Minimum wage in Manitoba

Here is an excellent commentary on minimum wage in Manitoba. Kudos to sandboxinian St Norberter for the blog.

http://bgilchrist.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/manitoba-the-ndp-lie-about-caring-for-the-lower-class/

Excessive taxation is directly related to excessive government spending.

Government should re-evaluate what it spends money on as it can no longer afford to be all things to all people.

Imagine life under a Libertarian-influenced government. Much more free enterprise, much more prosterity. Sounds good to me.

One of the things I have often wondered about ( and at somepoint I’ll get around to finding the data behind this) is what the real impactof minimum wage increases are on the working poor.
Sure, Social Planningcouncil and other anti-poverty groups will argue that it does have asignificant effect. But a $0.25 min wage increase is only a $520/yr grossincrease (or $20 bi-weekly before taxes and deductions).
I’d really like to know how many people make minimum wage inthis province that:
a) Have been in that position more than 6 months
b) Don’t make tips
Given that 7-11,Tim Hortons and I believe McDonalds all paymore than minimum wage to start, who makes minimum wage that isn’t in schooland lives (or supports a family) on that amount?
I’d like to find the numbers, but I can’t see this numberbeing very high.
Of course it’s easy to make minimum wage increases, becausethe employer pays and the gov’t gets some of the increase as increased taxrevenue.
It’s harder and requires more intestinal fortitude to givelower wage earners tax relief that all low wage earners could benefit from. Ofcourse that option reduces income tax income, as opposed to increasing it.

SOME of that data might be in the Winnipeg Census data

http://winnipeg.ca/census/2006/Selected%20Topics/

in particular the 2006 income by neighbourhood one



has before tax, after tax, composition of income..

Close, but no cigar.

It shows % of wage earners classified as low income in specific neighborhoods. Using neighborhoods, you can find out #s.

But....

If low income earners is defined as some number greater than min wage then it doesn't work.

meh... if you simply spent 10-20 hours massaging the data you would get what you want.

Deank wrote:meh... if you simply spent 10-20 hours massaging the data you would get what you want.

I think your onto something....sounds familiar...almost like the method for estimating costs of major projects, museums, stadiums...

I'm ...but whatever.

St Norberter wrote:Close, but no cigar.

It shows % of wage earners classified as low income in specific neighborhoods. Using neighborhoods, you can find out #s.

But....

If low income earners is defined as some number greater than min wage then it doesn't work.

StatCan defines Low Income by some cut-off value, which varies for different household sizes and regions. The cut-off value is set so that the % will be somewhere between 10 and 20%, depending on neighbourhood characteristics such as age, population density, and ethnicity. This also includes people without wages who derive their income from non-employment sources, so not necessarily associated with minimum wage.