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Comment by murderfs | Hacker News Reader

That's a good way of turning the poorest US workers into the poorest US unemployed. If you raise the minimum wage above the actual value of an employee, then they're just going to get fired. Even if they still provide more value than their being paid, it makes automating away their job more competitive.

California tried this with a $20/hr minimum wage in fast food restaurants: the next time you go into a McDonalds, count the number of empty cash registers and number of shiny new ordering kiosks: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34033

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McDonalds were going to do that anyway.

And what's the point of a minimum wage of it doesn't provide a living? That's just letting private enterprise piggyback off the welfare system.

Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.

Not a family. Especially not families with - for other reasons- only one breadwinner.

The problems of poverty (to the extent the US even experiences it) are broader than demanding someone make uneconomic decisions with their investors capital.

> Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.

This is false and not at all the reason why the minimum wage exists. It was created to bust sweatshops. You are making the same argument as the people that were defending sweatshops. It may be the argument proponents make now to argue against raising it, but it was not why it was created. Roosevelt literally said that the intent was that any business unable to provide a basic living wage for their workers was one that should not exist.

I may make a similar argument, but you go too far sir to imply I am aligned with evil people defending sweatshops.

I agree with Roosevelt that businesses should provide a living wage for their workers. Mine does.

I'm happy to have both: "minimum single-income with extended-family obligations wage" and "young, single individual minimum wage".

You just won't find a lot of the former.

This is actually the policy argued for by the Catholic Church in various documents; but it results in an obvious inequality that makes many angry - two people doing the exact same job, and the single man is paid less than the married family man.

(The reality is we pretend we don’t have that, then rebuild it badly with bandaids - child tax credit, earned income tax credit, daycare credits, MFJ deductions, healthcare, etc).

Why not?

I know several people supporting families on minimum wage.

Do they not deserve to be paid more?

So by your logic we should consider lowering the minimum wage in order to ensure employment.

Employment is not a means in itself, the point of being employed is to "make a living". If a job cannot sustain a person then it should not exist.

People deserve to live with dignity, earning a living wage.

>People deserve to live with dignity, earning a living wage.

Look, I get where that is coming from. But no one deserves anything, even clean air. Instead, you pay for things with other things (e.g. clean air in exhchange for slightly more expensive cars).

A (shitty) job is better than no job. Minimum wage should be lowered. You gotta help people with something else. For instance by allowing to build higher density housing.

> But no one deserves anything, even clean air. People 100% deserve clean air?

> no one deserves anything

https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/2021/03/udhr.pdf

Pure japes.

Ordering kiosks mean we can meet volume because more time is spent in production. Same with mobile ordering.

The employee count doesn't need to change up or down.

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