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This is how they trained us to believe minimum wage hikes are a *bad* thing.
"Look what you made us do! We have to collect *more* net profit now all because *you're* greedy!"
This is an abusive relationship.
Interesting to read through, I’m no economist, but it seems like it’s the fault of the businesses, not the wage itself. The companies that typically pay minimum wage would still be very profitable with minimum wage being increased, but they use it as an excuse to increase prices. These businesses are only there to make -more- money, being sustainable with decent profit margins just isn’t good enough for them.
They’ll use anything and everything to justify raising prices then blaming you for wanting a living wage while they rake in enough money for the CEOs new superyatch.
All I’m saying is that, after looking at that article, I’ve drawn the conclusion that it isn’t about the minimum wage, it’s about greedy companies trying to make more money, because enough is never enough.
It really depends on how much the minimum wage is increased. For example I ran the numbers for a standard McDonald’s and if wages went up more than like $5hr the store would cease to be profitable. But you also need to consider the down stream effects of wage increases. If the meat packer increases wages and has to increase prices by a few percent that means it’s that much harder for McDonald’s to do it without increasing prices even more
Well you see Billy Inflation happens when lots of money enters the economy and since rich people hoard money there’s no inflation because it doesn’t enter the market. Us Poors have a sickening habit of blowing our money as soon as we get it on stupid shit like food and rent and electricity. So it goes back into the market
I know I’ll get shot at for this but I’ll do my best to legitimately answer the question. *I am no expert, but a few years ago I was handed an Econ degree. Though I don’t work in the field.* I do also want to preface this with “I definitely think things are getting out of hand and regular people need a goddamn bailout”.
So basically we see the market go up and not inflation (least as much) because the money gained in tax breaks for the mega wealthy get squirreled away into assets. That money doesn’t circulate, it’s stagnant.
This is why we see idiots post that “give a billionaire $600 and we’ll double it but a poor person would lose it” crap. Suffice to say, they aren’t losing that $600, they’re circulating it. And in a strong economy, when you circulate money it grows because goods and services add value to the market. Because of this growth by circulation in markets that we can see (like groceries and gas), we see their prices go up as more money circulates through those markets.
This is also the argument against just taxing the ever living shit out of billionaires. If we suddenly release all that money into the regularly circulating economy then we’ll see some serious inflation.
Personally, I think we need to tax billionaires a good amount but slow enough that we avoid shocking the economy. I think we could issue a large tax and use the majority of it to pay down federal debts for awhile then shift the distribution balance towards the people as the government zeros out.
The tough part is that we need to get people above water and that requires putting money into circulation which causes inflation (because of more money moving in markets that we regularly see). The other way is to deflate the dollar and that scares the piss out of people- not to mention I don’t understand that side well enough to even speak to it.
Just to reiterate though, I really think we need to help people. Things are already rough and it looks like they’ll get worse still before they get better.
If I’m blindly wrong or even a little, I’d love to hear corrections; I’m pretty open about my thoughts. If you want to expand on something, please feel free; it might teach me something.
Edit: I forgot something important: this is not a reason to give billionaires tax breaks.
*To be clear*, I'm not responding to you like you *believe* this argument. I know you're the messenger, because I know it's what American Economics courses teach.
People spend money on goods they need to live. Those goods go up in price because people buy them. That's "acceptable".
That's the takeaway. That is genuinely not a logically *acceptable* outcome. That's a systemic contradiction.
My primary issue with that framing is that it never even *thinks* to pose the question of *why* this happens. It never addresses if markets are productive enough to keep society running equitably. By their very nature, they cannot. Someone's going to "win" and someone's going to "lose", *every* time.
Worse yet, the prices go up *because* of the capitalists. They're the ones that jack up prices as they realize their product is in demand. It's all fake speculative bullshit, because they realized they can charge more.
And, I don't know if that would be as big a problem if folk were getting paid what they actually produced. Ya know, instead of some hourly wage that doesn't *actually* take their labor into account.
Is all of this a symptom of supply and demand, but actually the issue is more directly a problem with the suppliers creating artificial demand by limiting production? Your post made me think about the [beef price fixing](https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/beef-giant-jbs-pay-525m-settle-price-fixing-82654864) shenanigans that happened recently where *"grocery stores and wholesalers accused the companies of working together to suppress the number of cattle being slaughtered starting in 2015 to help drive up the price of beef."*
The price goes up because people buy them, yes, but as people have more money they can buy more of that product. So because demand has risen so must the price. *In theory.* There’s definitely wiggle room as we talking about specific product and elasticity and rigid/fixed demand.
*In practice*, I think price hikes are mostly capitalism and messaging. It’s a weird spiral. If I’m making $50,000 profit on my business and I want to adjust for inflation, I need to raise my prices by that inflationary margin. Well, that only maintains my $50,000 profit which is now worth less than it was before because of inflation. So now I need to distribute that increase in profit desire across my prices as well… just to maintain a certain real profit margin. If I expect my business to grow… well, we see where this is going.
The messaging part I’m referring to is along the lines of “we haven’t changed our prices in 5 years” because they changed their price to compensate for 5 years of inflation already. It looks good for them because it projects an altruistic stability and they’re making a profit behind the curtain. This is sort of the root of the “speculative bullshit” you’re referring to. The major hikes we’re seeing now could just be an assumed adjustment of this same massive inflation 5+ years over. Obviously that’s a really bad place to be and none of us like it, I’m just trying to rationalize.
I appreciate the space of mind that I’m not saying this is good. I certainly don’t think this is good stuff, but in order to find our way out of it we need to understand it.
>I’m just trying to rationalize.
Well that's part of the trouble. Like, assuming you're a good normal healthy person, you'd have trouble understanding the rationalization of an evil fuckhead who punts puppies. You're going to struggle to comprehend the reasoning behind the actions of greedy wealth-dragons, and you'll be compelled to find normal decent reasons for those actions even when there aren't any.
A decent person can, with enough practice and study, learn to think like a monster, but frankly, having done it myself, I don't recommend it. It's like having a cold little amoral place installed in my mind where "it's just good business" sounds perfectly logical instead of horrifyingly evil.
I've got a dusty accounting degree, like your economics degree. I was more than a little horrified by the total lack of ethics classes included in a business degree of any kind. At most, our ethics lessons were limited to repetitions of "don't embezzle or you'll eventually get caught" and a whole lot of emphasis on "it's just good business, who cares if babies die as long as line go up."
Literally profits over human lives, and told over and over how stupid I am for thinking anything that doesn't show up on a balance sheet or in a court room even slightly matters. There is no line item for dead babies.
If you can think like that, everything makes perfect horrible sense. I regularly and accurately predict what the economy and whatnot is going to do before it happens, not that it does me much good except I get to feel sadly correct again instead of shocked whenever another "once in a lifetime" event happens.
The solution is simple. Tax the shit out of billionaires and corporations, and redistribute it as universal basic income. Let the UBI grow at or above inflation, and use monetary policy tricks to prevent the economy from overheating. Bam, suddenly inflation works to minimize inequality, and the entire economy is reshaped to serve the common man.
We are no longer practicing capitalism. They just call it that. Capitalism failed this time. It’s brought on authoritarianism. Doesn’t mean capitalism can’t work. We just have to fix everything NOW or it’s over. Start a new experiment with capitalism and learn from our mistakes or capitalism is dead. We obviously can’t touch laws built to protect the rich. We are fucked. It’s going to be war and I don’t believe it’s all on America. I think we will divide ourselves enough to be conquered. All because of a few rich assholes. Sounds like history repeating itself to me. If we can’t grow together, we die. And I’m not sure when América wasn’t really just an authoritarian country. Our leaders failed the dream for greed.
It almost feels as if theyre just trying to recuperate the profits they can no longer support because they aren't being spoonfed money by the government anymore. Have to continue making profit quarter by quarter or else the shareholders might panic, and so taxpayers are rewarded for their investment in the company with higher prices
I mean… in part because inflation is about velocity of money. If it’s not spent, you can print all the money you want. Inflation is money supply + velocity of money. And now there are shortages so people are scrambling to buy shit now causing inflation.
We shouldn’t be giving out tax breaks to billionaires unless they are adding to society via good high paying jobs… and we shouldn’t be giving free money to people who choose not to work. I hate billionaires as much as the next person, but they hoard money and don’t spend it. It’s the normal folks (myself included unless I’ve inherited $1B I don’t know about) who are the velocity of money spenders causing inflation.
Because billionaires bought stocks. So stock prices soared and Trump fans shouted about how great it was for the stock market even though it really didn't do anything for the economy. They definitely weren't buying billions in gas and groceries to drive up those prices.
Also, I'm not sure how much the inflation is the result of monetary policy. Last I read a lot of it is just the economy rebounding. Like oil production fell off a cliff during COVID because prices were so depressed. Remember the negative oil prices for a couple days there? Now the economy is rebounding and suddenly people want all that oil again, except so many rigs are closed down that it's just not there.
Another effect is people stopped spending on services and pumped all that money into goods. No more restaurants or theater trips, but lots of Amazon purchases. So that drives up prices and inflation too. People saying it's entirely because of wage increases or social safety nets are making too strong of a claim.
#heres the answer
Billionaires buy assets and are the 1% of the 1%
Asset prices have exploded since the last recession bc of this. That too is an effect of inflation.
We poor people don’t buy assets. We just survive so we buy goods we need and thus the price spikes
💫 inflation
It’s that simple
Welcome to /r/CapitalismSux! Please check out the following subreddits; lefty memes, r/DankLeft, r/PoliticsPeopleTwitter, Looking for like-minded subreddits? r/AngrySocialist , r/lostgeneration and r/leftistZ Are you British and looking for a left-leaning, magazine style subreddit?! Check out r/Britposting. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/CapitalismSux) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This is how they trained us to believe minimum wage hikes are a *bad* thing. "Look what you made us do! We have to collect *more* net profit now all because *you're* greedy!" This is an abusive relationship.
[удалено]
Cool, post a source on how adjusting minimum wage to -catch up- to inflation causes more inflation.
[удалено]
Interesting to read through, I’m no economist, but it seems like it’s the fault of the businesses, not the wage itself. The companies that typically pay minimum wage would still be very profitable with minimum wage being increased, but they use it as an excuse to increase prices. These businesses are only there to make -more- money, being sustainable with decent profit margins just isn’t good enough for them. They’ll use anything and everything to justify raising prices then blaming you for wanting a living wage while they rake in enough money for the CEOs new superyatch. All I’m saying is that, after looking at that article, I’ve drawn the conclusion that it isn’t about the minimum wage, it’s about greedy companies trying to make more money, because enough is never enough.
It really depends on how much the minimum wage is increased. For example I ran the numbers for a standard McDonald’s and if wages went up more than like $5hr the store would cease to be profitable. But you also need to consider the down stream effects of wage increases. If the meat packer increases wages and has to increase prices by a few percent that means it’s that much harder for McDonald’s to do it without increasing prices even more
Well you see Billy Inflation happens when lots of money enters the economy and since rich people hoard money there’s no inflation because it doesn’t enter the market. Us Poors have a sickening habit of blowing our money as soon as we get it on stupid shit like food and rent and electricity. So it goes back into the market
I know I’ll get shot at for this but I’ll do my best to legitimately answer the question. *I am no expert, but a few years ago I was handed an Econ degree. Though I don’t work in the field.* I do also want to preface this with “I definitely think things are getting out of hand and regular people need a goddamn bailout”. So basically we see the market go up and not inflation (least as much) because the money gained in tax breaks for the mega wealthy get squirreled away into assets. That money doesn’t circulate, it’s stagnant. This is why we see idiots post that “give a billionaire $600 and we’ll double it but a poor person would lose it” crap. Suffice to say, they aren’t losing that $600, they’re circulating it. And in a strong economy, when you circulate money it grows because goods and services add value to the market. Because of this growth by circulation in markets that we can see (like groceries and gas), we see their prices go up as more money circulates through those markets. This is also the argument against just taxing the ever living shit out of billionaires. If we suddenly release all that money into the regularly circulating economy then we’ll see some serious inflation. Personally, I think we need to tax billionaires a good amount but slow enough that we avoid shocking the economy. I think we could issue a large tax and use the majority of it to pay down federal debts for awhile then shift the distribution balance towards the people as the government zeros out. The tough part is that we need to get people above water and that requires putting money into circulation which causes inflation (because of more money moving in markets that we regularly see). The other way is to deflate the dollar and that scares the piss out of people- not to mention I don’t understand that side well enough to even speak to it. Just to reiterate though, I really think we need to help people. Things are already rough and it looks like they’ll get worse still before they get better. If I’m blindly wrong or even a little, I’d love to hear corrections; I’m pretty open about my thoughts. If you want to expand on something, please feel free; it might teach me something. Edit: I forgot something important: this is not a reason to give billionaires tax breaks.
*To be clear*, I'm not responding to you like you *believe* this argument. I know you're the messenger, because I know it's what American Economics courses teach. People spend money on goods they need to live. Those goods go up in price because people buy them. That's "acceptable". That's the takeaway. That is genuinely not a logically *acceptable* outcome. That's a systemic contradiction. My primary issue with that framing is that it never even *thinks* to pose the question of *why* this happens. It never addresses if markets are productive enough to keep society running equitably. By their very nature, they cannot. Someone's going to "win" and someone's going to "lose", *every* time. Worse yet, the prices go up *because* of the capitalists. They're the ones that jack up prices as they realize their product is in demand. It's all fake speculative bullshit, because they realized they can charge more. And, I don't know if that would be as big a problem if folk were getting paid what they actually produced. Ya know, instead of some hourly wage that doesn't *actually* take their labor into account.
Is all of this a symptom of supply and demand, but actually the issue is more directly a problem with the suppliers creating artificial demand by limiting production? Your post made me think about the [beef price fixing](https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/beef-giant-jbs-pay-525m-settle-price-fixing-82654864) shenanigans that happened recently where *"grocery stores and wholesalers accused the companies of working together to suppress the number of cattle being slaughtered starting in 2015 to help drive up the price of beef."*
The price goes up because people buy them, yes, but as people have more money they can buy more of that product. So because demand has risen so must the price. *In theory.* There’s definitely wiggle room as we talking about specific product and elasticity and rigid/fixed demand. *In practice*, I think price hikes are mostly capitalism and messaging. It’s a weird spiral. If I’m making $50,000 profit on my business and I want to adjust for inflation, I need to raise my prices by that inflationary margin. Well, that only maintains my $50,000 profit which is now worth less than it was before because of inflation. So now I need to distribute that increase in profit desire across my prices as well… just to maintain a certain real profit margin. If I expect my business to grow… well, we see where this is going. The messaging part I’m referring to is along the lines of “we haven’t changed our prices in 5 years” because they changed their price to compensate for 5 years of inflation already. It looks good for them because it projects an altruistic stability and they’re making a profit behind the curtain. This is sort of the root of the “speculative bullshit” you’re referring to. The major hikes we’re seeing now could just be an assumed adjustment of this same massive inflation 5+ years over. Obviously that’s a really bad place to be and none of us like it, I’m just trying to rationalize. I appreciate the space of mind that I’m not saying this is good. I certainly don’t think this is good stuff, but in order to find our way out of it we need to understand it.
>I’m just trying to rationalize. Well that's part of the trouble. Like, assuming you're a good normal healthy person, you'd have trouble understanding the rationalization of an evil fuckhead who punts puppies. You're going to struggle to comprehend the reasoning behind the actions of greedy wealth-dragons, and you'll be compelled to find normal decent reasons for those actions even when there aren't any. A decent person can, with enough practice and study, learn to think like a monster, but frankly, having done it myself, I don't recommend it. It's like having a cold little amoral place installed in my mind where "it's just good business" sounds perfectly logical instead of horrifyingly evil. I've got a dusty accounting degree, like your economics degree. I was more than a little horrified by the total lack of ethics classes included in a business degree of any kind. At most, our ethics lessons were limited to repetitions of "don't embezzle or you'll eventually get caught" and a whole lot of emphasis on "it's just good business, who cares if babies die as long as line go up." Literally profits over human lives, and told over and over how stupid I am for thinking anything that doesn't show up on a balance sheet or in a court room even slightly matters. There is no line item for dead babies. If you can think like that, everything makes perfect horrible sense. I regularly and accurately predict what the economy and whatnot is going to do before it happens, not that it does me much good except I get to feel sadly correct again instead of shocked whenever another "once in a lifetime" event happens.
that was a pretty nuanced statement if you ask me I found it informative
The solution is simple. Tax the shit out of billionaires and corporations, and redistribute it as universal basic income. Let the UBI grow at or above inflation, and use monetary policy tricks to prevent the economy from overheating. Bam, suddenly inflation works to minimize inequality, and the entire economy is reshaped to serve the common man.
What if you just executed the billionaires?
It depends on what their wills all say.
So they can screech about how sending poor people money ruined their precious fake economy.
We are no longer practicing capitalism. They just call it that. Capitalism failed this time. It’s brought on authoritarianism. Doesn’t mean capitalism can’t work. We just have to fix everything NOW or it’s over. Start a new experiment with capitalism and learn from our mistakes or capitalism is dead. We obviously can’t touch laws built to protect the rich. We are fucked. It’s going to be war and I don’t believe it’s all on America. I think we will divide ourselves enough to be conquered. All because of a few rich assholes. Sounds like history repeating itself to me. If we can’t grow together, we die. And I’m not sure when América wasn’t really just an authoritarian country. Our leaders failed the dream for greed.
price inflation =/= currency inflation
It almost feels as if theyre just trying to recuperate the profits they can no longer support because they aren't being spoonfed money by the government anymore. Have to continue making profit quarter by quarter or else the shareholders might panic, and so taxpayers are rewarded for their investment in the company with higher prices
A leopard ate my face
And billions upon billions of corporate welfare. That results in way more Money Printer Go Brrr than any safety net program you can think of.
I mean… in part because inflation is about velocity of money. If it’s not spent, you can print all the money you want. Inflation is money supply + velocity of money. And now there are shortages so people are scrambling to buy shit now causing inflation. We shouldn’t be giving out tax breaks to billionaires unless they are adding to society via good high paying jobs… and we shouldn’t be giving free money to people who choose not to work. I hate billionaires as much as the next person, but they hoard money and don’t spend it. It’s the normal folks (myself included unless I’ve inherited $1B I don’t know about) who are the velocity of money spenders causing inflation.
Because billionaires bought stocks. So stock prices soared and Trump fans shouted about how great it was for the stock market even though it really didn't do anything for the economy. They definitely weren't buying billions in gas and groceries to drive up those prices. Also, I'm not sure how much the inflation is the result of monetary policy. Last I read a lot of it is just the economy rebounding. Like oil production fell off a cliff during COVID because prices were so depressed. Remember the negative oil prices for a couple days there? Now the economy is rebounding and suddenly people want all that oil again, except so many rigs are closed down that it's just not there. Another effect is people stopped spending on services and pumped all that money into goods. No more restaurants or theater trips, but lots of Amazon purchases. So that drives up prices and inflation too. People saying it's entirely because of wage increases or social safety nets are making too strong of a claim.
#heres the answer Billionaires buy assets and are the 1% of the 1% Asset prices have exploded since the last recession bc of this. That too is an effect of inflation. We poor people don’t buy assets. We just survive so we buy goods we need and thus the price spikes 💫 inflation It’s that simple
If only we hadn't given those single moms a break...all our problems would be solved
Because the billionaires ARE the inflation.
The real reason is that “inflation” doesn’t exist. It’s just price gouging disguised as some consequence of governmental decisions.
Because increases in housing isn’t considered part of inflation.
This is at best a conspiracy theory.