i am SO FREAKING DONE guys !!!!!!!

[Scuba Steve]

5 hours ago, dr_st said:

More [Americans have $300,000 to loan] than you imagine.

The average American has roughly $8,000 in savings with just a quarter of people having enough savings to live on for more than 6 months. In fact, far less than ten percent of households have that kind of savings, restricted mostly to a SINGLE percentage of households with over 300k in savings. You must be trolling, nobody could possibly be this fucking dense about the state of the vast majority of Americans' lack of wealth and income. "More than you imagine" lol get out of here with this ignorant shit.

Edited June 16, 2020 by Scuba Steve

[WowozuelaSpammer]

I'm not sure if the second one is a troll, he's called "Krist the 30 year old boomer", are you sure he's not a troll?

[dr_st]

@Scuba Steve

Kindly spare me your personal attacks and your mockery, just because you fail at big numbers and/or reading comprehension. Nowhere was I speaking about "majority" or "median" or "average" Americans, was I?

 

I said "more than you imagine".  Let's go with your assumption of single-digit percentage. Let's say 5% can afford that kind of investment. For a population of 300 million that still leaves you with 15 million people that have $300,000 to spare (divide by the average household size to get the number of households if you prefer).

 

15 million people. That's more than the entire population of many countries. That's more people than you will ever meet in your life. But, I bet that if you live in the US, you pass such people on the street without knowing it, and you might even know a few of them personally.

[Cacodemon345]

What actually matters is the ratio between the minimum wage and the average cost of living.

For example, let's say your earnings is $15/day. Assume that the cost of decent living tends to be much higher than that (assume $30/day or $35/day approx.). Assume that the cost of living a poverty tends to be similar to your earnings (let's assume the cost of living in a poverty is $12/day). You would be thinking that life in your place is hard, since the ratio of your earnings and decent living is 1:2. But then your earnings and poverty living cost is almost 1:1, so you have to try looking for a job in your place that offers higher earnings. But then it is possible that that also doesn't allow you to escape from poverty. Consequently, if you find that making a decent living in your place is hard and if migrating to a better place is an option for you, you want to migrate.

 

Assume then, you want to migrate to a better place. And that said better place has higher earnings. Then migrating to that said better place is going to look more attractive.

 

Of course, admittedly, there are far more factors involved in the attraction of migration and eventual, actual migration. There's also that factor of what kind of jobs your are able to do and the greater benefits of that said job. I am ready to be proved wrong in any case; at least that's the opinion I held learning from the experience in my country.

[dr_st]

11 minutes ago, Cacodemon345 said:

What actually matters is the ratio between the minimum wage and the average cost of living.

Why look at the ratio between the minimum wage and the average cost? Why not look at the average/median wage?

[Cacodemon345]

10 minutes ago, dr_st said:

Why look at the ratio between the minimum wage and the average cost? Why not look at the average/median wage?

Read the rest of my post. You will understand.

[Mr. Freeze]

just tie minimum wage to the local median wage lmao eCONomists BTFO

[Nine Inch Heels]

4 hours ago, dr_st said:

I'm sorry. I don't quite understand you. You say "well-adjusted" minimum wage, but what does it mean? Well adjusted to what? As in "the higher the better"? Or some other policy? I think, given that you started your post as a rebuttal of the Cato institute's opinion, that you believe minimum wage should be increased.

Yes, of course it needs to be increased. That shit explains itself.

Quote

The median wage in 2019 is $19.33 per hour, which translates into about $40,000 per year for a full-time, full-year worker.

 

The average cost to employers of the wages and salaries of blue-collar workers was $12.61 per hour.

 

Data provided by the US bureau of labour statistics, by the way...

Does 7.25$ do anything here? No, it actually doesn't...

 

And it's not like employers get to just save 5$ if they hire somebody for the minimum wage, they save more, because what you're getting paid isn't how much you actually cost your employer: Once you have taken into consideration basic salary, taxes and benefits, the real costs of your employees are typically in the 1.25 to 1.4 times base salary range. In other words, an employee earning $30,000 will cost you somewhere between $37,500 and $42,000

 

4 hours ago, dr_st said:

How does increasing the minimum wage cause reduced immigration? If now the minimum wage is $7.25, and an employer can fire his employee to hire someone illegally for $3, what prevents him from doing the same if the minimum wage is $15? If anything, it gives him even higher incentive to hire illegally, as the gap grows.

 

4 hours ago, dr_st said:

And if you're talking about employers that pay legal minimum wage to everyone regardless of their migrant status - well, then the immigrants have even higher incentive to immigrate, so they can be making $15 instead of $7.25.

Ah, I see how it is. Lots of supposed book smarts, but when pressured beyond the first few layers you suddenly can't keep up any more... I already explained why the incentive for immigrants to move the US would be lower if the minimum were able to do its job. It seems you just assume that if people think they can earn even more, they'll want to migrate even more, and contrary to what Cato would like to make believe, that's just not how it works, because...

 

Jobs don't exist in a vacuum, the job market is a competitive market:

Firing a native worker in favour of an immigrant becomes much less attractive if you -from the perspective of a business owner - don't get to save as much money to get same amount of work done. In order for there to be an incentive to to hire somebody who works for a lower hourly rate it needs to pay off somehow. When you hire, you need to train these new workers, that costs time and money. There are language barriers involved too, so the immigrants are less efficient at the same job than the natives. So the moment the minimum wage is raised to a level where it doesn't justify the effort any more, the available jobs will more likely go to trained native workers instead of untrained (or less trained) "foreign" ones. Different educational baselines will put the native workers at an advantage over immigrants the moment Human Resource Departments need to make a call. This greatly reduces the chance of immigrants with low qualifications being able to establish a foothold on the american job market, making immigration in the pursuit of monetary gain much less attractive, lowering the incentive to migrate in the first place.

 

This really isn't rocket science, you know? I mean, did you even read any of the link of the links I've given you here? I'm just asking because if you did, and you understood the topic, then we wouldn't be discussing this at such a low level any more, we'd be looking at things like multi-level-analysis breakdowns and statistics to discuss this topic going forward.

 

Also, hiring illegal immigrants in particular comes with a risk for the employer. The reason they do it regardless and hope to get away with it is because it's worth the risk. The moment it isn't worth the risk any more, the incentive to illegally jump borders will also be reduced drastically. What does minimum wage have to do with this? Simple, if legal immigrants already struggle getting with getting their feet on the ground, then how much more difficult is it gonna be for illegal ones? The answer is: A lot, because the moment immigration in pursuit of job opportunities lowers, the more like it is that illegal immigrants will stick out like a sore thumb, which consequentially puts pressure on employers and business owners to play a "clean" game.

 

 

4 hours ago, dr_st said:

Did you read their conclusion? I don't quite think it supports the theory that increasing minimum wages reduces immigration:

Of course I read their conclusion, not only do they include "naturalized citizens", "lawful permanent residents" as well as "legal nonimmigrants" (like students students on vistas) in the same bracket, but it also is a strong argument for why the current minimum wage in the US simply doesn't do its job, and I'll explain this as a one and done kind of deal, because just fending off mere conjecture and whishful thinking isn't my idea of having a proper debate.

 

Quote

Twenty-one states began 2020 with higher minimum wages. Seven states (Alaska, Florida, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, South Dakota, and Vermont) automatically increased their rates based on the cost of living, while 14 states (Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Washington) increased their rates due to previously approved legislation or ballot initiatives.

 

Now you'd think that all of these states in the US, which have a higher minimum wage, would also have more immigrants than all the other states in the US, which have the baseline of 7.25$. You'd think that if that were the case, then it would be a strong argument against raising the minimum wage. You'd think that now your point is proven, but it's not, because the sates in the USA with minimum wages above 7.25$ are not necessarily the ones with the most immigrants.

 

Simply put, the minimum wage data for individual states is not congruent with the percentage of immigrants, which would have to be the case, if your position in this "debate" was accurate.

-Washington, nearly double the amount of the federal minimum wage of 7.25$: Share of immigrants only 2%.

 

-Vermont: 3$ above federal minimum wage: Share of immigrants 0%.
 

-New York: 4.50$ above federal minimum wage (more than a 50% increase!): 10% of the population there are immigrants.

 

-Colorado: At 12$ minimum wage (more than a 50% increase!): Share of immigrants across the entire USA: 1%

-New Mexico: 9$ minimum wage. Share of immigrants: 0%

 

-Arizona, at 12$ minimum wage: Share of immigrants: 2%

 

-Oregon, at 12$ minimum wage: Share of immigrants: 1%

 

-Texas, at federal minimum wage: Share of immigrants: 11%

 

There is no data that supports the claim that higher minimum wage leads to higher immigration on a state level. If minimum wage was the driving factor for immigration, then clearly the distribution of immigrants across the US would be a lot more congruent with the minimum wages in each individual state, which it is not.

Edited June 16, 2020 by Nine Inch Heels

[Scuba Steve]

1 hour ago, dr_st said:

@Scuba Steve

Kindly spare me your personal attacks...

No, get fucked. You're a bad faith actor who twists words and uses disingenuous sources. You deserve ridicule and mockery. "Hurt Durr technically there might be 15 million people..." you say with a shit eating grin... "Got him!" while completely glossing over the core message: three in four Americans are working poor and don't have enough savings in an emergency and one percent of people own more wealth than half of all Americans combined! It's simply not sustainable to have that much wealth in the hands of so few, when the rest are one accident away from defaulting on their mortgage.

 

Like I said, you're a bad actor who couches arguments with weasel words like "I think..." and isn't interested in actual dialog about wealth inequality. I won't, and nobody else should, waste time debating someone who is deceptive let alone give them an ounce of respect. Fuck off, mate.

[dr_st]

@Nine Inch Heels

I begin to understand your debate tactics. :) Put a wall of text, write a whole lot of unrelated stuff, avoid actually answering any of the direct questions you were asked, and insult the person who asked them for being "supposedly book-smart" but obviously too stupid to understand your bulletproof logic.

 

Normally, I don't continue the discussion when presented with such tactics, because there is nothing in it for me. This probably won't be a very long conversation either, if you keep up your current approach. However, for the benefit of other readers, I will kindly try to go back to the topic one more time.

 

12 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Firing a native worker in favour of an immigrant becomes much less attractive if you -from the perspective of a business owner - don't get to save as much money to get same amount of work done.

You still didn't clarify whether you were talking about employing immigrants illegally and paying them less than the minimum wage, or legally and paying them the minimum wage.

 

If it's the former - then it's obvious why it will become more attractive as the minimum wage rises, and not less attractive as you claim.

 

If it's the latter, then you seem to have a hidden assumption (that you did not mention) that an immigrant will work for minimum wage regardless of what it is, but a native will demand some fixed salary, regardless of the minimum wage, and then your savings as an employer really diminish as the minimum wage increases.

 

Is that your assumption? If so, then what is the meaning of the $3/hour number you mentioned earlier? And how do you justify this assumption? And even if it's justified - doesn't it basically mean that raising minimum wage is done mostly to deter employees from hiring immigrants (as the natives were already refusing to work for such low wages)?

 

23 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Of course I read their conclusion, not only do they include "naturalized citizens", "lawful permanent residents" as well as "legal nonimmigrants" (like students students on vistas)...

So you read their conclusion, including the parts I put in bold, which clearly say that they saw a correlation between higher minimum wage and incentive to immigration, but you disagree with it, due to various factors. However, you still cherry-pick other parts of the study that you believe support your position. Okay...

 

26 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Now you'd think that all of these states in the US, which have a higher minimum wage, would also have more immigrants than all the other states in the US, which have the baseline of 7.25$. You'd think that if that were the case, then it would be a strong argument against raising the minimum wage. You'd think that now your point is proven, but it's not, because the sates in the USA with minimum wages above 7.25$ are not necessarily the ones with the most immigrants.

The elephant in the room here is the proximity to Mexico, obviously, but not only. In case it was not clear, I do not think that the minimum wage is the driving factor for immigrants deciding on which US state to settle in. I can think of many other factors, such as cost of living (as Cacodemon345 mentioned), immigration policies, general immigration-friendliness of the state, and many many more. I was just surprised at your choice to quote a study whose conclusion you disagree with.

[dew]

6 hours ago, dr_st said:

Yes, but what you, personally you, are advocating for is exactly the Soviet system, even if you don't have the guts to admit it (or perhaps not even the knowledge to understand it).

And you have the gall to demand respectful tone from others. Your disgusting false dichotomy will get you nowhere, everyone has seen through your bullshit.

[HombreSal]

Everyone here's so shocked about you being done but I'm shocked because I always thought you looked like Frank Zappa.

[NoXion]

This thread requires more cat pictures.

[Not Jabba]

Looks like this has gone far enough, and ended appropriately. Thank you for the joke video and the cat pictures.