Wage protesters move through downtown

You're not that smart either. Nothing personal - nobody is. Not you, not me, nobody.

Funds will underperform their benchmark by about the level of their fees. Over a long enough period of time 80-90% of funds (assuming they survive that long) will underperform. The performance of the remaining 10-20% is effectively randomness and the law of large numbers at work.

The last equities "superstar" manager, Bill Miller, blew up 15 years of work in about a year during the financial crisis. Local rockstar at Fidelity Contrafund Will Danoff has underperformed the S&P by about 0.25% over the last 5 years - and note that's a period where his growth style of investing has been in vogue. If value stocks come back - and they will - he's toast.

Buy a good mix of low cost index funds - when one becomes too small a piece of the portfolio - buy more. When one becomes too big - sell some. If you don't know how to do that part - hire someone to do it for you. If your average fund cost is over 0.5% you are doing something wrong. About 0.25% is your target (and if you are paying an advisor over 0.25% for any significant amount of assets, you are also getting ripped off).

I quite literally "wrote the book" on this.

The "Welfare Cliff" is a Fox News fairy tale.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/07/23/fox-cites-...

It's a lovely notion but money doesn't grow on trees. There's no free lunch. With such a large increase in wage, businesses must raise prices, cut jobs, or both.

Why should I pay him $15

Because it's a law the Commonwealth should enact, aimed at establishing a baseline of "If you work 40 hours a week, you should be entitled to live above the poverty line." Which the federal minimum wage does not even approach. If you can't pay your employees that much, then you're expecting the rest of us to pick up the bill for the difference, to which I respond "If you can't afford to pay your employees what they're worth, then you deserve to go out of business."

which really after taxes is $20

I have reason to suspect that you do not understand taxes, wages, or indeed any part of Econ 101.

Why should I pay him $15

How can fast food workers live without the latest $650 phone every year and gigs of data every month to watch videos, movies, shows, selfies, chat, facetime, Facebook, Tinder, Twitter, Uhub.... kicks, threads, shades, booze, and incidentals like food and shelter?

Look, why not just say the price of coffee would go up 2000% in order to support your opinion that you don't want the minimum wage to go up? I mean if numbers are meaningless, 2000% sounds a hell of a lot scarier than 60%...or were you trying to strike that middling ground of "scary, but still seemingly plausible enough that people will just accept what I say and agree that they don't want to pay 'more'"?

http://www.futurity.org/fast-food-minimum-wage-971...

Purdue University researchers found that a jump to $15/hr for fast food workers would equate to a FOUR PERCENT increase in restaurant prices. FOUR, not FORTY or SIXTY. And that's restaurant prices. A previous study found the same for food prices, but for overall prices the increase would be 0.4%...not even a single percent!

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/i...

And further to the point, more and more places are starting to realize that even in a shitty fast food job, there's institutional knowledge about how their particular location/clientele, etc. operate the best. Losing your workers because you pay them the bare minimum and then act as if they're completely interchangeable with anyone who comes in off the street tomorrow means losing that institutional knowledge and ultimately that's lost value as your new staff wastes even more time learning all the pitfalls your past staff already ran into and learned to avoid/workaround. So, keeping workers paid better so they don't seek other opportunities and even going further to letting them see some of the profits of their work through profit sharing or other equity type methodologies means they remain more invested in helping you make more money in the end (less wasted product/costs, less downtime on the job, less customer service complaints). You end up doing much better as a whole when everyone involved is well-compensated and invested in the team and not more worried about whether they can afford to buy bread that night or whether the landlord can wait a week for the rent.

I would rather pay more for goods and services, and have the satisfaction of knowing that the people that manufacture my clothes, and pour my coffee, are treated well.

Out in the inner suburbs, like Arlington or the Belmont/Watertown line, it's possible to rent about 600-700 square feet for under 1500 (about five years ago it was under 1100), within walking distance of groceries, a bus to Cambridge, and everything you'd need to live without a car. Most of that housing stock is 3 deckers or "garden apartments" so it's entirely reasonable to have that split over 1 or 2 additional people so that you cost of the bare minimum housing drops from 1k a month to maybe 600.

So yes, it's getting harder to live within city limits on 10 or 7 an hour. But there are options for people to do so, and raising the min wage will just raise the prices, both because of passed on wage costs and because people will now be able to pay more.

It's been well documented that basic services cost more in absolute terms in urban ghettos than elsewhere, and raising min wages will not fix that.