? States that have more people with blonde hair have higher employment? His/her/its position has no logic or sense to it.

One would need to know the context of what jobs are being created. If the jobs are in engineering, then the increase in the minimum wage is irrelevant

The argument from the right was increasing minimum wage would have a net decrease on jobs. That has never proved to be true throughout history ...and its not proving true now.

Its one thing to have an ideological viewpoint about minimum wage. We can agree to disagree. ...its something else when you ignore history, statistics, and facts. Its not worthwhile debating people who base their position on the Loch Ness Monster.

Think about what Chilli wrote PJ. Anybody can find some type of statistic to try and win a point, but the key point is relevancy. Why would employment go up when an employer has to pay more in wages and payroll taxes (and maybe other benefits)? Hoops is absolutely correct.

The argument was that if you increased the minimum wage it would decrease the number of minmum wage jobs, thus in the long run hurting the people it was supposed to help.

Example, A few years ago ther was an unused armory in the Bronx. A developer offered to convert it to an indoor mall with the potential for over 1,000 jobs. The Bronx has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. The politicians got involved and demanded a minimum wage of $10 an hour for those working in the mall. The developer cancelled the project

The armory is still vacant.

Raising minimum wage may not have made employment go up. It most certainly did not make it go down - which was the anchor of the right wing's argument against raising the minimum wage. Where are all the lost jobs we were told would come in the wake of this action? Anyone ?

People with minimum wage jobs in these states now have more money to buy goods and services - which does ultimately make employment go up albeit probably not this soon. And those workers are less likely to qualify for big government safety net programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps.

So if raising minimum wage doesn't have the apocalyptic effects on employment conservatives told us it would then what is the remaining argument against it? Its ok to be honest and admit you have an ideological objection to it. That's a better answer than telling a story about Big Foot.

Let's see what happens when raising minimum wage to $15 and how it affects inflation over a several year period. I will state again Chilly's statistic was completely irrelevant to the situation. No employer is going to have the incentive to want to hire more people when required wages and taxes are raised.

Most conservatives have a firm understanding that lowering taxes puts more money in your pocket ....which results in more money being spent in the economy. They have a much more difficult time understanding this same exact concept when that pocket money comes from increased wages.

I dont treat my spending dollars differently depending on their point of origin...but maybe conservatives do.

The CBO recently concluded that an increase of the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour likely would cost some jobs. CBO puts that figure at 500,000. That seems plausible to me.



But I think that the benefits that 16.5 million would reap, including the 900,000 who would emerge from poverty, would be worth that tradeoff.

The point worth taking from Friday's report by the Labor Department is that the various apocalypses that the GOP always predicts about Democratic economic policies (runaway inflation, unmanageable debt, soaring unemployment, collapse of stock market, tax increases causing a depression) are never correct.

Never.