One absolute prerequisite for this would be making the minimum wage a thriving wage. Until and unless that happens, jobs traditionally seen as "bottom of the barrel"—things like fast food, grocery cashier, etc—will remain an important source of jobs for those in dire straits (very much including adults with families), while also still paying so little that even a teenager looking to make some money over the summer might think twice. And that's before seeing how the people working those jobs get treated.
Any non-mandatory "incentives" or "initiatives" to get people jobs that can keep them and their families fed, clothed, and housed will invariably leave tens of thousands to millions of people behind as companies just shrug and say "don't wanna".
What makes you say that someone should be able to "thrive" on the least-paying job? That's like saying that the dumbest person should be able to do get into selective universities, or that the weakest and slowest person should be able to win medals at sporting competitions.
Let me put it another way. Does $66k/year sound like a thriving wage to you? That's a little over $4k/mo after taxes. You won't be able to afford to pay rent, let alone buy a home, in any of the country's most popular cities, or take a family of four to vacation in Paris every year, or buy a nice new car. You could live in a smaller city in a less popular state, drive an older car, and maybe take your family to Disney World every now and then. Would you call that thriving?
That number ($66k/year) is all personal income in this country combined divided by the population; so that's the standard of living you could expect if all income was evenly distributed and it magically had no detrimental effect on the supply of goods and services. It seems like an extraordinary claim that the lowest income should even be able to afford a median lifestyle, let alone a "thriving" one. Perhaps I misunderstand what you mean by that word.
"Deserve" has nothing to do with it. I want everyone to have the opportunity to make something of themselves and keep more of their labor. I recognize that not everyone will succeed at that, and that there are no guarantees that I or anyone else will thrive. I am OK with this tradeoff.
It's not that I think some people deserve to be miserable, but I am confident that no political-economic system is capable of fully eliminating misery, let alone ensuring that everyone thrives. (I assume we agree that there is a middle ground between misery and thriving.)
Consider that even Norway, which is a truly remarkable combination of a monoethnic culture that values hard work, high social trust, and incredible natural wealth, has homeless people to the tune of 0.62 per 1000[0]; vs. the US at 1.8 per 1000[1]. You'd think that homelessness rate in Norway with all its advantages would be one-tenth that of the US.
Moreover, I am confident that a political-economic system that can guarantee everyone's success is not one that is sustainable over the long run, nor one that isn't a few bad generations away from turning into something authoritarian and rapidly worse off for its inhabitants.
I think you may have gotten too hung up on the idea of "guaranteeing" thriving.
A "thriving wage" is not as well-established a concept as a "minimum wage" or a "living wage", but I'm hardly the first to mention it. It basically means a wage at which people will, in general, have enough for all the necessities of life plus enough extra to actually enjoy living.
This does not guarantee thriving, or eliminate misery. Plenty of people are very capable of making themselves miserable no matter what their other circumstances.
A thriving wage, on its own, does not even guarantee no homelessness. (I believe we should be solving that through other means.) For one thing, it doesn't even guarantee everyone a job.
What it does guarantee is that everyone who has a job has a very real opportunity to make themselves a comfortable life, provided they make reasonably good choices about where to live. (A federal "thriving minimum wage", for instance, would be unlikely to meet my above criteria in downtown SF right now.)
(Personally, I'm more in favor of UBI, but the poster I originally replied to was specifically talking in terms of that being impractical to implement, which I think is likely to be true right now.)
Point taken around the guarantee of thriving. However:
> it doesn't even guarantee everyone a job
> everyone who has a job has a very real opportunity to make themselves a comfortable life
I want to go further on this point. There have been plenty of empirical studies evidencing the Econ 101 maxim that a government-imposed price floor causes a surplus, and conversely a price ceiling a shortage. A minimum wage is a price floor on labor that causes a surplus of it, meaning unemployed people. Rent control is a price ceiling on housing that causes a shortage of it, meaning people on waiting lists for affordable housing. So on and so forth; in every case it's great for the people in the system, and terrible for the people outside.
There's a second-order effect to this, especially deleterious in the case of the minimum wage, which is that the young and the marginalized take the brunt of the impact of missing out on the upskilling, networking, and building experience that comes from having a job, even if it pays very poorly, maybe not even for the necessities of life, let alone the enjoyment of it. So over time, the difference between the ones who were lucky enough to get in and the ones who were unemployed because the economic value of their labor was less than the minimum wage broadens, and you run the risk of the latter group becoming a permanently unemployable underclass.
In other words: even a shitty, poorly-paying job is likely to be better for the employee over the long run than no job at all; and because of this, a high minimum wage is likely to result in an unintentional increase in the disparity of outcomes between the haves and the have-nots.
Any non-mandatory "incentives" or "initiatives" to get people jobs that can keep them and their families fed, clothed, and housed will invariably leave tens of thousands to millions of people behind as companies just shrug and say "don't wanna".