Well how much of the problem is due to the fact that when I go to a fast food restaurant now it’s filled with 20, 30 and 40 old low wage employees. When I was a kid, it felt like I knew those people because they were also kids. I don’t know that minimum wage jobs are intended to give livable wages so much as we didn’t have anywhere else to put people who used to do work that’s not as readily available now that did pay middle wage jobs, call centers, unskilled factory work, construction (when real state was down).
I think we lost middling and low but not actual minimum wage jobs and didn’t get anything to replace them or give a means to people who used to take those jobs to go to something other than these jobs. I’m not saying that’s always the case, and I’m not saying there are’t issues with the market but @Timex is right. To say the market is wrong is to say something else is right, and who gets to decide that. It’s not the population really because that’s the result of the market. Imperfections or not, I choose what I work for and whether or not I take a job. If they don’t pay enough, I don’t work for them. I did that several times, turned down multiple jobs despite this pressure that said take anything, and I am glad I did. Those people, those employers look for 4 year degree folks and paying 10.75 an hour are nuts.
What if the choice is rapid starvation with no wages versus a brutal struggle to get by with low wages?
You are correct in that a huge problem with low wage jobs in the US is that the middle tier of jobs that used to be available for seniority/advancement/etc. have shrunk, trapping more and more experienced workers in low wage jobs.
So do we say “well the market has decreed that there shall be no mid tier jobs, and you will take a low wage job and struggle to get by and YOU WILL LIKE IT!”? Or do we say, we need to tweak the rules under which the market operates?
Keep in mind, no market exists in a vacuum. Let’s talk about the finance sector. Right now, the duty owed by financial advisors is not the highest level; some trustees and so on are held to a “fiduciary duty” (which is a high standard) whereas other types of brokers and advisors are not. This means that the less regulated advisors have less risk of being sued, and greater opportunity for self dealing, which make those jobs relatively more lucrative than trustee jobs or other jobs that carry a fiduciary duty. Now, is that rule regarding fiduciary duty some sort of inherent natural thing that mandates we must pay brokers lots of money? No. We set that rule. The rules of financial duty and broker regulation have changed many times.
And that example of market outcomes being impacted by the laws and other rules we enforce on the market applies to pretty much every market. If we allow employers to prevent employees from organizing unions, then we lessen the bargaining power of employees. If we relax our merger laws and allow companies to get larger (as Reagan did in the 80s), we allow them to concentrate and amplify their bargaining power, which will make big companies even bigger. If we lower capital gains rates even when capital formation is at a high level (as George W. Bush did in the 00s) then we increase the return on capital which in turns increases the concentration of capital. If we have rules that allow that capital to be spent for political influence, then we allow that concentrated capital to become concentrated political power.
I could go on. There are a few markets that are pretty near perfect markets with a need for minimum regulation. (I recall reading about the paperclip market being a very efficient market. It’s also an absurdly simple and non-vital market.) But most markets operate the way they do because we have many rules. And the markets produce results in large part based on those rules.
Markets don’t create themselves out of vacuum. We create markets by enforcing rules. I mean the very first human market, likely barter between neighboring tribes, required rules in order to come into being: rules against killing the other tribe on sight as well as rules against raiding the other tribe and taking their stuff, etc.
I don’t think it only those two choices. We need to retrained people from industries that have lost their competitive edge in this country. We need to invest in emerging industries which probably need trained workers. We need to provide opportunities for people to exit low wage jobs.
I am not opposed to tinkering around with minimum wages to assist with some of the problem, but I don’t believe it solves that problem. Sure there will always be low wage and low skilled adults in alongside teens in those lower-tiered jobs, but we’ve got people in there who were pushed out of other industries too. Those individuals, I think they want better and I think they’ll try and get it if they can. We need to give them a chance to do that.
Now I typically stick myself in the liberal and D camp because I do believe in regulation. I support rules. We’ve never had a truly Free Market and never will. And for a Free Market to truly exist anyway, we need a free flow of information too which is also not available. Regulating monopolies, and not on the basic level only two market but market share, yes but you have to be cautious with that. Regulating financial institutions that have the potential to bring the entire system down, yes. Introducing rules, laws, bills whatever that says financial advisors should actually be providing sound advise to the best of their ability and not just pimping their company’s product, yes. Pointing at one guy and saying you have no value and are paid to much and then pointing at another guy and saying I like what you do more so here’s more money… no.
As someone who worked in the financial industry, it amazed me how many financial advisors made off of clients, while having little to no knowledge of the retirement industry. Some were glorified sales people with little interest in helping the client. The new rules that came into play, making them fiduciaries caught a lot of them by surprise, despite being in announced early last year. A few didn’t even know how much each fund paid them, or that they need to go fee based (so they were paid directly by the plan or client) or levelize their compensation so that each fund paid them the same percentage. All this lack of knowledge and yet they regularly charge over twice the fee that my company, the third party administrator and record keeper charged. The saddest thing is that many Financial advisors could be replaced by a investment firm that selected competitive stocks for as long as 25 basis points, but we could never tell the client that, because almost all our business came through the financial advisor recommending us.
And that is the worst of it. Since the whole industry is based on recommendations by others in the industry, we can’t rat each other out without huge cost.
You have to feel horrible for the person who lost their daughter here, but this headline makes me want to throttle something small and furry. There’s plenty to dig into w/r/t gun violence without this clickbaity, misleading nonsense.
I mean the goal’s to just ensure that guns are effectively banned forever but changing Amendments is hard, you take a different tack and attack the problem at its source!
The idea of holding a gun SELLER responsible, if he sold it to an obviously unhinged individual, is at least reasonable to me… similar to a bartender selling booze to a guy who is already falling down drunk.
But the manufacturer? That kind of nonsense is pure absurdity.
Colorado law specifically says you can’t sue someone for a firearm unless it’s because of a defect. Hell it goes on and on about how you simply cannot ever sue a gun maker/seller.
p5
I don’t disagree with going after someone who blatantly disregards something, but Lucky Gunner just sells ammo (and I guess magazines and other accessory crap). They were suing the guy who sold ammo over the internet, which is not illegal nor does it require a background check.
The problem with that kind of thinking is the same kind of thinking that pseudo-expects Masters or PhD candidates in reading-heavy courses to just skim and summarize because who actually has time to read all that stuff? Degrees are not about learning, degrees are about getting a piece of paper that enables you to earn more money. The skill you learn in college is not the content of the course but how to give the professor what they want to see and get that A with the least amount of work and thought possible.
Now that being said… there is something of a point there in that many of these students do not intend to go on to “math heavy” courses. But this isn’t differential equations. It’s a few tiers above primary educators going “Well, they’re all going to be athletes or manual laborers anyway, why expect them to know how to read? All it does is cause them to fail to graduate”. If every aspect of education can be redefined a “barrier” and graduation, no matter how low the standards, is an “accomplishment”, we’ve seemed to misidentify that whole point of what education is actually supposed to be.
Exactly. This is algebra. In all honesty, this is shit that these kids should have learned in highschool. Hell, I’m pretty sure I learned algebra in Jr. High.
In the future labor market, you are really not going to be able to function if you can’t even grasp basic algebra.
People say you don’t use algebra in everyday life. Except you totally do, pretty much every time you spend money (assuming you don’t have near-infinite money).
The problem is like i’ve said before, the educational system just isn’t set up to fail large numbers of students in primary and secondary, so it pushes them out regardless of their actual level of attainment. If half the class can’t do basic math, you push them out the door because you can’t hold them all back, because doing so would break the school.
