Minimum Wage: You Have Never Thought About "One Hour of Work"

If you think raising the minimum wage  - or even the existence of a minimum wage - is a good idea, think again.

Among other things, maybe you should realize this first: You have completely missed a basic property of wages: CUSTOMERS PAY THOSE WAGES.
 
Consider the cost to YOU, an employer, if you hire someone under those laws:
• you must identify an employee properly
• you must keep track of their hours to make sure of their status w/r/t medical care
• you must insure against their incompetence/mistakes on the job
• you must provide a workplace free of hazards per OSHA
• you must show that they are legally employed
• you must withold taxes properly
• you are directly liable for their performance.
Or you can hire somebody "under the table". The work gets done.
Yeah, I thought so.

But let's talk about money, since it's the cry of people who think their first job should be their only job. Whenever a hike is mentioned, pundits actually ask a very good question:

Why not make it $20 an hour? $100 per hour?

Have you answered that? Because that's only a matter of degree. It's logical to ask that.
The fact of the matter is that there is an effect on cost that is invisible unless you know how the market for labor works.  
When you hike the minimum wage, you devalue the dollar immediately. 
This is because there is no change in the amount of work obtained for more dollars!

Let me spell this out for you.

The DOLLAR is a marker, which people use for trade. Left to themselves, people decide how many dollars are appropriate to trade for a product or service. There is always a ratio of the number of dollars needed to obtain a product or service, and this ratio is established by the customers. It is known as "what the market will bear".
Now, when speaking about a service (labor), there is always a unit involved:  

One Hour Of Work.

Now, there is a fundamental quality to this. One Hour Of Work cannot be changed by anyone - not government, not an individual... and satisfactory work always has the same quality to it: the Hour Of Work produced the desired result.

Now, here comes a government agent, who or which has decided that the long-term effects of legislation are insignificant next to the good will and votes available by appealing to that mysterious demographic, "the poor", and people sympathetic to their plight. Somehow, it is impossible for an American to "earn a living wage" without government action.

 (You MUST IGNORE the success of immigrants for this case)

The agent declares, by law, that One Hour Of Work must cost at least X dollars. Now, the ratio of the number of dollars needed to obtain a product or service is established by the government.

The law has just set a number of dollars as being worth One Hour Of Work. 
When that number is increased - by the SAME entity which establishes "full faith and credit" for those dollars - the actual value of each dollar is immediately decreased.

Glue this to your forehead if you will forget it - legislation cannot change an hour of work. It can only change the number of dollars required to pay for it.

Maybe I should say that again for you, since a lot of people don't seem to get it:  legislation cannot change an hour of work. It can only change the number of dollars required to pay for it.

And have you noticed this? "Government", or the employer, is not paying the unskilled worker more - YOU, the Customer, ARE. It is always the customer who pays the costs of any business. You are not changing this, either.

Want a great example? Look at any Federal facility, like Savannah River Site. Workers there make quite a bit more than minimum wage, which you might grant because of the hazards of handling radioactive waste -- but will you get more work if you raise their pay? NO.  

Work is determined by the process, not by wage legislation. If they - I - were granted a raise, you, the taxpayer, would pay more for the exact same tasks.
How do you like that idea?

Here's what happens in the workplace, courtesy of Andy Puzder, CEO of Carl's, Jr:

“For example, Apple did $39.5 billion in business last year, and only has 97,000 employees. So they made about 407,000 dollars per employee, which gives you a lot of latitude to increase wages, if you want to do so.
In the retail segment, if you take all 22 retailers on the Fortune 500 and add them together, they did about $34 billion in business last year, and … made about 6,300 dollars per employee.
Now if you give a minimum wage employee an increase to 12 dollars an hour, rather than making 6,300 dollars an hour on employees, you lose about $1,100. If you give them a raise to 15 dollars, you lose about 6,000 dollars per employee.”

It doesn't matter if we talk about Andy Puzder or you: you must make money to keep your business open, and it costs about 135% of a person's declared wages to employ them.

Let me present a practical example.
Imagine for a moment that I have gifted you $50000 to open a store, and that once ALL of that money is GONE, you now have a store with two employees. Business licenses, insurance, power, water and data(phone), are paid for, a year in advance. The store sells Gadget™ brand Doodads© of fifty kinds, and nothing else. There are one thousand Doodads© in stock.
You will pay the wages to two employees, and save up to pay those recurring bills, from the money you get from your customers as they buy Doodads©. You also buy new Doodads© to replenish stock. Whatever you have left over, if anything, is yours to keep or invest as you choose, because a) the gift was to YOU, and b) it is ALL GONE. It is now up to you to stay in business.
1) Where does a pay raise come from?
2) What if taxes or those recurring bills go up?
3) What happens if the Affordable Care Act applies to your workers?
4) Is there any such thing as "free" money?
Go ahead. Make things up. You can do that here, but trust me, no bank is going to let you pretend anything.

Now, think about those bullet points up there and those two employees.
Administrative costs are real. It turns out that you have to EARN at LEAST 135% of an employee's wages before having that employee benefits your business. For example, you have to take in about $13.50 an hour to pay them $10 for that hour. The employee has to help move those Doodads© at a profit.
This is one reason there is markup on merchandise (the other is storage, handling and inventory tax expenses).
If you sell a Doodad© for {Cost=$10} + $3.50, you must sell one every hour just to pay the employee.
If this does not happen, you lose money, and cannot continue to employ that person no matter what - and you must sell more Doodads© to pay the other expenses you have before the business earns one penny.

Back to that universally-mandated minimum wage idea: Remember asking when you would ever use algebra in the real world? Well, here you go - what happens when you add the same amount everywhere? Yes, when you hike everyone's pay, nobody is better off. They just feel that way momentarily because they see a bigger number on their paycheck.
Nationally, minimum wage increases are one of the Big Three reasons for the inflation you see today (the other two are Affordable Care Act restrictions on full-time workers and Federal pandemic spending without sending government employees home).

Go look on the shelf at the supermarket, at the gas pump, in a jeweler's cabinet and see what you're supporting by way of wage - and therefore price! - hikes. It's not "them" - it was you, supporting minimum wage. One of the reasons illegal immigrants are here and textile jobs are overseas.

What Do You Really Know?

I am so sorry - your school hasn't taught you everything, because it couldn't.

Now that Facebook has allowed the speedy delivery of idiocy and nonsense from all over pop culture, I thought it might help if we all had somewhere equally speedy to look to figure out if what is posted is "the real deal". So, in addition to Snopes.com, here are a few links to help you figure out if your buddy's ladder has a top step:

Engineering Issues:
Now and then, somebody will post something nuts about how human artifacts are built. Try The Engineering Toolbox
Few things online indicate the advanced state of the scientific arts better than this page from the National Institute of Science and Technology...
Keep in mind that technology is not a thing - it is the process that allows things to be made!

Aircraft:
You might have a problem with statements about air travel.
The ultimate crash data center is the Joint Air Crash Data Evaluation Center
A ridiculously complete photographic archive - of everything that flies! - is at Airliners.net
If you want a pilot's perspective of how the aircraft industry is run, including some observations about the current state of American airline security, you can Ask The Pilot

Religion:
Ahh, yes, the subject best not mentioned in polite company!
At one time, a non-profit group produced a Web page called "Adherents", with a thorough desciption of the basic tenets, rituals, etc., of over a hundred religions. That site is off-line, and so a Wikipedia article is the easiest thing to show.
Hope you picked the "right" one... not much about religion is logical after a commonality of purpose is adopted by the participants, and what they claim is surprisingly limited once you realize how much real study goes on elsewhere. In a world populated by those who can measure currents under the surface of the Sun and detect atmospheres on planets orbiting distant stars, there are those who haven't learned very much. Here are a couple of eye-openers that challenge some of the assumptions religious people make without really thinking about them (take a deep breath, these are serious articles!):

• Evolution
• DNA

Earth Studies:
There is a HUGE amount of material to study at Darwiniana . In case you have a problem with the title of that Web site, well, you can independently find many of the same things by going to:

• Earth - An Introduction To Physical Geology
• Radiometric Dating - A Christian View 
• The Scale of The Universe
• The National Climatic Data Center page on ice-core data

If you'd like to see photo-detail of the Earth itself, few things are as fun as Google Earth. The Moon and Mars are also shown in detail there courtesy of the Lunar and Mars Reconaissance Orbiters. Also, you can actually get Google Street View to show you what the Martian landers are seeing!
There are a couple of other places to find amazing photos. Take a look at Mars and Saturn while you're browsing. Those Cassini probe people have a lot for you.

Public Issues:
"News" vs. the law: You should know the difference between such editorial content and the information source. Do you know where to find the actual content of legislative bills?
Right here: The Library of Congress 

Nuclear Weapons: You might not know how many atom bombs the USA has tested, much less how many have been tested elsewhere; did you think that Iraq had no WMD program, because you forgot that the Israelis bombed it? Anyway, here's a fascinating report on those weapons: The Nuclear Weapons Archive

Crime is one of those things that everybody thinks they know about, but don't, because it depends on definitions. "Evidence", for instance, is only what is presented to a jury when you speak of a trial - it is NOT what you see as a spectator. I bet you think you saw evidence in OJ's trial. You did NOT.
I hope you have more sense than Cheez Whiz and can look up the laws of your state, rather than counting on hearsay or Facebook. Need crime statistics? Here's the Bureau of Justice Statistics page. No, some people are not being picked on by police.

Discussion Tool:
A fallacy is a statement containing a flaw which immediately invalidates that statement. Here is a list of those fallacies. If you want to make a point and make it true, you don't have a choice - you MUST avoid these! (No, really - you don't have a choice. The law of cause and effect extends from the real world into logical argument!)

If you're looking at this material, take a minute, sit back and relax, and then marvel at something almost invisible: there were thousands of discoveries, moments of inspiration and connections between investigations to produce what you see. Then, there are people at the store now who have no idea where meat comes from.

Now, you can find out. We have something in common here!

"Miracle!"

A miracle is an event or phenomenon of rare occurrence or circumstances, for which the cause or sequence of events is not clear to the observer.

Recently, I have been asked to support the idea of a belief in "miracles".

Nope. I'm not going to - but not for the reason you'd assume, especially if you are in the habit of taking things on faith, without thinking too carefully.

Look at the description above, then consider any event that you find extraordinary, or maybe one that you have heard described as "miraculous" by some observer. If you look closely, you will find that the observer very simply cannot understand how such a thing has happened.

The short story is that the incredulity or expertise of the witness has NOTHING to do with how any event or phenomenon occurs. Suggesting this effectively insists that something happens differently depending on whether Albert Einstein or Forrest Gump is watching.

If you went back in time and handed your cell phone to Dad in 1970, he'd have called it a "miracle" - and you know Samsung or Apple built it, even if you don't know how, so it's not miraculous to you.

On a more personal level, "miracle" is often applied to events with harsh consequences. We hear of the cancer survivor beating horrible odds, or the infant flung a hundred feet from the flipping SUV and surviving. In fact, neither of these events violates a single natural law.

We don't consider a lottery win a "miracle", because we know that a Lottery Commission controls the odds of a win and publishes them for all to see, but we'll use that term lavishly for things which are more common. 

Have you considered the term, "believe in"? That indicates a serious emotional investment in whatever is being discussed. Do the emotions of an observer change the process by which an event occurs? NO.

The laws of cause and effect are not changed by anything. Do you, or do you know someone who is prone to call something a "miracle" and then assign divine intervention of some kind to the event? That's common, because people fervently wish for there to be some force acting to keep order, so that they can be safe and comfortable -- but in order to claim one cause, you must actually rule all other causes out. I'm sorry, but this does not change based on how good a person you are, what church you attend or which way you face when the National Anthem is played.

When you see or are told "a miracle" has happened, do not stop there, with mouth open in astonishment. Work to understand what happened. If there was injury or death involved, you may discover a way to avoid that risk.

And you will not disperse any of the wonder and awe that attended the event. I think you will marvel, instead, at the forces at play.

Global Warming? Start With The Basics, and Make The Distinction Between Science and Politics

This issue does not depend on the idea of government telling you what you can do, or if you mistake being able to drive for some sort of liberty, even though opportunists and hustlers are doing their best to take control of you using this issue.

Do you recognize that if you light a candle in your house, the house is hotter immediately? Do you recognize that your house is NOT a closed system?

If your answer in either case is "no", I suggest that you have been brought into this argument by emotions, and that you have something to learn about heat. Please relax and consider the laws of thermodynamics before you continue. It is necessary to know something about them to make intelligent judgments; it is not necessary to know everything. In short, heat is not temperature. Heat is the transfer of energy due to a difference in temperature. Heat transfer occurs by the mechanisms of conduction, convection and radiation, and there are factors we can show we have changed to produce a difference in things we can actually see and measure.

This issue is being screwed up by fighting over what to do about it.
You might not know how to figure out who is lying and who is not. This is pretty simple to figure out, if you can simply understand that heat flows from "hot" to "cold" because the "hot" area has more energy in it than the "cold" one.

Pictures of the Earth from space will show you cities. Lots and lots of cities. Expending energy, right on the surface of the earth.

So here's how that goes:
There are cities where there were none before.
Human population and energy usage grow over the years.
It is hotter in the cities.
It is that simple. Population is proportional to energy release into our living environment.

This is not debatable: our liberation of energy from chemical and nuclear sources occurs directly into our living environment.

Do you know how to figure out how much water vapor and CO2 your car puts out? You should, if you want to understand human impact. Gasolines and diesel fuels are blends, and they also contain impurities, but they generally do these things: the carbon in a fuel molecule makes many CO2 molecules when burned, and the hydrogen in a fuel molecule makes many H2O molecules. You can derive many of the properties of gasoline as a fuel by observing this article.  Note that ~114 grams of fuel - about 1/4 pound - will combine with ~272 grams of O2 to make about 386 grams of exhaust vapor? In the process, your exhaust will release most of the heat of combustion to the air around you.
And one gallon of gas is about 24 times this amount of fuel.

Burn one gallon of gas, produce about 20 pounds of heated exhaust gases.

Now, look around you in traffic. Have you ever noticed that thirty cars making 30mpg burn one gallon to get one mile? I bet not. So you and 29 other people went to the convenience store a mile away, or drove a mile in traffic. Or drove less than a mile on the Interstate, in formation, at 80mph because 70 is inconvenient.
Did you notice it took mere minutes to burn that gas? So. Hundreds of millions of cars, buses and trucks are on the road worldwide. Ships and trains burn fuel, too - like trucks, their engines are a bit more efficient, especially newer models, but this is less than a factor of two - we're still in the ballpark.

So heated exhaust emissions are in the billions of pounds per minute category.

Take a look at this graphic (click to zoom). It shows the sources of energy and its usage in terms suitable for comparison. It also shows us something the layman might not recognize at all: rejected heat. You can think of this as the unused energy found in your hot exhaust gases - feel the tailpipe of your car. Realize that heating your exhaust pipe didn't push your car.

Look at the ratio of each of the Energy Services to Rejected Energy, and you will see that we:
• Lose more energy than we use;
• Lose more energy as a fraction of usage in "transportation" than anywhere else.
Think of millions of cars idling. That's waste, and that's where electric cars are going to save a great deal. The chart does NOT indicate exhaust gases, because the loss of energy occurs even in processes where gases are not emitted, like nuclear power electrical generation, AND it does not address direct heating of the environment by lighting, or building heaters.

Okay, now.
Two wrongs do not make a right. If you were downwind of a factory that let off sulfur dioxide, you'd never tell them, "Hey, that's OK, volcanoes do that!" It doesn't matter what volcanoes or other natural forces do at all. Citing them invokes the "two wrongs" fallacy, and does not excuse our deliberate actions.

You might have a hard time when some well-meaning duffer blames a severe thunderstorm, tornado or fish kill on "global warming". Hey - I do, too, because warming cannot be credited for an individual incident without investigation. That's not right. You MUST show your work.
That said, a hurricane's wind is the product of a truly tiny differential pressure exerted across hundreds of miles of compressible medium. I bet you can't describe the mechanism, and I bet you don't deny that a hurricane is a real thing.

This issue does not depend on the idea of government telling you what you can do, or if you mistake being able to drive for some sort of liberty. This article is NOT political. You should notice it does not depend on who is in any government office.

The laws of thermodynamics will have the final say here. You should know what they are - and realize that when you set fire to something, the fire is the hot part.

Is Your Opinion Popular? You May Be Mistaken.

Public figures are often wrong and fool you frequently.

Here are a few things to ponder:

• If you believe a comedian about the Founding Fathers, you don't have an education. George Carlin, Robin Williams, Daniel Tosh and others decry them as "slave owners" as part of their act.
Hey. It's an act. What you're doing, when you believe something they say, is join the good feeling of the moment with their schtick - even though there are heinously wrong elements to their presentation. 
What the founders did was make it possible for rights to be extended to all, an idea that just plain didn't exist anywhere in practice. We've just been too comfortable for too long to think about that.
What you do when you believe celebrity is confuse opinion with an information source. George Carlin was the colloquial master of English, bar none - but that doesn't make him right in any case. You might like to believe CNN, or Rush Limbaugh, but even on their best days they are merely repeating what someone else said, and they have no real duty to produce objective data.
Notice this? Whenever you're looking at the big news of the day, there are a hundred talking heads trying to scare you - but they're all talking about the same reporter's story. One story!

• If you think a corporation needs to be punished in some way, think about their charter - actually, you might want to think about what a corporation is. Yes, it really can be shown to be a fictional person, established in order to coordinate an activity, like manufacturing (on this point, you probably really ought to listen to the multi-millionaire, rather than a professional mouth). It is actually not your business what their CEO is paid. The charter of the corporation states that. If you clamor for the company officers to travel together, for instance, so that you can personally feel more comfortable about their energy use in a time of high gas prices, you probably ought to think about their actual job: protecting the investors in their company. Don't whine just because you're not one. You have that opportunity. Which brings me to another point.

• Don't base your opinion on wealth envy. Especially when you vote.
I have some harsh news for you: every measure to limit wealth has made it harder for the poor to get there. In fact, every measure to tax wealth has mixed results. A good example is the "luxury tax". Hundreds of boatbuilders were put out of business in Florida alone when it was enacted, as a 10% price hike killed business. Very expensive yachts are now built overseas, because only an idiot would pay a million more dollars on a ten-million-dollar yacht when she could have one shipped here from the Netherlands or Singapore for less.
Maybe that isn't obvious, so I'll spell it out for you: trying to punish "the rich" put tens of thousands of ordinary people out of a job - and actually cost other taxpayers as those people took unemployment benefits.
The bottom line is that legal limits are fine, but basing things on simple jealousy is just plain petty, and you will identify yourself as such.

• Don't believe any organization has the same goals you do.
There may be a coincidence, but if there is a choice between representing you and preserving the existence of the organization - you lose. Sometimes you can see this. Right now, educators are in the news constantly. Somehow, teachers' unions oppose testing to see if their members actually know anything. In New Jersey, state tax money goes directly to the teachers' union because the law makes teachers who are NOT union members pay the union, too. Nice, huh? State pensions are sapping taxpayer money to pay those who do no work, because nobody thought about it beforehand. Now, Flint, MI cannot put police on the street 24/7 because the money has to go to pensions first.
This principle means a lot more than "watch out" - it means you have to recognize the difference between an opinion and an information source. It's more fun to believe Piers Morgan or Rush or the press release containing pat phrases about how they care deeply for you, but these are not sources of information. Keep that in mind!

• Don't believe you have a handle on an issue because you associate with someone who has a presence or following - or that others agree with you.
On-line or off, the cult of personality doesn't convey any special understanding to you - until you evaluate what you've seen carefully. This is noticeable when people do not use critical evaluation skills they use at work to a subject under discussion. For instance, an engineer who would never think of using hearsay in evaluating an industrial process might jump on the bandwagon when a prominent biologist cites CNN as an authority. George Takei is a wonderful person, a great American citizen and a fine actor, but that doesn't make him an expert on the Federal budget any more than does your expertise at the bowling alley or pool hall - and being a fan of his doesn't make you any smarter about that issue, either. We must NOT believe what someone says because of their office or specialty or just who they are, because they can be wrong, or lie; we MUST note that proper credentials and education DO enable a person to present a comprehensive argument or evaluation which stands on its own!

• Don't believe your past performance indicates any sort of future success.
The investment people cite this in their sleep, because idiots continue to believe that a cash cow is infinite.
This principle extends over a wide range of human activity, because hope and denial are basic survival mechanisms people use to fight off despair. 
No matter how successful you are, rush-hour traffic does not care about your philanthropy or kindness to animals.
I know you have kids, have made your way, etc. The cruel world does not give a damn about what you did back in the day. You still need to look out, especially if you invest in a subject you have never studied.

• You need to vote more - and not just for a President.
One of the enduring stupidities of elections is that Presidential candidates will promise to do things they are expressly forbidden, or are not their duty once they take office. It appears that the public consistently gives them a pass on that, being either ignorant or uncaring about the actual structure of government.
If you call for the manager every time, rather than the first person who can solve your problem - my French fries are cold, damn it! - you may be the type of personality who thinks they shouldn't waste their time on "lesser" elections.
Guess what: The House of Representatives has 100% of Federal money.
What can you do without money?

• Don't believe a law or bill says what anyone says it does.
The law is specific. I don't know if you knew this, but crime has a specific definition, which you will not hear from anyone: A crime is an action in violation of a statute. 
If there is no statute, there cannot be a crime, regardless of what you think of the story you heard about some poor unfortunate soul.

Law is not what your friends or family say it is, no matter what you think of them. Dad's a good guy, but he's outnumbered a thousand to one by people with the power to change the law. Look it up yourself. Then...
You will notice that Congress routinely misleads people with the title of bills...

Activists will deliberately lie about the law or a bill to get what they want. Sometimes these are Congressmen, and the Constitution is ignored, such as when they collectively subvert immigration law (8USC1182). Good luck with that.
The key here is to recognize that you are subject to the law, not its master -- and the irony here is that if you do not pay attention to your duties as a citizen, other people can use the law to oppress YOU.
Sorry.

• Don't believe the Constitution says what someone else says it does.
Read it yourself. Then brace yourself when someone claims "it's a living document", or that what they're doing is either mandated or supported by it.
If you take a look, you'll find out that "popular" opinion differs from what it says, and some people with authority make claims about it - curiously, these claims usually support a power grab by the speaker.
The Constitution actually limits government, not you. You do NOT GET anything from government that you do not pay for - either directly, in taxes, or by the surrender of some liberties. That's another dish, rich food for thought.

Another couple of dishes: consider whether "the establishment of religion" meant "religious organization, plural" when the 1st Amendment was written. Note that Congress routinely passes laws affecting religion in the USA. Then, if you think that the National Guard is the "militia" mentioned in the 2nd Amendment, go read the fence down at the National Guard Armory. I think you'll find it says "US Government Property", and their uniforms say, "US ARMY".
Your own Congressman may tell you that the National Guard, established in 1905, was what the Founders were talking about, so you can be disarmed.
So you - YOU - can be disarmed. You are a threat to the power of the State if you do not do what you are told.

• Don't believe your education ends, OR that it is ever complete.
I have actually heard someone say, "I'm done with school."
That person, by temperament or upbringing or both, has consigned herself to menial work. She will never matter.
The rest of the world is in competition with you. 
Other people will get the nice apartment, raise a family and so forth based solely on their intelligence and ambition (shut up about "the rich" - they know about money, and chances are that if you're whining, you don't). You don't get a choice about participating.
Of course, you could sign yourself into the slavery of welfare, where you are a commodity, a thing, cultivated for your vote.
That's how poor people are made.

• Don't take the first impression or meaning from any statement in argument. Look for the underlying, real, issue. Examples:
There is a protest against the rule prohibiting the use of portable electronics in aircraft, with a lot of noise being generated about how they can't really interfere with the plane, or, on the other hand, that they do. That's not the point. That rule is to make your dumb ass pay attention to the plane, and what is happening around you. This might be a surprise, but aircraft, when things do go wrong, make a hell of a bang when they hit something and then erupt in astonishingly big fireballs. I'm really sure Tapfish or Farmville can wait for you.

Extend this principle to other scenarios. I think you'll be surprised what you find.