OT: $15/hour minimum wage coming to Seattle

Not where I grew up. The place was staffed with old men, in their 50s or older. I didn't see younger employees there, until the late '70s.

I call total bullshit too. That GD Beatts Making $28 thousand a year and probably only working 6 days a week. What a greedy bastard.

Dan

What I saw was the hiring of a large number of mentally handicapped folks, downs sufferers, and other not so well off folks.

I do not see that as much any more.

Not at all, and the wage is phased in according to business size, the smaller ones have 7 years. Jobs will not be lost.

But the left excels at unintended consequences. You can't deny them the only thing they're good at.

So the invasion of Irak achieved the ends that Dubbya and his crew had in what passes for a mind in a right-wing nitwit?

Politics is complicated, and things often fail to turn out as planned. Right-wingers do tend to be unambitious, but none-the-less often fail to achieve what they can nerve themselves to attempt.

Magnificent line! Do you mind if I steal it ?>:-} ...Jim Thompson

Please be my guest.

My favorite unintended consequence is the one where I almost got killed when my fuel pump failed and I stalled on the highway. The car was a 1992 so it wasn't designed for ethanol. If the oil companies had put it in there voluntarily then they would have been "evil" and I'd have a case against them. But there's no civil action against the government. Mechanics told me a lot of cars had problems, so the chances are that some people were killed. Then there was the inflation of food prices and food riots in some countries. That Robert Reich s*****ad and his kind thought 10% ethanol was such a reasonable amount.

We're heading for an interesting stand-off... the left wants yet more ethanol, and the car companies say it will void warranties. ...Jim Thompson

The food riots should get interesting too. If they get their way it will change the course of wars and alliances.

Certainly an advanced society needs government; the question is, how much?

The Laffer curve posits that tax revenues vs tax rates is an inverted parabola, with a peak point somewhere; neither 0 nor 100% tax rates generate much tax income. There is an equivalent graph of social happiness vs size of government. Clearly zero government is bad, and clearly having 100% of everything be government is bad, so there is a peak between those points somewhere. We're probably past the peak.

The other factor is the *quality* of government, which, in the USA, is really mediocre.

The major beneficiary of government in the USA is the governing class.

Their best trick is applying resources, messing things up, and then demanding more resources to fix the problem.

The homeless situation here is like that. SF spends about $160 million a year on "homeless services", we have over 5000 people in shelters and in "supportive housing", and the number of people sleeping in the streets continues to increase. The answer? Spend more!

Yes.

That's not clear - principally because I don't think anybody can actually identify the market-clearing wage even after the fact.

Interesting - I am just repeating stuff from interviews with Ray Kroc. Whether his ideas were made real or not is beyond me.

Well, economist can identify the threshold, but actually it isn't important to measure it precisely.

A Boston-area datapoint: The minimum wage in Mass is $9.00 per hour. A local Dunkin Donuts in Natick on Rt 9 West has a sign advertising jobs at $10 per hour plus tips. Sign was there for some time now. I'll have to check if it's still there. In any event, DD clearly figures that offering $9 won't work, so the clearing wage must be higher, something like $10. DD has no problem measuring their clearing wage.

Joe Gwinn

Thee progressives will just blame it on global warming.

owns

mit

The Laffer Curve obviously exists, but the peak seems to be at a different point for every industry, and moves towards a higher tax rate with time, as the government gets to be able to do more to help industry. Digging canals , building railroads, building highways, making sure that everybody who can benefit from a tertiary education gets one, are all things that government can do with tax revenue.

But you'd probably be better off measuring the quality of the government, r ather than it's size.

The US may be past the peak, for the government that it has got - which is currently dominated by Tea Party Republicans. Sweden and Germany are curren tly doing rather better than the US, despite the fact the German government collects some 45% of the German GDP in taxes and levies - as against the U S 30% - while in Sweden the government collects 65%.

The Germans and the Swedes do seem to be able to elect more competent polit icians than the US can manage. Angela Merkel has a Ph.D. for a thesis on qu antum chemistry, which puts even Jimmy Carter in the shade.

_ST_N.htm

This is positively Nelsonian - with the telescope being definitely in front of the blind eye. Government employees in the US are being screwed over le ss enthusiastically than the employees of private companies, but the big wi nners in recent years have been the top 1% of the income distribution, who have been getting the benefit of the bulk of the expansion of the US econom y since Reagan came to power.

The governing class is definitely coining it, but civil servants aren't par t of the governing class. In the US the people who own the country run the country, essentially for their own short-sighted advantage.

With a few references to the right-wingers who deny the existence of global warming as an excuse for not spending money on slowing it down.

Since krw is too dim to understand that anthropogenic global warming is real, he probably imagined that he was being rude about the progressives.Pity about that.

It was a steel town, and no college nearby so they hired older people who still wanted to work. It could have been different in other places, but that's what I remember of the two our family visited when I was a kid. Most restaurants used older people, in that area, even into the mid '70s. Were you ever waited on by a 60+ year old carhop? :)