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How many of the people arguing for keeping the minimum wage unchanged were arguing that in good faith? In general, increasing pay into people at the bottom of

How many of the people arguing for keeping the minimum wage unchanged were arguing that in good faith? In general, increasing pay into people at the bottom of the ladder has a much bigger economic effect than the opposite. Reasonable increases in the minimum wage, particularly ones that track inflation and cost of living are not going to harm the economy. 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 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. 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. We are much more likely to get a better deal via the minimum age than we are via the tax system; the latter of which is heavily skewed in favor of the wealthy and corporations. It's not big corporations paying non-liveable wages who will be paying to cover food stamps.

buboard 7y ago
The question is did this raise average wages? There is litle benefit otherwise unless the min wage is way too low
- burkaman 7y ago
  The minimum wage is way too low.
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    Too low for what purpose?
    - colejohnson66 7y ago
      Living.
      - gnaritas 7y ago
        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.
        JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        Maybe in 1950. Today, it can be any retired person, highly educated or not, who can't find a better job.
        gnaritas 7y ago
        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.
      - conanbatt 7y ago
        Are people on minimum wage dying?
        JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        Yes, statistically, more than others. For stupid preventable reasons. Because of no insurance, worse food, difficult transportation options, crime.
        conanbatt 7y ago
        If that's your cause, what do you think about reducing the tax rate on wages below 30k? They pay about 20%.
qzx_pierri 7y ago
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.
- babesh 7y ago
  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.
- majormajor 7y ago
  "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?
  - EricE 7y ago
    >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...
- 7y ago
Izkata 7y ago
> 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.
- take_a_breath 7y ago
  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.
  - Izkata 7y ago
    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.
    - take_a_breath 7y ago
      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.
  - btilly 7y ago
conanbatt 7y ago
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.
- autoexec 7y ago
  > 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.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 7y ago
    Funny, i dont see you starting a business. If you want to tell businesses how to operate, less talk and more action. If your public statements are different from your private practice, that doesnt override your private practice but instead negates your public statements
ScottBurson 7y ago
> 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.
- Alex3917 7y ago
  Higher minimum wage is a subsidy for tech companies though. A better policy would be UBI rather than higher minimum wage.
  - danmaz74 7y ago
    > Higher minimum wage is a subsidy for tech companies though By which mechanism?
    - Alex3917 7y ago
      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.
      - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 7y ago
        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.
      - sachdevap 7y ago
        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.
undersuit 7y ago
>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.
- monocasa 7y ago
  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.
  - btilly 7y ago
    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.
    - Ericson2314 7y ago
      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?
BurningFrog 7y ago
> 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.
- jellicle 7y ago
  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?
- everdev 7y ago
  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.
- rndgermandude 7y ago
  >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.
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  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?
marcusverus 7y ago
> 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?
- reissbaker 7y ago
  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.
  - marcusverus 7y ago
    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 $8.70.
    - jeremysalwen 7y ago
      That's not cherry picking. (Adjusted) minimum wages are raised to their peak, and then are gradually lowered due to inflation. If you're picking a point of comparison for the proposal to raise the minimum wage to a new historical peak, it's natural to look at the last time it was raised to a new historical peak. To look at it another way, even if the 15$ minimum wage is passed, that doesn't mean that the future minimum wage will be 15$ on average.
      - 7y ago
Digory 7y ago
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.
frogpelt 7y ago
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?

buboard 7y ago

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

burkaman 7y ago
The minimum wage is way too low.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Too low for what purpose?
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    Living.
    - gnaritas 7y ago
      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.
      - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        Maybe in 1950. Today, it can be any retired person, highly educated or not, who can't find a better job.
        gnaritas 7y ago
        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.
    - conanbatt 7y ago
      Are people on minimum wage dying?
      - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
        Yes, statistically, more than others. For stupid preventable reasons. Because of no insurance, worse food, difficult transportation options, crime.
        conanbatt 7y ago
        If that's your cause, what do you think about reducing the tax rate on wages below 30k? They pay about 20%.

qzx_pierri 7y ago

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.

babesh 7y ago
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.
majormajor 7y ago
"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?
- EricE 7y ago
  >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...
7y ago

Izkata 7y ago

> 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.

take_a_breath 7y ago
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.
- Izkata 7y ago
  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.
  - take_a_breath 7y ago
    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.
- btilly 7y ago

conanbatt 7y ago

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.

autoexec 7y ago
> 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.
- IG_Semmelweiss 7y ago
  Funny, i dont see you starting a business. If you want to tell businesses how to operate, less talk and more action. If your public statements are different from your private practice, that doesnt override your private practice but instead negates your public statements

ScottBurson 7y ago

> 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.

Alex3917 7y ago
Higher minimum wage is a subsidy for tech companies though. A better policy would be UBI rather than higher minimum wage.
- danmaz74 7y ago
  > Higher minimum wage is a subsidy for tech companies though By which mechanism?
  - Alex3917 7y ago
    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.
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 7y ago
      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.
    - sachdevap 7y ago
      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.

undersuit 7y ago

>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.

monocasa 7y ago
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.
- btilly 7y ago
  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.
  - Ericson2314 7y ago
    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?

BurningFrog 7y ago

> 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.

jellicle 7y ago
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?
everdev 7y ago
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.
rndgermandude 7y ago
>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.
fzeroracer 7y ago
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?

marcusverus 7y ago

> 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?

reissbaker 7y ago
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.
- marcusverus 7y ago
  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 $8.70.
  - jeremysalwen 7y ago
    That's not cherry picking. (Adjusted) minimum wages are raised to their peak, and then are gradually lowered due to inflation. If you're picking a point of comparison for the proposal to raise the minimum wage to a new historical peak, it's natural to look at the last time it was raised to a new historical peak. To look at it another way, even if the 15$ minimum wage is passed, that doesn't mean that the future minimum wage will be 15$ on average.
    - 7y ago

Digory 7y ago

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.

frogpelt 7y ago

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?