God, for a moment I thought you suggest that companys should adopt foster children for cheap labour.
Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats
- Thread starter GasBandit
- Start date
GasBandit
Staff member
Isn't that the end of Air America?
...where they're basically like, "Eh, you caught me. So what? I'm so entrenched now that it doesn't even matter any more."
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
5 Fetuses Found in Home of DC Anti-Abortion Activist Lauren Handy: Police
Police have found five fetuses inside the Washington, DC home of anti-abortion activist Lauren Handy.
www.nbcwashington.com
figmentPez
Staff member
Handy told WUSA (CBS in Washington DC) she expected the raid to "happen sooner or later."
5 Fetuses Found in Home of DC Anti-Abortion Activist Lauren Handy: Police
Police have found five fetuses inside the Washington, DC home of anti-abortion activist Lauren Handy.
Either she's in serious need of psychiatric help, or she's angling to get charged with "murder" and set some sort of precedent.
GasBandit
Staff member
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been funding child pornography with public funds. At a home for sexually abused girls.
Judge asks feds to probe possible child porn production at Bastrop home for sexually abused girls
A federal judge on Wednesday asked for a federal criminal probe of possible child pornography production and distribution at a Bastrop County facility for...
www.dallasnews.com
figmentPez
Staff member
And not a single Republican vote will be lost because of this news.
I saw that, and people in the comments were asking "Why???" and all I could think of was that Goya painting.
5 Fetuses Found in Home of DC Anti-Abortion Activist Lauren Handy: Police
Police have found five fetuses inside the Washington, DC home of anti-abortion activist Lauren Handy.
--Patrick
This appears to be behind a paywallTexas Governor Greg Abbott has been funding child pornography with public funds. At a home for sexually abused girls.
Judge asks feds to probe possible child porn production at Bastrop home for sexually abused girls
A federal judge on Wednesday asked for a federal criminal probe of possible child pornography production and distribution at a Bastrop County facility for...www.dallasnews.com
If you're fast enough, you can copy/paste it into another doc and read it that way for free.
--Patrick
I adblocked the popup
GasBandit
Staff member
Hm, I guess my ad blocker is catching the script, because it stays on my screen full time.
Anyway, full text follows:
Anyway, full text follows:
AUSTIN — A federal judge on Wednesday asked for a federal criminal probe of possible child pornography production and distribution at a Bastrop County facility for young sex-trafficking victims.
U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack also blasted the administration of Gov. Greg Abbott for allegedly downplaying the severity of misconduct by employees of the facility, The Refuge for DMST, or domestic minor sex trafficking.
And she kept up the pressure for Abbott and state GOP leaders to quickly transfer state funds and draw down available federal funds to create more treatment foster homes and high-quality congregate-care placements. That would help alleviate a shortage that last month caused 191 children in state care to spend two or more consecutive nights in state offices, hotels or other makeshift settings.
The biggest fireworks Wednesday were over The Refuge, a facility for girls who’ve been victims of sex trafficking that has attracted high-level support in state government, including from Abbott and his wife, The Dallas Morning News has learned.
While the Department of Public Safety disputes Jack’s characterization that it was trying “to disprove the allegations” against The Refuge’s management, the judge noted how Abbott on March 16 tweeted that the Texas Rangers “clear” the facility “from allegations of sexual abuse or human trafficking.”
At a tumultuous court hearing in Dallas in the long-running foster care lawsuit, Jack repeatedly stressed that she deems highly serious various revelations about The Refuge, including an alleged nude photos-for-drugs scheme and employees’ aiding runaways, including one girl set to testify in a federal prosecution of sex trafficking in another state.
“I am concerned about the many infractions that The Refuge had,” she said.
Last October, Abbott’s office awarded a $500,000 grant to The Refuge, which it recently revoked but only after nearly $200,000 was paid to the facility, The News found.
Also, first lady Cecilia Abbott attended a January 2018 fundraiser for The Refuge and visited the facility six months later, shortly before it opened, The News confirmed.
Also, twice in recent years, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office made the Bastrop County residential treatment center the beneficiary of a charity drive by its employees — an idea for raising money and donated supplies that Comptroller Glenn Hegar and his employees emulated at least once, according to records from Paxton that the newspaper obtained.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Jack threatened to hold state attorneys in contempt of court.
She complained they impeded access by her monitors to videotaped forensic interviews of girls at The Refuge. The interviews were conducted by a trained sex-abuse expert at a nonprofit child advocacy center partially funded by the state.
Jack also upbraided Assistant Attorney General Karl Neudorfer, who represents the Department of Family and Protective Services, the parent agency of Child Protective Services. It had sought to have the judges’ monitors file their update on The Refuge this week under seal, meaning it wouldn’t be made public. Jack defended her monitors, saying they have handled confidential information about children with sensitivity, never revealing their identities.
Bastrop County facility
Jack said she will ask her monitors to make a criminal referral to U.S. Attorney Ashley C. Hoff of the western district of Texas about The Refuge. The referral will ask federal prosecutors to investigate whether child pornography was created and distributed at The Refuge and, if so, whether that qualifies as sex trafficking.
Also, monitors will ask Hoff to look into whether obstruction of justice occurred in connection with allegations at the Bastrop facility, Jack said.
The judge, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton who is on senior status, has praised Abbott and the Legislature in the past for increasing state funding of CPS and foster care. But she unloaded on Abbott and especially his March 16 tweet that suggested The Refuge had been cleared of suspicion.
Jack said “from the top down,” an attitude of dismissal and belittling of her monitors has been pervasive in state government.
DPS director Steve McCraw’s March 16 letter to Abbott and subsequent testimony to two legislative panels “confirmed” fears that the governor and McCraw were engaged in a publicity ploy, Jack said.
DPS spokesman Travis Considine responded on Twitter that McCraw’s letter said “initial findings” and that, so far, “Texas Rangers have not identified any additional evidence of sexual abuse or human trafficking at The Refuge.”
“We are committed to pursuing each and every allegation to its end,” Considine tweeted.
The spectacle exploded into view almost four weeks ago. Under mysterious circumstances, a protective-services department lawyer’s unfinished memo detailing a spate of “intakes” to the state abuse hotline about The Refuge was shared with Jack’s monitors.
In the version of the memo transmitted to monitors Deborah Fowler and Kevin Ryan, caveats were removed. Raw, unverified allegations suggesting perhaps a significant number of the girls had been revictimized while in state care were presented as at least credible if not totally substantiated facts.
Jack hastily called a March 10 emergency hearing. Plaintiffs’ lawyers in an 11-year-old suit about foster care before her alerted the news media. After CPS and a Fort Worth-based state foster care vendor pulled their children from the facility, The Refuge temporarily closed.
Abbott ordered a Texas Rangers investigation. GOP legislative leaders launched hurry-up investigatory committee hearings. Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Beto O’Rourke scheduled a March 16 news conference in Austin and deplored Abbott’s management of CPS and foster care.
The Refuge’s founder, Brooke Crowder, hired new background-check screeners, a crisis-communications specialist and a lobbyist. The facility issued a timeline showing it had fired or accepted the resignations of four employees over two incidents. The facility promptly reported both to the protective-services department, state foster care regulators and law enforcement, it said.
Shortly after O’Rourke presented the “revictimization” of girls at The Refuge as an established fact, Texas DPS director Col. Steve McCraw released a letter in which he gave Abbott an update on his agency’s investigation. The “initial findings” showed “no evidence that any of the residents at the Refuge shelter have ever been sexually abused or trafficked while at the shelter” and “[t]here were no allegations or evidence that these residents were sexually abused or assaulted by anyone,” McCraw wrote.
DPS officials have said McCraw was speaking about 9 of the 11 girls staying at the facility, not two young women who he agrees were likely exploited by a since-fired nighttime caregiver. The $18-an-hour employee, a woman, allegedly sold drugs to the two young women, both with known substance-abuse histories. She also allegedly let them use her cell phone to generate sexually oriented images that could be sold using Cash App, a mobile payment service.
While news accounts and testimony at legislative hearings initially suggested that both young women took pictures of themselves nude and sold them using the employee’s phone, an update filed by court monitors Fowler and Ryan this week showed a more complicated chain of events: Both girls said that, late last year, they had planned to sell nude photos of themselves on Snapchat. But it’s not clear any of the sales materialized.
One of the girls, identified as “AA,” who had been placed at The Refuge in August 2020 by Our Community Our Kids of Fort Worth, told protective-services workers that, with help from a former resident at the Bastrop facility, she posted a nude photograph of another person, not showing the person’s face. The former resident got paid $5 through Cash App, the girl said.
In an advisory to Jack filed Tuesday, Erica Griese of San Antonio, The Refuge’s lawyer, said the two girls’ nighttime caregiver “groomed” the two girls, “persuaded them several times to create Commercial Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) using a smuggled burner phone, and sold the images online for her personal commercial gain.” While the former employee passed background checks, she was in a relationship with a man now incarcerated, according to the monitors’ update.
According to Griese’s filing, after The Refuge learned of the nighttime worker’s “inexcusable criminal behavior” on Jan. 24, it fired her that night. The next day, it reviewed her resume, which revealed that she’d worked “as a direct care provider for vulnerable individuals at six different organizations in the preceding eight years.” The Refuge is strengthening its background checks, Griese said.
Runaways
DPS officials have said they’re still trying to locate girls who lived at The Refuge during the nighttime caregiver’s five-month tenure — an arduous process. The facility says that, in its 3½ years of operation, 70 girls from five states have been residents. The average age is 16.
McCraw testified that he’d very much like to see the nighttime caregiver charged with crimes such as sexual exploitation of a minor and child pornography. However, he said it’s unusual to have a criminal probe conducted under such a glare of publicity. Proving that the woman actually directed the creation of sexual images and profited from their sale has been challenging, the DPS director said.
As more details emerged, protective services officials realized that the nighttime caregiver had a sister, an aunt, a cousin and a cousin by marriage who were also employed at The Refuge, Fowler and Ryan wrote.
“Two of these staff, and their housemate who was also employed by The Refuge, have been implicated in allegations that staff members assisted two children who ran away” from the facility on Feb. 20, the monitors said. The two girls were ages 16 and 17. On the first night of the girls’ flight, law enforcement found the 16-year-old on a freeway and returned her to The Refuge.
But the 17-year-old, who was placed there by child welfare authorities in another state, is “a witness in a criminal sex trafficking prosecution,” the monitors wrote. The FBI and the Texas Rangers, who are investigating facts surrounding her flight, told Texas protective-services officials around March 14 that four employees at The Refuge either assisted the 17-year-old’s escape from the facility or had contact with her while she was missing. Sometime on the day after the two girls fled, the 17-year-old was found at the Greyhound station in Austin.
Authorities charged one of the employees with making a false statement to the FBI. On Feb. 24, one of the employees implicated in the runaway incident resigned and two others were suspended. The next day, The Refuge fired the two suspended employees.
While DPS officials say McCraw’s March 16 letter to Abbott was intended as a snapshot on the criminal investigations’ progress, the monitors wrote this week that it was “at best, premature.” They found “ample evidence” for the protective-services department to substantiate civil determinations that sex abuse, exploitation, failure to provide 24/7 awake-night supervision of children, staff members sleeping on the job and record-keeping failures occurred at The Refuge.
Other foster-care issues
Jack grilled Abbott’s appointees who run protective services and the Health and Human Services Commission on how much progress they’ve made in carrying out January recommendations by three national child-welfare experts. They would amount to a far-reaching program of new mental health services for children, mobile crisis teams to help distressed families and high-quality treatment programs for youths struggling with mood disorders and addictions.
When state officials testified they needed the Legislature’s approval for proposals costing money, Jack questioned why they wouldn’t tap the more than $12 billion in the state’s rainy day fund.
“I can tell you it’s raining on these children,” she said.
Sergio Gamino, the newly appointed protective-services official who will oversee the push, told Jack that the state is just now scheduling interviews with people to fill 11 new clinical care coordinator positions. The coordinators will honcho efforts in each region to place and treat children who lack licensed placements. Earlier, the department said it expected to hire them by March 30. Gamino, a former Veterans Administration official from the Pacific Northwest, told Jack he had no experience in child welfare.
“Oh, this is progressing well,” she said. Then, catching herself, the judge said, “I’m sorry, I’m not criticizing your efforts.”
“{Expletive}! You sure are!” interjected a private foster-care provider executive on the Zoom call, later identified as Connie Davis, a training supervisor of 2INgage, the lead vendor in community-based care for a region stretching from Abilene to Wichita Falls.
Though 2INgage leader Shirley Dwyer apologized for the outburst, Jack said it reflects “a pervasive attitude” of disrespect for her court and monitors at CPS and the community-based care vendors. Earlier, the judge had noted it took Tennessee 17 years to get out of a similar class-action lawsuit and 20 years for New Jersey.
“I don’t think I have another 20 years to spend overseeing this case,” Jack said.
Austin correspondent Allie Morris contributed to this report
U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack also blasted the administration of Gov. Greg Abbott for allegedly downplaying the severity of misconduct by employees of the facility, The Refuge for DMST, or domestic minor sex trafficking.
And she kept up the pressure for Abbott and state GOP leaders to quickly transfer state funds and draw down available federal funds to create more treatment foster homes and high-quality congregate-care placements. That would help alleviate a shortage that last month caused 191 children in state care to spend two or more consecutive nights in state offices, hotels or other makeshift settings.
The biggest fireworks Wednesday were over The Refuge, a facility for girls who’ve been victims of sex trafficking that has attracted high-level support in state government, including from Abbott and his wife, The Dallas Morning News has learned.
While the Department of Public Safety disputes Jack’s characterization that it was trying “to disprove the allegations” against The Refuge’s management, the judge noted how Abbott on March 16 tweeted that the Texas Rangers “clear” the facility “from allegations of sexual abuse or human trafficking.”
At a tumultuous court hearing in Dallas in the long-running foster care lawsuit, Jack repeatedly stressed that she deems highly serious various revelations about The Refuge, including an alleged nude photos-for-drugs scheme and employees’ aiding runaways, including one girl set to testify in a federal prosecution of sex trafficking in another state.
“I am concerned about the many infractions that The Refuge had,” she said.
Last October, Abbott’s office awarded a $500,000 grant to The Refuge, which it recently revoked but only after nearly $200,000 was paid to the facility, The News found.
Also, first lady Cecilia Abbott attended a January 2018 fundraiser for The Refuge and visited the facility six months later, shortly before it opened, The News confirmed.
Also, twice in recent years, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office made the Bastrop County residential treatment center the beneficiary of a charity drive by its employees — an idea for raising money and donated supplies that Comptroller Glenn Hegar and his employees emulated at least once, according to records from Paxton that the newspaper obtained.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Jack threatened to hold state attorneys in contempt of court.
She complained they impeded access by her monitors to videotaped forensic interviews of girls at The Refuge. The interviews were conducted by a trained sex-abuse expert at a nonprofit child advocacy center partially funded by the state.
Jack also upbraided Assistant Attorney General Karl Neudorfer, who represents the Department of Family and Protective Services, the parent agency of Child Protective Services. It had sought to have the judges’ monitors file their update on The Refuge this week under seal, meaning it wouldn’t be made public. Jack defended her monitors, saying they have handled confidential information about children with sensitivity, never revealing their identities.
Bastrop County facility
Jack said she will ask her monitors to make a criminal referral to U.S. Attorney Ashley C. Hoff of the western district of Texas about The Refuge. The referral will ask federal prosecutors to investigate whether child pornography was created and distributed at The Refuge and, if so, whether that qualifies as sex trafficking.
Also, monitors will ask Hoff to look into whether obstruction of justice occurred in connection with allegations at the Bastrop facility, Jack said.
The judge, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton who is on senior status, has praised Abbott and the Legislature in the past for increasing state funding of CPS and foster care. But she unloaded on Abbott and especially his March 16 tweet that suggested The Refuge had been cleared of suspicion.
Jack said “from the top down,” an attitude of dismissal and belittling of her monitors has been pervasive in state government.
DPS director Steve McCraw’s March 16 letter to Abbott and subsequent testimony to two legislative panels “confirmed” fears that the governor and McCraw were engaged in a publicity ploy, Jack said.
DPS spokesman Travis Considine responded on Twitter that McCraw’s letter said “initial findings” and that, so far, “Texas Rangers have not identified any additional evidence of sexual abuse or human trafficking at The Refuge.”
“We are committed to pursuing each and every allegation to its end,” Considine tweeted.
The spectacle exploded into view almost four weeks ago. Under mysterious circumstances, a protective-services department lawyer’s unfinished memo detailing a spate of “intakes” to the state abuse hotline about The Refuge was shared with Jack’s monitors.
In the version of the memo transmitted to monitors Deborah Fowler and Kevin Ryan, caveats were removed. Raw, unverified allegations suggesting perhaps a significant number of the girls had been revictimized while in state care were presented as at least credible if not totally substantiated facts.
Jack hastily called a March 10 emergency hearing. Plaintiffs’ lawyers in an 11-year-old suit about foster care before her alerted the news media. After CPS and a Fort Worth-based state foster care vendor pulled their children from the facility, The Refuge temporarily closed.
Abbott ordered a Texas Rangers investigation. GOP legislative leaders launched hurry-up investigatory committee hearings. Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Beto O’Rourke scheduled a March 16 news conference in Austin and deplored Abbott’s management of CPS and foster care.
The Refuge’s founder, Brooke Crowder, hired new background-check screeners, a crisis-communications specialist and a lobbyist. The facility issued a timeline showing it had fired or accepted the resignations of four employees over two incidents. The facility promptly reported both to the protective-services department, state foster care regulators and law enforcement, it said.
Shortly after O’Rourke presented the “revictimization” of girls at The Refuge as an established fact, Texas DPS director Col. Steve McCraw released a letter in which he gave Abbott an update on his agency’s investigation. The “initial findings” showed “no evidence that any of the residents at the Refuge shelter have ever been sexually abused or trafficked while at the shelter” and “[t]here were no allegations or evidence that these residents were sexually abused or assaulted by anyone,” McCraw wrote.
DPS officials have said McCraw was speaking about 9 of the 11 girls staying at the facility, not two young women who he agrees were likely exploited by a since-fired nighttime caregiver. The $18-an-hour employee, a woman, allegedly sold drugs to the two young women, both with known substance-abuse histories. She also allegedly let them use her cell phone to generate sexually oriented images that could be sold using Cash App, a mobile payment service.
While news accounts and testimony at legislative hearings initially suggested that both young women took pictures of themselves nude and sold them using the employee’s phone, an update filed by court monitors Fowler and Ryan this week showed a more complicated chain of events: Both girls said that, late last year, they had planned to sell nude photos of themselves on Snapchat. But it’s not clear any of the sales materialized.
One of the girls, identified as “AA,” who had been placed at The Refuge in August 2020 by Our Community Our Kids of Fort Worth, told protective-services workers that, with help from a former resident at the Bastrop facility, she posted a nude photograph of another person, not showing the person’s face. The former resident got paid $5 through Cash App, the girl said.
In an advisory to Jack filed Tuesday, Erica Griese of San Antonio, The Refuge’s lawyer, said the two girls’ nighttime caregiver “groomed” the two girls, “persuaded them several times to create Commercial Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) using a smuggled burner phone, and sold the images online for her personal commercial gain.” While the former employee passed background checks, she was in a relationship with a man now incarcerated, according to the monitors’ update.
According to Griese’s filing, after The Refuge learned of the nighttime worker’s “inexcusable criminal behavior” on Jan. 24, it fired her that night. The next day, it reviewed her resume, which revealed that she’d worked “as a direct care provider for vulnerable individuals at six different organizations in the preceding eight years.” The Refuge is strengthening its background checks, Griese said.
Runaways
DPS officials have said they’re still trying to locate girls who lived at The Refuge during the nighttime caregiver’s five-month tenure — an arduous process. The facility says that, in its 3½ years of operation, 70 girls from five states have been residents. The average age is 16.
McCraw testified that he’d very much like to see the nighttime caregiver charged with crimes such as sexual exploitation of a minor and child pornography. However, he said it’s unusual to have a criminal probe conducted under such a glare of publicity. Proving that the woman actually directed the creation of sexual images and profited from their sale has been challenging, the DPS director said.
As more details emerged, protective services officials realized that the nighttime caregiver had a sister, an aunt, a cousin and a cousin by marriage who were also employed at The Refuge, Fowler and Ryan wrote.
“Two of these staff, and their housemate who was also employed by The Refuge, have been implicated in allegations that staff members assisted two children who ran away” from the facility on Feb. 20, the monitors said. The two girls were ages 16 and 17. On the first night of the girls’ flight, law enforcement found the 16-year-old on a freeway and returned her to The Refuge.
But the 17-year-old, who was placed there by child welfare authorities in another state, is “a witness in a criminal sex trafficking prosecution,” the monitors wrote. The FBI and the Texas Rangers, who are investigating facts surrounding her flight, told Texas protective-services officials around March 14 that four employees at The Refuge either assisted the 17-year-old’s escape from the facility or had contact with her while she was missing. Sometime on the day after the two girls fled, the 17-year-old was found at the Greyhound station in Austin.
Authorities charged one of the employees with making a false statement to the FBI. On Feb. 24, one of the employees implicated in the runaway incident resigned and two others were suspended. The next day, The Refuge fired the two suspended employees.
While DPS officials say McCraw’s March 16 letter to Abbott was intended as a snapshot on the criminal investigations’ progress, the monitors wrote this week that it was “at best, premature.” They found “ample evidence” for the protective-services department to substantiate civil determinations that sex abuse, exploitation, failure to provide 24/7 awake-night supervision of children, staff members sleeping on the job and record-keeping failures occurred at The Refuge.
Other foster-care issues
Jack grilled Abbott’s appointees who run protective services and the Health and Human Services Commission on how much progress they’ve made in carrying out January recommendations by three national child-welfare experts. They would amount to a far-reaching program of new mental health services for children, mobile crisis teams to help distressed families and high-quality treatment programs for youths struggling with mood disorders and addictions.
When state officials testified they needed the Legislature’s approval for proposals costing money, Jack questioned why they wouldn’t tap the more than $12 billion in the state’s rainy day fund.
“I can tell you it’s raining on these children,” she said.
Sergio Gamino, the newly appointed protective-services official who will oversee the push, told Jack that the state is just now scheduling interviews with people to fill 11 new clinical care coordinator positions. The coordinators will honcho efforts in each region to place and treat children who lack licensed placements. Earlier, the department said it expected to hire them by March 30. Gamino, a former Veterans Administration official from the Pacific Northwest, told Jack he had no experience in child welfare.
“Oh, this is progressing well,” she said. Then, catching herself, the judge said, “I’m sorry, I’m not criticizing your efforts.”
“{Expletive}! You sure are!” interjected a private foster-care provider executive on the Zoom call, later identified as Connie Davis, a training supervisor of 2INgage, the lead vendor in community-based care for a region stretching from Abilene to Wichita Falls.
Though 2INgage leader Shirley Dwyer apologized for the outburst, Jack said it reflects “a pervasive attitude” of disrespect for her court and monitors at CPS and the community-based care vendors. Earlier, the judge had noted it took Tennessee 17 years to get out of a similar class-action lawsuit and 20 years for New Jersey.
“I don’t think I have another 20 years to spend overseeing this case,” Jack said.
Austin correspondent Allie Morris contributed to this report
I really want to see Disney be the one that takes down the GOP in Florida. Oh please.
www.newsweek.com
Florida Lawmaker Threatens a 'Living Hell' for Disney as Feud Intensifies
Anthony Sabatini, a member of the Florida House of Representatives, says lawmakers may strip away favors that have benefited Disney for nearly six decades.
www.newsweek.com
GasBandit
Staff member
If the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity, as it did until 1968, it would be $27/hr today.
www.businessinsider.com
American workers would make more than $20 an hour if minimum wage kept pace with productivity, an economist says
A higher minimum wage would supercharge the economy, says Dean Baker, as workers would have more money to spend in their communities.
www.businessinsider.com
GasBandit
Staff member
Not doing it didn't stop prices from rising.
Of course the other thing we did was get rid of the 90% top tax bracket.
I believe the stats are McDonalds could pay for a $15 wage by raising the price of the Big Mac 25 cents.
Who ARE you and what did you do to GasBandit?
17 cents.
This Is How Much A Big Mac Would Cost If The Minimum Wage Was $15
archive.thinkprogress.org
GasBandit
Staff member
You should see the e-mail argument I'm having with my grandfather. I'm sure to him I practically sound like a marxist.
Ironically, I just pointed out in that e-mail that Denmark's minimum wage laws mean McDonald's in Denmark pays $20/hr, and there the Big Mac costs a mere 27 cents more than here.17 cents.
This Is How Much A Big Mac Would Cost If The Minimum Wage Was $15
figmentPez
Staff member
IIRC, Denmark doesn't have minimum wage laws, it's very strong unions that are responsible for that high minimum pay, but that's just a nit-pick.
I'm really replying because even in the US the price of a Big Mac isn't tied to minimum wage. It's not that easy to get info on how much a Bic Mac costs at various locations, I learned when I was trying to understand these numbers a while back (and even harder to figure out what McDonald's workers are actually getting paid). Prices aren't higher in Seattle than in Houston. Real estate plays a much bigger role in fast food prices than minimum wage laws do.
The price of a Big Mac isn't a monolith. It'll cost double at some locations what it costs at other places in the US.
Denmark's union stance is very, very old school and ground level. No, you don't have to join the union and you'll probably be offered the same compensation... for the two weeks you'll be working at that job because once everyone else figures out you aren't in the union, your work life will become hell.
GasBandit
Staff member
The point of the argument though is disproving the "if you raise wages, you raise prices" argument that is always used to shut down the idea of raising the minimum wage. Clearly it isn't automatic, as the average starting McDonalds wage in the US is $11, and nearly doubling that does not cause the price to the consumer to nearly double... or even come close to doing so.
Right. It's just an academic exercise. If they could pay that minimum wage by raising the price of one burger 17 cents, they could pay it by raising the price of everything by only a couple of cents each, and actually probably come out ahead. Most buyers wouldn't probably even notice. McDonalds got out of pricing everything $x.99 long ago. Everywhere I go, the burgers are priced odd amounts.
GasBandit
Staff member
It's also worth mentioning to those that have never seen behind the curtain that your American employer's rule of thumb is that you "should" bring in 4-5 times your own wage in profits.
I've seen the invoices, I know they're charging clients 5x per hour for my labor than what they're paying me. And that doesn't even figure in the markup on the equipment they're selling the client that I am then writing programs for.
So, there's a LOT of wiggle room in there to keep costs down if we can crack that mindset that dictates they're entitled to 80% of our labor's value.
I've seen the invoices, I know they're charging clients 5x per hour for my labor than what they're paying me. And that doesn't even figure in the markup on the equipment they're selling the client that I am then writing programs for.
So, there's a LOT of wiggle room in there to keep costs down if we can crack that mindset that dictates they're entitled to 80% of our labor's value.
So what you're saying is that things would be more efficient if the
GasBandit
Staff member
Ehhh, I don't know if going THAT far is a good idea.
But it'd definitely be good for the executive class to actually be a teensy bit afraid of guillotines.