More Right Wing Ignorance Shot Down

CFM said:
That was the point. Those who support the $15/hour wage said it would result in people supporting themselves and that people wanted to earn their own way. Now, when they ask for reduced hours in order to get the same amount of benefits, the only thing that's changed is how much they work. The end result of their desire for less hours produces the same end result of still being freeloaders by getting just as much handed to them. The $15/hour wage was supposed to reduce that type of thing. All they want is the same bottom line just working less hours to get it. They don't want to work. They want freebies and less work. They got what they asked for now want the same amount of handouts. Worthless.
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Obviously, as they begin to earn more and begin to come off the subsidies they've been using to support themselves, its going to be a bit of a balancing act at first.
 
ZappasGuitar said:
Obviously, as they begin to earn more and begin to come off the subsidies they've been using to support themselves, its going to be a bit of a balancing act at first.
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when the people that are to benefit from the higher wage actually make the request to earn less so they can keep handouts, you don't call that a balancing act. it's simply a way for people to work even less than they were before and remain on the government dole.
 
ZappasGuitar said:
Oh, so you AGREE with me that wacko's response was just more diversionary nonsense meant to derail the thread.

Thanks for admitting the truth for once.
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I agree that your lowlife kind constantly discount the information when it's a source they don't like. That you missed the point proves you're an idiot. I've accepted your admission that you are an idiot and a hypocrite. Thanks for playing BOY.
 
ZappasGuitar said:
Obviously, as they begin to earn more and begin to come off the subsidies they've been using to support themselves, its going to be a bit of a balancing act at first.
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Thanks for admitting that they are freeloaders and the whole concept of them wanting to earn their own way was a lie.

If the amount of their handouts goes down at the same proportion as their income goes up, and it should, the bottom line is the same. The ONLY difference is their lazy asses simply wanted to work less.
 
ZappasGuitar said:
Seattle AND ITS SUBURBS.
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Seattle's suburbs are at $15/hr? Where do you see that?

Your article talks about job growth in the state. It doesn't break down numbers for those in Seattle who would be affected by the minimum wage increase. It's why your article is a hack piece.
 
cawacko said:
Seattle's suburbs are at $15/hr? Where do you see that?

Your article talks about job growth in the state. It doesn't break down numbers for those in Seattle who would be affected by the minimum wage increase. It's why your article is a hack piece.
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The $15-an-hour minimum-wage law passed by SeaTac residents two years ago does apply to workers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Washington’s Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

http://www.seattletimes.com/busines...tends-seatac-minimum-wage-to-airport-workers/
 
ZappasGuitar said:
Do you know what the "Tac" stands for in Sea-Tac?
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Ok, I f'd that up. I didn't realize there was an actual City named SeaTac. I thought it was just the airport. That is my bad.

I will still stick to my argument though that media matters is talking about the whole state and not focusing on the affected areas and thus it is an incomplete article at best.
 
cawacko said:
Ok, I f'd that up. I didn't realize there was an actual City named SeaTac. I thought it was just the airport. That is my bad.

I will still stick to my argument though that media matters is talking about the whole state and not focusing on the affected areas and thus it is an incomplete article at best.
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Technically it's short for Seattle/Tacoma.

It refers to the greater Seattle Tacoma metroplex.
 
ZappasGuitar said:
No wonder IHA doesn't want any discussion in his thread...


New Report Undermines Right-Wing Media Claim That Higher Minimum Wages Threaten Job Creation


Washington Led Nation In Workforce Vitality Report Despite Country's Highest Minimum Wages

According to a recent report by the private payroll firm Automatic Data Processing (ADP), the state of Washington received the highest score in the nation on wage and job growth in the fourth quarter of 2015. The state's outstanding performance runs counter to the doom-and-gloom scenarios pushed by right-wing media about the supposed side effects of elevated minimum wages.

On February 15, The Seattle Times reported that Washington was "far outpacing" other states in job and wage growth for the fourth quarter of 2015, according to the most recent ADP Workforce Vitality Report. ADP gave Washington a job and wage growth score of 117.9 on its Workforce Vitality Index, besting the average national score by over 11 points. The index looks at "key labor market indicators, such as employment growth, job turnover, wage growth and hours worked." From The Seattle Times:

=================================================================================================================

"Washington is really overperforming on employment growth," said Ahu Yildirmaz, head of research for ADP, a payroll services company.

Nationwide, employment and wages both increased by 2.1 percent year-over-year during the fourth/ quarter of 2015.

In Washington, however, employment climbed by 3.7 percent. Much of that came from hiring in construction, information technology, professional services, and leisure and hospitality industries.

[...]

In sectors such as in retail and hospitality, some employers in the region are raising wages for managers in response to recent minimum-wage bumps in Seattle and SeaTac, said Sage Wilson, spokesperson for Working Washington, an advocacy organization.

Anecdotally, Wilson has heard of employers outside of those cities finding that they must match higher wages to compete for employees. The minimum-wage increases, however, are relatively new and could take years before they significantly impact statewide data.

================================================================================================================

The state of Washington already has the highest statewide minimum wage in the country -- $9.47 per hour -- and, as The Seattle Times alluded to, the cities of Seattle and SeaTac are in the process of phasing in the highest municipal minimum wages in the country -- $15 per hour. While The Seattle Times reported that it "could take years" before municipal minimum wage increases "significantly impact statewide data" the ADP report undermines right-wing media claims that minimum wage increases are already hurting employers, workers, and local economies.

Conservative media smears against Seattle's minimum wage increase started soon after the city approved an ordinance raising the minimum wage to $15 over the course of a three- to seven-year period. In July 2015, Fox News' Dan Springer falsely claimed that Seattle was facing "unintended consequences" from the wage increase, with some low-income workers attempting to game the system so as to remain eligible for welfare benefits. In August, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) used cherry-picked data to claim Seattle's minimum wage increase "has started having a negative effect on restaurant jobs." Fox Business host Stuart Varney echoed AEI's sentiment a month later on his show, weeks after the specific job loss claim had been debunked. Other right-wing outlets, including The Daily Caller and Investor's Business Daily, have combed through municipal jobs data in Seattle to exaggerate alleged side effects of the minimum wage.

Right-wing media are staunchly opposed to increasing the minimum wage and dedicated to promoting the myth that wage increases result in job losses, despite a wealth of evidence showing that minimum wage increases have a negligible effect on employment.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/02/17/new-report-undermines-right-wing-media-claim-th/208644
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Uh-oh Zap. This is why you don't go to Media Matters for economics. This most recent study was funded in part by the City of Seattle. When the city publishes a report that speaks out against its own policies it's definitely not a good sign for those policies.


The Seattle Minimum Wage Study


The Seattle Minimum Wage Study, a study supported and funded in part by the Seattle city government, is out with a new NBER paper evaluating Seattle’s minimum wage increase to $13 an hour and it finds significant dis-employment effects that on net reduce the incomes of minimum wage workers. I farm this one out to Jonathan Meer on FB.

This is the official study that was commissioned several years ago by the city of Seattle to study the impacts of raising the minimum wage, in a move that I applauded at the time as an honest and transparent attempt towards self-examination of a bold policy. It is the first study of a very high city-level minimum wage, with administrative data that has much more detail than is usually available. The first wave (examining the increase to $11/hr) last year was a mixed bag, with fairly imprecise estimates.

These findings, examining another year of data and including the increase to $13/hr, are unequivocal: the policy is an unmitigated disaster. The main findings:

– The numbers of hours worked by low-wage workers fell by *3.5 million hours per quarter*. This was reflected both in thousands of job losses and reductions in hours worked by those who retained their jobs.

– The losses were so dramatic that this increase “reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis.” On average, low-wage workers *lost* $125 per month. The minimum wage has always been a lousy income transfer program, but at this level you’d come out ahead just setting a hundred million dollars a year on fire. And that’s before we get into who kept vs lost their jobs.

– Estimates of the response of labor demand are substantially higher than much of the previous research, which may have been expected given how much higher (and how localized) this minimum wage is relative to previously-studied ones.

– The impacts took some time to be reflected in the level of employment, as predicted by Meer and West (2016).

– The authors are able to replicate the results of other papers that find no impact on the restaurant industry with their own data by imposing the same limitations that other researchers have faced. This shows that those papers’ findings were likely driven by their data limitations. This is an important thing to remember as you see knee-jerk responses coming from the usual corners.

– You may also hear that the construction of the comparison group was flawed somehow, and that’s driving the results. I believe that the research team did as good of a job as possible, trying several approaches and presenting all of their findings extensively. There is no cherry-picking here. But more importantly, without getting too deep into the econometric weeds, my sense is that, given the evolution of the Seattle economy over the past two years, these results – if anything – *understate* the extent of the job losses.

This paper not only makes numerous valuable contributions to the economics literature, but should give serious pause to minimum wage advocates. Of course, that’s not what’s happening, to the extent that the mayor of Seattle commissioned *another* study, by an advocacy group at Berkeley whose previous work on the minimum wage is so consistently one-sided that you can set your watch by it, that unsurprisingly finds no effect. They deliberately timed its release for several days before this paper came out, and I find that whole affair abhorrent. Seattle politicians are so unwilling to accept reality that they’ll undermine their own researchers and waste taxpayer dollars on what is barely a cut above propaganda.

I don’t envy the backlash this team is going to face for daring to present results that will be seen as heresy. I know that so many people just desperately want to believe that the minimum wage is a free lunch. It’s not. These job losses will only get worse as the minimum wage climbs higher, and this team is working on linking to demographic data to examine who the losers from this policy are. I fully expect that these losses are borne most heavily by low-income and minority households.


http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/seattle-minimum-wage-study.html
 
cawacko said:
Media Matters?

Yes, I'll attack the source because you aren't serious about discussing the issue if this is who you post from.
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Maybe this helps ..

Seattle’s higher minimum wage is actually working just fine
Here's what's wrong with a University of Washington study that found it hurt low-wage workers.

When Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant and workers in the Fight for $15 were negotiating an increase in Seattle’s minimum wage back in 2014, opponents of their effort warned — as minimum wage opponents often do — that paying low-wage workers too much too soon would have harmful economic consequences. Two*years after Seattle began increasing its minimum wage (for most businesses with 500 or more employees, it’s headed to $15 an hour next year), Seattle’s economy is as strong as ever. The Seattle unemployment rate in April, for example, was 2.6 percent, the lowest it*has been in nine years. Yet the release of a new study this week from a group of researchers at the University of Washington has brought opponents of minimum wage increases out of the woodwork*again.

One would do well to dismiss these naysayers. The new study’s findings are out of step with a large body of research pertinent to Seattle’s minimum wage increase, and the study has important limitations. Another recent study without those limitations, from Michael Reich, Sylvia Allegretto and Anna Godoey at the University of California at Berkeley, is more consistent with other research and shows that Seattle’s minimum wage is having its intended effects. The Berkeley study also squares with the lived experiences of people across*the country who overwhelmingly support making businesses provide fairer pay for a hard day’s work.

Using confidential payroll data from the Washington Employment Security Department, the researchers compare employment, hours and wages of workers in Seattle and various other parts of Washington both before and after Seattle began raising its minimum wage. They argue that Seattle’s minimum wage increase reduced the total hours worked by Seattle’s low-wage workforce by about 9 percent. They also contend that the increase raised low-wage workers’ wages by only about 3 percent, implying that the costs of this wage hike outweighed its benefits for these workers.

But the idea that raising the minimum wage has a much larger effect on hours than on wages strains credulity, especially since, as economists Ben Zipperer and John Schmitt have noted, Seattle’s increase “is within the range of increases that other research has found to have had little to no effect on employment.” The study also finds that the minimum wage caused large employment and hours gains in higher-wage jobs, which suggests that its “methodology fails to account properly for the booming Seattle labor market during the period studied.” It’s not entirely clear why the University of Washington team gets such a weird result — since their data isn’t public, we can’t check it — but it’s worth noting at least two important issues with their study.

First, their data exclude workers at businesses that have more than one location; in other words, while workers at a standalone mom-and-pop restaurant show up in their results, workers at Starbucks and McDonald’s don’t. Almost 40 percent of workers in Washington state work at multi-location businesses, and since Seattle’s minimum wage increase has been larger at large businesses than at small ones — right now, a worker at a company with more than 500 employees is guaranteed $13.50 an hour, while a worker at a company with fewer than 500 employees is guaranteed only $11 an hour — these workers’ exclusion from the study’s results is an especially germane problem (note that low-wage workers in Seattle have had an incentive to switch from small firms to large firms since the minimum wage started rising). In earlier work, in fact, the University of Washington team’s results were different depending on whether these workers were included in their analysis; including them made the effects of the minimum wage look more positive.

Second, the University of Washington team does not present enough data for us to assess the validity of its*“synthetic control” in Washington — that is, the set of areas to which they compare the results they observe in Seattle. The Seattle labor market is not necessarily comparable to other labor markets in the state, and given some of the researchers’ implausible results, it’s hard to believe the comparison group they chose is an appropriate one.

The Berkeley researchers take a better approach. They construct the synthetic control in their study using an algorithm that matches Seattle with counties across the United States that are similar in terms of population size and a variety of economic characteristics. They use a publicly available data set — the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) — and include multi-location businesses in their analysis. They find much more plausible estimates of Seattle’s minimum wage increase on worker wages — each 10 percent increase in Seattle’s minimum wage is associated with a 2.3 percent increase in wages at limited-service restaurants in their study, for instance — and no statistically significant employment effects. (Each 10 percent minimum wage increase is associated with a smaller wage increase in the restaurant industry overall, possibly because Seattle restaurants have been making use of a new sub-minimum wage for tipped workers that lawmakers should eliminate.)

That doesn’t mean that nobody in Seattle will ever lose a job, of course, or that the University of Washington team’s research doesn’t merit further exploration. But it does mean that the Seattle minimum wage increase, like every minimum wage increase in American history, has lifted the wages of low-wage workers and been perfectly fine for the economy. Until you start seeing low-income people in Seattle and around the country taking to the streets to demand lower minimum wages, don’t listen to anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...lly-working-just-fine/?utm_term=.3bbb177a018d
 
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