[drzaiusapelord]

Yes. If you're some teenager selling ice cream for the summer and being taken care of by your parents, you shouldn't be making $35,000 a year.

The larger question, of course, should be answered by the customers of McDonalds or Target. Are they willing to pay twice the cost of goods so everyone who works there can make more money? Probably not, and those businesses will probably fold. Now you have everyone complaining about unemployment and the lack of affordable goods. Do you pass yet another law to make those cheap? Who pays for this stuff in the end? You can't economically dictate everything unless you want to migrate into command-economy communism, and the world tried that fairly recently with disastrous results.

Not to mention price inflation for common goods once the local econony has everyone getting $15 an hour. Great, now everything costs more and the people who weren't minimum didn't get a raise.

[21echoes]

this is a ridiculously warped view on minimum wage

1) The average age of a minimum age worker is 35, and 88% are not teenagers. So no, the example in your first line should not be "you're some teenager", it's "you're a parent working two jobs and still on food stamps". http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/upshot/minimum-wage.html

2) Talking about the cost of goods doubling is straight-up fear-mongering. Walmart set their minimum wage to $9, so raising it to $15 wouldn't even be doubling if minimum wage labor was literally their only cost of business. That's not even close to true, of course, but let's be generous and assume it's 1/3 of their sales minus CGS (~120B, so 40B). Their sales were ~500B last year, so with literally no other changes, they would only have to raise prices by 5% to go to $15 minimum wage.

[Domenic_S]

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Take this table for example, where your linked article got its information: http://www.cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/update-low-wage-worker-1...

Notice anything interesting about the age bands?

16 - 19 (4 years)

20 - 24 (4 years)

25 - 34 (10 years (!))

35 - 64 (30 years (!!!))

65+ (? years)

The 35 - 64 band is especially egregious because it includes both people at the peak of their careers and retirees (who often take throwaway jobs to stay busy or supplement early SS @ 62).

Ok, so everyone's got an agenda, no real news there. The money shot is here:

> “All of us used to think minimum wage meant a wage you could live on,” de Blasio said

Wat? Who used to think that? Roosevelt didn't think that when he introduced the FLSA, actually the major win there was the abolition of child labor in America. At some point the thought around minimum wage went from "the minimum amount you have to pay so you're not basically whipping child slaves all day" to "the wage we need to buy iPhones and 2 cars".

The actual question is, what level of lifestyle should minimum wage/basic income/whatever support? Is that level adjusted for local prices, or do you have to live in a "designated poor person area" to survive (ie, is the amount the same in SF as it is an Akron)? What about if someone blows all their BI on liquor or gambling and becomes homeless, do we give them more? Who is responsible?

I don't have the answers, and ultimately the discussion is pointless because no group of people will ever agree on this.

[21echoes]

... are you replying to the right comment? i didn't talk for a second about what de Blasio said, and those age bands don't do anything about the stat i cited: that 88% of minimum wage employees are 20 or older.

[Domenic_S]

I was responding to the "average age is 35" portion; the average is useless without more discreet bands because the post-retirement and going back to work post-empty-nest communities are so large. 88% being non-teens is a meaningless metric without more information -- I had a few minimum-wage jobs in college, and I was not a teenager then.

[fineman]

> The actual question is, what level of lifestyle should minimum wage/basic income/whatever support?

Enough to enable the barista, garbage collector, concierge, etc, to live in the same city they work in. It produces nicer cities. Like reserving and maintaining park-space, it's a cost you pay for for a nice place to live.

If some coffee shops want to automate, great. They'll be competing with vending machines, not the remaining human-staffed cafes.

[Domenic_S]

They can live in those cities already. They're not buying houses, but they can live there.

Again the question is what standard of living is the goal? Homeownership? Eating out? New electronics? That's the question that will never have a universal answer.

[phkahler]

>> The larger question, of course, should be answered by the customers of McDonalds or Target. Are they willing to pay twice the cost of goods so everyone who works there can make more money?

In most cases the cost of labor is not a large percentage of the purchase price. When the cost of labor is doubled, passing this on to the consumer will not double the price. In many cases it won't even be close.

[drzaiusapelord]

For fast food it certainly is the largest cost. Other industries are different, but shops with a brick and mortar presence often are wage bound.

[phkahler]

So the 6 dollars I pay for a fast food lunch take nearly a man-hour of labor? Once you get beyond the few minutes of handling my individual order its all bulk back to the source, so I have a hard to time believing that. OTOH the prices farmers get paid would suggest you're correct.

[meatysnapper]

One argument that can be made is that everyday services are needed and won't be automated in the near future. Also, rich people like going to cafes and restaurants, and it's nice to live in a place where everybody goes out in the city.

So, you end up with places like Australia and Switzerland where wages are high, but everyday costs are very high. I would be shocked if this didn't end up happening in the US.

Ultimately, do we want a two-class society, or do we want something more egalitarian (Brazil vs Germany)? I know which one I prefer living in!

[drzaiusapelord]

>Also, rich people like going to cafes and restaurants

I wouldn't use restaurants as some example of progressive and egalitarian labor. They're the number one source of black market labor today, let alone what would happen if you double these wages.

>I know which one I prefer living in!

The countries with the terrible disparities in living are usually the ones that flirted with communism in the past and are largely socialist and anti-free market today. They put in these policies which caused depressed entrepreneurial activities, lack of free markets, heavy corruption, etc and have a legacy of poverty from these failed leftist policies. More leftist policies aren't the solution here (see: Greece).

>(Brazil vs Germany)

New data shows Germany is not egalitarian. In fact, its the worst in the EU.

Earlier this year, the German Economic Institute (DIW) had released a study indicating that contrary to common conceptions, Germany had the most unequal distribution of wealth in the eurozone.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/23/wealth-gap-ineq...