Shoot, the $45 an hour mentioned up this chain would be life changing for me (yes, I live in the U.S.), after 15 years at my job I make 17.26 an hour. It's why this talk of $15 minimum wage mildly terrifies me, I know people need it but man, it suddenly thrusts me nearly to minimum wage (minimum wage is currently 7.25 here).

You can feel secure knowing if you lost your job, any other job you find would at worst pay $2.26 less than you're receiving now, so you wouldn't suffer an awful drop in living standards (and you'd hope it would also pressure your employer to give you a raise..)

You should see an increase in your wage when the minimum goes to $15. A rising tide lifts all boats. Inflation is virtually zero, so rising wages are a good thing for the vast majority of wage and salary earning employees.

I am not sure it's given that inflation will stay at zero with rising minimum wages.

I think GP is worried this may not be the case, and he would lose purchasing power.

Nothing may happen, but I think we'll have to wait and see if this is the case or not.

My annual merit based increases are often at or just below inflation levels and the cost increase of insurance, I wouldn't hold my breath on my employer upping my pay a comparable amount - shareholders aren't fond of shrinking profits.

I think the largest pay bump I've ever seen in a year was right at 2% or possibly even less.

Why would inflation stay at 0? That is extremely unlikely.

I would love to see you prove that with actual labor statistics. Employers do not do that, plus now you need to deal with higher prices.

It “suddenly thrusts” you absolutely nowhere. You still earn exactly as much as you do now, but it is interesting to observe the psychological effect of being surrounded by people who are more miserable than oneself.

>You still earn exactly as much as you do now,

And one would assume you'd see rents and housing prices very rapidly start going up, then presumably other prices over varying levels of time.

Perhaps. But why wouldn’t the same apply to salaries then?

What would happen if we were to set the minimal wage at 100K so that we eliminate the poverty in one swift move and everyone is either equally rich, or as you are worried - equally poor :)

Having people only make slightly less than you terrifies you? Why does knowing someone else might be getting a tiny raise terrify you?

The problem with minimum wages is that they don't do anything. There is a mild psychological effect that forces people below minimum wage to find a new job. However, if the economy doesn't have enough jobs above minimum wage, then it does nothing.

If the government offered jobs at the minimum wage there would be an effective price floor for wages. Better yet, if those government workers spend their income they can drive economic demand which ends up creating jobs above minimum wage. Eventually every job pays more than minimum wage and nobody is dependent on the jobs guarantee.

And if there are enough jobs, then it does something, and does it well. It forces companies to spend a bit more on their employees and in some ways, redistributes wealth.

Your solution isn’t better. The government cannot be everywhere the way that Walmart is.

I really don’t think its impact is going to be that big. Low skilled labor will still find ways to get hired for less, off the books if the need is great enough...it happens all the time.

The government is already in more places than Walmart is though?

The government already offers jobs like that too, just that it's through the prison system and the floor is much too low

Look, as much as I hate Walmart, they exist in places at levels that the federal/state does not. Either way, that's not the only thing my argument stands on. I'm as liberal as they come, and would never suggest expanding the government just to fit that capacity.

I work as a Senior Software Engineer for big international corporation in the 2nd world country and $45/hour would be life-changing for me and most of the people I know.

I live in the US in a metro of less than 2 million, and my very first contract job as a self-taught developer who barely knew JavaScript was $45/hour. The guy didn’t even blink when I asked for that much. It was life changing for me too, going from desktop support to doing dev work.

I remember meeting a taxi cab driver in the US that told me about his experience coming on a tourist visa, getting married to stay and working towards starting to work as an engineer.

There are ways to move anywhere you want, and ways to get remote work at us companies, especially now, if you don't want to move. They are not easy, but they exist.

You don't have to move to the US to make 200. That's easily available for remote people. For the big bucks, moving maybe helps but it's unlikely you make it from driving Uber to 1k/hr unless you run your own business.

> That's easily available for remote people.

Not easily at all, clients usually avoid working with offshore freelancers directly, and established freelance platforms tend to cap the overseas rates (because they want their cut and also clients expect offshore devs to cost much less)

Or am I totally wrong here?

My experience is, as I read the job ads, they want US based remoters for the easy accounting. So at the minimum, one would have to set up a US company. At the "easiest for the employer", one would have to bill/apply and work through a US resident.

If someone has other solutions for out-of-the-US, non-US-tax-reporters to applying to US remote jobs that list "US based" as a requirement I would love to hear about it.

You don’t present as a freelancer, but as a remote employee to get access to these sorts of things, for the exact reasons you correctly stated

A good idea in most parts of the world is not to measure $$$ but to measure compensation in sq. ft. of real estate per year. At my lowest-paid job (professor at top-30 school), i was paid 107 sq ft of take-home pay per year. I quit that tenure-track job @2y and took another job that paid 1800 sq. ft. per year. I currently earn about 300 sq. ft per year.