Regardless of what you know, Jack may not have known. You shouldn't put words in his mouth either, regardless of your feelings for his stance, or stereotype him. However knowledgeable you may be about the subject, LD is supposed to have standards that apply to everyone.

Here's an interesting article about how "the rich" do not in fact create jobs, it's the broader economy. Of course this should be obvious, but republicans like to repeat the myth over and over again until it becomes an accepted fact (like the tea party repeating "death panels" and Obama being a muslim etc). http://www.businessinsider.com/rich-people-do-not-create-jobs-2011-12


Here's an interesting history of America's tax rates and spending levels, make sure you follow the "See the truth about taxes" link at the bottom where all the real meat is: http://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-tax-rates#

Yor just a hater lanth ;3 plus you're incorrect as to exactly what I think of governments.

Vrael, I am now aware of that; sad to say I wasn't previously. However, the person who told me that taxation was possibly unconstitutional is correct; there is plenty of information a quick google showed me that suggests a) the 16th amendment may not have been ratified (which doesn't make any difference as if it wasn't, the current government would vote in a correct ratification quicker than you can say "unpaid politicians"), b) the principles of forced taxation are unconstitutional, and c) being required to fill in tax forms may be unconstitutional. Anyway, that's fairly irrelevant.

No, I wasn't imaging a world like that at all. Don't straw man.

You're assuming that everyone currently on minimum wage will have their wages dropped if minimum wage was removed. Many will, sure. Not all. My sister's wage was $13 before the minimum wage was increase to $13. You're also assuming that current prices are standard and that removing minimum wage would not affect prices, or if it did it would increase them. To the contrary, businesses who have enough employees would be able to lower wages, and also lower prices. The end result will mean more people will have an income, prices will drop in certain markets (particularly groceries, restaurants, retail stores, etc. which rely on entry level workers for labour), and the market will more accurately reflect actual costs and wages. In addition, the majority of people buying food from my current place of employment (a food court) are not minimum wage earners; business would not decrease at all and might increase if prices dropped due to cheaper labour (never mind that my boss underpays several workers anyway )

More likely, a lot of these businesses would keep prices the same and just pay their staff less, and pocket the difference.

"an income" is not the end goal. Being able to live off your income is the goal. You'd be very hard pressed to live on a $7/hr wage.

The market at the moment does reflect "actual costs and wages". The actual wage is the minimum wage, designed to give people a minimum amount of money to live on. If you reduce the minimum wage, you haven't magically made the cost of living go down, all you've done is enabled employers to turn people more into wage slaves than they already are.

Also, while wages are obviously a component in the price of goods, for things like supermarkets where it is very high volume with low margins, most of the price paid by customers comes from the actual cost of the goods themselves. If supermarkets were able to pay $10/hr instead of $13/hr, and some of them did this, you might be lucky to see your bag of chips go from $2.49 to $2.29. Big woop. Same sort of thing with The Warehouse; if the minimum wage was reduced I'm sure they would lose more in revenue than they'd save in employment costs.

Now for restaurants, the wage costs make up a large amount of the menu price (hence why some places charge a 15% public holiday surcharge), but if you're on minimum wage already you probably don't eat out at restaurants much. So the fact that restaurants are now cheaper because the minimum wage has gone down (and likely your income) doesn't actually help you, the minimum wage worker. It does help everyone else though; but they aren't the people that need help.

So minimum wage workers aren't going to benefit from your boss putting his prices down then, are they?

Unless your current customers work in industries who rely on minimum wage workers, who have less income and so their businesses have reduced demand, flowing through to your own. That is what happened in the early 1990's when Ruth Richardson slashed benefits.

So you have a scumbag employer who breaks the law. You should dob him in.

How is taxation unconstitutional? The US Constitution clearly says that Congress has the power to tax. (If this needs its own topic I'll happily argue Constitutional law elsewhere.)

Maybe. They'd then have to deal with competition from other businesses who DO drop their prices a little.
I know someone who lived off $35 a day, in Auckland Central. Of course he was by himself and didn't have anyone else to take care of; I imagine that's the same for most minimum-wagers.

I don't know where you get this idea that people would prefer being jobless to having an income, no matter how small. 6.6% of New Zealanders are unemployed; I'm sure most of them would prefer earning $7 an hour to $0 an hour.

The minimum wage is far above the minimum wage required to live.
Then the market would more realistically reflect actual market circumstances rather than being artificially inflated by a high wage floor.

And a 20 cent drop in price for each item in an average family's shopping trolley adds up to quite a large saving each year. Big whoop indeed!

The people that most need help are the people without any income at all.
No; minimum wage workers aren't the only people in the world ya know
Although zero-wage workers definitely would benefit from wages being dropped and more openings being made available for them to be employed.

Their market is increased because more people are employed due to lower wages. Individuals might not buy as much as previously, but the number of individuals is increased.
You have to be kidding, right? If his business was closed down, I'd be unemployed. And it wouldn't be easy for me to find a new job. In addition, approximately 20 other staff would go from anywhere between $7 and $13 an hour to $0 an hour, and also have difficulty finding new employment. Factor in the losses his suppliers get from not being able to sell him goods, and unhappy customers who can't have our food, and the world's a much worse place.

If the people in my workplace (and many other workplaces I'm sure) were able to find higher paying jobs, they'd go in a flash. And some do. They don't work for less because they want to help the business, they do it because they have no other alternative. Removing minimum wage would most likely give them more opportunities to find higher paying employment (plenty of places would hire more staff at $10 an hour if they could, which is definitely higher than $7 an hour).

@raynimagi I don't know enough about the constitution to argue with you about it all I know is that the 16th amendment, allowing taxation, may not have been ratified correctly.

You are so totally out of touch with reality.

First off, we have unemployment benefit, so no one gets $0/hr. Second off, if it costs you $100 a week in petrol, clothing and general expenses to work at a job where you make $280/week before tax, then it actually ends up costing you so much money to work that it's not worth it.

You must have a very distorted view of what "living" is, then.

The wage floor reflects what a very minimal subsistence living costs in this country. Too bad if you end up with any unexpected bills; better load up the credit card and hope you win lotto to pay it off.

And a $3-5 drop in what that family earned per hour work will still be many times larger than any money saved. Reducing the minimum wage might affect things like grocery prices, but it won't change electricity or petrol prices hardly at all, so this family will still end up worse off.

These people don't exist in this country (except by choice or fraud/crime).

No, but minimum wage workers are the ones who are catered for with the minimum wage policy. If you're going to change the minimum wage, the people whom you affect the most are those on the minimum wage (or unemployed) and so those are the people we should be most concerned about when we change minimum wage policy.

If your shop sells discretionary items, and you go from 10 people out of 100 being able to afford it to 5 people out of 100, then you need to double your market in order to account for the loss. That's assuming they even choose to spend the money at your store.

Or, a more efficient business that obeys the law will open up instead and the customers will be able to shop at that store.

I've pointed it out before in this thread, that the Ministry of Labour official advice is that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would cost approximately 6,000 jobs. If we listen to your ridiculous arguments surely we must assume that if we put the minimum wage up to $15/hr, there would be tens of thousands of people out of work?

I don't know anyone who was paid less than $13 an hour who had a family before minimum wage went up; I'd say I'm quite in touch with reality. However, you're welcome to further explain just how I'm out of touch with reality.

Immigrants who don't have permanent residency get $0 an hour. Under-18s get $0 an hour (unless they're married/in a defacto relationship). And ideally there would be no benefit at all from the government, which would mean everyone without a job would get $0 an hour, other than those who are supported by charities.

Living = being not dead. I never said "comfortable" living, although compared to many countries, $35 a day can lead to a quite comfortable life.

No, the wage floor doesn't represent the minimum required for subsistence living. I imagine you could get as low as $30 a day without starving, assuming you could find a place to stay. And even without minimum wage, there would be next to no one on that low a wage.

I daresay most families in NZ aren't on the minimum wage; I can't find any statistics to prove or disprove this though. Most families would be better off with a minimum wage removal.

I've seen the numbers and it isn't possible to run a business such as the one I work for with everyone at minimum wage without increasing prices a lot, which would subsequently lower our business a lot.

The Labour Department merely thinks 6000 jobs will be lost (that's a LOT of jobs by the way); they don't know for sure. It could be ten times that.

You should spend some time at a budgeting advice service. You might get back in touch with reality then.