>If the U.S. changed some policies – such as increasing the federal minimum wage – 46 million people could earn enough to rise above that fair pay line.

You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage and then those newly unemployed people will depress wages for other jobs since there is more labor on the supply side.

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frotaur 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Check out https://arindube.substack.com/p/a-minimum-wage-natural-exper..., very good post comparing states with minimum wage and without, that seem to go against this often repeated argument.

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logicchains 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Then why not raise minimum wage to $100? Obviously there's a limit.

	▲	inigyou 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"we should make murder illegal" "then why not make sleeping illegal? obviously there's a limit"

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Ekaros 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On other hand if you can not afford to pay your employees wages they can survive on you do not deserve to be in business. You should go out and any resources you use should instead be used in way that can reasonably sustain workers.

	▲	gadders an hour ago \| parent [-]
		As much as I think you can't raise minimum wage indefinitely, I kind of agree with this a bit as well. I would be in favour of some sort of mechanism that ties "Number of your employees needing additional benefits to survive" (Universal Credit in the UK) to "How much in profits you can give to shareholders". Even an annually published official list of "inadequately paying companies" would be something.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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thatwasunusual 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage [...]

This way of thinking is what's wrong with USA (among many other things).

You don't (or at least shouldn't) hire lots of people because it's cheap.

	▲	cyberjerkXX 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's a voluntary agreement between people. It's not immoral to pay minimum wage to someone when they both agree. I find it to be immoral for the government to force themselves into the agreement. Only ~1% of people in the US make federal minimum wage. ~58% of that 1% are serving related occupations who collect tips that are not counted in BLS wage data. You need to use median wage - which is ~$24 for all occupations.
	▲	freedomben 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If that way of thinking is wrong, why not just make the minimum wage a million an hour and let everyone be mega wealthy? What do you think would happen if we passed that? Edit: to the down voters, what is your answer to the question?

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gadders 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But if they made the minimum wage $1m/year then we would all be rich! /s

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inigyou 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I know on Reddit this sort of thing earns you karma but it doesn't work like that on HN.

	▲	gadders an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I don't go on Reddit, but you seem to still have people on here who are hard of thinking and believe that increasing the minimum wage has no second or third order effects.