I think the better option is to guarantee a minimum wage through a subsidy, while abolishing all minimum wage laws. Like a negative income tax. So let's say you earn $12 stocking shelves, the government should subsidize $4 per hour to give you a total income of $16 per hour. If you make $15/hr, they subsidize $1. If you make $20, they subsidize zero.
In this way, the downsides of minimum wages are avoided (cutting back on hours, laying people off, raising prices, and pricing low skill people out of the workforce), while still allowing a decent income for anyone working full time.
You can tax the subsidy at a higher rate than your normal tax rate, so that businesses are still dealing with competitive market incentives and cannot pay a $1/hr leaving the remainder to the government, and so that employees are always incentivized to take the highest paying job.
If you run the numbers, providing every employee in america with a $16 minimum wage, working 40 hours per week, and assuming the average employee making less than $16 makes $12, would cost $500 billion per year. This is not an out of reach policy.
The fact that they don’t is only because they can’t, because minimum wage law.
Pretty bad example - where’s the incentive to work harder for the extra $3/hour when you get nothing?
And do you really mean to tax per hour rather than per year which is where we currently base income taxes on? Wouldn’t that continue to encourage 70, 80, 90 hour weeks which is really bad.
I don't understand what you're asking here.
"And do you really mean to tax per hour rather than per year which is where we currently base income taxes on?"
You'd continue to be taxed the same way. But all the income from the subsidy would be taxed at a higher rate than the income the business paid.
In this way, you are always incentivized as the employee to take a higher paying job.
What’s the difference?
What stops you doing a deal where you (on paper) work 80 hours a week for $8 rather than 40 for $16, you’d cost the employer the same, but you would get twice the income ($1280 a week).
How do you even define when you’re working.
12 plus 4
15 plus 1
I’d expect it to be more like
12 plus 4
16 plus 3
20 plus 2
24 plus 1
A 20% marginal tax rate.
The hour thing seems massively corruptible
Earn 15 get 1 subsidy
Earn 12 get 4 subsidy
What’s the difference to the worker?
Fork 4/3rds harder to earn 16 not 12, see no gain. Equivelent of 100% marginal tax.
However, doing it through this weird reach-around where you have to make low-income earners a public charge (based on the immigration terminology) while subsidizing only the companies that pay so little as to require it - isn't IMO a rational approach. Have you seen how arduous Medicaid is? Food stamps? That's not a vocational training program, that's a punishment for being poor while having a system set up explicitly to make you poor. After all, this is not subsidizing the individuals, it's subsidizing the business.
It's a blunt instrument right now. Just paying minimum wage doesn't guarantee any sort of education or training. What corner store offers education and training programs?
The rational approach is to make companies pay a living wage as a baseline, and then if you want to encourage certain behaviors - like educational training, for instance - offer tax credits and rebates. Or, if you want to subsidize specific low value added businesses like corner stores, subsidize them directly.
Begin with a baseline of livability, and then, if the company wants to go above and beyond, reward them for doing so.