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Comment by qudat | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. Not everyone needs a livable wage (e.g. teenagers) and by removing entry level positions we eliminate the lowest rung of the ladder. This is not a good outcome.

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...but imagine the economic benefits of giving teenagers a living wage. People who have loads of extra money to spend on unnecessary items (because presumably they're not paying for the bare necessities like food and housing).

<Gasp! Some might even save some of that extra money for use in the future!>

But they already get a living wage, since for almost all working teenagers, their biggest expenses are usually taken care of by their parents (rent & health insurance).

Unless they want to save money for college. Remember when you could work an entry level job and make enough money to pay for a substantial portion of college?

Why create an incentive to exploit teenagers for profit? Work is work, regardless of if the person being paid is 18 or 81. You're paying for output.

Not a good outcome for employers. Good for everyone else.

Where do you think the employers get the money from?

Customers?

That's the point. Absent any competition (which there won't be, because everyone is subject to the same minimum wage), the cost is fully passed on to the customers (ie. "everyone else"). Therefore your conclusion is incorrect.

How is that the point? The studies I've seen tend to say that minimum wage hikes tend to come from profits.

E.g.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/203233/1/1667730924....

In the short term or long term? I skimmed the study and it looks like they only looked at two years? In the short term I can see it happening due to psychological effects like price stickiness, but I'm skeptical that in the long term the trend would hold. As evidence to the contrary:

>Ashenfelter says the evidence from increased food prices suggests that basically all of the "increase of labor costs gets passed right on to the customers."

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/02/16/967333964/what...

>In the short term or long term?

Wasnt transfer from profits supposed to be impossible in both cases because of competition?

Are you talking about how profits shouldn't exist because of competition?

I'm talking about your claim that the cost of raised wages would be inevitably passed on to consumers.

I'm sure there's a good reason why employers lobby so hard to keep wages down even when it doesn't affect them in the slightest cos they can just pass the costs on...

>I'm sure there's a good reason why employers lobby so hard to keep wages down

Yeah, because demand also drops when prices go up. Whether that's "good for everyone else" is debatable. Fast food? Maybe. Groceries? Probably not.

>Yeah, because demand also drops when prices go up.

That's probably largely why they try to keep prices the same and suffer the hit to profits.

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