"Hey you should absolutely ignore Economics fundamentals and listen to what I say. Print currency and regulate! After all I've bet early in Amazon and I'm doing great!"
With that logic, why 28 and not 5000? This Keynesians are being so cheap!
Let me give you a good pair of austrian rolling eyes...
This is sadly one of those situations where the guy's heart is in the right place but he is simply wrong on the number.
$11-15[1] by 2020 is a reasonable national range for a minimum wage with certain states/localities raising it higher. The simple fact is, the peach picker in rural Georgia has a lower cost of living than the Subway "sandwhich artist" in NYC.
[1] 2016 Dollars, permanently adjusting for inflation against 2016 USD indefinitely. This whole "random correct every so often" is simply disruptive to both businesses and workers since it makes projection difficult compared to small, annual raises linked to inflation.
So you propose violating a birthright, the 4th amendment and and the 5th because you don't like this guy. Your statement is a glaring example of what is wrong with the US. Everyone is willing to look the other way so long as the violations are for their team.
This is not strictly true, and it's important to this debate to understand why. The relevant equation is the equation of exchange: MV = PQ, where M is the supply of money, V is the velocity of money (how fast money gets spent), P is the price of goods, and Q is expenditures on goods and services (demand).
You're suggesting that if you raise M, P goes up. But there's two other possibilities, instead: Q goes up, or V goes down.
We actually did this experiment just recently, where we printed a whole bunch of money and dumped it into the economy (quantitative easing). We did NOT get inflation (increase in P), because V went way down over the same period - basically, the banks absorbed all of the money and didn't invest it, so it didn't actually move into the economy.
But if we gave money to poor people by printing currency, it's likely that V would go up, because these people would actually spend all of that money, and the people they spent it with would spend it, etc.
It's possible that in this situation, we WOULD get price inflation. But even in this case, that's not clear - what might happen instead is that Q goes up - we would simply get a general increase in demand for goods and services, but prices would remain more or less stable.
The difference is whether you think that we are limited in productive capacity. Many (some?) economists think that the main problem with our economy is a severe lack of demand - people are just too poor to buy shit. If people wanted to buy more stuff, we'd have no problem making it - we have factories and factory factories. In this situation, if we give everyone a large fistful of cash, all that happens is we all suddenly get to be busy doing exactly what we want - making shit and enjoying the products - without a huge increase in price.
Price increases happen when people are demanding goods and services but we can't produce enough to meet that demand. It's possible this might happen if we print a bunch of money, but I think in our economy, where the main story is severe underemployment, where productive capacity is going to waste, where smart people who get PhDs don't know what to do with themselves, this is not what would happen; we're much more likely to see a long period of economic growth before we start to see inflation happening.
I've been hearing this low-inflation nonsense for years. Okay, 1 lb. of chicken is still $4 at the grocery store, same as it was 10 years ago, but I'm guessing the cost of that chicken has been cut in half considering the 'chickens' are now HGH mutants and the workers virtual slaves that aren't allowed to take a piss during their shift.
On the other hand, I just looked at the cost of my public university: 100% increase, flat out, on tuition, compared to what I paid 10 years ago. In the expensive east coast city in which I live, home prices have doubled since the market crash in 2008. My medical insurance went from $10 copays a few years ago to my current 'catastrophic' plan; this means I pay 100% out of pocket for EVERYTHING until I hit a $2000 deductible. My premiums have not gone down.
So in essence, inflation seems rampant in those products in which the majority of my income is used.
Things that I spend a few percent of income (food, junk from Walmart, electronics) seems to have stabilized in price, yet is in every way inferior to past versions. And the costs to manufacture have dropped precipitously since technology has improved so much while third world wages have become the norm for the owners, even now in the West.
"..if the minimum wage had kept pace with average wages—i.e., if minimum wage workers saw their paychecks expand at the same rate as the average worker—it would be about $10.50 today. If the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity[i]—i.e., the economy’s overall capacity to generate income— it would be almost $18.75 today. Finally, imagine if workers at the very bottom were seeing the same kind of raises as workers at the very top. If the minimum wage had gone up at the same rate as wages for the top 1 percent, it would be over $28 per hour."
The person in the story is using EPI's last number
You can see that the federal minimum wage peaked in real dollars in 1968 (not coincidentally, the heyday of labor) - since that time, capital won the class war and the real minimum wage has dropped, even though the nominal federal minimum went up.
If we kept up with that high point, the federal minimum should be something like 40% hire than it is, more like $12.50.
I'd be curious to see what would happen - on the face of it, more people could afford to live in the urban center, and costs would rise to meet demand.
