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An article in Australian newspaper The Age describes a paper just released by the Reserve Bank of Australia which has found that periodic increases in the Minimum Wage (also known as the "Award" wage in Australia) did not negatively affect the level of employment in each respective industry:
The paper, published by the central bank's economic research department on the final day the Fair Work Commission hearings had to decide if 2.3 million Australians will get a pay rise in July, found "no evidence that small, incremental increases in award wages had an adverse effect on hours worked or the job destruction rate".
It used a sample of 32,000 jobs between 1998 and 2008, when award wages were increased by a flat dollar amount each year, to find jobs with larger award wage rises had larger increases in hours worked than jobs experiencing a smaller award wage rise.
"I am able to rule out adverse effects on hours worked. I also find that award wage increases do not have a statistically significant effect on the job destruction rate," said researcher James Bishop.
"If anything, the point estimates suggest that the job destruction rate actually declines when the award wage is increased."
[...] The RBA paper said their results may not "necessarily generalise to large, unanticipated changes in award wages", cautioned it only included adult positions, and that the consequences of wage increases may "be borne by job seekers, rather than job holders".
"There will always be some point at which a minimum wage adjustment will begin to reduce employment," the paper stated.
Naturally, this is proving problematic for some politicians who have been advocating against increases in the minimum wage due to fears that this will harm business.
Link to Abstract and Paper (pdf).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18 2018, @10:20AM (13 children)
Get the book "Economics, Private and Public Choice". It's a college textbook by Gwartney, Stroup, Sobel, and MacPherson.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @12:00AM (12 children)
When FDR took over, 1 in 4 USAians didn't have a job and the trend was still downward.
Capitalism had failed yet again and the Capitalists weren't hiring.
(When the last of the folks who remember the last great implosion are all dead, we get another one of those in our failed-once-again Capitalist system.)
FDR put 15 million USAians to work, putting money in their pockets to spend on the goods and services of Capitalists and in so doing saved the Capitalist economy.
Your author is a nitwit and so are you.
The only thing FDR missed was kick-starting worker-owned cooperatives the way that Italy has done since 1985 via their Marcora Law. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @12:52AM (8 children)
It's 4 authors, all PhD college professors with numerous awards and published works. Gwartney served as Chief Economist of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.
You've been lied to. There is a clear political motive to glorify FDR as a liberal icon... we'll just ignore stuff like putting American citizens of Japanese descent in concentration camps, his provocation of Japan and Germany in order to get involved, the commerce clause ruling, and his stacking of the supreme court.
But back to that book and the Great Depression:
Page 629 addresses people like you: "Generations of students have been told that the Great Depression was caused by the stock market crash of October 1929. Is this really true?"
After the 1929 crash, most was regained in the next 5 months. The book compares the 1929 crash with the crashes of the early 1970s, early 1980s, and 1987. The 1987 crash didn't even cause a recession.
The federal government sharply reduced the money supply, for example by aggressively selling bonds. This caused prices to fall, making farmers unable to pay their loans.
In 1936, personal income tax reached 79%. There was also a tax on retained earnings of corporations, a major source of business investment.
In 1933, 6 million baby pigs were slaughtered in an attempt to raise prices. This is like the idea that breaking windows will simulate the economy. All sorts of products were purposely destroyed.
In 1933, more than 500 industries were orgainzed into cartels under the National Industrial Recovery Act. Under government control, they ran industry in a rather Soviet way.
The Davis-Bacon act put minorities out of work by requiring that the government use expensive union labor.
Previous recessions, without the New Deal, had normally lasted 1 or 2 years, 3 at the most. Good intentions are no substitute for sound policy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @01:58AM (5 children)
Hoover got the top gig in March of 1929.
The economy (which has always been gaged by the stock market) tanked in October 1929.
Hoover made a few lame half-hearted attempts to get the economy up off its back.
By November 1932 (3 years and a few days of cratering employment numbers), the voters kicked him to the curb.
In March of 1933 when FDR took over, the GOP's downward spiral was ongoing.
Big changes were necessary.
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. --Franklin D. Roosevelt [google.com]
Your "logic" doesn't add up.
4 more years of Hoover and GOP economics would have been disastrous for USA.
FDR (though he started as a traditional Patrician), in office, became the antithesis of the "Do nothing; things will work themselves out in time" GOPers.
FDR instead created an abundance of consumers.
.
Oh, and when, in 1937, FDR listened to the idiots on Wall Street (who, it's clear, know NOTHING about Macroeconomics) and dialed back on The New Deal, he got The Roosevelt Recession. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [rooseveltinstitute.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 19 2018, @02:09AM (4 children)
In other words, the New Deal tanked, and you found scapegoats. I see a pattern here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @03:30AM (3 children)
The only pattern that I'm seeing is you continually being stupid and spouting Reactionary bullshit.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 19 2018, @10:02AM (2 children)
Marxist jingoism is another pattern I see here. Concrete difficulties are met with nebulous accusations and peculiar labels that nobody else cares about. FDR's New Deal policies were a minor disaster. That's what caused the rebound recession of 1937-1938. Seriously, look at the AC's earlier comments:
Why would we ever expect that sort of thing to result in a recovery from a serious recession? My view is that "Reactionary" is a good thing when the resistance is to stupid change. You have yet to show the New Deal was anything but stupid. We have things like the rebound recession and the Second World War to indicate the US was not doing so great due to the New Deal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @09:32PM (1 child)
What your little thing doesn't mention is that was the rate FOR THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS OF THE DAY.
As I already stated up in the (meta)thread, before FDR was done, he had that up to 94 percent.
...AND THAT KEPT THINGS STABILIZED UNTIL THE LATE 1960s.
(Followed by Lewis Powell, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, Ronald Reagan, and the rest of the Neoliberals and the current downward spiral for the majority of USAians.)
baby pigs were slaughtered
Yeah? So? Want to stop that stupid shit?
Get rid of (boom-and-bust) Capitalism.
BTW, what you consider stupid shit happened again within recent memory among France's dairy farmers in 2009. [google.com]
You keep making my point for me: CAPITALISM SUCKS!
Clearly, what you know about Macroecomonics could fit in a thimble with room left over..
the National Industrial Recovery Act
It stemmed the downward spiral.
Waddya want? A rubber biscuit?
in a rather Soviet way
Your revulsion at things that work (but aren't Oligarchical Capitalism) is comical.
If only you could step outside your propaganda-saturated brain and see yourself, you'd laugh your ass off.
Trotsky and Lenin (until his death in 1924) actually had things perking along quite nicely.
If they had been able to remove the constant military and economic harassment of USA (plus its Capitalist allies) and the financial and manpower burden that that posed on USSR--starting with an invasion as soon as WWI was over--Soviet collectives would have gone even better.
There was a fun Cold War Era movie [google.com] where those charged with the USAian occupation of a place in the Far East were supposed to get the local economy back on its feet.
The solution turned out to be COLLECTIVE. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 21 2018, @08:54PM
So what? It's money taken away from competent people and dumped on one of the more wasteful governments of the day. Let us also keep in mind that those competent people were able to keep the real world tax rate that they paid on income down to a little more than it is today via trust funds.
We have plenty of examples from top down Communism that shows this isn't somehow peculiar to Capitalism.
I ask everyone still struggling along in this thread to read that article and ask yourself "What does that have to do with capitalism?" Dairy farmers protesting low milk subsidies by creating a huge public nuisance (and apparently destroying almost a million gallons of milk in the process) is not Capitalism. Your argument is silly.
Note you posted this in response to the creation of oligarchies. It's dumb when capitalists do it. It stays dumb when anti-capitalists do it. The bigger problem is that anti-capitalists tend to treat human beings as just another commodity to destroy when it gets inconvenient. Lot of examples of that in the past.
Once again, we see your remarkable insistence on defending the worst of humanity. Lenin didn't kill quite as many millions of Russians in cold blood as Stalin did, but it wasn't that big a difference, certainly within an order of magnitude. That "perking along quite nicely" meant the death of millions and the suffering of tens of millions, eventually to swell to well over a billion by the fall of the Berlin Wall. He's everything you protest against, the antithesis of democratic reform of workplaces, yet you slavishly lick his boots.
How about Red Dawn or Rambo III, eh? Proof by movie only works if the movie can be shown to accurately portray reality. As in this case, that almost never happens much less is shown. The fundamental problem with movies is that they are fiction and hence, can represent events that are radically different from reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @02:15AM (1 child)
You're talking out your ass.
The Panic of 1837 (1837 - 1842)
The Long Depression (1873 - 1896)
The Great Depression (1929 - 1941)
Again, the Capitalist economy completely goes to shit about every 80 years.
Anybody who could do simple arithmetic could have figured out what was going on in the Capitalist economy of the 1930s.
If you had a roommate as unstable as Capitalism, you would have kicked his ass out long ago.
.
...and if the Capitalist economy goes more that 4 years without a downturn, that's considered a "success".
More that 7 years is considered unusual.
Source: Richard D. Wolff, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Economics
So, 4 years up and 2 or 3 years down is something to crow about?
Yeah. Right, dude.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 19 2018, @10:21AM
And it happens to be true. That results in a huge level of economic growth and well-being of the populace. China is a great example of what happens when you have a long stretch of capitalist growth. But of course, there are problems with that. One of those is the growth of inefficiency and waste. That's where those downturns have advantage. The inevitable downturns allow us to restructure our economies and societies in a distributed manner rather than top-down fiat.
Marxists have them as well and deal with them in a far worse manner. More effort is spent on seeking and blaming "Reactionaries" than on processes that fix what went wrong. In other words, the biggest reactionaries in a Marxist revolution are the Marxists themselves via idiotic outlook and policy.
Ultimately, a stable society that never has downturns is a stagnant society. There's a deep irony in desiring a huge, radical revolution merely to create a society that never changes. And I think no such attempt can ever be successful in the long run. The more stable you try to make your society, in addition to the pain you cause to its citizens, the more fragile you make that society. The downturns will come eventually, they just will be more severe and destructive when they occur. It is better to have the periodic downturns of capitalism than near destruction.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 19 2018, @02:07AM (2 children)
Notice that things didn't improve [wikipedia.org] until FDR started drafting people for the Second World War.
Didn't improve under FDR, let us note, until he got us into a world war.
Think about that. He put more than 10% of the US to work and unemployment barely twitched.
Eh, not much kick-starting (it's like 200-300 since 1985). I bet there's more such (and more successful) cooperatives created by workers who didn't use public funds to kick-start.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @09:25PM (1 child)
First, the direct link to the graphic is https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/US_Unemployment_1910-1960.gif [wikimedia.org]
Nitwit.
...and your ability to read a graph is as crappy as all of your other self-perceived "knowledge".
Allowing for some initial inertia in the feedback loop, the graph shows EXACTLY what I described.
Get an education and get a life outside of parroting the ignorant babble heard on Faux Noose.
Outside Reactionary circles, no one thinks that doubling down on the stupid is the same as improving your debating position.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:55AM
I'm not going to direct link to graphs from Wikipedia. Sorry. You lose important context, such as the articles where the graph came from. I grant I could have linked to a better source [wikimedia.org].
No, it doesn't. Note the rebound in unemployment during the second span of recession despite FDR supposedly taking more than 10% of the adult population off the labor market (or perhaps, because of). Peak unemployment was a bit under 21% in 1934 and it never fell below 14% until 1940 when massive conscription for the Second World War was underway.
And of course, we have the usual blame displacement. When FDR wasn't listening to Wall Street, he took too long with his policies. The problem here isn't the lag in his policies, but rather the lack of long term effect. One sees a near immediate drop of 7% in unemployment which is sort of what you'd expect from scooping up so many people for government programs. But then it bounces back up 4%, almost to where it was before.
You misspelled "Fox News", hurr hurr. And I'd be quite interested in knowing where Fox News interprets unemployment charts from the Great Depression. Sounds more interesting than their usual fare.