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"The problem is that if you had WANTED that deal you could have BARGAINED for it." -- it's plain as day you have no idea what you're talking about :D you guessed correctly later on - "But wait, I hear you cry: "minimum wage workers have no negotiating power so they can't just demand exactly what they want!"" -- that's right. some people have little to no choice, it's amazing that you are unaware of that... as for the whole reasoning, it goes under the assumption that all the gain will be taken out of benefits, which is unfounded. also, why would the worker not cover benefits him/herself? with cash in hand, s/he has a much wider choice then picking McD's or BurgerKing's bundle package or nothing... ultimately your argumentation also goes to show how important workplace safety regulations are, since many business owners think like you, and history has already taught us how that can end. as for the reasoning about studies, this is so full of fallacies and arbitrary pseudo-reasoning it's hard to even start answering. these things are hard to measure, yes. maybe you will be surprised, but people did already realize that long before you wrote that comment. but, when a couple of unemployment figures suit your point, then, OTOH, i am supposed to immediately blindly agree with you? :) this is getting boring. P.S. I cannot resist - do you even realize that after so much market-efficiency-based reasoning, you completely took a shit on it in order to discredit the study? the effects you expect are products of a theory based on ideal markets and market agents, yet when we fail to measure the expected effects, that's because they are anything but ideal. genius :D |
I'm not sure if you realize that across multiple industries the rate at which worker fatality stats improved either stayed the same or even declined when OSHA was introduced. In short, it's not clear at all that federal worker safety regs actually improve worker safety. You can perhaps see that best in the graph (Figure 34.1) on the third page of this PDF:
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/ca...
Regarding the study, I'm not saying you can't learn anything from studies. I am saying that when we have hundreds of studies showing that the minimum wage generally causes unemployment - and we do - one or two that say "but it's hard to see the effect of this one small change in this one small area with this one specific way of looking at the data" aren't enough to rebut that general presumption. If you want to "even start answering", you should read at least ONE study on the other side, not just look at data sources that agree with you. For instance, you could read this:
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~pjkuhn/Ec250A/Readings/Neumark_eta...
The unemployment stats I pointed to were comparing having a minimum wage AT ALL to not having one - bigger changes are more likely to be highly visible in the output data. BTW, to answer your question (somewhere else in this thread) about Germany, the last time it had very high unemployment was around 2005 when it had a high minimum wage and lots of "worker protection" laws. After the German labor market was freed up a bit (including getting rid of that minimum) the unemployment rate there dropped quite dramatically. Here's a chart of what that looked like:
http://mediaserver.fxstreet.com/Reports/95e05c46-b989-46ee-a...
(UPDATE: Wait, that's showing values in millions of workers, not as percentages, which is a little misleading. So here's a chart that shows the rate while comparing Germany to France over the same period:
http://thinkingoftheworld.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/chart-... )