If one person is 20,000,000x more valuable than worker X, why does that company employ worker X? He obvioulsy has little value to the company. They can do without him.
Instead of $15 per hour minimum wage... how about this?
- Thread starter The Tradition
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If one person is 20,000,000x more valuable than worker X, why does that company employ worker X? He obvioulsy has little value to the company. They can do without him.
Many companies already offer some sort of profit sharing, I see no need to mandate it.
I can also tell you that some people simply cannot, or will not, connect the dots and associate their work related activity to company profitability. Many people operate out of habit and are not motivated to change their work behavior, even when they could realize more profits for the company and/or themselves.
Exactly. And if a company is forced to pay that person $15/hr instead of $7.25, that's precisely what they will do.
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You really think someone above the age of 18 who is currently making $7.25/hr is going to be motivated by an ESOP or any other profit sharing plan where their "sharing of the wealth" amounts to somewhere between $0.41 and $0.86, depending on how good business was that month?
Profit sharing and ESOPs are effective for employees who are ambitious and have some sort of skills that you don't want to have to replace. Those without the ambition and skill to advance past minimum wage at age 30 aren't going to give a F regardless of what kind of system you put in place.
Maybe, but I think the evidence in play says something different. Why are you so wed to this view that people who work for a living are lazy?
I completely agree. There are a lot of jobs out there that aren't worth $15/hr. Flipping burgers at McDonalds is one of them (I flipped burgers in high school. Its not rocket science). Is the CEO of a bunch of burger flippers really worth 500-1000x more than the burger flipper?
Yes, the clientele can be challenging at places. The one in Ottumwa, IA, however, offers a pretty good environment. Living off campus is an option, also, that would be a way of handling those situations. You still get the free meals there. Like I said, there is another option of going through the Job Corps and getting one's Associates Degree through Indian Hills. Like everything in life, nothing is perfect, but you can make other decisions that can counter the bad experiences. You just have to know they are available and what your options are.
I worked at a place that gave out profit sharing once a year, it always came a month or two before tax time. I would spend a portion on it to buy something I would not normally have bought (electronics and gadgets mostly), but I would not spend more than 1/4 of the amount i received on such frivolities.
And, while i think there should be something done as far as minimum wage, especially when you have highly profitable companies receiving tax breaks while their employees are relying on the government to get by (i have no clue what the best solution is), the quoted part above is why people will never get ahead, even with a minimum wage boost....poor people make the poor decisions.....the extra money will likely be pi**ed away rather than saved or be used to get ahead.
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How many adults do you know that work hard and make good choices, yet only make $7.25/hr throughout their career? Minimum wage is for students working their way through school, and people with an extremely limited skill set that need to start somewhere before WORKING their way to something better. If you continue to make $7.25/hr year after year, that's a "you" problem. If you are worth more than what your current employer values you at, find somewhere that will pay it to you.
So? Maybe they have made poor decisions. Maybe they are limited people. I understand most people don't actually work for $7.25, but make $8-12/h. They are making the decision now to work for a living. That smart decision now should be rewarded. This is a smart way to reward effort IMO. Even if the only reason to reward it is so that you and I don't have to supplement their income with welfare.
Starting a small business is risky. To get a loan, you more likely than not have to sign your house as collateral. Rand Paul claimed that 90% of small businesses fail. That statistic is disputed, but why make it less rewarding by mandating profit sharing with low skilled employees? That will only make entrepreneurs less likely to risk starting something.
They need to have tiers for minimum wages, not just fifteen across the board. I could quit my high stress job right now with my 401K, investments and properties owned and still retire at 50 bagging groceries somewhere stress free for $15.00 a hour. This can't happen. What a disaster it would be to get good people to work difficult jobs when they don't have to. Raises will disappear.
To me, it's more risky if I have to pay double the current minimum wage no matter how the business venture goes. At least this way, I don't have to pay more unless I'm successful and make more.
This . . . It's about more then just the people making 7.25 an hour. $8 an hour isn't a heck of a lot better.
I don't want to be seen as assailing everyone who makes $8-12/hr - I know a lot of good people work hard and try to grind out a fair living in that range. But in life there are choices, trade-offs, and consequences. My mom was/is a very smart lady who worked for almost 25 years in a non-profit office job where she made somewhere in that zip code. Could she have made more elsewhere in a different role? Probably. But she made the trade-off to live in a small town where she was comfortable, had a lot of friends, got decent benefits from her employer, and didn't have a lot of stress when she walked out the door every night. If $5/hr more was that important to her, she could have gone elsewhere. Same goes for most everyone else with some skills. And if you don't have skills (like nunchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills), then you shouldn't necessarily make more than minimum wage until you go to the effort of acquiring some.
On the flip side, If someone slacks their way through elementary, middle, and high school, quitting jobs along the way because they are too hard, interfere with their social life, boss won't let them text during work hours, etc. and only decide at age 25-30-40 that The Man owes them something more that their current lot in life, I'm sorry. Actions have consequences. Doesn't make you a bad person, it just is what it is. Also doesn't mean you are stuck there forever - work hard and find a way to improve things, at your current job or otherwise. The enterprising small business owner that employs you (and probably works 4-5x your hours) shouldn't have to gut himself just so you can buy more consumer goods, especially when most of his minimum wage employees will probably quit on him within 6-12 months anyway.
Buy more consumer goods. . . you talk about it like they are living it up at that wage.
The way I see it when someone makes so little money that they can't afford to take care of themselves then it ends up being on the government and by extension the taxpayers to take care of them. And the whole thing of "get skills" doesn't play out. A lot of people who went and got skills have ended up in low paying jobs just because the market for their skills is saturated.
Ultimately even if everyone had a skill, (which often isn't as easy as you seem to think it is) many people are going to end up having to work at unskilled job. That's just the way it turns out. There just arn't enough skilled jobs available to hire everyone.
Minimum wage just isn't enough to care for yourself. So we're suppose to pick up the slack and subsidize employer's low wages through our taxes. Meanwhile many (not all) of these companies make off with enourmous profits. Walmart for example made 16.363 Billion in 2014 in NET PROFIT (After taxes) with 2.1 million employees world wide.
They could pay each and every employee $5000 more a year (about a $2.40 raise) and still make a pretty nice 5.863 billion dollars in profit. They can do that and not raise the cost of goods a single penny. Being willing to modestly increase prices (say 5 or 10% would mean that Walmart employees could take home an even greater amount of money.)
Now how many people do you suppose could be pushed off food stamps and the welfare rolls if Walmart gave all their employees . . . or the low level employees $5000 more a year? But instead conservatives would rather have the taxpayer subsidize Wal-Mart's profits by picking up the slack for their low wages.
Remember also we are just operating off of net profit. If we went off of gross profit (since they wouldn't be taxes on money they paid to employees) they could come up with even more money to pay their employees pushing even more of them off the taxpayer dole.
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If you truly believe a global corporation like Wal-Mart (or a small business for that matter) is going to lay down and take a $10 billion hit to their profits without raising prices dollar for dollar to make up for it (which will negatively impact low income earners disproportionately), then this conversation probably won't go much further. You know what you would see rather than these employees making another $5,000 annually? Additional self-checkout aisles (since they would just fire 1/2 their cashiers), or more likely in Wal-Mart's case, worse service and longer lines.
I suppose the government could come in with some sort of price controls ensuring that Wal-Mart couldn't charge more than $3.00 for a gallon of milk, maybe that would fix everything. Until grocers quit buying the price-controlled items from farmers, and then the government has to subsidize the dairy industry so they don't all lose their farms and have to find a job somewhere making minimum wage because their skills don't translate into anything else available in their community, and round and round we go.....
I suppose the government could come in with some sort of price controls ensuring that Wal-Mart couldn't charge more than $3.00 for a gallon of milk, maybe that would fix everything. Until grocers quit buying the price-controlled items from farmers, and then the government has to subsidize the dairy industry so they don't all lose their farms and have to find a job somewhere making minimum wage because their skills don't translate into anything else available in their community, and round and round we go.....
Hope you don't work for a farmer if you want profit sharing.
Fancy new truck, combine, and all kinds of other things can knock that figure to nothing.
I know a place that wrote up a farmers golf cart batteries as farm equipment so he could write it off.
What we need is a flat tax on gross income. No deductions and no shell games.
I would also take from the top 1/2 percent of earners and give that money to people that are or but work full time in the form of direct payments. No government programs or other crap spending.
Fancy new truck, combine, and all kinds of other things can knock that figure to nothing.
I know a place that wrote up a farmers golf cart batteries as farm equipment so he could write it off.
What we need is a flat tax on gross income. No deductions and no shell games.
I would also take from the top 1/2 percent of earners and give that money to people that are or but work full time in the form of direct payments. No government programs or other crap spending.
After looking further Wal-mart's gross profits before taxes where 24.8 billion.
What if they took 14.8 billion and used it to pay their employees more. They could pay them about $7000 more a year, a 3.36 an hour raise (if working full time)
That still leaves them with a $10 billion dollar gross profit. At the tax rate they are already paying that still leaves them $6.78 billion dollars profit.
What if they took 14.8 billion and used it to pay their employees more. They could pay them about $7000 more a year, a 3.36 an hour raise (if working full time)
That still leaves them with a $10 billion dollar gross profit. At the tax rate they are already paying that still leaves them $6.78 billion dollars profit.
They will take the hit in their profits and you know why?
Because if they try to make it all up in price they lose the price war and they lose business.
Walmart still has to compete with other stores. They can't raise their prices because their cost of labor increased. It doesn't work that way because someone else will decide to take the lower profit margins for extra business.
Someone already tried that. They were called "Wal-Mart". And until another someone comes along to offer those low, low prices in new gleaming stores with unmatched customer service and a helpful smile in every aisle, the former employees will be collecting unemployment and letting their skills deteriorate further.
Am I understanding you correctly that you want a system where you can't deduct business expenses?
Do you really think that Wal-mart is the only company trying to compete on the basis of price? They are only the most successful ones. But that doesn't mean that the competition isn't out there waiting for Wal-Mart to fail at that.
The only way Wal-Mart competes is with lower prices. If they can pay for their wage increase out of their profits they will do it because they will have to.
My tax penalty plan simply allows that we basically tell Walmart that they are gonna either pay that money to their employees or they are gonna pay it to the American people but we are not going to subsidize their profits anymore.
Look, the underlying problem here is birth control. Someone thinks that they don't make a "living wage" because they can't support their three kids? Guess what - quit having kids before you can afford them and we wouldn't be in this mess. Life isn't always fair.
Pretty sure you can't take care of even yourself on min wage.
Besides while I understand this issue, the idea that we should leave the kids high and dry because we don't like what their parents are doing is wrong.
I wonder how many of these people that can't "afford to take care of themselves" has money for cigarettes, smart phones, some fresh pair of kicks on their feet and high monthly cable bills.
and how many people will quit their jobs or reduce hours if they all of a sudden start making enough money to have their government benefits taken away?
Good point, let's merge welfare reform with a min. wage bill. Peg it to inflation and be done with this issue forever.
If the money made at working was significantly higher then government benefits then people will work. If people stand to lose money by going to work because min wage is so incredibly crappy then yes of course they will quit.
I think you overestimate the work ethic in a lot of people who are used to having all this stuff handed to them.
also you are not thinking of scenarios like the following. Late last year, I ended up jobless. Wife at the time was working part time. We were on medicaid or whatever for 5-6 months(they put me and my wife on it as we only applied to get our son on Hawki insruance, although the wife might have applied to get added and I got thrown on as well?) as I obtained a seasonal job over the holidays last year that turned permanent. Then I made too much and had to get my own insurance...so now, instead of having free insurance with damned good coverage, I have a huge chunk taken out biweekly. I make a decent amount and I don't have too many bills or an outrageous mortgage so it is no problem to swing it (although the coverage suuuuucks). But now, you have to take into consideration the cost of the possibility of $70 or more to cover the cost of insurance that will now come out of a persons check.
This is more to the issue than food stamps and a welfare check at the first of the month (or whenever they hand those things out). How much will wages have to raise to get to this mythical rate of prosperity that will eliminate poverty from the country?
I have dealt with job loss, working low paying jobs and struggling. I understand a need to provide a safety net for people like me who have used it as a temporary helping hand. Hell, I would even support providing community service for benefits received, whether it cleaning up parks, ditches or whatever.
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I just walked past a Panera and they are paying $9.25/hr to start. By choice. Boom, problem solved.
I wish I could find the video, but there was a news story some time back that really required a double take. Apparently some sort of municipal heating oil program for the poor was going to end, and a reporter was standing in the home of a "poor" person, complaining how she can't live without subsidized heating oil. While she's ranting about how "unfair" it is, she's standing in front of a big screen TV with a couple of game consoles and a bunch of games on the TV stand.
Hey lady! Sell your TV and buy heating oil!
Hey lady! Sell your TV and buy heating oil!
i recall seeing that a while back. Also reminds me of this article I read a while ago
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...wo-wants-MORE-money-government-help-diet.html
Jeez, how desperate was the father of those kids?
