Seattle seeks to push minimum wage to $15!

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/campaign-seeks-push-seattle-minimum-wage-15-19997290

 Washington already has the nation's highest state minimum wage at $9.19 an hour. Now, there's a push in Seattle, at least, to make it $15.

That would mean fast food workers, retail clerks, baristas and other minimum wage workers would get what protesters demanded when they shut down a handful of city restaurants in May and others called for when they demonstrated nationwide in July.

So far, the City Council and mayoral candidates have said they'd consider it in the famously liberal city. One said, however, that it may not be soon.

Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer said there's no time to waste. What the nation needs is money in the hands of regular consumers. "A higher minimum wage is a very simple and elegant solution to the death spiral of falling demand that is the signature feature of our economy," he said.

Some businesses advocates say a higher minimum wage will make it harder for companies in Seattle to survive. They cite Wal-Mart, which has all but refused to accept a Washington, D.C., decision to raise the minimum wage to $12.50 an hour in big box stores.

A higher minimum wage eliminates low wage jobs because that's how small businesses cut costs and that ends up hurting the people it was supposed to benefit, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

More than 15 million workers earn the national minimum wage, making about $15,080 a year — $50 below the federal poverty line for a family of two. San Francisco currently has the highest minimum wage for all workers at $10.50 an hour.

Economist Chris Benner of the University of California at Davis does not agree that a higher minimum wage would lead to job losses.

"There may be some job impact in those small businesses themselves," he said. But in the entire economy, when you increase income to low-wage workers, it creates jobs because those workers are likely to spend their additional income and that increases demand for goods and services.

Benner also doubts a higher minimum wage would affect prices enough to scare away consumers. His research has shown that even a large increase in wages, like the proposal in Seattle, has only a 4 to 5 percent effect on prices.

One of those affected by a potential wage increase is Caroline Durocher, 21, who has been working low-wage jobs since high school. She has been working at a Seattle Subway restaurant for about a month, since she was fired by another chain shortly after participating in the minimum wage strike.

"I have co-workers who are single moms. I honestly don't know how they make it," said Durocher, who sleeps on her father's couch.

City Council member Nick Licata doesn't expect the issue to get any official traction soon. One of the council's most liberal members, he said there are other issues the council should tackle to help low-wage workers, including wage theft and affordable housing.

Pushing it forward before it can actually pass would kill he idea, he said.

One Seattle City council candidate has made the topic the centerpiece of her campaign.

Economist Kshama Sawant is basing her campaign on similar efforts in New York City and Washington, D.C. While saying her chances of getting elected are not great, she is pushing the rise in the minimum wage and said she is hearing about it on the campaign trail.

An alternative, yet politically mighty, weekly newspaper, the Stranger, has endorsed her idea.

"We're getting a huge echo for the idea," she said.

———

Contact Donna Blankinship at https://twitter.com/dgblankinship

==================================================================

How incredible.  It might take a while, but if this gets through, no hard working person in Seattle will every have to say that they live below the poverty line.  

Freedom state!

[Supersonic]

Good Lord..

[bgwah]

That's Seattle, not WA. And it won't happen.

Sawant will lose and Hanauer is a turd who threatens to vote R when he doesn't get his way.

[DC Al Fine]

Let the shift to capital from labour begin

[CatoMinor]

My condolences to the soon to be unemployed young and minorities if this goes through.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

That's Seattle, not WA. And it won't happen.

Sawant will lose and Hanauer is a turd who threatens to vote R when he doesn't get his way.

Fixed.  

And if it doesn't get through, at least the idea of it is out there and was viewed as a possibility in a major city.  

And why do Atlas Republicans love for people to be poor?  

[CatoMinor]

And why do Atlas Republicans love for people to be poor?  

Well if you are going to say that then I suppose a fair response is why, exactly, do you love for young people and minorities to be laid off and face a more difficult time in finding employment?

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

My condolences to the soon to be unemployed young and minorities if this goes through.

Yea.  I guess ownership is just going to flip all those burgers and work all those registers themselves.  Why not?  I mean, they're so great and so wonderful and so amazing because they make all that money and we all want to be just like them!

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

And why do Atlas Republicans love for people to be poor?  

Well if you are going to say that then I suppose a fair response is why, exactly, do you love for young people and minorities to be laid off and face a more difficult time in finding employment?

Why would I have to answer to something that is not going to happen?  Did you even read the article?

Economist Chris Benner of the University of California at Davis does not agree that a higher minimum wage would lead to job losses.

"There may be some job impact in those small businesses themselves," he said. But in the entire economy, when you increase income to low-wage workers, it creates jobs because those workers are likely to spend their additional income and that increases demand for goods and services.

Benner also doubts a higher minimum wage would affect prices enough to scare away consumers. His research has shown that even a large increase in wages, like the proposal in Seattle, has only a 4 to 5 percent effect on prices.

I trust economists far more than sheep who cling to archaic capitalistic principles and apologists for our disgusting income disparity. 

[Dereich]

My condolences to the soon to be unemployed young and minorities if this goes through.

Yea.  I guess ownership is just going to flip all those burgers and work all those registers themselves.  Why not?  I mean, they're so great and so wonderful and so amazing because they make all that money and we all want to be just like them!

Nah, what they'd do is make do with less. Fire as many employees as they could while still keeping the place open, raise prices where they could, and maybe shut down a day or cut back on the hours when they're open. Expecting them to just take it and pay higher wages without cutting back would be naive.

[CatoMinor]

[Lief 🗽]

Yes, it was the minimum wage increases fault for those increases in unemployment.

Not the Great Recession.

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

Look at the terrible effect hiking the minimum wage had on non-minimum wage earners too!


The path forward is clear: We must return the minimum wage to $5.15 per hour. America cannot be great again until it is legal to pay someone $200 for a full-time workweek. Let's do it for the children.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Look at the terrible effect hiking the minimum wage had on non-minimum wage earners too!


The path forward is clear: We must return the minimum wage to $5.15 per hour. America cannot be great again until it is legal to pay someone $200 for a full-time workweek. Let's do it for the children.

It typically has a measurable negative effect on nobody.  The only effect it can have is an empowered working class, and this is obviously at odds with the richest and most diabolical owners who have no desire to see such a thing happen.  Naive?  I think the only naive thing to think is that the worst CEOs and Wall Street 1%ers have good intentions for the rest of us. 

[memphis]

My condolences to the soon to be unemployed young and minorities if this goes through.

Yea.  I guess ownership is just going to flip all those burgers and work all those registers themselves.  Why not?  I mean, they're so great and so wonderful and so amazing because they make all that money and we all want to be just like them!

Nah, what they'd do is make do with less. Fire as many employees as they could while still keeping the place open, raise prices where they could, and maybe shut down a day or cut back on the hours when they're open. Expecting them to just take it and pay higher wages without cutting back would be naive.

I've put in plenty of time in food service. Management already schedules as few people as possible. They don't have people on the clock just for the heck of it or out of benevolence. They always have as few as possible to meet demand. The point of this exercise is to increase demand, so that management will, in turn, have to hire more people. Labor usually runs <20% of sales, but that includes at least one salaried manager. Hourly folks are at most 15% of sales. It's not like a Big Mac would need to cost $10 to cover the difference. There are several countries with a high minimum wage, and most have notably lower unemployment than we do. To say nothing of all the tax money we have to spend to help these folks and all the shady crap they have to do to make ends meet.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

You see?  All some people can look at is the near-doubling of the federal minimum wage and how that can only be disastrous to have such a massive increase, when in reality, $7 an hour in a country as wealthy as America is peanuts.  How about we look at the reality?  

$15/hour at 40 hrs a week = $600/week = $31,200/yr at a 15% income tax bracket.  Take home pay of about $26,500.  That's a full-time worker, friends.  Only a Republican can think of this as disastrously excessive.  

I know, I know.  A teenager working at McDonald's doesn't need $26,000 a year; what a tragedy of economics.  But the private jets, golden toilets, numerous mansions, hundreds of cars, and year-round Caribbean retreats belonging to the wealthiest of the wealthy as they do nothing to reinvest that wealth is all good and dandy... a testament to the wonderful fruits of capitalism we can all achieve if we just keep pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps and reaching for the stars!  What tripe. 

[Lief 🗽]

Either way these people are going to have to get enough money to live. It'll either be from the state (through food stamps, medicaid, etc.) or through increased salaries. It's too bad that the Democrats are the only ones supporting free market capitalism here, while the Republicans embrace socialism and welfare dependence.

[memphis]

Either way these people are going to have to get enough money to live. It'll either be from the state (through food stamps, medicaid, etc.) or through increased salaries. It's too bad that the Democrats are the only ones supporting free market capitalism here, while the Republicans embrace socialism and welfare dependence.

That's a dishonest appraisal. You could count the number of Ds in Congress who would support this on hand. This is a Bernie Sanders (a man who isn't even a Dem) type idea, not something Barack Obama would advocate.

[Lief 🗽]

Either way these people are going to have to get enough money to live. It'll either be from the state (through food stamps, medicaid, etc.) or through increased salaries. It's too bad that the Democrats are the only ones supporting free market capitalism here, while the Republicans embrace socialism and welfare dependence.

That's a dishonest appraisal. You could count the number of Ds in Congress who would support this on hand. This is a Bernie Sanders (a man who isn't even a Dem) type idea, not something Barack Obama would advocate.

Well, yeah, it was tongue in cheek. But these businesses who pay below subsistence wages are massively subsidized by the government, and those who regularly rail against socialism or welfare culture don't seem to care.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Either way these people are going to have to get enough money to live. It'll either be from the state (through food stamps, medicaid, etc.) or through increased salaries. It's too bad that the Democrats are the only ones supporting free market capitalism here, while the Republicans embrace socialism and welfare dependence.

It's not about principle or care for anybody Lief, and you know that.  Those who pull the strings in the GOP have only an empowered working class to fear.  THAT'S what keeps them up at night.  

Plus, government dependence will keep them at the bare minimum of getting by.  People will have to keep scraping the bottom of the barrel of what the state can supply them.  Completely depressing and demoralizing, which is of course, central to the plan.  

[Small Business Owner of Any Repute]

I know, I know.  A teenager working at McDonald's doesn't need $26,000 a year; what a tragedy of economics.  But the private jets, golden toilets, numerous mansions, hundreds of cars, and year-round Caribbean retreats belonging to the wealthiest of the wealthy as they do nothing to reinvest that wealth is all good and dandy... a testament to the wonderful fruits of capitalism we can all achieve if we just keep pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps and reaching for the stars!  What tripe. 

I haven't seen a teenager working at McDonalds in a very long time.

[opebo]

Let the shift to capital from labour begin

Yes - that is precisely what we want to encourage.  Increase investment, reduce inequality, and increase consumption.  Its a winning situation for everyone but the vampiric elite.

I guess ownership is just going to flip all those burgers and work all those registers themselves.  Why not?  I mean, they're so great and so wonderful and so amazing because they make all that money and we all want to be just like them!

Nah, what they'd do is make do with less. Fire as many employees as they could while still keeping the place open, raise prices where they could, and maybe shut down a day or cut back on the hours when they're open. Expecting them to just take it and pay higher wages without cutting back would be naive.

You're being naive.  It is utter nonsense that a corporate poison-machine like a fast food restaurant or a dollar store or big-box store would ever close down 'to save hours'.  Think about it - you've invested millions upon millions in the machine, and get all the products from china or the like, and you're going to shut down this whole vicious process just because you have pay the tiny skeleton staff at the American end of the racket a few hundred more dollars a month?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The principal effect on employment of a city minimum wage law like the one proposed in Seattle is to encourage businesses that employ labor that could be paid less to relocate elsewhere, if that is possible.  Now obviously, relocation is not something that can be done instantaneously.  Indeed, for many small businesses the effect will likely not be that they themselves move, but that in the course of the usual churn of small businesses opening and closing, the openings will be encouraged to take place outside the city limits, while because of higher labor costs within the city limits, profits and/or sales will be lower than outside the city causing businesses within the city to have a higher rate of closure.  Problem is, the longer term you forecast the effects of an economic change the greater the degree to which biases in what the effects should be are likely to crop up in the analysis.

I'd be interested to know on what sort of time frame this Chris Benner has chosen to model and what his assumptions are. Other than his CV indicates he likely has a left of center viewpoint, I wasn't able to find much with a quick google. Still, while I did not glean much insight into the biases of Dr. Benner, this has shown the biases of some posters here by their determination to hang everything upon the effects predicted by one economics professor who hasn't been notable enough in his field to warrant even a stub article on Wikipedia. If you're going to play the appeal to authority card, it helps if you actually have an authority to appeal to.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

I know, I know.  A teenager working at McDonald's doesn't need $26,000 a year; what a tragedy of economics.  But the private jets, golden toilets, numerous mansions, hundreds of cars, and year-round Caribbean retreats belonging to the wealthiest of the wealthy as they do nothing to reinvest that wealth is all good and dandy... a testament to the wonderful fruits of capitalism we can all achieve if we just keep pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps and reaching for the stars!  What tripe. 

I haven't seen a teenager working at McDonalds in a very long time.

Doesn't mean the right won't and doesn't push that narrative, which is precisely what I was ridiculing in that paragraph, no? 

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

The principal effect on employment of a city minimum wage law like the one proposed in Seattle is to encourage businesses that employ labor that could be paid less to relocate elsewhere, if that is possible.  Now obviously, relocation is not something that can be done instantaneously.  Indeed, for many small businesses the effect will likely not be that they themselves move, but that in the course of the usual churn of small businesses opening and closing, the openings will be encouraged to take place outside the city limits, while because of higher labor costs within the city limits, profits and/or sales will be lower than outside the city causing businesses within the city to have a higher rate of closure.  Problem is, the longer term you forecast the effects of an economic change the greater the degree to which biases in what the effects should be are likely to crop up in the analysis.

I'd be interested to know on what sort of time frame this Chris Benner has chosen to model and what his assumptions are. Other than his CV indicates he likely has a left of center viewpoint, I wasn't able to find much with a quick google. Still, while I did not glean much insight into the biases of Dr. Benner, this has shown the biases of some posters here by their determination to hang everything upon the effects predicted by one economics professor who hasn't been notable enough in his field to warrant even a stub article on Wikipedia. If you're going to play the appeal to authority card, it helps if you actually have an authority to appeal to.

Yea... and googling Steve Forbes will give you millions of hits.