All-Purpose TEA Party Thread

One teen's inability to take his date to Sonic after the movie is one family's ability to feed itself for a month.

This chart doesn't account for the broader economy and overall changes in unemployment market-wide.

Even if the minimum wage hike has adversely impacted teen employment (first time I've really even considered this part of the discussion, since they're rarely breadwinners and make up a tiny portion of the workforce), that's a very, very small cost compared to the overall good it does for millions of breadwinners.

But we disagree ideologically, so I'm going to leave this alone. I do respect your POV, and used to hold it myself.

 

There aren't millions...according to the BLS, there are only 826,000 minimum-wage-or-less workers over the age of 25. And if teen employment is a tiny portion of the workforce, then adult minimum wage workers are an even tinier proportion, seeing as how 53% of minimum wage workers are under the age of 23. 63% of minimum wage workers are currently enrolled in college (paying their way through, perhaps?) or high school.

If we are concerned about low wage adult workers, at least we could do like the UK and have different minimum wages for adults and teens. But if we were really concerned about poverty instead meaningless symbolism for oppression, we wouldn't disemploy anybody based on how much their labor is worth...but we would add to whatever they earn through transfer programs.

 

If we could mitigate the obvious incentive problems this could create, we have common ground on this idea

HouseHead and SaoSebastiao for Congress! Post-partisan, bitches!

 

Teens should be in school, not working. Minimum wage or not. Just as a side note.

 

In the race to the bottom, who wins? The first guy to hit bottom, or the last?

I'm not calling you out for this, because you're not an econ professor and this isn't an econ site and you probably grabbed the first best stat you could find,and I appreciate that you back up your arguments with facts...but I just want to point out that we just moved from teenagers to people 26 and older.

I also wonder how many of those under the minumum wage are actually restaurant workers who make, say, $2.15/hour in wages, but $10 an hour in tips.

 

They should be in school AND working. Just a side note.

Honestly I would be happy with that provision, but happier with the welfare based transfers. To me, a minimum wage is just a way for the government to pass off the responsibility of social welfare onto employers.

I use the stats that are available because it would be less honest to make up my own. I wish I could find true "teen" statistics, but I couldn't. That being said, the stats as they are are still useful because they show how the people that the minimum wage is intended to benefit (people with responsibilities to feed families) are just a tiny sliver of the people who actually earn it.

 

This is barely an attempt, please try again. I asked for two examples where the majority of Libertarians want to take power away from government but give that power to corporations.

Especially as the Blue Authoritarian Party that you support is doing its best to give government more power and at the same time give power to corporations.

 

Neither did I. I wanted shit. My parents weren't buying. Not that they couldn't. Hell, they made more when I was a kid than my wife and I make now. But they weren't buying, period.

 

I'm not the one who has to dip down to teen unemployment to build a case against a minimum wage as a safety net against practices that are endemic to any economy that doesn't have it.

Your attempt to separate employers from the market for wages is also facile and/or disingenuous. It's the usual fantasy of endless elasticity in micro-economic environments. Cute, but crap.

But the main point you miss is that this isn't about economic theory, it's about social morality.

 

No, they should be in school, not working. The fact that most not born with a silver spoon do have to work, is simply a reflection of a poorly structured society. There should be a time to focus on studies before a lifetime of dedicating one's self to earning money. And in case you're thinking of responding with an anecdote of how you put yourself through college sleeping on the pizza parlor floor, I've pretty much always worked since I was twelve. So what? Don't make it right.

 

Same here

And I think most pizzerias around north Jersey don't give 17 yr. old new drivers keys to the delivery trucks any more. But they did to us, and we had a blast

 

Au contraire. It makes you appreciate dead-end work and get better grades

 

But not entirely impossible.

 

ya but you get the better ones with the car.. pluse the ones on the subway will stab you or there pimps will if you dont pay up ..hold on did I give too much away there

 

Possibly. That's debatable. I think there is a distinction though, between selectively taking on a part-time job, to have some extra money to bum around Europe in the summer,and having to work in order to be able to be in school in the first place, which in itself is a full-time job. It's just another peace of a class-divided society puzzle.

 

Of course you do! I'm a huge proponent of making the best of your circumstances. I despise complacency. I also despise conformism. Just because we live in a society where the well-to do-get to attend Yale on the merit of their fathers having attended it, and others have to put themselves through college working a night job, doesn't make it some pre-ordained, natural state of things. You can "take it any way you can" and at the same time recognize that the state of things could be improved. If we had always just "taken it", we'd still be sitting around caves, scratching our hairy asses.

 

But it isn't the employer's responsibility at all. It is a personal and societal responsibility. The only responsibility the employer has is to provide a wage that is commensurate with the labor provided which can mutually be agreed upon.

You see, health and safety regulations are there to prevent torts. There is no tort involved in a mutual agreement.

 

So what you are saying is that I don't have to pay my lead programmer a 6 digit salary, simply because I'm an employer and I control the cards? That I can offer him a mere $8/hr and he would still take it, albeit begrudgingly?

I can't think of anything more moral than not demanding more than your labor is worth.

 

I can't believe I have actually found something you wrote that I can agree with 100%.