There was a time in the not so distant past, that close to 100% of those "Minimum Wage" jobs were held by teenagers and youths with close to zero market value as employees, who needed their first few jobs to develop the skills, knowledge, resume and references so they could get an actual job.
Places like McDonalds and Summer Resorts and Amusement parks - were great places for youth to learn these skills. The real distortion is when you started having adults working in McDonalds. It was never a job to support a family - it was a minimum-wage job for kids to get started.
Those "minimum wage" jobs that you had a teenager in the 1950-1986 time period? They paid more than minimum wage does now, on an inflation adjusted basis. That $2/hr job in 1962 would be paying $21/hr if it had kept up with CPI.
That's the whole reason why adults started working in them.
Over time, federal minimum wage did not keep up even with national inflation rates, let alone regional cost of living changes. The result is that these employers, who were once forced to pay even their lowest level employees a living wage, can avoid paying even that.
What's gone awry in the last 40 or so years is that the labor market hasn't created enough new employment in what I could call "career" or "occupation" work - for adults, and as a result, they've started working in jobs that were never really meant for them, certainly not for doing things like paying rent, utilities, etc... and as a result - the working poor as a class has grown.
And $21/hour is not near enough to survive on in my region - (and is also a bit less than what most people in my area make at McDonalds (bay area)) - So you are in a round-about way proving my point.
Let me be as clear as I can be - "Increasing the minimum wage to be a living salary of $40-$50/hour would eliminate many opportunities for people entering the workforce who can't justify that kind of investment currently".
Leave it at the market-clearing level of $20-$25/hour, and ideally return to having teenagers/young adults working those jobs while grown-adults move onto other opportunities that our economy should be creating.
Jobs that that cannot support biological needs should exist as they are great for developing job-skills and experience in youth.
Do I think there should be jobs that would only be done in the context of parentally- or other-provided housing, food and clothing? I'm not sure. I lean towards the answer being no, but could be convinced otherwise.
I still don't agree with your 40 year take on this. When "fully grown adults" started flipping burgers, it was because you could live on the income that provided. Now you cannot (and ditto for lots of other minimum wage jobs). It was not the case that these jobs were "teenager only" and people took them even though they were impossible to live on, 60 years ago. They took them (slowly, over a period of time) and they gradually changed from teenager only work into "real jobs", and over a slightly longer period of time no longer acted as viable living wage work.
That said ... sure, the income levels for the lower 4 deciles of the population haven't kept up with things (until very, very recently at least), and this means in part that new jobs at appropriate (lower, but still livable) wages have not been created at sufficiently high rates.
> "Increasing the minimum wage to be a living salary of $40-$50/hour would eliminate many opportunities for people entering the workforce who can't justify that kind of investment currently".
Firstly, as I indicated above, I don't think it has to be that high. Secondly, I think that if there are "opportunities" that cannot afford to pay a living wage, I'm not sure anyone is foregoing much by them not existing. To be clear, what is meant here by a living wage is something that a full time job pays roughly 3x the local rental rate for an appropriately sized studio (perhaps 1BR) apartment in reasonable quality.
> Leave it at the market-clearing level of $20-$25/hour
"Currently, 34 states, territories and districts have minimum wages above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Five states have not adopted a state minimum wage: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. Two states, Georgia and Wyoming, have a minimum wage below $7.25 per hour."
There is not a single state that has the "market-clearing level" you mention, so "leaving it" there seems impossible. Tukwila, WA is the only city in the country with a minimum wage above $20.
I had a roommate when I started out and could not afford an apartment. At the time one could also rent someone's spare bedroom. Government zoning also got rid of boarding houses.
> haven't kept up with things
The increasing share of the economy that the government vacuums up comes from somewhere.
I also started out with a roommate when I had my first computing job, which was with a massive multinational. I could not have afforded my own apartment in Cambridge (UK), though that was caused by post-grad student debt than the salary level. I went on to rent a house with someone else until I emigrated to the US.
The fact that there are actually multiple pathways through life doesn't mean that we can't, as a society, draw up our own guidelines for what working for 40hrs a week ought to make possible, even if some people choose to (a) not work 40hrs a week (b) live differently.
Total government revenue as a percentage of GDP has been remarkably flat since the end of WWII (actually distressing to my preferred narrative in which it has declined and should not have).
I think you made that point. The other posters point was that this point is patently untrue. And it's very obviously untrue just by thinking about it for a few minutes. Peak hours for fast food restaurants (and most restaurants) are lunch hours where most teenagers would be in school.
They also tended to be open late night. The hours that teenagers can work are and have been heavily regulated for a very long time. No highschooler is working the 11pm - 4am shift at wendy's.
They were very obviously mostly employing adults.
And if you want a little anecdotal evidence, my father supported my family for a number of years working in fast food in the early to mid 80s during the oil crash
if you want further anecdotal stories, when in high school I worked retail. There were other highschoolers that worked there, but the vast majority of my coworkers were in their 30s.
When in college I worked graveyards at a certain 24 hour breakfast establishment. I was by far the youngest. Everyone else on that shift was in their 40s and had kids and families they were supporting.
We also literally have tropes about the old lady who's been working at the diner for 1000 years... "what do ya want hon?"
That trope didn't just come out of no where.
It's also the CPI-adjusted equivalent of 1960s minimum wage numbers.
giving me $1.25 * (304.702/30.6) = $12.44 or $1 * (304.702/28.1) = $10.84
my sources: https://www.dir.ca.gov/iwc/minimumwagehistory.htm https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/consumer-pri...
January 1962 $2 => Nov 2024 $21.03
Using $1.25 in Jan 1963 gives me $12.97 ...
I used $2 in 1962 because in the 2016 Republican primaries one of the candidates made a reference to their job working in a burger store using these numbers.
This is an excellent way to tell everyone you’re comment is just political garbage and can readily be dismissed. It completely drowns any possible signal out with a huge red flag.
You’re either making a statement about conservatives or you’re talking about actual ideas. You can’t have a meaningful conversation about ideas if you’re doing tribalism.
i am talking about an actual idea. an actual idea that happens to fit much more nicely into one political worldview than another. an idea that is repeated much more often by people who hold that worldview than by people who do not. an idea that is more or less demonstrably false.
so i am talking about both the (false) idea and the fact the it is an idea that continues to be talked about (despite its falsehood) by a particular group of people. that can be a meaningful conversation even if you don't like it.
It has nothing to do with feeling uncomfortable, it’s a statement about held beliefs being associated with a particular group and there is no evidence to back it up.
It doesn’t matter who he thinks holds that view. Discuss the idea and refute it directly or shut up. Drop the appeals to tribalism
At this point, it is more interesting that one political worldview still seems quite attached to the idea than the idea itself, which has been clearly shown to be false.
It's quite analogous to trickle-down theory aka the laffer curve. Shown to be false multiple times over the last few decades. Still promoted by people of one particular political worldview and not others.
That's the story here. The idea has been refuted, why are people still talking about it?
Nonsense: Fast-food chains never had a business model of closing during school hours! They remain open, and that shows each role has always required some adult employees with adult budgetary needs.
One can argue minimum-wage jobs are only for kids in school, or one can argue that a regular-businesses-hours company can have min-wage positions, but both together is incoherent.
It's not better to have people have no jobs and require 100% assistance.
> subsidy
Regardless of how you define terms, you'll being paying much more to help them when they are jobless.
> become like China
China has a largely state run economy, with the resulting problems.
It is actually. Former employees are free to learn new skills or do charity instead of being busy surviving a game they can’t win.
You are also subsidising an economically wasteful activity that cannot cover its own true costs - if fast food joint can’t pay a wage, it does not cover the negative externalities from extra traffic on the road, carbon emissions and people getting fat.
Business will be forced to innovate and invest in automation
>>Why should I pay a stealth subsidy to whatever business it is.
I think a lot of the argument around minimum wage is a disagreement (or misunderstanding?) about minimum wage workers.
Let's say you have a $10/hr minimum wage, and some company BigCo hires people and pays them $10/hr. Now, the disagreement: is BigCo actually getting $10/hr of value out of those workers? Or is it $20/hr, or $50/hr, or $5/hr, or $2/hr? Because I think that's a critical question both in terms of "should we subsidize those workers/BigCo" and "should we raise the minimum wage".
Some people do not currently, and may never, have skills that are worth $25/hr in terms of value produced in our economy. I think we need to make sure those people still have an acceptable standard of living, but I don't think setting the minimum wage to $25/hr is likely to do that.
I think this is the wrong question and it’s not our job to solve that.
Example - suppose I have a diamond mine, I can hire anyone with zero skill - homeless, drug addicts, criminals - pay them $5 an hour and they will dig up $1,000 of diamonds a day. What is the answer your own question - how much value is the business getting?
What we should consider instead is this - there is a certain cost for civilisation to continue. Workers must be born, educated, and then create the new generation. If they are not paid enough to continue the cycle, we will not let the country collapse, will we?
I as a taxpayer will end up picking up the tab in one way or another - whether it’s through food stamps, or in immigration or something else.
These jobs could be a total net loss once you account for carbon emissions and other externalities.
I would rather get these people to do charity work or plant trees instead.
And "biological needs" are an ever-increasing target, just beyond minimum wage. When minimum wage increases so does the target. Why? Because it's not about biological needs. It's about relative wealth dressed up as "basic needs".
I do think the US should have a minimum wage increase, but the discussion around it seems so disingenuous.
Good, a job that cannot support biological needs should not exist. It’s not a viable business.
Why should I pay a stealth subsidy to whatever business it is.
> Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
This excuse was used to start wars, trample civil rights and employment rights. It basically means we must become like China to beat China. What would be the point?