The $15 minimum wage

terp said:

ml1 said:

elsewhere in this thread the same analysis used to estimate job losses due to a $15 minimum wage also estimated that an equal number of families would be lifted out of poverty.  And just above there was an estimate of 28 million people getting pay raises.  And earlier estimates quoted in this thread showed that a significant number of the job losses will be among teens.  So I just don't find it a compelling argument that the minimum wage can't or shouldn't be raised because 1 million+ people will lose crap minimum wage jobs (many of them teens), and thus denying over a million families the opportunity to escape poverty and tens of millions of others to see their wages raised.  If we care so much about those who lose jobs, we could include enhanced unemployment benefits in the legislation.  Perhaps for a year to anyone who loses a minimum wage job due to the raise in the hourly rate.

this argument would pretty much be the definition of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good if the people making it were pushing for perfection.  But in this case it's letting the crap present circumstance be the enemy of a somewhat less crap future circumstance.

 You think too small.  $100 an hour gets everyone to upper middle class.  

Edited to add regarding commentary that a known side effect of subsidies is you get more of it.  So, you want to put an artificial price floor which will create unemployment and then furthermore you would like to subsidize the unemployment.  What could possibly go wrong?

 this should go into a time capsule as a prototypical response of yours.  Starts with gratuitous snideness, goes in to a libertarian talking point, then another snide comment that ignores what has happened in actual real world practice.  At no time in my lifetime has the government "subsidized" unemployment the way it did last summer with enhanced benefits.  And over the course of April though the fall, in what direction did the unemployment rate go?

while it may be true that often the "side effect of subsidies is you get more of it", it's not a "known side effect" in all cases.  The vast majority of unemployed people don't actually want to be unemployed, and they know that getting another job is a better long term solution than collecting unemployment benefits for as long as they can.  This "side effect" you cite is too simplistic to account for the motivations and behavior of actual real-world unemployed people.

ml1 said:

At no time in my lifetime has the government "subsidized" unemployment the way it did last summer with enhanced benefits.  And over the course of April though the fall, in what direction did the unemployment rate go?

while it may be true that often the "side effect of subsidies is you get more of it", it's not a "known side effect" in all cases.  The vast majority of unemployed people don't actually want to be unemployed, and they know that getting another job is a better long term solution than collecting unemployment benefits for as long as they can. 

In related empirical results, this reporting from Stockton is interesting:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/stocktons-basic-income-experiment-pays-off/618174/