they learn new skills like everyone else to keep up with technology

what did people do during the industrial revolution? the same thing, learn new skills to keep up with technology.

The people whose skillsets are made obsolete would then learn to operate the new technology.

The industrial revolution didn't have mass requirement for high skills sets. You could pull people off the street to do the job.

There is literally nowhere in the country this isn't true regarding the federal minimum wage. Even bum fuck Alabama can support a solid doubling over the next 10 years

you could do the same with new theoretical technology which would make certain jobs/occupations/skills obsolete. People just have to be trained

Would like to add as well that the industrial revolution WAS automation. People still need to direct the automatons properly

Perhaps, but minimum wage in NYC for example should always be higher than minimum wage in bum fuck nowhere. Index to living costs

Min wage like Bogie pointed to is a bare minimum price floor at the aggregate national level, think that's a sound way to look at it. You could reduce the minimum wage to $10/hour in NYC tomorrow and it would change nothing on the ground because the actual cost of labor is decided by the market, which is often based on some form of the wage you're earning being adequate, at leas to some extent. Even at $15/hour, that's very low for NYC, where in reality the true minimum wage being earned there now is somewhere in the high teens low 20s.

Problem with having 'federal' minimum wages is, as some already pointed to, there is a large cost of living variance. So if you set the minimum based on what it takes to survive in some tier 1 city, that's going be much higher compared to bumfuck Alabama. Think states should decide these factors, the feds if anything should be very slow to raise and let local state governments decide.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on May 3 2023 03:48pm

States are still far too large to set state-wide minimum laws: this is why upstate New York has been failing for decades, minimum wage is set as if it is NYC. It really should be on a municipal basis

I don't see a reason why there can't be a standard formula set every two or so years based on a standardized basket of goods in your area. Make it enough to afford medical care, a reasonable sized apartment with a room per individual, food cost, etc. etc



This is incorrect, and in fact is so incorrect that it was the subject of a nobel prize a few years ago where we literally observed the exact opposite. We've known this is an incorrect interpretation for over 30 years now and anybody still repeating it should be immediately ignored on their economic opinions because they don't know last generations research on the subject.

We KNOW (not theorize, have observed) that raising the minimum wage results in a negigable change to unemployment. All of the studies that show increases or decreases in employment as a function of changes in minimum wage that are based on observed data show unambiguously that when there is a measurable impact it is small, and if you aggregate the studies they cluster around no change in both the positive and negative direction. I.e. exactly what you would expect if there was no change.

The only thing people can point to that might cause it in the future is automation as you just did, but let's be perfectly clear, that kind of automation is coming for jobs all over the pay scale, not clustered around minimum wage.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on May 3 2023 04:51pm

Isn't that what the standard deduction is for?