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[The Albatross]

every state has at least one major urban area. i live in texas, which uses the federal minimum wage, and we have a population of about 27 million people. roughly 60% of that is urban, which comes to 16 million.

the other problem is that most red states will react harshly if any cities within them try to raise their minimum wage. north carolina's HB2 is best known for the transgender bathroom ban but it also reversed charlotte's minimum wage hike and might never have passed if that hadn't been a consideration.

Yes, every state has urban centers, but there is a reality that the standard of living index is very different throughout the United States, even in urban centers in different states.

I'm not saying that Texas doesn't need a higher minimum wage, or what have you, but just that applying minimum wage laws with Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC, and Boston in mind might not work as effectively for Lubbock Texas.

This is why the system we have now where states can set their own minimum wage can work pretty well. California, Massachusetts, Oregon, and other wealthy coastal areas can raise their minimum wage to $15/hr (or more) and tie it to the price index, and they can do so a lot quicker than waiting for federal legislation to pass.

 

[NoblesseOblige]

Ok for that level of education and skill, is the minimum wage not appropriate?

I have no idea how this all works, just wondering. Ideally, the cost of living would be cheaper 🤔

Personally I would never work at one of those jobs again for under $30/hr.

 

[HariKari]

Ok for that level of education and skill, is the minimum wage not appropriate?

I have no idea how this all works, just wondering. Ideally, the cost of living would be cheaper 🤔

It's not appropriate because it lags behind inflation and way, way behind actual productivity. The government ends up paying for the welfare of corporate employees because those places - like Walmart - don't want to pay a living wage.

 

[aeolist]

I mean, yes, having a platform is a good thing, but it's kinda hard to get enthused about this type of thing when an entire party that's extremely unlikely to become politically irrelevant wants nothing to do with it. Honestly, I feel like by the time the country's in a position to raise the minimum wage to $15, $15 will probably be the equivalent of 7.25 now.

"what we want isn't really possible, here's something we think is reasonable" has been the motto of the democratic party for 30 years. it hasn't worked, partly because that doesn't get people to the polls and partly because the republicans refuse to compromise anything.

the only way we pass any increase at all is by obtaining overwhelming political power throughout the system and being in a position to completely ignore republican demands. you do that by getting people excited and organized behind positive, easily understood messages. the ACA's "let's means-test everything, give handouts to the private insurance market, and make healthcare even more complicated in order to slow the rate of decay" isn't that, "medicare for all" is. "we'll increase the minimum wage but do it by applying a complex formula that depends on variables such as cost of living and median income" isn't that, "fight for $15" is.

 

[krae_man]

I get paid $10.50 to be an emt and help save lives.

Man, you guys get shafted down there.

A former co-worker of mine had a job one summer doing non emergency medical transportation which he was qualified to do since he was going to school to be a firefighter and he made almost $18/hour doing that.

Proper EMT's start at high 5 figures and fully trained and experienced ones make 6 figures here.

Canada BTW.

 

[ReAxion]

go for $15. then pin rent to it somehow.

 

[unhealthy_skeptic]

Man, you guys get shafted down there.

I former co-worker of mine had a job one summer doing non emergency medical transportation which he was qualified to do since he was going to school to be a firefighter and he made almost $18/hour doing that.

Proper EMT's start at high 5 figures and fully trained and experienced ones make 6 figures here.

Canada BTW.

From what I've gathered from some EMT friends, the pay scale for that job varies insanely based on where you live.

 

[Cyrano]

Pretty much, a permanent chaining to inflation, enshrined in law to automatically adjust every 5 years or so to match the last 5 years' worth of inflation, instead of having to have a big fight over it every decade.

After setting it to a competitive level, of course.

Adjustments should also happen when there are major shifts. If inflation shifts more than a few percentage points in a year, there needs to be an adjustment to ensure the spending power of the consumer stays roughly the same.

Realistically though a more workable solution to this would simply be a guaranteed wage. Once automation gets past a certain point (e.g., like self-driving cars), there will be millions of people without jobs. Need a net to catch those people and if they're going to be trained in something more intensive, provide the ability for them to do so.

 

[Almighty]

As someone who lives in a red state, when the federal minimum wage is raised they need to go big or go home. Fuck this raise it to $10.50 or whatever. It needs to be set to something that will actually allow someone to live off it for a decade until they raise it again.

 

[CLaddyOnFire]

Honestly? I'd be upset if it didn't boost my wages appropriately. Right now I make $24/hour as a chemist, and as such I am making a decent amount (no problems with rent, bills, etc.) but not enough to have much of an excess to put into savings, retirement, entertainment. If minimum wage was bumped substantially to $15/hour, and my pay didn't adjust accordingly, then after a few years when the market value of nearly everything in the country rises to accommodate the new minimum wage, I would be in a much worse place financially.

I am aware that people currently making minimum wage are already in that "much worse financial place," and I sympathize with that. However, I worked/paid my ass off for 7 years in higher education to get the degree necessary for my position, and I do believe that my financial situation should be elevated to a certain degree above what typical minimum wage positions provide. If my pay went from ~3x minimum wage to less than 2x minimum wage, it would greatly devalue the time and money I put into the degree I obtained to be able to better provide for myself and my family.

I completely agree that the disparity between the top 1% and the rest of America (or the world) is outlandish and needs to be addressed. However, I completely disagree with such a significant increase to a national minimum wage that would end up being meaningless in a few years once the market adjusts itself. A $1 bottle of soda would soon be a $2 bottle of soda and nothing will have changed except now the people somewhere between the bottom 25% and the top 25% will experience the same struggles currently plaguing that bottom 25%.

 

[BajiBoxer]

In anything but the short term setting and then increasing the minimum wage is just going to accelerate automation replacing humans.

Businesses eating the cost to automate increasingly becomes more attractive as an annually increasing minimum wage cost eat into profits.

In the long term, automation is happening anyway. It's happening right now. If someone can be replaced by robots, it's going to happen unless wages are dropped down to near slave level. And even then automation still may be cheaper. Companies will try to staff their businesses with the least amount of people regardless of what the wage is. You have an idea of what the minimum number of people needed to opperate effeciently is, and you try to hit that number.

I don't see how it accelerates anything, since it's allready full steam ahead on automation. Higher wages aren't going to magically make the robot ready to take your job sooner, and lower wages aren't going to delay the R&D and being put into automation, nor the implementation.

 

[G.ZZZ]

Minimum wage is a battle not worth fighting imho, rules on labor need to be less srrict and redistributioon ofwealth should be a function of taxing so that you maximize job creation while having a wide social safety net (aka basic income, start from a lower amount first, not necessarily enough for living at first )

 

[Pagusas]

Ok for that level of education and skill, is the minimum wage not appropriate?

I have no idea how this all works, just wondering. Ideally, the cost of living would be cheaper 🤔

Thats the basis of the argument. What are these jobs actually worth? Its a really hard thing to answer. Those jobs are not meant to be careers, not meant to be a lively hood. Unfortunately people get trapped in life sometimes without the education or people skills to move on to career jobs.

 

[Steel]

"what we want isn't really possible, here's something we think is reasonable" has been the motto of the democratic party for 30 years. it hasn't worked, partly because that doesn't get people to the polls and partly because the republicans refuse to compromise anything.

the only way we pass any increase at all is by obtaining overwhelming political power throughout the system and being in a position to completely ignore republican demands. you do that by getting people excited and organized behind positive, easily understood messages. the ACA's "let's means-test everything, give handouts to the private insurance market, and make healthcare even more complicated in order to slow the rate of decay" isn't that, "medicare for all" is. "we'll increase the minimum wage but do it by applying a complex formula that depends on variables such as cost of living and median income" isn't that, "fight for $15" is.

Thing about campaigning on hyperbolic specifics like that is that they'll quickly come back to bite you as soon as your base realizes that it's not going to get done. That was exactly Obama's problem: he didn't fix everything overnight like they felt he promised so his base became disillusioned and led to the tea party, which in turn led to Obama being unable to adjust Obamacare as it needed to be. Not to mention that they might not even work at all in the current economic environment.

If we're gonna name a specific minimum wage at a federal level, $12 is probably more reasonable. Quickly raising the minimum wage to $15 from $7 would be far too much of a shock to the system.

The thing that's probably going to come up next politically for the democrats is that they're gonna be left with the wreckage of a government that Trump and the pubs leave in their wake. They're gonna be forced to raise taxes after Trump brings them disastriously low. They're gonna be forced to completely re-instate the regulatory system that Trump will have dismantled. And after that's done? The Republicans will blame them for the increased taxes and come back in government, undo everything that the dems got done, minimum wage or otherwise. That's the long term game the Republicans are playing, and making broad promises that are either not going to get done or won't stay in place for long plays directly into that. There will never be a long time victory over the Republicans. There will never be a single party government that lasts.

 

[Cyrano]

Thats the basis of the argument. What are these jobs actually worth? Its a really hard thing to answer. Those jobs are not meant to be careers, not meant to be a lively hood. Unfortunately people get trapped in life sometimes without the education or people skills to move on to career jobs.

A job's "worth" is entirely arbitrary. This line of argumentation goes nowhere. If a job is necessary to the functioning of society, it's worth a wage that allows a person to live respectably.

 

[Linkyn]

Pretty much, a permanent chaining to inflation, enshrined in law to automatically adjust every 5 years or so to match the last 5 years' worth of inflation, instead of having to have a big fight over it every decade.

After setting it to a competitive level, of course.

The way we do it is that a number of common goods have their prices indexed. This index is continuously monitored, and if it hits a certain point of growth (I'm not sure what the exact percentage is), all wages (not just minimum) are more or less automatically raised in order to compensate for the increase of living cost. We tend to see one of these inflation-related adjustments every few years, but usually at least once per legislative period (which is 5 years at the national level).

 

[Inuhanyou]

In my controversial opinion, there should not be a minimum wage.

There should be a federally mandated living wage adjusted for each state depending on state requirements by percentage of income. Some states already get 15 dollars but in general many get less. Giving everyone a flat rate makes no sense.

 

[Vanillalite]

A job's "worth" is entirely arbitrary. This line of argumentation goes nowhere. If a job is necessary to the functioning of society, it's worth a wage that allows a person to live respectably.

This is gonna become less and less true with each passing year as automation takes over.

We probably have to do the minimum wage hike in the short term, but ideally we should be moving towards a guaranteed minimum income.

 

[soul creator]

Even for rural areas, isn't $15/hr still less than what it would be adjusted for inflation/productivity/etc.? If that's true (hey, I could be wrong), $15 still seems like a compromise, so I never quite understood why it's considered some extreme radical change, as opposed to just simply the low end of what it would've been if we hadn't been swinging rightward for the past 40 years

 

[ant_]

A job's "worth" is entirely arbitrary. This line of argumentation goes nowhere. If a job is necessary to the functioning of society, it's worth a wage that allows a person to live respectably.

This doesn't embrace the economic reality of employment. Every job indeed has a worth. Every business owner must decide that worth based off the revenue generated by an individual and the cost of that individuals labor. If you're making a losing investment (i.e. you lose money on an employee) than it is simply not economically viable to employ someone.

 

[BajiBoxer]

Honestly? I'd be upset if it didn't boost my wages appropriately. Right now I make $24/hour as a chemist, and as such I am making a decent amount (no problems with rent, bills, etc.) but not enough to have much of an excess to put into savings, retirement, entertainment. If minimum wage was bumped substantially to $15/hour, and my pay didn't adjust accordingly, then after a few years when the market value of nearly everything in the country rises to accommodate the new minimum wage, I would be in a much worse place financially.

I am aware that people currently making minimum wage are already in that "much worse financial place," and I sympathize with that. However, I worked/paid my ass off for 7 years in higher education to get the degree necessary for my position, and I do believe that my financial situation should be elevated to a certain degree above what typical minimum wage positions provide. If my pay went from ~3x minimum wage to less than 2x minimum wage, it would greatly devalue the time and money I put into the degree I obtained to be able to better provide for myself and my family.

I completely agree that the disparity between the top 1% and the rest of America (or the world) is outlandish and needs to be addressed. However, I completely disagree with such a significant increase to a national minimum wage that would end up being meaningless in a few years once the market adjusts itself. A $1 bottle of soda would soon be a $2 bottle of soda and nothing will have changed except now the people somewhere between the bottom 25% and the top 25% will experience the same struggles currently plaguing that bottom 25%.

Wouldn't your industry need to increase wages to keep workers? If it became much less atractive due to reduced spending power, I would think you'd end up with a labor shortage eventually as these well educated people up and leave for other fields of work.

 

[aeolist]

Thing about campaigning on hyperbolic specifics like that is that they'll quickly come back to bite you as soon as your base realizes that it's not going to get done. That was exactly Obama's problem: he didn't fix everything overnight like they felt he promised so his base became disillusioned and led to the tea party, which in turn led to Obama being unable to adjust Obamacare as it needed to be. Not to mention that they might not even work at all in the current economic environment.

this is kind of weird revisionist history. the tea party was a right-wing backlash to obama, not his disillusioned base. and i would say that the left lost faith in him so quickly because he didn't actually try to do anything progressive and compromised the ACA even before bringing it to congress.

If we're gonna name a specific minimum wage at a federal level, $12 is probably more reasonable. Quickly raising the minimum wage to $15 from $7 would be far too much of a shock to the system.

The thing that's probably going to come up next politically for the democrats is that they're gonna be left with the wreckage of a government that Trump and the pubs leave in their wake. They're gonna be forced to raise taxes after Trump brings them disastriously low. They're gonna be forced to completely re-instate the regulatory system that Trump will have dismantled. And after that's done? The Republicans will blame them for the increased taxes and come back in government, undo everything that the dems got done, minimum wage or otherwise. That's the long term game the Republicans are playing, and making broad promises that are either not going to get done or won't stay in place for long plays directly into that.

the system needs shocks. people like you were making the same "reasoned" arguments during the great depression that the economy was too fragile and couldn't withstand major change. then the new deal was rammed through and radically changed everything, followed by the greatest period of economic prosperity we've ever seen.

 

[Cyrano]

This doesn't embrace the economic reality of employment. Every job indeed has a worth. Every business owner must decide that worth based off the revenue generated by an individual and the cost of that individuals labor. If you're making a losing investment (i.e. you lose money on an employee) than it is simply not economically viable to employ someone.

A minimum income would help with this, but an increase in wages will not. With automation, most jobs will not be economically viable under this system, eventually causing mass unemployment. Because a capital system cannot sustain a populace that, let's face it, has less need of formal work as time passes.

 

[adamantypants]

Minimum wage is a battle not worth fighting imho, rules on labor need to be less srrict and redistributioon ofwealth should be a function of taxing so that you maximize job creation while having a wide social safety net (aka basic income, start from a lower amount first, not necessarily enough for living at first )

Agreed

I'm as liberal as they get, but in the end it's the conservatives (generally speaking) that are doing the hiring. They'll employ robots before a $15/hr standard wage. The onus of societal welfare should be burdened upon the government who should care about its citizens, not upon the private business, who care only about what lines their pockets.

 

[BajiBoxer]

In my controversial opinion, there should not be a minimum wage.

There should be a federally mandated living wage adjusted for each state depending on state requirements by percentage of income. Some states already get 15 dollars but in general many get less. Giving everyone a flat rate makes no sense.

I don't think that's too controversial. There would be a federal minimum wage still, but it would exist as a math formula rather than a hard number. It's just a PR problem, because it's easier to sell and rally around a concrete number.

I ahree with some others here that long long term at least, a minimum income/salary will be the way to go.

 

[aeolist]

This doesn't embrace the economic reality of employment. Every job indeed has a worth. Every business owner must decide that worth based off the revenue generated by an individual and the cost of that individuals labor. If you're making a losing investment (i.e. you lose money on an employee) than it is simply not economically viable to employ someone.

which is the case against having a minimum wage at all. if there are jobs that will be lost because $15 is too much i'm sure the same can be said of $7.25.

raise the minimum to $15 (and make sure it keeps going up by increments after) and have the federal government guarantee a job to anyone who wants to work.

 

[Pagusas]

A job's "worth" is entirely arbitrary. This line of argumentation goes nowhere. If a job is necessary to the functioning of society, it's worth a wage that allows a person to live respectably.

Well that's not true at all...

This doesn't embrace the economic reality of employment. Every job indeed has a worth. Every business owner must decide that worth based off the revenue generated by an individual and the cost of that individuals labor. If you're making a losing investment (i.e. you lose money on an employee) than it is simply not economically viable to employ someone.

And this is said far better than I ever could.

which is the case against having a minimum wage at all. if there are jobs that will be lost because $15 is too much i'm sure the same can be said of $7.25.

raise the minimum to $15 (and make sure it keeps going up by increments after) and have the federal government guarantee a job to anyone who wants to work.

How does a government guarantee a job to anyone who wants to work? Unless you are talking about the military...

 

[ant_]

A minimum income would help with this, but an increase in wages will not. With automation, most jobs will not be economically viable under this system, eventually causing mass unemployment. Because a capital system cannot sustain a populace that, let's face it, has less need of formal work as time passes.

Society has been facing the problem of automation since the industrial revolution. Since then, we've also had a huge increase in the available workforce (most women in the 21st century are working). I believe that new forms of automation will have a significant immediate impact on the labor force, but it's by no means a new problem. In the long term, the labor market has shown the ability to adjust to automation.

If you're suggesting that the living wage be subsidized by the government & not the employer, that's a compelling argument to me. The real question is, how? If this money is taken through taxes to the employer, than that cost will manifest itself in other ways - less jobs or higher prices.

which is the case against having a minimum wage at all. if there are jobs that will be lost because $15 is too much i'm sure the same can be said of $7.25.

raise the minimum to $15 (and make sure it keeps going up by increments after) and have the federal government guarantee a job to anyone who wants to work.

What's stopping the federal government from doing this now? There's no way the federal government can guarantee employment that pays $15.

 

[dark_chris]

I do not believe in it.
You should work hard or study your butt off to attain that level of pay, I don't believe it should just be handed to you at that starting rate. Hell, my mom was able to care for my brother and I alone with $10-14 an hour with good money management.

 

[Steel]

this is kind of weird revisionist history. the tea party was a right-wing backlash to obama, not his disillusioned base. and i would say that the left lost faith in him so quickly because he didn't actually try to do anything progressive and compromised the ACA even before bringing it to congress.

There will be the same exact sentiments said years from now after a Bernie 2.0 gets elected and realizes that they cannot do what they want to do.

Obama had a 60 seat majority in the Senate for only a couple months before the 60th vote was unable to participate and died. At the same time Obama was dealing with the worst recession since the depression. He didn't have the time or leverage to go around that unless he got rid of the filibuster, and everything done under that would still be undone Republicans shortly thereafter.

the system needs shocks. people like you were making the same "reasoned" arguments during the great depression that the economy was too fragile and couldn't withstand major change. then the new deal was rammed through and radically changed everything, followed by the greatest period of economic prosperity we've ever seen.

We're not in the great depression. FDR did not run originally on the New Deal's policies, in fact, at first he was trying to be deficit neutral in his policies. And even then, the opposition party wasn't as contrarian for the sake of being contrarian as they are now. There were Republicans who supported the new deal.

 

[Gotchaye]

Honestly? I'd be upset if it didn't boost my wages appropriately. Right now I make $24/hour as a chemist, and as such I am making a decent amount (no problems with rent, bills, etc.) but not enough to have much of an excess to put into savings, retirement, entertainment. If minimum wage was bumped substantially to $15/hour, and my pay didn't adjust accordingly, then after a few years when the market value of nearly everything in the country rises to accommodate the new minimum wage, I would be in a much worse place financially.

I am aware that people currently making minimum wage are already in that "much worse financial place," and I sympathize with that. However, I worked/paid my ass off for 7 years in higher education to get the degree necessary for my position, and I do believe that my financial situation should be elevated to a certain degree above what typical minimum wage positions provide. If my pay went from ~3x minimum wage to less than 2x minimum wage, it would greatly devalue the time and money I put into the degree I obtained to be able to better provide for myself and my family.

I completely agree that the disparity between the top 1% and the rest of America (or the world) is outlandish and needs to be addressed. However, I completely disagree with such a significant increase to a national minimum wage that would end up being meaningless in a few years once the market adjusts itself. A $1 bottle of soda would soon be a $2 bottle of soda and nothing will have changed except now the people somewhere between the bottom 25% and the top 25% will experience the same struggles currently plaguing that bottom 25%.

"Meaningless in a few years" is a very strong statement. Is there any reason to think that the prices of most goods would increase more-or-less proportionally with the minimum wage? You don't provide an argument for this and I'm unaware of an economist who would agree with it. But this weird theory seems to be the whole basis of your objection. As far as I can tell it only makes sense if you're supposing something like that virtually every company is basically a monopoly. I mean, think about what you're saying here. You're saying that if we legislate that businesses must pay their lowest-paid workers more they will somehow pull off some economic jujitsu that results in them making even more money than they were before.

Surely it's more likely that a minimum wage increase would at most result in a complete pass-through of the costs of the increased minimum wage to consumers. This still only increases prices by a pretty small amount - minimum wage labor is not a huge cost for most companies. They spend a lot on above-minimum wage labor, on rents, and on imports. You're not taking much of a hit. Even for a fast food restaurant probably less than 1/3 of its costs are minimum wage labor. And it's pretty unrealistic to suppose that consumers would eat 100% of the increased cost.

 

[Spyder_Monkey]

Yes because no one can live on $7.25 an hour. It's pathetic.

 

[sangreal]

I think the minimum wage should be a livable wage, but I don't think it makes sense to apply the same minimum nationally. I think it is especially bad for US territories like puerto rico or american samoa

 

[ant_]

Yes because no one can live on $7.25 an hour. It's pathetic.

This isn't the basis of the argument. People on both sides agree with this.

The question is - how do you get more of the population to achieve a living wage? Enacting a sweeping minimum wage law (such as $15/hr) could potentially raise the income of many low-income families. It will also cause the skill ceiling to raise and potentially reduce the employment of individuals of low-skill/low-education. This will consequentially exacerbate the problem of many minority communities - who face a problem of incredibly poor public education.

Opponents would argue that lower wages would allow lower skilled individuals easily enter the workforce and learn skills which will consequentially land them into higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs.

Economic mobility is an important factor here. It's also important to consider family income v. individual income.

 

[aeolist]

Economic mobility is an important factor here.

economic mobility is currently almost non-existent, so i think being so concerned about it is kind of a red herring. people aren't able to climb into the middle class with $7.25 as the minimum wage, i really doubt it would get appreciably worse at $15.

 

[Abstrusity]

Even for rural areas, isn't $15/hr still less than what it would be adjusted for inflation/productivity/etc.? If that's true (hey, I could be wrong), $15 still seems like a compromise, so I never quite understood why it's considered some extreme radical change, as opposed to just simply the low end of what it would've been if we hadn't been swinging rightward for the past 40 years

If we start at 1968, inflation adjusted wages should be somewhere just south of $12/hr.

Productivity is a meme. Technology, work flow, efficiency, whatever you want to call it, has people producing more for less labor than they otherwise would be using. It's safer then, to simply scale it by currency inflation. However, it would need to be $12 immediately, and that's directly harmful to the economy -- an increase of over 50% pretty much immediately.

So it'd have to be staggered over several years, each of those years compounding further inflation. Luckily enough, inflation is rather low right now....because of the deflationary effects of the recession. An increase of wages would counteract that pretty quickly.

If we're talking about staggering these out, though, it'd be a minimum of four years, by which time it'd have already fallen behind. However, it wouldn't be nearly as bad as it used to be, and if we peg it to inflation, we could drastically reduce the problems at the lower end of the spectrum. Normal CPI would work better here than C-CPI because of C-CPI's propensity to underestimate -- for instance, the poor tend to have higher costs of living changes, and not just because many elderly are poor -- they invariably pay more for goods and services because they pay for them more often. Healthcare costs, mechanic costs, food? Because of that, a chained-CPI scale would average those increases downward from month to month.

In essence, even C-CPI cost of living wage increases are better than NO wage increases, and we'll NEED to increase wages to around 12 anyway.

It's worth noting though, that my math is based on yearly inflation from 1968 (inclusive) to 2015(inclusive) and includes the inflation outliers of 1980 and 81.

 

[platocplx]

In all major cities and states that have high costs of living absolutely. more rural areas probably could be bumped up to 10 an hour.

I dont know how it could be uniform it still confuses me how costs to live varies so damn much.

I know in my state they definitely should be paid 15.

 

[TCKaos]

If only we had other countries that we could study as an example...

Speaking of which, when converted to American dollars both European and Australian McDonalds employees make markedly more per hour than they do in the US (I want to say $13-$15ish) and the Big Mac is still some 20 cents cheaper there than it is here.

 

[dead souls]

I do not believe in it.
You should work hard or study your butt off to attain that level of pay, I don't believe it should just be handed to you at that starting rate. Hell, my mom was able to care for my brother and I alone with $10-14 an hour with good money management.

So instead of a Mom taking care of two kids today being able to make more money than yours did you want salaries to remain low.

Instead of "fuck you, got mine" this is the even more odious "fuck you, didn't get mine" I guess.

 

[Abstrusity]

Speaking of which, when converted to American dollars both European and Australian McDonalds employees make markedly more per hour than they do in the US (I want to say $13-$15ish) and the Big Mac is still some 20 cents cheaper there than it is here.

It should also be worth noting that variable costs of transportation and beef trend higher in the US.

Beef, for instance, is markedly cheaper in Australia. There are millions of separate variables to deal with, so direct adjustment via exchange rate is a bit simplistic.

 

[ant_]

economic mobility is currently almost non-existent, so i think being so concerned about it is kind of a red herring. people aren't able to climb into the middle class with $7.25 as the minimum wage, i really doubt it would get appreciably worse at $15.

I'm in agreement that economic mobility is very stagnant and poor in America. You're ignoring a key point though - increasing the minimum wage will make economic mobility even worse for the poorest and least skilled individuals of the country. They now won't even be able to take an initial step towards employment because they simply don't meet the skill expectations of an employer.

 

[kirblar]

Even for rural areas, isn't $15/hr still less than what it would be adjusted for inflation/productivity/etc.? If that's true (hey, I could be wrong), $15 still seems like a compromise, so I never quite understood why it's considered some extreme radical change, as opposed to just simply the low end of what it would've been if we hadn't been swinging rightward for the past 40 years

No, not at all:

Blue line is the conversion to today's dollars. It maxed out at a little over 10 bucks.

 

[Rentahamster]

that's been happening for years but if you actually think right-wing state legislatures will pass increases just because it works well elsewhere you're delusional.

1. There have been ongoing rollouts for years, and as far as I know, only Seattle has reached $15, but there are still many exceptions and the full implementation won't be completed until 2021. That's hardly enough time to study its effects comprehensively. So no, not necessarily "been happening for years" in the context of what I was saying.

2. What do the whims of right wing legislators have anything to do with my point? On what basis am I being delusional?

 

[WaterAstro]

How about having universal basic income?

 

[Abstrusity]

How about having universal basic income?

This is a bit of a pipe dream currently. It's surely an inevitability, but wars will likely be fought over it before we get that far. First, let's see how the experiments in what was it, Ontario?...Turn out.

 

[B-Dubs]

I'm in agreement that economic mobility is very stagnant and poor in America. You're ignoring a key point though - increasing the minimum wage will make economic mobility even worse for the poorest and least skilled individuals of the country. They now won't even be able to take an initial step towards employment because they simply don't meet the skill expectations of an employer.

That's already happening though. The issue isn't so much the minimum wage, it's more about the devaluing of both the high school diploma and the college diploma. For a lot of jobs that used to require nothing more than a college degree to get started now require a masters, and high school diploma level jobs now require college diplomas. As a result it takes a lot more time and capital to get started.

 

[dark_chris]

So instead of a Mom taking care of two kids today being able to make more money than yours did you want salaries to remain low.

Instead of "fuck you, got mine" this is the even more odious "fuck you, didn't get mine" I guess.

She worked hard (although the salary she was making at that time was brief), she did make much more than that. She believed in making much more than that.

I just believe in working your butt off. I mean I do believe that over time, the minimum wage should be increased, but not to $15

 

[aeolist]

1. There have been ongoing rollouts for years, and as far as I know, only Seattle has reached $15, but there are still many exceptions and the full implementation won't be completed until 2021. That's hardly enough time to study its effects comprehensively. So no, not necessarily "been happening for years" in the context of what I was saying.

2. What do the whims of right wing legislators have anything to do with my point? On what basis am I being delusional?

"let some states do it and see what happens"

ok, and then? if we see that it helps that doesn't mean increases will be passed elsewhere. republicans control the majority of state legislatures and aren't known for their susceptibility to evidence. they will continue to fight any increase anywhere.

 

[ant_]

That's already happening though. The issue isn't so much the minimum wage, it's more about the devaluing of both the high school diploma and the college diploma. For a lot of jobs that used to require nothing more than a college degree to get started now require a masters, and high school diploma level jobs now require college diplomas. As a result it takes a lot more time and capital to get started.

I'm not arguing that it doesn't happen. I'm arguing that increasing the minimum wage has a logical outcome of making it worse than it already is.

This isn't a question of right or wrong answers, it's a question of what trade-offs we are willing to make.

 

[Rentahamster]

It's not theory crafting.

Can you point to any long term studies of $15/hour no exceptions minimum wage cities or states in the USA? On this specific issue, it's still more theorycraft than not.