> In general, increasing pay into people at the bottom of the ladder

The bottom of the ladder is the unemployed, who make $0/h.

The good faith argument for no minimum wage is that those people would have a much bigger chance to find jobs and build job skills.

There's still the challenge of overhead that comes with onboarding and managing a new full-time or part-time worker.

Most companies hiring for minimum wage positions want a respectful employee who will show up on time. I don't think they'd bend on those requirements for cheaper labor as the management overhead would quickly eat into any cost savings.

So, while I understand it's a "good faith argument", I don't think it holds much water. Companies will just use a no-minimum wage environment to negotiate cheaper deals with employees they would have hired anyway.

Also, one's salary is in large part due to one's ability to negotiate. A manager who hires dozens of workers a year is probably pretty good at negotiating while a low-income worker might not be experienced in that area. The minimum wage also helps correct that imbalance in negotiating power.

What job skills exactly are you learning doing minimum wage jobs in 2019? That always seemed like a bit of a meme to me, considering if you've already held one minimum wage job before then you've already learned everything they have to offer practically.

This might be different if companies were interested in training employees but they aren't. So what happens with no minimum wage is that you have a class of workers who work over 40 hours a week yet have to survive off of government assistance.

The government is literally subsidizing the profits of that company at that point. So why should companies get away with being a drain on society?

Job skills to learn for people who can't get a minimum wage job can be

- Getting to work on time and every day.

- Functioning in a workplace without getting in fights.

- Sobriety.

- A basic knowledge of English.

Once you've mastered those, McDonalds will be happy to hire you.

Those aren't job skills. Those are all things you learn as part of your basic education.

So again, what actual skills do you learn on the job? If your argument is that we should remove the minimum wage to help people who can't make it through the educational system, I think the actual argument is that our educational system is fucked and needs to be fixed. Even then, most of the unemployed have those skills you've mentioned but aren't hired for any number of reasons unrelated to their competency or wages.

Those are definitely skills many at the bottom lack. They weren't part of my basic education, but I'm sure we went to different schools.

Regardless, people without those skills exist. Us HN people never meet them, and have a hard time imagining their lives, but they're still out there.

I completely agree that our educational system is fucked and needs to be fixed. I don't see how that would help the people who already went through the fucked up version, even if it ever got fixed, which I think we can agree isn't likely the next decade at least?

To learn about how the "permanent underclass" lives, You could do worse than reading "Dignity": https://www.amazon.com/Dignity-Seeking-Respect-Back-America/...

I am very, very familiar with how the poor and poverty stricken live considering I've been there and have been very public about my and my family's experience.

Which is precisely why I find framing arguments around removing minimum wage as some benefit to the poor to be rather disgusting, because it does absolutely nothing to solve the problem.

A job which can't pay shit isn't going to help you survive when the rent is due and you're earning $5 or less an hour. Even moreso if you're disabled and companies further take advantage of your desperation to work you into the ground until you break.

This isn't about helping the poor, it's about allowing companies to fleece them harder.

I honestly can't understand how people think earning $5/h is worse than earning $0/h.

I'm not being sarcastic. It's such a bizarre mental contortion.

Because the way the American social safety net works, you often wind up losing more than $5/hour worth of benefits to get that $5/hour job.

Many low wage jobs are physically demanding, have terrible (or no dependable) schedules, and offer limited hours so as to avoid having to offer benefits. It's not uncommon for low wage workers to juggle two or three jobs in order to get enough hours of paid work to survive. The problem then is that it is very hard to manage schedule conflicts between the jobs when they occur. Too many conflicts can cost you your job. I've seen this happen many times.

Check out this article in Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/life-af...

Also highly recommend On The Media's multipart investigation into poverty in America: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/busted-ame...

> Because the way the American social safety net works, you often wind up losing more than $5/hour worth of benefits to get that $5/hour job.

Yeah, the marginal tax for the underclass is a huge problem!

If you lose $12/h in benefits by taking a $10/h job, most people won't take the job. Not because they're lazy, but because they're sensible rational people.

That's a big poverty trap we've built.

> The bottom of the ladder is the unemployed, who make $0/h.

If government programs are included, the unemployed definitely don't "make" $0/hour. As is often pointed out, taxpayers are effectively funding the underpayment of workers Walmart, McDonalds, etc because of government subsidies.

I don't have a dog in this hunt but the issue is much too complicated by government action to say unequivocally that the unemployed "make" $0. I'm not sure if it's good or bad but I definitely lean toward "we've made it too complicated".

[Now I'll go back to sorting through baffling health insurance complexity...]

I made $0/hour when I was unemployed at the start of my career. Never had a job before, and nobody was willing to give me a chance, so I got nothing.

I'm thankful that I will never be in that situation again. It was awful.

In the US? You should have been able to get heavily subsidized health insurance (which is a hassle), unemployment, etc. Still crappy but it's not $0.

But that's exactly my point: it's very difficult to discuss this when policy is such a swirl.

Canada, but it's the same in the States. Unemployment is for people who have lost a job. I would not have qualified.

What stuck with me was that everything required that I already had a job. Maybe it was the economy at the time, but nobody wanted to hire someone without work experience. When I discovered that even unemployment required I have work experience, it felt like I was living in Catch-22.

For that reason, I support the government acting as an employer of last resort. Everyone should be guaranteed a job if they're willing to work.

> For that reason, I support the government acting as an employer of last resort.

I like that concept as well. But there are problems. Quality of work is one. Another is the complication of getting something useful out of that manpower. Would probably be done by lending that workforce to companies... subsidized if necessary, but with significant bargaining power. Still this could end up becoming a nightmare with incompetent / corrupt governments. It would be a great natural minimum wage, though, since you'd be stupid to work for less than you could get at you gov job.

How did you shelter and feed yourself at $0/hour ?

Somebody or something was providing you liquidity.

Usually, in that situation, either you have family or friends who can help you or you end up homeless.

You clearly do have a dog in the hunt because you're framing it as the government subsidizing the companies. All of your examples are jobs with a ground level bar for entry so low that people with zero skills or clear mental illness can still manage to learn them and become gainfully employed. Were these people not employed at all they'd require /more/ government support not less.

How will it improve your life to work 80 hours a week for 3 cents an hour, living in the USA? What can you purchase with your two dollars and forty cents (before tax) of weekly pay? What job skills will you be learning?

>The good faith argument for no minimum wage is that those people would have a much bigger chance to find jobs and build job skills.

That isn't a good faith argument at all. That the "nice job you have there, stop asking for a living wage; it would be a shame if anything happened to it" argument.

> The reality for us every-day workers is that either the minimum wage is increased or we'll have to make up for it in taxes that support programs to compensate for the lack of a liveable wage.

Exactly. Too low a minimum wage actually becomes a subsidy to employers.

I used to think this was bad. Now I’m not sure. The model where employers are responsible for employee well being leaves a lot to be desired:

a) The employer can always get out of the obligation by just not employing the person, reducing their hours, switching to a contractor relationship, etc. It only benefits employed people.

b) It creates pressure for everyone to be employed by a corporation, as opposed to retirement, entrepreneurship, or whatever else people might want to do.

c) It favors large employers over small ones.

If we want everyone to have something, we should provide it at public expense, not attach it as a condition of other relationships. Yes this might be “a subsidy for employers” but progressive taxation takes it from the employer’s beneficial owner anyway.

Higher minimum wage is a subsidy for tech companies though. A better policy would be UBI rather than higher minimum wage.

> Higher minimum wage is a subsidy for tech companies though

By which mechanism?

When you raise the minimum wage, it makes automation more effective in comparison. Which is why in NYC when they raised the minimum wage for fast food workers, most of the people at McDonald's who used to take orders just got replaced with kiosks. This is in effect a subsidy for the tech companies that automate labor, like the company that makes the McDonald's kiosks.

If a job can't be done for a livable wage, then we have to be willing to let those jobs go. Automate them, outsource them, let the companies who rely on exploitative labor fail -- the jobs are going to leave eventually anyway.

Meanwhile, we should funnel some of those productivity gains to build a robust social safety net (including education and job retraining) to give the displaced some dignity, and the ability to retool and become productive again if they so choose.

>Which is why in NYC when they raised the minimum wage for fast food workers, most of the people at McDonald's who used to take orders just got replaced with kiosks

Is it really true though? When you actually look at the real world, you'll find those kiosks at McDonalds in airports too, despite not being in districts that raised minimum wage. And what about McDonalds in other wealthy countries, that often have state mandated living wages much higher than in the US? They don't particularly seemed to have rushed to automate any quicker than in the US.

In fact, I think it's more likely that you are overlooking the myriad of other benefits: The kiosk can take orders in any language, for example. Perhaps the Kiosk was always the superior option for McDonalds to use for their store. It just took until the coincidental timing for the technology to become cheaper, and robust enough, to use in practice.

They've been superior for a while. We had touchscreen kiosks at a Jack-in-the-Box (cheap burger chain) at near my university back in 2007.

It was a pilot program, and the CEO said they found that young people preferred to wait in line for the kiosk rather than place their order with an actual human, but older people preferred the opposite, so they decided to wait before rolling it out to all their locations. I think touchscreen devices are finally omnipresent enough that the older age demographics can handle ordering via a touchscreen.

A more sinister take would be that the larger restaurant chains anticipated minimum-wage increases, and timed the rollout of touchscreen devices to coincide with the rollout of minimum wage legislation, so their lobbyists can make the argument that minimum wage increases cost jobs, because they're still going to have to pay the cooks in the back and the people to keep the place clean.

That automation is in competition with minimum wage is unsubstantiated. And if companies innovate to get rid of the need for minimum wage jobs when min wage is raised, the society's response should not be to throttle innovation or keep lower minimum wage, but to institutionalize changes to how we redistribute the gains of that innovation.

If this is true, then I would guess that eventually it would have happened anyways. Automation is only going to get more effective, and the costs to automate can only go down. So at the most, all this could do is speed up adoption (but I still question if it really has or is just a scapegoat).

Higher wages might make it easier to make a business case for installing kiosks, but it does nothing to lower the price of the kiosks. I don't see how it qualifies as a "subsidy".

It's a market shift more than a subsidy.

Given a constant demand for, say, fast-food ordering services, there are two competing supplies addressing that need: minimum-wage labour, or automated kiosks.

By raising the minimum wage, you're shifting the supply curve up, which if sufficient, kicks the advantage to the kiosk manufacturer(s). Advantage: automation.

The kiosk vendors get a windfall benefit as they can now capture this share of the market.

The restaurateurs may wish to consider what their new market position vis-a-vis suppliers is. With minimum-wage labour, any one unit of input (worker) is fungible for another, and the employer has considerable leverage over the supply in that whilst a worker is out of a job, the employer need only find another replacement worker.

Up against a (likely) automation oligopoly or monopoly, the restaurateur is now at the short end of the market stick, and may face future price (or other) demands or concessions from the automation vendor(s). At least to the point of substituting back in human labour.

If minimum wage becomes a living wage then there are more people capable of accepting jobs that are needed and more difficult to automate - for instance, caregivers.

> How many of the people arguing for keeping the minimum wage unchanged were arguing that in good faith?

> Reasonable increases in the minimum wage, particularly ones that track inflation and cost of living are not going to harm the economy.

My understanding is that plenty of the arguments against it are from people concerned about the areas of the country still near the federal minimum. It's absolutely a good-faith argument concerning what they see as an unreasonable jump, of ~double the previous amount, instead of a reasonable increase.

How do you define “reasonable”? The bill that passed the House wouldn’t get to $15/hr until 2025. That would be a 4.6% annual increase (CAGR) going back to 2009 when the $7.25 rate was implemented. That might be a little higher than you’d like, but is it “unreasonable”? Maybe a compromise could include a longer ramp or a ramp to $13 or $14, but I haven’t heard that argument presented.

If we tracked inflation since 2009, the $7.25 would be around $8.65. Some might consider a stagnant rate as unreasonable in the face of annual inflation.

Lots of people say "tracked inflation", but few understand that inflation is measured relative to a basket of goods, and which basket of goods you pick really matters. Which means that the inflation rate you personally experience will depend on your lifestyle.

The result is that the inflation rate as experienced by the well-off (who consume more luxuries) is generally quite different than the inflation rate as experienced by the poor.

There is no good data that I know of over a long period of time for this. But https://www.chicagofed.org/~/media/publications/working-pape... has estimates for recent years, and it appears that inflation for low income groups is currently significantly higher than for high income groups. Mostly because price differences have been rising between stores available to low income groups versus high income groups.

There's a long-standing folk wisdom that the rich pay less for things than the poor.

How well that stands up to scrutiny I don't know, though I encountered it recently on an old (probably 1960s / early 1970s) Studs Terkel interview, as a guest comment.

(Guests were Willard Moss, pioneer amateur filmmaker, & John Dubay.)

The link that I posted was based on a fine grained analysis of actual spend by actual households.

It found that, indeed, the rich pay less for the same good than the poor. And that the gap is increasing over time.

Understood.

I am agreeing with you.

Indeed; it's certainly possible the people making that argument are misinformed about the ramp-up, or maybe they really don't think it's slow enough. And that's assuming they're wrong, maybe we just haven't seen the effects yet because we're not yet in 2025.

But misinformed isn't bad-faith. I was pointing out that, yes, actually listening to the other side does reveal real good-faith arguments against the increase.

I see your point and it’s true and reasonable. I would just add that at some point calling something unreasonable without educating yourself (or refusing to educate yourself) on the proposal is a form of bad-faith argument.

>The best solution appears to be to raise the minimum wage to a level that can support a person without government assistance and index it for inflation.

Which person? I contend that the person should be a 4 person family(so that I can throw out the oft proposed $15/hr rate fitting pretty closely with the US federal poverty rate of a similar family after taxes.) Other people say minimum wage is only for teenagers entering the work force.

Well, luckliy FDR himself discussed the concept in a speech as he signed one of the base laws to allow a federal minimum wage.

> In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.

Given that (and the context of these words in the late '30s), I'd say supporting a family of four is closer than teenagers who don't need the money.

It is worth noting that the rise of wealth in our society means that "decent living" by the standards of the 1930s means "extreme poverty" by today's standards.

More precisely the real value of median income tripled from the 1930s to the 1980s. Lower income brackets did likewise.

So it is historically incorrect to hear FDR say "decent living" and map it onto current notions of a decent living. Separately, we have many decades of experience with the program that FDR didn't, and therefore our opinions today can be better informed than his way. Therefore there is no particular reason that we today should feel bound to agree with his original views.

If you measure it in calories or other form of nutrition, did it triple?

If you define poverty not by an absolute standard of living but the poverty trap (the range where the rest of society trivially exploits you, intentionally or not, and you cannot advance as they do), does it triple?

As measured in calories it did not triple. But malnutrition went down a lot. And reduced malnutrition was one of the causes of rising IQ and physical stature over that time period.

The actual progress in standards of living in the USA from 1930 to 1980 is hard to overstate.

In what way are the poor exploited?

They possess essentially no power in labour negotiations, and most of them live under the yoke of debt.

I agree with those statements, and still dispute your use of the word 'exploit' insomuch as it implies unfairness or some kind of wrongdoing on the part of society.

Society has implemented welfare safety nets and minimum wages for the express purpose of improving the lot of the poor, at a non-trivial cost to the rest (i.e. financial net-contributors) of society. The wages that the poor are able to command (above the proscribed price floor) are the result of market forces of supply and demand; the prevalence of unskilled labor results in low pay--not society or greedy business owners.

The fact that society doesn't do even more to put money in the pockets of the poor can't be 'exploitation', unless you're 'exploiting' a homeless man when you put a dollar in his cup, when you could've put two.

Unless you're talking about loansharks, pay-day-lenders, and that sort of thing, in which case you're right, screw those guys.

Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological arguments. They're off topic here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not exactly. While you could claim that due to technological advances a person working a low skilled job at full time in 2019 is better off than someone doing an equivalent job in 1980, you fail to take into account that in 2019 that person would be by major guidelines in a much worse position, ie, no hope of owning a house, taking public transit, can't support a family in a city, less likely to be in a supportive union, and so on. In the things that matter, the person in 2019 is worse off. And at the same time, a worker in 2019 has wildly increased productivity compared to one in 1980. So in a sense, purely by the standard of what they produce, they make more but has less baseline property and amenities. This is an issue. It's no coincidence that rich people have proportionally gotten much much richer in these 40 years, and it has 100% come at a cost to the majority.

The comparison that I made is not between 1980 and the present, it is between 1930 and 1980. This is a very different time period and saw very different trends than have happened since.

FDR would have very much been of the opinion that rise of wealth in our society needs to be distributed to everyone, particularly the least well off among us.

This is true, but people who argue for it most vocally refuse to acknowledge the fact that it’s not economically feasible to reward the lowest paid people with a MUCH MORE than comfortable lifestyle. The minimum wage is for two things: To prevent the exploitation of workers at a certain level, and to allow workers to support themselves.

Some people also fail to realize that there will always be poor people. The only thing we can do is change the way we treat them. I support raising the minimum wage, but not as much as some. If there are really no other jobs, that’s what government assistance programs are for.

Mind you, I grew up dirt poor in the midwest. I’m now on my way to earning six figures by taking advantage of those aforementioned government programs.

Also: Some people are satisfied being poor. If they really wanted to get out, they would. I did. Those who argue that you can’t raise a family on minimum wage: You shouldn’t keep having kids if you don’t have a decent job. Of course uneducated people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds refuse to follow this rule, and this is why poverty is often generational.

"Some people also fail to realize that there will always be poor people" and "If they really wanted to get out, they would. I did" are interesting beliefs to share at the same time.

The connecting thread is "some people are satisfied being poor" but it's pretty tenuous. If those people stopped being satisfied, what happens?

>If those people stopped being satisfied, what happens?

Do what grandparents on both sides of my family did - work hard as hell and provide more for your kids than you had.

Not waiting around for the roast duck to magically fly into your mouth on it's own...

Minimum wage works out to about $2500/mo before taxes where I live. That’s not enough to pay for rent, utilities, food and incidentals. Not to mention insurance(s). Not to mention a car if your commute requires it. Not to mention family/dependents. Not to mention emergency savings. Not to mention retirement. The list goes on.

It’s not about a “much more than comfortable lifestyle”. It’s about establishing a baseline where full time work pays enough to live without government subsidy and/or crippling debt. And addressing the stigma that surrounds minimum wage jobs.

Is a minimum wage intended to provide support for one person or for a family (including dependents)? You aren't really clear in your comment on this point, which is common confusion in much discussion of this topic.

If it is for an entire family, then shouldn't there be a different, lower minimum wage for an individual without a family? What about a teenager with an after school job? What about a retiree who is just trying to keep busy but doesn't need a living wage at all?

IMO an average household. Going into more detail than that is a slippery slope towards profiling and discriminatory pay.

How does that work? If the minimum wage is intended to be sufficient for an "average household", then shouldn't it be less for a household without children, and smaller still for a single person?

That is discrimination.

So by your logic an employer would be required to pay every employee a wage that would allow them to support a family even if they don't have a family to support?

Yes. I’m talking about the minimum wage for any employee.

Consider the fact that it is illegal in the US to ask an interviewee their age, marital status, and family status, among other things.

None of that is illegal. You can ask, but you can't discriminate.

The page is wrong. Those are not illegal questions.

Agree to disagree

Um, no, you can read the law itself or follow some links on the page you linked. This isn't a matter of opinion.

Any employee? Part time job for a teenager?

s/?/.

That’s nuts, I lived a luxurious life in college on less than that. It’s certainly enough money for a room and food and a car and savings left over in nearly every US municipality.

Yay, must be nice being single all your life because you'll never be able to afford a family. Some people don't have the ability to get higher than min-wage jobs - ever because they lack the education necessary.

I live in an average city in utah. We rent a home for 1400. That's been our average for the past 4 places we've rented regardless of whether it was in a bigger city or rural. There are many rentals that are double or triple that w/ more room.

We generally try to go for 4-5 bedroom.. which includes a master, 2 kids rooms, and 2 offices for myself and my wife.

On top of that healthcare is about 1000/month. Kids grow fast we need to replace their wardrobe completely every 4-6 months. so say $200/month on clothes for two boys.

We're already at $2600/month. Add about $1000 for groceries (formula is $250 a month!). That's $3600. Add gas to get around town maybe $250/month. So $3800. Shouldn't people have some leisure? You said you lived a luxurious life, did you own a car? Go to social events? Go to movies ? how much per month was alotted for 'luxury'....I'd like to take the kids to Disney land that'd cost about $3000 or more.. so to budget that we'd need to break out maybe $300 per month into savings.

This is in Utah. San Francisco you're looking at a room going for 2x as much as our 5 br house. Cost of living increasing exponentially from there. I don't see how anybody in California exists on their minimum wages....

I'm a developer but I sometimes take crappy clients when jobs are low. Currently my most active client can only afford $25... I feel practically raped as I was used to $50/60 per hour doing laravel+vue, but can't figure out how to keep steady higher paying clientele. Summer left us almost homeless though, so I put out tons of lowball ads just to keep us housed. So now I'm essentially a senior-level developer earning $10 more than minimum wage. Depression and imposter syndrome don't help much with things either. Even for people w/ good skills times get hard in America. Higher minimum wages might make us freelancers be able to charge more, since we can compare our rates w/ low-skill workers.

I worked temp jobs without benefits for more years than I care to think about.

Here are some additional costs you haven't mentioned.

Medical insurance

Elder/child care

Student loan payments

Life doesn't always proceed exactly as you planned. Here are some situations that have happened to friends and acquaintances.

Husband became addicted to Oxycontin, sold most family assets to pay for it.

Wife moved to the opposite end of the country before the husband. She was told that she wouldn't have to work and to buy everything she needed on credit cards. He left the country with no forwarding address.

2500/month

- 400 taxes

- 600 rent (at least there's a listing for something at that price in San Jose, whether it's legit or not I don't know...)

- 0 car (Happy Birthday, college student)

- 100 gas

- 125 groceries (warning: not luxurious!)

- 440 health care

- 100 electricity

- 60 water

- 16 netflix premium (you said luxurious)

- 13 amazon prime

- 46 gym membership

- 30 internet

- 160 clothing

- 125 car insurance

- 0 car repairs (you lucked out this month)

= 285

Dating?

130 dating

= 155

- 350 car payment. (Happy Birthday, full grown adult.)

= -195

+ 130 impending breakup

- 0 alcohol (you lucked out this breakup)

= -65 savings

If someone is spending $130/month dating while at the bottom rung of the income ladder, They're Doing It Wrong. If they can't talk someone out of their clothes after a $10 coffee date it's probably best for everyone that their genitals not come near another human being's until they've leveled-up their ability to intelligently utilize their available resources.

And a GYM MEMBERSHIP?!?! On minimum wage?!?! Prison workouts/calisthenics/military-style functional fitness. That stuff costs $0, and can be learned from free YT vids.

In what year?

2010

565 room (5 ppl in one apt but in separate rooms)

800 car all in (I drove a bmw, wasteful luxury)

600 food (ate out all the time, wasteful luxury)

50 utilities (gas and internet were included in rent)

100 entertainment (not much time)

That’s about 2400 in 2019 dollars and if I had gotten a cheaper car or taken public transit like most students there would have been plenty of savings.

On minimum wage you are about 400 in the hole after taxes, and before health insurance, savings, retirement, SO, kids etc. Not to mention this is one rented bedroom, not even a studio apt.

I did as well (in massachusetts in 2016)

With all respect to your experience, comparing a college roommate situation to a FTE earning minimum wage is a bit apples to oranges IMO. Students are eligible for many benefits including health care, and have a finite period of time (typically in their youth) until graduation. Whereas a minimum wage worker may be living on this amount with marginal raises for their whole life. Think about having a marriage and kids all while living in your college room indefinitely.

I rented a house, and didn't have roommates? I mean, it was in the shithole that is worcester, but its not impossible.

The implication is that minorities that have been historically discriminated against and are disproportionately poor will have fewer kids. This is a bad idea that people have 'tried' in the past and is ripe for abuse.

"Some people also fail to realize that there will always be poor people."

Replace "poor people" with heretics and you sound as self-rationalizing as an inquisitor.

About 2-3% of hourly paid workers earn minimum wage. For the most part, it's not about the masses, but the skills necessary to get onto the bottom rung.

As others have said elsewhere, in most cities, labor is at about $!5/hr already.

Adjusting it at all assumes that supply and demand do not apply to the labor market.

Why isn't there a minimum wage for computer engineers?

The question is did this raise average wages? There is litle benefit otherwise unless the min wage is way too low

The minimum wage is way too low.

Too low for what purpose?

Living.

Are people on minimum wage dying?

Yes, statistically, more than others. For stupid preventable reasons. Because of no insurance, worse food, difficult transportation options, crime.

If that's your cause, what do you think about reducing the tax rate on wages below 30k? They pay about 20%.

It's not meant to provide a living. Companies don't exist to provide jobs, jobs are a byproduct of the business, not its reason to exist. Minimum wage jobs are people with no skills who are easily replaceable, usually teenagers learning to enter the workforce.

Maybe in 1950. Today, it can be any retired person, highly educated or not, who can't find a better job.

It certainly can be, but that's not a business problem, there will always be people who failed to prepare or lacked the necessary skills to prepare for old age or people who refuse to move somewhere they can find a job. Education doesn't equal skill; jobs pay for skills, not for education; if you have skills you can find a better than minimum wage job, but you might have to move.

Those are problems for society, not for individual business owners. Those problems should be solved by taxes, not by forcing business owners to pay people more than they are worth to the business.

> As many have pointed out, the minimum wage in many places has been eroded for years by inflation, so increasing it is really just making up for a lack of indexing on it.

The last minimum wage hike was in 2009, when the minimum wage was increased to $7.25. Inflation adjusted to 2019 dollars, that would be about $8.70.

In 2016, both main Democrat candidates supported a $15 minimum wage, which would be an increase of around 10X the required inflation adjustment.

What is it that you were saying about arguing in good faith?

Even in 2009 the adjustment wasn't sufficient to bring minimum wage back to 1970 levels, adjusted for inflation. Picking the last rate change isn't a good way to measure minimum wage.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, in 1970 the minimum wage was $10.66. So it is very accurate to say that the minimum wage has eroded due to inflation; currently it is $7.25, which is significantly lower.

Some Democrats propose raising it even higher than it was in 1970, but that doesn't refute the claim that modern, current minimum wage has been eroded — it has, significantly.

You've cherry-picked the highest (adjusted) minimum wage over an ~80 year period. The average is closer to $8 in current dollars, which is actually below the inflation-adjusted 2009 figure of $8.70.

That's not cherry picking. (Adjusted) minimum wages are raised to their peak, and then are gradually lowered due to inflation. If you're picking a point of comparison for the proposal to raise the minimum wage to a new historical peak, it's natural to look at the last time it was raised to a new historical peak.

To look at it another way, even if the 15$ minimum wage is passed, that doesn't mean that the future minimum wage will be 15$ on average.

>That's not cherry picking.

Picking the highest of the highs over 80 years is the definition of cherry picking. Why not simply pick the average over time? Or any other peak if you desire peaks?

Picking 1970, before many women entered the workforce and competition was more global, is likely not a good value to pick. It's probably better to let states, which have vastly different costs of living, set state or local wages to account for those disparities. Forcing a mom and pop in the middle of nowhere to pay what a worker in NY or SF gets by law will hurt many.

Who is to say what is the best wage? Should the government decide what people's wages should be? Should the government come to you and tell you specifically that your salary is not what you got from the exchange of labor with your employer and change it unilaterally?

Minimum wage debates in economics aside, there is a core ideological issue where some people really do like the idea of controlling other people, and some people prefer to keep those relationships nimble and organice.

As someone clearly on one side of the ideological debate, I would much prefer that government employees are banned from consuming any product or service produced by workers that earned wages below minimum wage, just to put skin in the game, and let the rest roam free.

> Who is to say what is the best wage? Should the government decide what people's wages should be?

I don't think the government should dictate exactly what a person's wage should be but setting a minimum makes perfect sense because otherwise businesses pay slave wages and use taxpayer money to subsidize their labor expenses.

As a taxpayer I don't want to my taxes spent on food stamps for employees working 40 hours a week just because some greedy company wants to put money that should go to those workers into their own pockets.

As a government, I wouldn't want the limited amount of available welfare funds going to people who are working to support themselves just because companies don't want to pay them a living wage.

You can argue all day that workers should be able to negotiate higher wages on their own and refuse to work for anyone who doesn't give them wages they consider fair, but we know that isn't an accurate description of reality. Some of the largest employers in the country have been a net drain on tax payers and directly contribute to high numbers of welfare recipients. Anti-union actions have weakened employee's ability to negotiate for fair compensation. Large corporations enter areas and eliminate competing businesses leaving local residents with fewer options for employment.

Like many cases, if companies hadn't exploited the system to the point where it is hurting people and causing a widespread harm I'd be more inclined to agree government should stay out of it, but that's where we are now.

> minimum makes perfect sense because otherwise businesses pay slave wages

Why is being unemplyed at 30U$S better than employed at 3U$D? It is clear that there are non-salary benefits to work that arent covered in MW. Thats why internships exist. Places that serve housing or food, like colleges, shelters, kitchens etc could afford to hire more people.

> As a taxpayer I don't want to my taxes spent on food stamps for employees working 40 hours a week just because some greedy company wants to put money that should go to those workers into their own pockets.

That is a complaint to the government. A private business has no control over subsidy policy. When you say you dont want to pay for those subsidies, why would businesses want to do it for you? You are merely transferring a burden from yourself unto another.

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Another important thing: MW is taxed significantly. Why doesn't the gov raise actual wages by reducing the tax burden? MW in california is taxed at 20%!

In fact, working for shitty pay is WORSE than being unemployed – you spend hours a day doing work that doesn't lead to any personal growth and just takes up your time and health AND still can't afford to live. But in desperation you'd still hang on to that, because what else to do? Beg on the street? Just die?

That's no way to treat people, but I assure you, many executives would not hesitate to sentence their employees to such fate if they could. They would squeeze the poor out like lemons and just throw them out when they're done. That's because companies are authoritarian and their ruling class have no obligation at all to people at the bottom instead preferring to enrich themselves. That's why trickle–down economics is fiction. The government however is democratic and supposed to prevent exploitation of its people. Hence the minimum wage.

> In fact, working for shitty pay is WORSE than being unemployed

Those employed at shitty pay disagree very strongly about this.

That's because their alternative is homelessness and starvation. Obviously they disagree with that even more than with being exploited.

But for society overall it's better to have even the most mundane jobs pay a living wage AND a safety net for those in between jobs.

> That is a complaint to the government. A private business has no control over subsidy policy. When you say you dont want to pay for those subsidies

I do want to pay for them though. I just want them to go to people who aren't working. People temporarily between jobs, people physically unable to work, etc. If someone is working they should be making enough to provide for themselves, anything less is a slave wage.

I do agree that people who are poor should be paying very little in taxes. However, most of the income taxes people making MW pay now are returned to them at the end of the year.

>>Who is to say what is the best wage?

This isn't a complicated question but it's strange you're proposing it like it's unanswerable. We have plenty of models that help us understand price. I imagine you could easily establish a basket of goods which would be used as a proxy for a 'fair' market rate. Regardless, the means do not dictate the ends. If a minimum wages is deemed an effective way to increase economic growth, the solution might be an iterative one.

Additionally, the Government isn't deciding what 'Your' salary is. They are setting a floor for the labor market. Without a floor for wages the economy would devolve into feudalism. Employers are a cartel and they would use size to suppress wages at the benefit of shareholder profits.

Personally I'm all for the free-market. There are certain instances where two parties are not negotiating from an equal foothold. I think the labor/employer relationship is one of those systems.

Its not a complicated one, it's an ideological one. I do not believe in the use of coercion to set wages. It just happens to also tend to be the best course of action in pure econ terms.

> Additionally, the Government isn't deciding what 'Your' salary is. They are setting a floor for the labor market. Without a floor for wages the economy would devolve into feudalism. Employers are a cartel and they would use size to suppress wages at the benefit of shareholder profits.

If you want to do X and someone tells you you cant, they are telling you what to do. But if gov is so concerned about those in the lower end of the tax bracket, why do they tax them at 20%?