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posted by janrinok on Monday December 08 2014, @06:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the consumers-with-more-money-to-spend dept.

NPR (formerly National Public Radio) reports:

By a 44-5 vote, Chicago's City Council set a minimum-wage target of $13 an hour, to be reached by the middle of 2019. The move comes after Illinois passed a nonbinding advisory last month that calls for the state to raise its minimum pay level to $10 by the start of next year.

The current minimum wage in Chicago and the rest of Illinois is $8.25. Under the ordinance, the city's minimum wage will rise to $10 by next July and go up in increments each summer thereafter.

[...]The bill states that "rising inflation has outpaced the growth in the minimum wage, leaving the true value of lllinois' current minimum wage of $8.25 per hour 32 percent below the 1968 level of $10.71 per hour (in 2013 dollars)."

It also says nearly a third of Chicago's workers, or some 410,000 people, currently make $13 an hour or less.

[...][In the 2014] midterm elections, voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota approved binding referendums that raise their states' wage floor above the federal minimum.

Media Matters for America notes that The Chicago Tribune's coverage tried to trot out the *job-killer* dead horse once again, to which the response was

According to a March 2014 report(PDF) prepared for the Seattle Income Inequality Advisory Committee titled "Local Minimum Wage laws: Impacts on Workers, Families, and Businesses", city-wide minimum wage increases in multiple locations--Albuquerque, NM; Santa Fe, NM; San Francisco, CA; and Washington, DC--produced "no discernible negative effects on employment" and no measurable job shift from metropolitan to suburban areas.

Related:

Seattle Approves $15 Minimum Wage

Mayor's Minimum Wage Veto Overridden by San Diego City Council

States That Raised Their Minimum Wages Are Experiencing Faster Job Growth

 
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @09:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @09:35PM (#123876)

    If wages had kept up with inflation, the minimum wage would be over $22 today.
    If wages had kept up with productivity, the minimum wage would be over $23 today.
    All workers in Denmark make over $20/hr.

    Neoliberalism, trade deals, killing off tariffs, and exporting manufacturing jobs have made the USA a third-world country--with tiny pockets of extreme wealth.
    Unemployment is currently almost 24 percent (if you don't cook the numbers the way the gov't does).

    Rick Perry likes to brag about how Texas is gaining jobs.
    What he doesn't say is that they're mostly poverty-wage jobs.

    -- gewg_

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Fauxlosopher on Monday December 08 2014, @10:00PM

    by Fauxlosopher (4804) on Monday December 08 2014, @10:00PM (#123890) Journal

    If wages had kept up with inflation, the minimum wage would be over $22 today.
    If wages had kept up with productivity, the minimum wage would be over $23 today.

    Where and how did this come to be? What is inflation? What causes inflation? Why aren't wages keeping up with inflation?

    Do understand that I am not suggesting that your claims are false; I am asking about what you see as the cause for the problem, as without knowing the cause, a working solution is unlikely to be found.

    While inflation, which I define as an increase in fungible monetary units (both credits as paper and positive bank balances AND debts as mortgages and credit card balances), is actually a vital tool to allow an economy to expand in proper proportion with population growth, when abused it can destroy a nation's economy... or a world's.

    In short, every $100 the US government (Federal Reserve, what-have-you) creates out of thin air, every $100 bill a North Korean counterfeit press turns out, and every unbacked emission of $100 worth of credit that a bank issues all have the exact same impact on each and every $1 that you have. Inflation (in all of its forms) in excess of population growth is theft, an insidious form of theft that has managed to steal straight though bank vault walls and from under mattresses without requiring the thief to bother with laying his physical hands on your property. Done at ~2-4% a year over the course of a hundred years, we are now feeling the powerful negative effects of compounding theft.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @11:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @11:36PM (#123934)

      Why aren't wages keeping up with inflation?

      In a word: Capitalism.

      In the Cold War days, there was a joke:
      Under Capitalism, man exploits man; under Communism, it is the inverse.
      This demonstrates a misunderstanding of what Communism actually is.
      It also shows that anyone can call anything by any name (Totalitarianism and State Capitalism with a fraudulent veneer).

      Now, the part about Capitalism was right on the money.

      French economist Thomas Piketty researched the previous 250 years of Capitalism and recently published his 696-page tome. [wikipedia.org]

      He concluded that Capitalism results in ever-increasing concentrations of wealth which then translate to political power.
      This is an unstable system and periodically the undamped system tears itself apart (French Revolution, numerous financial panics and depressions).

      Economics professor Richard Wolff thinks Piketty identified the cause correctly (Capitalism) but thinks he got the solution all wrong (wealth tax). [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [redfortyeight.com]
      (FDR's 94 percent billionaires tax worked for a while--until the New Deal was disassembled piece by piece by the folks with enough wealth to buy off the political system.)

      The correct permanent solution, however, is to disassemble the unstable system and replace it with something more stable.

      On a small-ish scale, the Mondragon worker-owned cooperative in the north of Spain (currently ~6000 workers) has had this figured out since 1956.
      In northern Italy there are numerous worker-owned cooperatives that are also successful.

      On a larger scale, northern Europe has figured out how to do this via a form of Socialism.
      Venezuela and Ecuador are moving in a similar direction.

      A guy in a tech forum I frequent has in his sig:
      It takes a lot of money to create poverty.
      Truer words were never spoken.

      -- gewg_

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday December 08 2014, @11:37PM

      by frojack (1554) on Monday December 08 2014, @11:37PM (#123936) Journal

      Modded you interesting, but not informative.

      Inflation is not necessarily linked to the increase in the money supply as you seem to suggest.

      That a bank loans out your deposits (Your $1000 deposit remains in your account, while $800 loan appears in another client's account), does not mean that inflation is going up or down. The convenience of the increase in money supply is paid for (over time) by the borrowers. It imposes no penalty on the economy as a whole.

      Just because a farmer borrows money for a new tractor doesn't mean you will pay more a pound of potatoes. The farmer can't raise his prices above the prevailing price and still expect to sell them.

      Government debt is a whole different matter, and when the government simply prints more money used to buy goods and services it is still dramatically different than when a government borrows money to buy goods and services.

      The problem comes in when the government retires debt by printing money.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.