Burger King Worker

[MADem]

21. I tend to squint a bit at shit coming out of FORBES magazine (because that mag owner is a

libertarian lunatic, among other reasons) but someone on his staff did do an analysis of the "buying power" of this wage:

...They’re clearly using some rather strange exchange rate as 110 DK is $16.35 at today’s rate. Still impressive as compared to the US.

But that’s not enough: if we want to compare wages we need to compare what they will actually buy. That is, we must adjust for Purchasing Power Parity, or PPP. And the correction there is 1.4. That is, in terms of what you can actually buy with any amount of money in the Danish economy we must divide the market exchange rate by 1.4. Which gives us $11.70 per hour as the Danish minimum wage.


Now, you might think that this is all fiddling around with the numbers and you’d be right. But it’s also fiddling around with the numbers in the correct manner. As we can see when we go to look at the OECD’s numbers for “real minimum wage”. That’s here. Set that to hourly and you’ll see that, among the OECD countries, the Australian minimum wage is in fact. $10.50, The French $10.70 and so on. That’s the “real” minimum wage, that’s what that minimum would buy you, in America, at current American prices.

Denmark’s not on that list as it being a very small country it’s not in that OECD database. But the corrections I’ve applied are exactly what are used to correct those OECD numbers.

And there’s one other thing to note. A $15 an hour minimum wage in the US (by definition, PPP numbers are set to US prices, so $15 is both the market and PPP exchange rate value for the US) would be nearly 50% higher than the minimum wage in any other OECD country, ie any other rich and large country.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/08/12/denmark-does-not-have-a-20-minimum-wage-try-11-70-instead/

At the end of the day, though, we need to move the minimum wage up. The federal wage in this century is an utter disgrace. It's just not enough. Odds are, as I said elsewhere, that the Congress will be dragged, kicking, screaming, whining, crying, by states and cities that do the right thing FIRST...leaving the federal government to follow along, as they do.