Quote:
Originally Posted by Raavak
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Increasing minimum wage doesn't increase the amount of money available to pay people, so the whole concept sucks. And Econ 101 shows us that minimum wage causes a surplus in available labor. Its nothing more than a political ploy... it works because most people don't understand the concept in my first sentence. All money comes from Obama's stash, amirite?
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As much as economics loves to pretend it's a real science up there with physics and chemistry, in reality it's just a filthy fucking mongrel somewhere between the other social sciences and real ones. So I wouldn't put much stock in some symbolic assessment of how they think minimum wage interacts with pure, hypothetical, or historical systems that are muddled with variables and complexities they are wholly incapable of properly accounting for.
Many of the economies who do far better than us (Not larger,
better: Less inequality and poverty, more happiness and social mobility, higher per capita wealth) have dramatically higher wages for even their most unskilled workers, along with lower unemployment.
Part of the idea is to put cash back in the hands of perennially cash-strapped Americans who, in the last decade, have watched wages shrink and economic opportunity decline. People without money can't buy homes, or any of the other innumerable horseshit that drives our pig economy. (Note that one of the factors leading up to the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007 was the sustained, astronomical increase in the price of petroleum that sucked absurd amounts of cash out of every family and business in the United States, and catalyzed the crash like a needle popping a bubble).
This is one of the reasons the Obama and Bush administrations have pushed (ineffectually) to reduce oil consumption. It's because the moment our economy starts booming again, we will see a commensurate increase in the price and consumption of petroleum that will temper economic growth and act as a 'soft cap' on the extent to which our economy can thrive. We're lucky domestic production has increased so much, but it won't do much good in the long run.