Der_Idiot

iTrader: (2)

http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/america.htm#Minnesota

Only Georgia, Arkansas and Wyoming are below with us.

Ryan_G

iTrader: (8)

It can be on the books all it wants. The Federal minimum still applies. The only time a State minimum wage overrides the Federal minimum wage is when the State mandated wage is higher.

EDIT: BTW just did the math on your friend. Assuming she is working 3 jobs so that none of her hours are paid overtime, she would be pulling in $44,200/yr even at $8.50/hour. So either you are exaggerating (likely) about her situation or she is living far above her means if she is also taking out student loans for school as you stated.

Ryan_G

iTrader: (8)

They are playing by the rules too. Politicians have set up the rules in their favor. No one is dodging taxes they "owe". They are simply legally minimizing their tax liability like any rationale decision maker would.

fooger03

iTrader: (2)

how many rooms does the apartment have? how many roommates does she have? where does she buy her clothes?

After she maxes out her roth, makes the loan payment on her 5-series and mini, pays half of the mortgage and utilities, buys new shoes every week, pays for health insurance, pays for disability insurance, pays for life insurance, and pays her student loan payment, my girl still can't figure out where her other 5-700/month goes. Damned health insurance.

Her 3 sisters are all scraping a living trying to make rent with their husbands. All raised in the same household with the same privileges, all fully competent, mentally and physically.

It's all about choices.

Sparetire

Nobody who works hard and makes sound decisions is poor. Anyone who is poor is either lazy or has made bad decisions.

Savington

iTrader: (31)

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

I thought we were talking about minimum wage workers? How did you take a pay cut if you were making minimum wage?

Links to a list of donors does not a rebuttal make. Of course a conservative think tank is publishing a study that supports their position; that has no bearing on the truth of the information in and of itself. If you think it's suspect, then demonstrate why.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

^ This.

I honestly could not have appreciated this before I became "the boss," but it's actually really damned hard to find workers who take basic concepts like showing up on time (or at all) and not being a lazy sack of **** who doesn't give a damn about the quality of their work seriously.

I've come to realize that the vast majority of those who actually want to work hard and take their job seriously already have a job. And regardless of whatever bullshit entry-level wage they started at, their employers are very rapidly increasing their pay in order to retain them, once they've figured out that they're worth keeping.

Full_Tilt_Boogie

iTrader: (1)

It's rational in that they are maximizing the wealth of the shareholders but it is not rational in a longterm sustainable way.
The rules allow them to move money around to minimize taxes and develop bizarre financial products that make money out of thin air, but that doesn't mean it's right. It's also doesn't mean that it's even in their best interests. It may mean making some money now but what if it damages society and the environment a century from now?

Economies tend to grow and there is constant technological innovation. These things build wealth. Unfortunately the way it is now this wealth goes to making a few people and organizations wealthier and everybody else stays were they are or is even worse off.

It ties right back into the minimum wage debate. The distance between the average workers salary and the average CEO salary is growing. This gap is massive compared to where it was just a couple decades ago.
They like to say how higher minimum wage will cause them to have to lay people off and raise prices on their products but they never say that they will cut the salary of the organizations strategic apex.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

You understand why, right?

Minimum wage workers are extremely easy to replace. That's kind of the point -- companies pay minimum wage workers the legal minimum because their work isn't very valuable and can be easily replaced by another not-very-valuable worker.

Executive positions, on the other hand, are much harder to fill. It's easy to look at some 60 year old schlub in a suit and tie and think, "Heck, I could do that," but realistically, there are not that many people in the world who have the skill set to avoid running a billion dollar company into the ground within a year or two, much less make the decisions that lead to healthy profits year after year. As such, their services are in high demand. You pay for a good CEO or you watch him walk to your competitor.

05pearl

iTrader: (4)

I vote $500/hr, because any idiot should at least be able to make what a $^&^#ing lawyer makes... :spin:

Full_Tilt_Boogie

iTrader: (1)

But are CEOs seven times more valuable than they were in the 70s? Because that's how much more they're being paid compared to the average employee.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

You say that as though it's intuitively obvious that high CEO pay is a bad thing.

All else being equal, the average CEO works longer hours, is more highly educated, bears greater work-related stress, and contributes more to a company's bottom line than, say, the person sweeping the floor or performing a mid-skill, repetitive task on an assembly line.

It is not wrong, therefore, that a CEO should be more highly compensated.

"But," you might say, "The compensation of CEOs is massively disproportionate to that of minimum-wage workers!"

So? The MSRP of a Koenigsegg CCXR Trevita (US$4.8m) is disproportionately high as compared to the performance increase that it yields over a Corvette ZR1 (US$0.1m). The cost of foie gras is disproportionately high as compared to store-brand hot dogs. The cost of Kopi Luwak is disproportionately high as compared to Folgers instant coffee.

At the extreme upper-end of the spectrum, the very best things are always disproportionately expensive.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

To pick a corporation at random (and I swear, this was literally a random choice that I made before looking at the data), General Electric took in $22.5b in earnings (revenue - expenses) in 2007. Its CEO, Jeff Immelt, received total compensation of $14.2m (salary, stocks, bonuses, options, etc.)

In 2008, earnings dropped 19% to $18.1b, coincident with the financial crisis. Immelt voluntarily forewent all bonuses, and his total compensation dropped to $5.7m.

So, far from your claim that "they never say that they will cut the salary of the organizations strategic apex," the CEO of GE took a voluntary 60% pay cut the year that GE's earnings fell 19%.


Therefore, how do I put this delicately... You're wrong, you obviously don't know what you're talking about, and you're apparently fabricating lies out of thin air with no substantiation whatsoever.



Here's the difference between facts and bullshit:

Sources:

GE 2007 annual report: http://www.ge.com/ar2007/pdf/ge_ar2007_full_book.pdf

GE 2008 annual report: http://www.ge.com/ar2008/pdf/ge_ar_2008.pdf

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Given the improvement in corporate revenues which they have overseen since the 1970s, a 7x increase [citation needed] seems conservative.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

The average employee should welcome the change if his standard of living is also higher than it was in the 1970's.

Savington

iTrader: (31)

Sounds like he fits in perfectly in the Political section here

Full_Tilt_Boogie

iTrader: (1)

Now joe, you didn't really interpret that statement as me saying that no CEO has ever seen a paycut, did you?

This is a forum. There is a lot of flowery, hyperbolic language in here. I'm not posting like I'm writing a thesis, but if you guys want to put everything under a microscope then I guess I will have to get serious.
I do know what I'm talking about and I could actually argue the counter points well. There was a time when I would have agreed with you guys and I could have told you all about Ludwig von mises and we could have had a great big free market orgasm together.

fooger03

iTrader: (2)

Can anyone explain to me how a minimum wage earner is worse off today than he was 30 or 40 years ago? Seems to me that every facet of his life has improved tremendously. The fact that his life hasn't improved at the same rate as top income earners is irrelevant.

2ndGearRubber

I hear you FTB. Your beef is with huge increases between classes, while jobs like manufacturing that once provided stable, good paying work, leave the country. As all that happens, banks and large business continue to reap huge/record profits. The job market is flooded with people with manufacturing level skills. And no manufacturing jobs. We have a nation of desk jobs, with no tangible, real world "value".


We seem to give corporate america a pass on what they actually do. "They make more than 250K a year, they gotta be important". Next time your septic tank backs up, and you literally have **** for a back yard, ask the CEO for some help. I'm sure his secretary will know a good plumber.



Yeah, I know, commie bullshit. Sue me.