I live in ND, we have a bit of an economic boom going. I'm not trolling, but you seem to miss the point of a lot of commentators on this post that minimum wage changes are not an answer and only a feel good measure for people who don't take the time to look at the economy. It sounds good, but will have all sorts of backlash. Its a bad idea and treating the symptom, poorly.
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.
I agree with your statement here, but it should be noted that it's important to have smart minimum wages adjusted for regional cost of living. In the US, the minimum wage hikes can often result in local reductions in employment in the short-term.
In the long-term, minimum wage hikes tend to not at all reduce employment, even when implemented in clumsy fashion like the US tends to do.
It's a shame that conversations on these things are so politicized, because it immediately prevents nuanced discussions because ideologues pounce and label you an opponent if you try to discuss realistic details.
Because increasing minimum wage is popular politics but it doesn't really solve the issue, and that is even if policymakers are capable of coming together to agree on how to make a 'livable' minimum wage (a livable wage in rural midwest is not the same as NY or SF for example), and how to keep that wage at a livable level without having to go through the political quagmire we currently are going through every 10-20 years. It isn't even clear that the minimum wage should be livable in the first place, as that also has its own costs as capital is liquid enough to go elsewhere leading to a race to the bottom.
Policymakers have shaped the economic system in a way that suppresses the value of unskilled labor, and simply forcing the increase has serious costs which most people don't appreciate, costs that are harder to bear for some compared to others, for example huge multinationals are much better equipped to deal with said costs compared to smaller, independent businesses. The appeal to emotion regarding this is especially dangerous since it often ignores the reasons why the problem persists, and when the problem is as difficult as this is, there are many potential pitfalls when creating a solution (especially a popular one), which can lead to making things even worse than before. The road to hell is paved with good intentions after all.
I think it is a little disingenuous to characterize people who are critical of concepts like a livable minimum wage the way you have, wage insecurity is a serious and complex problem that wont be solved simply by controlling the price of labor.
Ian Shapiro has a lecture about wage insecurity in his power and politics course at Yale that discusses UBI, minimum wage and other alternatives which I think provides a decent, but brief overview of the issues faced regarding policies like this. Here is a link specifically to where he starts to discuss the idea of 15$ minimum wage.
Let me try a different tack. Wages used to go up without relying on minimum wage. Wages have flattened, so there are a bunch of other issues that should be looked at before just forcing wages up, which can have all sorts of unintended consequences, especially if the real reasons wages are flat aren't addressed first.
There's some truth to this. A minimum wage is a blunt instrument that can end up causing more harm than good. If the goal is to raise wages, I think there's better ways of doing it. Maybe with some kind of tax code reform.
People already making about what the new minimum wage is will probably be hurt the most by the price increases. Most everyone below it should still benefit even with the price increases. In that sense, minimum wage hikes are sort of a regressive solution to the problem, in terms of where the most harm falls.
Bingo! This debate is almost entirely predicated on all sides claiming to know the unknowable, and predict the future outcomes of policy changes where not only is the evidence and data very mixed, but where we aren't really sure what outcome we want. This is terrifying to me, because we have smart people with zero skin in the game playing with the poorest, most vulnerable people's lives in an ideological shouting match.
On what outcome we want, I think people are confused about the actual affect minimum wage has. Some people will lose their jobs when minimum wages increase. That is just inevitable, and not something anyone really argues against. The most positive response is that job losses will be small, and/or those jobs are usually not very pleasant anyway.
If we assume someone on an unlivable wage can either have their wage increased to livable, stay the same - i.e. minimum goes up, hours go down, actual pay is ballpark the same - or lose their job and become unemployed, what population level outcome is acceptable?
In the most simplistic case, what split of people losing jobs and becoming unemployed is acceptable if everyone else gets a livable wage? 60 (made unemployed) vs 40 (employed)? 50-50? 40-60?
What if the the group that works for unlivable wages stays almost static, and it is 10% job loss, 70% no change, 20% increase? Is that the success or failure?
These examples ignore people outside this group, and it is possible that some people who currently make livable wages today could have their hours cut or accelerated automation catches them as well. Even with the most simplistic outcomes, I don't know what numbers society wants to optimise for. How can we judge if a policy works if we don't know what we want to achieve?
It also ignores the economic diversity of the USA. Prices will rise a LOT in some places if Seattle/SF minimum wages are applied to less economically strong states, and the results could be disastrous. AFAIK (data is a few years old) there are a few states with median wages less than $15 in the USA - see https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-lunches-like-th... A blanket $15 is troublesome, while maybe ineffective (if it works) in some other states.
So it seems to me we have no clear objectives, no outcomes we are excited by, but what we do have are people for whom minimum wage laws are an article of faith. Any attempts to actually measure the affects of any of this will be fought vociferously by all sides, usually with competing BS studies. You just have to see what happened in Seattle, where a long term, detailed but ultimately negative study was countered with a hastily written pro-report for ideological reasons.
Terrifying certainty in an uncertain domain combined with unclear goals and a determined effort to not measure? Nah, nothing could possibligh go bad here...
Yes but I don't think we have any reason to expect major changes in that. And if that were to change then I'd expect us to see minimum wage hikes to start causing unemployment.
Ya, I'm not sure why we're nit just talking about raising the minimum wage. I suspect they're worried it would hurt small mom and pop shops who also rely on paying their employees below the poverty line.
Sure, but some of that is normal. Economic downturn? A few folks get permanent unemployment. Big enough place closes? Sure, a few get permanently unemployed. I don't think there is a way to stop that, nor do I really see that as an issue so long as it is a minority of folks. It definitely isn't something special to minimum wage hikes in any case.
In fact, I'd argue that even then we are better off. Say you have 20 low-paying jobs, the sort which means you are still eligible for food stamps and other tax-payer funded assistance. All 20 get laid off. 13 find full time work at the new minimum wage, so they no longer need assistence. Four find part-time work, making nearly what they did before with fewer hours. They still need assistance, but slightly less since they don't need as much child care. One makes less money. The other two are unemployed forever, requiring assistance. I'm gonna guess this is a win in the end.
Normally, I am not too bothered by the downvotes, but this one makes me chuckle. effects of unemployment rate is not a settled matter in economics, and it's highly politicized - with left wing leaning economists publishing all sorts of empirical studies showing no effect or mixed effect and right wing economists doing the opposite. But, clearly, raising minimum wage to $15 in a strong economy like Seattle will have a less adverse effect, if any, than in a weak local economy such as Chicago
Seattle's minimum wage hike has as a massive confounding factor the most extreme economic boom in Seattle's history. The wage hike could have significant adverse effects and you'd never notice in the current economic environment in that city. It should lead to serious doubt that this is replicable in most other cities or even Seattle in other times.
The assertion that this demonstrates anything useful about minimum wages, rather than the fact that the city has a severe labor shortage and is swimming in money, is dubious. Show me the data from a city with median economic growth and median unemployment statistics and I would find it more convincing.
Any adverse signal from changes to the minimum wage are going to be buried below the noise floor of a Seattle economy that is extremely hot right now. You have to account for the fact that (1) the drop in unemployment has nothing to do with minimum wage jobs and (2) there is a general labor shortage in Seattle that is driving up wages at all tiers regardless of the minimum wage.
If the Seattle economy was flat and they could demonstrate no impact on employment of minimum wage workers that would be one thing, but they aren't demonstrating that here. Given the economic conditions in Seattle, the article is arguing from a dubious correlation.
It's not that simple. No one can agree if a given minimum wage increase results in a workforce reduction, and if it does by how much. There is no consensus here, which probably means at the minimum wage increases we've seen, the effect is negligible.
I think we as a society have put in place lots of social programs, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars a year to ensure "survival" is not at play here.
Further at the end of the day wages are not the problem, cost of living is, economic value of labor is. Waving a magic wand and proclaiming a new min wage does not resolve those root issue, it may in some limited circumstances help a few people for a limited amount of time, but you need to resolve the root issue which mandated minimum wages increases is not going to do and often harms the very people you are looking to "help"
I don't believe that raising the minimum wage will trigger businesses to cut jobs significantly. They will probably pass the higher cost onto the consumer. Ultimately, it's a method of wealth redistribution, which is sorely needed in our economy.
Individual companies raising their minimum wage is perfectly reasonable. They know what their bottom line can handle, and any consequences are fairly limited to the company itself and its competitors, for good or ill.
An entire national economy raising a minimum wage is pulling yourself into the air by tugging on your bootstraps - futile, and likely to make you keel over instead. There's no alternatives if it fails or has catastrophic effects.
Much like software, businesses work best when there aren't single points of failure - damage is limited when things go wrong. Individual companies can experiment and make decisions that would be dangerous for an entire economy, with nowhere near the same level of risk for anyone except the people at the top.
yeah - but if you increase the minimum wage all you're doing is hurting the middle class. If i had a relatively Okay/good job that required some kind of education (phlebotomy, for instance) and get paid $20 an hour, I can live comfortably. Once you raise the minimum wage to $18 an hour, my pay isn't going to jump but you can bet inflation will.
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