Hacker News Reader

>We can address the homeless problem pretty easily if we could decrease the minimum wage for them... Jobs that would pay very low wage wouldn't be difficult jobs, but they also wouldn't care if the person is only half mentally there. Small pay, small work, you can be promoted and given raise. A factory for instance could even build a campground with facilities."

Congratulations, you've just reinvented fuedalism, complete with the keep. Not trying to be flippant, but this is a perfect example of how 'rational' geeks can trivially rationalise literally anything, by ignoring context and history. Protections like minimum wage, safe working conditions, minimum work age etc didn't arise de novo. They exist (all be it in a much more limited form in the US than elsewhere in the developed world), because of repeated public outrage at the abuses their lack engendered. Repealing them to 'create jobs' as though that were in itself a nebulous good is the same logic that has prisoners in chain gangs (universally from poor, and overwhelmingly black) recreating the era of slavery in Texas.

>>because of repeated public outrage at the abuses their lack engendered.

I recommend anyone who holds this view to read at least one book written by Thomas Sowell.

Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed#Criticisms...

Repeated public outrage: cars are becoming less safe.

Economist: There is a tradeoff between safety and affordability, and making cars safer means less poor people can actually afford to buy them. In turn, this makes transportation even harder for them, which in turn means they will have fewer chances to improve their lives.

Repeated public outrage: lack of minimum wage will cause more exploitation.

Economist: Minimum wage destroys job opportunities for low skilled workers, who are already heavily marginalized in society. And once they are out of the job market, it becomes even harder for them to return to it.

The root problem of transportation is governments favoring roads over mass transits and bicycles, making cars a requirement for living in the country as opposed to optional, not safety regulations of motor vehicles.

> Minimum wage destroys job opportunities for low skilled workers, who are already heavily marginalized in society. And once they are out of the job market, it becomes even harder for them to return to it.

That's why you create unemployment benefit, preferably in a way that does not discourage going back to work.

This way, works with starvation wages don't exist, and low-skilled workers have a chance to prepare for their next job (and even to be a bit picky). In my view this improves the job market much better than a race to the bottom in working conditions and salaries.

> That's why you create unemployment benefit, preferably in a way that does not discourage going back to work.

Alternatively you could subsidise low wage employment via a wage subsidy like the earned income tax credit. That way you get more people in work as opposed to fewer and those people develop skills and professional networks which will allow the recipients to escape low wage work in time.

>>preferably in a way that does not discourage going back to work.

Isn't this much easier said than done? Where will you cap the unemployment benefits so people are not discouraged? How do you come up with the number? How do you plan to verify the effect of your suggested cap?

I was on unemployment with the state of Michigan last year, and it was a literal nightmare. A few hours into the work day, customer service became backlogged for the entire day with a message saying "we're full" and then hang up on you. Living on the west coast meant I had to get up at 4am to catch the early call. The online portal was an absolute mess in usability and functionality, and nearly every step I took required some "fact finding" requirement, often taking several weeks to resolve. Many times my benefits were delayed, someone's up to a month. It's easily the worse system I've ever used.

Raising minimum wage has negative side effects. You can't escape this truth.

Is the evidence actually solid for the minimum wage thing?

My half-informed impression was that it's not–demand for labor is often surprisingly inelastic. Maybe you can go from 100 to 95 people on an assembly line, but you can't have 0.95 of a person taking orders. Also, increasing someone's salary by $1/hr only costs a few thousand dollars per year (~2000 working hours/year + payroll taxes).

The problem with paying people extremely little for "easy" work is that they don't make enough money to live. Pay in Vietnam or wherever is much lower, but so is cost of living. I don't see the point of having people work forty hours weeks when they can't afford an apartment, food, and the other basic necessities of life.

I also don't think that paying off state debt right now is a good idea. Interest rates are pretty much zero or even negative. We should instead borrow as much as possible. For example we could invest trillions into getting rid of fossil fuels in the next twenty years. That would also create many jobs.

I am not American but to me it is clear that your idea here would increase the inbalance you already got there. Namely the inbalance between private corporations and the state. Many of the problems the US has are not rooted in state action, but in the actions of companies, their lobbyists and politicians that own said companies.

So you want to reduce the only leverage any honest regular hard working citizen has? To do what? Save money? How about taxing companies properly for starters? You are the second-biggest market in the world after all.

And another thing: if your goals are to decrease unemployment, homelessness and incarceration it is a totally valid strategy to state those goals publicly. The european givernments I lived under always do this and it doesn’t really seem to have the devastating economic consequences typical US-citizen’ always tell me it must have.

It is amazing how ingrained that corporate think is in the US and how unable people are to see that there are other things inbetween full on anarcho-capitalism and soviet style single party oligarchy.

this. From an outside point of view, I think you could solve most of the problems of the USA if you just stopped allowing corporations to influence politicians so much.

I think the obsession with billionaires and the glorification of rich people should stop. The public discourse often feels like we just need to keep rich people happy so they can shower their generosity through “created ” jobs on the rest of the population.

We can address the homeless problem pretty easily if we could decrease the minimum wage for them

This statement reveals a lack of knowledge of the root causes of the homelessness epidemic. Those who are homeless for purely economic reasons are a tiny minority. More often than not homelessness is a second order effect of mental health issues compounded by breakdown in family/community. Those need to be addressed first.

Go do some volunteering and you will very quickly start to understand.

I think it is a very achievable goal in the USA, if the USA took the money to achieve those goals directly from the military budget, it would still have the largest military budget in the world. And on health, it would actually save money.

But also, I think this was not meant to be US specific. The real political challenge is trying to do it for everyone. Doing it for the US is easy.

That's a thoughtful answer, thanks. I don't agree with all of your points, but I do think of progress as something which benefits everyone, including vulnerable people too.

> Americans have a hard time admitting that increasing minimum wage has negative side effects, especially on small business.

If you can't afford to pay employees, then your business is not viable

It's a shame the larger corporate machine wouldn't wear it, but you could, say, have a lower (or subsidised?) minimum wage for the first 2 years of business operation?