Key Points
- As shoppers await price cuts, retailers like Home Depot say their prices have stabilized and some national consumer brands have paused price increases or announced more modest ones.
- Yet some industry watchers predict deflation for food at home later this year.
- Falling prices could bring new challenges for retailers, such as pressure to drive more volume or look for ways to cover fixed costs, such as higher employee wages.
So should wages for poor people ever go up, in your opinion?
What’s your opinion on legislation that would tie wages to their ROI for the business?
Edit: Why not force large corporations to pay their CEOs less so they can raise wages for their employees while keeping prices the same? It seems like you/economists realize corporations will let the country go to shit while stealing as much of the profit as possible and prefer that average workers deal with the detrimental impacts.
More like wages are kind of irrelevant from a macroeconomic perspective. Money doesn’t matter. We can double our money supply tomorrow and it won’t make anyone’s lives easier.
See Argentina’s minimum wage, and tell me if that solved any problem at all.
But… if increasing the minimum wage makes you feel better I’m not against it. I just don’t think its the right focus to have on a policy front.
That sounds like a good way to kill innovation, as most companies that innovate lose money year-over-year for long periods of time.
The entire damn point of the stock market is to take people who like to take risks with their money (ie: investors), give them a story about how money line goes up, and “trick” investors into shoveling money into money-losing businesses until those businesses catch a good wind and make money.
In many cases (ie: MoviePass), everything collapses and everything sucks afterwards. In other cases (ie: Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple), life gets better in the long term. Its near impossible to tell the difference (do you think Uber is going to collapse? Or do you think Uber will become another major player of our economy? Do you think NVDA deserves all the extra money they got last week? Or is that a bubble?). But the important thing is that the USA has a large group of shareholders and investors who like making such risks, and who take the responsibility (ex: lose tons of money) if these bets go sour.
The goal is for us as an overall economy to make new things, and improve the lives of everyone. Money strangely enough, doesn’t do that. We improve the lives of everyone by producing more, thereby giving everyone more dishwashers, homes, cars or whatever they need.
The big problem with the current “economy” isn’t anything in general. USA’s general economy is actually very good and people should be proud of what USA has accomplished in the past 3 years. The reasons why life sucks are outside of what economic forces can do. Ex: Housing prices skyrocket because we’ve been building fewer and fewer houses each year for the last 20 years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
This is despite population growing more-and-more.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPPOPGROWUSA
So guess what happens when housing supply drops while population increases? No one can afford a house, and there’s no economic policy you can do to force people into buying houses (ex: increasing wages) because there’s simply not enough houses in our country.
Until we build more houses, we ain’t gonna get more affordable houses (at any wage). The focus on money is counter-productive. The focus needs to be on houses or other goods/services in the economy. (Ex: not enough nurses, not enough doctors, not enough etc. etc. etc.)
Investors/shareholders risking their own money to make new services, new goods, new technologies is fine. That’s the part of our economy that works. The problem is that we’ve got a $HundredBillion plowing into crap companies that won’t do anything ever… but somehow somewhere our economy has forgotten the basics like housing starts. Maybe its regulatory (too many NIMBY laws that outlaw cheap housing), or something. But we have the investor-money, we have the culture, we have the materials. We just need to actually build the damn houses.