Joe Biden is now officially the 46th President of the United States of America

This part of the discussion is pretty much over at this stage, but you're responding to a post that directly mentions not one, not two, but six developed countries (all of which are apparently paradise worthy of emulating, at least according to the American left) with no minimum wage regulation by the government, so apparently "always" in all actuality means "sometimes, if at all". The use of scrip, IOU's and tokens isn't uncommon around the world, but it's usually reserved for times of extreme recession when legal tender is limited. These alternative methods of payment have nothing to do with minimum wage, frankly. Your level of remuneration is detailed in your contract, the company can't just forget about it - it signed it just like you have.

 

Government is like family - it looks best on a family photo. I love it so much that I'm keen to see it once a year, around Christmas time. In fact, my love for it increases with my distance away from it. I get your point, I simply disagree with your assessment that government intervention is required here - I fully trust employees, individually or unionised, to represent their interests sufficiently. We know this to be true because only a small fraction of employees in the US make minimum wage or below - around 2%. All of this has been discussed already and doesn't belong in this thread - Biden's administration is more interested in raising the minimum wage nationally, so we'll see what the result will be. I have my suspicions, but I'll keep them to myself so as to not stoke the fire further.

 

These are all the same arguments we always hear. "The government spends a lot on the military" - yeah, I don't like that either, even though I recognise the importance of that kind of spending. Spend less and lower the deficit, or better yet, lower taxes. "Big Mac's abroad are only 20c more expensive, that's not much!" - again, left-wingers being poor with numbers. That's a 10% increase in price of goods, and we're talking about one specific product in one specific company. If the price of bread went up by 10%, restaurants, caterers etc. would have a *big problem* on their hands because their baked goods expenses just went up by 10%, and that necessarily means cutting their expenses elsewhere or an increase of prices for customers. Now imagine if it was steel, or some other key resource used in more expensive goods, and that 20c can scale up right quick. It's all the same regurgitated pulp that's always pulled out of the hat whenever the subject rears its head. The system of sudden increases of minimum wage is stupid, it shocks the economy every single time. *If* I'm supposed to accept minimum wage as something that's not set arbitrarily using a random number that looks good on a slogan, it has to be pegged to something so that it's constantly mobile without the need of additional legislation. Want a systemic solution? Make one. Propose a sensible system and stop touching it. Peg it to the GDP, peg it to exchange rates, peg it to relative living costs, but don't just write a cute slogan that demands the entire economy raises the minimum wage by nearly 100% overnight. It should be dynamic, or revisited annualy, or a staggered roll-out to allow for adjustment over time. There's *zero* economic sense in doing this the way the U.S. does.

 

I watched the video, it's why I mentioned it in the first place, along with other solutions. That is *not* what's being proposed by the $15 movement, nor how it's actually arranged in the U.S., which is the problem. One of the many reasons why the current, real-life implementation of minimum wage increases is dumb.

By rescinding development permissions for Keystone XL which would've further increased American energy security and provided a bunch of jobs in the energy sector and the construction sector.

 

Unarguably speaking, if I were asked to increase the wage of workers in a company I was running by 100% overnight *without* increasing prices, I'd either have to cut their hours or sack some of them because I have a set budget for wages. I raise your study to the study by the Congressional Budget Office:

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55410

This study assumes a staggered roll-out until 2025 in six steps. The rise to $15 has predictable effects:

To translate from Congress-speak to English, overall poverty levels would've lowered at the cost of making millions of workers jobless - you double some incomes and reduce other incomes to zero. I could've told you that without reading it, it's obvious. You're reducing the number of kinda-poor people by increasing the number of extremely poor people - d'uh.

Should the roll-out be instant, the effect would've been more pronounced, as I previously mentioned.