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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

> On the other hand, the minimum wage definitely benefits middle class teenagers on their first jobs (if they can get a job), and has questionable benefit for millennial humanities college grads who have yet to start a career.

This is the problem. Everyone working 40 hours per week deserves a living wage, whether they're fresh out of high school or 8 years into a humanities degree. There's this weird sense out there that working in food service isn't a "real job," or as you say they haven't started their "career." This is how you end up with people working 60 or 80 hour work weeks, or two or three jobs, to provide for themselves and their family. Every 40 hour job is a "real job" and deserves a living wage. Otherwise you're just making people depend on our social safety net, and no one wants that.

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Whether they deserve or it or not doesn't change whether the market will support it. Some people making 10 dollars an hour might get a raise to 13, but some might just get fired. So law decides that someone whose labor is only worth 10 dollars to the market is better off banned from working.

I'm willing to entertain other ideas. If the living wage is X and the minimum wage is Y < X, then someone has to make up the difference. Two methods to make up the gap that make sense to me are taxation and redistribution, or raising the minimum wage. How do you suggest to make up the gap?

> How do you suggest to make up the gap?

How about first reducing the gap by reducing taxation of labor income, including employer-side payroll taxes (which both reduces the nominal wage necessary for livable income and makes it less expensive for employees to hire workers at any given nominal wage.)

I admit I've never been on the employer side of the payroll equation, but I'd be shocked if that was enough to make up the gap, especially when you consider the reduction in social services that would be required to balance it. Kansas is going down the "no tax" route and is on the verge of falling apart.

I am an employer. Sharpen your pencil and work it out from the other side. You’d probably be a generous boss. See what you can do.

There lies enlightenment.

> reducing taxation of labor income, including employer-side payroll taxes

How do you replace the funding those taxes provide, especially FICA which funds Social Security and Medicare?

I edited my original comment: universal basic income + no minimum wage or other forms of welfare (most of which offer negative incentives, such as TANF, unemployment benefits, mandatory social security, etc.). UBI should get you a very base level of livability (not enough to live in an expensive metropolis like SF/NYC), but not enough that most people won't want to work to improve their standard of living.

Minimum wage and other forms of welfare just don't make sense compared to a simple, clean, basic income.

"Deserve" is pretty subjective and vague, borderline meaningless. One could argue that they only deserve the value they create.

The problem is that automation increases inequality (I think). Between individual workers (software engineers vs factory workers) - and between capital and labour.

The solution is income redistribution. To me, the negative income tax with no minimum wage makes most sense. Minimum wage is a weird, hard-to-analyze hack.

> "Deserve" is pretty subjective and vague, borderline meaningless.

I don't think so. If we agree human labor has value, then the question is what that value is. About a century ago, we collectively agreed that 40 hours of work per week is a decent balance between work and home life. It seems reasonable to conclude that someone working those 40 hours has performed enough work to earn enough to have all of their needs paid for, including housing, transportation, food, and leisure time costs. In short, someone working 40 hours per week deserves a living wage.

What would you need to be able to afford for it to count as a living wage? I would say enough to cover food, clothing, housing, and healthcare for you and a dependent.

One of my issues with setting a national minimum wage is those last two are very different if you are living in Seattle vs rural Arkansas. How would you set minimum wage in such that it gives the same standard of living to people in both of those places?

As an aside, I think our social safety net should be changed so that any income will increase your standard of living. There are too many situation were going from 0$ to something will decrease your standard of living.

> As an aside, I think our social safety net should be changed so that any income will increase your standard of living. There are too many situation were going from 0$ to something will decrease your standard of living

That's a major argument for UBI.

There are ways to solve the problem without UBI. Such as making sure the sum of help reduces slower than income increase.

With the current system the aid is earmarked for certain items. This prevents one of the issues with UBI where someone gets a check, eats steak for a week, then cannot make rent the next week.

I know the earmarks don't work perfectly currently or prevent all bad choices but I think that UBI would allow for more bad choices.

> Otherwise you're just making people depend on our social safety net, and no one wants that.

I suppose the homeless and chronically unemployed people you've condemned do not usually use public assistance? I disagree with this, and regardless, it doesn't sound like a good solution for them.

There are a lot of cheap places out there (see: Midwest, South), but unfortunately, millennials do not want to live there. I would rather let economics sort it out instead of creating a vicious local inflation cycle that prices out local minorities and increases the homeless population via minimum wage.

You moved goalposts from >Every 40 hour job is a "real job" and deserves a living wage.

to >I would rather let economics sort it out instead of creating a vicious local inflation cycle that prices out local minorities and increases the homeless population via minimum wage.

>Everyone working 40 hours per week deserves a living wage (...)

You can earn a living wage for 40 hours a week doing anything in the US. You just can't afford a new iPhone. All the minimum wage does is makes it impossible to employ low-skill workers. So while before the minimum wage you could make a living, now you either can't make a living or you're effectively in the lower middle class.

Ask your dad or granddad what they had to go through to get you to a position where you think 15$ an hour is merely a "living wage".

> You just can't afford a new iPhone.

Or a home. Or a car. Or healthcare. The idea that minimum-wage life in America is in any way up to developed-world standards is horribly, laughably, tragically wrong.

Not saying that minimum wage is the answer. Personally, I support abolishing it in favor of a Universal basic Income. But suggesting that the problem it is trying to address isn't even real is... just not correct.

Yes, it does afford you healthcare the way US works right now, if it doesn't, that's a failing of Obamacare. Also, you want to be able to afford a car and a home by working at McDonald's? What are you talking about? And your solution is to not even have people work, just be given money. That's borderline insane. What cozy life do you have to be living to think that you're entitled to these things.

You support, and vote for, universal healthcare and advanced and subsidized public transportation systems, right?

Then ask your dad or grandad to adjust for inflation, cost of living, decreased value of both highschool and college degrees, etc.

I'm talking standard of living, not how much they earned. If you think you have it worse or as bad, you don't know anything.

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