small raises in the minimum wage lead to slower wage growth for low-wage workers
minimum wage reduces job growth over a period of several years with the effects being strongest for younger workers and for those in industries with a higher proportion of low-wage-workers.
Other research shows less clear results of increasing the minimum wage as an antipoverty tool in disadvantaged neighborhoods and a decrease of worker hours and increase in capital investment following minimum wage increases
Just raise the wages! surely less hours available, slower job growth and slower wage growth is the best way.
I’m in Massachusetts and practically nobody actually gets paid the state minimum wage. Ice cream scoopers were making 16-18/hr+ before we had $15/hr minimum wage. I was making 10 back when our min was 8 as a cashier.
A National minimum wage hike is going to encourage job outsourcing. It’s already possible to pay someone $900/mo in Chile who speaks fluent English to recruit tech people. (That’s $5.19/hr.) Do you think lower tier professional jobs are going to increase, stay the same, or shrink in the US?
How do you think the rising cost of american labor will affect the import/export balance?
If you want to fix our problems start with insurance and pharma and continue on with the finance sector. Only by crushing those huge-profit-leeching industries by having similar regulations to what exists overseas will you bring down the high wage jobs and reduce the disparity.
Health insurance is only expensive because drugs have no standardized national pricing (like most of the world does.) Our health insurance is the highest in the world despite not providing the highest standard of care and paying not so great compared to single payer countries.
Then comes insurance… some of the highest paying roles out there are in big insurance companies. I’ve seen IT helpdesk roles advertised in Boston for 170k+ for executive support roles because insurance is such a glut with profit - they cannot ever lose. Medical insurance going single payer is an obvious thing but other insurances suffer other problems like maximum profit %s being regulation encouraging insurance companies to up gross price and cost to make an end result profit of X% based on the gross. They want to make more money and the only way is to raise prices and expenses.
It’s like the nursing home problem. They are designed to never make any actual money but they seem to pay their external company cleaning crew $1000/hr to clean and they are informed about inspections ahead of time so they can adjust staffing to appear appropriate. It’s all a game to make it look like their non-profit is really not making a profit for the owners but all the associated business to business supports they have also happen to be owned by the same owners as the nonprofit and those businesses are private and make a killing.
I’m not going to go into the finance side. I know i’ve already lost everybody.
Anyway, I know i’ll just get downvotes because “I WANT MORE MONEY” but the problems we have require a lot of big losers to reverse the hoarding of wealth by the wealthy and bring it down, and honestly a lot of the more well-to-do upper middle class would be greatly affected - it’ll never happen.