Training and safety nets, funded through tax revenues.

Keep in mind, the national minimum wage in Australia is currently $18.29. The entire US has been getting a discount on minimum wage labor for decades, and everyone is kicking and screaming now that those workers are having their wages ratcheted up to what they should be making when accounting for inflation [1] [2].

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/04/5-facts-abou...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/21/adjusted-for-inflation-the-f...

And a popular videogame can be wildly more expensive. MLB The Show 2018 for instance is $60 in the US and $100 in AU. These prices are outside that which is explained by the current exchange rate.

Yes, you are being paid more. The price of living is also drastically higher there. I think there are better case-studies than Australia.

[0] https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/fact-finders/cinema/indus...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187091/average-ticket-pr...

"Australia has a one of the strongest economies in the developed world. It survived the recent recession unscathed and hasn’t had a real recession in 20 years. And as Australian academics have noted, "Australia and New Zealand, with among the highest minimum wages in the world, have both low levels of unemployment and significantly lower levels of low paid employees.

Bankruptcies due to medical costs, which accounted for 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies before the Affordable Care Act, are completely unknown there."

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/laura-chapin/2014/12/09...

That's actually easily explained by manufacturers tying their product to the US dollar. We're getting fucked by this in Canada, too. My favorite is when Apple laptops fluctuate by $200CAD in either direction while my salary stays the same.

Just look at a chart of your dollar against the USD. Movies are more local in a sense.

Equivalently to your argument of picking the highest value you can find and claiming others getting a discount, maybe Australia is overpaying for labor, and has been getting less as a result.

Historically I think it has turned out that machines/computers are really good at jobs that people think are hard, but really bad at jobs that people think are easy.

Machines are great at doing precision machining, which is hard for humans. But they're terrible at walking, which most people can do without difficulty.

For example, waiting tables is a classic minimum wage job (in fact, in most states in the US, the minimum wage for waiters is actually less than the standard minimum wage because tip income is assumed to make up the difference), and I'm not seeing waiters being replaced in any significant capacity by robots in the near future.

And on the other hand, a difficult job like being a machinist is becoming increasingly obsolete. A master machinist will always be able to find high-paying work, but the market for apprentice or journeyman machinists is drying up very rapidly, because a single master machinist can set the template for a hundred CNC mills and lathes, to the point where the pipeline for master machinists is on life support.

It's like saying because React has made people more efficient at building bug free user interfaces that we can all relax in our jobs as there is no IE6 to support. Instead we all know that the UI has just got more complex, interactive and shiny.

also janitors with large areas to clean have been operating mopping machines for 30+ years.

The question we should be asking is why are we devaluing the completed labor of the lowest wage classes?

I would keep raising it incrementally until inflation hits around 4-5%.

This is probably the simplest, most effective way of solving the income inequality problem. Minimum wage hikes cut in to the bottom line first and prices second. There's a lot of profit at the top that an just be redirected to the bottom by increasing the minimum wage - barely even affecting the middle classes.

>why are we devaluing the completed labor of the lowest wage classes?

So the value of their labor above and beyond which they are compensated for can be extracted and redistributed - mostly in the form of profits.

This is done via outsourcing (lowering the demand for domestic labor), austerity (e.g. leaving portland's pothole fixing to the anarchists) and slashing benefits like SNAP/ unemployment (lowering the negotiating leverage of workers).

I don't think that is the working model. The value of labor is decreased by government policy because it's believed that wages are sticky and decreasing the wage value will lead to greater employment macroeconomically.

Yes, the downstream effect is that we line the pockets of corporations and the already wealthy, but the justification and motivation for it is progressive social policy.

The median full-time wage is $50,000 per year. That's closer to $25 per hour.

If you include an 18 or 70 year old working a part-time job, you'll dramatically reduce that median income and present a false picture of true labor earning potential.

This about the impact of a minimum that affects nearly HALF of all workers in an area. It's absurd to think that this will not cause serious disemployment effects.

(Nationally, median hourly wage is $18.12)