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Except that the fact is that the minimum wage has risen faster than inflation over time, not slower. It's only if you peg it to an arbitrary high point that you can claim it hasn't. Today's minimum wage is 72% higher in adjusted dollars than it was when the minimum wage was first established in the US. So, by your own standard, I have a valid point, yes?

As to your second condition, I also agree that's not smart. But I've done far more than just say "just because". So how about countering my arguments instead of just pretending I didn't make them?



Um... No, it wouldn't. The $15/hour rate is a bad idea regardless of whether it's sufficient as a living wage. So you'd raise it to that level even though it still isn't high enough to be a living wage, but also still has all the bad problems associated with it? How does that work? You actually want all the negatives with none of the positives? I could see someone arguing that the negatives are worth it to help people earn a living wage, but if you don't even think it's enough to live on, then what exactly are you trying to accomplish?

The correct approach is to make it easier for people to obtain skills with which they can actually earn enough to live on, not artificially inflate their earnings regardless of the value of their labor. Raising the minimum wage is counter productive. You don't achieve the benefits you think you're going to achieve, and you create a false sense among low skill earners that there's some magical route for them to achieve success other than improving the value of their skills. Um... There isn't. But every time some politician, pundit, or even internet poster plays lip service to this silly idea that raising minimum wage can save the poor from their condition, they make the problem worse, not better. It's like telling addicts that a pill to cure addiction is about to be released, and another pill to eliminate all the side effects of addiction is in the works. What do you think that will do? It'll make more people become addicts.

When you tell people that if only we pass <insert wage law here> their 10th grade education and lack of job experience will still command enough money to support a family on, what effect do you think that will have? Yup. More high school dropouts. More people who will choose to sit on the couch waiting for that law to get passed rather than going out and learning a marketable skill. Why study hard, or get some training, or work your way up through the workforce, when you can just wait for the government to make your near zero skills earn a good living for you?

It's a really really dumb idea.

Why don't you write an email to the economist in question and ask him why you should support raising the minimum wage? I'm not the one advocating for a change here. What's interesting is that you make a big deal about my links not supporting my position, yet for the most part the argument for raising the rate "a little bit" instead of right to $15/hour, isn't based on all the good it'll do, but that at smaller increments it does less harm. Um... How about not doing any harm at all? Shouldn't we have some balancing help in there somewhere?

Link #2 outright says that raising minimum wage is bad.

Link #3 says if you accept Dube (and ignore others who disagree with him), it's a bad idea to go to $15, but maybe it should be based on median incomes in a given state/region/whatever. And it's light on *why* we should do this, just that it's less bad to do so. The author himself argues for many of the things I do. Increased training for workers to make their labor actually worth more.

Link #4 says much the same thing. Presents lots of different sides, without really taking a position. Um... But once again, it's hard not to notice that the main arguments for increasing the wages to various levels seem to revolve around arguing that it wont be harmful, rather than that it will be helpful. He links to one economist saying that $15/hour wont hurt (while mentioning that pretty much every other economist thinks it's a terrible idea and will cause massive harm). But even the lower level increases are sold more on the "this amount wont hurt" angle. I just don't find that to be very persuasive.


What benefit do you think we'll gain from raising the minimum wage to any given level? And do those benefits outweigh the harm caused by doing so? Isn't that how we should be approaching this? Most of the articles supporting ideas like Dube's seem to come from the approach that we should reject the "sides" of the issue, and somehow a compromise in the middle is fine. Um... Why? That isn't necessarily true. If person A proposes chopping off your arm, and person B proposes not chopping off your arm, that doesn't mean that person C's "compromise" of just chopping off your hand is a great idea.


Dube's approach is pretty much that. And again, I don't really buy that. I'm not sold on the need to have a minimum wage in the first place, let alone why we should raise it by any amount at all. If we're going to have a minimum wage it really should be the bare minimum we think someone anyone should earn no matter how unskilled their labor is. I just think that we should change our thinking on this subject. No one should be able to support a household on wages earned while performing the bare minimum skill work. That's just not economically sustainable. What will happen if you try to do that is massive unemployment of the very low skilled workers you're trying to help. Now, if your objective is to drive as many people out of the workplace and onto government assistance as possible, then that's a great way to do that. If you want as many people as possible to be able to support themselves with their own labors, then it's a terrible idea.

A good start is to not block them out of the bottom career rung with overly high minimum wage laws. It's not an accident that as minimum wage levels have risen relatively speaking, the number of entry level positions requiring little or no skills but which can lead to upward mobility within the same business organization have decreased. We've made it where it's very very difficult to get your foot in the door of a good paying career without a college degree. And that has a lot to do with minimum wage laws (and a host of other employment cost increases). If I can pay some kid $4/hour to work in the mail room at my company, I might just do that. And that kid will learn about the other jobs in the company and may advance over time. But if I have to pay $10/hour minimum, I'm only going to hire recent grads to that position, or phase it out entirely in favor of automation. So the job disappears and the opportunity for advancement does as well.

Similarly, I'd drop the "4 year university or bust" approach to our education system. Put more focus on trade schools, and adult education programs. Focus on skills that can actually get people jobs in the market, not what some politicians think are the shiny education buzzword of the day. Most jobs don't actually require a degree, if you can just get some basic applicable skills in place instead. Again, it's about getting that foot in the door.

As to colleges themselves? Get rid of college loan/grant programs. All that's done is massively inflate the cost of an education for those who do pursue it. When colleges have to survive charging what the market can actually bear economically, their prices will drop. And when more students have to pay for their own education (or their parents do), they'll make smarter degree choices as well. Right now, the applicability rate for college degrees to the job market is ridiculous. All the claimed focus on STEM stuff hasn't really made a dent in it either. I'm still seeing tech companies struggling to fill job slots, and hiring workers from overseas because our colleges aren't putting out enough graduates with appropriate skills. Meanwhile, the graduates who thought a degree in liberal arts their professors all raved about are wearing paper hats and taking the jobs away from the low skilled workers because the employer figures if he has to pay that high minimum wage, he would rather hire someone with a degree than a single mom.

Those are just a few places I'd start at. How about you? Got any ideas?

You realize that those cost money, right? In fact, with the decrease in union programs and apprenticeships, the primary source for trade schools are private schools which tend to be quite expensive. If they're not just outright scamming their students. Of course, private vocational schools aren't much better.

That's for the employer to decide, isn't it?

Mind numbingly poor suggestion. All this does is push people seeking loans into the private sector (ok, so I guess it's a great idea from a GOP perspective), it doesn't decrease the cost of education or make jobs not require degrees. Also, not to put a fine point on it, but the whole reason student loans exist is because college was already prohibitively expensive for many people (and Eisenhower wanted more college educated people to compete against the commies). If "charging what the market will actually bear" wasn't working in the 50s and 60s, what makes you think it's the solution now?

Are you under the impression that you don't have to repay student loans? Or that most students are getting grants to cover all their expenses? Did you actually go to a 4-year college or university?

Sure, but you're the one suggesting this as a replacement for minimum wage so I'm more interested in discussing yours.

Edited, Nov 5th 2015 12:29pm by Jophiel

I start at a conclusion then make up the details and hope no one calls me on it.

No, you don't, because your statement is based on an ideological argument that doesn't change. My statement is based on statistics that can go either way.

Let me clarify my point. If the money is there, but you choose not to, then it's "just because". I wasn't specifically reference to your argument, but in a general sense.

Less than traditional 4 year universities though, right?



Ironically, from your first link:



So it's $22k/year to go to ITT? And that's "one of the highest tuition costs" for for-profit colleges? Seems like you're making my point for me here Joph. Have you sent a kid to college lately and looked at tuition costs? That's cheap. Sad, but true. And frankly, it wouldn't be even that expensive, but that these colleges can bill themselves as less expensive routes than traditional four year universities and thus peg their costs to those at those traditional universities where $40k/year is closer to the norm. To be fair, the actual "tuition" cost averages at $32k/year, but it's a lot harder to avoid all those other costs that inflate the total (mentioned in the article) when attending a four year university than when attending some kind of for profit commuter school (like ITT for example). Not that I'm pushing ITT as a grand example for education or anything, but we do have to kinda compare the two, not just bash one side in a vacuum.



Of course it is. But, as I pointed out earlier, if you have a glut of college educated kids with degrees in basket weaving, and the employer is forced to pay his entry level low skill workers a minimum wage of $12/hour (or higher), he's going to hire the kid with the college degree instead of the one who decided to go right into the job market. It's the cart pushing the horse. The market for college educated workers it not what's pushing college graduation numbers. It's the combination of over focusing on 4 year university or bust in our K-12 education system and the over abundance of various loan programs designed to make it appear to be easy and cheap to get that degree that is driving it. And the result is a lot of kids going to college because they think that's what they should be doing, but with no clue what they actually want to do with their lives, and then kinda drifting along, finally settling on something that seems "interesting" in college, and then graduating with what is often a somewhat useless degree, with massive college debt, and then getting hired into something unrelated to said degree anyway, just because the glut of said graduates forces it.

Absent that glut, the same kid could have gotten the same job he got absent said degree, and saved himself a ton of money. It's a self creating problem.



You're assuming that the total number of students who would seek out 4 year degrees would remain constant (and that costs would remain constant). No. Most of them would look at the costs, and decide it's not worth it. And then they'd go job hunting and likely arrive at the same job they'd have gotten with the degree, just 4 years earlier, and without owing $100k to a bank somewhere.



And there's you not accepting that things change over time. Yes, providing guaranteed student loans has made it easier (or even possible) for more students to attend college. But a side effect of that has been to create a "free money" situation for those colleges. Their incentive to minimize costs while maximizing value has been eliminated. Surely, we can find some solution in between, which will allow those whose outlooks will truly be enhanced by attending college to afford to do so, while not cruelly tricking those who wont into basically just racking up debt on their lives from the outset.

I just find it amusing that you linked to a lawsuit about ITT doing basically what every other non-profit college in the US does as well. So somehow because the college just pads its endowment instead of its stockholders pockets, this makes the exact same practice any less predatory? Ok. So ITT was pulling a bait and switch with a credit program they created, but the point is that a ton of students get treated to the same cost anyway regardless of where they go. At the end of the day, the costs don't change. And bait and switch or not, ITT's costs are lower than the average cost for college, so from a "are students paying too much to get an education" standpoint, isn't that relevant? So the kids going there thought it was actually going to be even less expensive, and then found out that it's just a bit less expensive instead. So what? At the end of the day, I'm not sure how much it matters what route a student takes to get himself into massive college loan debt. What matters is that he does.

College is way more expensive relatively speaking than it was back in the day. I think it's silly to ignore that fact. Hand waving it away because you can more easily get a loan for the massively higher amount kinda misses the point.



Did I complete a 4 year degree program? No. Have I taken classes at 4 year universities (via extension and adult education programs), yes? And you know what? I paid for those classes directly out of my pocket. And I did it because I felt the classes were worth paying for as they would expand my own knowledge and make me a more valuable employee. And I've never regretted it. Point being that I didn't take classes in underwater basket weaving (or the equivalent), because that would have been a waste of my money.

A kid being put through school via a combination of parent cash, grants, and student loans, is far less likely to make good choices about his education. And yes, I'm well aware that you have to pay back student loans. That's part of the point I'm making. Young people will make terrible choices if you give them a big credit card to pay for stuff with. And colleges basically take advantage of this with the entire setup. From the tuition costs, the silly frills they put out there that don't actually contribute to the education at all, to the meal plans, housing costs, etc. Everything is bundled in a way as to make it difficult to tell what you're actually paying for things, and to basically maximize the costs.

The fact that those costs will have to be paid back "later" is there, but doesn't really affect the spending choices along the way (and to a large degree, it's a choice of "pay this cost, or don't get a degree"). Students don't have a lot of choices. Even the "cheap" options are still so expensive that it's nearly impossible to avoid huge debt at the end. I know many people in my and my parents generation who actually worked their way through college and graduated with no debt at all. That option is nearly gone now (I'm not sure it's possible at all actually). In many cases, the universities themselves have rigged rules that virtually prohibit it (or make it even more expensive to take that route due to large overhead costs in the tuition beyond straight credit costs).




Lol. Um... Sure. So you're unwilling to propose alternative solutions then. Got it.

$22k/year is triple what it costs to go to any Canadian University for tuition.