Poll of the Day > Let's see if we cn get every minimum wage job to pay 20 per hour.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Some mass applying and quitting and some indeed.com fuckery might do the trick.

I mean, I don't know what to do at this point, upping the min wage is probably going to make life so much harder for so many people *sigh*.

We need a serious overhaul tbh, things are getting rediculous. Yeah it's fine for people who retired with tons of money, but if you have retired with just barely enough to get by, you are going to be screwed if the cost of everything keeps going up so fast.

Since I moved to WA min wage jumped by 50%, the rental costs doubled pretty much across the board, food prices have almost doubled as well. Many skilled jobs that used to make a bit more then min wage, are now making only min wage (and even people that worked them for years are making that). Home health aid? Used to have to get 3 months training and started at $14 an hour or so back in 2016 (when I moved here). The training was about $800 as well.

Now they almost all pay within a dollar or 2 of min wage, and people that have been working there since 2016 are still making that as well.

If you boost min wage to $20, I think many people who expected to be able to retire are going to be screwed, people who have social security that pays less than $1000 a month, are going to be screwed, people working jobs that paid between 10-20$ an hour, and have years of experience, are going to be paid the new min wage after all that time, basically screwed.

Not sure what the solution is, but just raising min wage isn't really helping alot of people and it's hurting many of them.

The lower middle class got sucked into the working poor. Meanwhile rich get richer.

I was gunna link a bunch of studies... like this one: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12663/w12663.pdf

But it turns out there are too many confounding factors to make reliable predictions without extreme changes to minimum wage... For example, the evidence shows that increasing minimum wage does not significantly affect inflection and for the most part does improve the quality of life of a region... the rate of disemployment also increases, and the degree of such is straddling the line of not knowing if it's a net good/bad or whatever - so it seems more like increasing the minimum wage just vampires more wealth from the bottommost bracket, it's good for everyone except them.

...

But I also found studies claiming the exact opposite... :/

Basically ,unless a grand experiment is done where a large region has either no minimum wage or a very high minimum wage there's no way to know for sure

Lokarin posted...

But I also found studies claiming the exact opposite... :/

Basically ,unless a grand experiment is done where a large region has either no minimum wage or a very high minimum wage there's no way to know for sure

Fuck studies.

Seriously, I have seen the results and a large increase in minimum wage seems to just freaking hurt everybody.

It doesn't help people making minimum wage because the cost of everything goes up more than the increase % of minimum wage (Even though that makes no freaking sense).

I seriously hurts anyone making anywhere between min wage and 3x min wage, sometimes significantly by dragging them down to the new minimum wage in fact.

It still hurts anyone making more than that as prices go up and the money they make doesn't go as far.

I absolutely CRIPPLES anyone living on retirement funds, fixed incomes, social security etc.

I'm not saying min wage shouldn't go up, but it should be a flat wage increase for everyone making under a living wage (I would say anyone making less than 3x minimum wage/hr or anual salary based on 40 hours a week at min wage).

That would probably solve most of the worst problems (although you would see an even larger increase in prices probably which would again make those actually making min wage or close hurt even more).

There is no simple solution, unless you freeze rent prices at least, increasing min wage just hurts everyone, only the wealthy or upper class have the fund or enough income to not really notice the difference much. Everyone else freaking suffers.

wolfy42 posted...

Not sure what the solution is, but just raising min wage isn't really helping alot of people and it's hurting many of them.

Step 1: Gather the entire executive suites and boards of every oil company, agricultural company, property development company, utility company, and any other company that is directly fuelling the cost of living crisis under the pretense of compensating for inflation that they're single-handedly creating for the sake of sating their unbridled, unjustifiable greed
Step 2: Guillotine
Step 3: Profit!

More reasonably, the main thing that needs to happen is to tie minimum wage to the cost of living directly, rather than trying to define a flat figure in a delayed effort to catch up to growing costs. Something like "Minimum wage for a position must be enough for full-time work to provide three times the cost of renting and supplying utilities to one third of a median 3-bedroom apartment within a 30-minute walk of that position's location," or a similar policy for a 30-minute drive (in typical traffic for the position's start/end times) that also covers the cost of owning and operating a car (and maybe another one for transit). Throw in some provisions for food costs as well to keep those down, and you've got a self-regulating system: If rent gets too high, businesses will have to move elsewhere to be able to pay their staff, which drives rents and property values down because areas with fewer nearby businesses are less attractive than those with more, which enables more businesses to move in. That would also require a lot of re-zoning to have more mixed commercial/residential land in places dominated by single-family homes (which should not make up entire districts because suburbs are stupid), and probably more investment in non-car transportation infrastructure.

Another potential element of that is to introduce rent regulations that require landlords to operate a certain number of properties that qualify as "affordable," defining that based on regional median income. Renting in general needs some major reforms, though, since the whole market is just catastrophically unsustainable.

Alternatively, UBI. That's actually the better option than anything to do with minimum wage, since it makes it much easier for small businesses and other businesses that actually try to be good places to work to establish themselves.

adjl posted...

Another potential element of that is to introduce rent regulations that require landlords to operate a certain number of properties that qualify as "affordable,"

there's an alternative solution that's a little harder to work with... and that's mixing high and low end housing together; As it is a person is 99% likely to have neighbours in the same economic bracket as themselves, and this hurts economic communication which promotes financial mobility.

Lokarin posted...

there's an alternative solution that's a little harder to work with... and that's mixing high and low end housing together; As it is a person is 99% likely to have neighbours in the same economic bracket as themselves, and this hurts economic communication which promotes financial mobility.

Yeah, all this nonsense of "our building has 5% affordable units, but they have to use a separate lobby so the rich people don't have to look at the middle class" needs to be kicked squarely in the dick. Some degree of economic segregation is kind of inevitable, given how inextricably linked location is with real estate prices, but deliberately concentrating all affordable housing in a single area and isolating people based on SES is a really bad idea.

Of course, the flip side of that is that forcibly separating existing affordable neighbourhoods is also bad. That happened here in Halifax with the community of Africville, which was a predominantly-black community that was little more than a ghetto because of how badly the city neglected it. In the 60's, the city condemned the entire community, deported everyone against their will, and razed the whole thing to make room for the new bridge that was being constructed across the harbour. All the former residents were sent to one of three public housing districts established around the city, each of which is about a half-hour walk from the other. That was done with little regard for who wanted to live near whom, and that fragmentation did some serious harm to each district's sense of community and likely contributed a lot to how high-crime the areas were for many years after that.

The reason minimum wage changes don't seem to be making a dent is because it just gives the upper class more funds to suck up from the plebs.

You need mass guillotines wage and compensation slashes for the executive class, high ranking bureaucrats and the financial sector. Because that's where the money is going. The drain needs to be clogged at the source.

Of course that's never going to fucking happen so for now minimum wage increases is the best we can hope for. Even if that ultimately just upsets things in the short term it will create an incentive to fix things more broadly (eg, create a labor shortage for middle class jobs that are no longer providing competitive compensation).

Blightzkrieg posted...

The reason minimum wage changes don't seem to be making a dent is because it just gives the upper class more funds to suck up from the plebs.

That's rarely the case -

Ok, lets say the top 3 companies are about to face an increase in taxes... many if the rich folks are mad and angry and against the increase in taxes, but these top 3 companies know that what they'll pay in taxes doesn't compare to the benefits they'll gain by their two competitors having to also pay... their complaints only make sense in the case of a monopoly.

Money is like electricity, the exchange of money being like voltage... increasing the total amount of energy in the system doesn't necessarily increase the voltage.

Overlooking that it'd ramp up inflation, force small business owners to work more hours because they can't afford labor, create incentives to outsource even more labor, jack up inflation, and generally fuck up the country, it sounds like a great idea. But why stop there? Why not go for $25/hour? or $40/hour?

teddy241 posted...

The lower middle class got sucked into the working poor. Meanwhile rich get richer.

Well, the lower-middle class get fucked, anyway -- as does the middle-class whose expenses get pumped up. The rich mostly just stay rich.

It also fucks over a lot of industries.

Lokarin posted...

I was gunna link a bunch of studies... like this one: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12663/w12663.pdf

But it turns out there are too many confounding factors to make reliable predictions without extreme changes to minimum wage... For example, the evidence shows that increasing minimum wage does not significantly affect inflection and for the most part does improve the quality of life of a region... the rate of disemployment also increases, and the degree of such is straddling the line of not knowing if it's a net good/bad or whatever - so it seems more like increasing the minimum wage just vampires more wealth from the bottommost bracket, it's good for everyone except them.

...

But I also found studies claiming the exact opposite... :/

Basically ,unless a grand experiment is done where a large region has either no minimum wage or a very high minimum wage there's no way to know for sure

Overlooking that we've seen massive inflation in recent years partly thanks to increases in wages (and -- in some industries -- continuing supply chain disruptions), this would be a very extreme change. It would effectively more than double the Federal minimum wage and it'd be a huge increase even for states with a high minimum wage (for context, the highest minimum wage at the state level will be $15/hour and this is a 33% increase).

Count_Drachma posted...

Overlooking that we've seen massive inflation in recent years partly thanks to increases in wages (and -- in some industries -- continuing supply chain disruptions), this would be a very extreme change. It would effectively more than double the Federal minimum wage and it'd be a huge increase even for states with a high minimum wage (for context, the highest minimum wage at the state level will be $15/hour and this is a 33% increase).

I'm just saying that the science is wishy-washy on this, and that's weird

Lokarin posted...

I'm just saying that the science is wishy-washy on this, and that's weird

Generally because economics is very complex, and even the people who study it for their whole lives have a bad record when it comes to using their knowledge practically.

Anybody who draws a straight line between minimum wage and inflation is economically illiterate, just straight up.

Lokarin posted...

I'm just saying that the science is wishy-washy on this, and that's weird

Considering the social sciences are more art than science -- and heavily influenced by whoever is funding the project and what results the researches want to see -- it's not terribly weird. That's on top of the inherent complexity and unpredictability in some of these subjects, including the fact that different programs will have different impacts depending on the region (which is why federal-level decrees are inherently problematic).

ya, inflation is directly related to product vs. consumption.

We've had 2 years of equal production during the pandemic, but lowered consumption... as a result there's far more product in circulation than can be used, which lowers the value of those products... which is directly related to the value of cash since we have a command economy.

Count_Drachma posted...

Overlooking that we've seen massive inflation in recent years partly thanks to increases in wages (and -- in some industries -- continuing supply chain disruptions)

Due to increases in wages, or due to the fed injecting $1,500,000,000,000 into the stock market over the course of half an hour because rich people started panicking in the early days of the pandemic, followed by oil companies deciding last winter that the war in Ukraine was enough of an excuse to double the price of gas (which has a downstream effect on the cost of everything else) so they'd have a bigger pile of money to spunk into?

Like pretty much anything in economics, trying to pin anything on any one factor or completely rule out the effect of any others is generally a bad idea, and I don't doubt that wage increases have had some impact, but to cite wage increases as the primary driver when there are so many other factors that are obviously more significant is pretty out of touch.

wolfy42 posted...

Since I moved to WA min wage jumped by 50%, the rental costs doubled pretty much across the board, food prices have almost doubled as well. Many skilled jobs that used to make a bit more then min wage, are now making only min wage (and even people that worked them for years are making that). Home health aid? Used to have to get 3 months training and started at $14 an hour or so back in 2016 (when I moved here). The training was about $800 as well.

Yeah, it's all local minimum wage increases that are causing national inflation. Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that the government spent 5 trillion that it doesn't have over the last few years to handle covid.