$15/hr minimum wage

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(08-07-2018, 10:58 PM)Nately120 Wrote: I haven't looked at any actual employment data, but everyone I know who went to college has a job and I also know plenty of people who didn't go to college who also have jobs.  And there have been daytime TV ads running for trade schools for decades, so I'm not sure where you get the notion that this country is full of great trade jobs that people are trying to scare teens away from pursuing.

I will say one thing I've noticed is that my pseudo-nephew (yeah, I'll marry my gf eventually...get off my back) is 19 and he went to trade school and everyone else in his class was around my age.  People my age could get jobs out of high school and make enough money to support themselves and a family and have some insurance and so on.  Now that isn't true, so people are having to go back to get skills in order to earn a life that "just plain old working" no longer provides.

What I'm saying is that if going to college these days is tantamount to paying $250,0000 for a degree that will leave you working 16 hours a week at Wal Mart and going to trade school or driving a truck will get you $100k per year then kids will wise up soon enough and the market will right itself.  You can joke that getting a 4-year college degree is "following your dreams" but the real dream is making $80k+ per year when you are 19 years old, so I don't see why arms need to be twisted to lead teens towards those jobs.

Anywho, this thread is about minimum wage and I don't think that is something that applies to people who go to college or go to trade school.  But honestly I'm not deep enough into either side of the political coin to laugh about those dumb dumb conservatives who didn't go to college and work at the local dirt farm for peanuts as they lack the critical thinking skills required to understand why they "ain't rich like Trump."  Nor do I laugh about those smug liberal millennials who spend a quarter of a million dollars on their lesbian interpretive dance dream weaving degrees and then sling Starbucks for a pittance while they smugly burn the American flag.

Purely anecdotal evidence, but when I was in school, we did go to visit a trade school late during my Sophomore year... but to offset that they spent the previous 5 years+ telling us nonstop that we needed to go to college to be successful. How poor we'd be if we didn't go to college, etc.

I have a decent amount of friends who got degrees, but not a ton of them ended up getting jobs that actually pertain to their degree. For the first handful of years especially, there were a lot of pizza delivery/bartender jobs after spending 4 years and a bunch of money.

I don't think trade schools are given their proper positive light because everyone who is teaching you is someone with a college degree, and almost always a masters degree to boot. There's a stigma they create over working with your hands rather than getting "educated".

(08-07-2018, 11:16 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Raising the minimum is just the first effect. What do you do with the employee that has earned more than the minimum due to seniority ect...? 

You're starting out on fries and make $15/hour. What do you do with the cashier that has been there 1 year and has made a couple extra dollars more than the minimum? 

Yeah, that's a big problem with jumping the minimum wage up any large amount, too. If you're making $15/hr already when the minimum wage is $7.50 or whatever, then you need to get a raise to $30/hr to maintain your gap over minimum wage if it increases to $15/hr, and nobody is going to do that.

It'll crush the middle/lower middle class because 50 weeks a year of 40 hour weeks at $20/hr is $40k. That has decent spending power right now (unless you're living somewhere seriously expensive). If the minimum wage was $15/hr at that same rate, that means the minimum wage folk would be making $30k and suddenly that $40k isn't so decent.

It'd crush all the middle class except for upper middle, so you'd have a tiny upper middle class, the rich folk, and then a huge amount of the new lower class income.