[imgabe]

> 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.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2016/home.htm

[mlevental]

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.

[imgabe]

> 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.

[mlevental]

>Because it costs money?

the question was "should" not can't. your answer is therefore normative rather than descriptive. let's agree to disagree that market forces shouldn't interfere with people's abilities to survive (healthcare, housing, justice system).

>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?

you wrongly believe that raising the minimum wage will lead to mass lay offs. ny raised minimum wage in 2016 and 2018 and the only sector that cut jobs was food service.

> 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

facetious nonsense. not a single one of those things is a current policy practice (section 8 is not a housing voucher).

>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.

like i told the other guy: go ahead and build housing at cost. until then i'll vote for minimum wage increases.

[imgabe]

> let's agree to disagree that market forces shouldn't interfere with people's abilities to survive (healthcare, housing, justice system).

Fair enough. I mean, market forces do interfere with people's ability to survive whether we care to agree with it or not, at least until we can develop a post-scarcity economy.

[mlevental]

again you're missing a key normative word: should. i said should. i'm well aware that they do. i don't think they should. like i keep saying - which is why i will vote always vote for minimum wage increases.

[imgabe]

What I'm saying is, raising the minimum wage does not make market forces go away. It just changes the input to those forces. Look at San Francisco. Even people who earn far, far above minimum wage have a hard time affording housing there. The existence of high incomes didn't magically make market forces go away.

The only way a market goes away is if the supply of something is so high that it is effectively worthless, because everyone can freely access all they could ever want. For instance, there is no market for breathable air. We can all breathe as much air as we want without impacting the ability of anyone else to do so. Hence, there is no reason for anyone to try to sell air to anyone else (for now, anyway...).