Stiv — Donald Trump Insists That Wages Are ‘Too High’

Donald J. Trump on Wednesday morning repeated a statement he made the night before in the Republican presidential debate: that wages are “too high” in the United States, an argument he made to explain his opposition to raising the minimum wage....

In an interview Wednesday morning on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, the co-host Mika Brzezinski raised the topic again, which gave Mr. Trump the chance to clarify his remarks from the debate. She pointed out the current minimum wage, saying, “Donald, nobody can live on that.”

Mr. Trump responded: “Our taxes are too high. Our wages are too high. We have to compete with other countries.”

Counter Current News
Donald Trump Insists That Wages Are ‘Too High’
Stiv

Brad DeLong — Must-Read: Cathy O’Neal: The Fight for 15

It seems to me that there are two questions: 1. Should the the aggregate of the minimum wage and the earned income tax credit add up to a living wage? Answer: yes. 2. what is the right mix and balance between raising the minimum wage (which will, if it is raised high enough, diminish the total number of jobs) and increasing the earned income tax credit (which will, once we are away from the zero lower bound in interest rates, require raising taxes somewhere in the system)? The minimum wage should not be considered in isolation.…

WCEG — The Equitablog
Must-Read: Cathy O’Neal: The Fight for 15
Brad DeLong

Bill Mitchell — The Job Guarantee is a progressive vehicle for change

In my search for new terminology and descriptors I am no longer going to use “minimum wage” to describe the wage that a currency-issuing government should pay when implementing a Job Guarantee (JG). In the past I have written that to avoid disturbing private sector wage structure and to ensure the JG is consistent with stable inflation, the JG wage rate is best set at the minimum wage level. I have also indicated that the minimum wage should not be determined by the capacity to pay of the private sector, but should, rather be an expression of the aspiration of the society of the lowest acceptable standard of living. My view is that any private operators who cannot “afford” to pay the minimum should exit the economy. I also have proposed that the JG wage should be supplemented with a wide range of social wage expenditures, including adequate levels of public education, health, child care, and access to legal aid.

Finally, I have stressed for many years that the JG does not replace conventional use of fiscal policy to achieve appropriate social and economic outcomes. In general, the JG would be accompanied by higher levels of public sector spending on public goods and infrastructure. I have written several times, in various outlets (academic, Op Ed, blog), that I see the JG as part of a fundamental transformative agenda to broaden the concept of work and to allow all people to receive a dignified and appropriate access to the distribution system. That message doesn’t seem to get through. So from now on the JG wage will be referred to as the living wage. Further, recent discussions of the JG reveal that commentators who criticise it do so from a standpoint of ignorance – a problem that is engendered by the blogosphere, which should be a liberating force, but in my view seems to unfortunately spawn narrow-mindedness and an anti-intellectual approach to policy debates.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The Job Guarantee is a progressive vehicle for change
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at the Charles Darwin University, Northern Territory, Australia

Josh Eidelson — Video: McDonald’s tells workers to get food stamps A new recording captures the fast food giant's worker 1-800 number touting public assistance

An audio recording released by labor activists Wednesday afternoon captures a staffer for McDonald’s’ “McResources Line” instructing a McDonald’s worker how to apply for public assistance.

The audio – excerpted in the campaign video below – records a conversation between Chicago worker Nancy Salgado, a ten-year employee currently making the Illinois state minimum wage of $8.25, and a counselor staffing the company’s “McResources” 1-800 number for McDonald’s workers. The McResources staffer offers her a number to “ask about things like food pantries” and tells her she “would most likely be eligible for SNAP benefits” which she explains are “food stamps.” After Salgado asks about “the doctor,” the staffer asks, “Did you try to get on Medicaid?” She notes it’s “health coverage for low income or no income adults and children.”

Salon
Video: McDonald’s tells workers to get food stamps A new recording captures the fast food giant's worker 1-800 number touting public assistance
Josh Eidelson

I suppose the conservative answer is to cut all welfare payments in order to force companies to pay a living wage, and that welfare just encourages companies to do this.

Alan Pyke — Low Wages Cost Taxpayers A Quarter-Trillion Dollars Every Year

From 2007 to 2011, the biggest public benefits programs spent $243 billion each year on working families who live in poverty or on the brink of it because their jobs pay so poorly, according to a study published Tuesday by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The research focuses on fast food workers as exemplifying the plight of low-wage workers and the costs that low wages pass along to taxpayers.

The study focused on the largest direct assistance programs to establish the cost of the “last line of defense between America’s growing low-income workforce and the want of basic necessities.” The combined cost of public health care programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps), the Earned Income Tax Credit that targets low-income workers, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, formerly known as welfare) for working families averaged $243 billion from 2007 to 2011.

ThinkProgress
Low Wages Cost Taxpayers A Quarter-Trillion Dollars Every Year
Alan Pyke

"Cost the taxpayers" is out of paradigm with MMT, but $243 billion is a huge subsidy to low wage employers and it's an appropriation that could be directed elsewhere if the subsidy were ended by adoption of an MMT JG that set a living wage as a floor, or a basic income guarantee.

"I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment."

 — Sam Walton (Attributed in Adam L. Penenberg, "Why Google Is Like Wal-Mart", Wired, 21 April 2005. Wikiquote

Moyers & Company — The federal government is the largest low-wage employer in the country — and that needs to end

Americans are coming to face the hard reality that they live in a new Gilded Age, with inequality at levels not seen since before the Great Depression. Even worse: Uncle Sam is subsidizing this lopsided economy.

The federal government is, indirectly, the largest low-wage employer in the country. While it has relatively few of the working poor on its payroll, the government hires thousands of private contractors that pay poverty wages to their workers, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to their executives.

A coalition of progressive groups are urging the Obama administration to issue an executive order requiring contractors to pay their workers a living wage — defined as the minimum required to meet one’s basic needs.

The Raw Story
The federal government is the largest low-wage employer in the country — and that needs to end
Moyers & Company

Daniel Gross — Radical Fast Food Joint Doubles Down on High Wages

So you thought $12 an hour for a burger place was revolutionary? Try $15. Daniel Gross talks to the owners of Detroit’s Moo Cluck Moo as they supersize starting wages.

The Daily Beast
Radical Fast Food Joint Doubles Down on High Wages
Daniel Gross

Pavlina R. Tcherneva — The Long Battle For A Living Wage Goes On

Short historical summary of going backwards.

New Economic Perspectives
The Long Battle For A Living Wage Goes On
Pavlina R. Tcherneva | Assistant Professor of Economics at Bard College

Pavlina has a new working paper up at Levy, too.
Reorienting Fiscal Policy: A Critical Assessment of Fiscal Fine-Tuning

Joshua Holland — CATO Institute Report Says Poor Americans Have It Too Good

CATO Institute Report Says Poor Americans Have It Too Good (via Moyers & Company)

Conservative think tanks have spawned a cottage industry churning out dubious studies purporting to show that poor families are living high on the hog on public benefits, a claim that anybody who has actually experienced poverty in America would find…

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Finally, a business owner who gets it!!!!

There's a small, but growing number of restaurants who are eschewing the "normal" tradition of tipping and I think this is a fantastic trend. I have long been against tipping and it's one of the reasons that I hardly go to restaurants. It's bad enough that restaurant food is pricey (it's impossible to find value anymore), but what really gets me is when I'm expected to pay the business owners' staff twice--once via the menu prices and the other via direct tipping.

Tipping is a typically American custom and it's a lousy one. I lived in Europe for 10 years and never had to tip anyone and the people who served me, whether they worked at restaurants or anywhere else, were totally fine with it.

But nowadays here in the U.S. you can't go anywhere without someone sticking their hand out. Let their damn employers pay their salaries! (Greedy bastards!).

Anyway, check this out:

A recent move by Sushi Yasuda, a high-end Japanese eatery in New York, to prohibit customers from leaving gratuities — the restaurant raised menu prices by roughly 15% to cover waitstaff salaries — is prompting discussion about whether the no-tip movement could reach, well, a tipping point. And it is a definite movement: Such renowned restaurants as Thomas Keller’s Per Se in New York and French Laundry in Yountville, Calif.; Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif.; and Grant Achatz’s Alinea in Chicago have similar policies in place. So did the recently closed Linkery restaurant in San Diego, where owner Jay Porter found that service improved because of the policy, despite widespread beliefs that the tradition of tipping fosters a culture of accountability. Porter’s argument? Having a reliable income is empowering. “If you don’t have to think about money, you can focus on doing your job well,” he wrote earlier this month.

This guy is sooooo freakin' right. I wish more employers had his attitude, it would save the damn economy. I want to email him and tell him how smart and wonderful he his.

Bud Myers — Low Pay Keeps Millennials Stuck at Home

It seems that fast-food wages can't pay the rent these days, so this week fast-food workers took to the streets in protest. Then panic ensued, and Fox News immediately launched a counter-offensive by putting on a high-priced restaurant lobbyist to argue that America's most titanic and profitable corporations, as well as the largest job creators, can't afford to pay their employees a living wage. If this is true, then capitalism, as we once knew it, has come to a shuttering halt.

The Economic Populist
Low Pay Keeps Millennials Stuck at Home
Bud Meyers

New York's City Council passed a living wage ordinance

On Monday, New York's City Council passed a living wage ordinance, reports Good Jobs New York's Bettina Damiani. The 45-5 vote means the Council can easily override a threatened veto by Mayor Michael Bloomberg (New York Post, May 1, via Nexis subscription service).

Read the rest at Angry Bear

New York's City Council passed a living wage ordinance

by Kenneth Thomas

"The rent is too damn high."

Minimum Wage Battle Moves In On Home Health Care

Last year, one of the industry's leading for-profit companies, Home Instead Senior Care, spent at least $362,0000 fighting the Labor Department's proposal, even as it yielded an 18.8 ratio of investment to revenue, USA Today reported. The industry has increased in profitability -- and employment -- since 2006, even as so many other industries shed employees and businesses declared bankruptcy.

 According to MSNBC, privately-owned home health care companies saw a revenue increase of 12.8 percent over the last two years and net profit margins of about 8 percent, while their public counterparts saw revenues rise by 2.5 percent over the same time period, and saw net profit margins of 4 percent.

There are currently around 1.7 million home care workers, according to the National Employment Law Project, a low-wage workers advocacy group. In 2009, those who worked 40 hours per week in the industry earned a little over $20,000 a year -- below the federal poverty line for a family of four.

Read it at The Huffington Post
Minimum Wage Battle Moves In On Home Health Care
by Lila Shapiro

Government assistance for the working poor subsidize firms that pay a wage that is below the poverty line.

What Ever Happened to a Fair Day's Pay for a Fair Day's Work?

“Our nation, so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population, should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied men and women, a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.”– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937

Read it at Counterpunch

Working and Poor in the USA
by Bill Quigley
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

Our nation is much more richly endowed now after the technological revolution, and we are slipping back the other way.

Living Wage And Self-Sufficiency Resources — UC Berkeley

Living Wage and Self-Sufficiency Tools and Data

Websites

Recommended Books, Articles and Reports

Extended Bibliography

The Living Wage Calculator

Introduction to the Living Wage Calculator

In many American communities, families working in low-wage jobs make insufficient income to live locally given the local cost of living. Recently, in a number of high-cost communities, community organizers and citizens have successfully argued that the prevailing wage offered by the public sector and key businesses should reflect a wage rate required to meet minimum standards of living. Therefore we have developed a living wage calculator to estimate the cost of living in your community or region. The calculator lists typical expenses, the living wage and typical wages for the selected location.

Select a Location

To get started, enter a location into the search box above, or browse to a location using the list below.

The Living Wage Calculator

(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)