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Comment by opo | Hacker News Reader

>...$15/h was proposed as a sensible raise ten years ago

Sensible? Different states and different parts of states have vastly different costs of living. The average wage in San Francisco is going to be different than rural Alabama. The non partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the proposed 2021 increase to $15 would have caused a loss of 1.4 million jobs. (And obviously would have been even a bigger effect 10 years ago.)

>...online inflation calculators say the modern number would be $18.22.

No, that is wrong.

The minimum wage started at .25 in 1938. If it had followed inflation it would be at $4.70.

The last time it was adjusted was 2009. If it had been adjusted for inflation since then, it would be about $8.95.

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This conversation about what minimum wage should be always devolves into useless bickering about location and which inflation statistic to use.

A more productive conversation would be to define the minimum quality of life that one should have, then calculate the cost of it, then divide by how many hours one “should” work to achieve that quality of life.

Should a person be able to own land in a tier 1/2/3 urban/suburban area? Should a person be entitled to healthcare with a certain out of pocket maximums(gold/silver/bronze)? Should someone be able to afford daycare for infants? How much should one have saved up by retirement date (which brings up its own cost calculation for expenses during retirement)?

>A more productive conversation would be to define the minimum quality of life that one should have, then calculate the cost of it, then divide by how many hours one “should” work to achieve that quality of life.

That's not productive at all for the simple fact that you cannot legislate people into wealth.

The real minimum wage is and will always be zero, because that is how much workers who are less productive than the legal minimum will get.

Let's be clear as to what a minimum wage actually is, it's simply and exclusively making employing unproductive people illegal.

It does not, and can not ever help low value added workers for the simple reason that all it does is prohibit them from working.

> Let's be clear as to what a minimum wage actually is, it's simply and exclusively making employing unproductive people illegal.

It also gives raises to those whose productivity exceeds their negotiating power.

At the expense of equal losses of employment from people competing for those jobs.

I don't understand what you mean, can you elaborate?

I think it means that if a company had money for $14/h for labour, and it originally hired 2 people for $7/h, then if minimum wage was raised to $14, one person would be fired and the other (presumably better) worker would get a raise. But total available capital for labour for the company did not change.

It also prevents subsidies from government to corporation. In many cases the minimum wage job creates less value for the local government than having the person do nothing at all. In those situations the job should not exist

> A more productive conversation would be to define the minimum quality of life that one should have

This assumes that everyone is in a similar situation in terms of trying to support a particular kind of lifestyle on whatever is deemed to be the minimum wage (or maybe two of them).

Should those same considerations apply to teenagers who are not trying to support that lifestyle themselves? What about the ones who _are_, including emancipated minors?

What about retirees who are working part time because they like to feel useful but generally not expecting to live off that money?

It feels to me that the right solution to the problem of us feeling that people in a certain situation (e.g. supporting kids) should have a certain minimum income is probably better solved via solutions like the EITC (which can be much more tailored based on overall financial situation), not a minimum wage.

Of course that gets some people arguing about the dignity of work and how receiving handouts rots people's souls. But I would argue that taxes are opaque enough that people receiving EITC don't perceive it as a "handout" anyway....

I agree there are better methods than a minimum wage to achieve the goal of providing people with a floor on quality of life.

> No, that is wrong. [...] The last time it was adjusted was 2009. If it had been adjusted for inflation since then, it would be about $8.95.

I think you've misunderstood egypturnash's comment here. They're saying that if the $15 dollar minimum wage proposed in 2010 had been adjusted for inflation since then, it would now be equivalent to $18.22. If you check an inflation calculator, $15 in 2010 is equivalent in purchasing power to $18.22 in 2021. The argument is not that the actual minimum wage of 2010 would now be equivalent to $18.22 today.

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