15 ms·

If society decides that everyone should have minimum standard of living despite their skill level or net contributions, then it should be society as a whole tha

If society decides that everyone should have minimum standard of living despite their skill level or net contributions, then it should be society as a whole that bares that burden, not just the enterprises that employ low/no skill labor or their consumers. A minimum wage is nothing more than a tool in our arsenal to fight poverty. I (and many economists) argue that it is one of our worst tools. A negative income tax is much better. It won't distort labor markets or risk driving up unemployment. And it's fairer in that the burden is shared collectively rather than just by some industries. Goldman Sachs doesn't get hurt by a minimum wage, but small business owners, such as those running a convenience store, do.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
DeonPenny 6y ago
Minimum wage by ruins a lot of poor young people ability to gain skills. And everytime its raise poor people especially poor young boys with no skills take the brunt of the pain.
- fhsm 6y ago
  All of this was familiar to me except the sex effect. Why are males disproportionately impacted?
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    Women can be supported by men in exchange for cohabitation, without minimum wage concerns.
  - blix 6y ago
    One argument I've heard is that women tend to do better at men at picking up 'soft skills,' i.e. interacting with other people, while men tend to be better at physical labor. New low-skill jobs tend to focus on soft skills, while jobs requiring physical labor are disappearing. It's unclear how much of this shift is driven by the minimum wage, but certianly it incentivizes automation/outsourcing/illegal labor, which tend to disproportionately affect physical jobs. This leaves poor, uneducated men pretty vulnerable. I don't have any sources on hand, but there was a nice feature in the Economist about this a year or two ago.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - DeonPenny 6y ago
    I heard its cause 1 boys do worse in school because they more disagreeable so learning on the job becomes more important. And 2 men do 80% of the trade jobs which on the job training or being comfortable in job environment before hand is a lot more important. But yeh boys unemployement jumps when minimum wage is increase typically. And increases criminal behavior based on some studies. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/teenjobless.png?x88519 https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/teenjobless.p...
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  What job pays minimum wage and teaches a skill and isn't exempt via an education exemption?
  - dantheman 6y ago
    There are skills that all jobs teach - showing up to work on time, being reliable, etc.
    - watwut 6y ago
      If the school did not taught you that, why would the job do?
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Because sooner or later everyone realizes that - with the exception of people aiming for education grants or university eduction - school is an artificial, self-contained environment and things that happen there have little consequence. When you stop caring whether you get C or E on anything, the school loses its power to teach you punctuality and reliability.
        oblio 6y ago
        Well, normally the forcing function for school, if school itself doesn't work, is parents. But if your family sucks... School won't save you :-(
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Indeed. And unfortunately, quite a lot of families are dysfunctional, for various complicated reasons. When parents offload parenting to schools, while schools expect kids to be parented at home... kids parent themselves.
        watwut 6y ago
        Punctuality does not really make difference between C and E. In my experience, people who were not at time in school, were not at time in their jobs. And either they found a job where it did not matter or were in constant trouble because of it or got fired. Generally, they did not acquired puntuality nor precision. The lack of either was result of general attitude toward everything around and it did not magically changed after school.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Minimum wage by ruins a lot of poor young people ability to gain skills. There are some jobs that don't get done because of minimum wage, but the claim you make is much stronger and really demands some evidence. > And everytime its raise poor people especially poor young boys with no skills take the brunt of the pain. So you are saying that the long stretches where real minimum wage erodes are good things for “poor young boys”? Because I don't think there are any measures of the welfare of that group that support either that necessary corollary or your specific claim.
- smileysteve 6y ago
  No, 16 year olds need wages too! We have the most student loan debt ever; and the highest tuition ever; but somehow 1990s wages are good for people saving for college? (Or if not college, life)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Barrin92 6y ago
>, then it should be society as a whole that bares that burden, not just the enterprises that employ low/no skill labor or their consumers. society as a whole already does that, as do other employers, who generally do cover healthcare, invest in the training of their workforce and so on, it's Uber and other 'gig economy' companies which by means of legal arbitrage are the exception. And while it's fair to talk about the trade-offs between small, family scale businesses and minimum wage, last time I checked Uber did not exactly fall into that category.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Why are employers covering healthcare at all? This also shouldn’t be the purview of private companies.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    WWII-era wage controls meant to combat inflation. Employers sidestepped them by offering other benefits to attract employees. Health insurance was a big one. It became entrenched and we're still stuck with it today.
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
      With economic policy, I sometimes wonder if artificial floors tend to cause less strange distortions than artificial ceilings, because there's usually already a floor: zero. We just raise it a bit. I feel like it's easier to anticipate the side effects of raising a minimum wage than it is for an earnings cap.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
93po 6y ago
Cool, as soon as we have meaningful negative income tax I will be willing to reevaluate my perspective on minimum wage.
arcticbull 6y ago
> And it's fairer in that the burden is shared collectively rather than just by some industries. This is where we disagree. Companies that employ workers below subsistence wages are actually being indirectly subsidized collectively by every single taxpayer. Those underpaid employees are the ones who then go on to collect public benefits to make up the difference between survival and their take-home pay, and those benefits come out of our tax dollars. Allowing employers to pay below subsistence wages is corporate welfare. All this bill does is tip the scales back to where they need to be: if you as a business are not paying a living wage to your employees, you're effectively forcing the taxpayer to pay the part of the salary you're not interested in paying. This is also the interest the state has in the matter, as not doing so negatively impacts the state. No more mooching. > Goldman Sachs doesn't get hurt by a minimum wage, but small business owners, such as those running a convenience store, do. And I'm sorry but those businesses wouldn't exist without the government passively subsidizing them by providing benefits to the workers they're stiffing. If these are the kinds of businesses we want more of, it should be via an explicit, active subsidy program. If not, they will have to go out of business or find a way to make the economics work. That's capitalism.
- rtx 6y ago
  If you are not paying more then you are making more. It will comeback to the society as taxes.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - trickstra 6y ago
    It would, if the money wasn't being sent away and laundered (did Panama Papers not teach us anything?) or if the taxes weren't "forgiven" like in the case of Amazon or even the $750 Trump taxes. Practice shows that it doesn't come back, no matter how well it sounds in theory.
  - smt88 6y ago
    > It will comeback to the society as taxes. It should, but it doesn't. Amazon is a classic example. Despite being the beneficiaries of many types of corporate welfare (including paying some full-time employees so poorly that they had to be on welfare), Amazon has paid $0 in tax a few times. In fact, there is no meaningful relationship between Amazon's profits and taxes. Their profits go up, and sometimes their taxes actually go down[1]. 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/fWL3rv40cvsIPAqSvf1wzRPl44A=/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost/public/UC2UWT4MENA4DLABR2MZUK4X2I.png https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/fWL3rv40cvsIPAqSvf1wz...
buildstatements 6y ago
> not just the enterprises that employ low/no skill labor or their consumers. Why would any company ever employ anyone in the close-to-minimum-wage bracket? Amazon gets flack for employment, and Google gets none. Only one of those two has made room for any significant number of close-to-minimum-wage workers. This is a massively perverse incentive that prioritises how rich people feel about themselves over how people without much actually live. IMHO, that's about as close to a working definition of evil as I can muster. Semi-related: this is also why basic income will never work. Basic income will be seen, inevitably, as subsidising rich companies, which will lead to it being killed off.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  What work is there at Google that can be done by a person with no particular skills? Almost anybody can move a box from a conveyor belt to a loading dock, or unload boxes from a truck.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    That hardly matters. Amazon provides hundreds of thousands of new jobs and they get crucified for it. Same with any other large company with a huge number of workers. It's just a bad incentive structure because nobody wants these workers due to the terrible PR. Amazon is trying it's hardest to automate everyone out of a job.
blargmaster42_8 6y ago
Minimum wage creates poverty...
8bitsrule 6y ago
>A minimum wage is nothing more than a tool in our arsenal to fight poverty. I (and many economists) argue that it is one of our worst tools. For companies who prefer to pay their workers as little as they can get away with, it is the tool of choice for those who recognize the meaning of 'wage-slavery'. Theories and promises about 'much better' tools haven't solved the problem. Raises do. A bird in the hand.
- jiriknesl 6y ago
  > to pay their workers as little as they can get away with Which is natural, when you employ people with almost no marketable skills. The solution is not raising minimum wage. The solution is more competion for Uber HR so they have to pay more because people have better alternatives. Maybe deregulating labor market so there are more jobs would be a solution.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    Seems to me those skills are quite marketable. There is consistent demand for basic labor. Those doing the labor need to make enough to exist and show up for work. If they do not get enough to make it and show up for work, then they don't make it and don't show up for work. People have costs. Existing and showing up for work has a cost. If we truly do not pay those costs, people die and dead people do not show up for work. Clearly, dead people not showing up for work helps no one, so we need to make sure they get enough to make it and show up, right? If we decide government has this responsibility, fine! Seriously. But that too has a cost. Literally everything does cost something, and the cost for that is not shaming the fuck out of people who do not make enough to make it and show up for work. And that happens constantly! Those minimum wage peeps are worthless! Lazy! Dumb! Free loaders! Queens! And on and on it goes. Pretty hard to say all of those things when a ton of jobs do not pay enough to make it and show up for work. What do we expect them to do? Work more? Well, life breaks down into thirds. One to sleep, one to work, one to be a person and do all the human things humans do, laugh, live, grow, build, do, etc.. When so many jobs do not pay enough to make it and show up for work, people run out of thirds to work, and they have to sleep, and working all the time does not exactly allow for personal growth does it? Nope and we all know that too. I sure wish we would just settle on one or the other and quit trying to blame and shame millions of people who do basic labors that are necessary and that save a lot more of us a ton of time that we use to do our work and be humans and all that good stuff. If we are gonna say government does it, and minimum wage is super low, fine. Government needs to do that, and we need to pay appropriate taxes and get on with life and let everyone play their role with some dignity and compassion. Or? We say corporations need to fully fund their labor. In that scenario, we need to pay them appropriately for their goods, services and insure robust competition so margins don't get out of hand. Taxes will be lower, making room for all that to happen. And again, everyone gets on with life, playing their roles with dignity and respect. Which is it? The current "blame them" scenario is completely unacceptable. And it is unacceptable because we need those basic labors, someone will be doing them and that needs to be recognized as the value in our lives it truly is and not frowned upon as some how bad, because it just isn't. So which is it? This is the national discussion on all this we ought to have.
scarface74 6y ago
We already have a negative income tax. It’s the Earned Income Tax Credit. The issues are that it isn’t distributed through out the year and it’s not high enough. The EITC is not a liberal or conservative issue. Every President Republican and Democratic since 1980 has supported it. I don’t know if Trump has said anything one way or the other.
nemothekid 6y ago
>If society decides that everyone should have minimum standard of living despite their skill level or net contributions There is a fallacy here where you assumed society operates in a certain manner but provided no evidence to support that. The idea that people's standards of living is a directly a function of their skill level and not deeply influenced by other uncontrollable factors is a very contested and argued point of view. On the contrary, it's clear to see that despite individual productivity sky rocketing over the last 40 years, wages have remained stagnant. Even the framing of your question is odd - who is the "society as a whole" that bares that burden, when most people who make up society are working class? Rephrased you could have simply stated that the majority working poor shouldn't cause undue burden on the aristocrats. Lastly, I'll add that the state is already burdened in one way or another. Having a large amount of uninsured people due to corporations off loading their social contract creates a public policy problem. The state can't have people dying in the street or spreading disease because the vast majority of them are underinsured - and to solve these problems the state then increases taxes on everyone just so a corporation or two and get away with the bare minimum.
andrewjl 6y ago
> Goldman Sachs doesn't get hurt by a minimum wage, but small business owners, such as those running a convenience store, do. Goldman Sachs is a red herring in this argument. The ones hurt most are the very poor who never have a chance to own such a business to begin with. And a business model that relies on cheap labor is not one that should be ethically allowed to exist in modern society IMO. Also as the sibling comment points out, all of society loses when business underpays it's employees and they are forced to permanently rely on transfer payments to make ends meet. A minimum wage is the best way to use market mechanisms to eliminate poverty via an improved alignment of incentives. Businesses invest in additional capital to make labor more productive due to it's increased inherent cost. More productive labor can in turn charge higher rates. Which translates into higher total demand, which begets more investment and growth. There are also ancillary benefits as well, many anti-immigration supporters (inaccurately) point to stagnating wages as a negative result of present immigration policy. A boost in minimum wages would take that rhetorical sleight-of-hand away from them.
rualca 6y ago
> A minimum wage is nothing more than a tool in our arsenal to fight poverty. This is quite wrong: minimum wages do not "fight poverty". The only effect that minimum wage laws have is to render low-paying job illegal. Minimum wage stops potential employers from creating low wage jobs. That's all they do. If unemployment rate is low enough then society doesn't notice, but if unemployment rate is high then people just work ilegally.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

DeonPenny 6y ago

Minimum wage by ruins a lot of poor young people ability to gain skills. And everytime its raise poor people especially poor young boys with no skills take the brunt of the pain.

fhsm 6y ago
All of this was familiar to me except the sex effect. Why are males disproportionately impacted?
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Women can be supported by men in exchange for cohabitation, without minimum wage concerns.
- blix 6y ago
  One argument I've heard is that women tend to do better at men at picking up 'soft skills,' i.e. interacting with other people, while men tend to be better at physical labor. New low-skill jobs tend to focus on soft skills, while jobs requiring physical labor are disappearing. It's unclear how much of this shift is driven by the minimum wage, but certianly it incentivizes automation/outsourcing/illegal labor, which tend to disproportionately affect physical jobs. This leaves poor, uneducated men pretty vulnerable. I don't have any sources on hand, but there was a nice feature in the Economist about this a year or two ago.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- DeonPenny 6y ago
  I heard its cause 1 boys do worse in school because they more disagreeable so learning on the job becomes more important. And 2 men do 80% of the trade jobs which on the job training or being comfortable in job environment before hand is a lot more important. But yeh boys unemployement jumps when minimum wage is increase typically. And increases criminal behavior based on some studies. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/teenjobless.png?x88519 https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/teenjobless.p...
alisonkisk 6y ago
What job pays minimum wage and teaches a skill and isn't exempt via an education exemption?
- dantheman 6y ago
  There are skills that all jobs teach - showing up to work on time, being reliable, etc.
  - watwut 6y ago
    If the school did not taught you that, why would the job do?
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Because sooner or later everyone realizes that - with the exception of people aiming for education grants or university eduction - school is an artificial, self-contained environment and things that happen there have little consequence. When you stop caring whether you get C or E on anything, the school loses its power to teach you punctuality and reliability.
      - oblio 6y ago
        Well, normally the forcing function for school, if school itself doesn't work, is parents. But if your family sucks... School won't save you :-(
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Indeed. And unfortunately, quite a lot of families are dysfunctional, for various complicated reasons. When parents offload parenting to schools, while schools expect kids to be parented at home... kids parent themselves.
      - watwut 6y ago
        Punctuality does not really make difference between C and E. In my experience, people who were not at time in school, were not at time in their jobs. And either they found a job where it did not matter or were in constant trouble because of it or got fired. Generally, they did not acquired puntuality nor precision. The lack of either was result of general attitude toward everything around and it did not magically changed after school.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Minimum wage by ruins a lot of poor young people ability to gain skills. There are some jobs that don't get done because of minimum wage, but the claim you make is much stronger and really demands some evidence. > And everytime its raise poor people especially poor young boys with no skills take the brunt of the pain. So you are saying that the long stretches where real minimum wage erodes are good things for “poor young boys”? Because I don't think there are any measures of the welfare of that group that support either that necessary corollary or your specific claim.
smileysteve 6y ago
No, 16 year olds need wages too! We have the most student loan debt ever; and the highest tuition ever; but somehow 1990s wages are good for people saving for college? (Or if not college, life)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Barrin92 6y ago

>, then it should be society as a whole that bares that burden, not just the enterprises that employ low/no skill labor or their consumers. society as a whole already does that, as do other employers, who generally do cover healthcare, invest in the training of their workforce and so on, it's Uber and other 'gig economy' companies which by means of legal arbitrage are the exception. And while it's fair to talk about the trade-offs between small, family scale businesses and minimum wage, last time I checked Uber did not exactly fall into that category.

scarface74 6y ago
Why are employers covering healthcare at all? This also shouldn’t be the purview of private companies.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  WWII-era wage controls meant to combat inflation. Employers sidestepped them by offering other benefits to attract employees. Health insurance was a big one. It became entrenched and we're still stuck with it today.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
    With economic policy, I sometimes wonder if artificial floors tend to cause less strange distortions than artificial ceilings, because there's usually already a floor: zero. We just raise it a bit. I feel like it's easier to anticipate the side effects of raising a minimum wage than it is for an earnings cap.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

93po 6y ago

Cool, as soon as we have meaningful negative income tax I will be willing to reevaluate my perspective on minimum wage.

arcticbull 6y ago

> And it's fairer in that the burden is shared collectively rather than just by some industries. This is where we disagree. Companies that employ workers below subsistence wages are actually being indirectly subsidized collectively by every single taxpayer. Those underpaid employees are the ones who then go on to collect public benefits to make up the difference between survival and their take-home pay, and those benefits come out of our tax dollars. Allowing employers to pay below subsistence wages is corporate welfare. All this bill does is tip the scales back to where they need to be: if you as a business are not paying a living wage to your employees, you're effectively forcing the taxpayer to pay the part of the salary you're not interested in paying. This is also the interest the state has in the matter, as not doing so negatively impacts the state. No more mooching. > Goldman Sachs doesn't get hurt by a minimum wage, but small business owners, such as those running a convenience store, do. And I'm sorry but those businesses wouldn't exist without the government passively subsidizing them by providing benefits to the workers they're stiffing. If these are the kinds of businesses we want more of, it should be via an explicit, active subsidy program. If not, they will have to go out of business or find a way to make the economics work. That's capitalism.

rtx 6y ago
If you are not paying more then you are making more. It will comeback to the society as taxes.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- trickstra 6y ago
  It would, if the money wasn't being sent away and laundered (did Panama Papers not teach us anything?) or if the taxes weren't "forgiven" like in the case of Amazon or even the $750 Trump taxes. Practice shows that it doesn't come back, no matter how well it sounds in theory.
- smt88 6y ago
  > It will comeback to the society as taxes. It should, but it doesn't. Amazon is a classic example. Despite being the beneficiaries of many types of corporate welfare (including paying some full-time employees so poorly that they had to be on welfare), Amazon has paid $0 in tax a few times. In fact, there is no meaningful relationship between Amazon's profits and taxes. Their profits go up, and sometimes their taxes actually go down[1]. 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/fWL3rv40cvsIPAqSvf1wzRPl44A=/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost/public/UC2UWT4MENA4DLABR2MZUK4X2I.png https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/fWL3rv40cvsIPAqSvf1wz...

buildstatements 6y ago

> not just the enterprises that employ low/no skill labor or their consumers. Why would any company ever employ anyone in the close-to-minimum-wage bracket? Amazon gets flack for employment, and Google gets none. Only one of those two has made room for any significant number of close-to-minimum-wage workers. This is a massively perverse incentive that prioritises how rich people feel about themselves over how people without much actually live. IMHO, that's about as close to a working definition of evil as I can muster. Semi-related: this is also why basic income will never work. Basic income will be seen, inevitably, as subsidising rich companies, which will lead to it being killed off.

throwaway201103 6y ago
What work is there at Google that can be done by a person with no particular skills? Almost anybody can move a box from a conveyor belt to a loading dock, or unload boxes from a truck.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  That hardly matters. Amazon provides hundreds of thousands of new jobs and they get crucified for it. Same with any other large company with a huge number of workers. It's just a bad incentive structure because nobody wants these workers due to the terrible PR. Amazon is trying it's hardest to automate everyone out of a job.

blargmaster42_8 6y ago

Minimum wage creates poverty...

8bitsrule 6y ago

>A minimum wage is nothing more than a tool in our arsenal to fight poverty. I (and many economists) argue that it is one of our worst tools. For companies who prefer to pay their workers as little as they can get away with, it is the tool of choice for those who recognize the meaning of 'wage-slavery'. Theories and promises about 'much better' tools haven't solved the problem. Raises do. A bird in the hand.

jiriknesl 6y ago
> to pay their workers as little as they can get away with Which is natural, when you employ people with almost no marketable skills. The solution is not raising minimum wage. The solution is more competion for Uber HR so they have to pay more because people have better alternatives. Maybe deregulating labor market so there are more jobs would be a solution.
- ddingus 6y ago
  Seems to me those skills are quite marketable. There is consistent demand for basic labor. Those doing the labor need to make enough to exist and show up for work. If they do not get enough to make it and show up for work, then they don't make it and don't show up for work. People have costs. Existing and showing up for work has a cost. If we truly do not pay those costs, people die and dead people do not show up for work. Clearly, dead people not showing up for work helps no one, so we need to make sure they get enough to make it and show up, right? If we decide government has this responsibility, fine! Seriously. But that too has a cost. Literally everything does cost something, and the cost for that is not shaming the fuck out of people who do not make enough to make it and show up for work. And that happens constantly! Those minimum wage peeps are worthless! Lazy! Dumb! Free loaders! Queens! And on and on it goes. Pretty hard to say all of those things when a ton of jobs do not pay enough to make it and show up for work. What do we expect them to do? Work more? Well, life breaks down into thirds. One to sleep, one to work, one to be a person and do all the human things humans do, laugh, live, grow, build, do, etc.. When so many jobs do not pay enough to make it and show up for work, people run out of thirds to work, and they have to sleep, and working all the time does not exactly allow for personal growth does it? Nope and we all know that too. I sure wish we would just settle on one or the other and quit trying to blame and shame millions of people who do basic labors that are necessary and that save a lot more of us a ton of time that we use to do our work and be humans and all that good stuff. If we are gonna say government does it, and minimum wage is super low, fine. Government needs to do that, and we need to pay appropriate taxes and get on with life and let everyone play their role with some dignity and compassion. Or? We say corporations need to fully fund their labor. In that scenario, we need to pay them appropriately for their goods, services and insure robust competition so margins don't get out of hand. Taxes will be lower, making room for all that to happen. And again, everyone gets on with life, playing their roles with dignity and respect. Which is it? The current "blame them" scenario is completely unacceptable. And it is unacceptable because we need those basic labors, someone will be doing them and that needs to be recognized as the value in our lives it truly is and not frowned upon as some how bad, because it just isn't. So which is it? This is the national discussion on all this we ought to have.

scarface74 6y ago

We already have a negative income tax. It’s the Earned Income Tax Credit. The issues are that it isn’t distributed through out the year and it’s not high enough. The EITC is not a liberal or conservative issue. Every President Republican and Democratic since 1980 has supported it. I don’t know if Trump has said anything one way or the other.

nemothekid 6y ago

>If society decides that everyone should have minimum standard of living despite their skill level or net contributions There is a fallacy here where you assumed society operates in a certain manner but provided no evidence to support that. The idea that people's standards of living is a directly a function of their skill level and not deeply influenced by other uncontrollable factors is a very contested and argued point of view. On the contrary, it's clear to see that despite individual productivity sky rocketing over the last 40 years, wages have remained stagnant. Even the framing of your question is odd - who is the "society as a whole" that bares that burden, when most people who make up society are working class? Rephrased you could have simply stated that the majority working poor shouldn't cause undue burden on the aristocrats. Lastly, I'll add that the state is already burdened in one way or another. Having a large amount of uninsured people due to corporations off loading their social contract creates a public policy problem. The state can't have people dying in the street or spreading disease because the vast majority of them are underinsured - and to solve these problems the state then increases taxes on everyone just so a corporation or two and get away with the bare minimum.

andrewjl 6y ago

> Goldman Sachs doesn't get hurt by a minimum wage, but small business owners, such as those running a convenience store, do. Goldman Sachs is a red herring in this argument. The ones hurt most are the very poor who never have a chance to own such a business to begin with. And a business model that relies on cheap labor is not one that should be ethically allowed to exist in modern society IMO. Also as the sibling comment points out, all of society loses when business underpays it's employees and they are forced to permanently rely on transfer payments to make ends meet. A minimum wage is the best way to use market mechanisms to eliminate poverty via an improved alignment of incentives. Businesses invest in additional capital to make labor more productive due to it's increased inherent cost. More productive labor can in turn charge higher rates. Which translates into higher total demand, which begets more investment and growth. There are also ancillary benefits as well, many anti-immigration supporters (inaccurately) point to stagnating wages as a negative result of present immigration policy. A boost in minimum wages would take that rhetorical sleight-of-hand away from them.

rualca 6y ago

> A minimum wage is nothing more than a tool in our arsenal to fight poverty. This is quite wrong: minimum wages do not "fight poverty". The only effect that minimum wage laws have is to render low-paying job illegal. Minimum wage stops potential employers from creating low wage jobs. That's all they do. If unemployment rate is low enough then society doesn't notice, but if unemployment rate is high then people just work ilegally.