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Both of those ranges, including the range you claim is the Mode are vastly monopolized by unemployed who earned a few minutes of hours of work...A more reasonable usage of data might be to use the cut-off of $15,080 as being unemployed.
This would have 114.7 million people earning a total of $19.618 Trillion, for an average of $171,000.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:

SECOND - So it's the official democratic position to focus exclusively on the minimum wage as their pretense of 'caring' about workers, even though it'll help only 1.1% of all wage workers (1.9% of all hourly workers, which are only 58.1% of all hourly plus wage workers)?

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
A more reasonable usage of data might be to use the cut-off of $15,080 as being unemployed.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
The problem with raising the minimum wage is that it will encourage businesses to automate jobs out of existence.

Unless there is a government commitment to full and meaningful employment (has to be government, business always wants to reduce expenses and in the long run that means getting rid of employees) including a commitment to industrial production, you will just be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

#WEARAMASK

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Raise the minimum wage to $15 overnight and you're going to see millions of extra jobs shed within a year.

They can probably manage to do it without the cost of goods being raised too much, but if you thought you had a hard time finding an employee to assist you in the stores now, just wait until the minimum wage gets hiked to more than double of what it is today.

That's also not to mention how many small businesses, particularly restaurants who operate on a razor thin budget already, will go out of business.

But I get the argument though...

25 years ago, minimum wage jobs were for kids and nearly exclusively were held by kids. Now that I've been working them again during the last 10 years, seeing a kid working one is the exception to the rule. The last job I had, most of the adults working it also had a 2nd or even a 3rd job to pay all the bills.

I can't imagine a life where you had to work an 8 hour shift at one thankless job only to get in your car and drive your sad ass to another one before you could go home and sleep. :(

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6IXSTRINGJACK:

Raise the minimum wage to $15 overnight and you're going to see millions of extra jobs shed within a year.

They can probably manage to do it without the cost of goods being raised too much, but if you thought you had a hard time finding an employee to assist you in the stores now, just wait until the minimum wage gets hiked to more than double of what it is today.

That's also not to mention how many small businesses, particularly restaurants who operate on a razor thin budget already, will go out of business.

But I get the argument though...

25 years ago, minimum wage jobs were for kids and nearly exclusively were held by kids. Now that I've been working them again during the last 10 years, seeing a kid working one is the exception to the rule. The last job I had, most of the adults working it also had a 2nd or even a 3rd job to pay all the bills.

I can't imagine a life where you had to work an 8 hour shift at one thankless job only to get in your car and drive your sad ass to another one before you could go home and sleep. :(

SECOND: You sound precisely the same as a Texas Republican businessman arguing against raising the minimum wage. Just shut the hell up and raise the wage, then see what happens. Remember the story about the business owner who raised minimum wages to $70,000? I heard a thousand times from idiotic and rich Republicans (and some Democrats who weren't any better informed than Rush Limbaugh) that the business would fail because it doesn't give all the rewards for success to the business owner. Instead, it prospered.
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-51332811

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Democrats support the creation of an infrastructure bank , a public bank that will leverage public and private resources to build infrastructure projects of national or regional significance, including in rail and transit, clean energy and water infrastructure, broadband, and affordable housing. Projects that receive assistance from the bank will be required to follow Buy America and Buy Clean provisions, pay Davis-Bacon prevailing wages, utilize project labor agreements, and ensure employers remain neutral in workers’ organizing efforts.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Infrastructure jobs. Even FDR ran into the limits of infrastructure investment, and HE was solidly committed to them! If this creates "hundreds of thousands" of jobs it is a pittance compared to the 7.5 MILLION jobs lost since 1980.

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SIGNYM:

Infrastructure jobs. Even FDR ran into the limits of infrastructure investment, and HE was solidly committed to them! If this creates "hundreds of thousands" of jobs it is a pittance compared to the 7.5 MILLION [MANUFACTURING SIGNY] jobs lost since 1980.

SECOND: A $1 trillion investment in infrastructure spending would create as many as 11 MILLION jobs through 2027. This stimulus will restore the growth path of job creation that was derailed by the Great Recession. Some political analysts argue that this proposal would compel the Republican Party to uphold the campaign promises made by President Trump, in order to maintain support from blue-collar workers, who helped elect him.
https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/trillion-dollar-infrastr
ucture.pdf

You might have noticed that Trump wrote no infrastructure bill. Why? Ask him about it in his second term. (The GOP Senators didn't want to pay for it, but that's just between you and me. I'm unsure if Trump knew. Maybe somebody should tell him?)

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
JSF

First of all, the SS Wage Statistics deal with people who are earning a paycheck - not the unemployed. Unemployment benefits aren't wages. So your argument that low wage workers are "essentially" unemployed, and trying to pass them off in that category, is in error. They may be working very few hours, and their wages may be abysmally low, but they're working. Instead of trying to fudge away the data, realize that, indeed, the wage data posted in the SS Wage Statistics is as dire as the lives most working people are living.

When you're dealing with a continuous variable - like wages - it's a common and acceptable practice to divide the data into 'slices' and subject those slices to statistical evaluation. "With an arbitrary range of 0-49,999 the average of $3,216 - and this would be your Mode with all income ranges at $50,000." It's a well known problem that picking arbitrary ranges can affect statistical evaluation, so the practice is to create as many ranges as you can possibly work with, to more accurately reflect the distribution shape of the original data. Picking a very arbitrary and very large range is also misdirected.

"With a Federal Minimum Wage of $7.25 per hour, any wages below $15,080 are essentially unemployed or Part Time employ." Yes ... and that's another problem that goes unaddressed by the focus on the minimum wage - the many many people who work gig, ad hoc, part-time, or less than part-time work.

"But you are not including all of the Wage Earners who were unemployed completely." And that's still another problem with the government stats like mean and median wage - it misses all the people who aren't working at all. And that includes the formally unemployed as well as those who've dropped out of the labor marker entirely, and therefore not counted in any unemployment statistic.
Another way to look at unemployment is to look at the labor participation rate.
After a drastic slide post 2007
https://i.insider.com/529f21b6eab8ea780a58f40b?width=1085
it leveled off around 2015.

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And it hasn't improved since then.

I'm not seeing an economic miracle for people who work for a living, and certainly not one under Trump.

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