America's Tax Burden To Rise

care to point toward some of that proof?

BTW, you are the last person to be qualifying other's credentials when you claim to be an accountant but can't even wrap your head around legal forms of tax evasion.

So then, is it worth risking job losses with a raise in the minimum wage to help a smaller number of people have more money that likely won't use it to rise above poverty anyway?

Poverty and minimum wages aren't the same thing, at least they shouldn't be. Raising the minimum wage always has a positive impact on reducing poverty rates, the problems is that it is raised modest amounts about a decade after it should be.

You spent a paragraph explaining how one can lie with numbers in terms of productivity reporting and then completely whiffed the point I was making.

Maybe I am being too subtle. Or maybe the word "poverty" is being treated like other ***-words, e.g., "healthy," where no one is prepared to offer a definition and it just gets to mean what you think you want it to mean.

When I say "poverty is tied to federal minimum wage," I'm referring to federal poverty guidelines. Those little bumps you see when the minimum gets raised are eventually flattened out as the guidelines themselves get adjusted. Federal minimum wage largely gets increased to keep apace with inflation, after all, not to provide people with better lives. Even President Obama's $10.10 figure is mostly just inflation because the US dollar has dipped pretty hard in our lifetime.

It's everyone's favorite game: move the goalposts and claim a win. If we really cared about dragging people out of poverty (or, alternatively, making poverty a sufficient minimum for people to live in), we'd either charge all those job-creators pocketing our money to move their ***back on US soil or we'd nationalize some businesses and employ people through government. I'm sure there are other options, mind you, but minimum wage jobs are the service-sector-***jobs that no one really wants to fill. Even pushing a broom around a construction site should pay $9/hour in most markets.

So then, is it worth risking job losses with a raise in the minimum wage to help a smaller number of people have more money that likely won't use it to rise above poverty anyway?

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No, I was making sure you didn't have an elementary understanding of economics.

But I disagree with you in your idea that raising minimum wages has a positive impact at all. There is a weak correlation between the two, but other proven factors play a key role in decreasing poverty. In fact, it also has been proven that raising minimum wage does nothing more than increase the wage that defines the poverty line, and by definition increases poverty, both in the short and long terms.

For most families with low-wage workers, a higher minimum
wage boosts family income, because of the increase
in earnings that many of those workers (including those
whose wages were slightly above the new minimum)
receive. A much smaller number of low-wage workers
become jobless and therefore experience a decline in
earnings because of the higher minimum wage.

For families with low-wage workers, the effect of a higher
minimum wage depends on how many such workers are
in a family, whether those workers become jobless (and, if
so, for how long), and whether there are other changes in
family income. For instance, the decline in income from
losing a job can be offset in part by increases in nonlabor
income, such as unemployment compensation, or by
increases in the work of other family members.

For business owners, family income (including income
for shareholders) falls to the extent that firms’ profits are
reduced. In addition, real family income for many people
tends to fall a bit, because the increase in prices of goods
and services reduces families’ purchasing power.

The effects on total national income of an increase in the
minimum wage differ in the long term and in the short
term. In the long term, the key determinant of the
nation’s output and income is the size and quality of the
workforce, the stock of productive capital (such as factories
and computers), and the efficiency with which workers
and capital are used to produce goods and services
(known as total factor productivity). Raising the minimum
wage probably reduces employment, in CBO’s
assessment. In the long term, that reduction in the workforce
lowers the nation’s output and income a little,
which means that the income losses of some people are
slightly larger than the income gains of others. In the
short term, by contrast, the nation’s output and income
can deviate from the amounts that would typically arise
from a given workforce, capital stock, and productivity in
response to changes in the economywide demand for
goods and services. Raising the minimum wage increases
that demand, in CBO’s assessment, because the families
that experience increases in income tend to raise their
consumption more than the families that experience
decreases in income tend to reduce their consumption.

Raising the minimum wage increases
that demand, in CBO’s assessment, because the families
that experience increases in income tend to raise their
consumption more than the families that experience
decreases in income tend to reduce their consumption.

The people losing jobs from the raise would be the worst skilled people. Firms are more likely going to fire someone who has the lowest skill rather than someone with better skill even both are working in an unskilled job. A skill training course would , hopefully, bring some of these people back into the workforce - displacing other worse skill workers and have them back into the training ground.

If I recall the date right, that 2003~ upward turn of profits of the 1% correlates about the same time as the Bush tax cuts, no?

Talk about wealth redistribution...

Not his source for this claim, however this is the closest thing I could find to support his claims, from the CBO.

Source (PDF)

I was referring to the fact that real wages do not increase. I know if Jassik and Kara ever opened an economic book before, they would have seen it somewhere towards the middle of the book.

Nominal income rises, but real income stays flat. Our purchasing power goes down, so that bottle of water that costs $1.25 when we were making 7.50/hr goes up to $1.75 when we are making 10/hr. (not exactly, but you get the picture, I hope).

Maybe if people were aware of their surroundings during the last few minimum wage increases, they would have seen the price of common items sharply increase each time minimum wage increases. Ever stopped to ask why that is every time?

Increasing the minimum wage, to me, is counterproductive to any kind of Keynesian method to control inflation. You penalize the consumer by increasing the price of ordinary goods, and let the banks keep their dirt cheap interest rates. Not that I agree with a Keynesian model at all, but if you're going to follow it, do it the right way for a change.

You don't 'buy' propaganda, you only 'invest' in it.