Joe Biden Wants an Early 2021 Stimulus Package

Raise to 15 dollars an hour for minimum wage is in the bill, RIP small businesses.

Moody's take:

Seems optimistic to me, but even if we fall short of that it would be a great result.

@mattbbpl: small businesses

Are going to fold up in record numbers.

This is going to be the equivalent of a Stalin riding a meteor!

The first $600 is kind of a wash as it was only part of most people's rent/mortgage bill. It would be more useful to just include $2k in this bill instead of just $1400.

Why $15 minimum wage is pretty safe

And why economists changed their minds on the minimum wage

Link

When David Card and Alan Krueger came out with a landmark study in 1994 showing that a big minimum wage hike didn’t cause unemployment (as most economists predicted), Card was actively shunned many of his colleagues, who were deeply invested in the theory that minimum wage kills jobs:

[E]conomists who objected to our work were upset by the thought that we were giving free rein to people who wanted to set wages everywhere at any possible level…I've subsequently stayed away from the minimum wage literature for a number of reasons. First, it cost me a lot of friends. People that I had known for many years, for instance, some of the ones I met at my first job at the University of Chicago, became very angry or disappointed. They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole.

Note that this opposition wasn’t just the anger of theorists who didn’t like having their favorite theories debunked by empiricists. The anger was partly political and ideological. The economists Card describes saw themselves as guardians of the free market, and viewed Card’s research as giving succor to advocates of command economies.

But over the next few decades, an interesting thing happened — empiricists like Card and Krueger began to take over the discipline of economics, while the scholars who recoiled at his minimum wage research became both rarer and quieter. And as the economics profession evolved, so did economists’ beliefs about the minimum wage.

There's a lot of good condensed information in there, but the bottom line is that there is significant evidence that the current minimum wage is way to low to cause significant employment losses with the proposed raise.

Hey now poor people doesn't deserve 15$ an hour. How is that for a counter argument? :P

@horgen: Policy by morality play is largely all that's left without blatantly ignoring modern evidence. Your rebuttal will be used by someone, I'm sure.

Ignoring modern evidence. Never seen that before. Nope, never, not at all.

@mattbbpl said:

@HoolaHoopMan said:

@mattbbpl said:

To be fair, it's been a while. How do we know that it will turn out the same way now as it did in the before time?

I'm not very sold on the argument to be honest. If anything I believe the magnitude of change to be the larger argument against it, not the time element. We're talking about a 100% increase, at least in some states.

The impact would be felt differently on a state, county, city, level depending on their local minimum wage. Places where there's no minimum or the state minimum is below federal would feel the impact harder obviously. However, I'm of the opinion that a net amount of good would probably come of the increase. If the sudden jolt is too much they should just implement it in phases.

The bigger problem today is income inequality. Everyone is so myopic and over fetishizes the unemployment rate numbers, never contextualizing them. Cost of living is far outpacing wages for the lower class and isn't sustainable. What good will a $7.25 an hour job be if it can't even pay rent? I guess we can be proud of our unemployment numbers while ignoring our poverty and homelessness numbers.

My response above was meant to dripping in sarcasm, but I'm horrible at conveying that through text.

I know what you're saying, and I'm with you. Here's a graph that I think illustrates your point well.

It's all good, I should have known my audience better. I guess I'm at the point where I'm tired of hearing the same recycled excuses while ignoring actual literature on the subject.

Negative rates. If we're going to spend, now is the time to do it.

Cool.

@mattbbpl: Liberal lies from a Trump nominee!

As long as the policy is right, I'm fine with whatever name is in front of it.

But what about the money?!

lol 'package was too small'.

I knew the moment it was valued at a 1/3 of the original proposal it was a no go. Nothing for local and state governments as well. I was hoping that these 10 senators would at least meet Joe around the 1.2 trillion mark.

@mattbbpl:

I'm really happy to hear that Democrats aren't making the same mistakes that they did in 2009 by waiting for Republicans to compromise with them who are arguing in bad faith.

@Serraph105: They still have plenty of time to make those mistakes. To wit:

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/03/schumer-and-mcconnell-agree-to-organizing-resolution-for-50-50-senate-465444