| Medium does get tiring to read... Archive link: https://archive.is/6JuaJ Using: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart I looked over the article and never saw a single justification for $15/hr. outside of "people need it". The Jacobin study included productivity which I don't know if you can even properly quantify into dollars. Certainly, minimum wage is not addressing the needs of the lowest earners in the country. But there must be a metric to go by: If we use base minimum wage adjusted for inflation the numbers look even worse than they are today. $0.25 in 1938 is $4.74 in today's money. So that's not good. It would appear using these numbers minimum wage has beat average inflation using the BLS' own CPI calculator. If we loosen the requirements to the last "stopping point", 2009, $7.25 becomes $7.49 according to the same calculator. Not keeping up with inflation, but I don't think even the poorest people are going to write home about coming up 24 cents short. But this ignoring local minimum wages. Using the following data: https://www.statista.com/statistics/238997/minimum-wage-by-u... We arrive at an average minimum wage of $9.78 and a median of $9.45. So, neither of these really indicate a lacking in inflationary tracking even at the state level. So what's the cause? Well, I'm not an economist but I think the issue is local and not federal. The federal government can set the minimum wage to $15, but that doesn't change the fact the wage curve is heavily skewed by ultra low CoL states and ultra high CoL states. Not being an economist I am willing to ascribe to this something I'm going to call "state-local inflation" where places like California and New York probably demand a minimum wage closer to $25/hr. whereas somewhere like Georgia might do just fine sitting at $10. As a result I think this medium article is more of a tirade than anything and does not elucidate anything related to the problem other than the tautology that it is a problem (which I do agree with). The solution however, seems far more complicated than the "just raise the wage" protests would make it out to be. |