[RANT]: Raise the minimum wage! This is so unfair!

[MJ DeMarco]

"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country."
-President Franklin Roosevelt

In that same respect, no business which depends on free traffic from the Google SERPS has any right to be in business.

In any event, I parodied the picture for your Fastlane enjoyment.

 

[twdavis]

I see people posting this picture and similar ones all the time on my Facebook timeline all with the same message, but for some reason today it irritated me more than usual.

The simplest delta between the Slowlane/Sidewalk lifestyle and the Fastlane lifestyle is:

***Drumroll**


Mindset

Wahh wahhh boo hoo.


The 99% needs to shut the F*ck up and get off their a$$ and create value so that you can be that "CEO" guy.

Technically, the last girl is headed in the right direction, maybe. Just depends where her "second online income" is coming from and how much time it's costing her.

About a year ago, I was these people. I thought the exact same way they do, which is the same way my mother and most of my family still does. Complaining because "the price of groceries is going up! This is outrageous", well maybe you people should do something about that! Yanno...something other than continuing down the same path of insignificance that society pre-subscribes you to.

I mean I know this is constantly talked about on here, but it took me until this year to really flip my mindset from "value-consumer" to "value-producer", and everything that goes along with it, and also it took me until this year to realize that this is how roughly 99.999997% of people think.
Then they get to be 65 or late 50s and I have to hear them whine and bitch because they worked all their lives and have back problems and now they have nothing to show for their 50+ years of toil.

I mean is this REALLY how most people are content living and thinking?

 

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[SBS.95]

I have a habit of straying close to breaking the "no political talk" rule. So I'll just give you the +rep and see myself out.

Have to get one comment in though:

The MINIMUM wage is not, nor was ever meant to be, nor ever should be, the LIVING wage. They are not the same. Why the F*ck anyone would ever want to only be "the minimum" is beyond me.

I have to go now before I get too riled up.

 

[Trivium iz rC]

It's always funny when talking to someone with the "Entitlement" mindset & the whole minimum wage issue.

"I've been working at McDonalds for 8 years as a fry cook and i'm only making $8.10/hr". McDonalds/Wal-Mart should be paying us $15.

I always tell friends that are stuck in the rat race that McDonalds & Wal-Mart don't control the price of labor THE MARKET & your skills do. No ones putting a gun to your head and saying "Your My Slave Now You Must Work Here Forever" as any other job in the states you have a right to quit or leave if your not satisfied with the work place or work pay.

A cashiers job, fry cook, retail clerk are all jobs made for people entering the work force with no experience, not for some 32 year old man/women to work trying to raise a family of 3.

There are plenty of opportunities in these big corporations to move up but sadly, "The Entitlement" disease has crippled many americans to say "I want the pay raise, but I don't want the responsibility & hard work of the higher paying jobs."

"Ya I support higher wages for Wal-Mart employees" Yet no one would votes with there wallet.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Peter+Schiff+Wal-mart

"But Kosta you're not being fair CNN says the middle class is shrinking" Ya the middle class is shrinking and you're right, in 2008 there was a fork in the road for the middle that said "Wealthy" or "Poverty". Some chose wealth and some chose poverty, we don't live in the industrial age anymore were you can work in a factory for 40 years & do mindless work then retire. You have to be constantly improving and adding skills to your tool box & adapting to change in the Information Age. Those who can't adapt or improve in business or work will lose.

What the poor and middle class don't understand is, it's not the minimum wage that's the problem. The decreasing purchasing power of the dollar is the main enemy for the middle class and the poor. It doesn't matter if the minimum wage gets raise to $20/hr if they keep inflating & doing QE it won't matter how much you get paid an hour because your purchasing power will go down the toilet.

To everyone who read my post we are living in the greatest time the world has ever seen, We have all the information of the world in our finger tips, and you can literally learn any skill you want to online & improve yourself Physically, Mentally, Emotionally. Yet all people do is complain.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Yup, I see a picture with 3 paths... hopefully the coincidence isn't lost on the folks here.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

I see a lot of hatred towards the "General population here'

Oh, and there's no "hatred" toward the CEO/Rich Guy/1% Dude? Politicians and the media encourage "Rich shaming" as that's narrative that gives them votes from the intellectually challenged. Class warfare is at its 52-week high.

These stupid comparisons go on in the fitness world too.

Post a fit muscular woman with abs on Facebook and watch the hatred fly.

"Narcissist" (because she cares deeply about her health and what goes in her mouth?!?)
"That woman looks like a man!" (Oh and you look like Frosty the snowman that's dived into a vat of butterscotch)
"I don't have time for that!" (No, but you have time to see every episode of Dancing With the Stars don't ya?)
"I'd rather spend time with my kids than be at the gym!" (Implies that the fit gal is a bad mother)

Notice here that the hatred is framed as an either/or, and an absolute. It never is, but that's how you mentally trick yourself into believing your mediocrity.

And yet, if you're fat and can barely fit into an economy seat on SW Airlines, you get a pass. Hell, there's an entire gym chain (planet fitness) that revolves around "fit shaming" where fit people are shunned, discriminated, and even expelled from the facility.

Crap like this makes me believe that Idiocracy's intellectual apocalypse is now at hand.

 

[Kak]

 

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[The-J]

Not gonna get political or economic here... but if you're older than 22 and are still working at a minimum wage job... and HATE IT... then you really need to take a good hard look at what got you there and change your damn path.

 

[Kak]

The fact of the matter is that if you are truly worth more than you are getting paid you could get it elsewhere. There is a market rate for labor just like there is a market rate for everything else. Why should I ever pay someone more than they are worth?

If I were a stockholder in a company that decided to take a dumb stance and pay living wages to unskilled workers I would sell my stake immediately.

Not only should we not raise it... There should be no minimum wage at all.

 

[socaldude]

Notice how they try to subconsciously influence your perception with the wage trio.

The CEO guy is fat and is colored red. Fat is greed. Red is danger, death and destruction.

These beliefs regarding wealth are becoming more prevalent in our society. Becoming wealthy means you did it by screwing others over.

Despite the laws of economics say that being entrepreneurial is one of the best things you can do to help the wealth of society in general.

 

[RHL]

I propose that mustaches, top hats, canes, and monocles are mandatory attire for Fastlane Meetup 2015.

On a serious note, a fitness instructor/model whose workouts my wife follows has a saying I really like, because even though it's not applied to money in her context at all it's 100% applicable-

"Make the same choices, get the same results."

It's really the heart of the fastlane, and something that I was really dissapointed that I never figured out before TMF . Why would you waste time bitching about the CEO guy, which changes nothing, when you could spend the same amount of time *becoming* the CEO guy???

*EDIT, JUST SAW THIS:

>The CEO guy is fat and is colored red. Fat is greed. Red is danger, death and destruction.

Yep, and it's funny because wanting something you haven't earned is the definition of greed, and obesity is far more prevalent among the first "path" on that chart than the last one. If you're too fat, you won't be able to fasten the seat belt in your Countach. Just ask Matt Farah.

*EDITEDIT: HOLY IRONY GOLD BATMAN.

I just ran the hash tag of the girl who posted the original meme on facebook. Guess what Novaelife is. Take a guess. Go on. I dare you.
http://www.novaelife.com/
http://www.novaelife.com/

You guessed it! Although it camouflages itself as an entrepreneurship coaching program that "doesn't want to sell you anything," at the bottom of the page are three very expensive starter kits that you can't buy without entering the name of the person that referred you. Although info is limited, it walks and quacks like that paragon of the sidewalk, an MLM.

"I'm earning extra income online." No you're not, you're being sold as a product and action-faking on the sidewalk. Damn is this depressing.

 

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[Vick]

You know the thing that pisses me off the most.

In are youth, we learn a shit load very quickly about the world we live in.

And most of it is all bullshit.

 

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[Charnell]

I wish these people would understand what a price floor was.

All that raising the minimum wage does is creates a huge gap of unemployment and competition. If I have $30 an hour to spend on employees, and I can get 3 for $10 an hour, I'll hire 3. Minimum wage goes up to $15, now I can only hire 2. I'm not going to increase my $$ per hour total, I'm going to reduce my employees, and if those two can't do the work of three, I'll fire them and find two people that can, because competition is fierce.

 

[IGP]

 

[RazorCut]

The fact of the matter is that if you are truly worth more than you are getting paid you could get it elsewhere. There is a market rate for labor just like there is a market rate for everything else. Why should I ever pay someone more than they are worth?

Totally agree. The problem is people are loathe to work harder in their job until they are paid for it. They don't understand the concept that to get a pay rise they HAVE to provide the increased value FIRST.

Technically if you want to better yourself in your job you will always be in a position of being underpaid as you constantly strive to provide MORE value to get yet ANOTHER pay rise. Most people on minimum wage see their pay per hour not as a ladder but as their position in life.

I like the late, great Jim Rohn's take on minimum wage:

 

[FeaRxUnLeAsHeD]

Have to bump this one back from the dead because this is truly gold. I saved the image MJ made on how your choices change your life and put you into 1 of the 3 buckets of people...

I've been taking some notes myself and came up with my own set of criteria for the difference between a 'median-wage earner' and a successful entrepreneur.. obviously not as black-and-white as I'm making it out to be, but you get the point

 

[RHL]

Interestingly enough, most people will look at the CEO guy with disgust, rather than ask "how do I be that guy?"

It's because of the programming man. My parents were objectively smart as shit; my Dad went to Penn, my mom was a chemical engineer with tons of patents at the forefront of her field and now a computer science professor. But they always hated the CEO's and the fat cats because their un-accomplished parents taught them to. They never thought to try and become them even though they were so smart. In the same way, I came up, I went through school, and not to brag, but I wasn't like a lot of the people here. I didn't suck at school or hate school or drop out. I got 99th percentile SAT and GRE scores and excelled in a ton of subjects. I was in 400 level physics courses by my second year in college. I supposedly knew all about economics and how businesses and even nations worked on paper, and yet I was too damn ignorant, too damn stupid to figure out that little fact I just quoted from NinjaKid until TMF finally woke me up to the truth by beating me over the head with it page after page after page.

That's the part of the "1% Hate" and the "CEO hate" that I loath most. If I ever become really rich, I won't give a shit if people hate me for it (just like I'm sure Pia Muehlenbeck and Erin Heatherton don't lay up at night worrying about the fatties hating on their abs on Instagram), but I hate it because it makes people blind to a way they could improve their own lives, smart, resourceful, generous people who really want good for themselves and their neighbors and their families spend their lives in chains at a desk because of this stupid political nonsense teaches them to hate the rich blindly and to blindly accept that the only way you can become rich is by being greedy and selfish and causing harm to other people around you and under you. I don't care that "1% hate" makes people hate the rich; their reality can't change rich people's reality. I care that 1% hate makes the 99% slaves themselves because the ideology blinds them to the truth and binds them to mediocrity.

Make the same choices, get the same results. Be a sidewalker and bitter about the rich, live poor for a lifetime. Be a fastlaner and emulate the rich, live free for a lifetime.

 

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[amp0193]

Ironically, it has never been easier to start a business than today. All i say is kickstarter, wordpress, outsourcing, social networking and consumerism.

I agree with you, however, I believe it's even easier than that. This summer I learned how to repair appliances in 3 days on youtube. The next week I was making hundreds a week fixing/flipping washers and dryers on craigslist. A month later I was making a thousand a week, working around 30 hours a week. A month later, I taught a college kid to do most of what I did for me, and now I make the same amount for 10-15 hours a week. I learned in 3 days how to surpass my salaried teacher income that took me 5 years and 50k student loan debt to learn.

Any minimum-wager with two hands, a screwdriver, and a local library in my 130,000pop. city could do this of course, but there's one other dude on CL doing it.


Lastly, I think that completely unregulated labor rates can be bad: I.E. dust bowl, Grapes of Wrath, paying people $1/hr to pick oranges, etc., that over-regulated business is bad, i.e. Atlas Shrugged, but that the current state of a reasonable minimum wage is pretty ok. The key, as a couple people posted earlier, is the changing perception of what is "required" to live... i.e car, house, tvs, phones, etc. I teach middle-school low-income Hispanics that live in trailer parks... 95% of them have fancy smart phones with data plans, yet they "can't afford" lunch or breakfast, so we provide it to them. They make fun of me for having a flip phone with duct tape on the back, and cycling to work.

 

[theag]

How do you actually determine an employee's worth?

Based on how long it takes to replace them. Simple as that.

 

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[RHL]

Wanna jump back in here again and point out that buisinesses that are structured with pay scales like this:

Bottom employee: $25,000/yr
Manager: $60,000/yr
Regional Manger: $100,000/yr
CEO: $10M/yr

Are companies where all the heavy lifting is done by the guy at the top, the CEO. He came up with the idea for the burger chain or software platform, he coded or developed the alpha version himself, he bought the land or mortgaged his house or hit up his parents to buy the first facility that was used to produce the product, he suffered through the lean years alone while HIS WIFE and HIS KIDS and HIS REPUTATION were the ones in jeopardy. When the company hit it big, the lower employees came in with no risk, a system already created for them to work in, and very little unique value to add. Any employee at an individual McDonald's store can be replaced by any mentally competent adult with less than 40 hours of training.

Contrast that to places where risks are more equitably shared-Law firms, engineering firms, medical practices. Every doctor or lawyer working there makes a hefty salary. While they might make 1/4 or even 1/10 what the head guy makes, they don't make 1/400th what he makes. Why is that?

Because they have to do the heavy mental lifting to work out case law, or diagnose patients, to avoid malpractice suits, and to bring technologies their clients need to the table. They have to work aggressively to forge paths that their employer has not traveled before, and because of the creativity and risk involved in that, they earn $300,000+/yr or much more.

If you're nothing but a forklift made out of meat, or a mop-swisher made out of meat, or a change-o-matic made out of meat, you'll earn shit wages. To use an analogy from something I know a lot about, there's a reason why a new engine for a V12 Aston Martin costs $50K while the oil filter cost $150-the more important a part is to the whole machine, the more it's worth.

Nobody doing valuable stuff for a lot of people earns minimum wage.

 

[jazb]

It is one the biggest flaw in the capital system. A woker works his a$$ off and he still does not get his share of the profit. There is a minimum salary limit whereas there is not a maximum salary cap. Billionaires can earn on the blood and sweat of poor workers and they get away with it.

Why would you come on an entrepreneurial forum and spout this crap?

 

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[SBS.95]

Is Roosevelt a slimy politician? He's a great example of a man who lived up to his potential. Politicians pander to everyone; constituents, companies. It's what they do.

Anyway I don't vote, and I'm not american, so I don't really give a F*ck what you do with your minimum wage. And I'm not at all emotionally involved.
Some economists say it's actually better for the economy to have a higher minimum wage. Or maybe they would just spend it on more debt and consumer goods like MJ is saying.
Either way, it merits actual empirical research and proper debate.

1) Calm down. My reply was pretty lighthearted, I don't know why you're freaking out.

2) FDR was a very good war-time President, but that hardly means I have to agree with every one of his socialist ideas. The "slimy politicians" comment was not in reference to him.

3) If you "don't give a F*ck" about the American minimum wage, why are you in a thread about the American minimum wage? You tried to discredit my earlier post, so obviously you have an opinion on the topic. Share it.

4) "Some economists" saying something is not an argument. For someone who talks of proper debate, you have little.

-----

I believe a higher minimum wage is worse for the economy. It leads to inflation. So the Wal-Mart employee making $12/hour instead of $8/hour is happy for about 14 seconds before he realizes that a Big Mac now costs $7 instead of $4.

My other reservation is that it will just lead to a loss of jobs, which, being as the American infrastructure is still in pretty shit shape, is the last thing we need. When McDonalds is forced to pay employees $12/hour instead of $8/hour, they will find ways to cut costs. It will be more economically viable for them to invest in technology that outsources employees. No one will take your order, you will use a touch screen. We have cars that can drive themselves, you don't think we can have a machine that lowers shredded potatoes into a fryer for 30 seconds?

 

[twdavis]

The think I've also found is that most people from the baby boomer era don't want to hear this.

Go over to Reddit, especially the /r/PersonalFinance or pretty much any other sub pertaining to money and finance today in terms of wealth building.


This one guy posted in a thread recently (I lost the thread):

Literally the only way to get rich is:

1. Be born into a family that started a company years ago (Gee cause that's impossible to do today)
2. Win the lottery

I lost a few IQ points.

 

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[Mbc]

Have to get one comment in though:

The MINIMUM wage is not, nor was ever meant to be, nor ever should be, the LIVING wage. They are not the same. Why the F*ck anyone would ever want to only be "the minimum" is beyond me.

Not to start a political debate either. But that is EXACTLY what the minimum wage was meant to be:
"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country."
-President Franklin Roosevelt

Now maybe you don't agree with him, which is fine, but don't go rewriting history.

I would also be careful in assuming that it's a bad thing for society if the minimum wage was a living wage.

This should be more of an economic debate than a political one. (as if that could happen though)

 

[SBS.95]

I do feel bad for people who spend their time and money in college and can't find a job. Most people have no interest in being fastlane, which is fine and all; but some people who are okay with having a good job and making okay money aren't even able to do that. The one advantage entrepreneurs have is that the opportunities for them to make money is unlimited whille the availability of jobs is limited.

I disagree. The availability of jobs is not limited, it's that people are going to school and getting degrees in fields where there is no demand for workers.

There are tons of positions out there that are not being filled. And we're not talking shitty $9/hour jobs. I listened to a podcast with Mike Rowe (from the show Dirty Jobs) where he talked about two consistencies among many of the jobs he went around doing while filming- 1) the fact that many of these jobs were shockingly high-paying AND 2) the fact that employers could not find people to do the jobs.

There were dozens upon dozens of jobs where companies were offering $75,000+ positions with free on-the-job training and still had to expand their search radius for employees for hundreds of miles.

There's a good book called Is College Worth It? In it, the author provides a list of jobs with thousands of open positions, all of which require either on-the-job training, or a 2-year technical school education (paid for by the employer.) Many of the jobs paid over $100,000, and yet people were not jumping all over them.

Every week I can look through my local Craigslist and find well-paying positions for automotive mechanics. A quick scan through my local newspaper classifieds and there are tons of $60,000+ CDL driver positions with free job training and benefits.

TL;DR- The problem isn't that there aren't jobs. The problem is that people spend 4 years getting a degree in "17th century Belgian lesbian literature studies", and then expect to be handed a job simply because they stuck with the university's hand-holding degree process.

So no, I don't really have sympathy for those type of complainers. Nobody thinks plumbing is sexy until they need a paycheck.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Here's what $15/hour looks like...



[HASHTAG]#RaiseTheWage[/HASHTAG] ??

How about [HASHTAG]#RaiseYourValueSoYourWorth15AnHour[/HASHTAG]

 

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[SBS.95]

Not to start a political debate either. But that is EXACTLY what the minimum wage was meant to be:
"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country."
-President Franklin Roosevelt

Now maybe you don't agree with him, which is fine, but don't go rewriting history.

I would also be careful in assuming that it's a bad thing for society if the minimum wage was a living wage.

This should be more of an economic debate than a political one. (as if that could happen though)

I'll bite. Guess this shows my (lack of) self-control. I tried, I really tried.

The first time the idea of a "minimum wage" was kicked around was 1912, long before FDR. This is what I was referring to in my earlier post. At the time when it was established in Massachusetts, it was intended for women and children.

Now I'm not trying to be sexist here, but this is 1912, so stick with me. "Women and children" basically meant simple and uneducated. Again, not my opinion, but we're talking about a decade before knee-skirt-wearing flappers were a thing. This is a time period when a man was the sole earner for a family, so to have this wage rate established for women and children (read: not men) meant that it was not intended for the primary money maker of the household.

This was not a law created for the men of 1912. Which is to say, this was not a law created for those earning a living in 1912. When we adopted minimum wage nationwide years later--that's when this whole minimum=living wage thing began.

FDR's opinion on the matter does not change mine. If we want to bring this back to economics; I believe the market should decide what the minimum wage is, not some slimy politician who's simply pandering to his constituents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States

 

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[Ninjakid]

How the CEO guy feels about all the hate

 

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[PedroG]

Sorry man, you can´t throw around first semester economics and tell me that´s how the world works.

I wrote about this earlier in the thread already, but again, you have to base your thinking on certain assumptions. One of the assumptions for this model is e.g., a perfect market with perfect competition and so on, BUT this isn´t the case in the real world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_market

If it would be so easy, there would be a general consensus about this in the world.

Look, you could say:
If the wage goes up, people have more money and then they can buy more stuff. More stuff is sold, businesses need to produce more and hire more employees and so on.
--> But it would again be oversimplified (like the above graph).

I think the problem is that many view it as black and white. But there are lots of (50 xD) shades of grey.

Umm, no you don't need to assume a perfect market to know that when something costs more than what it's worth to you, you're not going to purchase it or you are going to purchase less. The problem with minimum wage supporters is that they think they know how much to raise the minimum wage by without causing unemployment. In a market of over 300 million people, no one person or group of persons could possibly know what the right price of anything should be. The only ones making assumptions are those who think they know what a wage should be.

There's no need to assume a perfect market here. Put a minimum price on cars. Let's say $3,000. What happens to cars that are worth less than 3,000? Do you think they will be purchased at the same rate? No, because they will now be competing with cars that are actually worth 3,000. Why would I buy a car that's really worth $500 for $3,000 when I can get the nicer car for $3,000? Also, a poor couple that could afford 2 cars at $1,500 can now afford only 1.

There's no assumptions there. Just logic and common sense. And those who claim raising the wage is good for the economy because people will spend more? That's more than over-simplifying. That's complete ignorance. Raise the wage to 1 million dollars then. Every one will spend so much money, we'll all be rich. They completely ignore the other side of the equation; those who are being forced to provide the 1 million in that case. No way does that compare to the points that I've made.

 

[Kak]

It is one the biggest flaw in the capital system. A woker works his a$$ off and he still does not get his share of the profit. There is a minimum salary limit whereas there is not a maximum salary cap. Billionaires can earn on the blood and sweat of poor workers and they get away with it.

I'm sorry, who held a gun to the head of the worker and forced them to preform the labor at that rate? What is “his share” of the profit? I would argue his share is his paycheck. If he wants to OWN part of the company than he needs to buy its stock.

This is the most unidimensional thinking I've ever seen in a post. I don't know if you're going to fit in here very well.