A lot of this points out why I just don't understand "right-leaning" folk. Unless you are a huge, faceless corporation you really shouldn't be paying your workers minimum wage or giving them crappy health benefits, so I don't see how your expenses in those areas are going to increase or that "It's going to be good times for workers. Not such great times for employers." Oh no, you might have to start treating them slightly more like human beings!
A lot of this advice is just that "smart people will find loopholes in the new tax codes and avoid paying it like they have been for decades", bordering on tax fraud. He indirectly admits he makes over $250,000 a year, and I hate to voice a knee-jerk reaction, but he should really be counting his blessings he's not been on the short end of the stick (living paycheck-to-paycheck working said minimum wage jobs, for example). Instead, he gets spooked that he might have to give more of his precious precious money away.
A lot of this points out why I don't understand "left-leaning" folk.
When the minimum is forced up, being better than the minimum gets harder.
If you make it harder to fire people, hiring becomes more risky and especially smaller firms will think twice.
If you force employers to pay for employees sickdays, and make it illegal for the employer to even ask you what's wrong, mr. nice guy, who'd never ask anyway, is cornered by mr. bad boss, who's just looking out for the law.
If you force the minimum wage up, all those jobs worth less than the minimum wage will not be done. Not a problem for high-tech startups, but if you're the guy washing staircases at night, and your price goes up, you'll be the first to go when things are rough. Low salary employees are seldom unexpendable.
If you think you're being unfairly treated at work, protest. If that doesn't work, quit.
If you need to keep your job because you have credit card debt and the installments on your new home entertainment center and custom build kitchen and the mortgage and ... well, you got yourself into the mess, do you really think it's fair to get the government to bully evil mr. $250.000 into bailing you out, and imply that he's somehow not deserving of his salary?
A lot of this points out why I don't understand "left-leaning" folk.
When the minimum is forced up, being better than the minimum gets harder.
A lot of that can be drawn out in a straightforward way on an introductory Economics class chalkboard. It makes sense & no one rational would argue that regardless of the lvel, employment would stay the same. At $100 p/h, the level of employment would decrease. On the chalkboard, the biggest most straightforward effect would be that most jobs paying less then that would cease to exist. The other effects of pushing the remaining low pay jobs over the line & a few of the ones close to it up a bit seem to have a hard job of it to make the whole thing worthwhile.
But the real world experience doesn't paint such a grim picture. Minimum wage changes, have not been shown in real world case studies to have very much of an effect on employment rates. The effects are usually cloudy & cannot be distinguished from the effects of say, a credit crisis.
Now economists can rationalise this in lots of ways. Maybe the labor market tends to place employers of low wage employees in better bargaining positions, so when you look at the difference between what a worker is willing to earn (there is no floor other then what his other options set) & what an employer is willing to pay (the marginal output of that labor), they settle closer to the bottom. Perhaps the various wildcards of social & psychological effects of the difference between a minimum wage job & welfare supplements or some such wishy-washy effect is screwing with things. You can even come up with all sorts of circular sounding arguments about stimulating spending by putting money in the hands of the poor. To put it on the chalkboard you need to talk abut it in terms of information availability, market power, mobility, secondary effects etc.
But when you take a step back, there just aren't many good examples of minimum wage humiliating itself in the same way that grain price floors or wool subsidies have. For such a heavy handed economic policy it has remarkably little catastrophe that goes with it. No stockbroker surpluses being dumped on unsuspecting thord world markets. No stockpiles of teachers that need to be refined into ethanol at a cost of 20X higher then cane ethanol.
The automatic rejection of minimum wage increases based on the classic economic theories is not rational.
But the real world experience doesn't paint such a grim picture. Minimum wage changes, have not been shown in real world case studies to have very much of an effect on employment rates. The effects are usually cloudy & cannot be distinguished from the effects of say, a credit crisis.
Now economists can rationalise this in lots of ways...
How about this one? No minimum wage increase yet has exceeded the actual market value of the jobs in question. They have simply been feel-good placebos that have marginalized very few real workers while gaining political kudos for the administrations in power.
Any real attempt to raise the minimum wage too far beyond the market value of the labor will result in mass unemployment, mass inflation, or both. Its actually a kind of rationing, and behaves as such.
I don't think that is true. There are a large number of people in almost all countries that earn minimum wage.
In Australia, the minimum wage or equivalent ranges $14-$18 (AUD $1 = aprox US$0.95 a month ago, approx $0.70 now). This is probably close to the median for countries of comparable GDP pp. Many employers pay the minimum.
The minimal US minimum wage is relatively low. But there are plenty of other examples around.
Your comment points out why I don't understand "left-leaning" folk. Mentioning he makes over $250,000 doesn't need to be "admitted". He should be proud of it. It's not that his money is precious, it's a direct result of his contribution to the economy.
And the money isn't whats important, the work that produced that money is what's important. Whenever someone in the country works hard and produces something, it benefits every person in the US, including you and me. However when we decide that the only important thing is that he made more money then us, then people like him will decide to either produce less (it's not hard if you are already well off to take a well earned vacation), or just produce more overseas to avoid our confiscation attempts.
> Oh no, you might have to start treating them slightly more like human beings!
I don't think many startups are guilty of this. But even so, could you imagine what it would do to the startup community if you required every company regardless of size to offer its employees health insurance? I don't think that Palo Alto would end up looking anything like it does now. There are risks involved in launching a startup the first few years. Everyone knows this. But, with the risks come proportionate rewards, which brings us to:
> Instead, he gets spooked that he might have to give more of his precious precious money away.
You have it backwards. It's been said a lot recently that the "hard working middle class middle americans" are the foundation of our country; actually, the entrepreneurs and business leaders who end up making tons of money are the foundation of our country. Without them, no one else would have jobs. You can offer as much welfare or unemployment benefits as you want, but the people you really need happy are the founders of the world. If you make it totally unprofitable or fail to recognize the risks inherent in going out on a limb with no safety net to offer a service to others, we'll either stop (well, slow down or find a new model to do it) or move elsewhere.
"But even so, could you imagine what it would do to the startup community if you required every company regardless of size to offer its employees health insurance?"
This would be an argument for "single payer" government health care.
How much easier would it be to find people willing to work for startups if they didn't need to worry about health insurance?
Taxes would have to increase to finance this, though-- taxes likely levied on the companies that would have been providing the insurance before. This just leaves them providing health insurance by proxy.
Before you get too cocky, remember the Singularity. Someday, the computers might decide they don't need you to program them anymore, Mr. Smarty Pants Hacker.
And if you have your doubts about the Singularity, maybe you should also have your doubts about who exactly will be automated out of existence and who will not. One of the things that surprised AI researchers initially was that it was a lot easier to make a computer good at chess than to make it good at, say, digging a ditch.
Trust me, when it comes to health care, things aren't good now for small businesses. Our rates have increased every term for the last year or two–sometimes as much as 30%.
Health care costs are already out of control and already preventing companies from hiring more people. If it gets more expensive under Obama, that will just get worse.
To me, this part is not a left-leaning/right-leaning issue.
Mixed thoughts on this article. The author raised some points that I thought were good, namely the fact that you don't need to be a direct beneficiary of the new administration's proposed programs to profit from them. If they plan to put money into green tech or education, perhaps you could make money by providing a service to those industries. If after school care centers are about to become flush with government cash, perhaps they'll need some kind of software to help them grow.
The downside to this article is that most of it is based what the Obama administrated has stated it ~wants~ to do. You'd be foolish to actually plan a business around campaign promises. But these are definitely some things to keep in mind.
Businesses generally perhaps, but not startups. I wouldn't advise the average startup to modify their strategy based on what administration is in power.
I think it's useful advice for people who are just starting up now, though. If you want to be an entrepreneur but don't know what field to start in, playing along the lines of what the new administration is looking for means that you're opening in a field that everybody will be watching.
I don't think so. A better and completely orthogonal compass is to try to see one's position on the pretty much inevitable path of technological development. Woz was much better off thinking "What can I do now that DRAMs have been invented?" than "What can I do now that Carter has been elected?"
I suspect that most people who go for whatever field is apparently "hot" wind up not doing very well. I would imagine those who get into fields because they're just following what they know\have interest in have much better chances. They have a hope of finding and building something so cool it makes the new "hot" field.
Course, that was a huge generalization with tons of assumptions, so YMMV.
Yeah. My thought wasn't so much "go for what's hot without thinking" as it was, "if you have no clue what to do, it might be worth your checking out big topics, just in case something jumps out at you." It's not something that people who've already got a vision do, but I see it the way I'd see writing prompts: sometimes, trying to write in a particular style gives you ideas that you'd never have otherwise.
if you have the choice of what to start in...but how many people have that? Am I going to suddenly start a wind farm company just because Obama will invest money into them? Its not like the small time entrepreneurs have a lot of hope getting government contracts. Most of that money will go to the established players in those industries who can afford to pay lobbyists
As consumer confidence in our government increases (as it always does in a new administration's honeymoon period), and as the policies of the current and future stimulus packages take effect, the economy will inevitably improve.
Despite the tax issues, if you thought John McCain's federal government spending freeze was a good idea during a recession, you don't know much about economics.
An improved economy means more funding and more customers. Forget the details, it is hard to make ANY money when the stock market is going down 40% in a few months and people are saving every penny because they are scared.
Wow. Despite the title, that's pretty much all doom-and-gloom.
Alternative possibility: move to another country. New Zealand, frinstance, has just elected a new business-friendly government, it has lots of smart, well-educated people and a low cost of living.
Is that for fact true? I would very much like to believe it since I've spent some time i NZ and found it to be very hospitable to companies in some respects.
That would mean that the US kick ass (Im considering relocating to the US btw).
Don't be silly. If you are going to be making $300.000 in profits anytime soon, you will have enough money to hire a tax adviser who will tell you how to hide this money.
A lot of this advice is just that "smart people will find loopholes in the new tax codes and avoid paying it like they have been for decades", bordering on tax fraud. He indirectly admits he makes over $250,000 a year, and I hate to voice a knee-jerk reaction, but he should really be counting his blessings he's not been on the short end of the stick (living paycheck-to-paycheck working said minimum wage jobs, for example). Instead, he gets spooked that he might have to give more of his precious precious money away.