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by true_religion 2560 days ago
Minimum wage doesn’t track inflation. If it did, I would have no complaints. But it’s hard for me to understand people saying minimum wage should only be for one person eking out a bare existence, when it’s value in real money has fallen over the past 70 years.
2 comments
xienze 2560 days ago
What everyone fails to realize is that every job has a maximum value associated with it, and therefore a maximum wage, assuming your employer isn’t in the business of losing money. When you raise the minimum wage to $X/hr, by necessity employers (again, in the interests of not losing money) will no longer be able to offer jobs that generate less than $X/hr in revenue. This becomes a problem for people who lack the skill to perform a job that generates at least $X/hr — they become unemployable, either through job elimination or automation.
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true_religion 2560 days ago
I know what the minimum wage does. I would prefer directly supporting the unemployeable to increase their skills, rather than forcing them to accept multiple minimum wage jobs and have no free time to learn.
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RhysU 2559 days ago
...and when you encounter a person whose skills cannot, at present and for whatever reason, be elevated above the minimum wage floor what do you do?
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true_religion 2559 days ago
If they can’t be elevated at present or in future, then that ought to be an edge case. If it is widespread then we have a a larger societal problem to deal with than merely setting a minimum wage.
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Kalium 2560 days ago
Would you be happy if minimum wage was CPI-indexed to track the cost for one adult's bare-bones existence? Obviously this also requires defining what that minimum is, as social norms are also subject to inflation - when a US minimum wage was introduced boarding houses were common. Now they're unheard of.
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true_religion 2560 days ago
That would be fine, as it would mean that we as a society explicitly agree what minimum wage should be about. And we would probably have massive campaigns to get adults with families off the minimum wage, as well as ensure that adults never have to take a minimum wage job in the future.

We could leave minimum wage to children, and charity workers.

As it stands, it used to pay better but has slowly slid to being subsistence living.

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