Should We Drop Minimum Wage?

[Cockney_Blue]

[quote]pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
There should be no intervention in the wage by government…period.

This creates disemployment by raising costs on employers who now must lay-off of their most marginally productive employees. Suddenly, street sweepers are out of work because no one thinks they’re worth $7.75/hr.

They should jack the minimum wage up, if for no other reason to piss Lifty off On a more serious note we need a livable wage, after we have everybody that wants to work having job then we can have a minimum wage
.

Yes it will be the lowest paid person in the work force. If a person takes a job at $5/hr, then obviously that job is fine by him. Yes, he may need another job, but obviously that person is in a position that he may need two or three jobs.

Yet, if you cannot hire him at the wage the government is demanding then, he gets no job. The sad thing is that the one time I told someone the reason that I could not hire them, I told them that for the job that I could hire them for, I could not pay them. They pleaded with me to pay them under the table for a lower wage.

So, it is obvious that there is people that will work for under minimum wage and have no problem with it. The government (which does not work anywhere close to minimum wage) thinks these people should be paid more, well that’s fine but when businesses cannot even hire someone to train them to be in a position to get more money how are the businesses supposed to eventually pay them that wage the government wants them to pay.

I sure if he took the job at five dollars an hour it was not OK with him , it was all he could get, If some one can not be in business and pay him a wage he can live on maybe they should not be employing people.

It is obvious to me that any body that would work for minimum wage or below would have many problems making so little money, but would be so desperate that they have no choice

Well if I paid someone $4/hr to put up fliers, run errands, deliver papers, pick up papers, etc I could hire more people instead of just contracting the work out to courier businesses and having to put more stress on my higher paid employees to do these marginal utility tasks.

See with economics it is all about the dollar. I need X amount of workers with a Y skill and I pay them Z to do W amount of work, I could hire A amount of workers with B (no skill) skill and pay them C (below minimum wage) to do D amount of work. Instead I have to hire less than A with the equal B skill, pay higher than C, and do more than D which cuts down on the marginal utility, increases marginal cost, and decreases marginal units produced per worker. On top of that, it also cuts down on the marginal utility of skilled workers since more load has to go onto them and/or they cannot be paid as much.

So what this comes out to is that with minimum wage, I higher less workers, for more money, and get less marginal units per worker. Which as well raises my average total cost, making it more expensive for my clients.

I am not sure if I get all you are trying to say , but may be if we were not paying the CEO eight hundreds times the amount we are paying our entry level employees we could pay our employees a livable wage and not even have to raise the price of our product

Well then the CEO leaves to work somewhere else and a less skilled CEO is the only person the company can attract due to the lower wage. This leads to some bad decisions being made causing drops in profitability. The company now needs to urgently increase its shareprice to attract more investment so it lays off 10% of the workforce in order to balance the books. Now instead of getting minimum wage, a load of guys are drawing unemployment benefit from the government.

I think one of the problems with public Corporations is that The CEO�?�¢??s priority is seldom
The Corporations best interest. Most of the time their priority is their own compensation package

I think comparing CEOs is like comparing NFL coaches.

These CEOs can cause a stock to drop in price, so they can leverage their purchasing power, they have the ability to save up certain factors and use them all at once to increase the price of the stock so they can leverage their selling price. They can do this over and over or can do this to an extreme,

I think to understand my point; you would have to compare private Corporations to Public Corporations.

I disagree that the CEOs have a lot to do with Corporations success. Their job is to run the Company properly, over see sales, production, legal matters, accounting and the likes. They do not have much to do with the market.

So the market value of a company is not linked to sales, production, legal matters, accounting etc?

And obviously I just used CEO becuase that was the term that the previous example had given. We need to include CFO, COO and CTO in this.

A well run company is an administrative procedure mostly. But making sure everybody does his job and making sure all the bills are paid on time making sure no one is breaking the law, does not make some one buy your product, I do not care how well you run a company that sells condoms for dogs. A company that makes condoms for people if run reasonably well will out produce the company that makes condoms for dogs. The market is the most important factor.

I agree about CFO we also left off the 20 Vice Presidents
[/quote]

Whilst I will admit that the senior management team in a company is often not as important as they think they are, they are way more important than you think they are.

[AlisaV]

That’s true.

I believe Ben & Jerry’s tried an experiment where their highest paid employee was to make no more than five times as much as their lowest paid employee. They were serious about this – it was entirely genuine idealism. But the CEO they found was worthless and damaged the value of the company. They had to keep inching up the CEO pay until it was over 100 times the wage of the lowest-paid worker. Just so they didn’t go broke due to incompetent executives.

It’s not that executives work harder or are more virtuous than, say, factory workers. It’s that their mistakes are incredibly expensive. In cost-benefit terms, it’s worth a lot of money to get an executive who doesn’t make mistakes.

[clip11]

[quote]AlisaV wrote:
That’s true.

I believe Ben & Jerry’s tried an experiment where their highest paid employee was to make no more than five times as much as their lowest paid employee. They were serious about this – it was entirely genuine idealism. But the CEO they found was worthless and damaged the value of the company. They had to keep inching up the CEO pay until it was over 100 times the wage of the lowest-paid worker. Just so they didn’t go broke due to incompetent executives.

It’s not that executives work harder or are more virtuous than, say, factory workers. It’s that their mistakes are incredibly expensive. In cost-benefit terms, it’s worth a lot of money to get an executive who doesn’t make mistakes.[/quote]

And by looking at all these companies closing and going bankrupt I would say that was money well spent…

[Vegita]

[quote]AlisaV wrote:
That’s true.

I believe Ben & Jerry’s tried an experiment where their highest paid employee was to make no more than five times as much as their lowest paid employee. They were serious about this – it was entirely genuine idealism. But the CEO they found was worthless and damaged the value of the company. They had to keep inching up the CEO pay until it was over 100 times the wage of the lowest-paid worker. Just so they didn’t go broke due to incompetent executives.

It’s not that executives work harder or are more virtuous than, say, factory workers. It’s that their mistakes are incredibly expensive. In cost-benefit terms, it’s worth a lot of money to get an executive who doesn’t make mistakes.[/quote]

Please do not sit there and try to use real world examples to prove your point. The only way to win an argument is to have more compassion than someone else, so obviously, helping people “less fortunate” no matter what is always right. Wait what is that you say? Teaching someone to fish, may after all be more beneficial to the “less fortunate” than just giving them a fish? Hogwash.

V

[clip11]

Some of you talk like everyone has equal opportunity. While its nice to say, its just not true. Like telling a 4 year old that they can be anything they want to be if they work hard enough. Some people just dont have the smarts to be a heart surgeon I dont care how hard they work. Some people dont have the athletic ability to be a NBA player, I dont care how hard they work.

I think it would be more productive, after teaching a child basic reading, writing, and math skills that theyll actually use in everyday life, to find ot what theyre good at and teach them that and have them master that skill.

Some people succeed because of other factors. A lot of people say “start a business” as if its that simple. That takes money, and if you have none, then that avenue is closed to you, even if you are willing to work hard. So to make it seem like someone is lazy because they dont have a certain kind of job is wrong.

Its like if you have a 30 y/o thats an accountant for a financial firm and another 30 y/o ex con that flips hamburgers at Wendys full time. It would be reasonable to say that the accountant is more intelligent than the ex con (I dont mean street smarts I mean real IQ). They both were 4 year old children at some point whom some adult told then that they can be whatever they want to be. Im sure the 30 y/o didnt plan to be flipping burgers at Wendys full time back when he was 4.

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2008/11/26/relating-iqs-and-occupations-what-can-a-graph-tell-you-about-yo/3

[Vegita]

[quote]clip11 wrote:
AlisaV wrote:
That’s true.

I believe Ben & Jerry’s tried an experiment where their highest paid employee was to make no more than five times as much as their lowest paid employee. They were serious about this – it was entirely genuine idealism. But the CEO they found was worthless and damaged the value of the company. They had to keep inching up the CEO pay until it was over 100 times the wage of the lowest-paid worker. Just so they didn’t go broke due to incompetent executives.

It’s not that executives work harder or are more virtuous than, say, factory workers. It’s that their mistakes are incredibly expensive. In cost-benefit terms, it’s worth a lot of money to get an executive who doesn’t make mistakes.

And by looking at all these companies closing and going bankrupt I would say that was money well spent…
[/quote]

No the real problem is that the companies should have been allowed TO go bankrupt. Then another company who did not have poor business practices, incompetent CEO’s, and provided a better service to the customer would have been allowed to take thier place.

Unfortunately, the governemtn has allowed these companies to continue to exist and tried to “fix” them. So we rewarded the companies who screwed up, and in doing so punished the companies who handled themselves properly. Being for free market is just that, for free market. This in no way suggests that the current system is free market.

V

[orion]

[quote]clip11 wrote:
AlisaV wrote:
That’s true.

I believe Ben & Jerry’s tried an experiment where their highest paid employee was to make no more than five times as much as their lowest paid employee. They were serious about this – it was entirely genuine idealism. But the CEO they found was worthless and damaged the value of the company. They had to keep inching up the CEO pay until it was over 100 times the wage of the lowest-paid worker. Just so they didn’t go broke due to incompetent executives.

It’s not that executives work harder or are more virtuous than, say, factory workers. It’s that their mistakes are incredibly expensive. In cost-benefit terms, it’s worth a lot of money to get an executive who doesn’t make mistakes.

And by looking at all these companies closing and going bankrupt I would say that was money well spent…
[/quote]

That is cheap populism and I think the Austrian Business Cycle Theory should answer some of your question.

[Stronghold]

[quote]clip11 wrote:
Some of you talk like everyone has equal opportunity. While its nice to say, its just not true. Like telling a 4 year old that they can be anything they want to be if they work hard enough. Some people just dont have the smarts to be a heart surgeon I dont care how hard they work. Some people dont have the athletic ability to be a NBA player, I dont care how hard they work.

I think it would be more productive, after teaching a child basic reading, writing, and math skills that theyll actually use in everyday life, to find ot what theyre good at and teach them that and have them master that skill.

Some people succeed because of other factors. A lot of people say “start a business” as if its that simple. That takes money, and if you have none, then that avenue is closed to you, even if you are willing to work hard. So to make it seem like someone is lazy because they dont have a certain kind of job is wrong.

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2008/11/26/relating-iqs-and-occupations-what-can-a-graph-tell-you-about-yo/3[/quote]

There is equal opportunity. Aptitude may not be equal, but “opportunity” implies that a choice is being made.

Like I said earlier, there are public schools and near universal access to higher education. Even the less intellectually gifted students have an opportunity in many states to learn a trade while in high school. There are numerous adult education and technical schools that offer the opportunity to unskilled, unqalified workers to become skilled, qualified workers. The people working at McDonalds when they are 35 and trying to support children on that income almost always made a series of choices that got them into that situation.

Teach a man to fish and if he doesn’t want to learn, then let him get so hungry that he figures it out himself.

[clip11]

[quote]Stronghold wrote:

There is equal opportunity. Aptitude may not be equal, but “opportunity” implies that a choice is being made.

Like I said earlier, there are public schools and near universal access to higher education. Even the less intellectually gifted students have an opportunity in many states to learn a trade while in high school. There are numerous adult education and technical schools that offer the opportunity to unskilled, unqalified workers to become skilled, qualified workers. The people working at McDonalds when they are 35 and trying to support children on that income almost always made a series of choices that got them into that situation.

Teach a man to fish and if he doesn’t want to learn, then let him get so hungry that he figures it out himself.[/quote]

Alot of those schools cost money and time alot of people dont have. I know a girl that tried to get into one of those schools. It was a full time program, so it required her to quit her job, which she couldnt afford. It also required lots of money, which she also couldnt afford. The point is, you cant lump each person into one category w/o knowing the circumstance.

[Stronghold]

[quote]clip11 wrote:
Stronghold wrote:

There is equal opportunity. Aptitude may not be equal, but “opportunity” implies that a choice is being made.

Like I said earlier, there are public schools and near universal access to higher education. Even the less intellectually gifted students have an opportunity in many states to learn a trade while in high school. There are numerous adult education and technical schools that offer the opportunity to unskilled, unqalified workers to become skilled, qualified workers. The people working at McDonalds when they are 35 and trying to support children on that income almost always made a series of choices that got them into that situation.

Teach a man to fish and if he doesn’t want to learn, then let him get so hungry that he figures it out himself.

Alot of those schools cost money and time alot of people dont have. I know a girl that tried to get into one of those schools. It was a full time program, so it required her to quit her job, which she couldnt afford. It also required lots of money, which she also couldnt afford. The point is, you cant lump each person into one category w/o knowing the circumstance.
[/quote]

I know many people who have paid their own ways through those schools. My father is one of them. What someone can “afford” is largely a function of how much utility someone garners from a decision. Does your friend work 16 hours per day, 7 days per week? Community colleges and technical schools offer night classes specifically to accommodate for those who work during the day and the cost of attending is generally low and, in the absence of major credit problems, fairly easy to finance with student loans.

Now, of course, if your friend is also attempting to raise a child on minimum wage earnings, has enough delinquent debt to make getting a loan impossible, or simply doesn’t want to sacrifice her evenings or weekends in order to fit work and school into her schedule…then she has already decided that something was more important to her than making more money.

[pittbulll]

[quote]Stronghold wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

As far as me breaking some social rule by expressing my opinion, you would be as guilty as I,by your standards. You think life has to oppress people, and any attempt to minimize the hardship on the less advantaged of us is going to make the sky fall. It won�¢??t period. The people that run this world want you to think if you do it any other way than they prescribe the world as we know it will cease to exist and too many people buy that.

So you think that people who work at minimum wage jobs as unskilled laborers do so because they are oppressed?

We have public schools. We have near universal access to higher education if they are willing to work hard.

While it won’t make the sky fall, it will create more hardship and place a burden upon those who are working harder (“less fortunate” is a crock of shit. Go to your local McDonalds and ask the guy working the fryer what his GPA in high school was if he even graduated). You seem to think that legisliation has zero economic impact, but this is understandable since you have ZERO understanding of how economies and labor markets operate. What far too many people believe is that all people with money got there by somehow taking from others and those without deserve to be supported entirely on the backs of those who are working for their living. I forget who on here said it, but “the problem with the US today is that half of the population has been tricked into thinking that our largest economic emergency is people making money.”

This has nothing to do with expressing opinions. You want me to assign myself to a collective “we”.[/quote]

You and I disagree about the whole experience here at T Nation. WE disagree on politics,

I do not care what the fryers education level is, if he has the gumption to work and the labor market has a place for him, they should pay him a livable wage

Yes I believe the money I have, I took from some one else, just the same as you. The money you have is money you took from some one else.

And on the subject of disagreeing on opinions, your opinion is different than my opinion. That is all it is, nothing more. No grand scheme on how intelligent or not you are No rules are broken, Grow up and learn how to communicate like a big boy.

I do not want to make any designations of you. Other than you

[pittbulll]

[quote]Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
There should be no intervention in the wage by government…period.

This creates disemployment by raising costs on employers who now must lay-off of their most marginally productive employees. Suddenly, street sweepers are out of work because no one thinks they’re worth $7.75/hr.

They should jack the minimum wage up, if for no other reason to piss Lifty off On a more serious note we need a livable wage, after we have everybody that wants to work having job then we can have a minimum wage
.

Yes it will be the lowest paid person in the work force. If a person takes a job at $5/hr, then obviously that job is fine by him. Yes, he may need another job, but obviously that person is in a position that he may need two or three jobs.

Yet, if you cannot hire him at the wage the government is demanding then, he gets no job. The sad thing is that the one time I told someone the reason that I could not hire them, I told them that for the job that I could hire them for, I could not pay them. They pleaded with me to pay them under the table for a lower wage.

So, it is obvious that there is people that will work for under minimum wage and have no problem with it. The government (which does not work anywhere close to minimum wage) thinks these people should be paid more, well that’s fine but when businesses cannot even hire someone to train them to be in a position to get more money how are the businesses supposed to eventually pay them that wage the government wants them to pay.

I sure if he took the job at five dollars an hour it was not OK with him , it was all he could get, If some one can not be in business and pay him a wage he can live on maybe they should not be employing people.

It is obvious to me that any body that would work for minimum wage or below would have many problems making so little money, but would be so desperate that they have no choice

Well if I paid someone $4/hr to put up fliers, run errands, deliver papers, pick up papers, etc I could hire more people instead of just contracting the work out to courier businesses and having to put more stress on my higher paid employees to do these marginal utility tasks.

See with economics it is all about the dollar. I need X amount of workers with a Y skill and I pay them Z to do W amount of work, I could hire A amount of workers with B (no skill) skill and pay them C (below minimum wage) to do D amount of work. Instead I have to hire less than A with the equal B skill, pay higher than C, and do more than D which cuts down on the marginal utility, increases marginal cost, and decreases marginal units produced per worker. On top of that, it also cuts down on the marginal utility of skilled workers since more load has to go onto them and/or they cannot be paid as much.

So what this comes out to is that with minimum wage, I higher less workers, for more money, and get less marginal units per worker. Which as well raises my average total cost, making it more expensive for my clients.

I am not sure if I get all you are trying to say , but may be if we were not paying the CEO eight hundreds times the amount we are paying our entry level employees we could pay our employees a livable wage and not even have to raise the price of our product

Well then the CEO leaves to work somewhere else and a less skilled CEO is the only person the company can attract due to the lower wage. This leads to some bad decisions being made causing drops in profitability. The company now needs to urgently increase its shareprice to attract more investment so it lays off 10% of the workforce in order to balance the books. Now instead of getting minimum wage, a load of guys are drawing unemployment benefit from the government.

I think one of the problems with public Corporations is that The CEO�??�?�¢??s priority is seldom
The Corporations best interest. Most of the time their priority is their own compensation package

I think comparing CEOs is like comparing NFL coaches.

These CEOs can cause a stock to drop in price, so they can leverage their purchasing power, they have the ability to save up certain factors and use them all at once to increase the price of the stock so they can leverage their selling price. They can do this over and over or can do this to an extreme,

I think to understand my point; you would have to compare private Corporations to Public Corporations.

I disagree that the CEOs have a lot to do with Corporations success. Their job is to run the Company properly, over see sales, production, legal matters, accounting and the likes. They do not have much to do with the market.

So the market value of a company is not linked to sales, production, legal matters, accounting etc?

And obviously I just used CEO becuase that was the term that the previous example had given. We need to include CFO, COO and CTO in this.

A well run company is an administrative procedure mostly. But making sure everybody does his job and making sure all the bills are paid on time making sure no one is breaking the law, does not make some one buy your product, I do not care how well you run a company that sells condoms for dogs. A company that makes condoms for people if run reasonably well will out produce the company that makes condoms for dogs. The market is the most important factor.

I agree about CFO we also left off the 20 Vice Presidents

Whilst I will admit that the senior management team in a company is often not as important as they think they are, they are way more important than you think they are.[/quote]

You and I must have a different perspective.

[pittbulll]

[quote]AlisaV wrote:
That’s true.

I believe Ben & Jerry’s tried an experiment where their highest paid employee was to make no more than five times as much as their lowest paid employee. They were serious about this – it was entirely genuine idealism. But the CEO they found was worthless and damaged the value of the company. They had to keep inching up the CEO pay until it was over 100 times the wage of the lowest-paid worker. Just so they didn’t go broke due to incompetent executives.

It’s not that executives work harder or are more virtuous than, say, factory workers. It’s that their mistakes are incredibly expensive. In cost-benefit terms, it’s worth a lot of money to get an executive who doesn’t make mistakes.[/quote]

I personally would agree with you that if a company is well run and is profitable, then the CEO should be adequately compensated, but what constitutes adequately is not eight hundred times the entry level position. And if the company shows little or no growth then their compensation should reflect that as well

[orion]

[quote]pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
There should be no intervention in the wage by government…period.

This creates disemployment by raising costs on employers who now must lay-off of their most marginally productive employees. Suddenly, street sweepers are out of work because no one thinks they’re worth $7.75/hr.

They should jack the minimum wage up, if for no other reason to piss Lifty off On a more serious note we need a livable wage, after we have everybody that wants to work having job then we can have a minimum wage
.

Yes it will be the lowest paid person in the work force. If a person takes a job at $5/hr, then obviously that job is fine by him. Yes, he may need another job, but obviously that person is in a position that he may need two or three jobs.

Yet, if you cannot hire him at the wage the government is demanding then, he gets no job. The sad thing is that the one time I told someone the reason that I could not hire them, I told them that for the job that I could hire them for, I could not pay them. They pleaded with me to pay them under the table for a lower wage.

So, it is obvious that there is people that will work for under minimum wage and have no problem with it. The government (which does not work anywhere close to minimum wage) thinks these people should be paid more, well that’s fine but when businesses cannot even hire someone to train them to be in a position to get more money how are the businesses supposed to eventually pay them that wage the government wants them to pay.

I sure if he took the job at five dollars an hour it was not OK with him , it was all he could get, If some one can not be in business and pay him a wage he can live on maybe they should not be employing people.

It is obvious to me that any body that would work for minimum wage or below would have many problems making so little money, but would be so desperate that they have no choice

Well if I paid someone $4/hr to put up fliers, run errands, deliver papers, pick up papers, etc I could hire more people instead of just contracting the work out to courier businesses and having to put more stress on my higher paid employees to do these marginal utility tasks.

See with economics it is all about the dollar. I need X amount of workers with a Y skill and I pay them Z to do W amount of work, I could hire A amount of workers with B (no skill) skill and pay them C (below minimum wage) to do D amount of work. Instead I have to hire less than A with the equal B skill, pay higher than C, and do more than D which cuts down on the marginal utility, increases marginal cost, and decreases marginal units produced per worker. On top of that, it also cuts down on the marginal utility of skilled workers since more load has to go onto them and/or they cannot be paid as much.

So what this comes out to is that with minimum wage, I higher less workers, for more money, and get less marginal units per worker. Which as well raises my average total cost, making it more expensive for my clients.

I am not sure if I get all you are trying to say , but may be if we were not paying the CEO eight hundreds times the amount we are paying our entry level employees we could pay our employees a livable wage and not even have to raise the price of our product

Well then the CEO leaves to work somewhere else and a less skilled CEO is the only person the company can attract due to the lower wage. This leads to some bad decisions being made causing drops in profitability. The company now needs to urgently increase its shareprice to attract more investment so it lays off 10% of the workforce in order to balance the books. Now instead of getting minimum wage, a load of guys are drawing unemployment benefit from the government.

I think one of the problems with public Corporations is that The CEO�??�??�?�¢??s priority is seldom
The Corporations best interest. Most of the time their priority is their own compensation package

I think comparing CEOs is like comparing NFL coaches.

These CEOs can cause a stock to drop in price, so they can leverage their purchasing power, they have the ability to save up certain factors and use them all at once to increase the price of the stock so they can leverage their selling price. They can do this over and over or can do this to an extreme,

I think to understand my point; you would have to compare private Corporations to Public Corporations.

I disagree that the CEOs have a lot to do with Corporations success. Their job is to run the Company properly, over see sales, production, legal matters, accounting and the likes. They do not have much to do with the market.

So the market value of a company is not linked to sales, production, legal matters, accounting etc?

And obviously I just used CEO becuase that was the term that the previous example had given. We need to include CFO, COO and CTO in this.

A well run company is an administrative procedure mostly. But making sure everybody does his job and making sure all the bills are paid on time making sure no one is breaking the law, does not make some one buy your product, I do not care how well you run a company that sells condoms for dogs. A company that makes condoms for people if run reasonably well will out produce the company that makes condoms for dogs. The market is the most important factor.

I agree about CFO we also left off the 20 Vice Presidents

Whilst I will admit that the senior management team in a company is often not as important as they think they are, they are way more important than you think they are.

You and I must have a different perspective.

[/quote]

N-O-K-I-A!!!

A-P-P-L-E!!!

M-I-C-R-O-S-O-F-T!!!

[pittbulll]

[quote]clip11 wrote:
Some of you talk like everyone has equal opportunity. While its nice to say, its just not true. Like telling a 4 year old that they can be anything they want to be if they work hard enough. Some people just dont have the smarts to be a heart surgeon I dont care how hard they work. Some people dont have the athletic ability to be a NBA player, I dont care how hard they work.

I think it would be more productive, after teaching a child basic reading, writing, and math skills that theyll actually use in everyday life, to find ot what theyre good at and teach them that and have them master that skill.

Some people succeed because of other factors. A lot of people say “start a business” as if its that simple. That takes money, and if you have none, then that avenue is closed to you, even if you are willing to work hard. So to make it seem like someone is lazy because they dont have a certain kind of job is wrong.

Its like if you have a 30 y/o thats an accountant for a financial firm and another 30 y/o ex con that flips hamburgers at Wendys full time. It would be reasonable to say that the accountant is more intelligent than the ex con (I dont mean street smarts I mean real IQ). They both were 4 year old children at some point whom some adult told then that they can be whatever they want to be. Im sure the 30 y/o didnt plan to be flipping burgers at Wendys full time back when he was 4.

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2008/11/26/relating-iqs-and-occupations-what-can-a-graph-tell-you-about-yo/3[/quote]

Clip regardless of how these people talk they are all losing. Prices are going up and wages have been stagnant. They think life is good now; they should take a time machine back to the 70â??s. Everybody was middle class; we had a few poor people and a few rich people, now we have a lot of poor people and a few rich people. The ones here I doubt are rich they are just less poor than most.

[pittbulll]

[quote]orion wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
There should be no intervention in the wage by government…period.

This creates disemployment by raising costs on employers who now must lay-off of their most marginally productive employees. Suddenly, street sweepers are out of work because no one thinks they’re worth $7.75/hr.

They should jack the minimum wage up, if for no other reason to piss Lifty off On a more serious note we need a livable wage, after we have everybody that wants to work having job then we can have a minimum wage
.

Yes it will be the lowest paid person in the work force. If a person takes a job at $5/hr, then obviously that job is fine by him. Yes, he may need another job, but obviously that person is in a position that he may need two or three jobs.

Yet, if you cannot hire him at the wage the government is demanding then, he gets no job. The sad thing is that the one time I told someone the reason that I could not hire them, I told them that for the job that I could hire them for, I could not pay them. They pleaded with me to pay them under the table for a lower wage.

So, it is obvious that there is people that will work for under minimum wage and have no problem with it. The government (which does not work anywhere close to minimum wage) thinks these people should be paid more, well that’s fine but when businesses cannot even hire someone to train them to be in a position to get more money how are the businesses supposed to eventually pay them that wage the government wants them to pay.

I sure if he took the job at five dollars an hour it was not OK with him , it was all he could get, If some one can not be in business and pay him a wage he can live on maybe they should not be employing people.

It is obvious to me that any body that would work for minimum wage or below would have many problems making so little money, but would be so desperate that they have no choice

Well if I paid someone $4/hr to put up fliers, run errands, deliver papers, pick up papers, etc I could hire more people instead of just contracting the work out to courier businesses and having to put more stress on my higher paid employees to do these marginal utility tasks.

See with economics it is all about the dollar. I need X amount of workers with a Y skill and I pay them Z to do W amount of work, I could hire A amount of workers with B (no skill) skill and pay them C (below minimum wage) to do D amount of work. Instead I have to hire less than A with the equal B skill, pay higher than C, and do more than D which cuts down on the marginal utility, increases marginal cost, and decreases marginal units produced per worker. On top of that, it also cuts down on the marginal utility of skilled workers since more load has to go onto them and/or they cannot be paid as much.

So what this comes out to is that with minimum wage, I higher less workers, for more money, and get less marginal units per worker. Which as well raises my average total cost, making it more expensive for my clients.

I am not sure if I get all you are trying to say , but may be if we were not paying the CEO eight hundreds times the amount we are paying our entry level employees we could pay our employees a livable wage and not even have to raise the price of our product

Well then the CEO leaves to work somewhere else and a less skilled CEO is the only person the company can attract due to the lower wage. This leads to some bad decisions being made causing drops in profitability. The company now needs to urgently increase its shareprice to attract more investment so it lays off 10% of the workforce in order to balance the books. Now instead of getting minimum wage, a load of guys are drawing unemployment benefit from the government.

I think one of the problems with public Corporations is that The CEO�??�??�??�?�¢??s priority is seldom
The Corporations best interest. Most of the time their priority is their own compensation package

I think comparing CEOs is like comparing NFL coaches.

These CEOs can cause a stock to drop in price, so they can leverage their purchasing power, they have the ability to save up certain factors and use them all at once to increase the price of the stock so they can leverage their selling price. They can do this over and over or can do this to an extreme,

I think to understand my point; you would have to compare private Corporations to Public Corporations.

I disagree that the CEOs have a lot to do with Corporations success. Their job is to run the Company properly, over see sales, production, legal matters, accounting and the likes. They do not have much to do with the market.

So the market value of a company is not linked to sales, production, legal matters, accounting etc?

And obviously I just used CEO becuase that was the term that the previous example had given. We need to include CFO, COO and CTO in this.

A well run company is an administrative procedure mostly. But making sure everybody does his job and making sure all the bills are paid on time making sure no one is breaking the law, does not make some one buy your product, I do not care how well you run a company that sells condoms for dogs. A company that makes condoms for people if run reasonably well will out produce the company that makes condoms for dogs. The market is the most important factor.

I agree about CFO we also left off the 20 Vice Presidents

Whilst I will admit that the senior management team in a company is often not as important as they think they are, they are way more important than you think they are.

You and I must have a different perspective.

N-O-K-I-A!!!

A-P-P-L-E!!!

M-I-C-R-O-S-O-F-T!!![/quote]

They all have awesome products; Apple and Microsoft were run for a long time by the founders. That is where it is at innovation. The irony that you chose two friends that took the same product in two directions just prove my point even more. I do not know a lot about Nokia; I have had one of their phones and really liked it

If you want to prove your point that a CEO makes a company, tell me one that sells dog shit and makes a handsome profit.

[Stronghold]

[quote]pittbulll wrote:
Stronghold wrote:
pittbulll wrote:

As far as me breaking some social rule by expressing my opinion, you would be as guilty as I,by your standards. You think life has to oppress people, and any attempt to minimize the hardship on the less advantaged of us is going to make the sky fall. It won�?�¢??t period. The people that run this world want you to think if you do it any other way than they prescribe the world as we know it will cease to exist and too many people buy that.

So you think that people who work at minimum wage jobs as unskilled laborers do so because they are oppressed?

We have public schools. We have near universal access to higher education if they are willing to work hard.

While it won’t make the sky fall, it will create more hardship and place a burden upon those who are working harder (“less fortunate” is a crock of shit. Go to your local McDonalds and ask the guy working the fryer what his GPA in high school was if he even graduated). You seem to think that legisliation has zero economic impact, but this is understandable since you have ZERO understanding of how economies and labor markets operate. What far too many people believe is that all people with money got there by somehow taking from others and those without deserve to be supported entirely on the backs of those who are working for their living. I forget who on here said it, but “the problem with the US today is that half of the population has been tricked into thinking that our largest economic emergency is people making money.”

This has nothing to do with expressing opinions. You want me to assign myself to a collective “we”.

You and I disagree about the whole experience here at T Nation. WE disagree on politics,

I do not care what the fryers education level is, if he has the gumption to work and the labor market has a place for him, they should pay him a livable wage

Yes I believe the money I have, I took from some one else, just the same as you. The money you have is money you took from some one else.

And on the subject of disagreeing on opinions, your opinion is different than my opinion. That is all it is, nothing more. No grand scheme on how intelligent or not you are No rules are broken, Grow up and learn how to communicate like a big boy.

I do not want to make any designations of you. Other than you
[/quote]

No, you are assigning me to the collective “we” and then using that as the basis for your argument that I am responsible for someone else not doing what they need to do to get by. You really are dense.

The money I have is money I received as a result of my economic activities. I worked hard in high school (public school, mind you), worked hard in college, and got a job that rewards my hard work by paying me more. I now work hard at my job to pay off the expenses resulting from my education. No where did I “take” anything from anyone which was not willingly given to me. I am no blue blooded old money aristocrat. My father got one pair of shoes per year and a fruit basket for Christmas. He did what I see so many of these entitled hands-out-for-their-welfare-checks freeloaders claiming they cannot. He got an engineering degree in spite of time and monetary challenges. Through his hard work, I was able to forgo a similar experience, and through my hard work, my children will be able to avoid it also. You need to stop assigning your own guilt to others.

Have you ever worked a minimum wage job? You do realize that these are not exactly complex or incredibly important tasks that these people do, right? So simply for having the gumption to dick around for the first 20 or so years of their life and THEN try to pay their bills, we should pay them a “living wage”? Fuck that. Let’s get rid of the safety nets and then maybe people will have more incentive to do something with themselves instead of sitting around with their thumbs up their asses until they realize that living costs money and they need to get some. When there’s no safety net, people tend to focus a lot harder on not falling in the first place.

[orion]

[quote]pittbulll wrote:
orion wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
There should be no intervention in the wage by government…period.

This creates disemployment by raising costs on employers who now must lay-off of their most marginally productive employees. Suddenly, street sweepers are out of work because no one thinks they’re worth $7.75/hr.

They should jack the minimum wage up, if for no other reason to piss Lifty off On a more serious note we need a livable wage, after we have everybody that wants to work having job then we can have a minimum wage
.

Yes it will be the lowest paid person in the work force. If a person takes a job at $5/hr, then obviously that job is fine by him. Yes, he may need another job, but obviously that person is in a position that he may need two or three jobs.

Yet, if you cannot hire him at the wage the government is demanding then, he gets no job. The sad thing is that the one time I told someone the reason that I could not hire them, I told them that for the job that I could hire them for, I could not pay them. They pleaded with me to pay them under the table for a lower wage.

So, it is obvious that there is people that will work for under minimum wage and have no problem with it. The government (which does not work anywhere close to minimum wage) thinks these people should be paid more, well that’s fine but when businesses cannot even hire someone to train them to be in a position to get more money how are the businesses supposed to eventually pay them that wage the government wants them to pay.

I sure if he took the job at five dollars an hour it was not OK with him , it was all he could get, If some one can not be in business and pay him a wage he can live on maybe they should not be employing people.

It is obvious to me that any body that would work for minimum wage or below would have many problems making so little money, but would be so desperate that they have no choice

Well if I paid someone $4/hr to put up fliers, run errands, deliver papers, pick up papers, etc I could hire more people instead of just contracting the work out to courier businesses and having to put more stress on my higher paid employees to do these marginal utility tasks.

See with economics it is all about the dollar. I need X amount of workers with a Y skill and I pay them Z to do W amount of work, I could hire A amount of workers with B (no skill) skill and pay them C (below minimum wage) to do D amount of work. Instead I have to hire less than A with the equal B skill, pay higher than C, and do more than D which cuts down on the marginal utility, increases marginal cost, and decreases marginal units produced per worker. On top of that, it also cuts down on the marginal utility of skilled workers since more load has to go onto them and/or they cannot be paid as much.

So what this comes out to is that with minimum wage, I higher less workers, for more money, and get less marginal units per worker. Which as well raises my average total cost, making it more expensive for my clients.

I am not sure if I get all you are trying to say , but may be if we were not paying the CEO eight hundreds times the amount we are paying our entry level employees we could pay our employees a livable wage and not even have to raise the price of our product

Well then the CEO leaves to work somewhere else and a less skilled CEO is the only person the company can attract due to the lower wage. This leads to some bad decisions being made causing drops in profitability. The company now needs to urgently increase its shareprice to attract more investment so it lays off 10% of the workforce in order to balance the books. Now instead of getting minimum wage, a load of guys are drawing unemployment benefit from the government.

I think one of the problems with public Corporations is that The CEO�??�??�??�??�?�¢??s priority is seldom
The Corporations best interest. Most of the time their priority is their own compensation package

I think comparing CEOs is like comparing NFL coaches.

These CEOs can cause a stock to drop in price, so they can leverage their purchasing power, they have the ability to save up certain factors and use them all at once to increase the price of the stock so they can leverage their selling price. They can do this over and over or can do this to an extreme,

I think to understand my point; you would have to compare private Corporations to Public Corporations.

I disagree that the CEOs have a lot to do with Corporations success. Their job is to run the Company properly, over see sales, production, legal matters, accounting and the likes. They do not have much to do with the market.

So the market value of a company is not linked to sales, production, legal matters, accounting etc?

And obviously I just used CEO becuase that was the term that the previous example had given. We need to include CFO, COO and CTO in this.

A well run company is an administrative procedure mostly. But making sure everybody does his job and making sure all the bills are paid on time making sure no one is breaking the law, does not make some one buy your product, I do not care how well you run a company that sells condoms for dogs. A company that makes condoms for people if run reasonably well will out produce the company that makes condoms for dogs. The market is the most important factor.

I agree about CFO we also left off the 20 Vice Presidents

Whilst I will admit that the senior management team in a company is often not as important as they think they are, they are way more important than you think they are.

You and I must have a different perspective.

N-O-K-I-A!!!

A-P-P-L-E!!!

M-I-C-R-O-S-O-F-T!!!

They all have awesome products; Apple and Microsoft were run for a long time by the founders. That is where it is at innovation. The irony that you chose two friends that took the same product in two directions just prove my point even more. I do not know a lot about Nokia; I have had one of their phones and really liked it

If you want to prove your point that a CEO makes a company, tell me one that sells dog shit and makes a handsome profit.
[/quote]

Who do you think makes the decision what to make and sell and how to produce it?

[Cockney_Blue]

[quote]pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
There should be no intervention in the wage by government…period.

This creates disemployment by raising costs on employers who now must lay-off of their most marginally productive employees. Suddenly, street sweepers are out of work because no one thinks they’re worth $7.75/hr.

They should jack the minimum wage up, if for no other reason to piss Lifty off On a more serious note we need a livable wage, after we have everybody that wants to work having job then we can have a minimum wage
.

Yes it will be the lowest paid person in the work force. If a person takes a job at $5/hr, then obviously that job is fine by him. Yes, he may need another job, but obviously that person is in a position that he may need two or three jobs.

Yet, if you cannot hire him at the wage the government is demanding then, he gets no job. The sad thing is that the one time I told someone the reason that I could not hire them, I told them that for the job that I could hire them for, I could not pay them. They pleaded with me to pay them under the table for a lower wage.

So, it is obvious that there is people that will work for under minimum wage and have no problem with it. The government (which does not work anywhere close to minimum wage) thinks these people should be paid more, well that’s fine but when businesses cannot even hire someone to train them to be in a position to get more money how are the businesses supposed to eventually pay them that wage the government wants them to pay.

I sure if he took the job at five dollars an hour it was not OK with him , it was all he could get, If some one can not be in business and pay him a wage he can live on maybe they should not be employing people.

It is obvious to me that any body that would work for minimum wage or below would have many problems making so little money, but would be so desperate that they have no choice

Well if I paid someone $4/hr to put up fliers, run errands, deliver papers, pick up papers, etc I could hire more people instead of just contracting the work out to courier businesses and having to put more stress on my higher paid employees to do these marginal utility tasks.

See with economics it is all about the dollar. I need X amount of workers with a Y skill and I pay them Z to do W amount of work, I could hire A amount of workers with B (no skill) skill and pay them C (below minimum wage) to do D amount of work. Instead I have to hire less than A with the equal B skill, pay higher than C, and do more than D which cuts down on the marginal utility, increases marginal cost, and decreases marginal units produced per worker. On top of that, it also cuts down on the marginal utility of skilled workers since more load has to go onto them and/or they cannot be paid as much.

So what this comes out to is that with minimum wage, I higher less workers, for more money, and get less marginal units per worker. Which as well raises my average total cost, making it more expensive for my clients.

I am not sure if I get all you are trying to say , but may be if we were not paying the CEO eight hundreds times the amount we are paying our entry level employees we could pay our employees a livable wage and not even have to raise the price of our product

Well then the CEO leaves to work somewhere else and a less skilled CEO is the only person the company can attract due to the lower wage. This leads to some bad decisions being made causing drops in profitability. The company now needs to urgently increase its shareprice to attract more investment so it lays off 10% of the workforce in order to balance the books. Now instead of getting minimum wage, a load of guys are drawing unemployment benefit from the government.

I think one of the problems with public Corporations is that The CEO�??�??�?�¢??s priority is seldom
The Corporations best interest. Most of the time their priority is their own compensation package

I think comparing CEOs is like comparing NFL coaches.

These CEOs can cause a stock to drop in price, so they can leverage their purchasing power, they have the ability to save up certain factors and use them all at once to increase the price of the stock so they can leverage their selling price. They can do this over and over or can do this to an extreme,

I think to understand my point; you would have to compare private Corporations to Public Corporations.

I disagree that the CEOs have a lot to do with Corporations success. Their job is to run the Company properly, over see sales, production, legal matters, accounting and the likes. They do not have much to do with the market.

So the market value of a company is not linked to sales, production, legal matters, accounting etc?

And obviously I just used CEO becuase that was the term that the previous example had given. We need to include CFO, COO and CTO in this.

A well run company is an administrative procedure mostly. But making sure everybody does his job and making sure all the bills are paid on time making sure no one is breaking the law, does not make some one buy your product, I do not care how well you run a company that sells condoms for dogs. A company that makes condoms for people if run reasonably well will out produce the company that makes condoms for dogs. The market is the most important factor.

I agree about CFO we also left off the 20 Vice Presidents

Whilst I will admit that the senior management team in a company is often not as important as they think they are, they are way more important than you think they are.

You and I must have a different perspective.

[/quote]

Quite possibly. My job title is Senior Manager

[Cockney_Blue]

[quote]pittbulll wrote:
orion wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Cockney Blue wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
Brother Chris wrote:
pittbulll wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
There should be no intervention in the wage by government…period.

This creates disemployment by raising costs on employers who now must lay-off of their most marginally productive employees. Suddenly, street sweepers are out of work because no one thinks they’re worth $7.75/hr.

They should jack the minimum wage up, if for no other reason to piss Lifty off On a more serious note we need a livable wage, after we have everybody that wants to work having job then we can have a minimum wage
.

Yes it will be the lowest paid person in the work force. If a person takes a job at $5/hr, then obviously that job is fine by him. Yes, he may need another job, but obviously that person is in a position that he may need two or three jobs.

Yet, if you cannot hire him at the wage the government is demanding then, he gets no job. The sad thing is that the one time I told someone the reason that I could not hire them, I told them that for the job that I could hire them for, I could not pay them. They pleaded with me to pay them under the table for a lower wage.

So, it is obvious that there is people that will work for under minimum wage and have no problem with it. The government (which does not work anywhere close to minimum wage) thinks these people should be paid more, well that’s fine but when businesses cannot even hire someone to train them to be in a position to get more money how are the businesses supposed to eventually pay them that wage the government wants them to pay.

I sure if he took the job at five dollars an hour it was not OK with him , it was all he could get, If some one can not be in business and pay him a wage he can live on maybe they should not be employing people.

It is obvious to me that any body that would work for minimum wage or below would have many problems making so little money, but would be so desperate that they have no choice

Well if I paid someone $4/hr to put up fliers, run errands, deliver papers, pick up papers, etc I could hire more people instead of just contracting the work out to courier businesses and having to put more stress on my higher paid employees to do these marginal utility tasks.

See with economics it is all about the dollar. I need X amount of workers with a Y skill and I pay them Z to do W amount of work, I could hire A amount of workers with B (no skill) skill and pay them C (below minimum wage) to do D amount of work. Instead I have to hire less than A with the equal B skill, pay higher than C, and do more than D which cuts down on the marginal utility, increases marginal cost, and decreases marginal units produced per worker. On top of that, it also cuts down on the marginal utility of skilled workers since more load has to go onto them and/or they cannot be paid as much.

So what this comes out to is that with minimum wage, I higher less workers, for more money, and get less marginal units per worker. Which as well raises my average total cost, making it more expensive for my clients.

I am not sure if I get all you are trying to say , but may be if we were not paying the CEO eight hundreds times the amount we are paying our entry level employees we could pay our employees a livable wage and not even have to raise the price of our product

Well then the CEO leaves to work somewhere else and a less skilled CEO is the only person the company can attract due to the lower wage. This leads to some bad decisions being made causing drops in profitability. The company now needs to urgently increase its shareprice to attract more investment so it lays off 10% of the workforce in order to balance the books. Now instead of getting minimum wage, a load of guys are drawing unemployment benefit from the government.

I think one of the problems with public Corporations is that The CEO�??�??�??�??�??�?�¢??s priority is seldom
The Corporations best interest. Most of the time their priority is their own compensation package

I think comparing CEOs is like comparing NFL coaches.

These CEOs can cause a stock to drop in price, so they can leverage their purchasing power, they have the ability to save up certain factors and use them all at once to increase the price of the stock so they can leverage their selling price. They can do this over and over or can do this to an extreme,

I think to understand my point; you would have to compare private Corporations to Public Corporations.

I disagree that the CEOs have a lot to do with Corporations success. Their job is to run the Company properly, over see sales, production, legal matters, accounting and the likes. They do not have much to do with the market.

So the market value of a company is not linked to sales, production, legal matters, accounting etc?

And obviously I just used CEO becuase that was the term that the previous example had given. We need to include CFO, COO and CTO in this.

A well run company is an administrative procedure mostly. But making sure everybody does his job and making sure all the bills are paid on time making sure no one is breaking the law, does not make some one buy your product, I do not care how well you run a company that sells condoms for dogs. A company that makes condoms for people if run reasonably well will out produce the company that makes condoms for dogs. The market is the most important factor.

I agree about CFO we also left off the 20 Vice Presidents

Whilst I will admit that the senior management team in a company is often not as important as they think they are, they are way more important than you think they are.

You and I must have a different perspective.

N-O-K-I-A!!!

A-P-P-L-E!!!

M-I-C-R-O-S-O-F-T!!!

They all have awesome products; Apple and Microsoft were run for a long time by the founders. That is where it is at innovation. The irony that you chose two friends that took the same product in two directions just prove my point even more. I do not know a lot about Nokia; I have had one of their phones and really liked it

If you want to prove your point that a CEO makes a company, tell me one that sells dog shit and makes a handsome profit.
[/quote]

Cheez Whiz