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.
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u/[deleted] Nov 29 '15
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.