Something to think about next time the pimple-faced, stoned, chuckling dumbass kid 'working' the drive through fucks up your simple, two-item order.
Are you kidding me? A forced minimum wage increase in the middle of a fucking recession? Jesus H. Christ the government is fucking stupid.
I'm going to hire an intern this fall from the University of Memphis, but if there was no minimum wage, I'd hire two, maybe three.
Happy hope and change, bitches! At least we can now answer the question 'what happens when you elect our most inexperienced leader ever during an economic crisis?'.
It was passed by the 2007 Congress. http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/04/pf/mininum_wage/ Geroge Bush's fucking veto pen appeared to be broke that day. The kicker is - whatever compromises he made will be overturned if they haven't already.
No, I mean people like me that got an education and gets up and busts their ass every day instead of expecting someone else to take care of them. You know the type...
One arguement I haven't seen get alot of play is that is a political move designed to punish the South and Mountain West. The Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast already have (State mandated) minimum wages higher and so this will have no effect on their economies as opposed to the South and Mountain West where this will drive up labor costs, slowing the migration of jobs and people from Blue to Red States..
Hmm. I notice from the chart that executive pay is heavily affected by overall GDP while other workers' pay is relatively stable. So, by starting your series during the low of the 90-91 recession, your "baseline" is a point in time when execs would have been relatively underpaid, thus exaggerating the actual difference in "gains," at least some of which must have been merely the restoration of "normal" executive pay following that recession. Of course, I'm just guessing here, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same chart was deliberately timed to end when it does for the same reason. Because it sure looks to me as if the gap was closing toward the end. Tell me, are you in on this deception, Rob, or are you merely another one of the deceived???
Just curious, on what basis was the first minimum wage law enacted? And don't say regulating interstate commerce, that's the excuse for everything!
I think they were trying to end child labor. Raising minimum wages always causes unemployment. Unemployed children is arguably okay. Since children were chased out of the workplace, modern wage increases mainly serve to keep young black males from finding entry-level jobs. What with the state of inner city public schools, it's not like they're going to have any actual skills, is it???
We don't even know if the chart accounts for inflation or not. In any case, all it shows is that when people went investor-crazy during the dot-com bubble, people were convinced that "geniuses of the industry" were in high demand and should be paid accordingly. Which begs the question, if the Twins can field a competitive baseball team each year, can companies find decent/great corporate officers on the cheap as well?
Uh... No. GDP isn't even on that chart. What the chart shows is that Executive Pay is heavily affected by Stock Prices, and not necessarily Corporate Profits. In fact from the chart it appears that there is an inverse relationship between Executive Pay and Corporate Profits. However that is just a snapshot so no real conclusions can be drawn from it.
Recessions are times when the economy needs to rearrange, to rebuild itself into something more efficient that can grow again. Constraints on that rebuilding process keep that from happening. Increasing taxes is bad because it takes investment capital out of the system. Not every new venture is prevented by higher taxes, of course, but during a recession, we should be trying to maximize the number that succeed. Government spending appears to be a good idea because it gets some people working, but it's really not. First, the government usually has to print or borrow money to make that happen. If the former, inflation results and people's savings are reduced in value. If the latter, the national debt increases and the government gets fatter when it should be getting leaner. In either case, the government injects capital into the marketplace to buy things people don't actually want; this results in competion with private firms for workers and resources, driving their prices up when they should be coming down. A new higher minimum wage kicking in right now is an additional constraint. You compassionate folks who like to think you're giving low earners a break are only partially right: you're giving those who are working currently (and who hold on to their jobs) a raise, but you're making it harder for companies to hire more minimum wage workers (because they're more expensive). Is this so difficult to understand? A firm has to spend money on people and other resources to operate and, after it sells its product or service, has to have a profit. If there's no profit, the business is losing money (costing more money to operate than it produces). The biggest cost for many businesses (including your small, neighborhood businesses that employ many, many people) is labor. If a business operating at its capacity finds itself unprofitable, it has three choices: decrease costs, or go out of business. If the answer is cutting costs, what will be the result? Think of this another way: a minimum wage is a bad idea simply because some jobs aren't worth that cost and even an employee who would CHOOSE to work for a lower wage CAN'T. The new federal wage is $7.25/hour. That means that anywhere there's a job worth $5 or $6/hour, the employer will choose to either (1) not do it [nobody gets the job] or (2) hire/retask someone earning more than the job is worth [increasing the costs of the business]. Neither of these outcomes is good. Let me give you an analogy. Suppose some well-intentioned Congresspeople got together and wrote a bill to protect the auto industry from "cutthroat pricing." The new law would set the minimum price for a new car--any car, sold anywhere--at $17,000. What would be the effect on new car sales? How many people would buy cars that formerly had MSRPs of $15,000? Bonus question: what do you suppose the carmakers will do to the prices of their cars that cost only a little more than $17,000? Long story short: lots of new constraints when the economy needs flexibility are bad.
Can anybody remember a time when the economy was this shaky and there was a minimum wage increase? Has it even happened? I'm not saying it hasn't, or was close, but something keeps telling me this jump and this particular economy might be the perfect storm. Once unemployment skyrockets, it's going to tank home builders and send out another blast like the one that started this whole fiasco. Where was one of Obama's passionate speeches about the 'no time left to discuss this'? Maybe there weren't any because it would hit him even harder after promising $9+ by 2011? This is about to be a clusterfuck.
It's true that GDP isn't on the chart. But it's also obvious that exec pay is far more volatile than other salaries, and the chart does begin during a recession when we should expect executive pay (and GDP, stock prices, etc.) to be lower. And even though it's just a snapshot (or should I say because it's just a snapshot?) the relative performance of volatile CEO pay is heavily dependent on when you choose as the starting point. And this starting point was obviously chosen by somebody who could have picked a lot of other starting points, but who, for some reason, chose this one. If the same chart was started in 2000 the same CEOs might look like heroes making sacrifices for the rest of us. Always, there is someone who knows exactly what he's doing behind these charts. He intends to manipulate someone -- usually liberals, since they seem to believe that anything they see on a chart is "proof" of something. It also seems to me that benefits are usually overlooked on these charts as well, even when it can be established that companies are actually paying considerably more real compensation to employees than mere paychecks suggest.
I'm sure you brilliant fellas will post us right out of this mess. Ring an egg timer or something when it's done, I'll be resting my eyes.
Another thing the chart doesn't show is that it was caps on Executive Pay imposed by President Bill Clinton that led to CEO pay skyrocketing. Another poster child for government-run business policy? Even Paladin became tired six months ago after echoing for the millionth time the axiom about unintended consequences. Unintended perhaps, but certainly not unforeseen. Link Anyway, it's a poor comparison to measure improvement in worker pay relative to CEO pay. The real point is deciding which system is better for everyone, not the measurement of the gap between top and bottom earners (the latter is most meaningful for populist politicians, and the credulous sheep that vote for them). Bad policies - such as Obamism and socialism, rely on some mythical person that doesn't exist in any significant quantity: selfless, honest, hard-working individuals who don't want what they didn't earn, and don't need a law to force them to pay their debts, because the moral obligation is sufficient in itself. [Basically, true conservatives (except for that bit about selfless, but at least we're honest about it).] High CEO pay is simply a necessary evil of a free-market system - the system that has repeatedly proven itself superior to all others. E.g. currently in the US the bottom half of earners pay no income taxes, and yet have a higher quality of life than their counterparts of past decades, pretty much all the way back to the beginning of time (today blessed with air conditioners, internet/cable, cars, and cell phones, to name a few, plus big-ticket indulgences like handicap ramps practically everywhere (some of which lead to nowhere), closed captioned PBS broadcasts in high def, safer workplaces, liberty to travel to 95% of the planet). Smart government policy (yes the Joker-in-Chief promised this lie too) would recognize the limits of government regulation, and pass smart regulation, not things like minimum wage laws (or the proposed higher payroll taxes) that will result in fewer total jobs as a direct, and foreseeable, consequence. To make these bad policy moves during a steep recession is beyond myopic- it borders on criminal stupidity.
You mean unemployment rose considerably during a month where Obama was President for a whole eleven days? Well, I'm convinced. That guy's worthless.
That chart shows -9.3% decrease in Federal Minimum Wage during '04-'05. Is this even possible? How unpopular that must've been. If that happened in Canada, I think politician's heads would roll.
