Can someone answer my question about the minimum-wage hike?

[quaker bill]

102. One can always argue that people should be paid less.

The problem with international comparisons is that today, for the most part, MW jobs are service sector type jobs and are not exportable. Jobs that are or have been exportable to cheap labor markets have at this point been exported to the extent it makes any economic sense to the business owners to do so.

You cannot outsource shelf stocking, floor sweeping, burger flipping, delivery driving, cashiers, unskilled labor at construction sites, and lawn mowing to China or Mexico. This labor has to come from workers at the site where the labor is needed.

A more relevant analysis would look at how our economy actually works for people at this end of the economic scale. In short we as a culture make low wages sustainable by taxing businesses and more affluent individuals and transferring this revenue to the working poor in the form of an "earned income tax credit", food stamps, low income housing block grants, free meals at schools, food banks and other charitable efforts, TANF, and so on and on...

There is nothing wrong with any of these efforts to provide relief, other than that the funding is at times subject to political whim and the availability of the assistance is at times highly conditional. For instance, the homeless folks I have worked with over the decades often have very limited access to assistance of any sort as they have no fixed address and often enough a criminal record. I am not clear how making the desperately poor, frequently incarcerated, and homeless more desperate and poor serves any social interest, but we do this with intent of some sort.

All that said, this means of redistributing income is quite inefficient. It takes a large trained staff to work these programs to assure that requirements for all the various conditions are met. It would be inherently more efficient to simply have the employers pay workers sufficiently in the first place, rather than tax them and redistribute the revenue through government.

Now if the larger goal is to reduce the size of the poverty industrial complex in this country, then a wage in the neighborhood of $15 an hour is likely the right answer.