Should the minimum wage be abolished? Or else, if you believe it doesn't increase teenage unemployment, should the minimum wage be $100? per hour?

[Adaeva]

Updates

+1 y

Only 2 people that responded are capable of logical reasoning.
If a higher minimum wage didn't cause higher employment, why not make it $100?
A $100 minimum wage would result in 94% employment because only people worth $100 an hour would be employed.
At $50, 78% would be unemployed
at $25, 44% would be unemployed
at $12.50, 14% would be unemployed.
At $7.50, 6% are unemployed. (Mostly teenagers without work experience.)

Updates

+1 y

Correction, *A $100 minimum wage would result in 94% employment.
I intended to say, A $100 minimum wage would result in 94% unemployment.

[PositiveFlight]

Basic economics says that if you increase cost for labor to produce goods and services, the cost of doing business then increases, which translates to the end-user having to pay more in order to procure goods and services. So in essence, you have an over inflated price on everything from food, commodities, housing, services, etc. So sure, raise the minimum wage to $100 per hour and watch a gallon of milk increase to $30 or $40 per gallon. In essence what you’ve done is negate the wage increase by now having to pay more for every needed item and service. Or worse, just get laid off completely because the company in order to survive will have to become more efficient by paying less. Most employees don’t realize that for every dollar a company withholds from an employee in payroll taxes, the company must match that amount. The government gets to double dip, aka double commit theft of one’s money as well as the company. Trust me, most small and medium size businesses are not the enemy of the employees. The real enemy is the government. Both employee and employer share a common enemy, the government!

Honestly, government should have never been involved in dictating a minimum wage, or any other payment benefits. Are people so inept and incapable that they can’t negotiate for themselves what they want in exchange for their labor? Why do we need a government babysitter and micromanager? If a person truly possesses a skillset or even just some basic value of being willing to work and produce, economics dictate that they will be hired for a fair wage. For those wanting to make $100 an hour, develop a unique skillset that constitutes and justifies truly $100 an hour or more! Even better, make the sky the limit and start your own business venture. Make as much money as you desire. Success, taking risk, and working hard should never be punished!

But simply just showing up and gracing everyone with your presence does not entitle you to even $1 an hour, let alone an arbitrary sum of money the government dictates!

[shortster]

Definitely, the minimum wage is a barrier to employment.

[Varanus]

Minimum wage should be set by region based on the cost of living. Rent should be no more than about a third of your income, so take the median 1 bedroom apartment in the area, multiply by 3, and that's what minimum wage for a full-time job should be tied to, in my opinion. Maybe that's $15/hr in Kansas, maybe that's $35/hr in NYC.

If minimum wage had kept up with inflation, it would be $21-25/hr today, depending on the source you look at. We pay low-wage workers 40% less than we did 50 years ago. Would raising the minimum wage to a sane level cause some products to be a little more expensive? Yeah. But not as much as the fearmongers claim. Would it make all the jobs vanish? No. Companies still need workers, and they're all in the same boat if wage costs rise across the board. There are limits where you start putting lots of companies out of business, but we're waaaaay too far on the other extreme right now, and anyone telling you otherwise is trying to profit off of wage-slavery.

The question is, do we want to live in a country where 90+% of people are destitute while 1% of people make tens of billions? Or would we rather live in a country where most people have enough to live a modest life, while the top 1% make hundreds of millions?

[D_Bone_Steak]

Every logical person is going to see that driving up the price of hiring a toilet-cleaning trash man that also serves food is going to make their rent even more expensive.

Their pay would be sufficient and worth just as much as it was for the boomers, but what have we changed since then? If you haven't walked into an apartment filled with 12 south Americans sleeping all over the place and getting paid tax-free and sending all the money home... then you have no real idea what I'm even talking about. Your kid, can't get that shit job because those guys are cheaper.

I've been on this earth for so long that I've watched the position the liberals took get switched with the conservatives. Now the other side wants to build a wall and the other side is like "but who will clean my toilet." The old conservative talking point was that cheap labor makes your vegetables cheaper. The new liberal argument is something like "you're racist." (Let them vote for us with no ID requirements)

Until you people make up your minds about what you really want... your kids will serve me hamburgers at their fancy food service jobs. Yeah... that boy should probably have a carpenter job by now... but you've replaced him with people that don't give a fuck about you or paying into your social security. Enjoy not getting to kick back and relax and work your ass off until your dead now. Have a fucking cheeseburger. Enjoy it while it lasts.

[Glyn54]

The USA is a bit backward in this respect and many people are underpaid in the USA.
If you have to rely on tips in order to be anble to survive then you are being underpaid.
In australia we have a minimum wage which is much higher than hat in the USA but it's still too low.
However,
people under the age of 18 CAN be paid lower wages than someone who is over the age of 18. That is done to make it easier to employed young people - eg in fast food restaurants. In these restaurants the food is (relatively) cheap and I think they need to pay lower wages to keep their costs down to be able to supply their junk food at a "reasonable" cost. I don't eat this type of food but lots of other people do.
The USA should abolish tipping as a normal practice and you should tip ONLY if you beieve that you got exceptional service and you should pay the staff a wage that they can actually LIVE on.
many of the companies that want to underpoay their staff are also the same companies who make huge profits by exploitung their staff.

[FunkyMonkee]

Right!! Are you gonna work $100 worth every hour? I seriously doubt it!!
Okay, you get paid $100 an hour, that means that the company you work for HAS to dramatically raise their prices in order to be able to afford you! In order for people to BUY whatever your company makes, THEY, TOO have to get a nearly 100% raise in their wages to be able to buy it! If they don't, your company can't sell their product and that means they have to make cuts! Guess who's neck is on the chopping block? YOURS!! Or, they can no longer MAKE ANY money selling what they sell and they close up! You're out of a job!
Let's say that ALL those other companies pay their staff $100 an hour! That means they ALL HAVE to drastically raise their prices!! That means, you can't even go to the store and buy a candy bar for less than $75.00!! So, what have you solved? NOTHING! You've made the dollar COMPLETELY worthless (if it isn't already!!) and you STILL have to work just as hard and long to earn what you need to be able to buy that candy bar as you're working and earning right now!! You're right back where you are now except that, now, prices are fucking INSANE!!
6 years ago I had to pay $100 for a pair of ordinary work boots!! Shoes that SHOULDN'T cost more than about $60!! Hours ago, I was looking at a pair of Jesus sneakers... they want $105 FOR A PAIR OF SANDALS!!! I wouldn't pay more than $20 for something like that! THANK YOU, all you greedy bastards!!
Why don't you just get a JOB that already PAYS $100 an hour?
Minimum wage jobs are mostly just to see to it you get SOME money in your pockets until you can find something better! If you start out at $100 an hour (which NO ONE is gonna pay you for the kind of work minimum wage jobs do), there's nowhere to go!

[FunkyMonkee]

How do figure what you said is logic?

[abc3643]

No, the minimum wage should not be abolished.

Here is a fundamental fact of life:

>>> People will do whatever is necessary to survive and keep their family alive.

They will operate within the rules of society but, when forced with a choice of:

1) Obeying the rules and dying
OR
2) Disobeying the rules and surviving

they will always select Option 2 because 4 billion years of evolution outranks 12000 years of civilization. Thus, if a nontrivial fraction of the population faces that scenario, that will escalate crimes including violent crime or even revolutions.

For example, you need to learn about the Romanian Revolution and the present Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu received on Christmas Day 1989.

[Adaeva]

Obviously, the minimum wage should be abolished. No one working would be harmed by abolishing the minimum wage because wages are established by the employed, not the employer. That is because employees work for employers that pay the highest wages for their job. If you are foolish enough to believe employers set wages, tell the person that mows your lawn that you will only pay $20 for mowing your lawn. Moreover, tell your plumber, lawyer, and doctor, that you will only pay $10 an hour.

Minimum wage laws harm people, typically teenagers without work experience, that are worth less to employers than the minimum wage. That is because they cannot get hired until after they have more education or work experience, which is difficult to obtain because of the harmful minimum wage laws or more education.

[abc3643]

No, not obvious at all and you will understand that when you live on your own.

[Adaeva]

I don't need to live on my own to understand that a minimum wage increases unemployment. That is obvious because no employer hires people worth less to an employer than the minimum wage. The higher the minimum wage the more people there are that are employed. If that were not so, the minimum wage should be $100 an hour, and all employees would be wealthy. If the minimum wage was low enough, for example, $1 an hour, an amount that in modern, society no one would be willing to work, the minimum would not increase unemployment.

[Rei13]

Minimum wage isn’t all bad, there should be a minimum but it doesn’t have to be high. It should be just enough that you can support yourself if you’re frugal and it should be based on area where you live. I did it but the place I lived in was small (I lived in a studio apt that was an attic lol)/not ideal area (safe, just extremely inconvenient) and I couldn’t get all the things I wanted. Continually raising minimum wage just increases the costs for everything and makes companies hire less people. Every time they raised the minimum wage at my previous job they stopped replacing employees whenever they left and the remaining employees took on more work.

[Adaeva]

@Rei13 There is nothing good about the minimum wage. It is what politicians do to win votes. However, when the economy is good and there appear to be more job openings than people willing and able to fill them, the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is not bad because few people would be willing to work for less than $7.25 and almost all employed people earn more. However, when the economy is not good and there are far fewer job openings than people looking for jobs, the minimum wage increases unemployment. For example, many people would be willing to pay a baby sitter $4 or $5 an hour. However, they choose to stay at home or make other arrangements if they must pay minimum wage.

In the 1950s, when teenagers would work for less than fifty cents an hour [see "Back to Future"] most service gas stations were full service. The minimum wage laws put a stop to full-service gas stations because it was not profitable to hire teenagers at minimum wage salaries.

[Losalt]

If you don't want a minimum wage then the best alternative is strong unions like we have in Scandinavia where we use three way negotiations and laws against wages significantly below the agreements between the unions and employers organizations for any given field.
As a result we can have different "minimum wage" for different professions and for different regions, and it'll be adjusted regularly without involvement from the politicians and it may indeed be lowered if needed.

That said, with the union busting in the US minimum wages is required.
And up to a point it does actually increase employment.
People who might currently have two or more jobs simply work one full job instead and gets paid enough by that.

[Spongebobssocks]

No because we need avarage low pay workers for society to function. If you only hire the top percent that are worth that money there is a lot of avarage important work that isn't being done. Plus the more money people make the less it will be worth in value. (Talking about over all). So if the minimum wage is 100 usd/hour and we still have as many people working that will be worth almost nothing.

Society needs workers:) but its a very good question. You are very young and learning a lot thats great!

[Sour-rose]

Sooo just taking away the minimum wage would not be great. then down here in texas, we be getting paid $3 an hour. But also making it $100 an hour would make things even worse.

So hear me out, that sounds nice and all but i came back to my hometown and my mom used my $100 to pay the internet bill... even though I told her once we need to sign a petition to save the internet-she didn't care. So why care about paying the bill? The point is with more money, amercians will spend it on stupid shit. So much, they will put themselves in debt. So i believe keeping at where it's needed and leaving it alone, is for the best. Because ya know... the bigger money has value, the more everything goes up.

[Anonymous]

The minimum wage isn't even an issue. Not even 2% of the population work for minimum wage. Why? Because nobody would work for minimum wage but kids and maybe some working a second job. Wages are set by what people are willing to work for. That's why illegal immigration has effected the wages so much.

[Adaeva]

Based on the US Bureau of Labor & Statistics, 2% is correct. That is, 2% earn $7.25 per hour. Based on the Income Percentile Calculator for the United States 6% earn $7.25 per hour. Either way, you correctly understand, employees (not employers) determine wages. For the ignorant people that claim employers would set wages and take advantage of workers, let them tell their doctor, lawyer, plumber, or auto mechanic they will only pay them $20 an hour.

[KostasKouvalis]

Teenagers shouldn't be working in the first place. They should be having fun

$100 an hour would be AWSOME, though unrealistic. I think there should be a flat minimum wage, but it should be set by the federal government, not the states. And yes, I am aware some states have an extremely low cost of living. That's the point. I want to create a society where we have high wages, but low cost of living. I know it's gonna hurt us here in CA, but it would help a ton of people elsewhere. I don't know what determines cost of living to begin with. Your $100 per hour would be incredible! We'd all be living like gods, but that's unfeasable and actually a bad idea for many reasons

[Adaeva]

You can understand that, with a $100 minimum wage, people worth less than $100 would not be employed. However, if you are capable of logical reasoning, and most people are not, you would also understand that people worth less than minimum wage, especially black teenagers with no prior work experience, are not employed because they are worth less than minimum wage to employers.

People that lack logical reasoning, fail to understand that the minimum wage increased unemployment. That is because less than 5% of people looking for work are worth less than minimum wage and, in effect, that 5% is invisible to most people.

[KostasKouvalis]

That's fucking stupid.

[KostasKouvalis]

You think 94% of the population is worth $100 an hour? How did you even come to that conclusion, and what exactly determines what wage someone is worth?

[Adaeva]

Thank you for calling my attention to my mistake. I corrected the mistake with an update.

[KostasKouvalis]

Okay, that makes a lot more sense

[TomMarks]

Every time the minimum wage goes up, jobs are lost. Some businesses can’t afford to pay the higher rates and still operate at an acceptable level. The ones that do either raise prices or reduce costs (yes, employee wages are a cost to employers.) The rise in cost to businesses also translates to higher prices. Which means the new minimum still only affords the same as the prior one did, which creates a cycle of pushing more increases to wages that then increases prices more.

[Surely]

You need to get a history lesson on NAFTA. When the free trade agreement was signed. Many businesses packed up their companies and left the USA. Where they found cheaper labor. Even slave or child labor! That way they could keep their prices down and profits up.
So if you want to see even more companies leave the USA. Just make the minimum wage something ridiculous.
Profits come before workers!

[Surely]

@adaeva. Where did you acquire these figures?
You do know that figures don’t lie, but liars figure!

[Surely]

@adaeva. Gee follow Gag ers! I am sorry that I insulted your intelligence. My mistake.
Don’t we at least deserve an apology after your comment!

[jshm2]

The problem is businesses having to be strong armed to provide a minimum wage instead of a living wage. If you still don't get it, then you are the problem.

Your employer gets money for their products and services. They employ to make it possible for the role to get done. Therefore you are making them money. If they cannot pay you properly, then they are effectively engaging in slavery and labour theft.

[Fireguy17]

That would just be absurd.
No one would be able to afford anything.
Your burger at McDonald's would cost you 75 dollars.
Then the people with job skills would be paid 800 to 1500 dollars an hour.
It would just keep escalating.
You would end up using money for toilet paper because it cost less.

[goaded]

Nobody's suggesting $100 minimum wage, although if it had kept up with Wall Street bonuses, it would be $42, right now. The last increase was 14 years ago, when it was worth something like 30% more. Why not link the minimum wage to senator and representative wages. Easy!

[Anonymous]

All the States in blue think it should be lower many of them have cost of living that also say it should be lower.

If a minimum wage is to exist at all it must be local and reflect local cost of living as a result of other local polices. Its propose should be in no uncertain terms than to banish people unworthy of that wage from the community. That is what a minim wage law is, the banning of work deemed to low in value from an area.

[Anonymous]

$100 per hour? You realise hardly any business would employ anyone if they had to pay that. Not sure about other places, but where I live people are already losing their jobs and being replaced with self service and we are also on the way of being forced to be a cashless society because it's cheaper for businesses.

[purplepoppy]

Great idea because no matter how low you pay you'll always find someone to accept the wage. I say sack everyone and replace them with Mexicans on a dollar a day and make America great again.

[exitseven]

@purplepoppy That may sound like a good solution except the taxpayers have to subsidize them and all their kids. It becomes really expensive really fast.

[Adaeva]

No Mexican will work for $1 a day. Maybe a few Mexicans will work for less than $10 an hour. My father pays a Mexican and his helper$75 to mow, sweep, and edge our lawn and it doesn't take much over an hour.

[DextroShade]

$25/hour indexed to inflation forever. There won't be this massive unemployment rate either because that didn't happen when the minimum wage was first introduced. If companies have to pay more then they will raise prices just enough to compensate, but not enough make everything unaffordable.

[YesterdaysChild]

I can't believe all the draconian states that still have $7.25 an hour. That doesn't even pay for 2 gallons of gas where I live. Funny how California's minimum is twice that.

[Soteris]

The idea that there exists jobs where the employee can't reasonably live a life on the wage they are given is abhorrent to me. If a minimum wage eliminates that and nothing else improves, that in and of itself is a massive win in my books.

[Grond21]

It should be abolished. It has only hurt workers, despite the rhetoric to the contrary. If we wanted to be truly compassionate then it must end.

[WhitneySnow]

I totally couldn’t follow your update but the minimum wage in my state is fine with me (though I haven’t actually had a summer job yet; maybe next summer before college)

[Lokiion]

This isn’t logical now think about it if the minimum wage is $100 every things price will change and that $100 and hour is going to be like what minimum wage is now and if minimum wage is gone people will be paid even less

[genericname85]

i think minimum wage is what kills small businesses and hinders healthy market competition. in addition to this it dumps wages and causes inflation.

[Iron_Man]

Yes, make it $100 per hour for anybody that’s new to the job to start out with any age

[Anonymous]

I think we need to focus on driving costs back down to earth instead of bowing to inflation and bringing the bottom up. We’re on course to eliminate the middle class and revert back to the old days of the rich who own everything and the poor.

[DWornock]

Of course, the minimum wage should be abolished. It serves no useful purpose but it increase unemployment.

[zagor]

A minimum wage is needed to prevent a race to the bottom when the labor market is tough. The idea that it can't be too high is ridiculous; that would just unleash out-of-control inflation.

[zagor]

Unfortunately politicians use political expediency rather than logical reasoning when setting it.

[BigDog1989]

No, it shouldn't be abolished, but, it needs a new raise. The cost of living has gone up again. It should reflect that

[exitseven]

It should be raised but not to 100 dollars an hour but to some realistic number.

[Jerre]

$100 an hour? Guess if you want to pay $50 for a hamburger that’s ok. But seriously doubt most businesses could afford to pay that much.

[nawtee_me]

Compare the cost of living to their respective states and see which is really the best place.

[Fuentes]

Let's just get rid of Joe Biden and every leftist scum on earth.

[OfDeath]

Abolish the minimum wage and you end up with slavery.

[Anonymous]

The successful democrat states usually have high minimum wages.

[gorydetails]

Eliminate the minimum wage.

[MementoMori777]

I'll take the hundred dollars an hour 😂

[ChefPapiChulo]

What the fuck are you talking abour

[rigmarole]

Yes.

[AviatorTom]

No, and No.

[Anonymous]

No it shouldn't be abolished.

[noname9696]

Can I send u message

[Adaeva]

If you wish.

[noname9696]

I mean technically i can't

[Adaeva]

That doesn't make sense to me. Just click on my name and then click on Message. Moreover, to be certain that is possible, I clicked on your name, clicked on Message, and sent you the message "Hi!" Regardless, I'm certain that you can reply.

[noname9696]

I sent u message already u didn't notice