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You probably remember Subway's famous "five-dollar footlong" promotion as much for the obnoxiously catchy jingle as for the sandwiches themselves. (Sorry for getting that stuck in your head all day.)
The sandwich chain recently resurrected the promotion in a national advertising campaign promising foot-long subs for just $4.99—but the special deal won't fly at one Subway restaurant in Seattle, where owner David Jones posted a sign this week giving customers the bad news.
Sadly, the consequences of high minimum wages, excessive taxation, and mandate-happy public policy are not limited to the death of cheap sandwiches. The cost of doing business in Seattle is higher than the Space Needle, and the unintended consequences of those policies are piling up too.
The biggest cost driver, as Jones' sign mentions, is Seattle's highest-in-the-nation minimum wage. It went from $9.47 to $11 per hour in 2015, then to $13 per hour in 2016, with a further increase to $15 per hour planned.
The result? According to researchers at the University of Washington's School of Public Policy and Governance, the number of hours worked in low-wage jobs has declined by around 9 percent since the start of 2016 "while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent." The net outcome: In 2016, the "higher" minimum wage actually lowered low-wage workers' earnings by an average of $125 a month.
And now those same employees will have to pay more for sandwiches from Subway—and everything else too.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Saturday January 13 2018, @11:39AM (10 children)
There isn't a simple relationship between cost and demand for anything, least of all the labor you need to run your business. There is a relationship, but it's far from simple. Studies of minimum wage changes over several decades lean toward minor increases having negligible or slightly positive effect on overall employment. But it's not even close to simple.
Pardon me, I was being slightly hyperbolic to make the point that prices increase over time. Although I did think it started much earlier than 2008. Have you noticed in your lifetime that prices for everything, especially food, increase over time? Because prices for things, especially food, increase slowly but surely. You know. Over time.
You would agree, I hope, that if they kept trying to sell $5 footlongs for long enough it would eventually become untenable no matter what the location or how far minimum wages were allowed to drop. Point being that a fixed-price product can only survive a limited time in an economy subject to any amount of inflation (as all healthy economies seem to be), and that this is only tangentially related to minimum wage variations.
For work... they aren't... doing. Holy shithole, Batman. Textbook conservative response. The low wage earners don't "deserve" a pay increase, because they are low wage earners, and therefore lazy and unproductive. So... explain why everyone in all the pay grades above lower middle class have been getting pay increases every year, beyond what was required to keep up with inflation, for the entire 35 years or so when minimum wage was stagnating. Were they all doing more and more productive work every year? How? How is that possible? Why did higher wage earners "deserve" to make more and more money while the lower wage earners literally earned less and less as their wages failed to keep up with inflation? It's literally a damn self-fulfilling prophecy. The poorer they get, the less they "deserve" to get paid more, because the fact that they aren't being paid more already is proof positive that they don't deserve to be paid more. Right? That's how it works in conservative minds, right? "Poor people" are worthless scum who should lick their employers boots clean every morning for being given the privilege of employment. Right? And if you didn't want to be a "poor person" you should have chosen different parents. Got it.
And if we got rid of minimum wage, would inflation suddenly stop, or reverse? I don't see how, since all higher wages would still continue to go up faster than inflation, as they have for several decades, and the prices of a great many things will follow the increase in higher wages just easily as other things might follow the increase in minimum wages. But the increase in minimum wages is pocket change to the increases in the wages for the upper crust. We already have inflation, and a minor amount seems to be part of every normally functioning economy that isn't rapidly shrinking, so what do you mean "create inflation"? How high does the minimum wage need to be before it triggers increased inflation? What is the exact relationship between the minimum wage and inflation? What is the relationship between the highest wages and inflation? Somehow I doubt that you can find specific answers to these questions that you haven't cherry-picked to match what you already believe. It just isn't that easy. It's very, very complicated.
But what isn't complicated is that minimum wage used to be reasonably adjusted to keep up with inflation in the past, and then at some point people started promoting things like trickle down economics (a.k.a. "Fairy Dust") and minimum wage was allowed to go off the rails and lag inflation for decades. And all anybody is really asking for is to realign the minimum wage with inflation, at an equivalent level of buying power as it had prior to the '70s. Is that really, seriously too much to ask of the MOST PROSPEROUS NATION ON EARTH (AND APPARENTLY GOD'S NEW CHOSEN KINGDOM)? Oh, excuse me, sorry for raising my voice. Anyway, I don't think it's too much to ask.
You are legitimately insane, as expected. It's like you're incapable of realizing that those people are only "poor" because their employer is filling its own pockets with taxpayer dollars while they make more than enough profit to pay everyone much higher wages. Instead of noticing that they are screwing their employees out of a reasonable level of prosperity, you believe they are actually doing their employees a huge favor by deigning to employ those "poor people" in all their unresplendent worthlessness, at a wage level that would never allow them to escape poverty. But if they paid higher wages they wouldn't be heroically employing "poor people", they would be unheroically employing "middle class people". The intense self-referential circularity of this concept is extraordinary. If the minimum wage was 30 cents per hour, just imagine how much more "heroic" those big-hearted companies would be for employing those worthless people wallowing in abject poverty. Why, we should give them all medals! And prop up their company profits with even more taxpayer funds! Why don't we just wire the welfare checks directly into the company bank account and cut out the middleman? After all, people in abject poverty only buy booze, hookers and drugs, right? A respected Republican Senator said so just the other day. What was his name, ASSley or something? (I jest.)
Didja miss the part where these companies are pulling in higher profits than they ever have before? They are literally making record profits and are in no danger of going out of business. And their employees don't deserve any piece of that action because... ? Oh, I forgot, because they are Poor People[TM]. And Poor People[TM] don't "deserve" to not be Poor People[TM]. What I tell you three times is true, eh, Alice? At least in Looking Glass Land.
"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"
Um, no, you do not understand this concept. If the employees of a company are being supported by welfare checks to reach a total wage level that allows them to live at a permanent address and eat food, that company's profits are literally being SUPPORTED and INCREASED by the taxpayers. And they are making YUUUGE profits. They are having no problems filling their bank accounts and paying all their high level management megabucks. So why are we wanting to feed them even more money and increase their profits even more if none of it goes to benefit working people who actually need it? (ZOMG! The specter of "wealth redistribution" rears its ugly head! Socialist, begone! Out, foul demon!)
I'm sorry? In no functional society could that possibly be true. There is a level far above zero where it simply becomes easier for the populace to kill off all the rich people and redistribute their resources, a la French Revolution, and then turn to something awful like communism or heaven forbid, democratic socialism. If I have to work for 70 hours to afford to buy a hamburger, you are done. Capitalism is done. Over. That would happen long before anybody gets to $0/hr. It's as if people like you actually want capitalism to collapse, and millions of Americans to reach starvation level poverty.
There's actually a word for being paid $0/hr: slavery.
Yes, isn't it wonderful? Many more will follow. And I predict the Moon won't fall from the sky, and red states will continue to be by far the poorest states in the union, leeching off the taxes of blue states, as they have for decades now. Shall we come back in a couple more decades and see which of us was right? Anyway, there's no way in hell we're going to agree on any of this. We both think the other is looking at the world upside-down and inside-out. So this is all a remarkably fruitless exercise.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @06:32PM (1 child)
There are numerous federal employees in blue states, both direct and contractors. By increasing the minimum wage, you force the federal government to supply more money.
You raise your taxes, but your economy doesn't suffer the full result. People are allowed to deduct that from federal taxes. This forms a subsidy to the blue states.
Lots of people are being paid off-the-books due to illegal alien status. This cuts the burden of federal taxes in those states, particularly California.
Blue states ought to be paying far more than red states, because they vote for the expensive things. The red state people are at least trying to save money. If you vote for it, you should pay for it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RedBear on Sunday January 14 2018, @01:04AM
I live in a red state, BTW.
I've never seen evidence that the federal government paying people to do real work is a terrible thing, unless it's like half the population. Sure helped pull us out of the Great Depression.
Thanks to the new GOP tax plan blue states are now being actively penalized for having higher state taxes by a limit to state tax deductibility. Even if things were quid pro quo, the blue states still pay significantly more in federal taxes and receive fewer benefits back from the federal government (because they don't need them as much, because they have higher state taxes). Blue state taxes that go to the federal government get redistributed to red states. You have things completely backwards. If blue states lower their taxes to avoid penalizing state residents under the GOP tax scam, less money will flow through the federal government to the red states. Then red states will have an even bigger shortfall. I don't think the results will be what you expect.
What percentage of jobs are held by undocumented workers, even in California? If this cuts the burden of federal taxes in blue states by a significant amount, why do blue states still pay way more in federal taxes than red states? Blue states already pay much more than red states, but you want them to pay even MORE than more? How the hell does that work in your mind?
What expensive things are you talking about, that blue states vote for, that affect red states? Schools? Roads? Hospitals? The military? You'll have to be more specific.
Thanks, I now have a better understanding of the specific conservative insanity that created the GOP tax scam.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Saturday January 13 2018, @07:04PM (3 children)
We're not speaking of minor increases here.
To give an example of how deceptive the assertion of the last sentence is, consider the case of Puerto Rico. They are indeed "slightly positive" after minimum wage was increased (over the period 1974 to 1983) to match US mainland minimum wage. But that happened by about 2-3 million Puerto Ricans moving off the island between 1980 and present to places with higher wages. That has resulted in two effects that are ignored in the studies above: cost of living and increased migration.
The great unanswered question here is what does a lower demand for labor look like? People aren't just going to stop working. They'll move, they'll accept lower pay relative to their costs, accept workplaces with more difficult conditions, etc. And that's what we see. Much has already been written of the decline in wages+benefits relative to productivity in the US. Much has been written of the "greed" of employers. Much has been written about living wages and the people who don't receive that arbitrary threshold of income. That's all signs of reduced demand for labor just as one would expect from a half century of policies that make US labor more expensive.
Yes. Next question.
Then don't pay those employees, if you don't like it. The policies create the (alleged) problem. But really what problem is there here? You wanted to support these employees. And that had the effect of supporting this company's profits. It's working as intended.
Or we could look at what works. Your angst is the result of half a century of supposedly helping out the US worker. Destroying jobs and forcing people into high cost of living areas is not fixing the problem.
Meanwhile, I predict Fresno [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday January 14 2018, @02:04AM (2 children)
It's my understanding that we've basically been leeching off Puerto Rico for decades without doing any real reinvestment to build them up. That's why they are having major infrastructure problems now. Because they aren't a state and we've never treated them like one.
Yet you have no answer for how America doesn't turn into a 3rd world shithole if we don't pay people enough to be simultaneously employed and housed and fed. Or perhaps you're fine with that happening.
Wow. Now that's integrity. But will you go so far as to admit you believe "poor people" to be genetically inferior? You feel it in your bones, don't you? I'll bet you even wish you could have Bill Gates' genetically superior baby.
Don't pay... Oh, you mean don't provide welfare checks so people can feed their children while working at Walmart. What reveals your intellectual dishonesty most clearly is how you continue to shy away from acknowledging that these corporations we're talking about are making record profits and therefore have no reason not to pay their employees a reasonable wage. Record. Profits. Not revenue. Profits.
High cost of living areas are created by the fact that we don't place any limits on the upper end of income levels and the limitations we place on developing new housing, not by having a reasonable minimum wage.
Guess we'll just see about Fresno.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Sunday January 14 2018, @04:56AM (1 child)
And yet we have:
In other words, Puerto Rico receives more in net benefits per capita from the federal government than two thirds of the states. If spending at levels comparable to far wealthier states is not reinvestment, then what is?
I certainly do have an answer here. Get out the way of employers. One of the most obvious things about an economy is that just because you have a need, doesn't mean that you have a means to fulfill that need. You need the infrastructure in place. For example, most people have a need to not die. But we don't have any sort of infrastructure that would allow us to radically extend our lifespans beyond the usual range. No matter how much one could pontificate about the importance of not dying, it's not going to matter in today's world.
Same goes for space colonization. One can decide that humanity living off of Earth is the most important thing ever, but mere money isn't going to make that happen. We'll need to build all kinds of Earth and space-side infrastructure to make that happen down the road.
At least with your above paragraph, we have the means to do so. But it involves maintaining infrastructure for employing people gainfully. The key part of that infrastructure are employers. Without them, it's just as impossible as having your 200th birthday, or living on Mars would be without the corresponding medical or space-side infrastructure. I'm tired of people telling me what they want, without offering a way to get that (or worse proposing all sorts of road blocks to getting the very thing they claim to want). Thus, my usual response that you don't actually deserve this thing any more than you deserve that 200th birthday or that Mars bungalow. And if you're not going to try to get it with approaches that actually work, then of course, you won't get it. Economics like most of reality doesn't go away merely because you can't be bothered to think rationally.
Your race-baiting is noted.
There's no problem here. Subsidize the companies that employ these people and there is no problem. But you can't have that. Envy is your downfall.
Of course, I already explained how that is incorrect. A reasonable minimum wage in San Jose is not a reasonable minimum wage in Fresno or Puerto Rico.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 14 2018, @05:02AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @07:21PM (1 child)
This is why I want the south to succeed. Whole gulf coast. So they will be forced to live this bullshit without taxes from the blue areas. The south is a hidden welfare state. And the idiots who support it dumb enough to fall year after year for changing Fox News propaganda.
The south is a cancer. Let them feed of each other.
Please Texas. Succeed like you pretend (manly like) to want. But in reality you like you hidden rural welfare system.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday January 13 2018, @11:13PM
Gods, yes. The entire South. They won the fucking civil war; they made us keep them. They make all this noise about seceding? Well they can put their money where their toothless sister-screwing mouths are and get the fuck out. They'll be a basket case inside of 6 months, and then we can conquer them and *properly* reconstruct them like what should have been done in the first place. Or maybe just burn the entire place to the ground.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @11:53PM (1 child)
khallow is basically a medieval feudalist. He doesn't call them kings, dukes, barons, knights and lords, but his attitude towards the rich is exactly that of a peasant who truly believes that god mandated their stations in life. It is an honor just to serve them, and the scraps from their table are more than a peasant deserves.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday January 21 2018, @08:32PM
It's called being thankful. It's called GRATITUDE. You should try it!