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Posts Tagged ‘statistics’

The Myths Of Minimum Wage

by Bunk Five Hawks X ( 42 Comments › )
Filed under Communism, Economy, Fascism, Liberal Fascism, Politics, Progressives, Socialism, unemployment at September 7th, 2014 - 12:29 am

Minimum Wage graph Poverty Level BS

My eyes glazed over when I saw that graphic, because there are no numbers or statistics to back up that arbitrary wiggly line and its specious claim. It’s pure socialist propaganda. Ready for some unadulterated reality?

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, 1979-2012 minimum wage jobs comprise an average of about 60% of all hourly jobs for any given year, but guess what percentage of workers over the age of 16 make minimum wage or less?

In 2012 a whopping 4.7 per cent of the working population above the age of 16 earned at or below minimum wage nation-wide. In California, only 1.4 per cent.

[Source: www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2013/ted 20130325]

Why such a small percentage? Because the majority of those workers are in transition to better jobs, better pay, and the minimum wage jobs have an unsurprisingly high turnover rate. Who wants to scrub pots at Denny’s for the rest of their life, let alone for more than a year?

Which industries employ the majority of minimum wage earners?

Minimum Wage Bar Chart by Industry

[Source: www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2013/ted_20130325 ]

Agriculture is relatively insignificant, especially once you combine the Service/Retail percentages, and note that the Federal Government employs very few minimum wage earners.

Now let’s look at the make up of the minimum wage workforce, the nebulous 4.7 percent.

2013 Census Table 7

[Source http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2012tbls.htm#7]

Now let’s examine the age makeup of the 4.7 percent who make minimum wage or less.

Minimum Wage graph 1 ALL

Note that many workers in restaurants and hotels (waiters, waitresses, busboys, bellhops, etc.) often receive less than minimum wage, as they’re expected to make up the rest in tips. Tips account for a large percentage of income and workers typically earn more than minimum wage, sometimes a lot more in upscale venues. Since tips are un-monitored cash transactions, much of that income goes unreported. Let’s break it down a tad further.

The prevailing federal minimum wage in 1979 was $2.90, $3.10 in 1980, and $3.35 in 1981-89. The minimum wage rose to $3.80 on April 1, 1990, to $4.25 on April 1, 1991, to $4.75 on October 1, 1996, to $5.15 on September 1, 1997, to $5.85 on July 24, 2007, to $6.55 on July 24, 2008, and to $7.25 on July 24, 2009. When I checked Minimum Wage Job Numbers and correlated them with Minimum Wage Increases I found none, which suggests that employers covered the increased overhead with higher prices for goods and services in order to stay in business, and the costs were passed down to the consumer. The low income population takes another hit.

Minimum Wage graph 3 PCT Men and Women

Blue is for boys, pink is for girls. Statistics are not sexist.

I’m not an economist, and I’m also not a CPA, but I suspect the IRS gets something out of this scenario because the basic illogic of raising the minimum wage, especially in a sluggish economy, escapes me.

Who else benefits? Union leaders, long-march socialists and politicians whoring for votes.

Aside from the fact that the majority of the poor do not remain poor indefinitely (any more than the majority of the wealthy stay wealthy) raising the minimum wage gives people an incentive not to advance. If a worker finds that minimum wage meets or surpasses his/her current expenses, why not ride with it a few more years? The problem with that scenario is that the worker is not improving his/her resumé for those valuable “few years,” and by the time they realize it, they are years behind those who abandon minimum wage jobs, pick up new valuable skills, and naturally earn more. Those who choose to remain in low-skilled positions deny recent graduates the opportunity to find work, and the ladder to prosperity becomes stagnant.

Another scenario is of a family who needs a secondary income to give them a financial cushion during the expensive child-rearing years; or perhaps an elderly couple may not have saved enough for their retirement because their investments tanked; or simply because they choose not to retire.

Wage and price control is a socialist/fascist concept that has never worked because it creates more problems than it solves, and the problems it attempts to solve are non-existent in the free market. Pay a worker for the value of his/her work, and if there aren’t enough workers for the job, then you’re paying too little. Nobody wants to be a buck an hour pot scrubber for the rest of their life, but we’re still talking about only 4.7 percent of the working population, and most of those workers are moving up the ladder uninhibited.

There is also a macro-scenario that has to do with illegal immigrants and the Cloward-Piven Strategy that aims to overwhelm a stable government with free services provided and paid for by successful corporations, entrepreneurs and the common man, fomenting economic collapse and allowing Socialism/Communism/Fascism to prevail.

This road has always led to mass murder, without exception.

May God help our children and grandchildren if the progressives succeed.

Bunk

[Update: Fixed broken/missing links to graphs and stats. – Ed.]

Your eyes won’t glaze over: Bayes’ Theorem for elementary school kids

by 1389AD ( 221 Comments › )
Filed under Open thread, Science at July 8th, 2014 - 12:00 pm

Understanding Bayes’ Theorem

Published on Jul 3, 2014 by Acts17Apologetics
http://www.acts17.net
Many people are intimidated by Bayes’ theorem, because it looks like a complicated mathematical equation. However, once we understand what the symbols represent, Bayes’ theorem turns out to be based on the sort of math we all learned in elementary school. To prove it, here’s a video of me teaching Bayes’ theorem to two of my sons (ages nine and ten). If they can learn it, you can learn it!

Bayes' Theorem
It’s explained above.

 

How to Predict the Odds of Anything

by 1389AD ( 35 Comments › )
Filed under Medicine, Science at February 27th, 2014 - 7:00 pm

On YouTube:

Published on Feb 17, 2014 by SciShow

Statistics! They’re every scientist’s friend. But they can be easy to misinterpret. Check out this thought exercise with Hank to understand how some mental kung fu known as Bayesian reasoning can use stats to draw some downright surprising conclusions.
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Sources:
http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/science.pdf.html
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/04/07/schools-of-thought-in-probabil/
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521284147/singinst
http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2008/01/are-you-bayesian-or-frequentist-or.html
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/bayesbiog.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/The-Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions/dp/159420411X

56 Years Since Tornados Were Invented

by Bunk Five Hawks X ( 51 Comments › )
Filed under Environmentalism, Humor, OOT at June 4th, 2013 - 9:00 pm

tornados suck donkeys
[Image found here.]
Tornados suck. When Mother Nature gets all humpy, she yanks the Universal Electrolux from the closet and, well, you know what she’s capable of when she’s in her hissyfit mood.  It’s not fun, and there’s nothing we mortals can do about it except to hunker down in little dark dank fraidy-holes, play with our GI Joes and Barbies, and wait until the storm passes. Then we play Pick Up Sticks.

But that image blows me away, especially when AGW hucksters start huckstering about AGW. The obvious solution to tornado intervention is humidity control and mountain construction. Taxation just won’t cut it, but there’s one thing that’s sure to have a temporary coolng effect, and it’s called
The Overnight Open Thread.