How many of you have ever wanted a different choice in the general election, but have been stuck with Republican or Democrat, and no other options? Lord knows I would LOVE to have other options. There are MANY other political parties out there, the largest of which is the Libertarian Party.
The Libertarian Party is the 3rd largest political party in the nation (after Republicans and Democrats, of course) and also the fastest growing party. Here's where it gets REALLY good. The Libertarians believe in personal freedom and responsibility for your actions, and small government.
What does this really mean to you? It means much lower taxes, because the government doesn't have it's hands in everything. It also means that you will have a much higher level of personal freedom. You have the ability to make choices in your own life, without the government telling you what to choose. Libertarians typically believe that drug control is a wasted policy, and people should be free to do what they want to do. If you feel like smoking a joint when you get home from work, that is your choice. Whatever choices you make in life with have natural consequences that you have to live with. If you OD on Heroine and end up mentally handicapped because of the experience, then that was your choice, and you are suffering the natural consequences of that decision.
There is no reason why the government should be involved in many of the things that it deals with every day. You would be free to make your own decisions, and reap the rewards or suffer the consequences of those decisions. Gee, now why didn't anyone else think of that? Wait! They did. More than 200 years ago, a rather large group of people thought of that, and drafted a document founding a nation on those very same ideals.
However, in Washington State, we have what is known as a 'top two' primary. This means that the candidates that receive the highest and second highest votes are automatically the only two candidates listed on the general election ballot. Even if the third highest was only one vote behind the second highest.
This almost always means that every position will have a Republican and a Democrat, and nobody else listed for the general election ballot. Theoretically, you could have two people from the same party, but that's almost as likely to happen as having two people that are neither Republican or Democrat on the ballot. It's just highly unlikely.
So, at least for now, you will be stuck with the choice of Republican or Democrat on the general election ballots in Washington State. The other options are blocked for you, because of how our government chooses to run elections here.
To find out more about what the Libertarian Party believe in and stands for, check out http://www.lp.org/issues.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Washington State Minimum Wage Law - Friend or Foe?
I recently had a rather lively discussion with a family member regarding minimum wage. She was arguing that the minimum wage law in Washington State was a good thing, I was arguing quite the opposite. As I get rather lively while arguing anything regarding laws that I think are ridiculous, I'm happy that my family members are a little more in control than I am, and she simply backed down from the argument saying 'we're obviously not going to agree', and we dropped it.
That gave me the idea to write a brief article explaining exactly why the law in Washington State is stupid. Feel free to send in whatever comments you want supporting either my opinion, or your own opinion on this, but if you think I'm wrong, I can explain to you in no uncertain terms why I'm not.
The law in Washington State, adopted by a vote of the people 1998 (Initiative 688), requires L&I to make a cost-of-living adjustment to the minimum wage each year based on the federal Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). What this means, in normal language, is that every year in October, the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries figures out what the inflation for the year was, multiplies that by a really long number, and figures out how much to increase the minimum wage.
The initiative was passed into law by a vote in 1998, and became effective January 1st, 1999. The law initially raised minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $5.70 an hour in 1999, $6.50 in 2000, and then started the calculations based on inflation for every year thereafter. Since the law was passed, 2010 was the only year that the wage did not increase, owing to the fact that the inflation rate actually decreased. For 2011, the wage is set to increase, once again, to $8.67 per hour. While you may look at this and see 'only' a $0.12 per hour increase, lets do the math for a small business owner.
Lets say that you own a small sporting goods store. You employ 15 people, not counting yourself, and you act as manager for your store. Of those 15 people, you can safely assume that 10 of them are making minimum wage. We'll further assume that those 10 people all work about 20 hours per week. This is not at all an unlikely scenario, although most businesses would have more than 15 people running the place.
A $0.12 per hour increase, times 20 hours makes $2.40 per week. Multiply that by 10 people, you're looking at $24.00 per week. Now, multiply that times 52 weeks per year and you have a net loss of $1248 per year. So this business owner, through no fault of his own, has lost $1248 a year from either his income or his business operating budget for the year, depending on how he has things set up.
Whoopy, $1248. Not a lot, right. Ok, so if your employer comes up to you and says that they're cutting your wage by $100 a month, what are you going to have to say about it?
Let's take it a step further. What if minimum wage went up $0.48 (like it did from 2008 to 2009)? Well, that same scenario above would have lost the small business owner $4992 a year, or $416 a month. How many of you want to lose $416 a month from your income?
It keeps going from there. How about when the owner is barely scratching by, and just can't take that loss to his income. Well, there's one sure way to make that money up. If you lose $4992 a year based on something you can't control, and you have 500 sales a month that average $50 per sale, you can make up the difference by increasing your costs. Just add another $1 per sale, and that will cover it. So now the owner is forced to spend time going through his inventory and determining which items he can increase the price of without making too many customers angry, and without affecting his overall customer base. So now costs go up.
How is inflation calculated? It's based on costs. If costs go up because of a law, that causes inflation. If inflation goes up, then next year when L&I calculates the minimum wage, it's going to go up. This, in turn, causes small business owners to have to increase their prices, or close their doors, which in turn causes yet more inflation. Are we seeing the pattern here yet?
This example was based on one small business, with one owner who operates as the manger of the store. Several years ago, I managed a restaurant, and the owner of this restaurant owned two others in addition to the one I managed. The one I managed lost him about $32,000 a year. The other two combined gave him a net income of about $25,000 per year. When calculating the minimum wage increase one year, I found that it was going to cost him $34,000 to pay the increases, and this was assuming that we didn't increase the wages for the people who were making more than minimum wage at that time. So that would have reduced his net income to -$9,000 per year. Hmmm..... Seems to be a problem. Once again, prices were raised to compensate for this discrepancy. Of course, we couldn't raise prices enough to take up all the slack without alienating a lot of customers, so he ended up losing money in the long run, once again.
Yet, the most frequent arguments I hear FOR this ridiculous law is 'people can't live on that'. I'm going on the record, and my official campaign will be based on this. Duh. That's the only response I can possibly make to such a over exaggerated, simplistic view point. Minimum wage was NEVER intended to be a 'living wage' for your average US worker. Minimum wage was established to prevent employers from taking unfair advantage of industrial workers in 'sweat shops', which were mostly staffed by women and children who, at that time in history, had no real power in the world at all. People were being worked for 18 hours a day, and paid little to nothing. Some of these places had cots where people would sleep between shifts, and some people lived there full time because they could afford nothing better. It was the equivalent of indentured servitude, and was a very harsh way of barely surviving. Minimum wage and labor laws, specifically child labor laws, were passed to prevent this atrocity from continuing. Slowly over the years, the focus has shifted to the point where people believe that it should be a wage that a person can support their family on. This notion is patently ridiculous, and just not possible. How in the world can you require employers to pay such a wage, for what is an unskilled profession (face it, if it was skilled labor, or something requiring specialized knowledge, they would be making much more than minimum wage)? Who would then be making MORE than minimum wage, and thus be able to afford the products of the businesses that are paying minimum wage? The is no way, economically, this could support itself.
Minimum wage is a STARTING WAGE for people just entering the work force, with little or no specialized skill, training, or knowledge. Anyone who is a hard working, contributing member of society, will be able to earn more than minimum wage simply by showing their bosses that their output is of higher quality, or they are more productive, or have the ability to do more than the other people working there. However, if you're working for a minimum wage job in Washington State, it's difficult to every advance, because every year that industry is hit with a cost increase that they must somehow attempt to absorb and continue to be in business.
The people who work their entire careers, going from one minimum wage job to another, never getting much more than that, never making it further ahead in live, are the people that the voters in Washington said needed a little extra 'help' by increasing the Minimum Wage. They are also not helped one bit by the wage increases, that are constantly offset by price increases every year. They WOULD be helped by specialized training, or education of some sort that made them more productive, and allowed them to contribute more to a business, thus being more competitive in the market place, and being able to earn a higher wage. Most people have the ability to help themselves, if they'd just look for ways to do so, and they choose not too. Very few people have no ability to help themselves, and those people are the ones that we should offer assistance too. The people that choose not to try, even though they have the ability to do so, have absolutely no right to complain about their 'lot in life'. If you're unhappy with your life, try to do something to change it. Learn something new. Seek advice from somewhere. Ask friends, family members, or even total strangers for ideas.
Here's a novel concept. Take responsibility for your own position in life, and do something about it.
That gave me the idea to write a brief article explaining exactly why the law in Washington State is stupid. Feel free to send in whatever comments you want supporting either my opinion, or your own opinion on this, but if you think I'm wrong, I can explain to you in no uncertain terms why I'm not.
The law in Washington State, adopted by a vote of the people 1998 (Initiative 688), requires L&I to make a cost-of-living adjustment to the minimum wage each year based on the federal Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). What this means, in normal language, is that every year in October, the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries figures out what the inflation for the year was, multiplies that by a really long number, and figures out how much to increase the minimum wage.
The initiative was passed into law by a vote in 1998, and became effective January 1st, 1999. The law initially raised minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $5.70 an hour in 1999, $6.50 in 2000, and then started the calculations based on inflation for every year thereafter. Since the law was passed, 2010 was the only year that the wage did not increase, owing to the fact that the inflation rate actually decreased. For 2011, the wage is set to increase, once again, to $8.67 per hour. While you may look at this and see 'only' a $0.12 per hour increase, lets do the math for a small business owner.
Lets say that you own a small sporting goods store. You employ 15 people, not counting yourself, and you act as manager for your store. Of those 15 people, you can safely assume that 10 of them are making minimum wage. We'll further assume that those 10 people all work about 20 hours per week. This is not at all an unlikely scenario, although most businesses would have more than 15 people running the place.
A $0.12 per hour increase, times 20 hours makes $2.40 per week. Multiply that by 10 people, you're looking at $24.00 per week. Now, multiply that times 52 weeks per year and you have a net loss of $1248 per year. So this business owner, through no fault of his own, has lost $1248 a year from either his income or his business operating budget for the year, depending on how he has things set up.
Whoopy, $1248. Not a lot, right. Ok, so if your employer comes up to you and says that they're cutting your wage by $100 a month, what are you going to have to say about it?
Let's take it a step further. What if minimum wage went up $0.48 (like it did from 2008 to 2009)? Well, that same scenario above would have lost the small business owner $4992 a year, or $416 a month. How many of you want to lose $416 a month from your income?
It keeps going from there. How about when the owner is barely scratching by, and just can't take that loss to his income. Well, there's one sure way to make that money up. If you lose $4992 a year based on something you can't control, and you have 500 sales a month that average $50 per sale, you can make up the difference by increasing your costs. Just add another $1 per sale, and that will cover it. So now the owner is forced to spend time going through his inventory and determining which items he can increase the price of without making too many customers angry, and without affecting his overall customer base. So now costs go up.
How is inflation calculated? It's based on costs. If costs go up because of a law, that causes inflation. If inflation goes up, then next year when L&I calculates the minimum wage, it's going to go up. This, in turn, causes small business owners to have to increase their prices, or close their doors, which in turn causes yet more inflation. Are we seeing the pattern here yet?
This example was based on one small business, with one owner who operates as the manger of the store. Several years ago, I managed a restaurant, and the owner of this restaurant owned two others in addition to the one I managed. The one I managed lost him about $32,000 a year. The other two combined gave him a net income of about $25,000 per year. When calculating the minimum wage increase one year, I found that it was going to cost him $34,000 to pay the increases, and this was assuming that we didn't increase the wages for the people who were making more than minimum wage at that time. So that would have reduced his net income to -$9,000 per year. Hmmm..... Seems to be a problem. Once again, prices were raised to compensate for this discrepancy. Of course, we couldn't raise prices enough to take up all the slack without alienating a lot of customers, so he ended up losing money in the long run, once again.
Yet, the most frequent arguments I hear FOR this ridiculous law is 'people can't live on that'. I'm going on the record, and my official campaign will be based on this. Duh. That's the only response I can possibly make to such a over exaggerated, simplistic view point. Minimum wage was NEVER intended to be a 'living wage' for your average US worker. Minimum wage was established to prevent employers from taking unfair advantage of industrial workers in 'sweat shops', which were mostly staffed by women and children who, at that time in history, had no real power in the world at all. People were being worked for 18 hours a day, and paid little to nothing. Some of these places had cots where people would sleep between shifts, and some people lived there full time because they could afford nothing better. It was the equivalent of indentured servitude, and was a very harsh way of barely surviving. Minimum wage and labor laws, specifically child labor laws, were passed to prevent this atrocity from continuing. Slowly over the years, the focus has shifted to the point where people believe that it should be a wage that a person can support their family on. This notion is patently ridiculous, and just not possible. How in the world can you require employers to pay such a wage, for what is an unskilled profession (face it, if it was skilled labor, or something requiring specialized knowledge, they would be making much more than minimum wage)? Who would then be making MORE than minimum wage, and thus be able to afford the products of the businesses that are paying minimum wage? The is no way, economically, this could support itself.
Minimum wage is a STARTING WAGE for people just entering the work force, with little or no specialized skill, training, or knowledge. Anyone who is a hard working, contributing member of society, will be able to earn more than minimum wage simply by showing their bosses that their output is of higher quality, or they are more productive, or have the ability to do more than the other people working there. However, if you're working for a minimum wage job in Washington State, it's difficult to every advance, because every year that industry is hit with a cost increase that they must somehow attempt to absorb and continue to be in business.
The people who work their entire careers, going from one minimum wage job to another, never getting much more than that, never making it further ahead in live, are the people that the voters in Washington said needed a little extra 'help' by increasing the Minimum Wage. They are also not helped one bit by the wage increases, that are constantly offset by price increases every year. They WOULD be helped by specialized training, or education of some sort that made them more productive, and allowed them to contribute more to a business, thus being more competitive in the market place, and being able to earn a higher wage. Most people have the ability to help themselves, if they'd just look for ways to do so, and they choose not too. Very few people have no ability to help themselves, and those people are the ones that we should offer assistance too. The people that choose not to try, even though they have the ability to do so, have absolutely no right to complain about their 'lot in life'. If you're unhappy with your life, try to do something to change it. Learn something new. Seek advice from somewhere. Ask friends, family members, or even total strangers for ideas.
Here's a novel concept. Take responsibility for your own position in life, and do something about it.
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