[samd]

Enforce minimum wages that people can actually live on. Most poor people work significantly harder than your typical white collar office worker. The only thing that separates most of the middle class from the poor is that the middle class had a solid foundation from their family on which to build their future.

[te_platt]

What if minimum wage laws actually perpetuate the problem by preventing low skill workers from getting hired in the first place?

[samd]

I don't think minimum wage laws are a significant cause of unemployment, but there is plenty of dispute about that. Even if you're right, what good is having a job if it gives you nothing more than the ability to spin your wheels and never progress in life or provide your children with some good opportunity? It seems preferable to have a system where workers are paid well and there is higher unemployment, but also stronger safety nets as opposed to a system with lower unemployment, few safety nets, and swathes of working poor that will never make progress.

Also, there is reason to believe that higher minimum wages encourage your workforce to become better skilled in order to compete on the world market at their higher price, as is the case in Germany.

[robryan]

Being hired on the US minimum wage is hardly going to lift people out of poverty. One thing that really seems crazy to me is that the US minimum wage isn't even tied to inflation and went though a period of no increase from 1997 to 2006.

Almost need some kind of subsidy somewhere to give these people at least a decent standard of living.

[rick888]

"Enforce minimum wages that people can actually live on. Most poor people work significantly harder than your typical white collar office worker. The only thing that separates most of the middle class from the poor is that the middle class had a solid foundation from their family on which to build their future."

What would stop companies from increasing the costs of their goods and services because they know minimum wage is higher (and people can now afford it)?

Minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hour (many states are higher). A person couldn't support a family on this, but they could find a place to live (either renting a room, cheap apartment, or sharing a bigger apartment with friends) and have enough left over for the bare-minimum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._minimum_wages

[ja30278]

Following your comment through to it's logical conclusion: why not make the minimum wage $1,000,000/yr?..that should take care of poverty altogether.

[ewjordan]

That's not even close to the logical conclusion: the statement was "Enforce minimum wages that people can actually live on", not "Higher minimum wage is always better."

Contrast that with many right wing arguments about taxation, which usually take the form "Lower/more regressive taxes are always better, and here's why" - disturbingly many of those arguments are "valid" (i.e. if you accept the arguer's claims, the conclusion follows) no matter what the starting point is, and the end result would either be zero taxes for everyone or (surprisingly common) almost 100% taxation of the lower classes and no tax on the upper; hell, if we allow for redistribution, many of the conservative arguments actually imply that the upper class should be given money by the lower class, for the good of the economy.

If your argument pushes some number in one direction but doesn't turn around for some value of that number, then there's typically a problem with the argument; here, that's not the case, the poster explicitly provided that stopping point.