tj444
Posts: 7574
Joined: 3/7/2010 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: joether Raising the minimum wage is attractive to people, since there is a general feel of 'lost ground' due to events in America. That a family of four with two wage earners making minimum wage at 40 hours/week are STILL needing many government programs (that we, the taxpayers are paying for) just to make ends meet. The majority of these Americans are not junkies, screwballs, or those 'gaming the system'. They are good natured, hard working, individuals that want their community and nation to prosper. They have little to no actual power or influence to change their circumstances. So the raising of the wage would be a 'get even' with companies that keep obtaining 'record net profits' by keeping wages low. My view on this is, that companies take the short period of decreased profits while increasing their worker's pay and/or hiring more workers. Long term, they would not only regain the ground lost in those profits not taken, but acquire higher levels of profits. There exists heaps of financial and economic history that shows this to be correct. When companies piss off Americans, Americans will simply use government to 'get even'. So really, companies stand to benefit from doing things on their own rather than being forced to do them. For example, Wal-Mart, the largest retailer on the planet, ups its pay of worker to $13.5/hour and hires more workers (in the US), would stand to benefit from such a move. When it does, others would likely follow suit. I don't think raising the minimum wage to 10.10 is much of an answer, very short term it gives the "feeling" of catching up but it will not take much time before rising costs & rising rents put those people right back where they were before the "raise".. plus they will be paying more of their income back in tax! The real and biggest problem is that there is no affordable housing for low wage earners.. affordable housing is defined as no more than 30% of your income spent on housing, and a lot of people are spending much more than that, they are spending as much as 55% of their income for rent.. which means they must choose between paying their rent or buying food.. the govt decided to use a quick "fix" called Section 8 to help them but imo that's a major fail.. from what I understand of that is it takes years to get that help & some landlords wont accept Section 8, etc.. Imo, the govt needs to build affordable housing.. but that unfortunately wont happen, even tho it would be a real solution if enough housing was built.. and here in the US, the govt is so corrupt that it would be just another taxpayer rip-off anyway.. So even if there is a 10.10 minimum wage, expect more and more people becoming homeless or living on top of each other like rats in small cages..
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