Monday, June 23, 2014

On Becoming Valuable

By Chris Rossini

Here's the latest puff of hot air from Mount Olympus:

Ok...if that's Obama's opinion, fine. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion of how things "should" be. I can rattle off a few "should(s)" myself. However, while my opinions are harmless to everyone else, Obama's aren't. He can, and does, use force to take what he perceives to be a problem, and make it much worse!

Here's how to make more money in the marketplace: become more valuable. You are paid based upon how valuable you are to your employer. No government law can change that. Your task is to make yourself so valuable that your employer can't function without you. Even the thought of losing you makes them anxious.

You do this by constantly upgrading your skills and responsibilities:

Today you do A.
Tomorrow you do A & B.
Next week, you're doing A, B & C....

You ask for more work (without asking for more money). You give more ideas (without an expectation that they'll be used). Operate under this philosophy for a long enough period of time, and you become indispensable. Most people will not do this, so the competition is not with anyone else. The competition is only with yourself, and if you allow any excuse to stop your climb.

Your employer will have no choice but to pay you more, and they'll be more than happy to do it. Keeping you becomes a priority. After all, you've become so valuable that the threat of a competitor trying to woo you away enters the picture.

We hear all this talk about "income inequality," but why do you think the CEO of a company like McDonalds earns so many millions? It's just a guy. He has two arms and two legs like everyone else. It's because he is so valuable, that if he doesn't earn the millions at McDonalds, someone else will snap him up to take advantage of his skills. His capacity to handle responsibilities have reached an astronomical level.

Obama, obviously, can care less about any of this. He writes #RaiseTheWage when he should be saying #RaiseYourSkills. Naturally, he's going to make life much harder for those who don't raise their skills (i.e., for many millions of people).

Raising the minimum wage cannot change the fact that you're paid based on your value to an employer. If the minimum wage is $10/hr, but you only have the skills to earn $9, $8, $7, $6....you're out of luck. You're now forced into unemployment. It is now against the law to hire you based on the skills that you actually have!

Become more valuable to earn more money. #RaiseTheWage is nothing but an unemployment generator. Obama can only hurt the very people he's purportedly trying to help.



Chris Rossini is author of Set Money Free: What Every American Needs To Know About The Federal Reserve. Follow @chrisrossini on Twitter.





3 comments:

  1. I really like how this only became a meme after the same people raised the payroll tax and took away some of the few deductions that were available to low income people that can't itemize, like for health savings accounts.

    Want to raise the minimum wage? Abolish the IRS and replace it with a 100% income tax on politicians.

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  2. Or, you could, you know, reduce your bills. "Bills" are not some set amount for each person issued to us by God. They come about as a result of our choices. And it is within our ability to change them.

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  3. The term “just wage” appeared first in Catholic literature in Rerum Novarum (published in 1891), an encyclical of Pope Leo XIII. He used it much as people now use the term “living wage”. It was not until the encyclicals of Pope Saint John Paul the Great that the term was used, not to mean the way a living wage was to be attained (such as by legislating a minimum wage), but as an indicator that the economic system was functioning properly. Thus, if all people were capable of working for a just wage, that meant that the economic system was itself just. That still does not mean that every wage would be a living wage, but it would be just given the value of the work being done, which is to say, a true market wage. All attempts to gin the system with artificial wage levels only makes matters worse, and, in fact, less just.

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