$15 Minimum Wage

[angelfromanotherpin]

Will 15$ minimum wage cause fast food prices to rise?

Asked and answered, earlier in the thread?

Purdue did a study that suggested fast food prices would go up 4-5% if the minimum wage went to $15. So a $4 Big Mac would jump to ~$4.17.

[Occluded Sun]

Governments can also destroy value counters, it's called taxes.

No, it would be burning money, melting coins, and deleting database entries of certain kinds. Not taxation.

[Pseudo Stupidity]

Governments can also destroy value counters, it's called taxes.

No, it would be burning money, melting coins, and deleting database entries of certain kinds. Not taxation.

Somebody who's better at economics than me could explain this more clearly, but I'll give it a shot.



Can the government print money when it wants to? If yes, the government has infinity of the currency it produces (not that it would ever PRINT that much, and there's a hard limit eventually because paper and shit).

What is infinity + all the taxes that government collects? Still infinity.

The government can, at any point in time, just stop releasing the money it collects. Those bills still exist, but since they aren't in circulation nobody fucking cares and they are effectively destroyed. Taxes aren't doing anything for the infinity dollars the government has, it just absorbs that money back into itself.

Note: this is not to say taxes aren't important and necessary, this is to say the government can choose not to release the taxes it collects and that is essentially destroying that money. The amount of US currency the USA has is fucking infinity if it wants it to be because the money is colored paper the US government gives to people.

[hyzmarca]

A basic income that's sufficient to cover basic needs such that people don't have to work shitty low-pay jobs just to survive.

Wrong. You can't conjure money into existence out of nothing, and those unpleasant jobs still need to be done. They're low-pay because supply outstrips demand.

Well yes, that's why it's called wealth redistribution. You take money from rich people in the form of taxes and give it to poor people. That's the point.

And the unpleasant jobs will pay more once demand vastly outstrips supply.

[Occluded Sun]

Finally someone acknowledges supply-and-demand.

But you can't control demand, which leaves supply as the only manipulable variable. And we're currently vastly increasing the supply of workers available for all the low-level jobs by tolerating illegal immigration.

[angelfromanotherpin]

But you can't control demand...

Except that you so can. It's been done. A lot.

And we're currently vastly increasing the supply of workers available for all the low-level jobs by tolerating illegal immigration.

We are?

[Occluded Sun]

We are?

Looking at the deportation stats is meaningless without looking at how many people are sneaking over the border. The absolute numbers aren't nearly as important as the relative proportions.

[angelfromanotherpin]

You, of course, have a citation that suggests that 'the relative proportions' support your statement. I'm sure that failing to provide it was just a memory lapse.

[Occluded Sun]

What would I need a citation for when I understand basic mathematics?

[Maj]

A basic income that's sufficient to cover basic needs such that people don't have to work shitty low-pay jobs just to survive.

Wrong. You can't conjure money into existence out of nothing, and those unpleasant jobs still need to be done. They're low-pay because supply outstrips demand.

If customers had more money, they could spend it - which lower classes do. That would increase demand.

Jobs are low pay because people aren't valued. In free market capitalism, wages are a race to the bottom.

[Omegonthesane]

What would I need a citation for when I understand basic mathematics?

In case you hadn't noticed, you need inputs to apply basic mathematics to a fucking problem.

[Koumei]

Also, I'd argue there's no evidence that OC understands basic maths. That's not the sort of claim we can just take on good faith here.

[DSMatticus]

A consumer class capable of enough domestic spending to make the creation of new firms - and the expansion of existing ones - profitable.

Wrong. You can't simply create new jobs out of nothing. Economics doesn't mix well with busywork.

"There exists sufficient economic demand to incentivize people to allocate resources to the creation of new firms" is not creating jobs out of nothing. Your unspoken hypothesis - unspoken because speaking it would open it to fairly trivial disproval and mockery - is that there exists a supply-side crisis and that there is a shortage of investable funds to allocate because government is a big ol' meanie pants. Growing a pair of balls and saying that would get you instantly shat on as an idiot who'd never looked at a set of economic stats in their life, and I'm not really interested in tip-toeing around this with a cowardly moron, so let's just cut to the "Occluded Sun is wrong, here's why" thing.

Interest rates are rock bottom. If there were truly a shortage of investable funds, basic supply and demand would necessitate competition over those investable funds in the form of high returns, i.e. high interest rates. In reality, there is so much money flooding into government bonds and other safe havens that the interest rates in the developed world are basically zero - sometimes even negative, with people losing money in real terms. People would genuinely rather pay the governments of first-world nations to hold their cash than invest it anywhere in the world.

The fact of the matter is that Say's law is bullshit. People do not invest money in businesses simply because they have money in their pockets. People invest money in businesses because they expect it to provide them a return on their money greater than other alternatives, because that's how rational actors fucking work. Right now, investors are choosing to put their money in low return government bonds and not into the creation of new businesses. And since the returns on government bonds are currently fucking awful, that immediatelly tells us that investors expect returns on investing in new businesses to be even fucking worse than that, so they won't do it.

Say was a naive idiot who handwaved away the notion that people would ever hoard money in order to create his utopian fantasy of self-balancing economies. Unfortunately, reality is a cruel and persistent mistress, and closing your eyes and going la-la-la doesn't actually make it go away. People do hoard money, all the time, and there are plenty of circumstances where it is completely rational to do so.

[hyzmarca]

Finally someone acknowledges supply-and-demand.

But you can't control demand, which leaves supply as the only manipulable variable. And we're currently vastly increasing the supply of workers available for all the low-level jobs by tolerating illegal immigration.

I agree. We should also give a basic income to illegal immigrants.

[TarkisFlux]

Finally someone acknowledges supply-and-demand.

But you can't control demand, which leaves supply as the only manipulable variable. And we're currently vastly increasing the supply of workers available for all the low-level jobs by tolerating illegal immigration.

I agree. We should also give a basic income to illegal immigrants.

I hadn't heard this or given this angle much thought before. What's the argument for doing so?

[erik]

That they are also humans? That paying them less incentivizes exploitation by employers?

[Pseudo Stupidity]

Also, poor people will immediately turn around and spend their money in the economy. A dollar given to a poor person will be spent somewhere, and whatever gets into the hands of other poor people will be spent somewhere, and whatever of that gets into the hands of another poor person will be spent somewhere, and so on until all the money gets to not-poor people.

All evidence suggests that if you gave every single poor person, legal or not, a thousand bucks a month the economy would be significantly better. And people would be happier, crime would drop, education would improve, hospital visits would drop, and everything would be all-around better.

There is no reason to dislike giving money to the poor except "fuck them I've got mine," and, if you're a minimum wage giver, "I love poverty wages!"

But if you're a minimum wage giver I offer you my sincerest Fuck You. Fuck you. I hope you go out of business and become poor. Then I hope the government gives you money because holy shit, nobody should have to go hungry or be homeless. Even you, you callous wank-sock.

[Koumei]

But if you're a minimum wage giver I offer you my sincerest Fuck You. Fuck you. I hope you go out of business and become poor. Then I hope the government gives you money because holy shit, nobody should have to go hungry or be homeless. Even you, you callous wank-sock.

That is a marvellous paragraph and deserves to be framed or something.

[Occluded Sun]

Let's see. A thousand dollars a month is twelve thousand dollars a year. There are at least three hundred twenty one million people in the US at present. Even if we exclude children - say, three hundred million people - that's 3.6 trillion dollars. Which is more than half the total budget of US government, federal and state and local combined.

[angelfromanotherpin]

You're underestimating. There are currently ~73.6 million children (age 0-17) in the U.S. So it's more like 2.96 trillion.

And yes, it's a big number. Very few numbers that involve the entirety of a very big country are not big.

[Maj]

I think they'd give money according to household. And there are 117,538,000 of those (the US population is 318.9 million, 23.3% of that are under 18).

[TarkisFlux]

I should have clarified, because I asked that terribly above. I was half asleep and stubbornly refusing to lie down. Apologies

Yes, everyone here needs to have basic income, because giving moneys to the poor does all kinds of great things and is way more effective than other distribution schemes. Plus, when productivity / automation advances a bit farther and reaching max employment isn't realistic or possible, a lot of people are going to be poor. The idea that people must work to exist needs to die, quickly.

And yes, it should go to everyone here, documented or undocumented, because wage exploitation is a terrible thing. There might be other ways around that, but this is almost certainly the easiest and probably best one.

That said, offering it to every immigrant is offering a pretty substantial reason to get in (assuming other countries haven't followed along), by whatever means necessary. I want to know what we gain from the potential immigration influx to offset the increased "cost" (in quotes, because fiat moneys and other ways to "pay" for it). I'm reasonably okay with getting nothing out of the deal aside from a bunch of happier people because I'm not just in it for mine, I just want to know what to expect in advance. Or would it just not happen, because other reasons I haven't thought about?

[Orca]

For what it's worth, the current usa illegal immigrant population is stable, not increasing. I can't imagine that'd continue to be true if some sort of basic income was extended to them, but the chance of that happening is remote enough that debating it seems kind of silly.

[Pseudo Stupidity]

The thing is our economy really does get huge growth out of people spending money and that money going into the hands of OTHER people who spend money. If we had a sufficiently progressive tax system there would be no reason to think an illegal coming over and spending their free money in the economy would cause harm, it would actually create more demand and that would create more jobs and that would create more prosperity. Then you'd have fewer people requiring government money and more people working and everything would be fucking amazing.

The issue is we do not have a progressive enough tax system and we do not give poor people money to spend. The economy thrives if money is being spent; giving money to the poor is literally never the problem for an economy. Find me a single source that says otherwise or I will laugh at you.

[Blade]

Another potential problem, (from what I've been told, I haven't studied this in detail to see if it's true or if it's bogus) that is probably less important in the US than in EU countries, is that some part of the money you give will be spent outside of the country.

Whenever people buy a Samsung phone, while a part of the money stays in the country, another part goes to Korea, China and other places. If too much of that money goes outside, and nobody from the outside buys stuff from you country, then you'll be spending a lot of money for very little return.