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An article in Australian newspaper The Age describes a paper just released by the Reserve Bank of Australia which has found that periodic increases in the Minimum Wage (also known as the "Award" wage in Australia) did not negatively affect the level of employment in each respective industry:
The paper, published by the central bank's economic research department on the final day the Fair Work Commission hearings had to decide if 2.3 million Australians will get a pay rise in July, found "no evidence that small, incremental increases in award wages had an adverse effect on hours worked or the job destruction rate".
It used a sample of 32,000 jobs between 1998 and 2008, when award wages were increased by a flat dollar amount each year, to find jobs with larger award wage rises had larger increases in hours worked than jobs experiencing a smaller award wage rise.
"I am able to rule out adverse effects on hours worked. I also find that award wage increases do not have a statistically significant effect on the job destruction rate," said researcher James Bishop.
"If anything, the point estimates suggest that the job destruction rate actually declines when the award wage is increased."
[...] The RBA paper said their results may not "necessarily generalise to large, unanticipated changes in award wages", cautioned it only included adult positions, and that the consequences of wage increases may "be borne by job seekers, rather than job holders".
"There will always be some point at which a minimum wage adjustment will begin to reduce employment," the paper stated.
Naturally, this is proving problematic for some politicians who have been advocating against increases in the minimum wage due to fears that this will harm business.
Link to Abstract and Paper (pdf).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday May 18 2018, @04:15AM (46 children)
The "minimum wage" is a lie. The premise is defective. What these laws do is simply declare that any labor worth less than X must not be done by anyone covered by the law. So it must be performed by illegals, robots or oursourced to somewhere labor is available at the price it is worth. Which would result in riots in the streets without the massive welfare state to prevent those thrown out of gainful employment with the basics of life... at the cost of their human dignity and any hope of ever advancing to higher paying jobs.
Notice also what has happened to entry to the job market as minimum wage and other burdensome labor laws have became ever more onerous. See many kids with summer jobs lined up right now as the school year draws to a close? How about minority employment? Notice how it has become a "chronic" "unsolvable" problem for all except the illegals who can work below the minimum?
The very premise of the minimum wage is defective. Every job should NOT pay a "living wage." There is nothing wrong with starting out at a job so crappy you either still live at home (usually a student) or have to have roomies. Having A job as early as possible is the important thing, learn and move up. If you are thirty and still working at Mickey D's it probably isn't because of "the system."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shortscreen on Friday May 18 2018, @04:41AM (16 children)
Kids can't find summer jobs because the burger joint is already staffed by thirty-year-olds?
So where are all the job openings that those thirty-year-olds were meant to "advance" into?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18 2018, @05:18AM (15 children)
The 30-somethings are working them both to make ends meet due to the problem of underemployment created by full- to part-time conversions increasing minimum wage and ever-increasing mandatory health insurance requirements for full-time workers. A full-time job requires benefits; splitting it into two part-time jobs is thus cheaper for the same number of man-hours.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 18 2018, @05:22AM (4 children)
So, is this actually a problem of the "minimum wage" or... is it caused by some other "distortions" in the economic reality of the place you consider?
Because if it is the latter, the fact that minimum wage is imposed or not is not going to solve the actual problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18 2018, @05:39AM
Oh, I'm one of those who thinks the minimum wage is bullshit. Both minimum wage and tipped wages are rooted in racism, too. Minimum wage increases are a form of class warfare.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Friday May 18 2018, @11:00AM (2 children)
Why go for straw man choice B when choice A is available? I think minimum wage itself causes many of the problems it's supposed to fix.
But of course, we still have choice A out there, meaning we need not arrive at this conclusion.
(Score: 5, Touché) by c0lo on Friday May 18 2018, @11:38AM (1 child)
Heh! khallow dixit ex cathedra: 'It's the minimum wage that is the root of all evil! That's an axiom you are not allowed to contest, I don't need to present any argument for it'.
The irony of it? He's doing it in spite of a research paper that shows the contrary.
Even more, he's doing it in the face of someone (me) who lives in the very country the study was made in and who directly experienced no problems with the existence of a minimum wage, its level and increase over time (actually over a period longer than the one the study draw it's data from)
Are you having an attack of 'Papal infallibility syndrome', khallow? You know, when you feel your decrees must .. mmm ... trump the reality?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Saturday May 19 2018, @01:31AM
Well, you are skilled at straw man arguments. My thinking however is that if your health issues are aggravated by some arsenic medicine you are taking (it doesn't have to cause the problems in the first place, let us note), then taking more of it is not going to improve things.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Friday May 18 2018, @06:57AM (9 children)
I thought you said the 30 somethings should be able to work for more than minimum wage. So why did the minimum wage affect that primary job? How will allowing their employer to pay them even less get them able to vacate that job at McD's so a teen can be abused instead?
As for healthcare, oddly enough the same people who oppose minimum wage also seem to oppose single-payer healthcare to relieve employers of the burden of providing insurance. They also seem to oppose measures to bring the cost of healthcare down so that insurance is less of a burden. Talk about a death panel.
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Friday May 18 2018, @11:51AM (8 children)
"Should"? Capability != obligation. Just because a 30 something chooses so doesn't mean I feel an obligation (much less "should" feel that way) to cripple my society to accommodate their lifestyle choices.
Why should that be a primary job? There is broken "thinking" here.
There are other possibilities, such as more jobs overall.
Who is paying for that? You won't be. It'll be the employer. Except that they have even less ability to control their costs than they do now.
What measures? Like inserting elective health care into insurance? Mandating coverage for everyone at the expense of well, expense?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18 2018, @06:10PM (1 child)
When will you stop sucking the government teat khallow? All these problems are a result of the violently imposed monopoly! OPEN YOUR EYE SOCKETS!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 19 2018, @01:32AM
I'm just as entitled to the government teat as the next parasite. Why are you such a communist!?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday May 19 2018, @07:45AM (1 child)
Considering the post of yours upthread I just replied to, that is hilarious to see. Enjoy the next few weeks relaxing in bed as your stumps heal!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 19 2018, @10:35AM
Huh? I don't see the relevance. The previous poster explicitly made the assertion that Ford had to pay enough that its workers could afford to buy a car. The obvious implication that the money is somehow going into buying Ford products and is large enough to be relevant to Ford's long term viability as a company. How's that going to work again?
But if one takes that to other industries like Walmart or a builder of pumps for hydroelectric power, we end up with absurd comparisons. Walmart needs to pay its employees enough that they can buy Twinkies or whatever, and that other business needs to pay its employees enough that they can build their own large hydroelectric dams, right?
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday May 21 2018, @06:06AM (3 children)
I think it's instructive to explain how Health Care works in Australia (and, as far as I'm aware, most of the rest of the developed world).
In Australia, your employer has no responsibility to provide you with health care. However, workers (particularly low level ones) are paid a higher wage than is typical for the US. It's then up to you whether to use that 'extra' money to pay for individual private health insurance, or rely on free public health care. The government strongly encourages people to take up private health care through tax incentives etc, but it's an individual choice. Individual health care does not need to compete against company-sponsored health plans (along with the relative risk profiles of the individuals who make up each), so the effect seen in the US (very high health care costs for individuals) are typically not experienced. Instead, the Australian model is closer to a market with a high level of competition between each different health care provider - all who need to offer some form of value for money if they are to convince people to sign up rather than take free health care.
The system is far from perfect, however it's a hell of a lot better than the utterly broken US system you have today. It's also closer to Capitalism than the US model - you dirty commies!
Fun fact - travel insurance plans here have a number of tiers, depending on the countries you plan on visiting. The second-most expensive plan is basically "everywhere except the US" and is a lot cheaper than the plan for those travelling to the US. Foreigners travelling to the US pay way more for health insurance than anywhere else in the world
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 21 2018, @01:49PM (2 children)
Keep in mind that health care costs have significantly outpaced GDP growth universally throughout the developed world. Getting health care is too frequently elevated to the status of a human right while paying for that health care is never elevated to a human obligation.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday May 21 2018, @11:08PM (1 child)
Except the US's health care costs have been massively higher than the rest of the world for decades.
You are correct that the world is about to hit a nasty health care bump as the Baby Boomers start to fall apart. However, I don't agree with your assertion that the rest of the world will see US-style pricing.
The problem is that the US government makes no attempt to look after its citizens' health care needs, unlike other countries which actually care about providing affordable health care to their populace. As a result, health providers in the US can hold a metaphorical gun to the heads of everyone.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:23AM
How is that an "exception" to my observation that health care costs have universally outpaced GDP throughout the developed world? Answer: it is not.
You have a reason? I'm not making this up [oecd.org]. My view is that these countries are still in a superlinear (that is, faster than linear growth) part of the logistics curve for health care spending as a fraction of GDP.
Which is outright false. The US has a variety of such programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veteran Affairs hospitals. The federal government spends [oecd.org] more on health care per capita than all but three countries do (Norway, Luxembourg, and Switzerland).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday May 18 2018, @05:19AM (5 children)
Huh!
In spite of the "theory" above, the practice in other countries show that nothing wrong happens to the society if you do have minimum wage requirements.
So, why should I reject it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Friday May 18 2018, @12:18PM (4 children)
Except for the poor getting poorer. Let us keep in mind that the predicted harm of minimum wage is expected to hit the poorest of society, and well, the fact that the poorest of society are that poor, is the excuse for minimum wage in the first place.
This is just an economic shell game. We might not know how you'll get conned because the game can be rigged in clever ways. But the laws of supply and demand didn't get suspended. Raise the cost of labor (notice that minimum wage specifically increases the cost of employing the poorest of society!) and the demand for it will go down.
My bet here is that we already are seeing problems of high minimum wages, such as increased migration from low cost-of-living areas (which also happen to be low wage areas) to high cost-of-living areas. But they are conveniently invisible to those who perform these studies.
I have a standing prediction [soylentnews.org] that if California successfully raises its minimum wage to $15 per hour, Fresno will within a few years see population decline for the first time in its existence. Fresno unlike nearby San Jose has almost half of its workers working for less than $15 per hour. So a high minimum wage will inordinately affect Fresno compared to San Jose (and other high wage/cost-of-living areas).
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 18 2018, @01:01PM (1 child)
Did you mean places where the income inequality is increasing above the "morbidity" line?
You can sleep well on this account, there are countries in this world where this doesn’t happen and still nobody is a destitute
Lower the cost of labor enough and nobody can afford to buy your products.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 19 2018, @01:37AM
You can only do that by forcing people to work for little. In practice other people who offer more will get the labor that you're not paying for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18 2018, @01:36PM (1 child)
But the demand for labour isn't solely determined by its cost, but also by its necessity. If a company needs four people to fulfil all its orders, then four people must be employed. Of course, the cost of the final product may have to increase, but that does not necessarily mean that the number of orders, and thereby the number of people employed, will decrease - especially if the price increases and small and gradual.
Essentially, by raising the minimum wage, it is a wealth transfer from the customers of businesses which employ people at minimum wage, to the minimum-wage earners themselves. If 100% of a business' customers are minimum-wage earners, then there is next to zero net change in wealth distribution. But if even just one more-wealthy person is a customer, then those on minimum wage will increase in relative wealth.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 19 2018, @01:35AM
In other words, we have here the claim that enough of the labor market is inelastic that we can squeeze employers for more money. But in practice, what do we see? Why massive moves to cheaper areas every time such a squeeze happens. Off-shoring and automation wouldn't happen at such high adoption rates, if labor markets were strongly inelastic.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday May 18 2018, @05:29AM (12 children)
Or it may mean that no paid labor is worth doing for less than that.
And I see absolutely no fault of accepting this as a premise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday May 18 2018, @06:26AM (5 children)
Well then don't do it. You do you. The question at hand is who chooses? Or more important, who claims the right to choose for you and on what basis. Seems the only rational basis for somebody making decisions for another is an implied presumption that they who decide are superior to you who are being forced to accept their preference. I reject that premise, even though I also reject Democracy btw. But if you don't at least own you to the point you can agree or not agree to work for a wage (or other compensation) you and a willing buyer of your labor agree to then you can't really say you own you. Whoever is deciding owns you. And by your agreement you are assenting to their ownership of you, which again is OK if that is what you need to do to be you... and it is OK with your owner. But if you or anybody else asserts a claim of owning me I kinda get these primal violent urges. Because that is me being me, not wanting to be somebody's bitch.
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Friday May 18 2018, @06:46AM (3 children)
The reality of the cost of life in a country and the moral values chosen by the people in the country that country.
If the work does not pay enough for the replenishing of the energy resources you spend by doing it (by eating, resting, recreation, etc), you are going to die sooner or later. The people of the country may choose to not want to live in such a society, so they are shaping the society to their liking.
Yes, they'll each sacrifice something in return for their choice, but it is still their choice
You don't like it, you move from there, not force what you like on them.
Rational enough for you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by qzm on Friday May 18 2018, @08:10AM (1 child)
Do you know that what you just said is 'nobody who does not maintain my chosen level of lifestyle has any value' right?
That's a pretty damn bad way to view others you know
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 18 2018, @08:15AM
Rephrase, please. It may be only that's Friday evening, or it may be that I'm denser than you'd expect no matter when, but I'm failing to understand: "nobody who does not maintain my chosen level of lifestyle has any value".
Too many negations for me to follow, you see?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 18 2018, @12:24PM
"IF". It does in low cost-of-living areas. But minimum wage is one-size-fits-all. Funny how that works.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18 2018, @06:18PM
We get it ok!??! You want to run your own little company town and play Lord Fucktard all day. Sadly for you the rest of us figured out we can create laws and force you to play nice. Your irritation at "claim of owning me" is very amusing, and your naivety about how minimum wage decreases people "owning" people is pretty fucking clear.
Irony levels at 999% cap'n!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 18 2018, @12:21PM (5 children)
The "we didn't need those jobs anyway" argument. Why is it your place to decide what jobs are worth doing?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 18 2018, @01:14PM (4 children)
Why should be you to decide there are jobs that, to work in them, one need to lose money for every hour you are working in such a job?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 19 2018, @01:38AM (3 children)
Sorry, that's stupid. If someone is losing money in a job, then they won't do it. It's not complicated.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mykl on Monday May 21 2018, @06:16AM (2 children)
Interns.
People will put up with slave-like conditions on the promise of a better life later. Sadly, this often turns out to not be the case, and these people end up trapped in an economic death-spiral.
Minimum Wage helps to avoid these traps, and ensures that the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs [wikipedia.org] are met, providing the opportunity for everyone to aspire to greater things rather than being trapped by circumstance.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 21 2018, @01:15PM
Amazing how adding "economic" in front of the word neuters it.
Not at all, since unpaid internships and unemployment exists even in the presence of a minimum wage.
Except where it has the opposite effect. Encouraging people to living in expensive cities just to have a minimum wage job is not meeting needs.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 21 2018, @02:28PM
In other words, they expect a lot more from the effort than merely something to do for a few months. It's a gamble, thus, doesn't always work out. So what?
Another problem with this assertion is that somehow one can only gamble once. Let us keep in mind that one can still get a regular job. An internship is still useful work experience. And sorry, the kind of people who do internships are nowhere near poverty level. They might be behind a little in wages to someone who didn't bother with the internship, but they're not "death spiraling".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18 2018, @05:33AM (2 children)
What does being, or not being, a wage slave have to do with human dignity? For that matter, what is human dignity in the first place?
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Friday May 18 2018, @06:28AM (1 child)
It is about earning one's daily bread vs being a charity case. Its a free man thing, you probably wouldn't understand. Go from our company and may your chains rest lightly upon ye.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18 2018, @09:31PM
More cuteness! Today is a great day for schadenfreude!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18 2018, @08:24AM (1 child)
Jmorris is a lie. Jmorris is defective. He only says these things because he cannot even make minimum wage, since all the Mexicans and Haitians, and Syrians, and Irish take jobs away from him, since they work harder than him and actually show up when they say they will, instead of having to post rants on gab, and thus have to call in sick, literally, on a regular basis. Jmorris is a lie.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 18 2018, @06:20PM
And here I thought he was an honest douche. TIL
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday May 18 2018, @09:04PM (4 children)
Let's say for the sake of argument that workers are a commodity like any other, morally identical to other stuff businesses need. Now, like all commodities, they have to be produced and maintained, or they will fall apart. That means that their proper price is the price of production and maintenance, amortized over their lifetime, just like any other capital good. The price of production is going to be the cost of keeping them alive when they're too young to work, plus the cost of educating said youngster to the point where they're capable of doing the job we need them to do. Maintenance, of course, would be the cost of keeping them alive once they've reached working age. And since we're treating them like commodities, once they can't work we're going to give them a heroin overdose or something so we don't have to worry about paying for their continued existence after retirement. Since the cost of producing and maintaining humans is not zero, there must be some earnings higher than zero that would accurately reflect all those costs.
Using current numbers: Federal poverty line calculates that it costs at minimum a little over $12K to maintain an adult, and $4K to maintain a child, so assuming we start putting kids into the workforce at age 12 and we'll be killing them when they retire at age 70, that means each worker needs $976K of lifetime earnings in today's dollars (58 working years at the adult rate, 12 non-working years at the child rate). Divide that by 58 working years, 52 working weeks, and 40 hours per work week, and you end up at around $8.10 per hour. If you're paying less than that, then you're going to have workers falling apart before they're 70 because they haven't been properly maintained, which reduces the length of time each worker can work, which means that the hourly cost of producing/maintaining them goes up because the initial stage where they can't work is a higher proportion of the cost. Also worth mentioning is that that's a nationwide number, and the numbers could be substantially different based on which state and municipality you are in.
So how do the wages lower than that get paid for? 1. By throwing people out early (e.g. they get sick and die, or are deported). 2. By discouraging people from producing more workers (i.e. having children). 3. By passing the cost onto somebody else, like the workers' family. But these are a market inefficiency, and adding a regulation to correct said inefficiency is not unreasonable.
And again, all of that is ignoring morality completely, since morality says that killing grandma and sending children to work in the factory is wrong, both of which increase the minimum wage calculations involved.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @12:14AM
Something you didn't factor in is that inflation doubles prices about once a generation, so that's at least a 4x increase in living expenses by the time you get old.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 21 2018, @02:15PM (2 children)
Where? It doesn't cost me that much, but I live in a place with low cost of living. A key part of the problem is one-size-fits-all. You will have very different costs of living if you're in downtown San Jose rather than the outskirts of Fresno (cities in California). Yet California policy makers choose to have the same minimum wage for each place (California is planning state-wide increases in minimum wage that will result in $15 per hour minimum wage by 2022).
Or by standard marginal utility. For example, a high school student is already paid for. So wages "lower than that" aren't necessary for the student's survival. If you already work a job that pays the bills, but want a little extra spending money, then gig economy jobs can help.
And we ignore here that things like minimum wage aggravate the problems they are alleged to fix. Cost of living won't go down when minimum wage increases labor costs.
I think what's worse about this thread is the utterly stupid morality arguments. It's quite clear you haven't thought about this in the least. A key problem here is that minimum wage doesn't fix the problems that it's supposed to fix - most particularly, increasing the ratio of wages to living costs for low wage workers. The products they need are heavily dependent on low wage workers. So every time, you increase minimum wage, you increase the costs that you're trying to outpace. It doesn't work - and that's even before the social contortions that incentivize low wage workers move to high cost of living areas.
My view is that minimum wage is a net harm. It either has little effect, when it is already near the effective minimum wage of the labor market, or significant harm, when it is much higher. It would be much better to simply not force businesses to deal with the regulation in the first place. That would actually widen the spread between wages and cost of living.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday May 21 2018, @03:23PM (1 child)
You are arguing that there should be no minimum wage whatsoever, not that the minimum wage in Fresno should be different than the minimum wage in San Jose. The fact that there is a non-zero cost of living in the outskirts of Fresno means that the minimum wage in Fresno should be capable of supporting an adult in Fresno.
You seem to be operating under the incorrect assumption that the reason high school students go into the work force is because they choose to because they want extra cash on hand to take their girlfriend to the movies or something. A lot of 16-year-olds start working primarily to help their families pay the rent, or because they have kids of their own they need to support, or because it allows them (and possibly a younger sibling or two) to escape an abusive parent. All of which are situations in which those teenaged workers are not "already paid for".
And here again you made the same mistake. Your Uber driver is probably not doing that gig because they want a bit of extra beer money. There's a substantial chance that they're driving for Uber because it's the only job they can get, or the job they already have doesn't pay the rent.
Do you have any evidence at all for that claim? 2 factors that could easily undermine it:
1. Prices on essential goods (housing, food, clothing health care, utilities) can and do increase completely independent of minimum wage increases. So you will need more than "minimum wage went up, and at approximately the same time rents went up" to prove that claim.
2. Even if your employers post-minimum wage pass the entire cost of the minimum wage increase onto the consumer in prices (which they may or may not do, because price increases will tend to reduce sales volume, per the Law of Demand), that cost is distributed over all the products those workers are involved in producing and distributing. For instance, if you increase minimum wage $1 per hour, and you have 5 people working a shift at Bob's Burger World, and Bob's typically sells 100 burgers an hour, then the entire cost of the minimum wage increase was a nickel per burger, which is not enough to outweigh the value of the minimum wage increase to the workers.
And you utterly failed to address the crux of my argument, which is that businesses employing low-wage workers have no inherent incentive to pay for the entire costs of those workers' survival whenever they can easily replace workers. Ergo, it's a system designed to use up workers as quickly as possible whenever possible.
I'll accept the elimination of the minimum wage in exchange for a universal basic income funded primarily by taxes on the wealthy. Until then, it's an absolute necessity.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 21 2018, @08:15PM
While that is true, it is irrelevant. You threw a universal number out without context. I pointed out the obvious flaw with the argument.
Why? A person isn't going to work for less than that.
I disagree on your interpretation of those scenarios. The first might be relatively common, but it's still a case of the young adult adding additional revenue to what is already sustainable. The other two are so rare as to be inappropriate for deciding universal policy. Moving on.
Calling an opinion a mistake doesn't make it one. I agree that there are hard luck cases out there. I disagree that minimum wage helps them, particularly given the harm it does to the rest of us.
This is the same pattern as was present in your bald mention of the federal poverty line. Because a nebulous, small number of people have problems we need this huge over-reaching policy. One-size-fits-all.
Are you really trying to claim that labor is not a cost for an employer? Particularly the many employers who go through a great deal of effort to reduce the amount of labor they employ? Or is this merely a fallacy argument to say that one doesn't need to consider a fact because the other side can't provide an arbitrary level of "evidence" for that fact?
I disagree. They have an inherent incentive to pay workers enough that they don't leave for other employers. After all, if only the interests of the employer mattered, then no job would ever pay above the absolute minimum that an employer was required to pay. Instead we see plenty of work which is way above minimum wage.
Moving on, we have this tidbit from earlier in the thread:
Ignoring here that you are mixing two different categories, commodity and capital good, we still have the issue that workers can improve themselves, own themselves, and have tremendous freedom of action. That makes them very different from any other commodity or capital good. And the early years maintenance argument is laughable. By the time the worker comes to the employer, the prior costs of raising and educating that worker are sunk costs - which would have been paid anyway.
Minimum wage does nothing to address that. Nor should it. The employer didn't have a say in those processes and is merely paying for present work. Further, such things are notorious for being grossly inefficient. If society or their parents want a shiny youth, then they should pay for it themselves. This is a standard part of markets that gets roundly ignored. People spend money on what they want. When they're spending other peoples' money rather than their own, then it's a strong indication that they don't really value the thing they're purchasing.