LogFAQs > #979003845

As a concept, a flat minimum wage will never work. It'll inevitably fall behind inflation, stagnating until the gap becomes severe enough to generate enough political will to fix it, by which point the economy has come to depend so extensively on poverty wages that fixing it is deeply disruptive and gives more ammunition to opponents of future increases.

Instead, it needs to be a sliding scale based on the regional cost of living: the minimum wage for a given position must be high enough that working for 40 hours a week pays as much as median rent for a 2-bedroom apartment (equivalent to paying 2x what's needed to pay for half of it, aiming for paying 3x what a sub-median apartment would cost) within a 30-minute walk of the workplace, or enough for a similar apartment within a 30-minute drive if you also cover the cost of owning and using a car. The benefits of that are twofold: you ensure that employees are able to afford to live, plus it automatically moderates the cost of living because jacking up prices to cover higher wages will prompt people to move somewhere cheaper and thereby force housing prices down.

The exact numbers will obviously need tweaking, and the increase will initially cause many of the same problems that any minimum wage increase will, but codifying that sort of policy is what's needed to ensure that minimum wage laws serve their intended purpose in perpetuity instead of being a constant uphill battle. Toss in some re-zoning measures to add more mixed-use properties in neighbourhoods to make it easier for people to work and shop locally, and you've got a recipe for a self-regulating system that ensures everyone is able to afford to live.

That, or just do UBI and abandon the idea of minimum wage altogether. That's probably simpler, though it still runs into the issue that living wages are not universal and there'd need to be some regional variation there (with some kind of checks to make sure people don't just move to expensive neighbourhoods so they get more UBI).

SinisterSlay posted...

So maybe the quick solution, if you openly support dictators, your taxes are raised to 99.99999%. Call it the treason tax. So only Musk, Trump, etc have to pay it basically. And we end poverty overnight

Fun fact: If you took away 99.99999% of a billionaire's net worth, they'd still have $10k left. Musk and Bezos would still be millionaires. A billion dollars really is a ludicrous amount of money.