But it is an increase and by your numbers an increase higher than the current rate of inflation.
And don’t forget all the federal/state/county/municipal workers who do not make anywhere near $15/hour. There are multitudes of people working cutting park lawns and at such that are not making that. Now you’ve skewed the budgets of those government entities resulting in higher property, sales, and income taxes.
What good is raising the MW when the increase results in higher costs for taxes and consumer goods? It ends up being a negative gain.
You realize Minimum Wage has lagged behind inflation right?
Part of this is a correction. $15 might be an over-correction, I’ll admit to not being an expert and Minimum Wage has never been quite right as the low cost of living states should have a lower Minimum Wage than the High cost of living states. There is plenty wrong and the current Minimum Wage is far too load for expensive states.
And the answer to that is to raise it to a level that causes inflation?
My other son is VP for a distribution company. They pay high schoolers and college students $10.15 and hour to order pick at the warehouse and stock shelves at stores. There is room for advancement and higher wages. But if they are forced to give bottom rung employees an almost 50% pay hike prices are going to go up.
Not really. The last MW increase was over a decade ago, and the total inflation over those years is more than 15%. This would actually be lagging behind inflation, overall.
That’s been the same argument made against every MW increase. And it has never actually worked out that way.
Unless you are trying to say that MW is the primary driver of inflation, then your logic fails. And if you are saying that MW is the primary driver of inflation, then you are wrong.
Do prices need to go up if the cost of energy goes up? Do they need to go up if the cost of the goods go up? Do they need to go up if the cost of gas for the delivery trucks goes up? Do they need to go up if the rent goes up?
Unless your answer to all of those is “no”, then labor is just one more thing that they have to take into account as a cost of doing business. And if your answer to any of those is “no”, then you are wrong.
I think the economic arguments are nonsense. There’s no evidence that raising the minimum wage leads to inflation or unemployment. The people who benefit from this will spend almost everything they earn, all that money goes back into economy and a minimum wage increase that makes up for the current lag behind inflation will lead to an economic benefit. Include the tax reduction I recommend as well and it will be an economic boom.
That would be pretty much the last MW increases, which went from 3.35 in 1990 to 7.25 in 2009. That’s a 116% increase over 19 years. This is a 106% increase over 16 years.
But the CBO report is based on incremental changes through 2025.
And as I’ve said upthread, that would be my recommendation as well.
It would be disruptive to do this tomorrow, but as that’s not anything that anyone has seriously suggested, it would be quite the strawman if that is what is being argued against.
Tell me about it. it’s a dirty little secret and it irks the hell out of me how conservative ideologues tap dance around it. In effect, they want it both ways.
If they counter the question you asked with something like “Well the 1% do have mountains of cash, but they’re small enough in number so as not to affect inflation” but then that would put a torpedo right at the waterline of the whole argument in favor of supply-side “trickle down” economics; an absolute article of faith among that crowd.
That same crowd pooh-poohs the idea of demand-side economics where a large swath of the hoi-polloi can drive the economy. However, whenever, as you note, these lumpen proles get any increase in their income, they trot out the “but that’ll cause inflation” trope. Isn’t that a tacit admission of the ability of the even the lower paid workers to drive the economy via their spending?
Of course, it’s one-percenter greed, but my hunch is that it’s borne of inveterate class disdain.
No it isn’t. It’s a increase of 106% over 4 years (now to 2025). That is a very severe shock to the system compared to the step increases between 1990 and 2009.
The empirical evidence, based on meta-studies, once publication bias is accounted for, minimum wage appears to show little or no negative impact of rising the minimum wage (in fairness to @pkbites pkbites, he might have a point about doubling the minimum wage within the span of a few years).
Some studies indicate that minimum wage might have impact on “marginal” labor forces and teen employment. This makes sense: as we all know, there are winners and losers even after the best of well-intentioned policies.
There seems to be an all or nothing attitude on this thread, forgetting that the OP doesn’t ask if the minimum wage should be raised, but if it should be raised to a specific amount, a ludicrous amount more than double the current rate, in a very short period of time.
I’ve seen no counter amounts. If $15/hour why not $20 or $25. At what point does the rate of pay for a teenaged hamburger flipper become ridiculous? What could we raise the minimum wage to that even the $15/hr crowd would say “no, that would cause inflation, taxes, and unemployment”?
It is still a similar increase over a similar time period.
That we’ve let it go so long without an increase to keep up with inflation is not the fault of MW increase proponents, it is the fault of MW increase detractors.
Would you rather have had it simply have been increasing ever since 2009 every year, so that by 2025, it reaches $15 an hour? Great, so would I, but we can’t go back in time and convince people who were against the MW increases to change their mind. Instead, we need to look to the future, and how it plays out there.
Are you against any increase, or do you simply think that $15 by 2025 is too much too quickly? I can see a debate on $14 by 2028, or some other number and target date being a viable alternative, but the longer that we resist any increase, the more shock to the system we will need to endure in order to catch it up to where it needs to be.
This happens to be the proposal that was presented in the currently discussed legislation (the clause that passed House but will not pass Senate due to reconciliation rules) – do the increase over 5 years, then index it.
I would agree (somewhat) that $15 is arbitrary, but at the same time this is the longest we’ve gone without a min wage increase since it was implemented. Wages have increased for the past few years (at least since the pandemic). There was economic growth pre-pandemic and likely will be once it’s behind us. I think these are cases for the minimum wage, which would be implemented gradually over the course of a few years.
That said, I suspect we might end up with a compromise amount that will please neither the progressive left or the economic right, but that might not be a terrible outcome. I’d be okay with a minimum wage that starts out at about $10/hr and then goes up to about $12-13 in 2 years. Some states would push their wages higher, assuming the economics justified it. The objective in my mind is to get the floor-scraping states like MS, LA, TN, and OK off the floor and into higher wages.
And yet, you have given no counter proposals, simply complaints.
That’s a pretty nebulous opinion.
Then make one. the $15 is actually based on information about what it costs to live in the US. $20 or $25 are not. This is actually something that has been thought about, it’s not just some arbitrary number.
You grievously insult the millions of people who are not teenaged hamburger flippers who are also working at MW. That’s not a fair stereotype, it just serves to dehumanize those who are less fortunate than you.
No, no, no. You’re laboring under a very common misapprehension: forgetting that Wealthy People Money creates jobs, while Poor People Bucks do nothing but buy drugs that enrich Latin American Cartels and drive up the price of hamburgers.
It’s a common mistake for which you are to be readily forgiven
Yeah. It’s insane, and has easily earned its place in The Book of Big American Lies.
Money is money. Spending is spending. Consumption is consumption and investment is investment.
