That's a good way of turning the poorest US workers into the poorest US unemployed. If you raise the minimum wage above the actual value of an employee, then they're just going to get fired. Even if they still provide more value than their being paid, it makes automating away their job more competitive.
California tried this with a $20/hr minimum wage in fast food restaurants: the next time you go into a McDonalds, count the number of empty cash registers and number of shiny new ordering kiosks: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34033
Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.
Not a family. Especially not families with - for other reasons- only one breadwinner.
The problems of poverty (to the extent the US even experiences it) are broader than demanding someone make uneconomic decisions with their investors capital.
> Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.
This is false and not at all the reason why the minimum wage exists. It was created to bust sweatshops. You are making the same argument as the people that were defending sweatshops. It may be the argument proponents make now to argue against raising it, but it was not why it was created. Roosevelt literally said that the intent was that any business unable to provide a basic living wage for their workers was one that should not exist.
This is actually the policy argued for by the Catholic Church in various documents; but it results in an obvious inequality that makes many angry - two people doing the exact same job, and the single man is paid less than the married family man.
(The reality is we pretend we don’t have that, then rebuild it badly with bandaids - child tax credit, earned income tax credit, daycare credits, MFJ deductions, healthcare, etc).
>People deserve to live with dignity, earning a living wage.
Look, I get where that is coming from. But no one deserves anything, even clean air. Instead, you pay for things with other things (e.g. clean air in exhchange for slightly more expensive cars).
A (shitty) job is better than no job. Minimum wage should be lowered. You gotta help people with something else. For instance by allowing to build higher density housing.
But is anyone _actually_ getting paid the minimum wage these days? Might want to check what the grocery store you worked at in 2010 is really paying these days. I’d bet good money it’s significantly more than $7.25/hour.
Doesn't the fact that 98.9% of all workers earn more than the minimum wage kinda highlight that it's really not necessary for the federal government to increase it? Clearly it's nearly impossible except in limited circumstance to actually _find_ workers who'll accept the minimum wage, hence the fact that hardly anyone is paying it.
A federal-level minimum wage doesn't make sense, precisely because what is considered minimum wage in LA isn't the same as what's considered minimum wage in rural Louisiana, and vice-versa. The fact that 98.9% of workers manage to receive more than the minimum wage strongly suggests the market forces have done a pretty good job of determining what a viable minimum wage for various parts of the US is (including apparently parts where $7.25/hour works).
> But is anyone _actually_ getting paid the minimum wage these days?
Yes.
> Clearly it's nearly impossible except in limited circumstance
No, you exaggerate. It’s a large number of people. I wouldn’t say it’s nearly impossible to find someone from Indianapolis (pop. 879k, 2024 est.), and the number of Americans is much larger than the number of working Americans.
> No, you exaggerate. It’s a large number of people.
It's 1.1%, an incredibly small portion of the entire working population. There's never any follow up like "where in the country does this occur?" which may reveal that it's actually a livable wage. Or other follow up questions like, "does this number include illegal aliens who are happy with being paid $7.25/hour tax free?"
You're also ignoring _how_ it came to be that 98.9% of all workers manage to get paid higher than the minimum wage without it being mandated. Are the companies doing this out of the goodness of their hearts or have market forces instead found what the _actual_ viable minimum wage for various localities truly is?
Pretty sure the data of the past few years has shown we don’t really need a minimum wage apart from ensuring people aren’t absolutely taken advantage of. Nobody is paying just minimum wage anymore, apart from servers and the like that make most of their income from tips. The local McDonalds pays at least 50% more, for instance.
You view this as zero sum. How many new business owners would be created if people had enough to save? How many new businesses would exist if more money was flowing in the economy? Should businesses exist if they can't pay livable wages?
These aren't hypothetical questions. We have an answer for them all over the country where state minimum wages are rising in Democratic states.
yeah, actually. If the worst thing you can find when paying living wages for workers is a small drop of 2.7% employment among fast food chains, that sounds like a great trade off.
Perhaps if we taxed the billionaires more we could subsidize increased wages for small business owners or even do something actually good like provide universal basic income so that they cannot be so easily exploited for wildly undervalued labor
... what people are willing to pay for it... when the corporations already achieved regulatory capture and can force a partly state subsidized work force to take shit underpaid jobs. It's like a handout to corporations.
Deliberately underpaying people and then telling them their work has low value is one of the most disgusting aspects of capitalists. There's lots of CEOs who are not especially productive, they just have leverage.
The government tries hard to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand, but so far has failed 100% of the time. The government can implement wage and price controls, but those still do not set the actual value.
For example, in the USSR, the price of bread was fixed by the state. But the real price of bread was how long you were willing to wait in line for it.
BTW, in the US, you are free to set up a company and then pay your workers whatever you want to. Workers can choose to work for you, or not.
Governments are on both sides of supply and demand: their powers to tax and spend mean they can put their metaphorical foot on the metaphorical scales to tip the balances whichever way they want, to a large degree, with rapid effect.
Central planning is only one of many ways to do this, it can also be managed more locally; and Soviet-style central planning is only one many ways to do central planning, most large businesses even in capitalist nations are also somewhat-centrally planned by the C-suite.
Labor rights have been a raging success. 40 hour work weeks, minimum wage, sick leave, vacation leave (in non-shithole countries).
>BTW, in the US, you are free to set up a company and then pay your workers whatever you want to.
What happens when competition with deeper pockets price dumps you into oblivion? Free market is a free market only when there is competition based on the product, not how rich your investors are.
There is evidence the workers are being exploited everywhere if you bother to spend a second looking. Like the parent said, your apologism of capitalists is disgusting.
California tried this with a $20/hr minimum wage in fast food restaurants: the next time you go into a McDonalds, count the number of empty cash registers and number of shiny new ordering kiosks: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34033