How can we protect people's social class?

[Julia_Mae]

You can’t just use stats to prove a minimum wage increase leads to unemployment. You have to have theory. Correlation is not causation.

And theory is wotrhless without data to show that the theory is sound.

Please post some data. Increases in minimum wage do not lead to increases in the rate of unemployment.

 

[Julia_Mae]

Okay, I looked up my own data. Between 1990-2000, the minimum wage was raised significantly twice. During that same period, there was a major trend DOWNWARD in the unemployment rate. I don’t think it started until late in 1991or early 1992, which would have given time for the wage increases to be instituted and start to take effect.

 

[Edward_H]

Really? Well, you take out the guys and the girls they would have taken with them and the rest of us so busy trying to get the war stopped and bring them home the last thing we cared about was going to the movies. That’s a rather large percentage of the largest movie-going demographic.

And the number of people staying home to watch color TV was a very large majority of the movie-going public. Had nothing whatsoever to do with the minimum wage.

That’s not data, theory, it’s worse than urban myth. It’s SWAG.

 

[Edward_H]

Okay, I looked up my own data. Between 1990-2000, the minimum wage was raised significantly twice. During that same period, there was a major trend DOWNWARD in the unemployment rate. I don’t think it started until late in 1991or early 1992, which would have given time for the wage increases to be instituted and start to take effect.

I said at the margin. Your macro numbers are completely ignorant of what goes on to people way at the bottom of the wage scale. My goodness.

 

[JIB]

Okay, I looked up my own data. Between 1990-2000, the minimum wage was raised significantly twice. During that same period, there was a major trend DOWNWARD in the unemployment rate. I don’t think it started until late in 1991or early 1992, which would have given time for the wage increases to be instituted and start to take effect.

Of course there’s no way to know what the unemployment rate would have been otherwise. You don’t have a control in an economy to use to prove a hypothesis. You can’t simply say, “Well, the minimum wage went up and unemployment went down” and then come to a conclusion. Well, I guess you could, but it would be sloppy economics.

If I said states with higher minimum wage rates than the federal rate had higher unemployment I’d be right (the only states with unemployment over 10% have higher minimum wages than the federal government requires). But that wouldn’t prove unemployment is caused by higher minimum wages.

 

[fakename]

Except it doesn’t say that. Paying people above their returned value to a business isn’t “just”.

Putting people in homes they can’t pay for isn’t just. It’s especially not just to charge everyone else for someone’s imaginary sense of justice.

But what about this:

“Langenstein, in the fourteenth century, is more specific; for he declares that anyone can ascertain the just price of the wares that he has to sell by referring to the cost of living of one in his station in life”

and

“Remuneration for work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family on the material, social, cultural and spiritual level, taking into account the role and the productivity of each, the state of the business, and the common good.”

And of course anything dignified has to do with his station in life.

 

[JIB]

But what about this:

“Langenstein, in the fourteenth century, is more specific; for he declares that anyone can ascertain the just price of the wares that he has to sell by referring to the cost of living of one in his station in life”

and

“Remuneration for work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family on the material, social, cultural and spiritual level, taking into account the role and the productivity of each, the state of the business, and the common good.”

And of course anything dignified has to do with his station in life.

The first one assumes there is a just price. There is no such thing. Cardinal Juan de Lugo wrote " ‘Just price’ depends on so many factors that it can be known only to God."

The second quote is correct. Of course, “productivity” doesn’t seem to be well understood by most people. A guy flipping burgers is not very productive and thus cannot earn very much money. Forcing a business to pay him above his marginal revenue productivity is unjust.

 

[Edward_H]

But what about this:

“Langenstein, in the fourteenth century, is more specific; for he declares that anyone can ascertain the just price of the wares that he has to sell by referring to the cost of living of one in his station in life”

and

“Remuneration for work should guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for himself and his family on the material, social, cultural and spiritual level, taking into account the role and the productivity of each, the state of the business, and the common good.”

And of course anything dignified has to do with his station in life.

Good homework…but you can proof text your way through tens of thousands of Catholic scholars over 2000 years and find isolated passages supporting just about any position in the universe.

But none of those taken in isolation compel any sort of moral conclusion on the part of the Church’s faithful. That you found so little in support seems to argue against it.

 

[Julia_Mae]

That’s not data, theory, it’s worse than urban myth. It’s SWAG.

Cook, David A. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000.

Bart, Peter. Who Killed Hollywood? Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999.

 

[Julia_Mae]

I said at the margin. Your macro numbers are completely ignorant of what goes on to people way at the bottom of the wage scale. My goodness.

“People way at the bottom of the wage scale,” aren’t affected by Federal minimum wage laws, Edward. My goodness.

Unemployment does not rise when the minimum wage is increased. Prove it does, because you are the one who keeps saying it. What does increase, slightly, are consumer prices. But not in any major way.

You want to know what causes unemployment? You go find out who controls the money supply. Then you come back and talk to me.

 

[Julia_Mae]

Of course there’s no way to know what the unemployment rate would have been otherwise. You don’t have a control in an economy to use to prove a hypothesis. You can’t simply say, “Well, the minimum wage went up and unemployment went down” and then come to a conclusion. Well, I guess you could, but it would be sloppy economics.

I agree entirely. And if the unemployment rate had happened to go up, it wouldn’t necessarily be related to the minimum wage at all.

BUT (almost) EVERYONE BELIEVES THIS - they think it “makes sense” - they believe it so much that if you say, “No, there’s no evidence of that” they look at you like you must be stupid because it makes sense to them. It’s simple. And heaven forbid anyone spend time educating themselves about how economics actually works.

How about if everyone ITT reads this article and comes back to discuss it-

The oldest propaganda technique is to repeat a lie emphatically and often until it is taken for the truth. Something like this is going on now with regard to banks and the financial crisis. The big bank boosters and analysts who should know better are repeating the falsehood that repeal of Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with the Panic of 2008.

• when they know what Glass-Steagall is.

We invited the pirates aboard ship and gave them the keys to the treasure chests because no one knew enough to start screaming when the repeal came up. Everyone go back and find out who voted for the repeal. Then you’ll start to know who is to blame.

 

[Edward_H]

“People way at the bottom of the wage scale,” aren’t affected by Federal minimum wage laws, Edward. My goodness.

Unemployment does not rise when the minimum wage is increased. Prove it does, because you are the one who keeps saying it. What does increase, slightly, are consumer prices. But not in any major way.

You want to know what causes unemployment? You go find out who controls the money supply. Then you come back and talk to me.

The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core
proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human
choice behavior is sufficiently rational to allow predictions to be made. Just as
no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” no self-respecting economist
would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment.
Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is
even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists
can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a
handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we
have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.”
************************* - Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan

 

[Edward_H]

And, pray tell, what happens to the money that now goes to a higher forced wage? Where else would that have gone?M and whose job would it have paid for?

This is the herpes of liberal minded politics. The error in their thinking just never goes away. They never look at the systemic effects. Static analysis only; narrow views of effects.

The government forces a wage. Normally wages are nothing but “prices”…but now they have this artificial political emotional component slapped on to them, gumming up the embedded information that is contained in things like prices and wages.

 

[LilyM]

And, pray tell, what happens to the money that now goes to a higher forced wage? Where else would that have gone?

Ummm … Most of it gets recycled back into the economy via those higher paid workers spending more on goods and services. Likely at those same businesses that are paying their workers the higher wages that enable them to do so. It’s not like it all goes out of the employer’s pocket into a great big puff of smoke that disappears into the ether or anything.

 

[Edward_H]

Ummm … Most of it gets recycled back into the economy via those higher paid workers spending more on goods and services. Likely at those same businesses that are paying their workers the higher wages that enable them to do so. It’s not like it all goes out of the employer’s pocket into a great big puff of smoke that disappears into the ether or anything.

At the end of the day my money buys less value. Period. And the overall economy has less, because we have inflated the value of someone’s work.

 

[Edward_H]

Maybe you’re operating under an assumption that increase will be eaten by the employer? Not so. It will get passed on, across the board, faster than an air from a bubble in a lake gets absorbed into the atmosphere.

So…name a product or service that we buy more of when the price gets jacked up? Apart from trendy products it doesn’t happen.

And you also need to consider what is no longer bought in that store because the grocery bill seems to be creeping higher. Few absolute goods bought, less demand for those products, and the employer supplying those no longer bought items, produces less, trims up his or her labor schedule. Etc.

 

[Edward_H]

I find the language of this thread wrong-headed.

As Catholics we don’t have any obligation to protect anyone’s ‘class’. Sure, we need to work and promote human dignity, general welfare, hygiene, food, etc. But not “class”. Class is something not even one step removed from vanity.

Class is too egocentric and social group focused. We are not serving someone’s good by focusing on their social standing or class.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Australia’s national minimum wage is currently $15.96 per hour or $606.40 per week which is a good beginning, and revised when required by rising costs.
Class consciousness has no part in all this but the aim is the welfare of all Australians.
I would imagine that things are not so different in the United States.

And yet, the median income in the U.S. is higher than that of Australia.

Not everyone in Australia gets that $15. Young employees and new hires get considerably less…about what they would get here. It’s only after, I believe, the fourth or fifth year of employment with a particular employer that one gets that $15 minimum, which most minimally skilled employees here with similar longevity would get.

 

[JIB]

Glass Steagall was only part of it and it was a bi-partisan repeal.

The ultimate blame rests on the federal reserve, but federal government policies of creating moral hazard are also a big part. Blaming deregulation is short sighted. Blaming greed is infantile.

 

[Julia_Mae]

"The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core
proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human
choice behavior is sufficiently rational to allow predictions to be made. Just as
no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” **no self-respecting economist
would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. **
Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is
even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists
can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a
handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we
have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.”
************************* - Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan

No one said it did. YOU said if you increase the minimum wage it increases UNemployment. That’s not the same as what is bolded.