Probably really location dependent, like you said. I could definitely live on that where I live in rural Iowa; the mortgage for my 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house is less than $800 per month.
What do you figure the mortgage would be at today's price and interest rates?
I'm not sure what it's worth today, but we bought it for 90k, so call it 150k? According to a mortgage calculator that I found online, my monthly payment would increase from the $800 I pay now (includes escrow and extra toward the principal) to about $1350 per month with escrow. Definitely a big jump, and I'm not so sure it's doable on that $15/hr minimum wage; it would require my wife to work as well if we want any disposable income after the mortgage, bills and groceries.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1322-Virginia-St-Berkeley...
> This is where the tech people are living.
Just to note, I am a tech person living out here! I run my own software business, and used to work as a dev for local and remote companies before that.
Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler.
It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services.
Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').
How you see this issue is likely governed by where on the spectrum between "human" and "labor" you see a person, admittedly. In this context, we're going through contortions to argue to pay people less by age "because we can."
There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!
Edit:
> There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!
I don't know what else to tell you my dude. McDonalds made $14B in profit last year. I can show you many examples where the economic resources surely exist based on the profits being made, in whatever industry or vertical you want to pick from, to pay people a living wage. I'm not saying no profits, I'm not cheering on communism. I'm simply arguing for the existing system to pay people enough to survive in comfort, regardless of age, with some combination of decreased profits and increased costs. If I can show you the economic value and wealth exists, and we still go through contortions to argue we cannot pay living wages to people (when the evidence is robust that we can), I can either come to the conclusion that someone has not built a robust mental model on all of the variables in play or they just don't think we should pay people enough to live. We're just arguing unnecessary economic system complexity (living wages for some, lower wages for teenagers even though a majority of minimum wage workers are not teenagers [2]) to paper over exploitation for some combination of consumer excess and shareholder returns. No attempt at dehumanizing is being made.
That's why I'm arguing with your presentation even though I don't oppose having a minimum wage. It's not just a question of lacking empathy for someone or living with dignity, because in those terms a minimum wage can have the opposite effect.
And dismissing contrasting views as unemphatic or suggesting that no one can be poorly paid with dignity detracts from having a useful conversation... it also says little about what the minimum wage should be. Certainly $1m/yr is more dignified than less! :P
Yes, minimum wages are unfortunate for those who don’t have sufficient skills to work at minimum wage. That’s why there are almost no more human order-takers at fast food restaurants. Kind of sucks for the kids — and poorer folks — who could have worked those jobs and used them as a springboard to something else.
California's $20 fast-food minimum wage improves pay at small cost to consumers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43806608 - April 2025
It'll be interesting to see if this effect turns out to be statistically signficant in time. ( https://reason.com/video/2024/12/19/no-californias-20-minimu... ).
> Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler.
> It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services.
Why would kids benefit from working? Shouldn't the benefit be from going to school? If they need to supplement their parents income doesn't that just mean that their parents salary is not high enough? It seems the only benefit of allowing kids to work is to the employers, enabling them to depress salaries, because somebody trying to support a family would not take the job. I find it interesting that often the same people (not saying you are) arguing against immigration because the immigrants take away jobs, argue for children to work because it's a "great experience".
> Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').
A job which doesn’t offer enough to live on will be less appealing to those trying to live on their own, but fine for high schoolers.
How are you supposed to live on 0 wage? Inevitably for some people that's what a minimum wage means: There is some work with some wage less than a minimum for which this person in this place could work, and they can't because of the minimum. Among other considerations any minimum wage has to balance that harm vs the harm for people who would be paid fairly more with a higher minimum wage.
It's also just the case that an extremely small portion of the public makes minimum wage, and since they're exceptional each of their situations are exceptional in its own way.
We have the means, it's a choice. We could make a better choice, but if we don't, demographics dynamics will make it for us.
https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://joshbersin.com/2023/09/why-we-are-entering-a-secular...
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-...
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-employers-hiring/101730
https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attac...
If they are working full time through the year, they likely aren't spending much time in school and whatever work they are doing should bring in enough money for them to not be homeless, starving, or unable to meet other basic needs like healthcare.
I'd further note that the government and it's taxpayers pay the toll regardless of whether or not we increase the minimum wage. We just end up paying the cost elsewhere in a way that's dollar for dollar a lot less efficient (policing, ER visits, homeless shelters, etc.)
Arguments aside, what do you feel would be an appropriate minimum wage for someone working a job in the US? What factors go into that number? In what situations does that number change?
It’s also possible that the increased artificial demand for high school labor pushes their average wage to just below the adult minimum wage.
These same people will also say "these minimum wage jobs are for people just entering the workforce, not people in their 30s/40s etc."
Pretty easily. Once you consider how productive an even below-average worker is in the US, the idea of running a business so poorly that you can’t make bank while paying somebody a living wage seems pretty embarrassing.
While the “teenager” line is often vilified as a sign of unfettered greed (which it is), in my experience it’s been more of the respite of folks with so little business sense that it boggles the mind that they would be an employer.
I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business” out loud with a straight face, there are some folks that gleefully proclaim stuff like that as if they’re talking about something other than themselves
> I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business”
An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn. This isn't tolerated by a lot of modern business philosophy so the jobs and industries that work like this increasingly just don't exist in the US.
Yes. It is an employer’s responsibility to train or fire employees that are harmful to the business. If they can’t manage to do that, that’s a failure to operate the business at the most basic level.
Insisting that there exists x or y groups of employees that intrinsically deserve to be paid less than a living wage is tantamount to asserting that an employer or manager is entitled to have their planned failure to operate the business subsidized by that same group that they insist on hiring.
Again, it’s not just greed behind the “[teenagers]* don’t deserve a living wage” spiel. It also tends to expose laziness, lack of imagination, entitlement, an active disdain for work, a lack of grasp on business fundamentals, etc. In other words, a lack of the bare minimum aspects of intellectual capacity and discipline necessary in somebody tasked with employing people
* it is not uncommon to see “teenagers” replaced with all manner of groups that any incompetent manager or employer might foist the responsibility for their failures upon. There is nothing special about them as a group
Fine to argue for a higher wage or EITC or whatever but it's goofy to pretend that people are trying to survive on the federal minimum wage. Nobody is, anyone offered $7.25/hr for a job would laugh in their face and get a different job.
If virtually no one earns $7.25/hr and employers wouldn't dream of offering it, then why not just raise the federal minimum to $12?
If it’s truly irrelevant, then it won’t affect anyone -workers won’t be hurt, and businesses won’t be forced to pay more than they already do. Seems like a win-win, right?
There's never political will to lower the wage even if economic conditions call for it. There's no benefit to raising the wage now, but there's inevitably a big cost in a few years.
source please
> Nearly 8 in 10 workers earning the minimum wage or less in 2023 were employed in service occupations, mostly in food preparation and serving-related jobs. For many of these workers, tips may supplement the hourly wages received. (See table 4.)
There's a long tail but you can start with 80% of that 1% getting tips in food service.
Low paid work is a gateway out of poverty, certainly compared to not having work at all.
I don't mean to argue here against a minimum entirely, but we shouldn't lose sight of that fact that it is just that: a minimum. And a minimum impinges both your right to work as well as it does someone's right to employ you.
The bare minimum standard we should hold ourselves to is that a 40 hour work week should be able to put a roof over your head and food on your table. The fact that the minimum wage is continuously supressed is absurd.
Absolutely, but it seems to me that as long as companies have A) the option to not hire people and/or B) ways to side-step minimum wage with non-US labor, minimum wage won't achieve that goal for everyone. It will enable the goal for a few and the rest will have a 0 hour work week and a harder time getting any type of job.
But there's the other side of the question - why is a roof over your head and food on your table getting so expensive? That's what needs to be addressed. High rent/housing/food costs prevent cheap labor. There's no point in raising minimum wage to $20/hr if the price of food and rent keeps going up.
davisr•3h ago
"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt