My rant fro the day: Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour? Businesses say that they will cut jobs because of costs. I see supermarkets and home places like Home Depot and Lowes adding self-checkouts. In my Safeway supermarket sometimes I see 2 lanes with checkers and 4 self-checkout stands. Those 4 self-checkouts are manned by 1 person and always busy? Why, because the lines with the checker is long. Why? because they dont have as many people working regular lanes. If you reduce the number of people working, you can force people t osue the self-checking lanes, thus reducing costs. Then there are photos of McDonalds with a self-checkout machine for customers. That idea (whether a real McDonalds or not) doesnt matter, that capability has been around for decades. Back in the 50s or 60s Marriott had a restaurant where you could order from your table via a little speaker and microphone. It was like the unit in a drive-in movie. We used to have automats where food was put into little cubbyholes where you would self-serve the items and one or two people behind the unit would keep filling the holes. Think a wall-sized vending machine. Rather than have someone behind the counter fill soda cups, we now have a machine out where customers can do it themselves. Convenience? No, cost-cutting. Perhaps 1/2 person less needed to handle soda orders and the cost of soda is low enough that it is cheaper to let people get some free extra soda than to hire someone to do it for them. So some of the McDonalds meals are $8 here. Lets say that McDonalds or Wendys etc have to increase the cost of the meals. Not everyone who eats there is employed, some are on fixed income. they dont get a raise, so now they cannot afford to eat out. Oh, of course we can (in on Social Security) raise their money with a cost-of-living increase, but where do you think that money comes from, thin air? It comes from the government, which is already saying the system is in financial trouble. So they raise the amount that is taken out of peoples wages to make up the deficit. That money comes from people working at, say, McDonalds. So lets say that McDonalds employees are encouraged to unionize (that is who appears to be pushing for the wage increases), they dont work for free. They collect union dues and some unions have wasted lots of that money in the past and thrown lots into political races. It is overhead that the worker has not had to pay into in the past. Overhead costs money. When I started working, one of my first jobs was not for my Dad. I worked at a Holiday House on the Garden State Parkway. It was one of those gasoline/restaurants along the Parkway, which had limited access and served people driving from places like New York to Atlantic City. We served cars and buses and might have 20 or more buses show up at a time. That gives you an idea of the size. I was probably making minimum wage at the time, but it was not long before I got my raise. I got it through hard work and dedication. There were few other jobs in my seacoast town. I ended up laying wall to wall carpeting, working in a gas station, working fro an electrician and the restaurant job. because there were few job opportunities, I had to learn new skills. Only the restaurant started as minimum wage, the rest were higher paying jobs. What this shows you is that I was flexible to be able to find a job outside of a minimum wage position when there were few other choices. I opted NOT to work on an oyster boat, work a concession stand over on the coast a 45 minute drive away or paint houses, but those jobs were available too. So by saying that minimum wage jobs are all these people can work, then why should we pay them LOTS of money for having no skills, rather than spend money to TEACH them skills? I think that by raising the minimum wage, we contribute to inflation because it is a closed system. People who work and get paid also pay that money for good and services than may cost more now and the government continues to take a larger potion of that money as taxes. In my opinion the government is not a frugal manager of funds either.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 20:51:13 +0000