Repair-It

The explanation of my opinion here is pretty straight forward: I acknowledge that the current minimum wage is not a living wage in many parts of the country (at least assuming that person works 40 hours a week and has no other sources of income), but I also feel that tampering with stuff like this always has unintended consequences.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/busi ... .html?_r=0

Mr. Horton concluded that when forced to pay more in wages, many employers were hiring more productive workers, so that the overall amount they spent on each job changed far less than the minimum-wage increase would have suggested. The more productive workers appeared to finish similar work more quickly.

When the minimum wage increased, employers tended to hire workers who had earned higher wages in the past, suggesting that they were looking for a more productive work force.

If the pattern Mr. Horton identified were to apply across the economy, it would raise questions about whether increasing the minimum wage is as helpful to those near the bottom of the income spectrum as some proponents assume. The higher minimum wage could cost low-skilled workers their jobs, as employers rush to replace them with somewhat more skilled workers.

In a pure sense, I always found many minimum wage arguments to sound basically like socialism: we can fix the poor by legislating that they make more money! And clearly it doesn't necessarily work out so simply. I have no issue working on a societal problem, but the solution isn't often simple. I mean, if you ask an extreme economic liberal, they'd probably say, well, you just need to regulate corporate profit and that would solve this problem. That's a dark road to go down.

Mr. Horton is quick to acknowledge that there are many reasons his experiment might not capture employer behavior in the wider economy. But he says a higher minimum wage could attract more highly skilled workers who were not previously in the labor market — say, college students. At the same time, less-skilled workers might lose their jobs and drop out of the labor force.

More broadly, he said, the contribution of his paper is to show that one impulse of many employers in the face of a minimum-wage increase will be to find more productive workers, even if there are limits on how much they can follow through on this desire.

In other words, in a sense, it could have the opposite effect: people who never considered those jobs suddenly find them appealing (or more appealing) and the people who you were supposed to be helping are without a job. Isn't that the wrong direction?

I think the answer is this: low skilled jobs should be paid appropriately. We can do something to help people advance their life if they want to but ultimately (aid with child support while training, which we probably already have anyway), those jobs are worth a certain amount of money to society. As long as the competition is fair (not like illegals paid with cash or whatever).