United States Raising the minimum wage

[Terthna]

Personally I think raising the minimum wage is a good idea in theory; wages haven't increased in tandem with inflation like they should have, and have been comparatively stagnant for decades. At one point, minimum wage could be considered a living wage; now though? Not even close; and the situation is further complicated by the existence of welfare. Not only are labor costs being subsidized with your tax dollars, via programs like food stamps, but oftentimes getting a job paying minimum wage would just makes things worse. Heck, take me for example; I'm on disability, and I'd actually lose money if I tried to get a job paying minimum wage.

Unfortunately, in practice raising the minimum wage nets you results like this:

McDonalds to Replace More Human Employees With Drive-Thru AI

How's that $15 an hour looking now?

summit.news

Which basically puts us between a rock and a hard place. If we raise the minimum wage, automation becomes cheap enough to be the preferred alternative to hiring low-skill workers; if we don't however, more and more of your tax dollars will go towards paying people to work in jobs that shouldn't exist.

 

[Lightershoulders]

I support the increase to the minimum wage, and people losing jobs to machines is fine as long as there is a human to fix the problem when the machine eventually breaks. People losing jobs is fine as a result, and it happens as technology improves. Right now we need more people to work jobs oth er r than cashier, so adapt to the changing world or starve.

 

[Shipmaster Sane]

My wage is twice that of a friend who lives in another state, and we take home the same amount of money.

 

[Cherico]

I don't think the minimum wage is the problem.

I think the problem is the cost of living, housing is too expensive, education is too expensive, medical care is too expensive, food....actually food is pretty affordable.

For education the public colleges need to be reigned in yesterday, a four year education shouldn't be the price of a fucking house.

For housing we need to simplify our housing regulations and let people build more housing.

Medicine....force hospitals to itemize and publically list the cost of their services.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

Medicine....force hospitals to itemize and publically list the cost of their services.

or maybe the government could stop decreasing how much competition is possible? Just an idea.

a four year education shouldn't be the price of a fucking house

Interesting things happen when you look into when college prices started going up fast.

I support the increase to the minimum wage,

yeah but... does doubling it this fast REALLY make sense?

 

[Cherico]

or maybe the government could stop decreasing how much competition is possible? Just an idea.

Interesting things happen when you look into when college prices started going up fast.

yeah but... does doubling it this fast REALLY make sense?

You know what lets do both things force hospitals to clearly list how much each service costs and get them to stop limiting competition we can do both.

As for colleges I realize we fucked that up, I'm against fucking with the private ones because their business's but public ones were purposely created to be the less expensive option and to serve the public good. Public colleges have failed in there orginal goal hard.

 

[Isem]

While it's a good idea in theory, it has a lot of potential to backfire in the form of making businesses either not hire people and/or reduce hours on the people they already have. As well as killing off the smaller ones by eating into their profit margins.

John Stossel did a video on it. As did PragerU. Admittedly Stossel is a libertarian so bear that in mind but he makes a sound argument. The concern you should have isn't people being replaced by machines but smaller bussinesses dying outright and less people being employed which would defeat the point of raising the minimum wage to begin with.

 

[Shipmaster Sane]

I don't think the minimum wage is the problem.

I think the problem is the cost of living, housing is too expensive, education is too expensive, medical care is too expensive, food....actually food is pretty affordable.

For education the public colleges need to be reigned in yesterday, a four year education shouldn't be the price of a fucking house.

For housing we need to simplify our housing regulations and let people build more housing.

Medicine....force hospitals to itemize and publically list the cost of their services.

We need to stop telling our children to buy useless fucking degrees for the cost of a house, not demand that the useless degrees be less expensive by raising everyones taxes.

 

[Terthna]

While it's a good idea in theory, it has a lot of potential to backfire in the form of making businesses either not hire people and/or reduce hours on the people they already have. As well as killing off the smaller ones by eating into their profit margins.

John Stossel did a video on it. As did PragerU. Admittedly Stossel is a libertarian so bear that in mind but he makes a sound argument. The concern you should have isn't people being replaced by machines but smaller bussinesses dying outright and less people being employed which would defeat the point of raising the minimum wage to begin with.

What do you think the point of raising the minimum wage actually is? If you cannot afford to pay your employees enough money to live off of, I'm sorry; but big or small, your business does not deserve to exist, and only does so at the expense of the taxpayer.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

If you cannot afford to pay your employees enough money to live off of

see, here's where people's understanding of "living wage" gets dumb.

In MOST of America the current federal minimum IS a "living wage" despite the fact that it SHOULDN'T be. Minimum wage jobs are generally entry level or lower, untrained, unskilled work that could be done by literally anyone. Including, say, a sixteen year old high school student getting some work experience. The exceptions are coastal cities. Here's where city and state laws can be deployed if you insist on entry level work being "living wage" providing. The Federal Minimum going up, especially to 15, is pretty dumb frankly.

Honestly the complaints I've heard tend to amount to "I've been working an entry level job for decades and I'm still not being paid more than my entry level job is worth."

 

[Lanmandragon]

see, here's where people's understanding of "living wage" gets dumb.

In MOST of America the current federal minimum IS a "living wage" despite the fact that it SHOULDN'T be. Minimum wage jobs are generally entry level or lower, untrained, unskilled work that could be done by literally anyone. Including, say, a sixteen year old high school student getting some work experience. The exceptions are coastal cities. Here's where city and state laws can be deployed if you insist on entry level work being "living wage" providing. The Federal Minimum going up, especially to 15, is pretty dumb frankly.

Honestly the complaints I've heard tend to amount to "I've been working an entry level job for decades and I'm still not being paid more than my entry level job is worth."

This is pretty true. In small towns minimum wage will get you along fine. While $15 an hour will make you solidly middle class. Urban people focus far to much on thier local condition. While ignoring the rest of the nation. Also frankly if you can't swing a wage that allows you to live in a city then move. Theres no excuse at all our anscetors rode wagons and walked across a continent to make it. You can buy a bus ticket out of LA or whatever.

 

[Isem]

What do you think the point of raising the minimum wage actually is? If you cannot afford to pay your employees enough money to live off of, I'm sorry; but big or small, your business does not deserve to exist, and only does so at the expense of the taxpayer.

How does that help? Now instead of just having a job that pays poorly you don't have a job at all and other people have lost their jobs as well in the process so now everyone is worse off including the government and the economy because now they have to subsidise more people while having less bussinesses to tax. You're just making things worse for everyone except big bussinesses who can eat the cost thanks to economies of scale, automation and reducing their work force and are therefore more then happy to see their competitors die off.

 

[Terthna]

see, here's where people's understanding of "living wage" gets dumb.

In MOST of America the current federal minimum IS a "living wage" despite the fact that it SHOULDN'T be. Minimum wage jobs are generally entry level or lower, untrained, unskilled work that could be done by literally anyone. Including, say, a sixteen year old high school student getting some work experience. The exceptions are coastal cities. Here's where city and state laws can be deployed if you insist on entry level work being "living wage" providing. The Federal Minimum going up, especially to 15, is pretty dumb frankly.

Honestly the complaints I've heard tend to amount to "I've been working an entry level job for decades and I'm still not being paid more than my entry level job is worth."

The minimum wage used to be an actual living wage; it isn't anymore, even though that was the intent for which it was created. Personally though, I agree; raising it to 15 all at once is stupid. It was supposed to increase gradually over the years to match with inflation; it did not. Maybe it could not. Regardless, the ways things are now is unsustainable. Something has to give.

How does that help? Now instead of just having a job that pays poorly you don't have a job at all and other people have lost their jobs as well in the process so now everyone is worse off including the government and the economy because now they have to subsidise more people while having less bussinesses to tax. You're just making things worse for everyone except big bussinesses who can eat the cost thanks to economies of scale, automation and reducing their work force and are therefore more then happy to see their competitors die off.

What's your suggestion then? Because the current way of doing things isn't going to last forever; eventually, automation will get cheap enough to compete without having to raise the minimum wage. What you warn of will happen regardless; it's just a matter of when.

 

[Sol Zagato]

Raising the minimum wage has a lot of externalities. I -like- most of these externalities, provided businesses don't do an end run and use illegal labor.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

The minimum wage used to be an actual living wage; it isn't anymore, even though that was the intent for which it was created.

I suggest looking into the first proposed minimum wage, what it was, and why. I think you'll be surprised by what you find.

 

[Isem]

What's your suggestion then? Because the current way of doing things isn't going to last forever; eventually, automation will get cheap enough to compete without having to raise the minimum wage. What you warn of will happen regardless; it's just a matter of when.

Just because you will eventually die doesn't mean you should just up and kill yourself now. The same principle holds here. Just because smaller bussinesses will eventually be ground down because of advances in automation isn't a good reason to up and cause most of them to shut down now and make a lot of people's lives worse. Until that time, maintaining the status quo is preferable and gives them more time to find a way to adjust to changes in technology. And that's about the best most of us can do. If any of us had a perfect solution to problems like this we would be a lot better paid and not discussing it here.

 

[Lightershoulders]

yeah but... does doubling it this fast REALLY make sense?

When living expenses have increased to such insanity while the minimum wage has not risen to match it?

Some course correction makes plenty of sense, and if they won't do it gradually a shock to the system is necessary.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

When living expenses have increased to such insanity while the minimum wage has not risen to match it?

Have they done so across the entire country though?

 

[Terthna]

I suggest looking into the first proposed minimum wage, what it was, and why. I think you'll be surprised by what you find.

I am well aware that the first minimum wage was 25 cents, which amounts to a little over $4 an hour in today's money. It was, however, created with the expressed intent that, in Roosevelt's own words, “no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” Perhaps not something the final product lived up to at first; but considering the practice of slavery, one could say the same about "all men are created equal". A good idea, not fully realized in its time. Much like with the abolishment of slavery, and desegregation however, later developments brought us closer to that ideal; to the point where the minimum wage in 1968 reached almost $11 in today's money.

Firstly, I hope you'll forgive the outdated graph, but secondly you'll note, I hope, that the current minimum wage isn't even close to that; though, in the other direction, neither is the proposed $15 minimum wage, which I also think is a bad idea. Then again, one could argue that matching with inflation should have made it even higher than that, but the issue is more doing it all at once, in my opinion at least. Better to just actually tie it to inflation, and add a couple of cents to a dollar at most every year or so, until it catches up to what it should be.

Just because you will eventually die doesn't mean you should just up and kill yourself now. The same principle holds here. Just because smaller bussinesses will eventually be ground down because of advances in automation isn't a good reason to up and cause most of them to shut down now and make a lot of people's lives worse. Until that time, maintaining the status quo is preferable and gives them more time to find a way to adjust to changes in technology. And that's about the best most of us can do. If any of us had a perfect solution to problems like this we would be a lot better paid and not discussing it here.

Perhaps; but we really ought to be preparing for it now, rather than just ignore it until the problem manifests. We might just be able to control it so that it causes less damage in the long run. Besides, you cannot seriously be arguing that the minimum wage should be locked at current levels; because however insufficiently, its always gone up. Although, does this mean you'd be in favor of raising the minimum wage after automation takes over? Just a thought.

 

[Largo]

There is a shitload of self-deception in regards to the minimum wage. To put it quite bluntly, let us suppose that the minimum wage needed to survive is $10/hr. On one hand, the government can mandate that businesses can pay their employees $10/hr. On the other hand, the government can let businesses pay their employees $6/hr, while they help subsidize the remaining $4/hr.

It's the same thing. In fact, the latter is better given that price controls suck for a myriad of reasons. But people pretend that the former is superior with claims that the governments shouldn't be subsidizing businesses or some crock. They of course ignore that in either case, the government is intervenining in the market. It's just that it is more opaque in the former case, which lets employees delude themselves into thinking "Oh, I'm not really dependent on the government." That's what makes it more politically palatable, and is the equivalent of those people who yell "Get your government away from my Medicare."