Magiver: * If someone wants to make more money then they need to do work that is worth more.*
This doesn’t really address the problem at a general level, though. Suggesting that all low-wage workers should just get better jobs is kind of like what Debaser said about suggesting that we should just legislate a universal minimum salary of $50K a year. The economics of it would be impossible in real life.
In real life, many workers simply don’t have better-paying jobs available to them. And many industries depend on having a large pool of low-skilled labor that is willing to work for very low wages. If full-time work at those wages doesn’t provide enough money to live on, what should we do about it?
If you think the correct answer is “Nothing”, you’re free to say that. “They need to get better jobs” is just a euphemism for “Nothing”.
John Mace: The MW is a blunt instrument and causes a distortion in the employment market. If the goal is to fight poverty, that can be done directly thru welfare. Then you’ll can target the beneficiaries and measure the exact cost.
I’m not sure it’s that simple, John. Remember, another goal of the minimum wage is to link a decent standard of living with paid work, at least in the case of the able-bodied. We want most able-bodied people to be working, because it makes the economy as a whole more productive and keeps the tax base broad. The reason we make private employers carry out part of our social policy of income redistribution, via a mandated minimum wage, is because it’s employers who provide work, and work is what we want to reward.
The MW “market distortion” operates by artificially increasing the attractiveness of work, because as a society we want most people to be motivated to work. If poverty were mostly fought by means-tested welfare programs rather than by wages, the incentive to work for wages would be reduced. (This is exactly the problem that inspired the movement for welfare reform, in fact.)
We want even low-skilled able-bodied people to be motivated to get and keep full-time jobs, so we artificially “overvalue” their labor by putting a legally mandated wage floor under it. Yes, this introduces a distortion in the labor market considered in isolation, but in the bigger picture, it reflects the value of having a very large percentage of the potential workforce committed to full-time work.