Brewha wrote:With a mean income of around $10 an hour short order cooks are a bit outside the conversation of the current minimum wage, perhaps. But at least we know why the prepackage and hastily prepared foods we get at Denny's and the waffle house are so poor. And in truth there is very little food in the food they serve.
But should the government subsidize the wages of a waffle House worker?
It doesn't matter how you slice it, people who work a full-time job have minimum requirements for money in order to live. And when those needs aren't met the government winds up subsidizing them. Like it or not we still pay for the waffles. And the owner of the franchise gets as many vacations to Bimini as he wants.
Fine then, survival of the fittest. Let the man of average intelligence and less go hungry. But I would remind you of what Alfred Hitchcock said; man's inhumanity towards men breeds countless more in humanities.
I'm always curious about the "minimum requirements for money in order to live". But regardless, I'm assuming based on your statement that your rationale for the minimum wage is that everyone needs to be payed an hourly wage which is sufficient to support them. That's an easy enough answer, then you need to set the minimum wage to a value which provides an annual salary at the welfare level. If we establish anyone below that level requires gov't assistance, then that is the level at which one is paid enough to live. A good measure of that is the EITC. If someone is below the EITC level, the government will give them $$. Interestingly, for a single individual, as long as you are earning 7.50$ an hour, (15k annual) you will not qualify for EITC. If you want our national minimum wage to actually support children, then you need to set it to approximately 20$ (40k annual).
So what does that do? think of the sort of impact that will have on education.
If your lowest common denominator can earn 40k annually straight out of high school, while your average joe goes to college and spends money on tuition, what does the first 4 years look like?
Lowest common denominator: 4 years @ 40k - 160k earned
Average joe: 4 years @ -20k - (80k) lost
Just getting out of college, your average guy is a quarter million behind the absolute laziest of us in lifetime earnings. How long will it take him to catch up with our lowest common denominator? Assuming our laziest and stupidest remains so, it will only take approximately a decade before our average guy is actually starting to earn money above their investment in time/money in their education.
However, Average guy, being average may do that calculation themselves. They may say "hey, because the government is forcing companies to pay so much for completely unskilled labor, it's going to take me a decade to overcome my initial investment in education. What if I spent that time instead working, and just worked my way up the walmart chain of command. If I start at a 40k/year stockboy, maybe in 10 years I could be a 60k/year manager"... suddenly it takes longer than 10 years to overcome that deficit, the math for an education is no longer as strong.
My point is that if you narrow the income gap between skilled labor, and unskilled labor you take away the incentive to be skilled. Hell, current average income for college educated (bachelors) individuals is a paltry 43k annually. That's barely more than $20/hr. If you want to pay a stockboy who can't add the same amount, then why would I go get educated?
If you want to hedge, and say that you just want to pay them more, but not a full living wage, then you're not actually solving any problem.