Speaker to Animals wrote:The price of milk is determined by a few co-ops. Lots of stores actually sell it at a loss to get people in the door to buy other things. The argument against raising the minimum wage so high has more to do with it's impact on unemployment and under-employment.
If you want to look at it's impact on prices, then you might want to look at fast food restaurants. That would make more sense, since the price of the food is heavily impacted by the labor costs, whereas something like a grocery store is much more insulated due to the high volume purchases (and the complexity of pricing for that matter).
I don't know where you got this meme from, but it's hugely dishonest. You got manipulated by somebody.
Well, let's compare apples to apples then.
The price of Fuji Apples in Washington State is 1.28lb.
Or how about you name something, that is tied to the price of minimum wage, where we can see in the data that as minimum wage go up, it must go up. The price of something, anything.
As towards you nmoore, and Smitty,
Vigdor said that restaurateurs in Seattle -- along with other employers -- responded to the minimum wage by hiring more skilled and experienced workers, who might be able to produce more revenue for their firms in the same amount of time.
That hypothesis has worrisome implications for less skilled workers. While there those with more ability might be paid more, junior workers might be losing an opportunity to work their way up. "Basically, what we’re doing is we’re removing the bottom rung of the ladder," Vigdor said.
Large businesses
There could be another explanation for the results, however: the fact that large employers are not included. It could be that even if employers with only a single location cut payrolls, large firms expanded at the same time, giving low-wage workers other opportunities to earn money.
Other researchers have found that large employers are better able to raise wages in response to changes in the minimum. Liberal economists often argue workers have less bargaining power when negotiating their contracts at larger firms, and that as a result, employees at those companies are often underpaid in the absence of a wage floor.
"I think they underestimate hugely the wage gains, and they overestimate hugely the employment loss," said Michael Reich, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley who was part of a group that published its own study of the minimum wage in Seattle last week.
Reich's study uses more conventional methods in research on the minimum wage, relying on a publicly available federal survey. His group's data did not allow the researchers to distinguish between high- and low-wage workers at a given firm, but they were able to separate large firms' locations in Seattle from those outside the city.
Their results from the University of California accorded with past research. The minimum wage increased wages for workers in the restaurant industry, without reducing employment overall -- in contrast to the findings from the University of Washington.
"Their results are so out of the range," Reich said.
One way of explaining the disagreement could be that small businesses in Seattle have been forced to downsize in response to the increased minimum wage, while larger firms have expanded.
Yet when Vigdor and his colleagues examined the overall number of workers at small firms with a single location, they did not find that employment had decreased. That fact could could suggest that small businesses have responded to the increase not by downsizing but instead by hiring more experienced workers.
Also:
Vigdor agreed that the effects of increasing the minimum wage could differ by time and place.
"The effect of the minimum wage depends on a lot of things. It depends on where you’re starting from. It depends on what kind of economy you’re raising it in," Vigdor said. "There is no one 'the effect of the minimum wage.' "
That means that future research on the question could come to different conclusions. Vigdor said he looks forward to receiving criticisms of his group's paper and suggestions for improving their approach.
"It’s really important to emphasize it’s a work in progress," he said.
Now this is from a non-peer reviewed study. I'm willing to concede to data, but did they actually publish it as a study that wasn't in progress? That was peer reviewed?
