Walmart Giving All Employees a Raise to $10/Hour

[AggregateDemand]

That will only happen if MBA falsehoods about the minimum wage are true. It's quite likely Wal-Mart will see a huge growth in revenue similar to Costco and will not follow through with plans to terminate employees.

You are so far out of your league, it's scary.

The extenuating circumstances necessary to negate the effects of a binding price floor are rare. Why subject people to this kind of needless risk?

If you want higher wages, focus on the extenuating circumstances necessary to raise wages. In this case, Walmart may be dealing with worker turnover, trouble recruiting, etc. You can't punish companies for hiring people, and then accuse them of creating a nefarious pseudo-economic theory to explain their reluctance to hire or pay.

[AggregateDemand]

What I'm getting at isn't that OH NO WE CAN'T RAISE IT TO $15/HR THAT IS TOO RADICAL AND SOCIALISTIC but that a raise in minimum wage is not the end all be all of solving the poverty of the working class.

It's not the be all and end all because it is a relatively worthless strategy. It's just an incredibly lazy way to buy votes without spending a penny or developing any worthwhile social programs or tax schemes. It's the laziest lie humanity has ever bought into, besides the myth that pickup trucks make the middle class service sector employee much productive and prosperous.

Furthermore, the cost of labor isn't actually $15 per hour. It's closer to $17 when you consider company-side FICA, FUTA and state unemployment. If you add healthcare for a family of four, wages for full-time employees are closer to $25. Companies shell-out $25 an hour to have an employee who pockets about $12 every paycheck. It's a miracle they care enough to hire anyone for unskilled entry-level positions.

The rent is too damn high because you're paying $25/hr for labor, plus imputed wages, taxes, healthcare, and compliance costs on every good and service provided by someone else.

This is the story of America:
Employer: Random Insurance Company
Box 1: $43,000
Box 12 Code D: $4200 (matched by the company)
Box 12 Code DD: $22,000
Boxes 2,4,6: -$7500

Taxpayer: My pay is too low. I'm voting Democrat, even though they are responsible for box 2,4,6 and for turning Box 1 into Box 12 Code DD. Freedumb!!

[AggregateDemand]

Here's a fun riddle: The cost of installing self-checkout lanes is only about $30,000; automated food ordering tech can cost even less than that. The tech is currently much less expensive than hiring a human to do it, and it's been that way for quite some time.

So: If self-checkout lanes are such a great money-saver for businesses, why aren't there more of them now?

Hint: It has something to do with the fact that most people simply don't like using self-checkout lanes.

Robots are only cheaper than humans, if you bury humans in FICA taxes and healthcare mandates, and forcing people to pay excise tax to fund roads (robots don't pay it, but they benefit from roads), rather than paying for roads with a broad economic income tax. 

Thanks, Democrats. Torpid little regressives with zero shame and even less brains.

[AggregateDemand]

Predictably, you are completely incorrect. Robots are cheaper than humans, even if the tax rate is zero; one self-checkout lane replaces more than one cashier because machines don't stop at a 40 hour week. Also: Your insults are not productive nor are they welcome on this forum.

You need to run the numbers again. An experienced low-skill worker is more efficient than inexperienced shoppers interfacing with automated checkout machines, especially if you consider the impact on aggregate demand caused by sagging employment rates and participation. Furthermore, automated machines are not a theft deterrent so people are still necessary to deter theft by patrons and monitor the machines to stop malfunctions and keep them stocked with cash and other supplies.

The primary reason we have a burgeoning machine workforce is because Democrats are shameless about taxing labor, thus, imposing imputed taxes on goods and services, while also handicapping human labor with other regulations like minimum wage. If they showed the same disrespect to machines, pocket calculators wouldn't survive the cull.

It's just a matter of regressive thinking and inept government policy.

[AggregateDemand]

I'm always amused to see the right insist they prefer Welfare over Working as the cure for poverty.

Refunding the inhumane taxes you impose on your slave workers is not Welfare. Even if the refund were larger than the tax liability, to relieve the imputed taxes on the goods and services they purchase, it still wouldn't be Welfare.

Welfare is teaching people to rely on the government by punishing them for aspiring to independence. Democrats have never stopped using this form of social control. Setting people free is difficult and unrealistic, and it upsets your economic ambitions.

We get it.

[AggregateDemand]

You all have to excuse AggregateDemand, guys. He was abandoned as a child and raised by a self-checkout machine. The subject of their uselessness leaves him slightly more defensive and less unemotional than usual. Luckily, an associate has been notified to assist us.

I find it tragic and inexcusable that certain political operators are so inept, they'd jeopardize access to employment. Maybe it's a joke to you, but it's not a joke to me.

Work was not hard to find, when I was a teenager. Work wasn't my favorite pastime, but it gave me money to get out of the house, buy things, and save a bit for school. Labor force participation for teens is down 30% since then. Meanwhile, labor force participation for the olds has doubled, thanks to lavish income subsidies and healthcare hand outs. The CBO has been whining for Social Security and Medicare reform during the entire debauched socioeconomic shift, but the clowns in Washington just crack more jokes about Boomerang kids.

Now people have to worry about being replaced by robots, as if offshoring wasn't enough to worry about. Maybe this is a joke to you, watching the US fall to pieces and borrow money from people who can't even vote yet. I don't find it amusing.

[AggregateDemand]

Yeah, we know that, but AD is clutching his pearls at the idea that poor innocent teenagers want to work for $5/hr but because of the minimum wage of $7.25 they are unable to find these jobs. This is not true.

You think irrationality is synonymous with lack of omniscience.

Furthermore, work is difficult to find, though, such declarations should be obviated by sagging wages, high unemployment for the under-24 demo, and falling labor force participation rate.

You've offered nothing other than an incorrect opinion from the outset.

[AggregateDemand]

So I just tell the fast food place by my work that has had a NOW HIRING sign up for months now on the side of their building that the problem is not that nobody wants to work there but that their jobs really don't exist because a guy on an internet says the data doesn't show they do.

First of all, now hiring just means they are willing to replace someone who lacks the credentials they prefer.

Second, if no one wants to work there, and they aren't raising wages, or they require a decade of economic planning before raising wages (like Walmart), they obviously believe there are plenty of people who are searching for work.

As I said before, these anecdotes are pointless. We have piles of macro data that all indicate declining employment opportunity and slumping earning power for the lower middle class.

[AggregateDemand]

AggregateDemand existing is an interesting social experiment. His thought process appears to be of someone who completely skipped K-12 school, and all the experiences that comes with it, skipped undergraduate work, and just straight up earned a Masters in Finance. He his knowledge tree begins and ends at the borders of an economics textbook.

What's not amusing about the situation is that I'm the one who works in the industry, maintains my own business, and has academic/professional credentials to my name.

I didn't skip K-12. It seems I'm one of the few people who learned something after 12th grade.

[AggregateDemand]

Except how not to speak like a condescending a#%hole who consistently demonstrates he knows far far less than he thinks he does. But good show and all that.

I don't start pissing contests. I just win them. Now quit being such a sore loser, and show some respect.