GM and others shutting down production.

JRscooby wrote:
Now explain how the mother flipping buggers to feed her family is less deserving of a living wage than the man hanging fenders on a model A?

Its not that the PERSON is less deserving of a "living wage", its that the JOB doesn't justify it. I'm tired of hearing the sob stories. I live in one of the more expensive counties in the country. Average home prices for a smaller rambler are close to $600K. The progressive politicians are always trying to guilt the tax base into thinking that everyone DESERVES to live in one of the most expensive counties in the country... they don't.

Just like *I* don't deserve to live in the most desirable and expensive neighborhoods, so I live in a smaller, older, less desirable neighborhood because that is what *I* can afford. If I ascribed to your theory, I should demand to be able to live in the $850K houses by the water instead of my $450K house in an older and smaller neighborhood that's further out.

And "living wages" back 30 years ago didn't have to pay $200/month for cable, $100/month for cell phone and didn't have $400K in student debt hanging over their heads. An average and safe vehicle didn't cost twice as much as starting pay in their field of work. Energy prices weren't nearly as high, and President Biden wasn't closing down American production and driving costs up back then either.

There are many, many things at play here when we talk about "living wages" and costs to live comfortably in society. We didn't have these luxuries even 15 or 20 years ago.

I drive a used car, bought a smaller and older house, stream our tv instead of paying exorbitant prices for cable, we cook our own meals most of the time, don't pay for Uber Eats, we don't have the newest and fanciest iPhone every year, etc. Its amazing how much further your money goes when you make little adjustments like that. I'm sure I said it up thread as well, but my wife stays at home to raise our kids. We made sacrifices but still have a comfortable life because we are smart about where we spend our money.

When I was 21 and making pizzas, I couldn't afford this. I went out and found a CAREER type job (without a college degree) and live comfortably, but not to excess. I've worked very hard and made difficult decisions to get where I'm at. I believe that I deserve my little older house more than that single mother who just flips burgers. Call me cold and callous, but decisions have consequences. She could move to the middle of Kansas and be able to afford more house than she could in my county.

wanderingaimlessly wrote:
The problem over the minimum wage is that folks have lost sight of what it is, and was.
Does flippin burgers for 8-10 hours in a 110 degree kitchen suck?
Answer is yes, and IT SHOULD.
People nowadays seem to think flippin burgers or running a cash register is a career.
NEWS ALERT IT's NOT
The fact that those jobs suck is supposed to be a motivator to make the poor schmuck working them get some training so they can have a better job with higher pay.
But the "Fight for 15" crowd is too stupid and lazy to get the training or think hard enough to get the better job with higher pay, and we are expected to make up for their deficiencies.

Another example of Americans needing to be more skeptical about what they are told
Every time I see or hear something like this I have to wonder; Has the speaker ever spent a day on a auto assembly line? Or working in a coal mine? I worked putting the same 2 bolts in holes, and tightening a couple somebody else put in for 4 shifts back in the late '60s. Not real fulfilling work, under comfortable conditions. But many thousands of people that where working that line had rewarding lives because the work paid enough for them to have a middle class lifestyle, they worked to live, not lived to work.
Most people think "flipping burgers" is only a afterschool job for highschool kids. News flash, that has never been true. And a little logic would prove that, if you just look at their open/closed sign. How many are closed 7-3:30 weekdays? A very high percentage of the labor bill of a fast food place goes to adults, many who hold the job because the can get off when school is out, take care of their kids.
Now I mentioned coal miners and auto workers for a reason. Read a little history, what was working conditions before UAW, and miners unions forced the companies to raise the pay of workers. A very small percentage of the workers advanced to "better jobs" This was what caused the greatest growth in middle class in this country. And to this day everybody that works for their money only works because of the spending power of the middle class.
Now explain how the mother flipping buggers to feed her family is less deserving of a living wage than the man hanging fenders on a model A?

The problem over the minimum wage is that folks have lost sight of what it is, and was.
Does flippin burgers for 8-10 hours in a 110 degree kitchen suck?
Answer is yes, and IT SHOULD.
People nowadays seem to think flippin burgers or running a cash register is a career.
NEWS ALERT IT's NOT
The fact that those jobs suck is supposed to be a motivator to make the poor schmuck working them get some training so they can have a better job with higher pay.
But the "Fight for 15" crowd is too stupid and lazy to get the training or think hard enough to get the better job with higher pay, and we are expected to make up for their deficiencies.

I'm a free market and a capitalist...but...

There are times when intervention is needed to protect those being bullied.

Like Martin Shkreli of the Turing Daraprim debacle and the Poster Girl is Heather Bresch of the EpiPen debacle...where they, in a pure capitalistic manner, raised the price on life-saving drugs...just because they thought they could up the price from a few hundred bucks to thousands of bucks overnight.

That is when one of our socialistic protection agencies, The SEC, took those two to court and won. Shkreli is still in prison and IIRC Bresch resigned.

As for government mandated min wage...I'd prefer to let the market decide, and competition is the greatest leveler.

A mandated min is a 'on size fits all' and doesn't work.

As a $15/hour min wage in big cities is not going to help (many already are there and even higher), but in a small, rural town...the line to apply for a job paying that would be around the corner.

The great and common leveler for those foreign countries (socialist, communism, dictatorship, etc.) has happened (USSR) and is currently working its way through China (albeit that government has a tighter hold on citizens than USSR)...and that leveler is discretionary time & money.

For once the population reaches that...they expect much more freedom that they gave up to 'help lift their country up from the depths of poverty'

As for production shutting down...one big component mentioned earlier, but decided to list some images that is happening all over the US port cities.






This is a China port

IMHO, what this country needs more than increase in minimum wage by law is more education of the working class. Not more time in school, but teach them to be skeptical of what they are told.
As a example, what time period was the greatest growth in middle class standard of living? When 1 person could work all week, take weekend to enjoy life, buy house, car, send kids to collage, and expect a better life for the kids? Now, when you have figured out, not for you but for the largest percentage of the population, look at what the top income tax rate was.
I did not go to school as long as most, and did not pay much attention when I was there, but I have always understood that giving somebody that has more money than they can spend even more money will not cause the factories to make more stuff. But if you spread that same money out, give a little to each person that can't buy everything they want, most will use that to buy things, and factories will have to make more things to sell

The problem with raising wages by law is that if our expensive workers are not protected from cheap competition they will soon find themselves out of work. That is why so few manufactured goods are made in this country. If you can put something in a box and ship it there are people on this planet willing to make those items for a lot less than $15/hr and under a lot worse conditions.

The same is becoming true for office workers. If a job can be done online it can be done anywhere on the planet now.

Service jobs are losing their safety. I can remember when almost every gas station had service bays and had workers pump the gas for you, I think that there is still one in town that does those things but I don't go there because it is too expensive. Plus, cars have been made better so that they need much less maintenance than they used to. My son installs automation for a living. He is rooting for a higher minimum wage so that more employers will be able to justify robots and other forms of automation. I am not making nearly as much money as I used to because my job went to India. India does not return that money to us, it is just gone from our economy.

I would love to see wages here increase but if not done carefully legislation will do more harm than good. One of the biggest things that we need to do is teach our kids a work ethic so that they are actually worth $15/hr or more. My wife and I put a lot of time into teaching our kids how to think and work. All four of them have jobs paying more than $15/hr but too many kids are being raised without skills or work ethic and really are not worth that much.

spoon059 wrote:

rlw999 wrote:
A $15 minimum wage only sounds expensive because minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation...

Not just minimum wage, ALL wages haven't kept up. When you double the minimum wage and keep my wage stagnant, it punishes me. Then the typical answer is that *I* should be paid more. I work for the government, are you going to be willing to pay more taxes to support my salary increasing by the same percent as the minimum wage? And if so, then YOUR wages need to increase to cover the offset of higher taxes.

See how that works?

The average household income in 1980 was $21K, that's $42K in today's dollars. The average household income in 2016 was $83K.

Inflation adjusted salaries have been pretty flat since the late 70s with a small increase (higher increase for higher income levels, with the top 1% being a clear outlier)

When you double minimum wage, it just brings minimum wage back to parity with what it was when it began.

Raising of wages unilaterally raises cost for all goods and services, close to the point of negating all positive effects of the raise. The only real beneficiary, is the government.
Folks who were low enough income to pay no taxes, now will. And the tax tables don't seem to be changed to reflect the old tax rate at the new pay level. Those who were paying 5% in tax will now pay 7 or 8 percent, Those who were paying 10% get upped to 15% and so on. NOBODY pays the same after these raises go into effect.
It is one more case of the Government telling schmucks that they are helping them, when in fact it's the government that benefits most.

rlw999 wrote:
A $15 minimum wage only sounds expensive because minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation...

Not just minimum wage, ALL wages haven't kept up. When you double the minimum wage and keep my wage stagnant, it punishes me. Then the typical answer is that *I* should be paid more. I work for the government, are you going to be willing to pay more taxes to support my salary increasing by the same percent as the minimum wage? And if so, then YOUR wages need to increase to cover the offset of higher taxes.

See how that works?

Or... people with a marketable skill deserve to be paid better, but people with no/low skills deserve to get paid a much lower rate. Want to earn more, LEARN more. That puts the focus back on the employee, to make themselves a commodity.

Anywho, we've gotten pretty far off topic. My apologies OP. I'm curious to see what happens to the truck market when they start being available again. Are they going to deeply discount the 2021's when the 22's get released? What happens to all the expensive used vehicles that people have bought or traded?

It'll be interesting for sure.

spoon059 wrote:

monkey44 wrote:
No law against paying more than minimum wage for trained and skilled employees. If we had brought that work back to USA, we would not be in this dilemma. It's not just trucks either.

It's the untrained, unskilled workers that are not worth that pay.

Perhaps the guy actually making the part deserves more than $15 an hour... but what about when you have to pay the janitor $15 an hour to clean up, the parts guy $15 an hour to order parts, the warehouse guy $15 an hour to move parts, the parking attendant $15 an hour to help people park, the lady behind the lunch counter $15 an hour to warm up food, etc etc?

It quickly becomes unsustainable.

A $15 minimum wage only sounds expensive because minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation... In 1980 I was earning $3.50/hour working at a gas station after school. In today's dollars, that's $12/hour. Paying a janitor $15/hour today doesn't sound crazy.

I don't know how much of a chip fab's cost goes to unskilled labor, but fast food is pretty labor intensive (around 30% of the cost of food is labor), and higher wages doesn't have a large effect on prices:

Burtless compared prices for two different types of burritos at San Francisco’s 710 Third St. Taco Bell (minimum wage: $16.07) to prices for the same burritos at a Taco Bell in Alexandria, Va., where the state’s minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour, equal to the federal minimum.

In Alexandria, a Bean Burrito goes for $1.29, while a Burrito Supreme costs $4.19. At the San Francisco location, a Bean Burrito sells for $1.99, and a Burrito Supreme costs $4.19.

The most expensive burrito on the menu, the Crunchwrap Supreme, costs $4.19 in Alexandria and $4.49 in San Francisco, a difference of about 7%.