The Government Should Eliminate the Minimum Wage

BOP This is a fallacy of shifting BOP. If the MW has no impact on jobs, it does not mean it has no impact on anything else. It is possible that the judges in this debate believe it has no impact on jobs , BUT it can reduce poverty. That would still have to account for something! As I noted in round 2 that was the very purpose FDR made it in the first place! If so, then no impact means I win, positive impact means I win, while negative impact means my opponent wins. My opponent cannot shift this BOP. -- http://www.nizkor.org... As I noted in round 2, I gave three criteria in order of priority: 1) Jobs, 2) Poverty Reduction and 3) Social Cohesion, all of which MW impacts in some way, and those impacts must be used to objectively “measure” the states' justification for MW. Sources I disagree here. I noted that think tanks ought to be looked at “with great scepticism” not that they're all bias. With an issue like MW with so many competing interests we want to see 1) expert opinion and 2) expert consensus to determine good/ bad evidence. I submitted Card and Kruger and their meta-analysis to show this. We cannot use think tanks: the Von Missis Institute is openly Austrian indoctrination and would never allow a study to be produced that is pro-MW for instance...it violates Austrian economic thought that they're trying to espouse. The evidence is also not peer-reviewed, and thus not reliable. Anyone can open a think tank, meaning it's unreliable in the first place, and the people producing the stuff of the tank might not be the expert opinion on the topic. I never tried to control voters. (Ron Paul opened up a think tank here: http://en.wikipedia.org... Mr Paul is NOT an economist) My opponent launched an appeal to hypocrisy here; wikipedia does have regulations regarding combating biases of any kind here: http://en.wikipedia.org... in short, these accusations are uncalled for from my opponent (His accusation against me is a sort of ad hom) . I only utilized them to give the audience a brief overview of the expert opinion on the MW issue, instead of citing all the studies. The studies in the link given, ARE peer-reviewed, and show the statistic trends of the policy. Finally, he simply claims that meta-analysis does not show the general economic experts' consensus, but it does show the general trend of economic observation: that MW actually correlated with increases in jobs, he completely drops this with a straw-man statement; not all economists study the MW issue ergo might not be their ideas, but it shows those who have worked on it conclude it is good. Theories I will quickly refute: Statistics in economics is essential because economics is in fact a social science. Meaning that we need clear, objective facts free from human delusion, that’s where stats come in my opponent claims that observation in the real world is important, I agree but those experiences are open to flaws due to memory lapses, selection bias, confirmation bias, sample bias, etc and thus we need stats. Claiming we do not is wreckless. Austrians being able to “predict” a recession actually furthers my point: it means their ideas are simply unfalsifiable and thus weak. It's not that they're right, but rather that they can never be proven wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org... Finally, Austrians REJECT statistics in economics (econometrics) any claim contrary is simply untrue: http://en.wikipedia.org... My opponent himself even admits this by arguing for experiences over statistics. In short: stick to mainstream otherwise my opponent must justify Austrian. Fallacy of the Broken Window this is not an actual fallacy, but rather a parable. A fallacy implies that there is something wrong with my syllogism, when there isn't. Results of a broken window only occur depending on the position of the victim: consider that the victim does not have excess funds, then nothing happens OR my opponent is correct, but if it is happening to someone of considerable wealth, then my previous premise of consumption still stands. Same thing with MW: it helps those of considerable lower income, while those of higher incomes have no impact/lose a little money but the economy still consumes more. http://en.wikipedia.org... Thought Experiments: My opponent never actually answered my question: why doesn't firms simply give internships to everyone if MW kills jobs? (My opponent dropped this in the previous rounds) I also have another question for my opponent: if the MW were abolished today, how many jobs would be created, and how much money would the state save? I ask because studies have shown that in fact raising it can be good for the economy, for instance in the Card and Kruger studies, when comparing two states that are the same with exception to the economic output, MW increases correlated with 0.5%-0.8% increases in employment. It doesn't sound like a lot, but if we have a state with 500 employed workers, 500 + 0.5% = 525 jobs total. http://davidcard.berkeley.edu... Again, why such a small increase? Those working for MW jobs only account for 6% of the workforce in the economy (as noted earlier). They continued to later compare it to the federal level, to California, and again New Jersey to which all found the same; no unemployment impacts. The same thing happened by Berkeley University who used bigger data-sets than C&K no unemployment impacts. http://www.irle.berkeley.edu... Labour Force Participation The source he uses claiming that unemployment drops admits in it's critique the following: “The analysis presented here omits several important elements of actual labor markets” This source admits it is in fact unreliable. I cited from the OECD showing that women's unemployment only goes up due to more participation and not because of MW per se. The same can be presumably for kids in the workforce as well. None of my opponents studies actually address this issue, and as such their studies fail to take into account this spurious variable. Gini Coefficient and Income Inequality I actually did show that income inequality is unwanted. It lowers social cohesion, increases crime and homicide rates, lowers civic participation, and erodes lower class worker's health. http://en.wikipedia.org... My opponent cites a CBO study, in it it also states the following: “ As with any such estimates, however, the actual losses could be smaller or larger” This report also admits that it is unreliable, thus we need a report that is in fact more reliable. Enter the Pew Research Centre. What it concluded was that 21 million workers would get a raise, while other jobs that are lower income would also have to get paid more as well. If you and I work in retail, and I being a manager make 11 dollars an hour, while you use to make 7, if we raise it to 10, I'll have to be paid more, because my duties require more pay. http://www.pewresearch.org... Consider that a person making 7.25, the only way they make it above the poverty line is to work full time. But most do not, even my opponent admits this, as such even if they only work 30 hours a week, this means they bring in a yearly income of 11,130, whereas for one person it's 11,670. This is unacceptable and raising MW would correct this issue. Nearly two-thirds of last year’s minimum wage employees in the U.S. worked part-time. Of which half were younger than 25 and 62 percent were women. Minorities get a pay raise (confirmed between the two sources and bureau of stats), and MW workers make more than the poverty line. http://aspe.hhs.gov... http://www.wbur.org...Finally, my opponent does not deny that the Gini Coefficent rating along with the Atkins index and standard deviation logarithems improve income mobility over other divices. Thanks, over to my opponent.