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posted by martyb on Sunday July 30 2017, @06:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the Lies,-Damned-Lies,-and-Statistics dept.

"In what has become a running joke amongst those skeptical of the claim that minimum wage increases have no effect on unemployment, a recent report by the Employment Policies Institute showed that 174 of the 184 co-sponsors of a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour hired unpaid interns."

"In a review of over 100 studies, economists David Neumark and William Wascher found that,A sizable majority of the studies surveyed ... give a relatively consistent (although not always statistically significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages. In addition, among the papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to negative employment effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries." http://www.nber.org/papers/w12663.pdf

"Yes, minimum wages still do increase unemployment."

https://mises.org/blog/seattles-minimum-wage-supporters-ignore-facts


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by theluggage on Sunday July 30 2017, @11:35AM (3 children)

    by theluggage (1797) on Sunday July 30 2017, @11:35AM (#546641)

    The result is a simple market response and should be expected.

    Except that the low-wage economy isn't "the market" - its an artifice created by massive, indirect government subsidies in the form of myriad welfare programs that allow people to work for less than a living wage without starving or becoming homeless (with, of course, many inefficiencies and injustices that mean the benefits don't always go to the right people). Even in the conservative, market-friendly US huge sums of taxpayers money are spent supporting the working poor. Other countries have even more generous in-work benefits (although I wouldn't bet on them being any "cheaper" than the US system).

    In a free market, businesses pay the "market rate" for commodities. So either you treat labour as another commodity and just let the surplus (and their children) starve, or accept that labour isn't just another commodity subject to the rules of supply and demand.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @11:05PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @11:05PM (#546879)

    Not really, it's a byproduct of people being allowed to accumulate ungodly sums of money without consequence. If the tax rates for the richest were dependent upon the living conditions of the poorest, you'd see very quickly that there'd be no homeless or working poor left. They'd have all have comfortable salaries as all the other jobs would disappear and the labor market would return to some measure of sanity.

    The reason you have all those people hussling like that is because there aren't many viable options left for improving ones standing in terms of income. Any time you have this much money concentrated in this few number of households, you're going to see the opportunities dry up.

  • (Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Monday July 31 2017, @09:02AM

    by fraxinus-tree (5590) on Monday July 31 2017, @09:02AM (#547047)

    A distorted market is still a market. There is no "THE" market, there are a lot of minor and major markets everywhere with their respective properties. And, market-wise, labour can behave as commodity or as something else. It depends. Looking around, i wonder where the fuck the surplus of labour and/or workforce is. I know a whole lot of unemployed for extended period people (my dad included) and most of them are unemployed for a "reproducible" reason. Well, I live in Bulgaria. YMMV, but not by much.