[ravitation]

HN is not a place for this kind of talking past each other... There is a reason they are in the same paragraph.

EDIT: No one said it had no impact of employment (just as no one said there were no "student workers").

There is nuance to the cost/benefit of given minimum wages...

[quantumBerry]

Glad to know you think anyone who can offer under $15/hr in value just a "nuance" worthy of unemployment.

[ravitation]

1) I feel like you know that is an oversimplification, and therefore you are not arguing in good faith... Something I would really like to not do here.

2) Even if we assume that a $15 minimum wage would eliminate a notable number of jobs, elimination of jobs is not equivalent to unemployment. We, as a society, are okay with, going by your own argument, eliminating all the $5/hour jobs (with state minimum wages being $7.25+) because it does not lead to significantly less overall employment. Do you have evidence this would not also be true with a $15 minimum wage?

[quantumBerry]

>1) I feel like you know that is an oversimplification,

No it really is this simple. Jobs that have negative economic value (wages do not cover value) are not maintainable in a free market for anything more than a short period of time. I'm sure some exist but jobs with negative economic value are not in any way plentiful compared to ones with positive or break even value. If I have a job that gives me $14/hr in value it does not make sense for me to offer it under a $15/hr minimum wage.

The ones actually acting in "bad faith" are those who fail to disclose to the ofter marginalized people working low wage jobs that their policy goals are to eliminate the only jobs available to these marginalized people, forcing them to operate on the black market or let their skills and work history decay in unemployment. The farther you slide the minimum wage bar right from zero, the more people you eliminate from the labor market: the nuance being if it is low enough it only destroys the earning power of the most marginalized that some of us are happy to forget about.

> We, as a society, are okay with, going by your own argument, eliminating all the $5/hour jobs (with state minimum wages being $7.25+) because it does not lead to significantly less overall employment

Well it does lead to significantly less employment for anyone who cannot provide minimum wage in value. But what happens is a mixture of elimination of those jobs and the pushing of those jobs to the black market, where those persons (including many illegal immigrants) just have to work in the shadows without any unemployment insurance or labor protections and have to live in constant fear the IRS will find out and also get them for unreported income. So they're definitely a lot worse off.

>elimination of jobs is not equivalent to unemployment

It is if there is no alternative job because you can't offer enough in value to make the minimum wage cutoff.

>Do you have evidence this would not also be true with a $15 minimum wage?

Do I have evidence that employers will have to eliminate jobs if the position doesn't create enough value to cover the wage? One example is when QFC had to close a couple Seattle stores due to mandated 'hazard pay' [1]. Simple logic tells you the jobs generating under $15/hr in value will either become black market or be gone, if it's illegal.

If you're in retail and can't find anyone to pay $15/hr, and think you are worth that, why not try it on the open market? You can come to my border city, where mexicans engage in retail without any boss whatsoever selling retail snacks and elotes. If you can really produce over $15/hr in value then go ahead and do it for yourself. I'm sure many of these street retail street vendors make more than that, and at least in my city the police don't care at all if you have a license or not.

[1] https://www.supermarketnews.com/issues-trends/kroger-s-qfc-c...

[ravitation]

I apologize, I guess I mistook your misunderstanding as bad faith.

I feel like I must point this out, but no one is arguing that "jobs that have negative economic value" would somehow exist.

> Do I have evidence that employers will have to eliminate jobs if the position doesn't create enough value to cover the wage?

This is actually not at all what my second point was asking... The ask was, if we assume for a minute that a $15 minimum wage simply eliminates jobs (as opposed to bringing extracted employee value more in line with employee compensation and reducing employer profits), whether eliminating the jobs that cannot pay $15/hour would actually increase unemployment in such a meaningful way as to offset the potential benefits it would offer... The context being that we, as a society, have already decided that the benefits of eliminating (see assumption above) $5/hour jobs was worth whatever effect it had on unemployment.

With this is mind, it's obvious that QFC closing two stores is completely meaningless because it provides nothing close to an objective view on A) the effect on overall unemployment, nor B) the positive or negative effects it had on the employees whose jobs (according to QFC) were eliminated. That's not even to mention the fact that QFC has a vested interest in blaming regulation, or the fact that a single anecdote is not at all representative of the job market.

I'll just also add that it's very hard not to take what you're saying as simply constructing a straw man (as opposed to misreading or misunderstanding), given how completely unrelated anything you wrote was to my other comment.

[quantumBerry]

>we, as a society, have already decided that the benefits of eliminating $5/hour jobs was worth whatever effect it had on unemployment.

We have eliminated some, but others we've simply relegated them to the black market so that those engaging them either do it entirely without unemployment insurance and other labor protections, or they do it as an independent business or contractor. Now a good deal of those jobs are instead taken by illegal immigrants (and I'm not judging these immigrants at all here, just noting what the effects are). What we really "decided" was it was worth making those jobs black market or self employment jobs -- and that is an opinion held by the tyranny of the majority against those who suffer under this regulation.

>With this is mind, it's obvious, that QFC closing two stores is completely meaningless

Somehow I doubt it was meaningless to the individuals who had the choice of move to a store not offering the hazard pay or lose their job. But meaningless from your priveleged perspective of not being immediately affected by the loss.

>I'll just also add that it's very hard not to take what you're saying as simply constructing a straw man (as opposed to misreading or misunderstanding), given how completely unrelated anything you wrote was to my other comment.

Rich from a person leading off with the straw man attacking Cato with the false argument that they had somehow claimed there weren't poor people making minimum wage.

[ravitation]

> We have eliminated some, but others we've simply relegated them to the black market so that those engaging them either do it entirely without unemployment insurance and other labor protections, or they do it as an independent business or contractor.

Do you have any evidence that this occurs at any meaningful scale? This theory, while occasionally toted by conservative/libertarian think tanks, seems to rely on only 1 example (a New York city car wash that was already cutting jobs through automation), which was covered/written by a libertarian think tank.

> Somehow I doubt it was meaningless to the individuals who had the choice of move to a store not offering the hazard pay or lose their job. But meaningless from your privileged perspective of not being immediately affected by the loss.

No, the article you linked is meaningless specifically because it tells you absolutely nothing about those individuals (and also because it's purely anecdotal). When discussing wage increases (or hazard pay in this case), we typically care about the outcomes for workers. Not to mention the fact, as I said, that QFC has a vested interest in blaming regulation.

> Rich from a person leading off with the straw man attacking Cato with the false argument that they had somehow claimed there weren't poor people making minimum wage.

I literally linked the exact quote. They made two arguments, the second of which was that (verbatim) "a lot of people who earn the federal minimum wage or just above it are not poor, or will not be poor in the longer term." The entire point of the original article was that this is not true...