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New Study: $10.10 Minimum Wage Could Lift Millions Out Of Poverty
Raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour could directly lift nearly five million Americans out of poverty, according to a new study from University of Massachusetts-Amherst economist Arindrajit Dube.
According to Dube’s findings, a $10.10 per hour minimum wage — the same level proposed by a bill co-authored by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA), and supported by President Barack Obama — would reduce the poverty rate among the non-elderly population by 1.7 percent. Taking lagged effects into account, the minimum-wage hike could eventually reduce the poverty rate by 2.5 percent, lifting 6.8 million out of poverty.
“To put this in context, the poverty rate among the non-elderly rose by as much as 3.4 percentage points during the Great Recession,” Dube writes. “So the proposed minimum wage change can reverse at least half of that increase.”
Dube is not the first economist to illustrate the impact that a minimum wage hike could have on fighting poverty; as this chart from the Economic Policy Center makes clear, a raise to $10.10 per hour would lift minimum-wage income above the poverty line for a family of three for the first time in 46 years.
In addition to helping families in need, raising the minimum wage is also a potent political tool; polls have repeatedly found large majorities in favor of raising the minimum wage and tying it to inflation. Due to the proposal’s popularity, Democrats are expected to make increasing the minimum wage a central tenet of their 2014 election strategy.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/new-stud...ut-of-poverty/
Last edited by boutons_deux; 01-05-2014 at 11:59 AM.
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Last edited by boutons_deux; 01-05-2014 at 12:50 PM.
Employees are not identical. Minimum wage jobs typically employ minimum skilled or minimum experienced employees. Historically, minimum wage jobs were entry level positions and the path to higher pay was not remaining static and stupid, but rather growing in experience and skills making yourself more valuable to your current (or another) employer. Minimum wage jobs were never intended to be careers that you raised a family on. You raised a family AFTER you acquired enough skills to make yourself valuable enough to your employer that they paid you enough so you could afford to raise a family.
As an employer in a technical field I am currently hiring and am reading 5 or 6 resumes a day. The common theme is that they all started our in minimum wage jobs and made multiple job changes/advancements as they grew and acquired skills till they reached a point that I would gladly pay them $20 an hour if they have acquired most of the skill sets I need.
Well let's say you have 10 full time employees and are paying them each $10/hr and the govt tells you that you must give them all 50% pay raises. I think it's awesome that you as an employer won't get rid of any employees and expect more from the remaining ones, and that you won't raise the price of your services. Instead you'll just take that extra $100k out of your own pocket, give it to your employees, and bask in the warm fuzzy feeling you get from helping society. That's really cool.
wonderful in theory.
in practice, ty jobs with ty wages require no skill and so offer no opportunity to acquire new skills on the job.
Raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would reduce taxpayer public assistance, give the employees a higher sense of worth, and hopefully encourage them to night school or whatever to pick up skills, training, knowledge they don't get on the job.
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Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers: 2012
In 2012, 75.3 million workers in the United States age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 59.0 percent of all wage and salary workers. 1 Among those paid by the hour, 1.6 million earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 2.0 million had wages below the federal minimum.2 Together, these 3.6 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 4.7 percent of all hourly paid workers. Tables 1 through 10 present data on a wide array of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics for hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage. The following are some highlights from the 2012 data.
- Minimum wage workers tend to be young. Although workers under age 25 represented only about one-fifth of hourly paid workers, they made up about half of those paid the Federal minimum wage or less. Among employed teenagers paid by the hour, about 21 percent earned the minimum wage or less, compared with about 3 percent of workers age 25 and over. (See table 1 and table 7.)
- In 2012, 6 percent of women paid hourly rates had wages at or below the prevailing federal minimum, compared with about 3 percent of men. (See table 1.)
- About 5 percent of White, Black, and Hispanic or Latino hourly paid workers earned the federal minimum wage or less. Among Asian workers paid at hourly rates, about 3 percent earned the minimum wage or less. (See table 1.)
- Among hourly paid workers age 16 and over, about 10 percent of those who had less than a high school diploma earned the federal minimum wage or less, compared with about 4 percent of those who had a high school diploma (with no college) and about 2 percent of college graduates. (See table 6.)
- Never-married workers, who tend to be young, were more likely than married workers to earn the federal minimum wage or less (about 8 percent versus about 2 percent). (See table 8.)
- About 11 percent of part-time workers (persons who usually work less than 35 hours per week) were paid the federal minimum wage or less, compared with about 2 percent of full-time workers. (See table 1 and table 9.)
- By major occupational group, the highest proportion of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage was in service occupations, at about 12 percent. About three-fifths of workers earning the minimum wage or less in 2012 were employed in service occupations, mostly in food preparation and serving related jobs. (See table 4.)
- The industry with the highest proportion of workers with hourly wages at or below the federal minimum wage was leisure and hospitality (about 19 percent). About half of all workers paid at or below the federal minimum wage were employed in this industry, the vast majority in restaurants and other food services. For many of these workers, tips and commissions supplement the hourly wages received. (See table 5.)
- The states with the highest proportions of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage were Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, and Idaho (all between 7 and 8 percent). The states with the lowest percentages of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage were Alaska, Oregon, California, Montana, and Washington (all under 2 percent). It should be noted that some states have minimum wage laws establishing standards that exceed the federal minimum wage. (See table 2 andtable 3.)
- The proportion of hourly paid workers earning the prevailing federal minimum wage or less declined from 5.2 percent in 2011 to 4.7 percent in 2012. This remains well below the figure of 13.4 percent in 1979, when data were first collected on a regular basis. (Seetable 10.)
http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2012.htm
You totally misunderstood me. Especially in the OP's scenario where the minimum wage increase only applied to one class of employees (hotel and motel workers) those current $10 an hour slug employees are inevitably toast. The hotels and motels can hire smarter, more motivated and industrious employees for $15 an hour now that they are required to do so. They will probably get by with a few less employees because of the higher quality workers but inevitably they will raise prices to cover the difference. And those $10 an hour workers? They will either get with the program and up their game, or be unemployed or working somewhere else for $10 an hour.
I understand and mostly agree with your historical view of that. The problem is that the job market changes and has changed. A lot of what used to be skilled work has been entirely replaced with automation and computers. You see it in all sorts of industries: Highly trained CPAs crunching numbers replaced by software, factory workers/packaging workers replaced by robots, sales people replaced by vending machines... on top of that, globalization has shifted most of massive low skilled work elsewhere. Wages have also not kept up with inflation, which starts eating up the middle-class (minimum wage increases modify the entire salary structure, not just low skilled jobs).
So a lot of these people will have to live with min wage jobs until they can re-train and get back into a path that moves them up on the food chain. There's also a lot of overqualified workers doing lower-skill work. That's just a reality that gets more and more severe as technology keeps on taking over. The Chinese tried to address this with the 1-child policy and manipulating their currency to get most of the low-skill work. That's how severe this thing can get.
BTW, there's no easy solution to this, IMO.
Increased cost will always be passed over to the customer. There's no scenario where I don't see that happening. However, I think you're misguided on how such a min wage only affects one class. Somebody is going to be doing the job that a $10 worker was doing for $15. So the guy that was already doing a more complex job for $15, will now want $20. AFAIK, salary structures always scale from the bottom up, not from top to bottom. A min wage increase will create pressure on the entire salary structure.
Should've used blue. I was just mocking the idea that raising the minimum wage to $15 would have no impact on employers like yourself and be nothing but rainbows and butterflies for everyone.
Henry Ford paid $5/day 100 years ago. That's $15/hour today
what bull .
the 2008 and following years increase in teenage (and all) unemployment was due to the Banksters Great Depression, not the rise in minimum wage.
Was he competing with China, Mexico, Japan, Indonesia, etc?
it's not compe ion that suppresses wages, it's VRWC War on Employees
You're right. Outlawing employment contracts has nothing to do with employment.
It's almost like, there can only be one cause of anything.
outlawing, denying employment contracts is part of the War on Employees
You're so smart! Clearly businesses never hire people. War on Employees and all.
Every time a business hires someone is another defeat in this epic struggle. They will only be satisfied when there is 100% unemployment!
The great Bouton's has spoken... and so it is written...
Economic War on Low Wage Workers Continues
A report from the Economic Policy Ins ute finds that low-wage workers are robbed far more often than banks, gas stations and convenience stores combined. The culprits are employers who fail to adhere to minimum wage laws or pay overtime.
“The country suffers an epidemic of wage theft, as large numbers of employers violate minimum-wage, overtime, and other wage and hour laws with virtual impunity,” University of Oregon economist Gordon Lafer wrote in the report.
Such workplace abuses are occurring as some of the most powerful corporate lobbies attack labor standards and workplace protections, including minimum wage laws, paid sick leave, and even child labor protections.
“According to our statistics,” EPI Vice President Ross Eisenbrey observed, “from 1983 to 2010 the bottom 60 percent of Americans actually lost wealth, despite the fact that the overall U.S. economy has grown over this same time period. This is a remarkable indictment of how the economy is not working for everybody.”
http://www.projectcensored.org/econo...ers-continues/
Crossing Borders and Changing Lives, Lured by Higher State Minimum Wages
There are restaurant jobs closer to home, but she is willing to drive the extra miles for a simple reason: Oregon’s minimum wage is $1.85 higher per hour than Idaho’s.
“It’s a big difference in pay,” said Ms. Lynch, 20, who moved last summer from her parents’ home in Boise, 30 miles farther east, to make her Oregon commute more bearable. “I can actually put some in the bank.”
Ms. Lynch is one of the many minimum-wage migrants who travel from homes in Idaho, where the rate is $7.25, to work in Oregon, where it is the second highest in the country, $9.10. Similar migrations unfold every day in other parts of Idaho — at the border with Washington, which has the highest state minimum, $9.32, and into Nevada, where the minimum rate tops out at $8.25.
Their experiences underscore what many proponents of raising the wage assert: that even seemingly small increases in pay can galvanize people’s lives, allowing workers to quit second jobs, buy cars or take vacations.
The compe ion for workers has in turn forced many businesses on the Idaho side to raise their wages.
But opponents of raising the minimum wage can also point to evidence here of negative, or uneven, consequences. When wages go up, they say, prices do as well. And a question resonates here no matter what side you are on: Can any region dependent on the minimum wage ever fully prosper?
“It feels like a wash,” he said. “It is not the consumer that wins, because most businesses will pass their increase on to the consumer through higher prices. The business doesn’t win, because they are forced to increase their prices to maintain proper margins to keep their doors open, thus affecting current customers and the potential of loss of new business. The employee doesn’t win, because they are the consumer.”
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/16...?from=homepage
the business owner who says “It feels like a wash,” is full of bull , like so many minimum wage employers screwing their employees with ty wages.
Raising the minimum wage has minimum impact on retail prices, and the people who get the increased minimum wage don't buy all their stuff from minimum wage suppliers.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 02-16-2014 at 01:35 PM.
LOL...
Seriously?
OK...
$1.85/hr more and pay extra gas, extra car maintenance, and Oregon income tax!
Why do liberal rags glorify stupidity?
Oregon taxes start pretty quickly as well. After you subtract your federal tax liability, the standard deduction is small, and you start paying taxes fast!
Single............................................ ...........$2,080
Married/RDP filing jointly................................ 4,160
Married/RDP filing separately
If spouse/RDP claims standard deduction...........2,080
If spouse/RDP claims itemized deductions.............-0-
Head of household........................................ 3,345
Qualifying widow(er)..................................... 4,160
You get what you pay for.
This is what minimum wage gets you.
If you need some links to conservative rags glorifying stupidity, let me know
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