Topic: Fate of $15 per hour lies in the hands of the Senate Parliamentary (Read 282 times)

Yup.

Pelosi is good at it because leadership in the house is much more powerful then leadership in the Senate. That’s by design of each houses of congress, not much is left to the individual themselves. In the Senate you’re looking at a 6 yr term, which insulates you from a lot of political damage from the party (as the house is 2 yr terms). Further - Someone like Joe Manchin can really just do whatever he wants as he is a DEMOCRAT in a reliably RED state that has no reason being in the Democrat caucus.

I know Bernie was trying some plan to penalize big businesses for not paying $15 per hour and leaving small businesses out of it but it’s not something that came to fruition anyway. Curious to see polling on progressives for this covid bill compared to other groups.

Drug laws are there to maintain a monopoly for Big Pharma, and take the focus off what is really being regulated. People are being regulated, not drugs.

Drug laws take away freedom. Freedom is better.

Minimum wage takes away freedom. Freedom is better.

Minimum wage is not that a big issue, especially it is not meant to be in that price for forever. Reforms is needed someday so it is okay to have a fight for it as they believed it must happen soon.

Anyways, are you saying that poor people should go trade drugs as their business, if it is, then you're a twisted guy. Drug laws are there for a reason, and it is not just that government wanted to take control, but it has issues that may affect peoples lives.

But consider. Drug laws have been around for ages. But the ingenuity of some of the poor people has gotten around the drug laws. Even the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, formed in 1930, can't stop the drug traffic.The only reason it has any success is that most people aren't interested in drugs.

Sure, there are people in prison for fighting government. But even people in prison outsmart government.

In other words, people will find a way when they get sick of being oppressed enough... even with stuff like a minimum wage.

Yeah, alright, we get it, you're pretty privileged peeps. Though I may agree to the concept of, if you can do it, do it. But saying that peeps who can't bring themselves to a business or something that will generate large amount of money is nonsense. They have different stories to tell, so give them some slacks.

The best part of this thread is the title. Anybody who isn't going to stand up and decide his own fate, deserves being a slave to $15 an hour.

From the looks of it, $15 minimum wage is simply not happening, at least a government-mandated $15 minimum wage (a market-based $15 minimum wage is already in effect for many labor markets).

I also believe that Pelosi is much better at whipping votes than Schemer is. Part of this is due to the fact that there are very few "safe" senate seats for either party, and part of this is the 6-year terms Senators have -- leadership today may be different from leadership in 6 years, which makes it more difficult to bully Senators, even if they will be facing a primary in the coming election season.

Update on the minimum wage - 15 bucks an hour thing is not going to happen. Congrats to small businesses in the US. You can thank a few brave democrats for that: https://www.newsweek.com/joe-manchin-slows-covid-19-stimulus-bill-passage-over-unemployment-benefits-1574187
The unemployment stipend will also be 300 dollars per week oppose to the 400 per week Biden promised. So it seems a few moderate votes in the senate are what will force some compromise. Joe Manchin seems to be getting a lot of hate for watering down the relief bill.

Get rid of the minimum wage. It is ruining us. Why? Because people won't work on jobs unless there is enough money to give them the living that they need. They can't afford it. Let supply and demand operate in the wage payment field.

If the min wage was so low and that was a big problem... why not make it $1000/h so everybody would live like kings?

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/raising-minimum-wage-to-15-would-cost-1point4-million-jobs-cbo-says.html

This is the problem with the minimum wage -- people who get to keep their job reap the benefits of being overpaid while those who get canned get the benefit of being paid 0 dollars per hour. 15 bucks in different parts of the US will go a long way, whereas in California it'd be useless. So why set the federal standard to be so high? Would it not be more effective for states to legislate what the minimum wage should be with respect to the cost of living?

Imagine being a start up business like a restaurant in rural Mississippi and expecting to be able to foot the bill of paying a server 15 bucks an hour.

Clearly, minimum wages make a business worse, especially for MSMEs. The government should be able to act more rationally towards things like this, for example by providing support to these businesses so that they can survive in a pandemic like this. They only demand that businesses provide good wages to workers, but at the same time businesses are struggling to rise from this crisis. It's like killing them.

^^^ I pretty much agree with this.

Some of the things that Biden is doing actually help the world, and stabilizes situations more than what Trump does. Other things that Biden does are a disaster.

All that Trump is, is a different form of disaster... one that may not be as bad as the Biden disaster, even though it might happen faster. Trump might bring the world to its knees faster than Biden, but when Biden's work is finished, there won't be any knees left... and maybe no world.

Minimum wage, no matter how great or small, gives businesses and workers a focus. The focus subtly says that we should all get the minimum. This takes away competition. Business people know that if we lose competition, we also lose the goal to better ourselves. This makes us apathetic. Minimum wage is simply another move government is using to drive us into socialism and failure. It's up to us to resist it.

What resistance? Government people are using government as a business for themselves. They are attempting to work their business against the business of our individual lives. They are trying to make slaves of us all. Minimum wage is simply one way that they are doing it.

Controlled demolition.  Just as I expected when I got the hell out of Dodge a few years ago, and pretty much right on schedule.

Trump mostly just tee'd up a bunch of fascist balls for the next guy to drive down the fairway.  I didn't in my wildest dreams imagine that they next guy they would have the chutzbah to put in would be Joe the Kiddie-Groper Biden so I didn't make that prediction, but I will say that it was brilliant.

They are going to get their 'people's revolt' (to crush) some way some how even if they have to totally stage it since Joe Sixpack is so vaxxed up that he cannot tie his own shoes.

So for example, the EITC was revised such that if someone has earned income of less than $31,200 ($15 * 2080 {if someone works 40 hours a week 52 weeks a year, they will work 2080 hours}), they will receive $y as a refundable credit, with y being ($31,200 - [earned income * 1.0]) * 0.88 (the lowest tax bracket is 12%).

If someone making $20/hour during the first six months of the year, gets laid off, and cannot find work in the next two months, will have a 100% tax rate if they find work making $20/hour for their work for the rest of the year because every dollar they earn will reduce their earnings by $0.88, and the federal income tax will take the remaining $0.12. (Someone making $20/hour for 6 months will make $20,800, and if they work an additional 13 weeks @$20/hour, they will earn $31,200).

If someone is making $12/hour at their job, if they were to receive a promotion involving them earning $14/hour but with more responsibilities, their additional income would be taxed at 100% in my above example because they would receive $0.88 less via the EITC for every additional dollar they earn, and the federal income tax would take the remaining $0.12. This is especially troubling because it gives incentives for employees to not take promotions involving earning more money, which may lead to longer-term reductions in earnings when they would not be in contention for subsequent promotions involving even higher wages.

In the above example, the earned income multiplier could be reduced to below 1.0, but this would still result in high effective marginal tax rates for low earners. It would also result in more people receiving the welfare benefit who doesn't need it.

If you want to have transfer payment welfare, it is best for the cutoff to be well into the middle class, where it is less trivial to turn down an additional dollar of income, and who will not be as harmed as much by not receiving the welfare.

What I described doesnt need to be run by a government bureaucracy. I was thinking that non-profits (or potentially for-profit entities) could receive grants from the government in order to administer the skills training and could be paid based on outcomes.

I agree that government bureaucracy is generally bad, however, I also believe it is superior to teach low-income (skill) workers the necessary skills necessary to earn higher incomes. This reduces reliance on government and should in the long run benefit everyone.  

There shouldn't be any minimum wage. It should be $0.

$15/h minimum will not improve the situation. On the contrary, it will make everything worse.

Most small-mid size businesses are not even operating and the US gov. is raising the minimum wage in this chaos... brilliant.

The employers will just stop hiring people they don't know. This is what this $15/h min-wage will do. They will employ their relatives, their neighbors instead. Nobody will care if you are really proficient at doing your job. Your college diploma? Now it is worthless.

None of these really matter of course when most of the small to mid size businesses are closed.

My explanation was massively simplifying how it works. There's a phase-in and phase-out curve to avoid exactly those incentive problems, it's actually implemented as a refundable credit based on annual income, not as an hourly payment boost, and there are other rules such as disallowing EITC if your unearned income is too high.


I'm much more wary about stuff like that compared to just giving people money, since it increases the size/scope of government bureaucracy, and the #1 objective of bureaucracy always ends up being growing/perpetuating itself. How many times have you heard someone in a government agency saying, "My agency is doing just just fine: no need for more resources or employees or powers. In fact, we could handle a budget cut just fine." ? If welfare programs have to exist, then it's best to do them with the absolute minimum number of government employees possible, even if it might make the overall program somewhat less targeted.

This would not be a good idea. It would effectively put anyone making less than $x/hr at a 100% marginal tax bracket until they make more than $x/hr. The EITC also does not discriminate based on how much a person works, so it would also mean that after a person earns $1 from their employer, they are in a 100% tax bracket, until they make more than the threshold so that they are no longer eligible for the EITC. This would result in people choosing to not look for work if they are fired or laid off early in the year until late in the year or the following year if their earned income is below the EITC limits.

As I noted above, it is far superior to let the free market decide what the "minimum wage" should be -- in other words, if a company were to pay too little, they would be unable to find and retain employees.

If the government were to take action on the minimum wage, IMO the best solution would be that anyone making less than $x/hr is eligible for free/low-cost skills training that will help them become qualified for higher-paying jobs that tend to pay above $x/hr. (teach them to fish).

The shouldn't pass the bill. We should get rid of minimum wage. Why?

If there isn't any minimum wage, the prices of everything will come down. Nobody is going to work for $1 an hour. Why not? Because he can't buy anything that way. So, big business will not get any workers. Ir they want workers, they will have to reduce the price of products and services, or increase wages.

What will happen when they increase wages? They will get people who are willing to work to make it worth getting the wages. After the sluggards get hungry enough, they will discipline themselves just to be able to do quality work so they can get a job.

The whole idea of a minimum wage is something that tears down the whole nation by turning everybody into "who cares?"

The bill is indexed to inflation, but due to inflation going up without a min wage increase in the last decade, that's why it starts at $15.

After it hits $15 (over a 4 year period), it's tied to inflation/cost of living.