This raises the lowest rung on the ladder, reduces the set of contracts that adults may consider or consent to, and can eliminate entire jobs and threaten entire sectors such as the old apprentice mechanic / gas station attendant and now fast food.
And higher income can lead to increased spending on businesses that are paying their employees more. I’m not saying it’s a silver bullet but you can poke holes in anything. The point is, one party is proposing “something” and not just posturing.
The cost of ingredients for a burger doesn’t radically change if a burger flipper gets paid more and the price of the burger isn’t going up drastically either.
Clearly companies with billion dollar market caps can also be held to higher standards because no one is going to pay more than they are required for labor. Maybe the minimum wage is a percentage of the business total profits and minimum wage at $7.25 is just the floor?
A lot of wealth is locked up in the wealthiest people which could be circulating in the economy instead of being in a Swiss bank account.
There are multiple layers, multiple solutions instead of hoping wealth trickles down. Poverty wasn’t solved under the last Trump administration as I recall nor do I expect it in the upcoming one.
> And higher income can lead to increased spending on businesses that are paying their employees more.
> The cost of ingredients for a burger doesn’t radically change if a burger flipper gets paid more and the price of the burger isn’t going up drastically either.
These things are two sides of the same coin. The increase in wages is the same as the increase in costs, so if one of them is small then so is the other one and if one of them is large then so is the other one.
> Clearly companies with billion dollar market caps can also be held to higher standards because no one is going to pay more than they are required for labor. Maybe the minimum wage is a percentage of the business total profits and minimum wage at $7.25 is just the floor?
This is only less of a bad idea because the bad idea then applies to fewer businesses. Also, the billion dollar market cap companies would then just contract it out.
> A lot of wealth is locked up in the wealthiest people which could be circulating in the economy instead of being in a Swiss bank account.
That's not real wealth. That's just money. Money is numbers in a computer. Taking non-circulating money and putting it into circulation has the same inflationary effect as printing it. Whereas leaving it non-circulating doesn't consume any real resources (land, labor, etc.) because it's just bits.
However, most rich people don't store their "wealth" as cash money anyway, they buy stocks and things, which in turn puts the money in the hands of businesses to use to hire employees etc. That money isn't non-circulating and what you're doing then is reallocating resources from something else.
You're trying to solve the problem that people aren't being paid enough by passing a law that literally says they have to be paid more. It's like passing a law that literally says housing prices have to be low. That's a dumb law. You can't just magic up a change in labor demand or housing supply. You need to figure out why wages are low or housing prices are high and do something about that.
I’m hearing a lot of hole poking and not a lot of solutions. If everything I’ve said is wrong then what do you believe is right?
Genuinely, if you have something to teach I’m all ears for my personal betterment.
How do we ensure everyone gets a livable wage without redistributing the wealth of the rich, mandating a higher minimum wage, or increasing inflation and since you mentioned housing, make that affordable without gutting the value of existing housing which will make existing home owners upset.
If the answer is tax cuts for the rich “job creators” so they might spend some of the savings on employees instead of pocketing it, we’ve had decades for that to work.
> You're trying to solve the problem that people aren't being paid enough by passing a law that literally says they have to be paid more
If a company is profitable and chooses not to share their profitability with their employees then I have no qualms with this anymore than I do with the current minimum wage law, which was created for a reason and the world did not burn down as a result.
Businesses are more profitable than ever, employees more productive than ever, they had their chance to do this on their own and avoid gov interference and they blew it. We can argue the details of that intervention but the market isn’t going to correct this.
> These things are two sides of the same coin. The increase in wages is the same as the increase in costs, so if one of them is small then so is the other one and if one of them is large then so is the other one.
It’s not 1/1 increase and labor is not the only cost. If 5 employees make an extra $1 the price of a burger doesn’t go up $5.
If 5 employees build a million dollar house the cost of the house doesn’t go up if they get paid $7 extra because the cost is tied up in material/licenses/etc, not labor.
> How do we ensure everyone gets a livable wage without redistributing the wealth of the rich, mandating a higher minimum wage, or increasing inflation and since you mentioned housing,
> If the answer is tax cuts for the rich “job creators” so they might spend some of the savings on employees instead of pocketing it, we’ve had decades for that to work.
The way "supply side economics" is supposed to work is that you lower barriers to entry and operating costs (i.e. simplify regulations and lower taxes) to make it easier for more companies enter the market, so you get more competition and competition reduces the share of prices that go to investors instead of employees or customers. This is basically right, if you actually do it.
So we've had decades for this to work, right? Here's federal receipts as a percent of GDP:
You can clearly see the point where we significantly lowered taxes to see what would happen, which is nowhere. 2016 was nearly the first time we tried lowering taxes at all outside of a recession, even that was by less than 2%, and that experiment got stuffed up by COVID.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to count the number of pages in the US Code or CFR by year and look for a trend.
Okay, so if we actually tried those things for once we might get more competition, which could be good.
The opposite of this is, of course, less competition. Zoning rules that inhibit construction of higher density housing, certificate of need laws in healthcare, corporate mergers that ought to be antitrust violations, etc. That is what we've actually been doing, and therefore what we need to stop.
> make that affordable without gutting the value of existing housing which will make existing home owners upset.
"Make housing prices go down without making housing prices go down" is not a thing. The closest you get is to make real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) housing prices go down while nominal housing prices stay the same, by keeping nominal housing prices from increasing (e.g. by building a lot of new housing) while wages and the prices of everything else increase. This might even satisfy existing homeowners, because then the price of their existing house doesn't go down relative to their existing mortgage.
Which is approximately what you get if you just build a ton of new housing until housing prices go down, then lower interest rates or otherwise create new money as that happens, which causes the nominal housing prices to maintain their current level while wages and other prices go up.
The real key for getting this to work is to make sure that the "inflation" also applies to wages, which for the last few years it hasn't, which is why everybody is so upset. If you make $110 and spend $100 and then in a few years you make $130 and spend $120, not a big deal. If you now have to spend $120 but still only make $110, huge problem. But this is the thing where market consolidation enables rent extraction; you have to enforce antitrust laws and prevent regulatory capture to prevent that from happening.
> If a company is profitable and chooses not to share their profitability with their employees then I have no qualms with this
Companies don't pay people more than they have to just as employees don't take lower paying jobs when higher paying ones are available.
If corporate profits are high, that's a sign that some kind of regulatory capture is happening or antitrust enforcement is necessary, because otherwise smaller competitors would use some of their profits to gain market share by lowering prices. Instead of trying to order them to pay more, figure out why that market is broken when it should be forcing them to charge less.
> It’s not 1/1 increase and labor is not the only cost. If 5 employees make an extra $1 the price of a burger doesn’t go up $5.
It's a 1/1 increase, you're just implying that it would take five employees an hour to make one burger. If five employees each make $1/hour more then that restaurant has to cover an additional cost of $5/hour, not $5/burger. But that whole $5 is coming from somewhere, and restaurants are notoriously competitive businesses, so that somewhere is liable to be from customers.
> If 5 employees build a million dollar house the cost of the house doesn’t go up if they get paid $7 extra because the cost is tied up in material/licenses/etc, not labor.
I suspect you're underestimating the proportion of construction costs that go to labor. "Materials" is also an input that has labor costs baked into it. You're buying "lumber" but what you're really doing is paying a lumberjack to fell trees and a sawmill operator to cut them and a truck driver to transport them and a clerk at the hardware store to ring them up etc.
What you really want to do is not to increase the cost of labor but to reduce the proportion of wages going to rents. The largest categories of these rents are actual rents (i.e. landlords/housing costs), high healthcare costs largely as a result of regulatory capture, and tax dollars spent on inefficient or corrupt government programs. Stop wasting money on those things -- we're talking trillions of dollars here -- and you get to put the money in your pocket.
I upvoted you for taking the time to answer me. Thank you
> It's a 1/1 increase, you're just implying that it would take five employees an hour to make one burger. If five employees each make $1/hour more then that restaurant has to cover an additional cost of $5/hour, not $5/burger. But that whole $5 is coming from somewhere, and restaurants are notoriously competitive businesses, so that somewhere is liable to be from customers.
I don’t mean to drag this on, I just want to end saying I’m not implying 5 people are needed to make a burger. I’m saying that increasing wages for 5 employees by a $1 doesn’t increase the cost of an individual good (burger) sold to customers by $5 so the burden to the customer to support this new paradigm is negligible, especially at the volume of goods being sold. It is not a death knell to the business as it is sometimes painted.
Yes the 5$ is made up somewhere, either in cutting costs elsewhere, increasing sales or increasing prices. They may already be making numbers that would support an increased wage without any changes to those things.
I accept that you may still disagree with me but I wanted to make my position clear.
> If they sell enough burgers at the same price and manage to cover their increased wage then that also works and doesn’t impact the customer at all. They may have already be producing those numbers but haven’t seen an increase in wage just because they’re looked down on as less deserving of compensation than people who went to college.
Restaurants are highly competitive. A fast food restaurant generally has ~25% of the price as direct labor costs and ~3% of the price as profit margin.
> I’m saying that increasing wages for 5 employees by a $1 doesn’t increase the cost of an individual good (burger) sold to customers by $5 so the burden to the customer to support this new paradigm is negligible, especially at the volume of food being sold. Yes the 5$ is made up somewhere but it’s spread out across multiple goods sold to multiple customers that share only small fraction of the burden for supporting that change. I don’t know how to state it more clearly than that.
Oh certainly, but then the spreading out comes back in again. You pass a law that requires the average wage to increase by 10%, so the price of the average item doesn't increase by $5 (i.e. 100%), it increases by ~10%. But then it's not just the burger that goes up by 10%, it's everything (on average).
Now, this result is not going to be uniform, but that's another problem in itself. For the average wage to increase by 10%, the wages of people who actually make minimum wage might have to go up by 100%, because there aren't that many of them. For them -- at least the ones who don't lose their jobs as a result -- the 10% is smaller.
But the other population for which the hit is smaller is the very rich, because they spend a lower proportion of their income. The CEO who makes 1000 times minimum wage is paying the same $5 for a burger as anyone else, so the 5% increase is a 0.005% increase in spending to them. Even if they buy a fancy burger for $100, 5% of that is still only equivalent to 0.1% for the person making minimum wage.
So if the hit is less to the very rich and less to the people making minimum wage (if they don't lose their jobs), where does the rest of the money come from? Oof, the middle class. They pay the higher prices and spend ~all of their income but don't get any of the money. And the goal is supposed to be to benefit the poor at the expense of the rich, not to hollow out the middle, right?
> If only there were people who wanted to raise minimum wage…
So you raise the minimum wage but keep the crazy high effective marginal tax rate? Then the benefits phase out eats the extra money the same as it would if they were working extra hours.
Also, hardly anybody actually makes the minimum wage. If your problem is you make $20/hour but that's not enough to afford housing, raising the minimum wage to $15/hour doesn't get you a raise and only makes the things you buy cost more. If you tried to use a $40/hour minimum wage you would get high unemployment and stagflation.
Minimum wage laws are broken technology. They do more harm than good and most of the studies "in favor" of them are really only claiming that they don't hurt that much, and those studies are performed in contexts where the minimum wage is quite low. Somewhat obviously, if the median wage is $18/hour and less than 1% of people make less than $4/hour and then you ban paying less than $4/hour, there is no major effect and therefore no major harm. That doesn't at all imply that banning anyone from paying less than $40/hour is going to be equally harmless.
