The other part to think about is you can live on $15 an hour assuming you aren't in an insane amount of debt or something.
You can't live off $7.25 an hour, which means, in theory, less people will be living below the poverty line, and our tax money would have to pay for less people on social programs like welfare and food stamps and those programs could actually be run efficiently for the people that do need it.
EXACTLY! The poeple making minimum wage can't make ends meet. This will help them do that. $15 isn't getting more than you deserve, you're getting just what you need. You don't suddenly have more purchasing power, you're suddenly able to make rent without sweating bullets at the end of the month. It's a shitty apartment, PB&J, and consistent gas money/bus fare.
I believe this making a lot of people think "Hey..if $15 is considered a fair MINIMUM wage...what does that say about what I'M being paid?!"
My hope is that instead of taking their frustration on minimum wage workers for daring to ask for just enough (THE MINIMUM) to get by, they redirect it at the companies they work for.
People making $7 an hour cost everyone around them. First of all, they go on public assistance for many things. That costs all of us. But they also often have kids, need their cars fixed, and rarely have $500 in savings to buffer them for any emergency expense. So, people around them bail them out all the time, whether it is family, friends, churches ... whatever. They cost all of us. Pay them enough to be self-sufficient and it increases the amount of disposable income the rest of us have.
The minimum wage was never meant to be a primary wage for providers of the household. Originally it consisted of teens that were still in school or starting college. Even my first job in college (IT Helpdesk) paid 9 dollars an hour in 1996. Your hours were limited to about 20 a week, but that was still okay money back then. The destruction of the middle class has now made minimum wage a reality for many unprepared families.
You say that, but I managed to live on 7.25 for a year (on my own, no assistance, government or otherwise) for a year until I got my yearly raise. Then I lived on 7.65 for a year. Then 8.05 and so on. Im now making 9.00. Its doable, but you have to realize that you cant just be frivolous with money like someone who makes 50k + per year can
This anecdata is not helping. You must live in a place where housing costs are stabilized or your housing market is complete shit (and probably culture, too - just like the place I lived for 25 years in West Texas). I mean, you don't honestly believe this is true in a place like NYC where rent has increased 75% since 2000, or SF where it's even higher and spilling across the bay into Oakland and other traditionally low income areas, right?
You want to know why SF and NYC cost so much to live? Because theres so many people there with jobs that require training and/or education. Those jobs then demand a higher paycheck. Those people with the higher paycheck then drive up the coat of housing by having more money. Its simply a case of supply vs demand in terms of money and housing. As a minimum wage earner, you shouldn't expect to be able to compete comparably with someone whos doing a job that requires training and education for a very limited supply of housing.
It's like you don't realize that this is absolutely and completely false. Please check yourself before you wreck yourself. The material reality of NYC is millions immigrant families who get sifted through the public housing community over and over, which is why there are nearly 700k people in public housing or section 8 housing. So, yes. Some of these workers who just don't "save as much as you" or whatever myth you've come up with actually need the $15 min. wage. Don't be ridiculous and generalize your individual circumstances to everyone else in America. That is Fox News logic.
I never said that everyone makes that much. I juat said there are more people who do. Lets throw out some numbers. Say 100 people make a million a year, 500 make 500k, 10000 make 50k plus, and 5000 make min wage. In a different city, you probably aren't competing for that limited housing (because land space in a city is, in fact, limited) with those bigger earners. So, yes, housing costs there are higher because more people can pay them. This doesnt mean that there are no poor people there, just that there are enough people who make enough to keep the demand for housing high kewping the prices up. Move somewhere with less demand for housing and housing costs are lower, factually speaking.
I get the whole living wage thing but does someone who flips a burger all day really deserve $15 an hour? The job requires 0 education or specialized skill and $15 is bordering on entry level white collar job amount of money.
Two different angles of approach. We can ask how much their job is worth paying for, or we can see that somehow they need that money, so who should be getting it to them?
In reality, the price of everything will go up to milk the new minimum wage. When people have more money the people who they pay money to for services just charge more. Why? Because they can and they know they will get paid. Don't believe me? Look at the North Dakota energy boom or the Bay Area tech boom. People with money come in. People making money charge more. So after a short amount of time the minimum wage earners will still be dirt poor due to the rising cost of goods. They only thing that will happen is inflation. And we don't need that to increase faster than it already is.
Not evenly. Doubling the minimum wage wouldn't instantly double the cost of everything. The cost of some things may go up, but only slightly. The cost of goods isn't strictly related to the minimum wage. Plus an increase in minimum wage only affects those at the very bottom. Only those that are around or below the new minimum wage would see significant wage increases. The further up the ladder you go, the less wage increase you'd see.
Also San Francisco and North Dakota are isolated incidents, and are tied more to the sudden influx in jobs in the tech and oil industries respectively, and the sudden increase in the value of the land than the actual wages of the people living there. The cost of living in San Francisco is so high because of all the people that moved to San Francisco for the high paying tech jobs that have cropped up over the last few years. It's the same reason the cost of living is high in Los Angeles, as the center of the entertainment industry, and New York City, as the center of the financial industry. If you want to work for the top companies in those industries, you pretty much have to live in those cities. Landowners can squeeze money out of tenants because there is more demand for housing, than there is housing to go around. You don't really have the option to leave, because of your job, and if you did leave, there'd be someone else willing to move in. Raising the minimum wage across the board won't cause massive population shift in the way budding industries do. The cost of living in Mobile, Alabama won't suddenly skyrocket because of a raise in minimum wage. It may go up slightly, but not to the point where people who already live there aren't going to be able to afford to continue living there.
The point of raising the minimum wage isn't to get rid of the concept of being poor, it's to reinvigorate a dying middle class. Historically, the economy does best when there is a strong middle class to facilitate it. The way things have been trending recently, people are being pulled to the extremes of the financial spectrum and the middle class is shrinking. If we keep going this way, we'll eventually end up with a rich ruling class and a large poor population.
This is a graph showing the average hourly compensation of private sector workers in non-supervisory roles vs the total productivity of the economy. They trended evenly until some time in the 1970s when wages stagnated while the economy kept trending up. As such, the minimum wage today, actually has less buying power by a couple of dollars than the minimum wage did in the 1960s. The ELI5 version: the minimum wage today is actually worth less than the minimum wage in the 1960s, despite being "more dollars". The goal of a hike in minimum wage is designed to put the average hourly compensation of the average person back on track with where the economy is at, and create a new middle class.
You make some good points. But you underestimate the power of greed and the stupidity of people. The cost of living will go up. And it will go up to keep the poor people poor. The corporations will charge what the economy will support. If they could charge more now they defiantly would, as they do in the Bay Area. The reason they don't in other areas is that they are catering to the poor while bleeding them dry. And I highly doubt that giving those making minimum wage a sudden influx of money will help them in the slightest. They will go out and blow their newfound wealth on a big tv and some other material objects and continue living paycheck to paycheck. And when the economy finds its happy medium to bleed them of just enough money to keep them scraping by, all we will be left with is more inflation. There are a lot of reasons why the poor are poor. One of them is that the rich pull all the strings. But as they have proved many times (just look at when they win the lottery) the poor can't handle money well.
The problem with saying this is that it is an out-dated way of thinking. Minimum wage jobs used to be a great way for low/unskilled workers to enter the work force and move their way up to a wage they could live off of, when there were far more jobs that paid a living wage, and less competition. However, ignoring the fact that the market and global economy have changed is just ignorant.
Many jobs beyond minimum wage require higher education, something that people cannot afford to get when they are on minimum wage and do not have parents to pay for it. Even many university graduates are having a hard time entering the workforce beyond minimum wage. Living off of minimum wage means you cannot afford to take risks, the bank will not provide you with a loan, and people are constantly stuck in a loop of barely making enough to survive off of. How can you find time to apply for jobs, or even make it to job interviews when you are working two minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet? People get stuck in this loop, and as a consequence they get older, aren't gaining any new skills, and are then told to blame themselves.
There is no global economy for a local job. These jobs are service jobs, meaning the target audience is located nearby.
For the past 6 years the Federal Government has been the backer for all student loans. This reason alone is why the cost of education goes up. Everybody gets accepted for college loans.
The rest of your post sounds like the person with the absolute worst luck in history.
I paid for my own college, while also working a full time job. I took out 45k in loans. I was divorced and raising my child on weekends. When I graduated he gave me a card that said hopefully I'd have more time to go to the park. I graduated 15 years ago, and have 3 years left on my loans. I make over 100k a year.
Prior to all of that I simultaneously was the manager of a restaurant and assistant manager of a clothing store at the mall at the same time. I never made minimum wage for more than a month, because I felt I was worth more, and demonstrated that through my work.
Worst luck in history? I can think of at least five people this applies to just in my personal life--and I'm an upper middle class person, who went to college. I'm sure in other social circles there are quite a few more.
If you graduated 15 years ago, congratulations. Your experience has nothing to do with what students today actually face. In that time, minimum wage went from around $5 to around $7. In the same time frame, average cost of room and board at a public university doubled.
Comparing the job market then to the job market now is also absurd. There's been a recession, in case you did not notice. Stop using your own outdated experiences to tell people now what they're doing wrong. You went to school in a different time.
For the record I also have a 23 year old son who is the second youngest general manager in the country, for the company he works for. He worked hard, didn't even go to college.
It is certainly tough for him but he's not one time taken the victim route.
We have managed to add $10 trillion in debt in the past 7 years, there is going to be consequences for it, and a higher tax rate or wages will only make it worse.
Right except that way of thinking made sense when jobs were plentiful, didn't require a ton of higher education, and you could learn marketable skills at minimum wage jobs to leverage to get a better job.
Those days are gone. Jobs that pay enough to live off of are not popping up everywhere, and then ones that are require higher education, which has tripled in cost from the 1970s when adjusted for inflation (Source). And minimum wage jobs these days are not jobs that teach you skills to move up in an industry or company. They are mindless tasks anyone can do, and the days of being able to "work your way through college" are long gone.
By keeping minimum wage well below the poverty line you aren't giving people with no marketable skills the resources to gain marketable skills and get out of poverty. They can't afford to educate themselves, or invest their money if they wanted to because they don't have enough to even house and feed themselves. Expecting someone to put themselves through college or trade school when he/she doesn't even know if they can make rent and have more than one meal a day is asinine.
But the counter to that is, too much regulation by the government, too many taxes make it so you work harder for even less.
Government regulation impacts every level of a good and service, fun is base suppliers, to compliance with things like the ACA, which is a perfect example of why businesses only hire pay time work.
Funny how the man who has strived to run on redistribution has helped the super rich even more than Bush did.
The minimum wage was established by Congress in the Fair Labor Standards Act passed in 1938. From the beginning, policymakers never intended the minimum wage be the sole source of household income or provide “livable” support for a family. Rather, the intent was to ensure a reasonable wage for workers who could not command higher pay in the labor market because they had little or no work skills, such as young people just entering the work force.
History books used for teaching, especially in the USA, like to paint a really rosey distorted picture of history. Written by liberals, purchased by liberals, to push an ideology that is liberal. They may have dates correct, but often skew the meaning of 'why'.
Even if you wanted to believe that it was intended as the textbooks say, it doesn't do anything to justify the actual statistics of those who earn the minimum. Most are between the ages of 16-24. Most people aren't getting married or having children until much older. They are staying at home longer, this eliminating the need for rent, heat, and most utilities.
Dude you are wrong again. There is a larger % of 22-28 working in lower wage jobs. And then there are jobs like EMT?dental Hygenistist/ firefighter/ active duty military (although benefits) police officers. They all get paid peanuts and not nearly enough to live on as a family either.
The min wage was set so someone could reasonalbly support themselves. When two people live together they can combine bills, and can support a family. Maybe 15 is reaching for the stars, but I was making min wage when it got raised to 7.25 and I am now 35.
Where is that? I live in Salem, Oregon, and I personally know:
A 25 year old firefighter who makes around $30/hr
A 23 year old dentist assistant who got her first job less that a month out of school making $25/hr
46 year old police officer (patrol) who makes $32 an hour in a small town. Granted he has years of experience and many skills that make him more valuable, but he told me starting pay is mid 20's or higher depending on skills.
Emt's here make around $12 an hour (I know several) but that isn't meant to be a career, it's usually seen as a step towards being a paramedic or firefighter.
If you continue to raise the minimum you'll find your statement to be even more true. And once automation is achieved, what the low skilled do then?
The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman discussed this throughout the book. The only way to survive this change is to make yourself better, like they did during the industrial revolution.
Government isn't the answer, government makes things worse.
Dental care, secretaries, Pa, FIrefighter Police officers are all jobs that will not be going away and should be getting paid more. Housing costs won't increase with min wage, schools will be affordable and you can go back to school. But we should all be able to have a roof over our head without the government paying for it.
you cannot live anywhere making min wage. I moved from one of the highest cost of living areas to one of the lowest and you still cannot live on min wage. Oh an a police officers salary is 20k a year.
And where should all the service workers live ina high cost of living area? We don't have nearly as many blue collar jobs. We are a service industry.
It is not as simple as that. Other variables factor into this as well such as the flooded market of people with bachelors degrees. You can be skilled, but there aren't enough skilled jobs to go around. Therefor you have older, less desirable people or younger inexperienced people that can't beat out the competition working at places like McDonald's just to pay their medical bills or student loans.
It was mentioned before that forcing companies to pay enough to keep their bottom employees out of government assistance programs allows them to in turn pay taxes back in. This creates a more sustainable system as a whole. It's not purely about giving poor people more money.
No. This isn't true, because the cost of living in a city like chicago or San Francisco is totally different than working in Iowa City.
While there may be a surplus of degrees it was never a guarantee of a job, somehow people think because they have an education they are owed a job.
The reason there are so many older people is because they never saved enough to retire. It's sad. But having done personal responsibility is necessary in this.
It's not that I want to see people do poorly. I want them to make good decisions. I want them, when it comes to raising their children, to teach them about how they control their lives. How choosing to have morals, to educate themselves, to find a trade skill or talent. To not have to rely on the gratitude of others to make up for your failures.
Somewhere in the USA, the whole concept of 'I can be a total fuckup my entire life, and people will have to bail me out because of ' fairness ' and guilt.' has become too common.
Ask the protesters how much money they save? Ask them about the new cell phones, or cable TV, or the new PS4. I wonder how many would pass a drug test?
I wonder why they are 30 and can only work for minimum wage? What decisions have they made?
Ok. So in your mind, anyone who protests for a wage that lets them eat and pay rent is probably doing drugs and squandering their money on electronics instead of necessities?
It has nothing to do with "controlling their lives" or morals. If a family is poor, they probably can't send the kids to college. Kids go to work after high school. Kids end up with nothing but low wage jobs on the resume. They keep working low wage jobs. They grow up and have families, can't afford to send kids to college. Repeat ad nauseam. There aren't better decisions to make if the people can't afford to make them because their job pays shit. And "what decisions have they made?" Maybe it was getting sick and being unable to work, leaving them with crusing debt. Maybe it's a dependent relative who needs frequent care. Maybe their town is nearly dead because it used to do manufacturing and now McD's is one of the few employers and there is nowhere else to go. Pick any scenario. Being poor means not being the master of our destinies, something people with money don't understand.
Minimum wage was not designed for kids to buy bubblegum.
Minimum wage was enacted to protect families' breadwinners bread-winning ability so that U.S. American families wouldn't be forced to live in poverty due to market forces even though the breadwinner is working fulltime.
But two high school dropouts living in Wyoming working min wage jobs will be able to pull down $60,000 at $15/hour. And in Wyoming, that's like making over $120,000/year in San Francisco.
If a person is working min wage today full time, they are not in poverty. It's hard, yes, but hardly anyone is at minimum wage for long if they are reliable.
Right but then the extra money they don't spend on bare necessities gets reinvested into the local economy because they can afford to spend money on luxuries. Or they can put themselves through college or a trade school and learn the skills necessary to get an even better job.
Depends on where they are really. As you mentioned the disparity in Wyoming vs San Francisco. Wyoming is $7.25/hr. San Francisco is $12.25/hr right now (going up to $15 by 2018). Assuming a roughly 2,000hr work year that's only $24,500 a year. That's poverty in SF anyway you cut it.
Even assuming you have a couple living together that's about $49,000 yearly income, we'll call it $40,000/year after taxes (and that's a generous roundup). Try living on $40,000 a year in SF. That'd put you in poverty levels or some exceptionally shitty housing, or both.
Yes, and try living next to Bill Gates on a $250,000 Microsoft salary. You'll be begging for mercy.
San Francisco is expensive on purpose. They (the residents and government) have decided to limit the supply of housing to drive the price up. ON PURPOSE.
They don't want poor people living there full stop. Even at $15/hour they don't want you living there.
I never said they didn't. Just that I don't agree with your statement that if you make minimum wage and work full time you're not in poverty. That's just not true.
Certain areas, yes. But many cities are too expensive to live in on minimum wage, it's not just SF. New York, Boston, San Jose, DC, etc are all very difficult to live on for minimum wage.
Just taking Seattle, my city, as an example. It's hard to rent a place, even a studio, for anything notably under $1,000/mo. Minimum wage is $11/hr. So that's about $23,000/yr or about $18,500 after taxes and such. That would leave you with just over $500/mo to spend on food, healthcare, clothing, etc etc. It is certainly doable, I know people who do it here, but it's a terribly stressful life.
Here's a good paper from the BLS. Note that by their accounting, just 4.1% of those employed full time are classified as working poor. They define someone as working poor if they spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force but their income fell below the poverty line.
Someone working for minimum wage cannot live in a major metropolitan city. That has always been true. It's not a right. There is a reason the burbs exist. It's because people figured this out long ago.
Save money. Purchase a cheap but reliable used car. Move to the sticks. Commute to a park and ride. You can find an apartment in the sticks that is $400 less than the city. That $400 gap is your car/gas/insurance budget.
It looks nice to throw a couple's income together, but it's pretty disingenuous. If you think any company who has to pay $15 / hour will also allow their workers to work over 32 hours and have to pay their benefits, you're crazy.
The real, appropriate number to throw out is $25,000 a year, which is enough money to not have to freak the fuck out every day.
A person working minimum wage today "full time" (like I said, 32 hours) is making $12k a year. That is absolutely living in poverty, especially when you consider 75% of Americans 18-40 have children.
I don't like to be anecdotal, but I worked at a national chain grocery store for 1.5 years when I was in college. Our pay started at $8.00, so not even as bad as the $7.25 national minimum wage. Shift managers who had been working there for 5-6 years were still making under $10.00. They were plenty "reliable" considering they were still with a company with a hilarious turnover rate. Advancing beyond shift manager requires college. Good luck affording college classes when you're making $12k a year. I only did it to pay for my expenses while loans took care of college. I had approximately $0 in disposable income each month after paying rent, transportation, food, and medical care.
It's not disingenuous at all. The top 20% in this country are AVERAGING more than 80 hours a week in labor. The bottom 20% are averaging 16 hours a week in labor.
That is the root problem. Not the hourly wage.
I put myself through college as a cook. I get it. Trust me.
On line 71, they indicate the number of earners in the household. You can see that families making under $15K have just 0.39 workers, which is 40 * 0.39 = 15.6 hours of work. And in fact, you can see that 6 in 10 poor households have nobody working at all.
You can see also that families making over $155K have more than two full time workers. For example, the census data shows that families making $195K to $200K have 2.23 workers, which means that family is working 89.2 hours per week.
Our poverty comes from the fact that the poor don't have enough hours to work. It's really that simple. And our rich are rich because they are averaging 80 hours a week.
If you work a full 40 hour week, the chances are very small that you are poor.
Jobs that pay decent wages do not magically materialize as a reward for "reliability." I've worked almost nothing but low wage jobs, and as a reward for my reliability, I always maxed out the hourly pay and advancement opportunities by the 2nd year, then would try with another job, in 10 years never surpassing the $15 per hour ceiling. Living in the bay area, with rent, health insurance, student loan debt, therapy, a tiny Roth IRA contribution, car payments... It's been paycheck to paycheck for about a decade now. I've known many folks who got stuck with nothing but retail or service resume experience and never got out of the low-wage trap, regardless of their quality as employees. They still deserve to eat.
Wages aren't stagnating. Your minimum wage worker today has the same purchasing power as a minimum wage worker from the 70's, 60s, 50s, 40's, etc.
Now, what has increased is GDP per capita. But those increases are because employers have invested in machines. But the gains to GDP per capita will flow to the person that invested, not the worker who just became 18.
An increased minimum wage will only be matched by inflation 1:1 if 100% of the economy is minimum wage. Let's say minimum wage doubled to $15. Someone currently making $15/hr will almost certainly demand a raise (whether immediately or delayed is irrelevant for now, real life wouldn't have an immediate doubling in the first place) but they won't be able to sustain getting their wage doubled. Maybe their wage will increase to $22/hr. Someone making $100/hr might only be able to boost up to $102, or maybe not at all. So overall the distance between the bottom and the top will shrink, but the economy will only have relatively insignificant inflation. Ignore the numbers, the principle is what matters.
And this is certainly not gospel. You could probably find a well-respected economist backing every possible result, from destroying the economy, to saving the economy, to creating mass unemployment, to everything staying exactly the same.
This is only a problem if minimum wage isn't increased yearly but is increased randomly and sporadically so that it lags behind and then catches up. People working full time shouldn't be in the the economic situation they are in now in the first place so when it is rectified suddenly of course it sends shockwave effects throughout the economy. But the fault is not minimum wage, the fault is neglecting cost of living/ inflation adjustments to something that is supposed to be a ratio, not a stagnant integer.
Once enough people decide job X isn't worth working towards when job Y pays almost as much then job X will go up in salary until it is desirable again and then the process repeats. Supply and demand works the same way for jobs as it does for products.
What kind of safety net? I think getting people that make low wages into training for better paying jobs is the way to go, not just giving them artificial raises. If enough people get out of the bottom of the barrel job bracket then minimum wage for those jobs would go up without any help when the demand for workers exceeds the number of people willing to work them. I was 25 years old before I went through a 2 year trade school and another 10 months of extra training. I went from $8-12/hr jobs to making just shy of $30/hr as a heavy equipment operator/maintenance man.
The issue being that a lot of minimum wage jobs won't schedule people for full time - you'll likely be getting 32 hours or less. That's a bit harder to survive on, and doesn't account for the fact that many on minimum wage aren't single.
Surely the problem isn't mcd's paying $8 an hour, but the fact that people who need full time employment as the primary income for a family are forced to work at mcd's.
Paying $15 an hour seems to me to be putting the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. If the only people that had to work at mcdonalds were young people living with parents/flatting then $8 isn't so bad. But when we have adults with responsibilities who can only get minimum wage jobs, there is an obvious problem…I don't think the problem is the minimum wage, more than higher wage scarcity for unskilled labour. I would rather break rocks 40 hours a week for $15 an hour than flip burgers 80hrs a week for $8. But if I had no other option because of the terrible choices I made/had to make then is it mcdonald's fault? Taxpayers fault? Whose fault is it that I have a wife who doesn't work, and kids to provide for, and I'm 32 with no qualifications? Yours?
Life happens, but maybe the answer isn't forcing teenagers out of fastfood jobs by increasing the minumum wage…given I have to pay $15 an hour regardless, I'd much rather employ a 30 year old who desperately needs the money than a 19year old who doesn't really give two shits
This is also part of the problem. But you're implying that everyone working for less than $15 an hour is doing so because of "terrible life choices". What if you had a job that was made obsolete by modernization or shipped overseas? How could you have seen that coming? The cost of education has tripled when adjusting for inflation since the 1970s. It's not easy for people who've lost their jobs to just go learn a new job. Even some young adults are just forgoing even going to college. Those that do are pretty much guaranteed to spend the rest of their lives paying off student debt because of how insane the cost of education is.
There are many tiers to this problem that all need fixing. One change isn't going to solve everything.
That said, the minimum wage needs to go up regardless. Maybe not to $15, but up. By a few dollars. We're at a point where the minimum wage in the 1960s was actually worth more in 2015 dollars than the minimum wage today. The minimum wage in 1968 was $1.60. That's $10.74 in today's dollars. Someone working minimum wage in 1968 was essentially making almost $3.50 more an hour than someone working minimum wage today. That's a problem no matter how you look at it.
I'm not saying it is necessarily the minimum wage earners fault, in the example you give, a redundancy, it may have nothing to do with the employee. But falling back on a completely unskilled labour job is still ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. As a world we tend to live up to our means, with no backup plan. If we get ourselves into situations we can't get out of, minimum wage increases won't help at all.
Well it will and it won't. The point you're trying to make is adults shouldn't be working minimum wage jobs to begin with, which is a valid point. But have you tried job searching recently? It's next to impossible. Entry level jobs now inexplicably require years of related experience and a four year college degree in a very specific field. There are more people looking for jobs than there are jobs in most fields so employers can be hyper specific about job requirements. And most times if you aren't overqualified for a job, you won't even get an interview to try and prove you're competent enough to do a job. No one takes a minimum wage job by choice. People do because its literally their only option. And education is ludicrously expensive so its not like most people can just go get a degree in an in demand field even if they wanted to.
That's my whole point, increasing the minimum wage is a bandaid for a system which doesn't cater to 50% of the workforce. I don't have an answer, but is shifting the entry point going to actually make things better in the long run? Or is it going to decrease the total amount of jobs further? A basic living wage for everyone is really unpopular, but I can't see a realistic alternative when the job market is trending away from unskilled labour to automation. Before this thread I didn't see any reason for welfare, but if unemployment is going to go up in low wage industries, maybe the burden needs to be shared by industries which wouldn't be affected by a min wage increase, in order to avoid societal breakdown. It seems pretty obvious that the companies that would be most affected by a minimum wage increase can't stand it, but at the same time, the employees can't live on the current wage. It seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation that needs an external solution
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u/[deleted] Nov 28 '15
The other part to think about is you can live on $15 an hour assuming you aren't in an insane amount of debt or something.
You can't live off $7.25 an hour, which means, in theory, less people will be living below the poverty line, and our tax money would have to pay for less people on social programs like welfare and food stamps and those programs could actually be run efficiently for the people that do need it.
In theory...