How do we fix the economy???

Imaginos, if you look at my previous post you will see that I had already done the conversion, and quoted USD$12 for full time permanent work and USD$15 for casual work. Not a lot but way more than $5.
Of course there is $15 worth of value for unskilled adult work, or our businesses wouldn't be paying it, and thriving. If equivalent businesses in the US claim that there is only $5 value they are either inefficient, lying or profiteering. Anyway truly unskilled work doesn't really exist nowadays. If it's really unskilled it can be automated. I agree that a minimum of $35 would be foolish, but so is $5.

Peterz, everyone here isn't free to turn down work that pays too little. We have a welfare umbrella that pays well over the $5 for the dole, but it is contingent on being available for legal work. Thus at $5 an hour minimum a breadwinner could see his family go from surviving to starving if they were forced to take such a wage.
A former conservative PM lost the election and his own seat (after 11 years rule) when he tried to impliment an American style wages system that would have led to lower minimum wages.

Then public policy should attempt to increase the number of jobs available not to further inhibit job creation. Higher manditory minimum wages tend to do just that. Complex regulatory environments tend to do the same thing.

The more jobs that are available will solve many issues being discussed here and further restrictions on what employers can do to hire workers will serve to restrict the number of jobs that may be available.

Annachie wrote:In Australia at the moment, there's about 10 unemployed per available job.
Possibly more.

There's no guarentee that a better job is out there.

Sent from my SM-G920I using Tapatalk

Daryl,
Creating enough jobs so that we are free to choose better jobs should be the goal of our economic public policy. Minimum wages pit those with few skills and experience against those that have more skill and experience because employers cannot pay any less for the least productive job they need done.

This creates incentives for employers to demand more productivity for those least productive jobs. Which in turn limits the least skilled and experienced from getting jobs that will allow them to gain skills and experience.

Better to allow more flexibility for employers and policy that encourages job creation to make things better for workers.

You don't address the points I've made:

I have said all along that an absurd minimum wage will result in high unemployment and devalued currency - and that is exactly what you've got.

How is it reasonable for "adults" to spend 10 or 20 years flipping burgers or bagging groceries? It's their own damn fault if they are too lazy to learn to do something better.
----------------------
If you want to learn, the worst schools and teachers in the world can't stop you. If you don't want to learn, the best can't help you.

Our minimum wage is not absurd, our unemployment overall is not high, and our currency is not devalued.
Sure the Australian dollar is worth about 70 UScents, but the US dollar is worth less than the Euro or Pound, relative levels like that have nothing to do with devaluation.
The US economy is bigger than ours, but with 320M versus 24M it should be, however our proportional national debt is much lower, and our fundamentals firmer.
Here too adults move from being paid $12 in lowkey jobs to better ones, but they don't start in semi slavery at $5.

Imaginos1892 wrote:You don't address the points I've made:

I have said all along that an absurd minimum wage will result in high unemployment and devalued currency - and that is exactly what you've got.

How is it reasonable for "adults" to spend 10 or 20 years flipping burgers or bagging groceries? It's their own damn fault if they are too lazy to learn to do something better.
----------------------
If you want to learn, the worst schools and teachers in the world can't stop you. If you don't want to learn, the best can't help you.

Daryl wrote:Our minimum wage is not absurd, our unemployment overall is not high, and our currency is not devalued.
Sure the Australian dollar is worth about 70 UScents, but the US dollar is worth less than the Euro or Pound, relative levels like that have nothing to do with devaluation.
The US economy is bigger than ours, but with 320M versus 24M it should be, however our proportional national debt is much lower, and our fundamentals firmer.
Here too adults move from being paid $12 in lowkey jobs to better ones, but they don't start in semi slavery at $5.

I don't remember the Australian dollar's historical value, but as I said the British pound has dropped from over $2.80 to under $1.46. Ten years ago the euro was over $1.60; today it's under $1.12. Again, this is all relative to a US dollar that has been devalued substantially over the same period.

Annachie wrote:In Australia at the moment, there's about 10 unemployed per available job.
Possibly more.

Hmmm. That sure sounds like high unemployment to me.

You lot always say "Raise the minimum wage! There won't be high unemployment or inflation." Then, when you get high unemployment and inflation, you try to find a way to blame it on something else -- anything but those foolish leftist policies. (Or, just try to deny it)

Inflation is an increase in the ratio of money to value. You are deliberately increasing that ratio - and pretending that it won't have consequences.
----
You are right about the US national debt. The leftists have put us in a hole that would take 300 years to get out of if we started today -- and they're still digging! They have piled on more debt in 7 years than in all of the previous 219 years combined.
--------------------
If you give politicians money to pay the government's debts, they will spend it all and borrow more.

As Chuck Colson wrote in “How Now Shall We Live?”, if we don’t diagnose the problem correctly, not only will we fail to fix it—we’ll create even more brokenness.

We seem to have an argument about the correct diagnosis. The only way to test an assumption is to compare it and its results to reality.

If we decided to change the argument to the best way to test the results of each diagnosis, what would you suggest

Australia's present inflation rate is 1.3%, the US is 1.1%. Thus by historical standards both are very low. The Australian unemployment rate is 5.7%, the UKs 5.1% and the US is 5%, once again similar and not high by historical standards.
As Annchie says there could well be 10 people looking for a low key job, but that doesn't mean that there are ten times the number of jogseekers as jobs, nationwide for either country. At least ours have a job worth doing when they get it.
The current exchange rate of 70 US cents per Aust $ is pretty much the norm over a long period of time. It was $1.15 US a couple of years ago.
I still relish a negotiation about 15 years ago with a US aeronautical company for tens of millions worth of long term aircraft hire when it was 34 cents US, and I got them to lock it in at a US $ price, and within a year it was 85 cents. Cost us less than half the budgeted amount for the lease duration.

Back again to my particular obsession. A living minimum wage over about a century has not caused either us, the UK, or most developed countries to have runaway inflation or unemployment rates compared to the US.

Imaginos1892 wrote:You lot always say "Raise the minimum wage! There won't be high unemployment or inflation." Then, when you get high unemployment and inflation, you try to find a way to blame it on something else -- anything but those foolish leftist policies. (Or, just try to deny it)

Inflation is an increase in the ratio of money to value. You are deliberately increasing that ratio - and pretending that it won't have consequences.

Why don´t you try to explain then, why Sweden, with fairly high minimum wages(although not set by law, so not a uniform monolith thing), have had to go to zero interest rate to avoid the opposite of inflation?

You are right about the US national debt. The leftists have put us in a hole that would take 300 years to get out of if we started today -- and they're still digging! They have piled on more debt in 7 years than in all of the previous 219 years combined.

How kind of you to ignore who was actually responsible for about 75-85% of that increase in debt.
President shrubbery, i´m looking at´cha, come on in and take your applause for the most failed US presidency ever, and still retaining your hardcore supporters.



Insanity rules.

Hmmm. That sure sounds like high unemployment to me.

There´s often over a hundred trying for any listed job here, yet we have similar unemployment rates to Australia(or at least not far from it).
Much of THAT though comes from a smaller part of those unemployed who go for a "numbers matters" way of finding a job, they can apply to dozens or even hundreds of jobs per DAY.
Especially those who don´t really care what job can go totally crazy with applications thanks to internet and cheap or even zero rates for phonecalls.

PeterZ wrote:So you believe that workers are so stupid that they will work for unreasonably low wages just because a prospective employers offers that wage? There are always other jobs out there. What sort of an elitist are you to think workers can't sort through this sort of rubish, Daryl? Everyone is free to turn down employment that demands unreasonable employment conditions. That's the best check against unscrupulous employers.

That´s a nice statement. Only problem is that it´s not part of reality. There are literally millions of people in USA that takes jobs below what they need to survive, because they DO NOT HAVE AN ALTERNATIVE.
Instead they ALSO take on a second, or even a second AND a third job.

This is a wellknown reality since years back.

Then public policy should attempt to increase the number of jobs available not to further inhibit job creation. Higher manditory minimum wages tend to do just that. Complex regulatory environments tend to do the same thing.

The more jobs that are available will solve many issues being discussed here and further restrictions on what employers can do to hire workers will serve to restrict the number of jobs that may be available.

And yet every time that "solution" is actually tried in reality, my my, what a surprise it didn´t lead to the "predicted" results.

When Sweden reduced its public sector(ie basically what was paid for through taxation) from over 70%, to around 50%, the lost taxes were supposed to be gained back(and much more!) by the greatly improved economy as a total.

No. The gain from increased economic activity was somewhere in the 10-20% range of the loss in taxes, and the economists had claimed the gain would go at least 50% beyond the loss because of how "stunted" the economy, "obviously" was. Never happened.

The exact same thing has happened again and again elsewhere, it never works.

Daryl,
Creating enough jobs so that we are free to choose better jobs should be the goal of our economic public policy.

The only costeffective way to CREATE jobs is for the state to hire people to do something useful.

Simply put, a government simply cannot create jobs through economic policy, without spending so much money on it that it would be cheaper to just hire the people themselves.

A nation tend to have a certain economic activity by default, adjusted by overall economic climate and any active "cheats"(for example if nearby country has a massive subsidy on one kind of work, any work of that kind will likely end up there instead of "here", likewise local resources may skew what is normal).

The effect that government policy has on that base activity is mostly very limited, policies needs to be massive or extreme to make a big impact. In some cases they need to be extreme even to just make a MINOR impact.
Major impacts commonly only happens when a natural shift coincides with a nonharmful government action.

Tenshinai wrote:How kind of you to ignore who was actually responsible for about 75-85% of that increase in debt. President shrubbery, i´m looking at´cha, come on in and take your applause for the most failed US presidency ever, and still retaining your hardcore supporters.

Bullshit. US federal debt at the end of 2000 was about $5.7 trillion and at the end of 2008 it was about $9.7 trillion. That's horrifying, but "president shrubbery" didn't even double the existing debt, so you can only blame him for about 21%. Today, 0bama owns 54% of the US government debt and still has another 8 months left to dig the hole even deeper.

Tenshinai wrote:The only costeffective way to CREATE jobs is for the state to hire people to do something useful.

Bullshit again. The government does not hire people to create value; most of them spend their days filling out and piling up government forms which are of no use to anybody. The only way to create value is by making physical products that are worth more than they cost, and governments don't do that. Government spending is at best neutral to the economy; money is taken from here and spent there, it is not worth any more when the government spends it, and no additional value is created.

Every dollar the government spends was either borrowed or taken from a taxpayer who got no value in return.

I remember when the Russians tried to have everybody working for the government, and that didn't seem to work out very well.
--------------------
My dad voted Republican until the day he died; since then, he votes Democrat.