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> No one wants to hire them at a high minimum wage, especially when locals are readily available The main drawback to a minimum wage is that it artificially in

• a3n 11y ago
  > The main drawback to a minimum wage is that it artificially increases the cost of labor, And? Why is that artificial increase a problem. Every law on the books is an artificial act. I don't see many people wringing their hands over the mortgage interest deduction, another of those artificial changes to the economy.
  • uxp100 11y ago
    If you read precisely past the point where you stopped quoting, you see their reasoning why this bad, the answer to your "And?" Whether or not you agree with that answer, shouldn't that answer be the part you respond to, instead of deliberately misrepresenting what the poster you were responding to was saying?
    • a3n 11y ago
      My objection was to the word "artificial," (which is why I didn't quote further) as if mandating a minimum wage is somehow different from everything else we do with the economy. The "natural" economy doesn't exist, except insofar as the adjusted economy we have is the natural economy. Making changes from what is to what someone wants is entirely normal.
      • kough 11y ago
        Well congratulations, you found a nit to pick.
  • ryanmonroe 11y ago
    Read the rest of the sentence >it's no longer worth it to an employer to hire a low-output employee
  • alttab 11y ago
    The mortgage interest deduction "hurts" only government tax revenues. Raising the tide on minimum wage impacts every business that has employees, regardless of what their cost structure is. What if your business worked in such a way that a single employee wouldn't even produce $15 of revenue in an hour? You can't lose money on every sale and make up for it in volume. The artificial increase is a problem because it goes against supply and demand, which is a natural law of economics.
    • spankalee 11y ago
      The mortgage interest deduction disadvantages renters compared to owners. Subsidizing home ownership effectively taxes renting.
      • alttab 11y ago
        Disagree. I've owned 3 homes and my mortgage interest deduction made no difference on whether or not I purchased. The difference between renting and owning is income, savings rate, and lifestyle. If you can't afford to buy, you either don't make enough or don't save enough. It's the down payment that separates a lot of renters and buyers. If you are arguing homes are expensive, I'd argue that $15 minimum wage isn't helping. Mortgage interest deductions may be bad policy, but it doesn't "tax renting." That's asinine.
        • msellout 11y ago
          It changed the amount you paid.
          • alttab 11y ago
            Either you're wrong, or I'm about to learn something. Explain?
            • sokoloff 11y ago
              You probably paid a higher purchase price, because even if you couldn't take the mortgage interest deduction (for whatever reason, maybe you paid all cash), you are still competing against other buyers, most of whom could take the deduction. That deduction saves them money, meaning they're willing to pay a higher price than they would if they couldn't take a mortgage interest deduction. That those other buyers are willing to pay a higher price affects the comparable sales, the appraisal, the "Zestimate [haha]", the willingness of the seller to select your offer, etc. Then, assuming you did have a mortgage and qualified for the deduction (most people with one home do), you paid less (net) for the loan than you would have otherwise.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • anoonmoose 11y ago
    He gave the "and" in his comment- artificially increasing the cost of labor can potentially prevent people whose contribution is worth less than that cost from ever entering the market.
  • harryh 11y ago
    The majority of economists (as well as many other people) think that the mortgage interest deduction is bad policy.
  • p4wnc6 11y ago
    It is a problem if all of the would-be employers look at you and say, "Well, for what you bring to the table, I would be willing to pay $3/hour, but no more. If I have to pay more than that, I will simply make do with life having fewer employees." You would prefer $7/hr instead of $3/hr, but you would prefer $3/hr instead of $0/hr.
    • alttab 11y ago
      $0 an hour is life's true minimum wage.
    • dvtv75 11y ago
      My employer, who hired me for my degree, told me that he was willing to pay me for 40 hours. I later found out that it was a requirement that I work 60-80 hours a week - not written into my contract, but this particular employer has an aversion to providing contracts. This displaces up to an entire employee. Said employer also gets taxpayer funding for the employee I've displaced. I would prefer that my employer met the minimum (non-US) legal requirements for salaried employees, but the literal threats of violence and permanent unemployment should I complain to the government, have kept me on up to $5/hour less than minimum wage - without meal breaks, public holidays, and weekends - all in breach of the law. Unethical law-breaking employers abound in my country, and many of the wealthiest have political contacts that mean they can get away with a lot. Having a minimum wage gives them something to dance around but if that disappeared things would get a lot worse: I would most likely find myself working for something nearer to $5 an hour. This (small) city alone has a median wage that sits about 25% under minimum wage on paper, but if you started really looking into it you'd find that the paid hours don't match the hours worked. No matter what your theories about minimum wage and the market say, you'll find that pragmatic side of having a minimum wage has a major positive impact on employees by providing some restriction to what employers can get away with.
      • p4wnc6 11y ago
        To put things in perspective a little, my younger brother works as an inventory clerk for a company that makes custom industrial fasteners in the Midwest, US, and the working conditions you describe are actually better than his working conditions -- though I wholeheartedly agree that both of you have unfortunate working conditions and more should be done to improve the situation. If your situation is so extreme as to involve threats of violence, then it is non-negotiable that you need to remove yourself from it, even if it means facing grave and dire financial hardship. The psychological damage of an employer threatening you is worse than the damage of financial ruin or uncertainty. Also, on one hand you are claiming that minimum wage laws are beneficial, but then you're also saying that the political favoritism of your country allows those laws to be basically ignored (as in your case) with no consequence. To me, your comment is much more about ensuring legitimacy of government and enforcement of laws overall, and is very much unrelated to minimum wage at this point. Only after the enforcement of those laws is legitimized can you then begin to ask questions about what is the actual human effect of the law. Finally, I'd like to point out that I already said this type of reasoning (the argument that minimum wage denies opportunity to those who would agree to work for less) is overstated. I understand the economic rationale in the ideal case, and I was explaining that case just to clarify for the OP that I commented on ... not positing it as a robust defense or anything. Here's my other comment if interested: < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11424743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11424743 >.
  • savanaly 11y ago
    I usually really, really hate when people trot out the "go back to econ 101" argument, but in this case it applies. The reasons why a minimum wage might be inefficient (to what degree is very much debatable and dependent on the cirumstances) are explained thoroughly in any introductory microeconomics educational resource.
    • maxerickson 11y ago
      Sometimes econ 101 is macro. I feel like a lot of the people who think economics is all terrible nonsense start off with macroeconomics (and maybe never get to microeconomics because of it).
    • thescriptkiddie 11y ago
      The ECON 101 argument regarding minimum wage and deadweight loss gets a lot less convincing when get to ECON 110 and start learning that the real world is a lot more complicated than two roughly-perpendicular curves. In real life, labor markets have very inelastic supply, which means that the deadweight loss is small and comes almost entirely from consumer (in this case, employer) side. In most cases this is a net gain for workers. Of course, all of this goes out the window if the minimum wage is non-binding (as it is in most of the US), in which case there is actually zero deadweight loss. Basic income is far superior to minimum wage for meany reasons, but "minimum wage doesn't work" isn't one of them.
  • merpnderp 11y ago
    And? It keeps people who want to work from working. People who would be willing to work at less than the minimum wage. Subsiding on government relief can lead to depression, loss of social status, load term mental illness. Not having a job is a very unhealthy thing for most people.
    • jack9 11y ago
      > It keeps people who want to work from working. That doesn't mean the work (the individual is capable of) is valuable enough to justify the position, in the locality.
      • occamrazor 11y ago
        But what are the alternatives, for the people whose productivity is lower than minimum wage?
    • justizin 11y ago
      There are people willing to do valuable work for less than the minimum wage - they're called volunteers. A lot of work done by volunteers is more important than work done by minimum wage workers, but involves no commerce. A basic income provides the opportunity for people to find healthy, fulfilling things that do not pay money. I'm absolutely OK with some types of paid work going away entirely. Our society leans too heavily on the ability to pay someone else to do something at a rate that is usually more than we would like to pay and less than we would like to make. It is essentially a way of saying that we are more important than other people and that's lame. Food delivery, for instance, is convenient, I take advantage of it, but I tip far more heavily than most people, and I could live without it. Some people who deliver for a pay service today may end up, with basic income, volunteering for meals on wheels. That's a better allocation of society's potential energy than to bring me a burrito when I don't feel like leaving the house.
    • a3n 11y ago
      And the mortgage deduction makes a house a better investment, and so increases the price of buying and renting houses. These are all tradeoffs that we decide to make.
  • jackcn 11y ago
    Actually, mortgage interest deduction was considered to be limited to only 1 home. It causes higher demand than without, which helps to drive house prices up, and at this point, out of reach of many in some cities. Same with the availability of cheap loans and grants for colleges - it only really serves to increase the price of an education.
  • EGreg 11y ago
    It makes people who got a bad education unemployable and perpetuates their culture of dependency on welfare. Conditional welfare perpetuates it also because people are afraid to take a job and then lose it.
  • maxerickson 11y ago
    I bitch about the mortgage interest deduction on a regular basis. A national policy that drives up housing prices is plain stupid (and it obviously isn't helping the ~1/2 of the country that doesn't have any wealth build wealth). I'm ambivalent about a minimum wage. I think the arguments about the imbalance in negotiating power have some merits, but the GP answered your question about why it is a problem with their next sentence, it likely makes some productive tasks uneconomic. I think it's important to try to characterize the actual economic impact of a minimum wage though, just pointing to the expected negative marginal effect isn't a very useful argument.
  • lujim 11y ago
    And borders are just imaginary lines. They are however a based around the underlying reality of geographical, cultural, and political factors. We could make a law that all airplanes must slow down to 50 miles per hour over crowed areas but that doesn't matter if most planes can't fly any slower than 120mph without falling out of the sky. Laws do have to take into account things like physics and economics. The latter is the study of scarce resources that have alternative uses and specifically addresses things like the cost of labor and the affect of artificially manipulating it.
    • dv_dt 11y ago
      Economics has no particular respect for human self-sufficiency. If businesses can operate with employees just above starvation wages then all sorts of technologically feasible efficiencies are skipped while human suffering is prolonged. From a practical standpoint, it feels like for a time that capitalism seeking local-optima was perfectly ok in that the efficiencies gained were lifting society all around - and it still seems that way in the world at large. However, in more mature economies it seems like a different discussion needs to be made because the business actions seem to be divergent from the interests of society - optimizing on the same financial metrics seems merely a shell game of keeping a larger share of the production -- to the point that there is little to no growth in value to most of society.
    • denim_chicken 11y ago
      > Laws do have to take into account things like physics and economics Economics is not even remotely similar to physics in any respect.
      • lujim 11y ago
        Where did I say they were? I called them both "things" I guess.
  • tikhonj 11y ago
    Really? I read complaints about the mortgage interest deduction all the time. I mean, subsidizing home ownership isn't exactly an obviously worthy goal in and of itself and it creates weird incentives. The difference in popular discourse is threefold: the mortgage interest deduction is less of a blue/red team tribal marker; it isn't as morally charged an issue (the arguments against it are more economic in nature than moralistic); a disproportionate number of the people who would be complaining about it are homeowners themselves and therefore heavily incentivized to keep it around, regardless of its economic effect.
    • a3n 11y ago
      My statement was exaggerated. Of course people object to it. I do. But relatively speaking, if you got rid of it there'd be all but revolution. I actually prefer zero deductions for anything, for all people and entities. Here's the rate: pay it. If you're below the line we draw, you don't have to pay.
  • BurningFrog 11y ago
    Because it keeps desperately poor people unemployed and outside of productive society.
• p4wnc6 11y ago
  I generally agree with this, but I think it is often overstated. There are still many domains of employment where there is room to raise the minimum wage significantly before getting anywhere near the margin at which the employer feels it's not worthwhile to hire the additional worker. Food service, for example. There are examples on the other end of the spectrum too, such as cashiers in a major convenience store chain, like CVS or Walgreens. These businesses are more capable of scaling automated cashier technology than others, so workers of this type would be disproportionately affected. But overall, many types of business have an inefficient profit surplus right now that should rightfully be eaten into by workers claiming more share as wage. I also think there is a genuine moral argument to be made that society, in some cases, should intervene when a person believes they are willing to sell their labor at an unsustainably low price. It's not quite right to characterize a minimum wage as "denying" them that "opportunity" as much as it is saying that the "opportunity" itself is unhealthy, unrealistic, and a person's reasons for choosing it almost always involve forms of coercion that cannot be dealt with as effectively if the person gets locked into believing they actually must provide their labor so cheaply. Incidentally, this is perhaps the most common thing I hear about the minimum wage (that it hurts employment due to marginal employment reduction on behalf of employers). A lot of people seem to think it's counter-intuitive and that it somehow shines real economic theory on everyone's pie-in-the-sky dreams of egalitarian wages or something. But really that's not true, this argument is extremely common and is brought up in almost every forum or discussion about minimum wage, whether it's just a bunch of nonsense troll comments on a YouTube video or in a place with a higher signal-to-noise like HN. It always makes me do a double take because I don't want to end up regurgitating what is effectively "sponsored content" from wealthy libertarian types who spam out this message to ensure it trickles down to all the conversations about minimum wage. Like I said, I mostly agree with this, but with some reservations.
  • msellout 11y ago
    You have some good points, but I think calling anything a "right" will bring downvotes. I suggest not asserting anything is a "natural right" as that's too open to interpretation and brings a visceral reaction for many people.
• ThrustVectoring 11y ago
  Wait, what? Employment is a net-negative, the denominator of economic productivity. If we have the same amount of material wealth, it's better to not work as hard to get it. "Increase employment" is targeting the wrong measure.
  • brandnewlow 11y ago
    I think the parent comment was operating on an assumption that "staying busy" has its own benefits for people.
    • firethief 11y ago
      It seems quite an assumption than grown human beings inherently require a supervisor "keeping them busy" for their quality of life. It's true to a certain extent in current society (speaking from the US anyway) due to our relationship with work: one's job is seen as their value to society, while meanwhile it's very common (I daresay normal) for people to spend their time doing jobs they don't like and don't inherently care about, working just to keep employed. In such a system if someone no longer needs to work, they've "won" the rat race. They no longer have a debt to pay society and they can lie on the beach until they rot. I would not call this a healthy attitude, but it's my sense of how our society feels about work and "leisure". Other systems are possible. Basic income is one way we could change the equilibrium; a BI high enough to provide a decent quality of life would alter our relationship with work in several ways: - jobs no one wants to do would have to be made worthwhile. If people had the option of not working in Walmart, you'd have to pay them a whole lot more to keep doing so. On the other hand, you can attack it from the other side and make the low-skill jobs less soul-sucking: even mopping the floors in a huge supermarket wouldn't be so bad if say, the employees own the store, they know each other, and have a sense of community; they are not jumping through the require hoops to receive a paycheck but doing something that needs to be done for an organization that matters to them. I've met a lot of people who could be satisfied washing dishes their whole working lives, if they had a sense of financial security and employers that treated them respectfully. One thing these people have all had in common was they were involved in their workplace as a community. So I don't think unskilled labor is inherently abhorrent to the human psyche, I think a lot of people, given the choice not to, would still do jobs currently considered menial if the other things about doing that kind of work environment didn't suck. - it tames the specter of Unemployment. To put this in a HN perspective, think of the holy grail for tech startups: Venture Capital. Speculative funding enables people to work on creating something, yet still be Employed while the project is not yet earning significant revenue. There's a cost of course: a lot of the project's profits go to rewarding people whose main role was having the money (and knowing what a potential good idea looks like, to be fair). It's a great system, it really is; what we've created in it is impressive. But I think BI would make things simpler for many startups; bootstrapping becomes potentially much easier than spending half your time chasing funding, when the members of the project already have a secure income and can focus on making something. Of course, it's much more general than tech startups; there are many things not being created (some of which could actually sell very well) because the would-be creators are "earning their livings" (what a concept!). - more generally, it reduces the need for an employer. Businesses have been becoming increasing agile and fluid as employees become freelancers due to massively decreased friction in the business-to-business markets thanks to the ability to collaborate online, from anywhere in the world. The largest barrier remaining keeping many people from working for themselves is risk; an employer offers steady wages. Even if finding one's own contracts would pay more than doing the company work, volatility is rightfully frightening in our economy. So yes, having a sense of purpose is very important. But the necessity that that purpose be "following the commands handed down from The Man" is only an artifact of traditional thinking about Life vs Work. I think we would tend to find more, not less, meaning in all the time we spend working under a BI system, since it gives people the power to do work they care about and employers the mandate to make their jobs jobs worth caring about.
• rmc 11y ago
  > it artificially increases the cost of labor That's the point. A floor. Through which people should not have to work below at.
  • rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    Whereas universal income means that everyone in society can tell terrible bosses that they can take their shitty job and shove it, and still live with dignity, a greater dignity than having to work at the absolute minimum of pay, regardless of whether 51% of politicians choose to call it a "living wage."
    • lujim 11y ago
      I'm sure we have all had terrible bosses. I have probably had one of the worst bosses you could imagine. Quitting that job was one of the best days of my life. However it still isn't a persons birthright or written anywhere in the constitution that you have only have to work for people you like. If you want to avoid bad bosses you need to learn a skill that makes you highly sought after or be self employed.
      • rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
        It's not about not having to work for an asshole, it's about being protected from abusive business practices. Not everyone can afford lawyers to sue bosses that made them work overtime without overtime pay, for example. Usually the people who need worker protections the most are the ones being abused the most, for the same reason: they are poor and have no other choice. They have no union and their cases are usually too small-fry to be worth it. >If you want to avoid bad bosses you need to learn a skill that makes you highly sought after or be self employed. Ha! Good one. Now let's all gather around a campfire and talk about how our tech giant/startup employer had us working insane hours because "crunch time" or "demonstrate culture fit". You can even add your own! Don't forget to mention prohibitive cost of living in tech hubs and the mountain of student debt you accumulated so you could have a "skill that makes you highly sought after." :)
• superuser2 11y ago
  > I think we'd all agree that increasing employment is a good goal Nope. Increasing good employment is a good goal; jobs which pay near minimum wage are not that.
• Nogwater 11y ago
  > I think we'd all agree that increasing employment is a good goal I don't agree, and I'm not sure why people would see employment for its own sake would be a good thing. I want to increase some of the things that employments brings (purchasing power, a sense of purpose, etc...) and not others (loss of time, feeling trapped, etc...).
  • dandermotj 11y ago
    I suppose from an individual standpoint examples like yours are very relevant - a big fear for myself is working a job we're I am unfulfilled - but from a broad view we must agree increasing employment is a good goal. The more people working, the greater the output and the cheaper it costs, from which everyone benefits whether we are employed ourselves or not. A highly employed nation is a bountiful one.
    • Absentinsomniac 11y ago
      Unless you're just hiring people for the sake of employment to do things that don't need done. I've read China's housing market is in a bit of a pickle due to this. Course they also apparently have really clean streets.
    • cortesoft 11y ago
      Shouldn't our measure be productivity, then, instead of employment? At least as far as what a society should care about? In terms of social benefits, not all employment is equal. We could hire all un-employed people to move rocks back and forth, but that won't contribute to society anything that simply giving those people cash for nothing wouldn't solve just as well. There are two separate goals we are trying to accomplish, and traditionally they have both been solved through employment - the need for productivity and the need for resource allocation. If you want to keep trying to meet both goals through employment (instead of meeting the second one through something like basic income), then we need to make sure we continue to address both needs.
      • dandermotj 11y ago
• QuotedForTruth 11y ago
  The counter argument is that human labor has an actual cost. That is the cost to keep a human alive and in some level of comfort. Government benefits of many different types have "artificially" lowered this cost. Where employees refuse to pay enough for a human to live on, the government picks up the slack. Raising the minimum wage may be "artificial," but its not the first control placed on some otherwise natural labor market.
  • clarkmoody 11y ago
    Critical omission on your part: not everyone needs to live on this wage. Think about high school kids trying to get a summer job. They don't need to survive on this wage, they simply need something productive to do over the summer. Should my business be required to shell out $15/hr for a high school kid, when the value of his/her labor is way less than that?
    • NDizzle 11y ago
      I'm really interested to see what happens to the price of a season pass to the community swimming pool if/when doubling the minimum wage goes through.
      • VLM 11y ago
        Probably roughly nothing. I pulled my (small) suburban cities budget which is a many hundred page long PDF and parks and rec runs 40-something neighborhood city playground type parks and 2 pools on 2.3 million total per year. Of which staggeringly only 1.5 mil are wages (we live in a rough climate, maintenance costs are high, over $100K spend on electric bills alone, etc). On the revenue side the two public pools combined pulled in about 1/3 of a million from fees collected at the door. Its pretty cheap compared to commercial entertainment (movie, restaurant, etc), they could certainly charge more without excluding too many people, given how much it costs to live here. I know from experience that they have a couple kid lifeguards at each pool all the time so lets say 10 total staff at all instants (LOL no) at $15/hr for 10 or so hours per day (LOL no not open that much), open about 100 days a year (LOL no they'd be ice skating in the spring on the pool if that were the case), if I multiplied this out correctly in my head, at $15/hr, the kid lifeguards cost $150K/yr while bringing in $340K of revenue. Note that I don't have the misfortune of living in CA, so the actual cost of a seasons lifeguards at the two pools is more like $80K. The cities very gross profit margin if by a miracle pools were free to build and maintain, just revenue divided by kid labor, is roughly $340K/$80K right now and if the min wage were $15 it would "collapse" to $340K/$150K which still ain't bad. Honestly I suspect the pool spends more on chlorine and electricity than on the kids labor. The capital cost is no laughing matter. The most recent ADA compliant complete remodel was something like $2M which for that one pool is roughly a decades revenue. This quick analysis leads to the conclusion that open hours for the pool are insanely profitable, and the "pool biz" is overall dominated by capital costs. The kids pay is irrelevant.
• branchless 11y ago
  Even if one simply manages to force employers to hand over more of their profit to workers this will simply force up rents/land prices and ultimately once again all gains pass to the rentier. Bloomberg don't talk about land value tax. They are happy to talk about basic income because it's not real change.
• pessimizer 11y ago
  > I think we'd all agree that increasing employment is a good goal I don't think we do. Employment is not a good in and of itself, and a person who is working is not necessarily in a better position than a person who is not. People working for a wage that doesn't support their needs (which then has to be subsidized by the government) are just vehicles for transfer payments from government to garbage business. > because there are huge benefits to being productively employed. To make your assumptions explicit here, if you value employment for employment's sake, anything that maximizes the number of people employed is good. Why not negative wages? I suppose a full time job that pays less than it takes to feed and house a person and has to be supplemented with welfare in order to do so is a sort of negative wage...
• petra 11y ago
  >> Down Syndrome [0] .. are they worth hiring at $2.00/hour? Yes, and they and their families are willing for them to work at that wage, because there are huge benefits to being productively employed. Realistically, for people with disabilities that aren't being able to be in the regular labor market, there are some societal useful things to do, like volunteering(say in a soup kitchen), helping their community,etc. Those are probably activities that wouldn't be done otherwise, carry a real sense of value, and usually in a custom fit environment. That is the situation at least in enlightened places with decent government services. I'm not sure about the US. I wouldn't want that to be replaced with people at the margin being exploited at a shitty factory , where the work is meaningless and often depression inducing, sometimes risky, etc.
  • Overtonwindow 11y ago
    I think the federal government and the states should reduce the tax burden on corporations that hire the disabled. For every disabled person you hire, your tax bill is lowered that much more. If 15% of your workforce is physically or mentally disabled, your state tax is zero. That would incentivize corporations to hire more disabled.
    • kough 11y ago
      All you're arguing is for a decrease in the cost of hiring from a specific labor pool, which is exactly what the government has already done by allowing companies to hire disabled workers for below the minimum wage.
    • tamana 11y ago
      Why bother? Corporations can hire the abled, and government can support the disabled. If disabled are the only available workforce and a corporation needs work done, corporations can pay the disabled (high) market rates. And, you know, of they are doing useful work, maybe they aren't relevantly "disabled" to deserve a lower wage
      • AlgorithmicTime 11y ago
• mc32 11y ago
  >No one wants to hire them at a high minimum wage, especially when locals are readily available Tying this in to our own economy, this is what Bernie and the Unions miss (or perhaps they don't). A min wage increase of 50% will entice low skills Americans who were on Snap to enter the workforce, driving out foreign low skills workers. And I agree with the increase. Too many of our workers possess too few marketable skills that jobs once the province of teenagers and part times have become the jobs for many adult household earning Americans.
  • kough 11y ago
    I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. If your "low skills Americans" were more attractive to employers than low skills workers, they would replace those workers regardless of the wage. Increasing the minimum wage will incentivize employers to hire more effectively (because the cost of a worker goes up), which means that only those workers who are productive enough to be worth being paid the new, higher, minimum wage will be hired. Your "low skills" Americans will still be competing within the same pool of labor that they were before the wage was increased, but now employers will be hiring fewer new employees. So I guess you're arguing that your "low skills Americans who were on Snap" are a) higher skilled than foreign low skills workers, b) unable to find work that pays what they feel they are worth, which is at least 1.5 x $MIN_WAGE? I also don't follow this; if they can't get hired at 1.5 x $MIN_WAGE now, what will make them hireable at that wage in the future?
    • mc32 11y ago
      At 10/hr many people on Snap will not enter workforce because their benefits get reduced. At 15/hr the increase in wage more than offsets decrease in Snap and will attract more workers into the workforce pool. Two low skilled Americans have an advantage in English language skills and for a significant portion of foreign workers, work eligibility.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      • 11y ago
• tryitnow 11y ago
  No, I don't think maximizing employment is a goal in and of itself. It would be better to not employ humans below a certain marginal productivity. Instead, those people need to focus on training/education to enhance their marginal productivity. And employers should focus on automating those low productivity tasks. I'm not going to consider the case of people with disabilities - that's fine to have an exception for them. But that's not really what's being discussed in these debates. I actually think the market wage is socially inefficient because it encourages people to take the short term gain of immediate cash over the long term investment of training/education. It also encourages employers to forego efficiency-enhancing improvements. Now if humans were rational, 100% responsible, and conscientious, then they would forego low wages, focus on training to achieve higher levels of productivity and enhance the economy by doing so. Instead, there are many people who either through their own lack of judgment or unfortunate circumstances do not seek to optimize their marginal productivity of labor. That's a market failure and minimum wage is one attempt to solve it.