[spunker540]

Do you support a minimum wage at all? You can either mandate that businesses shoulder some of the burden of providing decent living conditions, or expect the state to shoulder that burden more directly and let businesses coast on cheap labor that's dependent on welfare.

But if you do think some minimum wage is necessary and just this particular hike is too much, you'd have to justify what that minimum wage should be. And ostensibly you'd probably think that its based on some factors like cost of living and inflation, both of which are going up.

The bottom line is the US is not going to let its citizens starve, and it has 300 million citizens here and now who need to eat everyday and sleep every night. Some of them are qualified to work at well-paying jobs and some of them are not. For the ones who are not, do you want to make sure that the jobs that they can get pay enough so that they can get by, or do you want them to not be motivated to work at all and live off welfare?

[Gibbon1]

I think minimum wages do three things.

1. Flattens the wage curve. More money goes to the bottom end and less to the top. Given economists penchant to complain the distribution doesn't matter it's interesting that that freaks them out.

2. Low paying jobs are very likely in industries where employers have more bargaining power than workers. Minimum wages correct for that.

3. Increasing labor costs motivates employers to invest in increasing productivity which leads to better long term economic growth.

[mjevans]

I disagree with the first point.

Owner/operators tend to be compensated with profit. However the (low/mid) middle class aren't often even compensated with stock options. This leads to rising minimum wages raising the price floor of an area without a corresponding rise in the compensation that the middle classes receive.

As a result of that cost of living increase, the poor remain effectively just as poor while the middle class become more poor (relatively speaking).

A more socially progressive stance is to influence the market supply, thus tipping the scales towards minimal profits, particularly in "need to have" categories such as housing, healthcare, and other basic social infrastructure (transportation, power, communications (of all types), water/sewer).

For some of those there is a natural monopoly within a given area; it makes more sense to focus on highly regulated quality (particularly for the last mile, where parallel infrastructure can be massively wasteful).

For others a hybrid approach can help: a regulated marketplace where there is ample competition among similarly sized players and/or a public option of last/default resort to control prices/quality.

Finally there are healthy markets for //optional extras// (such as fast food) where competition is robust and effective.

[edanm]

> You can either mandate that businesses shoulder some of the burden of providing decent living conditions, or expect the state to shoulder that burden more directly and let businesses coast on cheap labor that's dependent on welfare.

Out of curiosity (this is a slight tangent), why do you think businesses should shoulder that burden (if you do, I'm just guessing). Just as a reminder, we're not talking about mega-corp businesses like Google here, we're talking about restaurants, which I think are commonly small businesses. Why should their owners be forced to pay for employees' welfare, vs. doing the more equitable thing and spreading that payment to everyone?

[lozenge]

Err, because they're getting the benefit of the work? Why should I as a taxpayer subsidise small business owners?

[edanm]

> Err, because they're getting the benefit of the work?

That's not the situation we were talking about, really. We talked about a minimum wage, which raises the wage above what the business would normally pay. And we talked about doing that as a way to give a social net to some workers. But this effectively amounts to a business owner paying extra money, on top of what they would normally pay to get the benefit of the labor, out of their pocket, to help workers. The question is, why does it make sense for this only to be paid by them?

> Why should I as a taxpayer subsidise small business owners?

You wouldn't be subsidizing small business owners, you'd just be subsidizing workers. Which makes sense, since the stated goal was to help workers. Why should business owners be the only ones to subsidize workers, and not everyone?