Another solution to help low wage/low skilled workers, is a negative tax rate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit

Maybe those better solutions have the same dynamics. Economics is all about trade-offs; many of them are hard to evaluate and some of them are not worth making. Minimum Wage increases to $15/hour seem more and more to be not worth making.

Taking a job which provides no on-the-job training, and takes no skill keeps someone where they are. Because they aren't learning anything they are stuck doing jobs at this level forever.

If a person is prodded into learning a skill in order to reach the bottom($15/hour) rung, and then at the $15/hour level, the person is doing skilled work, they will be defacto receiving on-the-job training, since they are providing some skill.

As long as there is a big enough social safety net, and access to resources like the library and the internet, unskilled and unemployed people will at least have the opportunity and a motive to learn.

It's really too early to tell whether a higher minimum wage will result in a more skilled, educated populous in the long run. But it does fit the data that most (all?) first world countries have a relatively high minimum wage and social safety net. It could be argued that a high minimum wage is partly how they got there.

2. The assumption that minimum wage jobs are dead-end by default is decidedly not true. Even the most menial minimum wage job provides people with employment history, which is very important for the poorest people in society to establish in order to get other jobs.

3. The logic here assumes that everyone who is displaced by the high minimum wage is capable of becoming a higher skill worker as long as their current employment opportunities are taken away from them. This is may be true for teenagers who are still in school. This is very much not true for all sorts of other minimum wage workers. Such as:

* Old people who are working to get a little extra money during their retirement.

* Single mothers, who often choose to take lower-paid work because many jobs have more flexible scheduling.

* People who have already been displaced from another high-skill job mid-career and have no where else to go to make ends meet (e.g. factory workers).

* People with disabilities that prevent them from pursuing high skill work.

4. The logic here also assumes that, even if someone does improve their skills, that there are enough high skill jobs that exist to employ all of these people. Higher skilled workers tend to be more productive than lower skilled workers, which in turn often means there are fewer high skilled jobs available than lower skilled jobs.

5. The problem with a large social safety net is that it acts as an alternative to working. You might find that trade-off to be acceptable, but you need to be aware that the likely choice many people will make isn't going to be to go to their local lending library to learn Javascript; it's going to be to stay home and not work. It's not because they're lazy or whatever people say; it's because the structure of the benefits incentivizes not-working over working for $X/hour or $Y/year. The values for X and Y go up when the safety net becomes more generous.

Closing the capital gains tax loophole is, presumably, a reference to stopping some or all of this favorable treatment.

2. Changing that would not do anything to solve this problem (even if you think it should be solved through more government spending, it wouldn't raise much money)

(I have advocated better aligning the treatment of capital, labor, and generic other income, but the details involve more than just counting long-term capital gains as ordinary income.)