If you want the government to "take care of it citizens", what we actually need is a floor on income (eg. welfare/UBI), not a floor on wages (ie. minimum wage). Minimum wage does nothing for people who are unemployed, of which it's inevitably going to exacerbate.
> Minimum wage does nothing for people who are unemployed, of which it's inevitably going to exacerbate.
Yet more "privatize profits, socialize the costs".
Minimum wage has always trailed living wage. Often by a decade plus. It's always in arrears that it is updated (and several of the last updates have been further and further apart).
Businesses have been able to pay people less than liveable wages, and then when there's an attempt at parity, they scream about how unfair it will be to that untouchable and sacrosanct pillar of American society, the Small Business Owner.
Except I don't recall reading anywhere that a business owner was entitled to profitability.
At a certain point, if your business can't afford to keep up with living wage needs, the solution is to close your doors, not advocate for underpaying people.
Hidden in this is an assumption is that everyone is more than more productive than the "living wage" (whatever that is). In a country that has high living costs and is facing competition from developing countries with far less living costs, I think it's fairly reasonable to say there's a non-negligible population where this assumption doesn't hold. What about those people? For them, raising the minimum wage to the living wage won't increase their income, it'd make it $0 because there's no point in hiring them.
>Yet more "privatize profits, socialize the costs".
You realize I explicitly mentioned "welfare/UBI" in my previous comment? Or do you somehow think it's bad for the government to forcibly transfer wealth by taxing people/companies and then distributing through welfare/UBI, but it's somehow okay for the government to forcibly transfer wealth by mandating that companies pay their workers more?
