[btilly]

Your reasoning is severely flawed.

Nobody today wants to accept an income below what you need to survive because..you need to survive. Liberals don't want to see other people accepting an income below what is needed for them to survive in a way that we can accept, so pass rules about a minimum wage.

With this proposal, there is wage that it too low. As long as you make enough to afford something nice that you want that you couldn't otherwise afford, there is no reason not to take the job. Therefore at the low end, employers can pay LESS than they do now.

What it does instead is remove perverse incentives that make poor people receive less money for working than not working. The classic example being a single mom who, while working, and paying child care, makes less than on welfare. (Incentives that we've responded to by passing rules forcing poor people to take the otherwise irrational work option.)

[yummyfajitas]

Liberals don't want to see other people accepting an income below what is needed for them to survive in a way that we can accept, so pass rules about a minimum wage.

This is silly. If that were the motivation, then minimum wage would be a few dollars/day.

Here is a list of countries by GDP per capita, after adjusting for purchasing power. Lots of countries (e.g. Venezuela, Georgia, India) have a GDP/capita below the US minimum wage. The world GDP/capita is below the US minimum wage. Yet somehow people in those countries still survive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...

As long as you make enough to afford something nice that you want that you couldn't otherwise afford, there is no reason not to take the job.

Sure there is - you might value that nice thing less than you value watching tv instead of working.

[btilly]

I don't think you read what I wrote carefully enough. Here it is again.

Liberals don't want to see other people accepting an income below what is needed for them to survive in a way that we can accept, so pass rules about a minimum wage.

The key points being that liberals don't want to see it (they don't see other countries), and it is the liberals defining what seems acceptable.

As for your "after adjusting for purchasing power" comment, you know enough economics to know that such adjustments depend on the bundles of goods being purchased, and the poor purchase different bundles than middle class people would. (The same problem means that the quoted inflation figures do not accurately predict the experience of specific socioeconomic groups.) Thus the figures should be taken with a grain of salt.

But that said, yes, people survive on that. But do liberals like seeing them do that? I submit that liberals don't, and this is the motivation for the minimum wage. (See the sibling reply to yours for verification.)

As for watching TV versus working, I'm sure that would happen. I know some of those people. I also know people who would happily work for less than minimum wage just to get out of the house.

[yummyfajitas]

I definitely misunderstood what you said. Thanks for the clarification. I suspect your theory about what people like to see has more than a grain of truth to it.

[SomeCallMeTim]

>The classic example being a single mom who, while working, and paying child care, makes less than on welfare.

It can be worse that this.

At least in some states, every dollar you earn is deducted (at least in part) from your welfare checks. This was at least the case a while ago; I couldn't vouch for its truth today after welfare has been "reformed" several times. It was definitely true at one time, though.

When this was true, at the very least, it was a severe disincentive to working, since until you were able to make more than your welfare check, you would be at best be making pennies on the dollar by taking a job.

[waps]

But how you cheat on universal income is to declare having more children than you actually have. Or just actually having them, treating them badly.

Or at least, every now and then, there's an article in various European news articles that someone pulled that crap. (Most Euro countries will give a monthly stipend of ~100 euro per child you have, no questions asked (in Belgium you have to work to get it, I believe, but no other qualifications. A bank director gets it, and so does the cleaning lady))

[SomeCallMeTim]

>But how you cheat on universal income is to declare having more children than you actually have. Or just actually having them, treating them badly.

Welfare also scales payments based on the number of kids you have. This is a common (and almost certainly apocryphal) accusation against people currently on welfare; if it's ever true, it's an exception and not the rule. (which is why it would be news)

What is true is that the vast majority of people want to feel useful -- and (at least when the women in question are even moderately educated) they don't want to have extra children just to have a higher stipend.

[dllthomas]

Not that original intent should in any way be binding, but it's an interesting cultural shift that "single mom who, while working, and paying child care, makes less than on welfare" is now a reason why welfare is bad, when "mothers shouldn't be working" was part of what motivated welfare in the first place.

[philwelch]

This reminds me of the old paradox that a man who marries his maid is reducing GDP, because when she was the maid she would cook and clean and he would pay her enough to support her as a business transaction, but as husband and wife, she still cooks and cleans and he still supports her but it's not a business transaction anymore.

Likewise, a mother who goes to work and spends her whole paycheck on child care increases GDP, but if she just stays home and cares for the child herself, it doesn't count because it's not a business transaction.

[rguzman]

What people need to survive is too low a standard given how much wealth there is in the world.

[saraid216]

True, but it's a higher standard than what we have now.