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Andrew Tobias

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Andrew Tobias
Andrew Tobias

Money and Other Subjects

15 Minutes A Flight; $15 An Hour

June 10, 2015June 10, 2015

BOREF

I know.  Quiet.  But WheelTug should have a good presence at the Paris Air Show in a couple of weeks; hope springs eternal; and in the meantime, this bit of a recent interview with Boeing’s CEO caught my eye:

Q. It seems what airlines want is still a bit beyond the realm of physics.

A. We live in a more-for-less world, and our customers challenge us. Some innovation will be required, because that market will want something that can fly a long distance and be able to load and unload passengers in 15 min.

Now, let’s see.  How would you be able to load and unload 200 passengers that fast?  Within the realm of physics, you’d probably need to load and unload from both the front AND the back doors, cutting the time in half.  But you can’t do that unless you can park the plane parallel to the gate (instead of nose in) and run jet bridges to both doors.  And you can’t do that if you taxi in with an engine on, because the exhaust, as you turn the plane sideways, would occasionally knock over other planes or people or vehicles.  So you need “e-taxi.”  So — one might argue — you need WheelTug.  The beat goes on.

THE $15 MINIMUM WAGE

It’s coming, at least in high-cost cities (there being considerable logic to its being higher in Los Angeles, CA than in Lumber City, GA) and that is a good thing for all most everybody.

From a Bloomberg opinion post:

What we know about the minimum wage is that modest increases have a negligible effect on employment, and usually work as a net economic positive to the region that passes them. The groundbreaking research by economists David Card and Alan Krueger has been confirmed by lots of subsequent research. This has become a pet subject for me, discussed many times before (see this, this and this) . . .

Taxpayers would benefit, because right now we’re subsidizing employers who pay poverty wages.  (Read the Bloomberg piece for the fascinating  economics of a McDonald’s franchise.)

And the economy as a whole would get a boost — which begins a virtuous cycle of rising sales, profits, and tax revenues; shrinking unemployment, poverty, and deficits.  (I.e., the Clinton and Obama years.)

And if, yes, hamburger prices went up a bit and business-owner profits shrank a bit (at first) as the pendulum swung back a bit from record-wide inequality, that would be a price worth paying.  In the long run, the more robust middle class and higher economic growth rate would more than make up for any short-term hit to burger buyers and business owners.

 

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