The minimum wage is “the least you can pay anyone for any reason.” If you set it too high, then first time workers who still live with their parents won’t be able to get jobs. At all.
You asked “what makes you think this is the typical minimum wage earner?” I answered “if you don’t take that case into account when setting minimum wage, then that worker won’t be able to get a job.”
Minimum wage is the least you can pay anyone for any reason. It is, by definition, an edge case.
> Although workers under age 25 represented only about one-fifth of
hourly paid workers, they made up just under half of those paid the federal minimum wage or less.
that means just over 50% of minimum wage earners are older than 25 (well outside the typical age where you're still living with your parents or just entering the workforce)
> that means just over 50% of minimum wage earners are older than 25 (well outside the typical age where you're still living with your parents or just entering the workforce)
And making minimum wage over the age of 25 is also outside of the typical pay, so it would make sense that they might be in the atypical situation of, say, still living with their parents. Only 2.7% of ALL workers are even making minimum wage to begin with [1], so you're talking about maybe 1.4% of workers over 25. Of those, some may be retired and have other sources of income. Some may have a spouse who makes much more and the are not dependent on the minimum wage income. So the remaining workers who are actually dependent on one minimum wage job to support themselves or their families are very much an edge case, since we're talking about probably less than 1% of all workers.
you linked to 2016 when i linked to 2018 report. why?
>since we're talking about probably less than 1% of all workers.
cool. congrats on proving it's an edge case. A+ case analysis.
so what? it's cool with you that 1.3 million people can't afford housing? even if it were 0.1% of workers? why should literally anyone be unable to afford housing? we're not talking iphones and gucci bags here - we're talking about the bare minimum needed to stay off the street.
> why should literally anyone be unable to afford housing?
Because it costs money? It takes time and effort from other humans to create and they need to be compensated for that? Anything that costs any amount of money will have someone that is unable to afford it. The article is not even talking about being able to afford any housing, they are talking about 2-bedroom apartments. There are smaller apartments. There are rooms in shared houses. There are other forms of housing.
Again, we're talking about the majority of the people earning minimum wage probably not depending on the job to pay for their housing. Maybe they are getting something else out of it. It's cool with you to eliminate a lot of their jobs by raising the minimum wage?
If the problem is some people can't afford housing, we can fix that by providing housing vouchers to those people, or changing zoning laws so more housing can be built to bring down the price, or nationalize the housing industry and just have the government build housing for everyone and we all get assigned a government issue apartment to live in, comrade.
Either way, we address the problem of housing by dealing with housing, not by manipulating the labor market which is only tangentially related to housing.
While I’m sure most people over 25 still making minimum wage would prefer a pay raise, and for the sake of argument, I’ll even accept that the world would be a better place if they got that pay raise, if you raise the minimum wage enough that it’s no longer profitable to hire inexperienced workers, then those potential workers will be locked out of the market.
I acknowledge that there’s a serious problem if millions of experienced workers are unable to get more than minimum wage, but I would prefer we fix that by helping those workers become more valuable, not by putting a “you must be this tall to ride” sign on entry level jobs.