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Open thread June 6, 2014

Dan Crawford | June 6, 2014 12:21 pm

Tags: open thread Comments (6) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
6 Comments
  • Denis Drew says:
    June 6, 2014 at 3:11 pm

    Re: Finally a Chance for Facts to Decide (Min Wage) – NYTimes.com

    >>>For example, if the minimum wage were pegged to half the median full-time wage, eight cities would set it at a level exceeding $11 per hour.>>

    In every city and state in the US way back in 1968, at about half today’s per capita income, the minimum wage was $10.90 an hour.
    http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1.60&year1=1968&year2=2014

    >>>In the U.S., at its height in 1968, the minimum wage stood at 55 percent of the median full-time wage.<<<

    If we are talking about the same thing, in 1973, the US 50 percentile wage was $15.65 an hour — according to the 2012 book, "The State of Working America — 12th edition, table 4-4, p. 186.

    Instead of "trickle down" our progressive economists tend to play "ratchet down" — seeing as the not-too-far-from-natural-starting-point whatever deeply bottomed out state of wages America's fangless for generations (!) workforce has fallen to in our, what I call, "subsistence-plus" * labor market
    * http://ontodayspage.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-american-amoeba-economy-literal.html

    Real world market conditions: The 65% of McDonald's customers who go through the drive through in their $5/gallon burning four wheelers literally may not notice their family visit going from $24 to $30 — certainly wont care — the upshot of a $15 an hour federal minimum wage.

    And fast food would be by far the most extreme high example of minimum wage caused price increase. (PS. The 35% walking in the door will be enjoying an average $8,000 a year wage raise — figure it out.)

    Wal-Mart prices would rise all of 3.5% if labor costs rose 50%.

    I put the extreme left Marxists and the extreme right unfettered market theorists on the same plane: very convincing sounding theories that have nothing to do with real life (for the right and too many in the middle see just above). But our "slightly left of center" progressives cannot seem to escape their own version of the theoretical jungle — something like weathermen who wont look out the window.

  • Mike Meyer says:
    June 6, 2014 at 7:33 pm

    The minimum wage should be the same or close to what I, myself, earned in buying power for goods and services in the 60’s. 5 gallons of gas per hour or 4 packs of cigarettes per hour. ($1.25 per hour-gas 24.9 cents per gal- cigs $.35 per pack) Here in Wyoming that should be around $18-$20 per hour. California—much, much more, around $25 per hour.

  • Denis Drew says:
    June 7, 2014 at 5:17 pm

    New name for unfettered market believers: Marketists — as in Marxists. Get it? 🙂

  • Denis Drew says:
    June 7, 2014 at 5:59 pm

    Just occurred to me. Reading

  • Denis Drew says:
    June 7, 2014 at 6:14 pm

    Just occurred to me:
    In Ha-Joon Chang’s “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism” he explains that so many more people going to college isn’t really that big a plus for economic output — that you have to go only because everybody else goes; meaning without it you wont compete on a relative basis.

    He give the example of Switzerland (I think) having only 15% college educated up to 1990 — with about the highest worker productivity in the world — now up to 40%; same reason.

    What occurs to me is that if a college education is not that much of an INHERENT plus economically — then — the gigantically jumping costs of recent years are not justified even the slightest little bit. If everybody understood that — or had understood that all along — then, whatever has was added to college costs that has ballooned them so high and put everybody into such a giant hole (now there’s the mixed metaphor of the week) APPARENTLY FOR NO REASON could have been cut to the bone without hesitation.

    If only everyone had clearly understood. Is it too late?

  • Denis Drew says:
    June 7, 2014 at 6:59 pm

    To continue high-jacking this thread:
    Given that this generation’s unnecessarily (super) deep college debt was just that UNNECESSARY (see just above) — maybe that gives us an opening to give them extraordinary one-time relief (one-time assuming we can reverse the crazy high cost trend) — like putting all such debt under the Income Based Repayment Program (and not charging tax on unpaid at the end — should be easier in a presumably more sane 25 years from now).

    This generation after all has also been a victim of 30 years of Republicans getting every lastVoodoo economic wish (written 2001:
    80’s Reagan got his 25% across the board income tax cuts — building unprecedented peacetime debt – his dereg’ing savings and loans crashing the industry. ’90’s Sen. Gramm and friends tore down the Glass-Steagall Chinese wall between retail and investment banking – not without help from Clinton Democrats — setting the stage for our much troubled 2000s. ’90s Greenspan noted Wall Street partying too hard while failing to remove the punch bowl – the burst bubble end gave us the 2001 recession.

    2000’s Bush cleared away more financial reg’s — while smiling on little reg’ed shadow banking’s proliferation – converted Clinton budget surpluses into trillions in tax cuts for the better off — which cuts flooded by now much degreg’ed banks and never much reg’ed non-banks with too much savings to be lent to too many borrowers – inflating an oversize real estate bubble whose burst aftermath left said prolonged illiquidity contraction and said low demand dips — while trillions of piled up Reagan-Bush debt inhibit routine Keynesian easing of low demand dips with temporary deficit spending.

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