EricGatzke

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

z31maniac

What is that wage when all the other benefits are concerned? Which doesn't even include the the retirement/pension package. I'm not trying to be snarky, but making a straight comparison on hourly wages with no benefits to one with a ton of benefits, isn't really a fair comparison.

I just checked my last payslip of last year, and noticed how much all my other "benefits" add to my actual hourly rate, about another $7.50/hr. And no pension, just whatever I manage to save in my 401k between now and then, because I have no doubt there will be no SS by the time I reach retirement.

samnavy

iTrader: (7)

When I was in elementary school, probably fifth grade (circa 1985), I remember watching a film and getting a lecture from my teacher that basically said the earth would be completely out of fossil fuels by the turn of the century. I remember this lecture because that was the year I figured I'd graduate college and my Dad promised he'd buy me a Mustang if I got a degree. But with no gas, how would I drive it? For a 10yr old, this **** was all I thought about for weeks... instead after college I joined the circus, so he was off the hook. Very vivid propaganda that our parents were destroying the world and crushing my dreams of cruising in my 5.0.

I just talked to a buddy of mine who is a landman in West Texas... said that at best guess, the Permian Basin is less than 20% tapped... maybe less than 15%. He said they actually find more all the time they didn't know was there, and that the science behind determining "reserves" usually ends up in an increase in thet total volume as the data gets more accurate. Makes me wanna punch my 5th grade teacher in the face.

This is kinda how I see the Social Security "crisis" being portrayed in the media. One mysterious day about 23 years from now, the checks will simply stop coming, and everybody knew it was going to happen, but did nothing... just like in 1985 when I was told we'd be out of oil in 15 years and nothing could stop it, but it was real important that I recycled all my soda cans to help out the environment. Do you really think that one day, there will be no more SS, and that they've already predicted the day it will happen, and that's the end of it? Have faith that more hard-core socialists get elected to Congress and relax about the "crisis".

***************************

And now on to your non-snarky question... you're right on the "what are benefits worth" comparison... best pulled-out-of-my-*** guess... $20k/yr.

Lets really add up what my retirement is worth.

I'll be retired at 44yrs old summer of '20 and begin collecting (let's round a bit here) $4000/mo. I come from very long-lived and healthy genetics. All of my grandparents died of lifestyle inflicted unnatural causes very late in life. All but 1 of them would likely be well into their 90's if not for some smoking and a nasty slip&fall. I currently have no medical conditions of any kind, take no medications, am tobacco free, eat as healthy as a bro can, and am very glass-is-half-full. People are living longer all the time, and I can't even begin to imagine the state of modern medicine in another 30-40years... cures for everything in pill form? I think I can expect to live well into my 90's barring catastrophe. So lets call it another 50yrs.

In 2019, I'll make $48k in retirement. But, I get a pay raise every year based on some inflation-derived formula. Let's say that it averages 2.25% (my best guess). If I live to be 90yrs old (another 46 years), total income adds up to... $4.8 million. So yes, it's a lot of money.

Plus Tricare, which is arguably the best and cheapest insurance plan imagineable.
Plus a great home-loan program through the VA.
Plus commissary benefits.
Plus tons of discounts on everything.
Plus tons more **** and more on top of that.

Diamond Dave

Are you very young or just extremely Liberal? Many young people mistake the fact that a Job is not supposed to "take care of them". When you walk into a grocery store and apply for a job as a clerk, the manager isn't interested in your personal, financial situation. They only care if you can show up to work on time and not cost them money for the wage they pay. Workers are paid according to value. If I get a job on an NBA basketball team, they will realize an incredible cost savings for my salary, but they won't see the VALUE of having me on their roster. Likewise, at a Grocery store, they won't see the value in having the Store General Manager bagging groceries full time, because they are paying for that person's value to run the store profitably.

Now, the warm hearted Liberals that love to provide other people's money for the poor and incapable want you to think that a job's purpose is to provide for families - much in the same way that they think Government should provide for families. The thing is, Government just taxes citizens and doesn't have a hard budget to worry about. But Families have a hard budget. They can only spend what they earn. Businesses have a hard budget because they have to produce a quality product/service and sell it for a price that allows them to grow the strength of their business. Payroll is the Number One cost that nearly all businesses (and Government by the way) have. it's usually about 65% of their total costs (rent, equipment, marketing, etc.). Forcing businesses to pay a higher wage than the value of the employees bring to the business only reduces their profit and ergo, their stability.

Lastly, a "Living Wage" is a Pollyannic fallacy. A single person living with their parents and taking public transportation has a different income need than a person that has a spouse and child at home, with a newer car they can't afford and a brand new iPhone that lives in a major metropolitan area. Many people that aren't "making it" financially are exactly in their position because of their financial and life decisions.

Did you see the news about Whole Foods Employees being outraged that their hours are being reduced? What's funny is that if you do the math, the situations where people's weekly hours reduced from 30/wk to 20/wk were still earning significantly more than when they were minimum wage. This is one by-product of a business controlling their costs. Also, Amazon is widely renowned as a leader in logistics and efficiencies. Whole Foods is renowned as one of those foo-foo boutique grocery stores where employees have all the time in the world to make sure all the canned food is faced to the aisle. Don't you think it makes sense that an entity that is very efficient would eventually streamline one of their acquisitions that was not efficient?

concealer404

iTrader: (3)

It's easy to point fingers at "dem dere bleeding heart libruls" but is your counterpoint to Eric's ACTUALLY "minimum wage jobs shouldn't be enough to eke out the most basic life on?" He's not saying it should be COMFY or lavish. Just bare essentials.

Because that's how your post reads when you reply in that manner, that what he said is wrong. His view point is hardly liberal, mostly because it was even pointed out "if you want more, you should do more," which is about as conservative/free market as it gets.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

awarded for use of the word pollyannic.



I'd tend to agree with the argument that minimum wage should not be enough to eke out a living on.

Here's an example: in his later years, my step-grandfather (maternal side) worked as a greeter at Wal-Mart. Like many people employed in this capacity, he was both elderly and disabled. Charles didn't need the income, he had a railroad pension and social security. Rather, it gave him something to do, and kept him actively engaged with the outside world.

Well, now that minimum wage is going up in a lot of places, Wal-Mart is eliminating the greeter positions in around 1,000 of its stores. The position is being replaced with that of "customer host," and the requirements for that job include being able to climb a ladder to retrieve products from an overhead shelf, and lift at least 25 lbs. That's not unreasonable for a job paying $11 - $15 per hour, but it means that the "value" of employees who are not capable of fulfilling that role has dropped from minimum wage to zero.


Or a personal example. My first job was working evenings and weekends as a board operator at a local radio station. That's the most entry-level job there is in all of broadcasting, and I got paid minimum wage. Basically, you sit in a chair, wait for the announcer to say "and with a pitching change we'll be back in sixty seconds, on the Texas Rangers Radio Network", and then you turn one **** and push one button. Not very demanding work, but it turned out to be a fantastic opportunity which evolved into what's now an extremely well-paying career.

But if minimum wage had been double what it was then, do you think they'd have hired a 16 year old kid to sit in a chair and push 4-5 buttons per hour? Doubtful. They'd have wanted someone more versatile, who could do more. Like someone with editing experience, maybe a CDL and an associate's degree in electrical, that kind of thing. Sitting in a chair doing my homework while keeping an ear out for the announcer just didn't merit the equivalent of $15 an hour today, especially for a tiny little AM radio station that was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy.


And that's the real problem. If you insist that the minimum wage be sufficient to support a family as a sole-earner in even the most spartan of conditions, you eliminate everyone who doesn't need to pay the rent and feed a family from the labor force.

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

If you want to be able to live on a minimum wage then you need to be prepared to make sacrifices much deeper than what you eat or if you drive or ride a bicycle. You must make sacrifices in location. You must be prepared to live where no one is willing to live and therefore is cheap enough to be affordable. This means the middle of nowhere or the heart of a shity ghetto. It also means having roommates when you don't want them, sometimes many more than you want for the amount of space you to have.

concealer404

iTrader: (3)

I'm not, nor do i think Eric was, suggesting that a single minimum wage should be enough to support a family. It should, however, afford someone to live on their own with the bare-est of essentials. Then if you want luxuries, you pick up more shifts and/or work towards a better job.

Does that sound more agreeable? I gotta think the disconnect was people reading into the posts and ASSuming anyone was saying a family of 5 should be able to survive on a single minimum wage, when nothing of the sort was said. It's just jumping to conclusions at the slightest scent of being able to rant against someone we can potentially maybe possibly hopefully excitedly label as a librul.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Even if you limit it to a single person, you're still excluding kids getting their first job, the elderly and disabled working just so that they have something to do other than sit around and wait for death, etc., married women who have been stay-at-home moms for 10-15 years and are now looking for part-time work after the youngest of the kids is in school, etc.

You can't put a floor on the cost of labor without excluding someone from the workforce. The question is simply how many people are you willing to kick out into unemployment?

concealer404

iTrader: (3)

I'm not excluding anyone. They can follow Six's thinking of potentially moving across country to a more favorable location with less competition for the tiny wages.

I guess to answer your question: I'm willing to kick however many people get kicked into unemployment as what "naturally" happens with my baseline of "can you barely eke by on your own?" I'm generally not concerned with kids getting their first job, at least how i define "kid," which is "still lives at home" or "part time because in school." They're not an essential part of the workforce. Neither are the elderly and disabled, your very example alludes to that, in that they're "working just so that they have something to do other than sit around." That's called a "hobby," whether we personally would consider being a Walmart Greeter a hobby or not, they're just looking for something to do. That job would be something i'd call a luxury, as distasteful as that sounds.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

That is an astonishing point of view.

If I hadn't gotten that job turning ***** when I was 16, I wouldn't have learned skills and made connections which allowed me to advance my way through the industry and become the man I am today.

But, hey, **** giving teenagers the ability to gain real-world experience to help guide them into a career. They should be totally isolated from reality and denied the opportunity to explore various industries before deciding what they want to rack up student loan debt studying.

Let's go ahead and eliminate all tradecraft apprenticeships, too.



Good answer. **** the elderly and the disabled. Why should they get to have something resembling a normal life? Into the nursing homes you go.

concealer404

iTrader: (3)

See, now you're using that word "give." Who's the librul now? (yes i'm aware that sounds whacko, it's tongue-in-cheek.)

As for gaining experience.... that's called "unpaid apprenticeship." Or even paid. Minimum wage paid apprenticeship. I'm not talking about a big amount of money here....I'm on board by and large with what Six said.

Kids here get part time jobs. Making minimum wage or higher. It's not an issue. You can live on current minimum wage here. The world keeps turning. When i say i'm ok with the unemployment scenario with a minimum wage.... we already have that. I don't see any need to make it drastically worse. Wage doesn't need to go up much. Raising it a dollar isn't going to ruin a kid's life because he/she/it will now magically be unable to get in the door any where or learn anything ever again. That's just not reality.

Diamond Dave

Don't take this the wrong way, because the way I'm going to present this point, it will be easy for you to take it personally. It seems like you have no idea how a business works or what Cost of Goods Sold means. Because when you increase a business' single largest expense (payroll at ~65% of total COGS), you are making a huge dent in the profit of the company. Do you know why we don't have $400 Nike shoes? because no one wants to pay $400 for shoes so we encouraged Nike to figure out how to take their manufacturing to a LCC and now we have nikes that are only $200.

You sound like you care and that is admirable and don't want to insult you. You're conflating too many points. Minimum wage jobs are the entry point into the workforce based on either skill added to the company or value added to the company. You can't say on one hand that minimum wage should cover basic needs, but then say that minimum wage is for teenagers. The fact is that every person can get a wage above minimum wage with a few simple techniques:

• Pass a drug test/criminal background investigation
• Show up on time (every time)
• Learn and apply skills to your job each day
• Have a positive attitude
• Be willing to leave this job for a better one

This is why we don't need to worry about a $15/hr minimum wage. Because if those people that wanted more money as a handout actually put the time into applying the bullet points above, they'd be earning above minimum wage within 12mos. Anyone working at a minimum wage job longer than 6mos is a turkey or they are doing it because they lack ambition or they aren't able to consistently apply skill. I know. I've placed a few hundred people at minimum wage jobs. Their managers tell me why they fired the last guy. They also tell me why they want to give a raise after someone has only worked there for 2wks.

Good discourse though.

Diamond Dave

But will I go another 40yrs before I use it again?! (with this election cycle and AOC, might be sooner than I think)


I think you summed it up well. Minimum wage has zero bearing on a person's family size, geographic living situation, or whether they are married or single or have kids. Minimum wage is only the lowest wage a company can pay an employee with no skill. it's a replaceable position, but it's also the point at which you receive training, experience, and an opportunity to move up. But, then again, I've only made thousands of job offers across most industries and skills sets.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Substitute the following:

"But, hey, **** allowing teenagers teenagers the freedom to gain real-world experience to help guide them into a career. Let's oppress them instead."



Unpaid apprenticeships are already banned in many parts of the US. Force skilled craftsmen (welders, carpenters, millwrights, painters, plumbers, electricians, etc) who operate in smaller markets to pay their essentially unproductive entry-level apprentices 1/3 to 1/2 of their total take, and you just killed apprenticeships.



Not everyone lives in a suburb of a major metropolitan area such as yourself.

In fact, most Americans don't.

I grew up in a small town (Port Charlotte, FL) in which the median per-capita income is $23,560. Assuming a 40 hour workweek, that's $11.78 per hour (2017 numbers.)

Explain to me how it's reasonable to expect that a 16 year old with absolutely no experience whatsoever is going to get hired into an entry-level job that teaches him skills which will lead to a prosperous career, if his baseline salary requirement is 21% higher than the present-day average salary for experienced workers.


I really can't stress this enough. Pricing young people out of the employment market will have catastrophic social consequences within a single generation, when you have a whole wave of newly-minted adults who have zero experience with any sort of work environment whatsoever aging out of their parents' insurance and housing. You think that the current crop of early-twenty-somethings with their entitlement mentality is bad? Imagine a near-future in which literally not a single one of them has ever held a job.

z31maniac

I have to take the side of "Minimum wage shouldn't be enough to live on your own" argument, get a roommate. Like the rest of us do. Hell before I moved to OKC, my old roommate and I made a combined, what $140k per year (in Oklahoma no less)? Neither of us needed a roommate, and neither of us needed to live in a home built in 1919 with no modern amenities past heating and cooling in the form of open flame gas stoves and window units.

But we chose to do so to save money and eliminate debt (we both had gotten divorced in the past 1-2 years and I had two layoffs to add to it). Granted he was still driving a BMW and me a 1.5 year old BRZ, but still. We made sacrifices to get our **** together.

My friend in fact, still lives in the rent house (my old family home). Because it's SUPER cheap rent ($400/month), it's on a quiet street, etc.

z31maniac

This of course completely ignores that only something like 2% of the wage earning population make minimum and more than 50% of those are in the service industry and make far more than minimum wage when you include their tips.

DNMakinson

iTrader: (3)

Societally, we need to do away with tips. Such an indirect system that is routinely abused. Let the employees work for their employers, not the customers.

I thought we could make it socially scorned by spreading that it has roots in slavery. But I found out it actually does have said roots; but the Internet is not aghast about it.

bahurd

iTrader: (8)

^ Doubtful you'd get overall buy in from the merchants on that one. And depending on the locality and business they make way more than the $15 "minimum" being thrown around. Maybe a waitress at Betty's Hungry House Cafe would disagree, dunno. Off topic, how's the hips?