Elizabeth Warren: Hey, why isn’t the minimum wage $22/hour?

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• OK, just for laughs, let's take the next step. If a janitor, or a McDonald's burger flipper is making $22 an hour, How much do I get paid? RN, BSN, 40 years of nursing experience in a variety of settings, I should legetimately get paid a great deal more that the minimum wage. So what, you pay me $100 an hour, plus holidays and shift differentials? Now what is your hospitalk bill going to look like. The "room charge" is based on the nursing staff you require, so an ICU bed (1:1) would cost what, $10,000 JUST FOR THE ROOM? They think our economy is shot now, try that.

  • $22 or $100, it's all just worthless paper without the gold to back it up that Corporate Greed stole.

    • Ron Paul stole your share of the gold. He said he needs it to buy his web domain name.

      Problem is thirty two cents won't go very far.

    • Fine, give up your "worthless" benefits, Mouth. Well, we're waiting...

      • Give me back my gold then.

        • You have no gold, unless you stole it from your sisters fillings, by the way is she still working outside the navel base entertaining the troops?

        • You are not productive. You don't HAVE any gold.

• Hey bitch you know why employers arnt payin more cause the bullshit you make us pay for all the government crap we pay I WOULD LOVE TO PAY MY GUYS MORE BUT EVERY TIME WE HAVE A BIT OF MONEY U GOVERMENT ASSHOLES TAKE IT AND YOU DONT EVEN WORK FOR ME!!!! GET THE GOVERNMENT OFF MY ASS I PAY MY GUY WAY MORE!!!!!

• AND WE LET HER BREED?

• Minimum wage could be $100 and it would still be as worthless as monopoly money without the gold to back it up. That's why Corporate Greed stole it, it's all about control.

  • on the other hand, i think gold is done as basis for currency. There isn't enough, and industrial usage has exploded. Why the fixation?

    If gold could've been used in swordmaking or cooking 3000 years ago, it could not have been as widely used as currency (and i mean real weaponry, not ornamental..) I've been reflecting on mediums of currency that also enjoy other applications. Salt certainly was a defacto currency, being a popular, portable, and uniformly identifiable trade item.. but still had to be turned into silver outside of particular trade regions.

    How much gold do you think there is? How much would represent minimum wage in your view? Why is fiat synonymous with theft to you?

    • Ideally, reverting wages and prices back to 1964 levels (the last year with a gold standard) would be the best solution to undo all the damage that Corporate Greed's corruption has done.

      • where do you work?

        • Crowley does noty work, he is PROUDLY unemployed and collecting welfare and his free Obama phone, plus he has enough money to go shopping on E-Bay and time to sit on his ass in mommy's basement with his Ron Paul Blow up doll and post stupid comments here that are always the same two things, Corporate Greed and he voted for Ron Paul, which was a vote of the Chicago Crackhead. He adds nothing meaningful and is just a paid troll that spends a few minutes here each day showing his complete and utter stupidity on issues.

      • I wish we could go back to the day your were conceived so we could stop your mommy from heading to the navel base to prevent you.

      • How?

  • and you would still be a leech, and you are still a moron.

• How does Australia do it..? Stuff is a bit more expensive (30% or so?), but they have considerably lower debt and very low unemployment (currency's roughly equivalent with ours, min wage is $15/hr)

  • While Australia has some, their proportion of worthless suck at the public trough losers is waaaaaay lower than ours. See Japan and Taiwan also.

    • definitely true.. we have poor welfare culture here..
      which makes me wonder, how does the Australian minimum wage compare against their welfare benefits? Maybe its a simple case of "wage" competetion

      If i had to guess, I'd say the U.S. welfare benefits (combined from multiple sources) easily outstrip the minimum wage. I'm imagining an experiment where minimum wage was raised gradually as welfare benefits were cut gradually.. How many would shift to working for a living

      • Because theirculture favoors working. Here, in the Depression. men (in particular) wanted jobs, The made it cler that even though the wre starving, they didn't want a hand out, they wanted a job to earn ther money. (radical Idea isn't it creeep?) We have always had freeloaders, but the majority were not only willing, but happy to work. It gae the a sense of self, it engendered pride in their accomplishments, and their ability to care for themselves and ther families. Now the social view of lazy assed refuse to work idiots. We coddle tem, we make excses for them, and we enable them to contine leaching off society. We have created this nightmare, and everyone is too wussy to back up and say "wait,we made a wrong turn somewhere. Lets get back on the main trail." I absolutely favor assistance to those who really need it. The ill, the elderly, the truely disabled. But I raised 3 kids and worked full time the whle time. I don't have a lot of sympathy for someon who sits at home and claims they can't work because they have kids to care for.

      • Absolutely it does. Hazlitt and Friedman wrote volumes about this. Here's an example: say a worker makes $25,000 per year but his boss offers him additional job training and a promotion that pays him $10,000 more annually. Now he has more responsibility and more work AND he gives up certain freebies like a chunk of the EIC and maybe food and housing assistance. The raise and welfare would be roughly the same but he only has to work for one of them. Guess which option he'll likely choose? I'm making up the numbers but you get the idea.

  • Considerably lower pop. (they'd all fit in NYC, LA,and Chicago with room for 5 million & change more) 22 million, 90% of which are urban. But the real kicker is 99% of those over 15 can read and write. Median age is 38.

    [edit] plums & prunes ALF? col]

    • I'm pretty sure ours is up at 98-99% like most of the First World (literacy).. Maybe Norway's at 100%.. time to pull up ye ole CIA factbook. U.S. maybe 4/5ths urban..? So you think a higher minimum wage wouldn't hurt unemployment if we had, say, 1/10th the population?

      If I remember, Australia cut a lot of farm subsidy too (New Zealand cut them all i think). That has to lead to better market-based pricing for foods.. so minimum wage can't be responsible for all the variance there (you'd spend $8 at McDonald's in Australia, versus $5 here)

      Is it worth greater employment and a smaller welfare state?

      • http://www.tradingeconomics.com/australia/indicators

        One takeaway is that Australia needs people badly. Low unemployment the way they calculate it and only about half the population working. 13 million job vacancies. I suppose they can support a higher minimum wage but they don't need one with a worker shortage creating competition for employers.

        • Nice site.. bookmarked.

          So what the heck does a country do with an excess of people?

          I've always kinda expected a future Australia where they've irrigated much of the outback and the bush.. (much like JP I've figured inevitable for the Sahara too). I expected more progress would be made by now. New desalination tech is promising, of course, and i figure its an extremely labor-intensive project.

          So i'm thinking we can dump our excess Down Under and they can get started. Used to be a penal colony, after all

        • I'm not sure we have excess but rather we are inefficient because the welfare state apparatus combined with lousy public education has rendered a less competitive and motivated workforce. The overall economic performance is a reflection of that. Other factors too but history has shown that population growth is not a precursor to rampant unemployment and misery so long as their is a high degree of economic freedom.

• Sure, why not 22 bucks an hour? Of course, burgers would be about ten bucks each and the cashier would have to duck back and cook it for you while manning the window. And sure, it would probably cause many small fast food places to go out of business, adversely affecting the poor, but hey, it's $22 an hour - of course, not for you. No, those few jobs are taken and the turnover is nonexistent.
  Morons...

• See what happens when you try to inflate the wages of working women in an open market? The Man smacks you down, even ESPN stars. These guys were just trying to pump up the local hospitality industry, but nooo

  http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/national/fossilman-gregory-paul-raymer-prostitution-sting-pro-poker-player-nabbed-in-undercover-bust

• We wouldn't need to keep raising the minimum wage if Corporate Greed didn't steal our gold.

  • Someone PLEEEEASE TAP THE NEEDLE!!!

    • TD,.......................MO.

  • You would still be a leach, and you are still a moron.

• I can't believe the dumb masses really elected Warren. Can we kick Massachusetts out of the Union for the duration of her term?

  • Or for forever?

• She want's 22 (???????????????) dollars per hour but I bet she and Chicago crackhead would settle for eleventy dollars an hour...in all fifty seven states, even places with real Indians....