Reply to Help me understand the impact of a $15 minimum wage?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm curious if those who are against the increase feel there shouldn't be a minimum wage at all? And why or why not?[/quote]

There should not be a minimum wage because it is not the proper way to address the underlying problem of[b] someone not being productive enough to earn a living wage[/b]. If someone is unable, temporarily or permanently, to increase their productivity, society may decide that this person needs help and provide a safety net. Such a safety net can be provided through welfare programs. A minimum wage is a broad economic distortion that causes people and businesses to make economically inefficient choices. Welfare and direct payments have far fewer of these problems. [/quote]
NP here. You (or maybe a couple of people) keep saying that low-skilled jobs aren't "productive enough", and I'm thinking maybe you don't understand what productive means. A low-skilled job can absolutely be productive. Productivity has to do with the value created. And a lot of low-skilled jobs can still be productive. I don't know how many burgers a person can flip in an hour, but I bet it's a lot. Their work produces a lot of value-added food products that grease the economy.

Yes, it's true that if the labor pool is larger than the number of jobs, you aren't going to be paid as much as if the situation is the other way around. But being a high-skilled employee is only tangentially related to being productive. Many people who work at quantitative hedge funds are extremely high-skilled, but if you question whether more market liquidity is always good (as I do), you could even argue that what they are doing has negative productivity.

If you want to create a caste system where low-skilled people doing "menial" jobs are treated like literal garbage (like in India before they enacted the 1947 Constitution), say so. But stop bringing the economic terms if you don't understand them.[/quote]

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