> I don't think people working 40s per week deserve to live alone
> I think people who do unskilled work don't deserve to live comfortably
1. It's unaffordable to spend more than 30% of your income on rent + utilities.
Perhaps ironically I think this rule is the least true in areas with highly priced housing markets- if you're paying 40% of your post-tax income on housing, that leaves a ton of room to spend money on other things. I realize this isn't necessary true for people making minimum wage, but I wish they did a more analysis that for that. Instead they just used the ancient 30% rule of thumb.
2. You can only afford to live somewhere if 40% of the 2 bedroom homes are within your budget
I'm definitely not an economist or housing expert, but it seems unintuitive to me that we'd ever reach an equilibrum where the lowest earners can afford to the majority of homes. If everyone can afford most housing, wouldn't landlords just raise prices on luxury or above-average properties until only people who make more than average can afford them? Two-income households also have an inherent advantage if there's any sort of bidding war.
Policymakers have shaped the economic system in a way that suppresses the value of unskilled labor, and simply forcing the increase has serious costs which most people don't appreciate, costs that are harder to bear for some compared to others, for example huge multinationals are much better equipped to deal with said costs compared to smaller, independent businesses. The appeal to emotion regarding this is especially dangerous since it often ignores the reasons why the problem persists, and when the problem is as difficult as this is, there are many potential pitfalls when creating a solution (especially a popular one), which can lead to making things even worse than before. The road to hell is paved with good intentions after all.
I think it is a little disingenuous to characterize people who are critical of concepts like a livable minimum wage the way you have, wage insecurity is a serious and complex problem that wont be solved simply by controlling the price of labor.
Ian Shapiro has a lecture about wage insecurity in his power and politics course at Yale that discusses UBI, minimum wage and other alternatives which I think provides a decent, but brief overview of the issues faced regarding policies like this. Here is a link specifically to where he starts to discuss the idea of 15$ minimum wage.
I value my solitude to be sure, but it's not really clear why living alone is a right rather than a nice-to-have or even a policy goal. If legislators had responded to my plight by making the terms of my employment illegal and hoping for the best, gratitude would not necessarily have been my first instinct.
Which is utterly insane when you think about it. The current minimum wage is practically unlivable, and it's supposed to be a good thing for people to make even less just to box-check "employed"?
At least if you're unemployed, it's theoretically possible to put your energies into learning something to get a better job, but impossible to do that if you're burning all your energy for little more than pocket money.
The only people who'd gain from a lower minimum wage are employers, who'd have the opportunity to exploit cheaper labor.
Because a job is obviously more than a "box check". It's an income. Otherwise, anyone could turn their nose up at those soul-sucking low-wage jobs and choose that unemployment alternative willingly.
Edit: Hah! Someone posted it at the exact same time I originally posted this. Perfect.
How about
> I don't think teenagers, people with employed spouses, people with investments or social security or other sources of income should ever be able to take a job for less than what a person could completely support themselves on.
Minimum wage jobs are a small portion of all available jobs. There are many jobs, even so-called "unskilled" ones that pay more than minimum wage. As a free adult, it is your responsibility to figure out how to make enough money to live in a way in which you're comfortable.
For the rest, maybe instead of asking "How can we distort the market to force employers to pay more for labor than the value it produces?" we should be asking "How can we make more higher value jobs available to more people?".
People buy things, including labor, at the price others are willing to sell them.
That’s why they’re not equivalent; if the store can’t charge more money (up until a point) it cuts into their profits. If a human can’t make enough money with their labor, they starve. Hopefully you can understand why these are morally dissimilar.
"Corporations" are just groups of people. They are not some amorphous, abstract thing that just preys on helpless humans.
> If a human can’t make enough money with their labor, they starve.
There is absolutely no reason a normal, healthy adult offering 40 hours per week of effort should not be able to produce far more than minimum wage levels of value. If there are not opportunities for them to do that, we should investigate why that is, and provide opportunities for them to create that value. That is better for everyone because there is more valuable work being done. Pretending that a job that only creates $7 per hour of value actually creates $15 or more is just a lie. It's spending a dime to get a nickel and it's ultimately unsustainable.
If there's an abundance of jobs paying well above minimum wage, then it doesn't matter what the minimum wage is because people will have better options and the market will determine what price people are willing to accept to do what work. We're already seeing this as people have better options and are refusing to do lower paid work.
The store owner is hoping to turn the labor of their employees into profits for themselves, not mere subsistence. When they pay their employees less than a livable wage, they are in effect demanding that the state subsidize their business in the form of food stamps for their employees.
If a company cannot afford to break even while paying livable wages for their employees, then it isn’t a sustainable model and I would like to see it go out of business and have the owners get new jobs themselves; jobs that I would advocate for paying a living wage for.
> There is absolutely no reason a normal, healthy adult offering 40 hours per week of effort should not be able to produce far more than minimum wage levels of value.
If we agree that an adult should be able to easily make more than that, why would you allow businesses to pay less?
> If there's an abundance of jobs paying well above minimum wage, then it doesn't matter what the minimum wage is because people will have better options and the market will determine what price people are willing to accept to do what work. We're already seeing this as people have better options and are refusing to do lower paid work.
Your position is incoherent. Raising the minimum wage would hurt workers by taking away jobs, while at the same time nobody is paid the minimum wage because labor is demanding better pay. Which is it?
Why do you imagine it is up to us to allow or disallow what agreements two adults make between themselves? I expect people to know better than I do what level of income they require to live in a lifestyle they prefer and to figure out how to get that income for themselves. It is not for me to dictate that to them, nor is it for you.
> Your position is incoherent. Raising the minimum wage would hurt workers by taking away jobs, while at the same time nobody is paid the minimum wage because labor is demanding better pay. Which is it?
Yes, it is incoherent if you so thoroughly misunderstand it. I never said nobody is paid minimum wage. I said that we could make it so nobody was paid minimum wage, if we focused on creating jobs that do more valuable work, instead of agitating to force employers to overpay for less valuable work.
The idea that some people know better than us and want less money is frankly bizarre. Perhaps that argument carries water for unionization, where workers do often vote against it, but deciding to be paid less because they know better than us? Ridiculous.
Such an angle really ignores the extra leverage that large businesses have in poorer areas of America. If a Walmart in the next town drove all your mom & pop shops under because of a combination of low wages and economies of scale, what exactly are you going to do in order to get a better job?
Part of the job of the government is to step in and reduce the risk of a coercion in these situations, and the minimum wage is part of that.
What is frankly bizarre is the belief that wages are just made up values that you can set to whatever you want, that they are completely disconnected from any notion of what value the work provides. Taking a $7 / hour job and demanding that people pay $15 per hour for it, does not magically transform it into creating $15 per hour of value, no matter how much you want it to. It will, however, transform it into a $0 per hour job, because nobody is going to pay $15 for something that is only worth $7.
Businesses that fail to make these evil, exploitative things called "profits" cease to exist, and provide no jobs for anyone.
Good. If businesses require the state to subsidize their workers rent and food, they deserve to go out of business.