Individual perceptions

Obama should bring up this graph during his many fundraising events to show what kind of jobs he "created" with his mad economic skills. That graph won't look any better once he unilaterally gives some amnesty payback (after the election of course.)

The difference, Z, is that I do not attempt to manipulate the data into supporting my position as you have done with your graph. Your graph includes 3 groups. One that comprises 3 years, one that comprises 4 years and one that comprises 40 years. Now given that the final group is at least 10x as large as any of the others, wouldn't one expect it to hold more of whatever is being examined than the other two? It would only be remarkable if instead of larger it was smaller, and yet the statists wish to imply something else, something sinister, is demonstrated. That only serves to demonstrate just how deceptive such people are.

Anyone can look up what the federal minimum wage was in 1938, anyone can plug that number into an inflation calculator and find out what the equivalent amount of money would be today. That doesn't require a link, just a little effort beyond regurgitating what one hears in their chosen echo chamber.

The reality of the minimum wage law is that it is a classic application of the Bootleggers and Baptists regulatory economic theory. The Baptists in this case are those who think of the individual person who labors for minimum wage, but who are the bootleggerrs? Why, the unions, mostly public employee unions, whose own base wage is tied to the federal minimum wage law. Their pay has not been increasing much over the course of the Obama "recovery" because tax revenues are still down and tax revenues are the source of their paychecks. Since the voters, who themselves are still struggling for the most part to pay their bills, aren't generally in the mood to surrender even more of the fruits of their labors to government at the present time, the unions are looking for a backdoor, a way to do an end around the voters and get their raises anyway. Enter the push to increase the minimum wage. The politicians can't say they support an increase because it will pay back their public employee union backers for their support, but they can say that they support the increase because economic justice, another statist buzz phrase, requires that people be paid a "living wage" (yet a third statist buzz phrase).

Wages to do work are based on the value of the work performed, not the value of the person performing the work. Those governed by reason understand and accept this intuitively, while those governed by emotion either struggle to grasp the concept or actively seek to demonize it in pursuit of their agenda.

Here's what the Pew Research Center had to say on the subject:

Perhaps surprisingly, not very many people earn minimum wage, and they make up a smaller share of the workforce than they used to. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, last year 1.532 million hourly workers earned the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour; nearly 1.8 million more earned less than that because they fell under one of several exemptions (tipped employees, full-time students, certain disabled workers and others), for a total of 3.3 million hourly workers at or below the federal minimum.

That group represents 4.3% of the nation’s 75.9 million hourly-paid workers and 2.6% of all wage and salary workers. In 1979, when the BLS began regularly studying minimum-wage workers, they represented 13.4% of hourly workers and 7.9% of all wage and salary workers. (Bear in mind that the 3.3 million figure doesn’t include salaried workers, although BLS says relatively few salaried workers are paid at what would translate into below-minimum hourly rates. Also, 23 states, as well as the District of Columbia, have higher minimum wages than the federal standard; people who earned the state minimum wage in those jurisdictions aren’t included in the 3.3 million total.)

www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/08...-makes-minimum-wage/

As a sidebar does anyone else remember when the feds made it illegal to raise prices or give anyone a raise?

I'm not old enough to remember it, but I am familiar with that bit of "progressive" history as well. It was the primary reason that health insurance moved from something that was individually acquired to something provided by your employer. Since employers couldn't raise your wages, they raised the value of the benefits offered to work for the company. That shift was actually encouraged by the federal government and suggested by it as an alternative means of raising the compensation offered to employees. Another Bootleggers and Baptists bit of regulatory slight of hand courtesy of the statists.

PrintSmith wrote: I'm not old enough to remember it, but I am familiar with that bit of "progressive" history as well. It was the primary reason that health insurance moved from something that was individually acquired to something provided by your employer. Since employers couldn't raise your wages, they raised the value of the benefits offered to work for the company. That shift was actually encouraged by the federal government and suggested by it as an alternative means of raising the compensation offered to employees. Another Bootleggers and Baptists bit of regulatory slight of hand courtesy of the statists.

Actually I was referring to Nixon ~1972.

PrintSmith wrote: The difference, Z, is that I do not attempt to manipulate the data into supporting my position as you have done with your graph. Your graph includes 3 groups. One that comprises 3 years, one that comprises 4 years and one that comprises 40 years. Now given that the final group is at least 10x as large as any of the others, wouldn't one expect it to hold more of whatever is being examined than the other two? It would only be remarkable if instead of larger it was smaller, and yet the statists wish to imply something else, something sinister, is demonstrated. That only serves to demonstrate just how deceptive such people are.

First of all, it isn't "my" graph. That's your inference.

Second, the fact you continue to refuse to provide links to your source data is more indicative of manipulation on your part than anything I've done to manipulate anyone. You see potatoes, I see potahtoes. Manipulation is all in the eye of the beholder.

Once again, I'll ask why my data is flawed and yours isn't, even though mine comes from the same source supposedly as some of your data. I offered to provide the source of this graph if you would reciprocate for yours. Thus far, you've been silent in this regard.

Regarding the "deception" allegation you make, everyone has an agenda. You have an agenda. I have an agenda. That those agendas are put forward in a forum like this isn't unique. Nor is it valid, as far as I'm concerned, to accuse one side of trying to do so without acknowledging one's own efforts to do so, as well.

PrintSmith wrote: Anyone can look up what the federal minimum wage was in 1938, anyone can plug that number into an inflation calculator and find out what the equivalent amount of money would be today. That doesn't require a link, just a little effort beyond regurgitating what one hears in their chosen echo chamber.

You're correct in that anyone can, in fact, look up anything they want to on the Internet. Taking your "just a little effort" into consideration, wouldn't it be just as easy for you to provide that effort? You put the information out there. Back it up with citations.

When you posit something with no factual backup, it diminishes your credibility as far as I'm concerned. My asking for verifiable citations isn't meant to be a hardship on you. Rather, it is my attempt to learn. Virtually every single site I visit has links embedded into their articles as source data. It isn't that hard to do. Virtually every scholar who writes anything for anyone does the same thing. It's professional.

www.studentnewsdaily.com/conservative-vs-liberal-beliefs/
This covers it pretty well. Liberals want to be taken care of by the government and conservatives want the government to leave us alone.

HEARTLESS wrote: www.studentnewsdaily.com/conservative-vs-liberal-beliefs/
This covers it pretty well. Liberals want to be taken care of by the government and conservatives want the government to leave us alone.

I got to thinking about my original text in this post and decided it needed to be changed because it went against my own rule of thumb/rules to live by.

That being said, individual perceptions of what's being said come through loud and clear in your post. In my view, the first sentence of each side of the divide pretty much says it all:

Liberals believe in government action to achieve equal opportunity and equality for all.

Conservatives believe in personal responsibility, limited government, free markets, individual liberty, traditional American values and a strong national defense.

Neither of these perspectives, on their face, are bad. It's when people, themselves, "interpret" what's being said to fit their own biases that each of them takes on a different meaning for each individual.