Honestly: the minimum wage does need to go up

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

This post got me thinking.

I am firmly in favor of:

A) A higher minimum wage in the whole US, and my home state of NY
B) Honesty in politics

While the OP I linked to is not exactly dishonest, it's not exactly honest either.
And this is not to put flak upon the poster there, but it's an example of political rhetoric that is used to leverage one side of a conversation, ignoring nuance.

the graphic in the linked to OP:

1) Doesn't seem to take into account state laws that raise min wage over fed laws
2) Doesn't take into account the vast difference in housing throughout a state

My objection is more with 2 than 1. 1 is easy to take care of, but 2 is not easy.

New York City is WAYYYY more expensive than Rochester or Buffalo, NY; or a large number of other places within the state I could name. Yet, this graphic gives us a number, presumably an average. But that average is way skewed. But how else should they do it? Give us on graphic for NYC and another for the rest of NY State? That wouldn't work either, because then you'd need to break it down for other cities and so on. So what do we do?

We must talk about things in the big picture without getting bogged down in details, otherwise we will have to talk for eons before we can understand what needs to be done. So while I agree that the min wage needs to go up, across the US, I have a problem with the info-graphics created to support that argument. They lack nuance, and as such, are deceiving. Even if they don't mean to be, and are honestly doing the best they can to compile and sort the data, the inevitability of misleading data is going to doom us all.

That said.
Happy saint patty's day.
Was I drunk when I wrote this? You decide.

Comments

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

Maximizing profits is indeed a tricky game. and not a new game.

On the one end it's money from sales. How much can I charge consumers before sales decrease significantly? In some business' it's quite a lot.

On the other end it's minimizing expenses. Cutting down on labour costs is not without consequences. But it is a significant savings up front.

Same things have been happening since dawn of time. Dickens wrote about it. 60minutes or your bus company, well, they ought to hire orphans. They work cheap and if you're lucky enough to get a good one he'll be easy to train. Or just beat them with a club until they understand.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

All true.

It's a touchy subject for me right now, this push to work harder. One of my comrades had a pedestrian fatality the other day. Everyone saw something like this on the horizon, but it doesn't make it easier.

Of course, we could just operate like Calcutta's system, where they pay the drivers based on how much fare revenue they collect. They average over one bus fatality a week.

Don't know if you've heard of it or read it, but since you mention Dickens, London Labour and London Poor by Mayhew is a fascinating look into the lives of those orphans you seem to like to beat. ;-)

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

My good friend (and former neighbour) works for Calgary Transit as one of their "Incident Investigators" which is a politely coded job description. She investigates all the fatalities, not just the accidents (which are widely reported in our local news, mostly blamed on i-pod headphones) but also the numerous suicides (which are not reported in the local papers). It's amazing how many people choose to end their life by jumping in front of a C-Train.