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from the while-my-guitar-gently-weeps dept.
Each holiday season, thousands of teenagers tear gift wrap off shiny, new guitars. They giddily pluck at the detuned strings, thinking how cool they'll be once they're rock stars—even if almost all will give up before they ever get to jam out to "Sweet Child o' Mine."
For them, it's no big deal to relegate the guitar to the back of the closet forever in favor of the Playstation controller. But it is a big deal for Fender Musical Instruments Corp., the 70-year-old maker of rock 'n' roll's most iconic electric guitars. Every quitter hurts.
[...]The $6 billion U.S. retail market for musical instruments has been stagnant for five years, according to data compiled by research firm IBISWorld, and would-be guitar buyers have more to distract them than ever. So how do you convince someone to put down the iPhone, pick up a Stratocaster, and keep playing?
Seems Fender didn't get the memo: the music of the future is hip-hop and autotuners.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @12:58AM
I didn't directly respond to what you wrote. I offered a more complete analysis. (Far from exhaustive, but a lot better.) But OK, let's try this again.
Right. And if these people aren't employed at all, we pick up the whole tab. Hm. Some of the tab ... the whole tab. Which would I rather pay? I think I'd like to pay part of it, yup.
You're assuming great inelasticity in the labour market - an assumption that does not hold water in unskilled, low paid environments. There are some areas where the inelasticity is big, and those people make bank. For example, working for a sewage plant. Not a lot of people want to, and so the ones who do, make a lot of money (for their level of education). The reality is that big corporations will cheerfully buy robots, review their procedures and generally do any damn thing they can to reduce their hiring, even if it means that they have to hire one highly paid guy instead of five minimum wage people. If they genuinely need the job done, they'll cut that hiring price every damn time, every way they can. It's not even about being able to afford minimum wage - you're misinterpreting how they calculate this. They're interested in justifying, not affording. Can they justify hiring some warm bodies at minimum wage? Then there they go. If not? No deal.
Yes. That is the definition of a minimum wage. You're not supposed to hire people for less. I think most of us got that. We also know that the US federal minimum wage does not reach, at full time, the US poverty level for a single earner supporting a family of four. That is true.
What is not clear at this stage is whether we will be better off by simply declaring that anybody who cannot justify a higher wage, must sit on the unemployment line, and that the higher wage must be, approximately $15/hour (or whatever your magic number is). There is a substantial societal cost to having people sitting around with their thumbs up their butts. And, to take your position above, we have to pay for ALL their needs, not just top off what they are being paid.
So your logic is that we're going to need so damn many (necessarily overpriced) janitors that we'll have janitorially-mandated welfare?
This isn't reality. We already know from looking at urban employment that companies, engineers, accountants, economists are very good at figuring out how to use fewer people. If I were in charge of a janitorial crew, and I could hire one smart, reliable, efficient girl for $40/hr to replace five people at $15/hr, I'd do it in a hot minute, even if I had to buy $50,000 worth of equipment to enable her to be that efficient. It'd pay for itself in under a year.
The proof of this is that the USA has had an ever-increasing efficiency of labour, with an ever-decreasing efficiency of capital application. We're trading off labour with capital, because labour in the USA is so damn expensive as a way of getting things done, and the returns on the investment of capital are crystal clear.
They're two sides of the same coin. The value of the labour is justifiable in terms of how much the work needs doing, and how willing people are to do it. Supply and demand. People really, really, really need sewage treatment, and so sewage workers get high pay for doing a literally shitty job. These days chimney cleaning does not involve sending kids up chimneys, it's both less hazardous and cheaper to use other techniques - so we do.
No, I need to admit no such thing. Some people need lots of support. I'm quite comfortable with the idea that many people need a little support, and plenty of people require effectively no support. Requiring the government to provide total support to anybody who can't meet some arbitrary bar of employability doesn't shrink the government one iota; it does the opposite.
Working poor are a substantially lesser burden on society than idle poor. I'm not in favour of tax evasion, but if a government is hellbent on creating such a heinously complex taxation and regulatory structure that tax avoidance is easy to the tune of trillions? That will in no way be solved by raising the minimum wage to the point that you're just converting the working poor to the idle poor. More so because you're adding more justification to the companies to sink their money into capital expenditures that they can write off over time, to reduce their long term labour costs. You're actually working hard to justify unemployment, in terms of the pressures generated by the government on business.
I can see how you get to your point of view, but alas it's not based on a broad, educated view of the situation.
Please, study some economics. It's actually an interesting field - you can think of it as the study of the law of unintended consequences, as they pertain to government. And this is, alas, one of the key areas where people moralise without realising what future they are wishing for.
I hope my brief outline of some of the key factors helps you make sense of the field.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @10:06PM
labour in the USA is so damn expensive
President-elect Donald Trump said of the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage, "you have to have something that you can live on." But perhaps real Republicans can talk sense into him. How about repealing the 13th Amendment too?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @03:53AM
Until recently, that rugged bastion of cutthroat capitalism and pitiless exploitation of the workers, Germany, didn't even have a minimum wage.
Oh, wait, that's not right. They have a robust social welfare system, with comprehensive benefits. They also have a strong industrial economy in which they produce premium products that the rest of the world lines up to buy. They have quite the reputation for reining in large corporations, and a healthy, expansive small enterprise ecosystem, and they built it all ... without minimum wages.
And why did they introduce minimum wages? To save the hapless orphans shivering on the streets?
No, basically as a political sop to pressure groups.
So take your irrelevant nonsense and break it over reality's knee.