Re: Raising Minimum Wage to $12 by 2020 Would Lift Wages for 35 Million American Work
Your argument, though well put, is way off base. The Depression Era is of absolutely no relevance whatsoever economically to the US presently, except to note that it was instigated by a frenzy on Wall Street - just as was the Great Recession of 2009/10.
First of all, your entire post completely sidesteps the points I raised. Both Marxism (and -isms like it) and MMT (and -isms like it), while very different from each other, are both very liberal schools of thought, and neither would be so obsessed with minimum wage legislation like today's liberals are. They would be asking the today's liberal why they are so obsessed with it and why they believe it to be some imperative that will save the American economy. They have other suggestions that do not require minimum wage legislation or other mindless arbitrary policies like many of those that seem to enthrall modern liberals.
It was your post that started with 'this was introduced in the 1930s' and 'we must continue to advance its cause.' That's why I point out that an 80 year old policy need not necessarily be maintained or advanced, because it may well cease to work as time goes on.
Poverty today is of quite a different order in that it is a permanent condition for about 50 million Americans given that the 15% level of population below the Poverty Threshold has existed since 1965, which is half a century ago.
Poverty as a permanent condition is not "quite different." How is it different? If anything it's different only in that living standards in poverty are higher today than way back when. A long time ago, poverty was dig-in-the-dirt poor. Today it's still dysfunctional and miserable relative to not-poverty, but not relative to the poverty of long-ago.
Let's just cut all the finagling with government subventions of minimum-wage earners, do away with them and simply boost the Minimum Wage to 12/15 dollars an hour.
Let's not. CBO guesstimates that raising it to a little over $9 might permanently eliminate 100,000 low wage jobs, yet raising it another dollar to $10 might eliminate 500,000, 5x the number as raising it to $9. If the CBO is even roughly accurate in that estimate, then what might we suppose could be the number of low wage jobs eliminated if it's raised to something like $15, as you're advocating?
I repeat as well: The rise in the minimum-wage if imposed across the country, WILL NOT trigger inflation.
Yet in a few sentences you're going to say it increases aggregate demand, which is associated with inflation. If more people are spending more dollars, prices will rise.
The beneficial aspect is that with more money in their pocket, and since those below the Poverty Threshold spend almost 100% of their earnings, people will spend it - so it will translate directly into a boost of overall Demand.
Which cannot but help the economy by instigating increased sales of goods and services.
It is all goodness ... !
It really isn't, no economic policy is. There is collateral damage and you don't want to acknowledge it. Low wage jobs
are phased out, eliminated, consolidated, and that trend will accelerate if minimum wage is doubled like you're advocating.
Last thing I'll s
