Bullshit. Minimum wage was simply an excuse.

minimum wage isn't even applicable to most agricultural jobs. So thats a moot point.

Like I said. State minimums are more than sufficient. There is no need for a federal standard. Its simply a way for politicians to buy votes and make the unions happy. There is no race to the bottom because some states have different minimum wages. If there is a race to the bottom there is a race to india and china not from new york to iowa. And considering most minimum wage jobs are service based there is no capital mobility. You can't setup a McDonalds in Iowa to serve the people in new york no matter what the wage difference is.

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"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end - Liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition - The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. - Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Action

It does actually, there are simply more exceptions. Primarily excluding piece rate workers who worked less then 13 weeks the previous year...

Another side effect of raising the minimum wage is that you then have to raise the wages proportionately of your other employees not making minimum wage. For example if I make $8 an hour in a supervisory position, and one of my supervised gets 5.15 an hour, when he is raised to 7.15 an hour, he is now making close to what I make, while not being any more valuable. He in effect got a raise. So, now I want to make 2 dollars more to show that my position is more valuable, requires more skill, etc.

So, now your labor costs skyrocket, and profits drop or inflation occurs, negating the effect of minimum wage increase, as my boss has to lay off employees, cut back hours, cut quality standards, etc. Allowing govt to control the economy is never a good idea. Luckily there are actually very few minimum wage jobs, about 2% of all workers. The average wage in the US is about $16/hr.

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http://www.fairtax.org

Elminate all taxes on income and replace with a national sales tax.

Yep, lots of exceptions.

http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/whdfs12.htm

So minimum wage doesn't even effect a large portion of agriculture.

My sister lives out in Idaho where every year school gets out for a week so people can go out harvest potatoes for piece meal.

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"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end - Liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition - The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. - Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Action

Not according to the Department of Agriculture

http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/nepp...006/rr0601.pdf

So suppose for a few weeks you have a harvest season, alright you can pay some of those workers a different wage then minimum. Farming doesn't just kick back and relax for the entire season until its time to harvest the crops. And I challenge you to find a location in the United States with a decent agriculture industry and a growing season shorter then 91 days. (of course theres work before and after the growing season too)

I am not sure how your quote has anything to do with agriculture industry- other than it being conducted by the department of agriculture. They are talking about prices at food establishments why are you assuming the the rising costs at from increased cost of food inputs(presumably from increased cost of labor inputs to create/harvest those food inputs) instead of simply from the increased cost of the labor at the establishment. Your quote doesn't really prove anything.

Harvest is the most labor intensive. The rest of the time it is much more capital intensive and sometimes the farmers are not doing much other than waiting for the stuff to grow.

Even if every job in Agriculture job in the US was affected by minimum wage Agriculture represents less than 1% of GDP. hardly an area to worry about a race to bottom assuming a worse case scenario. A race to bottom in agriculture is a moot point.

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"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end - Liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition - The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. - Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Action

I'm implying that the Dept. of Agriculture included all segments to give a more realistic survey, but they'd be uninterested if it didn't affect agriculture in some manner.

The Farms where I live have people working all through the growing season, and its the same people through the growing season. (Major crops are Corn, and Tobacco mostly, few orchards and others). And no farmers can't simply leave their crop, nor turn it completely over to machinery and just wait for the crops to grow.

I don't think we should place all our hopes on importing our labor and shipping them back to whence they came when the day is done. Fact is if like you say minimum wage is so irrelevent then we should have it for no other reason then the fact that the majority wants to.

Well obviously they are interested. But that still doesn't tell us how the number came about - and subsequently isn't that useful since we don't know how much that number was affected by ag prices vs how much was affected by labor at the establishment.



I know farms require work all year. MY point is simply that harvesting the crops is by far THE MOST LABOR INTENSIVE activity on a farm for most crops. I know there are some crops that require intensive work for planting as well. But this is a general rule.

I have no problem with the mexicans coming or them staying.

I don't really care if minimum wage is increased. It really isn't going to do much of anything - good or bad. I however do feel that minimum wage should not be a federal issue. And you argument that it should be a federal issue - because of this "race to the bottom" - doesnt hold much merit. In which case why not let states decide instead of having the uncle sam force everybody to do something - many of whom do not want it. This is part of why we have such devisive red state blue state partisanship going on - because half the country insists on making the other half live a way they find very disagreeable. You don't want jesus freaks telling you there can't be abortions or that you can't look at porn or whatever you find so offensive about republican politics well guess what the right donesnt like the libs pushing their crap on them. So lets try and keep issues at the local levels rather federal levels. Let the blue states embrace thier blue state policies and let red states embrace their own polcies. This would go a long way to reduce partisanship and make the whole country alot happier. Quite turnings every little damn thing into a federal issue - This is not a personal attack by the way, i am speaking very generally here. I could rant longer on this issue but I won't.

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"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end - Liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition - The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. - Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Action