BehindBlueI's
Grandmaster
- Oct 3, 2012
- 26,608
- 113
1. I've helped people get Visas and I know you know your way around the process because of your spouse. Do you really think the current system is in any way accessible to an uneducated non-English speaker of extremely limited means?
2. Sure, you could get some people to do the work, but you are still drawing from an extremely limited pool unless, as you acknowledge, you dramatically up wages. Upping wages causes the prices of products to go up. The price of products going up reduces demand. Reduced demand causes reduced production. Reduced production causes reduced employment and reduced economic growth. Ergo, the economy contracts. This applies way beyond mere produce. This benefits virtually no one.
3. See 2.
I knew we'd get there. While not 100% on topic, I'll just recycle this:
Doubling wages doesn't double product costs. This would assume that labor is 100% of the cost. Particularly doubling the wages of the lowest wages earners isn't going to cause prices on consumer goods to skyrocket, but it would help the economic recovery. I'm not saying raising minimum wage is the way to do that, there is no simple answer (if there was, it would have already been done), but do we really want to make the argument that workers should remain poor so that prices stay stable?
One of the huge arguments for turning a blind eye to illegal immigrants is that "our food prices will skyrocket" without them because they work so cheaply. Labor costs for farming varies, but 15% is a pretty good average for most types. Fruit tree farms require more labor costs because of the amount of care and the lack of machine harvesting. Massive grain fields require a bit less. Let's take garlic farms. The workers get a piece rate which is less than $2 per 5 gallon bucket of picked and cut garlic heads. Garlic ends up at about $1/oz for processed or $3/lb for fresh at the retail level. You could triple the wages of field workers and not have any noticeable affect on retail prices, because a tiny fraction of the end cost is field worker wages.
Similarly what Americans buy the most is processed foods, which rely heavily on grains, which are machine harvested and have very low percentages of labor per total cost. On average, the entire cost of the farming, including profit, is about 14% of the total cost of retail food. The remainder is in the infrastructure that transports it, wholesalers, jobbers, and retailers.
Doubling the wages of the lowest earners would definitely help the economy. They tend to spend what they earn, and spend a lot of it locally. Doubling the pay of the top 10% might help with investment capital, but those folks are already spending what they want to spend on consumer goods.
Paying a living wage to legal unskilled and semi-skilled workers would be a huge boon to our economy.
(Statistics from "The American Way of Eating")
One thing you are conveniently forgetting is demand is also fueled by workers having money to spend. Poorer workers spend more of their incomes, percentage wise. Money is like water to the water wheel of the economy. If it isn't moving, it's not doing any work.