Lol @ people buying into this garbage. Stopped reading after first post but also lol'ing at idea of there being 4 pages of this actually being debated in any serious manner. Yo OP, why don't we just 10x the minimum wage, then everyone would be making a killing and games would be great again.

I don't know. How is poker in North Korea?

We need a test to be an American.

I find it strange you are in favor of pursuing abject impossibilities. You are a hero.

If min wage raised to $15, there will be another extinction, that is professional live poker players (unless you can afford to play big)

The politics debate here is already on full-****** level but just in case you are really ignorant about it and not just flaming:

The idea is that there is that an employer makes Y from an employee and an employee won't accept a job for less than X. The employer can pay anywhere between Y and X to an employee.
X is affected by several things: supply of employees, supply of jobs which pay X or more, mobility of employees, their social/family situation etc.

It is quite possible (and a lot of people would say obvious) that employers are in position of power in most industries and can force a situation where they pay much closer to X than to Y (or even half-way). This is a social dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dilemma) in which employees lose because they need to think about putting food on the table and can't freely move around so their options are limited. Minimum wage and labor laws in general are a way to solve the dilemma.

If you are against minimum wage on principle, are you also against enforced 8 hours work week? What about basic safety regulations? Afterall, as history shows it's easy to find people "willing" to work 16hours/day for almost nothing. Those are all measures to move the point from X in direction of Y. Somehow though it seems half of this thread thinks there is nothing in between, everyone is payed optimally and once minimum wage raises 1$ carefully crafted equilibrium is gone and people lose jobs.

Two thumbs up for a thoughtful post. When it comes to economics debates, there are two huge problems: too many people know economics, and not enough people know economics.

You're going to argue that people shouldn't have to work more than 8 hours a week, then compare it to people working twice as much as that in a day? Of course there is something in between.

People shouldn't be forced to work in unsafe conditions and I don't see anywhere people argued otherwise in the thread. Poker dealers have safer conditions than almost any other tipped employee, or maybe even all of them. I can't imagine any master criminal is thinking about how they are going to rob the chip tray at a 1/2 game on camera, escape, then figure how how to turn that $400 into cash through the casino's cage they just robbed.

Do you really think poker dealers are less safe than cab drivers? Pizza delivery drivers? Graveyard bartenders? If so, what are the unsafe working conditions poker dealers are subjected to in your opinion?

Graveyard bartenders? Apparently I've been hanging out in the wrong graveyards.

I'm grunching here, but has anyone considered computerized tables could make a comeback?

It seems to me that the last time they were tried was before the advent of the smartphone. As such, I think people have gotten a lot more used to interacting with little screens, then with people, then with their screens. Having a dealer just becomes a luxury for the high rollers. (It kinda already works that way with craps where low rollers must turn to those cheezy big dice in a bubble games.)

Also they were last tried during the boom, when you had a lot of new players coming into the game. Having to call a boss over to show new players the ropes all the time probably made automation much more of a headache than it was worth during those hectic days.

I would love to live in a country where everyone was paid a living wage, and I understand the economics enough to know going to $15 an hour wouldn't be a big deal. Poker dealers could very well lose their jobs, but similar manual labor jobs will open up in other industries. In a world where no one has to settle for stale bread, the baking industry alone would probably absorb every displaced dealer and then some.

Oh and I'd definitely buy some stock in whatever company is making poker machines these days.

We are not completely at this point yet, but if poker dealers and other people making minimum wage are not making a livable wage, than that is a safety issue, for everyone. For the people saying "not everyone deserves a good wage" or "no one would go to school if minimum jobs paid well". These are just wrong. There's certainly a gigantic in between livable wages and amazing pay. When the minimum wage becomes unlivable or borderline unlivable you start getting wide spread and large amounts of crime.

How to fix it is another thing entirely.

wouldn't it be good for the loosing players to get at least 15 buks/h simply by playing poker? how will the casinos implement this change? i assume even more people will choose to become a poker player as profession if they get a $15/hr minimum wage guaranteed..

Weird. NVG is full of economically illiterate know-nothings.

Raising it will have no effect on poker.

It will continue to ensure that impoverished teenagers will have more hurdles placed in front of them. The black teenage unemployment rate in 1948 before the first major wage hike was 10%. It is just under 40% now. Minimum wage laws set up at risk teens up for a lifetime osf crime and poverty. Minimum wage laws are the most immoral, racist, economically unsound laws that governments pass. That is, of course, assuming you judge a policy by its outcome and not the good intentions.

Western countries without a minimum wage have half the unemployment rates of those with a minimum wage. Spare me pointing out Australia or the random outlier. They are terrible policy. And a $15/hr minimum wage is so insanely dumb. How is it working even in affluent high cost areas like Seattle and San Fran. Just awful policy. Poker players should know better.

Just in case this isn't a level.

The only way I see computerized tables making a serious run would be if there was a huge disparity between rake at the real tables and the computer tables. And the only chance the difference between the rakes gets that high is if we increase the MW to something ridiculous... like $15/hr.

No, the last time the computer tables made a run was years after the smartphone became popular.

How can you say that raising MW to $15/hr isn't a big deal then the next sentence suggest people are losing their job? Would would similar labor jobs (to that of poker dealer) just all of a sudden appear in other industries if we raise MW?

Those countries still basically have a minimum wages set by collective bargaining agreements. Plus they have a lot of unions, which isn't a bad thing, but they often set the minimum wage with the government on behave of the people. They technically do still have a minimum wage.

It would be a big deal. The evidence is conclusive. I get it. You can point to a couple of ideological cranks who have Nobel Prizes who disagree. The effect on low skill workers is the same effect Paul Samuelson pointed out in his textbook for decades.

The Wascher and Neumark paper looked at all of the literature and shows that they conclusively have a negative employment effect . https://ideas.repec.org/p/irv/wpaper/060708.html

It should give you pause when Christina Romer, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and others who aren't on the extreme ideological left are not on board these hikes. Here is a look at countries with and w/o minimum wages. http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=24759

Lol at this thread can this guy get a one week ban for this plz

As co owner of a small business I can say we would shut down operation and lay off all 8 workers if this happens. It's just not affordable for my business. That's why I don't think it can ever really get past 12hr

what about we just change the national minimum wage to only $14/hr then everyone can be happy

I like how the proposal is always a solid round number like 15 or 13. It's never 11.73 or something, which just proves everyone is just pulling a number out of there a$$ rather than doing actual math on what 40 hours a week at an hourly is needed to afford food and shelter.

How much of that 30% disparity is due to the increasing educational requirements of an increasingly technology based society? How much is due to displacement of workers by automation and other productivity enhancing technologies who migrate to lower level jobs, for example the ex-factory worker who becomes the McDonald's employee?

Certainly the entire decline in employment among black teens cannot be attributed to one variable.

lol +1

I don't really think anyone needs to make arguments in favor of minimum wage; all we need to do is just propose the idea and have it's opponents say idiotic things like this.

What I said is not an opinion. It is indisputably true. The problem is you know nothing about the topic. Instead you smugly call my completely non-controversial statement "idiotic."

Here is what Paul Samuelson (left wing economist) said in his textbook that most econ students used: "“What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2.00 per hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?”
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/MinimumWages.html

Here is Milton Friedman (kind of big deal economist) said: "most ‘anti-black law in the land"

http://www.aei.org/publication/milto...w-in-the-land/

So the two most respected academic economists of the second half of the 20th century gave the same reason for opposition.

Here is what Art Laffer said last year: "The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high."

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/qu...6DOOTb9uMqK.99


Thomas Sowell "Ruinous compassion" "The last year when the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate was 1930, the last year before there was a federal minimum-wage law."

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...-thomas-sowell


Greg Mankiw, who wrote the textbook I and most other college students use, opposes it. http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2013/...imum-wage.html


I could name 20 Nobel Prize winners off of the top of my head who have said the same or similar things about minimum wage laws.

lol google 'correlation vs. causation' dude. Just because America hated/hates black people and has oppressed them for a long time doesn't mean that minimum wage laws are the vehicle used to oppress them.

Yeah Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Paul Samuelson, Vernon Smith, Edward Prescott, Robert Lucas, James Buchanan, FA Hayek, Eugene Fama and all those other Nobel Prize winning economists are just dunces.

You NVGtard, of course, with your retort "lol" obviously do know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

If you want to win debates, don't make your arguments obviously fallacious. Logic and rhetoric lead to proper argumentation; You should learn to use them if you're going to make your thoughts known to the public, and especially if you plan on putting up a better attempt at refuting someone in a debate.

FWIW, yeah, history has not treated Fama or Friedman well at all. The Chicago School is sort of an incredible failure. And Hayek is pretty much only held up by those who think Ayn Rand was a great thinker.