Comment by rfrey
20 days ago
That's not a convincing rebuttle. Saying that "drinking water is healthy" is controversial because "drink 1000 litres in a day and see how that goes" does not help the conversation.
20 days ago
That's not a convincing rebuttle. Saying that "drinking water is healthy" is controversial because "drink 1000 litres in a day and see how that goes" does not help the conversation.
That’s a perfectly fine response when the entire counter argument is “raising minimum wage is fine because everyone magically does better business to support it”.
That’s ridiculous on its face because there isn’t any higher level of productivity so someone in the economy is eating that loss.
I don't think it is that clear-cut, though. People who are well-fed, well-rested, free from stress and have good healthcare do tend to be more productive.
You're ignoring all the people that lost their jobs and had their hours shortened. If 1000 people earn minimum wage, raising it, some of them make more money, some lose money because their hours are shortened, some lose money because the jobs disappear. Whether that's a net positive overall is what's debated.
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It's legal for employers to offer these benefits.
It is a convincing rebuttal.
Same for your water example. At some point, water stops being healthy, without knowing at what point, you can't just ask people to just drink more water, otherwise they may die. In fact people have died for that reason.
At some point, increasing minimum wage will cause unemployment and destroy companies. Maybe we are at that point, or maybe not, without a bound, there is no way to tell.
Well we're not at that point right now, and in 2009 $7.25/hr also wasn't at that point either. So surely we can bump to $10.83 pretty darn safely since it's the same in real dollars.
On the other hand, experiments with $20+ minimum wages in places like Seattle are creating an unsustainable drop in revenues for a lot of restaurants and the tips that employees expected.
It is a curve, and price discovery is definitely a thing that the government can’t ignore. In Seattle they are in the awkward phase where the politicians admit the problem but walking back the minimum wage policy, which ratchets upward every year, is not something they want to consider politically.
I have close friends in the food service industry in Seattle that have become quite against the minimum wage increases (which they earn as base pay) because it is costing them a lot of money in real terms and they foresee future reductions in employability, which puts them at risk economically.
This coming from an era when competent service employees were so in demand that employers would make concessions that even tech employees don’t get. They weren’t paid as much but they were given flexibility that most people would envy.
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