Baltimore mayor vetoes $15 minimum wage bill

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

3 minutes ago, SRVT said:

Trump, as a businessman, is only doing what the law allows.

 

As for him and free trades.. I will reserve my opinion until I see some action on the free trades (or the end of his term(s)) as to whether or not Trump the politician is any different than his predecessors. 

Thats cool he is a businessman, good for him,...he can go back screwing the workers with pay cuts after he finishes the gig he took an oath  to complete where he is shafting the workers executive orders.

[OriZ 3,165]

6 hours ago, smilesammich said:

well, i think he was saying that being a hs graduate and raising three kids on his salary (my mom didn't work outside the home until all her kids were out of the house) he wouldn't have been able to 'hold it together' enough put in the years to get paid for his skill (he started working in his dad's print shop, never went to school for it), save enough to buy a house about 10 years later, and eventually be able to handle the medical bills that came about from having a child with a chronic illness.like my dad i stopped after hs and had no skills, all my economic value is essentially with how long i've worked at the same job and the skills i've developed through employment. it's taken me almost 15 years at the same job to get to a somewhat decent salary. and i still couldn't afford to be the sole bread winner and tack on two more kids (one with a expensive medical condition) and buy a house.

 

I think part of the issue though is and we've talked about this before - the fact that everybody relies so much on college education when hiring. I personally disagree with that. I could give you dozens of people one with higher ed and one without and in each case the latter could easily be more skilled. 

 

5 hours ago, yuna628 said:

Well we live in a tiny town but there's still pretty much every type of restaurant available within driving distance. Except for seafood chains, which is okay because we have a ton of local places that offer the real proper good stuff. Cheesecake Factory is great, and is one the places we always take his parents to.

What's considered tiny for you guys there? Where we live it's 10,000 people where we work is the biggest "city' in the state with 40,000 lol. Seafood chains we have plenty of, but we don't do seafood, like, at all, whatsoever. My wife and I had a habit of going to Cheesecake Factory quite often when I lived with her in Milwaukee, but since we don't have one now, here's a funny story for ya: When we went to Florida almost two years ago we of course went to eat in one they have there. We figured, since we very rarely get their food now, instead of room service or anything like that we will order a TON of food, take 2 days worth with us, and just microwave it lol. So this waiter comes back with TWO HUGE bags full of boxes of food, reads off this whole list of everything it is, lands them on the table and goes "boom" and walks away. We couldn't stop cracking up. 

 

4 hours ago, SRVT said:

There's no shortage of jobs in the US. There might be a shortage of workers (justifying H1-B's), but certainly not jobs. 

Unfortunately, good, high paying high quality jobs today are very scarce. Most are in the service sector. See reply to ccneat - not good.

 

4 hours ago, smilesammich said:

indeed. 

 

*i'm out of ones

I have never ran out of ones in my life. I don't know how you guys keep running outta them, ya need to stop handing them out like they're brownies or something(sammiches in your case).

 

3 hours ago, smilesammich said:

i think the reason we're not seeing eye to eye here is that you're focusing on skill level and you feel a job deserves and i'm looking at employers and their actual propensity to voluntarily raise employee wages and benefits. i guess it all comes down to if you sincerely believe that those that hold the wealth and economic power are only waiting for the right environment to loosen purse strings. i don't subscribe to the trickle fairy tale at all. 

so you think that a person at mcdonalds screws up they don't get fired? why do you assume they get to keep their job? they're easily replaceable, hence the high turnaround..

While we don't do mcdonalds very often, or BK, I can tell you there were times we were there and people screwed up and I'm sure that wasn't the only time they screwed up and when we were there muchhhh muchhh later on they were still there. Also, my wife and I stop in DD for her coffee every day on our way in. We used to do Starbucks but there isn't one on our way in here but the scenario was no different. The people in this DD are horrible, but they all still work there. Screwing up for almost all of them is a daily routine.

 

2 hours ago, Bill & Katya said:

Economic theory essentially says as costs go up business owners have limited options, eat the costs and reduce the profits, reduce costs by laying off workers, reduce costs by increasing technology, or raising prices.  All of them leave the business owner in a precarious situation as profit margins may not allow for eating the costs, laying off workers may reduce the quality of the service provided, they may not be able to afford the technology, or the market may not sustain price increases.  There are other factors of course, but many of the businesses that utilize low skilled workers making minimum wage may not be able to cope with the cost increases and then everyone loses.  Like I said in an earlier post, setting artificially high wage floors generally have a negative economic impact especially when they are regional which is why it was the right decision by the mayor to veto the measure even though it was a backtrack to a major campaign promise.

Per my DD example above, in VT every Jan 1st minimum wage goes up. Coincidentally, every Jan 1st the price of coffee goes up. Funny how that works huh? The interesting thing is the price actually goes up by a higher percentage than min wage. Raising the min wage not only does not help advance those making it, it actually hurts the middle class and/or those only making a marginally higher wage, because their wages will not be affected and not go up yet prices will so there will be less they can afford. It also hurts the non working poor, like the unemployed, when now they can afford even less with whatever little bit of money they may or may not have. But they don't like to see the big picture of all the people getting hurt, it's easier to believe the fiction that it's helping those earning the minimum wage. I want just as much as the next person if not more, for everybody to earn a decent respectful living, and I don't even mind min wage at $9-10(going by the average cost, obviously some places need more some less), but I think $15 is simply outrageous. 

 

2 hours ago, ccneat said:

As wages rise so does the spending power of the workers.  Raising the spending power of the lowest wage workers provides stimulus to the entire economy based on the assumption that the lowest wage workers do not invest or save but spend.  Whether they spend it on that big mac that they can now afford is another question.

"anti minimum wage propaganda" lol...I call it the common sense propaganda then. They won't be able to afford the big mac because the big mac's price will rise. Not only will you not be helping them, but you will also be hurting the non working poor and the middle class.

 

Also, since when is stimulating the economy via spending considered a good thing? Sign of the times I guess, but that's part of the huge problem we've been having in the past couple decades and will continue to have. People need to save more, spend less not the other way around. And I'm saying that even though I own a shop where I want people to spend. The rate of savings in America is utterly ridiculous and instead everybody wants to spend like there's no tomorrow. It's a house of cards.

 

2 hours ago, smilesammich said:

trump himself outsources, and his businesses will continue to do so. this idea that there are all these jobs to "come back" to america simply isn't reality. trump's 'policy' of bringing back jobs to the us is a bunch of hot air.

I do agree with you completely there. I expect a net addition of 0 jobs over the next 4 years, with potential severe losses in the interim. 

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

25 minutes ago, OriZ said:

 

 

Also, since when is stimulating the economy via spending considered a good thing? Sign of the times I guess, but that's part of the huge problem we've been having in the past couple decades and will continue to have. People need to save more, spend less not the other way around. And I'm saying that even though I own a shop where I want people to spend. The rate of savings in America is utterly ridiculous and instead everybody wants to spend like there's no tomorrow. It's a house of cards.

 

 

[OriZ 3,165]

2 minutes ago, ccneat said:

I think I need a magnifying glass, I'm trying to locate the relevance.

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

11 minutes ago, OriZ said:

I think I need a magnifying glass, I'm trying to locate the relevance.

the context was poor people and "It's a house of cards" 

The quote is from the Big Short, a great book and movie. 

The banks create the bubbles, stuff happens, we blame the folks at the bottom

 

 

[OriZ 3,165]

7 minutes ago, ccneat said:

the context was poor people and "It's a house of cards" 

The quote is from the Big Short, a great book and movie. 

The banks create the bubbles, stuff happens, we blame the folks at the bottom

 

 

lol I know all about the big short, some of us have lived it even though we're not in the movie. 

 

Correction - the central bank, with assistance of many administrations, both in bed with the big banks, create the bubbles. I never blame the folks at the bottom, only those who support said policies. If you support ZIRP, QE and bailouts, you're part of the problem not the solution, I don't care who you are or which side of the political spectrum you're on.

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

2 minutes ago, OriZ said:

lol I know all about the big short, some of us have lived it even though we're not in the movie. 

 

Correction - the central bank, with assistance of many administrations, both in bed with the big banks, create the bubbles. I never blame the folks at the bottom, only those who support said policies. If you support ZIRP, QE and bailouts, you're part of the problem not the solution, I don't care who you are or which side of the political spectrum you're on.

But here we are in this forum, folks trying to get by looking just to get out of the hole with a step toward a living wage and we say : "you are the problem"

[smilesammich 10,727]

18 minutes ago, OriZ said:

I think I need a magnifying glass, I'm trying to locate the relevance.

that's about as relevant as it gets. the american worker today has no leverage, even the government that's supposed to be ours, is effectively run by the will of lobbyists. whoever has the money makes the rules. free market and innovation are great, but when the economy is set to syphon all the wealth to a mere handful..eventually the scales will tip. the way i see it, actual necessity and basic survival are going to be the desperate bare minimum for millions of people. and there's none of that to be found in currency.

and don't see it this way because of who is president, tho it is insane to me how many people trust trump.

[OriZ 3,165]

3 minutes ago, smilesammich said:

that's about as relevant as it gets. the american worker today has no leverage, even the government that's supposed to be ours, is effectively run by the will of lobbyists. whoever has the money makes the rules. free market and innovation are great, but when the economy is set to syphon all the wealth to a mere handful..eventually the scales will tip. the way i see it, actual necessity and basic survival are going to be the desperate bare minimum for millions of people. and there's none of that to be found in currency.

and don't see it this way because of who is president, tho it is insane to me how many people trust trump.

I just don't see how it's relevant to my comment though, I wasn't blaming poor people, to the contrary, I mentioned the negative effects it would have on poor non working people. I have also long had a not favorable stance towards banks. 

[yuna628 9,995]

1 hour ago, OriZ said:

I think part of the issue though is and we've talked about this before - the fact that everybody relies so much on college education when hiring. I personally disagree with that. I could give you dozens of people one with higher ed and one without and in each case the latter could easily be more skilled. 

 

What's considered tiny for you guys there? Where we live it's 10,000 people where we work is the biggest "city' in the state with 40,000 lol. Seafood chains we have plenty of, but we don't do seafood, like, at all, whatsoever. My wife and I had a habit of going to Cheesecake Factory quite often when I lived with her in Milwaukee, but since we don't have one now, here's a funny story for ya: When we went to Florida almost two years ago we of course went to eat in one they have there. We figured, since we very rarely get their food now, instead of room service or anything like that we will order a TON of food, take 2 days worth with us, and just microwave it lol. So this waiter comes back with TWO HUGE bags full of boxes of food, reads off this whole list of everything it is, lands them on the table and goes "boom" and walks away. We couldn't stop cracking up. 

 

1) In the tech industry having a degree is important, but I've noticed now a trend in certain tech jobs of just asking for certifications instead. People with degrees can do all the things in those expensive certifications and likely more... but the employer will want to not pick the person with the degree.. for less pay. Kid walked up to my husband the other day, and said he was getting a cyber security certification and wanted to know how he could get a job like him. So he asked - are you experienced in computer and printer repair? Do troubleshooting, PC building, virus removal, servers, or programming? The kid said no. Experience with Windows machines? Nope. Do you have any transferable skills at all?  What's that..? (....!!)

 

2) I reckon our town has about 10,000 people, I could literally walk down the street and be in the next town though which has about 2,000 people... and they still have chain restaurants aplenty. With the exception of the antique shops on main street and people getting shot these days, there's not a lot to do, so going out to eat is a staple in this area. I heard they might be trying to get an Outback, which my husband is super excited about.

Edited April 1, 2017 by yuna628

[smilesammich 10,727]

7 minutes ago, OriZ said:

I just don't see how it's relevant to my comment though, I wasn't blaming poor people, to the contrary, I mentioned the negative effects it would have on poor non working people. I have also long had a not favorable stance towards banks. 

commenting that people need to save more. sure - that's a nice idea. but millions of people needing to save more is a drop in the bucket in comparison to the wealth that has been taken from the average worker. there is not a single person alive on this planet that 'deserves' millions of dollars annually. but for some reason poor working people are suposed to do the right thing and save money, while banks get bailed out and pay themselves?

[OriZ 3,165]

7 minutes ago, ccneat said:

But here we are in this forum, folks trying to get by looking just to get out of the hole with a step toward a living wage and we say : "you are the problem"

Again, show me who said that. I don't happen to believe that trying to artificially set the minimum wage at $15 an hour is going to solve anything. Not to go too much off topic but since you brought up the big short, the film is deeply critical of Wall Street and weak banking regulation, most of which I see as valid. The one thing missing was that it didn’t clarify why the mortgage bubble emerged in the first place, which I would have liked Margot Robbie to have mentioned while she was explaining mortgage backed securities in the bubble bath.

 

The answer is straightforward: as the bubble expanded toward its inevitable collapse, the role of Wall Street was to create a massive supply of new “product” in the form of sketchy mortgage backed securities, but the demand for that product was the result of the Federal Reserve’s insistence on holding interest rates down after the tech bubble crashed, starving investors of safe Treasury returns, and driving them to seek higher yields elsewhere. 

 

The Fed provoked yield seeking by income starved investors. They found that extra yield in seemingly “safe” mortgage securities. But as the demand outstripped the available supply, Wall Street rushed to create more product, and generate associated fees, by lending to anyone with a pulse (hence "teaser" loans offering zero interest payments for the first 2 years, and ads on TV and radio hawking “No income documentation needed! We’ll get you approved fast!”; “No credit? No problem! You have a loan!”; “Own millions of dollars in real estate with no money down!”). The loans were then “financially engineered” to make the resulting mortgage bonds appear safer than the underlying credits were. The housing bubble was essentially a massive, poorly regulated speculative response to Federal Reserve actions.

 

The current, obscenely overvalued QE bubble is simply the next reckless response to Federal Reserve actions, which followed the global financial crisis, which resulted when the housing bubble collapsed, which was driven by excessively activist Federal Reserve policy, which followed the collapse of the tech bubble. It's like a rolling tsunami.

 

As one of not so few actually, but not widely known, not famous, not popular, people who anticipated both the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 collapses(and having shifted in 2003 to a constructive outlook inbetween), what I thought the film particularly got right was just how excruciating the wait was before the crisis unfolded, even for those who expected it. Though I don’t take leveraged positions in credit default swaps, or sell bank stocks short, even refusing to take equity market risk in the later stages of that bubble was excruciating enough. One had to suffer fools parroting things like “being early is the same thing as being wrong”(sound familiar?) until the collapse demonstrated that, actually no, it’s really not. The crash that followed wiped out the entire total return of the S&P 500, in excess of risk free Treasury bills, all the way back to June 1995. I love that the line made it into the movie.

 

The film also nicely depicted how entangled financial professionals were in facilitating, cheerleading, and denying the bubble, a major failure that we see again today - a striking willingness of the financial community to ignore a simple question: what is the historical relationship between the valuation measure you are using, and the actual subsequent return on the investments you are encouraging other people to hold? Two bubbles, two crashes, and at the peak of the third bubble, the answer hasn’t changed at all. 

 

Since two crashes weren't enough to teach the lesson, here we are again, at what's likely to be seen in hindsight as the last gasp of the extended top formation of the third speculative bubble in 17 years. In reference to our conversation a couple of weeks ago, if you like the book/movie don't ignore the eternal message it should send.

[OriZ 3,165]

2 minutes ago, yuna628 said:

1) In the tech industry having a degree is important, but I've noticed now a trend in certain tech jobs of just asking for certifications instead. People with degrees can do all the things in those expensive certifications and likely more... but the employer will want to not pick the person with the degree.. for less pay.

 

2) I reckon our town has about 10,000 people, I could literally walk down the street and be in the next town though which has about 2,000 people... and they still have chain restaurants aplenty. With the exception of the antique shops on main street and people getting shot these days, there's not a lot to do, so going out to eat is a staple in this area. I heard they might be trying to get an Outback, which my husband is super excited about.

Seems alot harder for many business to get into VT. It took walmart literally decades, and even though they finally did, they are only in a few places. No Target here at all. I do believe we actually have an outback. Lowest crime rate in the country so people don't get shot here very often, about 1 homicide per year. It's a quiet place but sometimes that can be boring. BTW adding to my comment before, that actually ended up being a running joke for us for weeks...any time a situation arised that called for it, we'd both look at each other and go "boom". We're over it now

[OriZ 3,165]

8 minutes ago, smilesammich said:

commenting that people need to save more. sure - that's a nice idea. but millions of people needing to save more is a drop in the bucket in comparison to the wealth that has been taken from the average worker. there is not a single person alive on this planet that 'deserves' millions of dollars annually. but for some reason poor working people are suposed to do the right thing and save money, while banks get bailed out and pay themselves?

Well again I don't support the bailouts, never did never will. Also see my comment above and I have made comments in that spirit numerous times over the last couple of years - how savers are getting screwed. I'm not blaming them, I'm just saying it's part of the problem. The fact they are being pushed into risky assets is part of the problem. The whole QE and ZIRP thing I've discussed at length in the past(I believe those were deemed too lengthy by you so you skipped them). However, when people spend well beyond their means(and I'm talking well beyond their means...I'm not talking taking a little vacation once a year because you've worked your ### off and deserve to have some fun) like some people I know that load up on credit cards that is in huge part their fault as well. 

Edited April 1, 2017 by OriZ

[yuna628 9,995]

2 minutes ago, OriZ said:

Seems alot harder for many business to get into VT. It took walmart literally decades, and even though they finally did, they are only in a few places. No Target here at all. I do believe we actually have an outback. Lowest crime rate in the country so people don't get shot here very often, about 1 homicide per year. It's a quiet place but sometimes that can be boring. BTW adding to my comment before, that actually ended up being a running joke for us for weeks...any time a situation arised that called for it, we'd both look at each other and go "boom". We're over it now

Our fondest memory of Cheesecake Factory was taking the entire wedding party there. We rented a van for the week to give everyone a tour of the state. Our best man was sick the moment he got off the plane, cranky as hell, and kept refusing to go to the clinic (seriously had that feverish glazed over look). At the restaurant, everyone had a huge meal, but he insisted upon eating two of the giant milkshakes and a cheesecake! Everyone just stared at him at the table... man oh man he looked so green, but he was determined to finish all of it. We get back in the van in the parking lot leaving, and we hit a speed bump.... I think you can imagine who lost their lunch.  These days he says he doesn't remember much (he got the entire wedding party sick), except for how amazing the Cheesecake Factory food was... I said man, it didn't even stay in your stomach for that long!