"Making my point for me"??? What the hell does that mean?

Sam Walton's dad was a farmer, Bill Gates' dad was a lawyer, and Zuckerberg's dad was a dentist.

"Wealthy" is a broad and imprecise definition, and farmers, dentists and lawyers are not normally poor, but they also hardly qualify as being in the same financial league as "self-made" gazillionaire entrepreneurs.

And if "the rest of Sam Walton's family" means his kids (I don't know anything about his siblings), it's asinine to say he got rich on his kid's wealth. Rational people would assume the kids got rich on Sam's wealth, right?

If that constitutes 'Making your point' for you in your mind, maybe you and I need to refrain from engaging.

"I'll see your Kylie Jenner, and raise you a Steve Jobes, a Sam Walton, a Bill Gates, a Jeff Bezos, a Paul Allen, a Steve Wozniac, a Michael Dell, a Mark Cuban, a Warren Buffet, the Google guys, and a couple dozen more 'self-made' gazillionaires whose names escape me at the moment."

Billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates both came from wealthy families just off the top of my head too. Not to mention the rest of Sam Walton's family other than Sam Walton himself.

Thank you once again for making my point for me.

If the entrepreneur has designed a business model that doesn't work they should go out of business.

Thank you so much for this gift. I shall treasure it dearly. *laughs* :)

What you present as a simple fact, is, in fact, your simplistic assertion. You don't present any real data, and you aren't specific about the model you are using, although
I would assume it is some form of the venerable supply demand curves intersect at price. There isn't just one plot, there are plots for every market. This is a massively multivariate problem. Napkins are notoriously 2-D, unless you are gifted in perspective drawing, in which case I'll grant you 3. Some low end workers lose jobs, but extinction is not a given and remaining workers can be expected to raise demand in other sectors, which may or may not increase the employment rate. Experts disagree.

Just because you can fit a model to data doesn't mean the model makes useful predictions. At the economic level of politics it is a macro, not a micro problem. As I noted earlier, simple supply demand models don't address externalities. Maybe not important to the factory owner, but very important to the public, who vote.

Garbage in, garbage out. So who is spouting mumbo-jumbo?

y'think?

like if i suggested people vote based on pie and after a decade or more of trying nobody did, i should find some other way to try to convince people to vote?

OK, do you actually intend that mumbo jumbo to be some sort of refutation of the simple fact I enunciated in my [13], or is it on the principle of "If you can't wow them with wisdom, baffle them with bullshit"??

None of your cracker barrel micro economic analyses of macroeconomic problems seem to include the concept of externalities, the costs or benefits incurred by third parties affected by an economic activity who have no say in the matter. This is the economic equivalent of military collateral damage....or the Gerrymander. Choose your economic boundaries to get the prediction that best supports your preferred outcome. It's sort of a free lunch, which supposedly doesn't/can't exist.

Your [18] argument is eaually true (or equally specious), with a Min wage of $40/hr, so why are you being so niggardly with your pay raises???

I'll see your Kylie Jenner, and raise you a Steve Jobes, a Sam Walton, a Bill Gates, a Jeff Bezos, a Paul Allen, a Steve Wozniac, a Michael Dell, a Mark Cuban, a Warren Buffet, the Google guys, and a couple dozen more 'self-made' gazillionaires whose names escape me at the moment.

But please don't raise ME with Obama's thing about how all those guys "drove on the public roads", etc. All the poor people and their kids also drove on the public roads, right?

According to a new paper put out by the Centre for Economic Policy research written by Sandra Black, an economics professor at the University of Texas Austin, and 3 co-authors, plus a raft of research, wealthy people are mostly wealthy because their parents are wealthy and has little to do with their actual inherent abilities.

They examined parents of adopted children in Sweden, where such data is extensive. They then looked at the wealth of the children in their mid 40's. The parents' wealth was a better predictor of their child's wealth than any other factor.

Wealthy parents have the ability to invest in their children to a type and a degree that other parents simply do not have access to, in terms of education, physical safety (an affluent neighborhood), extracurricular activities, and connections to other wealthy people who can act as investors and provide business contacts and loans that simply aren't obtainable to ordinary people. Wealthy parents also provide their children with a fabulous safety net that allows the children to gamble on risks they could not otherwise make. If you are growing up in a poor neighborhood and just scraping by instead, it becomes that much more harder to capitalize on and utilize any talents that you might actually have.

Kylie Jenner for example, while at least being intelligent about marketing and promotion, became a young billionaire, not because she invented some great new lipstick that never existed before, but because of the value the celebrity of her family brings her.

"Result, Jack either gets a robot to flip his burgers, or goes out of business. Either way, the flipper becomes unemployed, and NOT because of a "flaw in the business plan"!"

The flip side of that reality, which you fail to mention, is that if that burger flipping job does get eliminated, it's likely that worker will find employment at some other 15 dollar an hour job, such as being a coffee barista at Starbucks, where people will pay 5 dollars for a cup of coffee, and that worker will end up making more money because they now hold a 15 an hour job that didn't exist before, since it may have paid only 9 dollars an hour previously.

Re "Min wage laws do not . ." We need to HOPE they do not, because they certainly can.

Theoretical example, perhaps the burger flipper at a local fast food joint. Maybe not so in NYC, but where I live, jack (the owner) will quickly discover that he cannot pay his flipper $15/hr and still stay in business without raising the prices of his 'Bigjacks'. Trouble is, if he raises his prices, his customers will all switch to the pizza place next door.

Result, Jack either gets a robot to flip his burgers, or goes out of business. Either way, the flipper becomes unemployed, and NOT because of a "flaw in the business plan"!

The only way Min Wage laws can be quaranteed not to kill any jobs is when set so low that they are below the local labor mkt, meaning don' really do any good except make politicians feel good.

One of those is the law that monetary compensations (wages) are of necesssity, a function of productivity. If we pass legislation in violation of that particular law (as in mandating that a job which produces "X" amount of actual goods or services has to bear a wage that is in excess of "X", meaning that the person (entrepreneur) who creates the job is legally mandated to lose money for having created it, that job simply automatically ceases to exist.

Reality can be a bitch to live with, but it's still always reality!

If we are going to go down this road, let's decide on basic standards of living, and set the local living wage accordingly. Housing, education, medial care being the big three as I see it. Do we increase wages, or do we pay for the basics with taxes making up for shortfalls in minimum wages?

If 7 ft-tall guys who have the talent to toss a basketball thru a hoop from mid-court could only be allowed to earn $70,000/annum instead of $70 million, the price of basketball game tickets would likely decline to $.75.. If doctors could only earn $100K, the price of appendectomies would drop by 90%.

Something to think about!

If 7 ft-tall guys who have the talent to toss a basketball thru a hoop from mid-court could only be allowed to earn $70,000/annum instead of $70 million, the price of basketball game tickets would likely decline to $.75.. If doctors could only earn $100K, the price of appendectomies would drop by 90%.

Something to think about!

"A rising tide may lift all boats, but if you don't have a job then you don't have a boat and a rising tide doesn't help you if you are standing on your tippytoes up to your neck in the water- and there just won't be enough jobs for everyone."

Republicans are always fond of saying how many jobs they create without a minimum wage. But the caveat to that is always that those 8 dollar an hour jobs don't do anyone any good except for the illegal immigrants, since they are the only ones who can afford to live on and actually improve their situation from where they come from, at that level of income.

$15 falls a bit short, but is a lot closer than nothing.

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/11/18/heres-why-the-rich-do-get-richer.html

Exactly right that there won't be any such lower-wage states to move to. Thank goodness that there are no countries overseas that would welcome these companies with open arms and a near unending supply of low-wage workers... oh, wait!

I'm not trying to be a jackass... okay, maybe I am... but just FYI for people living happily in states not located in the South and other parts of the country similarly situated where the cost of living is vastly different, you should know that a $15 per hour minimum wage could literally decimate a multitude of small businesses and make quite a large dent in some medium and large ones as well. If anything of the sort is going to be enacted nationwide, it must be a phase in (as CW said), and would it be out of the question if it could be coupled with penalties and/or incentives for companies that endeavored to move overseas? Please. :)