The last time the Democrats had a majority was in the 117th Congress. They introduced a minimum wage increase bill HR 603 with 202 cosponsors, not a single one Republican. If the Democrats have a slim majority, all it takes is for a few Democrats whose districts rely on votes from small business owners who don’t want to pay higher minimum wage during a pandemic when their business is shut down to stop it. Those small business owners vote, and their employees listen to people like you. If you vote for enough Democrats that aren’t in that position, of course it will pass. The messaging to the employees should be that if their Democratic representative isn’t meeting demands, they should primary them, not that they should let Republicans win.

Democrates have enough problems with out encouraging them to act like republicans.

Great, next time you have a majority, pass the increase.

Impossible. Can’t be done. You don’t understand how politics works.

Now donate $2028 to my reelection campaign or this Palestinian refugee gets shoved into a wood chipper.

Every state with a coastline already has laws guaranteeing beach access. https://beachapedia.org/File:Surfrider_2019_Beach_Access_Map.png

Hawai’i addressed this problem a long time ago. All of our beaches are considered public and, by law, there has to be free public access (including parking) to every stretch of seashore (that itsn’t on a military base). It’s wonderful, compared to where I once lived in Florida where they’d charge you like $20 just to access the “public” beach.

Yeah that’s not gonna happen. It makes too much sense. The Democrats need one feel good piece of legislation every decade to show the poor that they give a shit about them and raising minimum wage is that legislation.

For a short time, everyone gets fooled and thinks that Democrats actually give a shit about them. Meanwhile, for the next decade they just continue to fuck them in the ass until the next minimum wage increase they can pat themselves on the back.

I agree, we need to stop chasing a moving target. Instead, minimum wage needs to be adjusted every year to account for inflation.

Fun fact, the maximum amount you can donate to your congressmen is increased every year to account for inflation. So, we already have the formulas in place.

wealth tax is the only (nonviolent) means available to redistribute the mountain of wealth which has been extracted from the working class. if we can’t begin to claw back some economic ownership, inequality will grow forever until something breaks.

recommended anyone even remotely interested in wealth tax to check out Gary Stevenson on youtube.

Newsom is gearing up to veto California’s newest attempt

Wealth tax is kinda stupid because that just makes hiding all of your assets in a tax haven the default for rich people. Right now at least I believe most American billionaires are paying SOME tax in the US, because most nominally own some stuff in the US.

Actually closing the loopholes one can use to skirt existing taxes is actually more beneficial. And using your stock holdings as collateral for a loan should trigger a tax event, consider it realized gains. Also start taxing stock options when they’ve vested, not when the stock is sold (which might be never). When sold, the increase in value is also realized gains and should still be taxed too.

Can’t wait to hear all the people complaining about this because they’re already making $25 an hour.

Sort of the joke with these bills.

You live in a neighborhood where $30/hr is the functioning poverty line, due to rent and utilities prices skyrocketing. Inflation makes a mockery of a five year phase in for a modern minimum wage.

Why not simply tie wages to inflation off the bat? Or straight up public employment doing work the private sector no longer cares about?

I suspect Mamdani’s public run grocery store will end up paying more than $25/hr in wages by the time it goes live - two years before this wage bump comes into effect

Isn’t it weird how when billionaires make more money “a rising tide raises all boats”, but when the poorest make more money, suddenly there’s extreme resource scarcity?

It’s called “punching down economics”.

As someone that makes around $25, that’s still not even that much money. It definitely feels like a good minimum wage as I can afford my bills and food relatively easily (although it is getting harder as prices go up) but it’s still not really enough to make my life that much more comfortable than it was 5 years ago.

The only complaint I have is that I needed to work for 10 years in order to reach a wage of what would now be considered minimum wage. It’s always seemed like every increase in wages I have ever gotten has been a year or two too late conpared to how expensive everything is. When I was making $14 an hour the average house prices in my area were $100,000 to $300,000. Now that I’m making almost twice as much and could afford a house 8 years ago, house prices in my area average around $400,000 to $800,000 and sometimes over $1,000,000. It’s like I’ve been playing catch up since the day I was born. In my opinion, I should be making $30+ an hour.

Fix poverty and you’ll see a bunch of completely unrelated problems magically disappear.

Which is exactly why rich people love poverty so much. Revenue stream.

I’m making about that much and I’m sick of my bosses saying “well it’s a good wage”. I would have so much more ammo for a raise if it was the new minimum. Don’t understand people who don’t understand a rising tide.

Bucket crab ass mentality

By the time this passes we’ll need it to be $30/hr.

Hopefully this can pass and it’ll be tied to inflation.

A swift “well, don’t you think you’re worth more than that” can build many bridges

This is the way.

Quitting in this economy? That’s risky af.

Fuck, they could agree to recalculate every decade and it would still be an improvement.

It should be tied to congress’s salary. Every time they give themselves a pay rise, minimum wage increases proportionally. Also healthcare and pensions.

The comment above yours laid out the details in this bill which include automatic increases adjusting with the median national income. I think that’s about as good as it could get coming from the federal government You could loby your local/ state government for additional adjustments based on COL, something i could see happening in NY, California or other high COL places. At least I could have seen in the pre-weasel reality, but who knows on this hellsphere.

Nah mate that has a chance of working, can’t have that.

County could get far too complex. By state would be fine. If counties had a set size or population that would be more reasonable, but they don’t. In some states you can easily drive 3 counties over for a daily commute. In others it can take over an hour to drive out of 1 county. That alone will create inequities

inb4 gop uses this calculation to set the minimum wage to like $10

Or just abolish the wage system.

Make it illegal to pay a wage. Instead make it a calculation based on the company’s profits, split evenly by all employees.

If you indexed minwage to the local affordable housing costs, there might be more interest in building some.

Unfortunately Federal minimum wage is not going to do locality calculations, that has to come down to locality or state intervention. And thats not discounting the fact that a federal minimum is obviously going to have a direct hand in blanket changes

Yeah, that’s called a wealth tax or marginal tax rate. And we need that too. Only problem is that over half of America has been thoroughly brainwashed into believing that a wealth tax would “ruin the economy” because multiple conservative think tanks funded by billionaires has spent the last 4 decades propagandizing that belief into them.

No reason it has to be only one. Both is the correct answer

definitely.

pass laws that say highest paid employees can only make 10x what lowest paid employees can.

Or cap the multiplier that upper management make compared to the lowest employees and make it harder for companies to hire contractors instead of full time employees with benefits.

Rich people live off equity. Make them realize gains used as loan collateral!

if you receive tips from your job, instead of the $7.25/hr minimum wage, you can get paid as low as $2.13/hr

And yet some workers still fiercely defend it and will insist these rules stay in place. They’ve been brainwashed by the system to think they will somehow make less if subminimum is eliminated.

It’s why one Goodwill was at one point paying a guy $0.22/hr:

This is absolutely disgusting. Fuck that company. Selling donations at market rate and exploiting workers all while claiming nonprofit status. Like a true capitalist. If the company is non profit and they’re triple dipping on the merchandise and labor, where’s the money going?

Seems a lot goes to executive pay and “grants” to other Goodwill organizations I wonder how much of that grant money is used for salaries in those organizations.

The impact of higher minimum wage on prices is way less than most people think.
First thing is that wages is only a minor share of the price already, with obviously minimum wage work again being only a minor part of the total.
The total of minimum wage workers in most companies is less than what the management makes. Sometimes even less than just the CEO. Have you ever heard fear of inflation or that prices increase because the CEOs are overpaid?

I haven’t, probably because the narrative is driven by the 1%, and has little to do with real economics.

SIMPLE ANSWER: Companies would learn to accept lower profit.

There’s no goddamn good reason for companies to “need” 15, 20, 30% profit margins. And there’s zero justification for companies to assume (a) every year is a winner and (b) every year, we gotta grow.

Every dollar they keep in excess profit is a dollar they stole from you. That extra dollar increases prices, decreases the value of the money you DO get to earn, and increases the political power of the extremely wealthy people who already own the government.

As is tradition in economics, this is an idea someone had at some point, and has been touted as scientific fact and misapplied ever since (see also supply/demand curves, Jevon’s paradox, and so on). It has no basis in reality.

https://www.cato.org/commentary/wage-price-spiral-explanation-inflation-dangerous-myth

Here is an article from the Cato institute disagreeing with the wage-price spiral myth. This is from a libertarian think tank – even they don’t believe it! Of course the article has the usual economics drawback of basically just guesstimating a theory and never looking at any data. Because as soon as you do that you end up with conclusions like “the living standards of Cuba went up faster than those of comparable nations with a capitalist system, even without correcting for the immense blockade by the US” and no one wants to hear that sort of stuff.

The USA is a consumer economy.

Consumption is good. Higher wages, more consumption.

Businesses are ALWAYS raising prices, we’ve had 20 years with seven bucks an hour minimum, and that sure as Hell didn’t keep prices the same.

Well, regardless, prices increase while wages stagnate regardless, and the federal minimum wage does seem to drive the floor and by consequence probably a lot of the rest of that stagnation.

Doesn’t seem to me that it makes sense to peg a federal minimum wage that stays the same for long periods of time while also seeing “inflation” constantly drive prices up (I’m using inflation as a catch-all to sum up all flavors of price increase, not just what’s strictly meant by the term normally). It’s inconsistent - two sides of one coin, but somehow one keeps getting larger while the other remains unchanged…?

But beyond that, yes, you’re right, it’s no panacea of any kind, because the bigger problem is that all markets (including labor markets) are driven and in effect controlled by the largest players. They don’t have to collaborate and conspire directly, though of course being above the law they often happily do. But yeah, not necessary, by and large they merely have to act in their own self-interest to produce the system of advantages for them causing the accompanying monstrosities we see everywhere for everyone else (us).

Raising the minimum wage is good but it isn’t anything close to a solution, the spiraling problems keep spiraling. But remember, that’s constantly, always happening, in directed ways, regardless. Bad idea to worry over downstream effects of things that clearly help folks struggling the ~worst. Address the actual problem, leave those folks out of it, I say.

[Edit: if you’d like a real-time example of price changes and govt relief being solidly one-sided - watch what happens as companies fight for and receive the court-approved reversals of collected tariffs. You’ll see some token price decreases and a few more strident responses, I expect, but by and large companies will have raised their prices to keep their profit margins intact, having a hateable president to blame and garner acceptance among consumers - and then they’ll get back the money they did send for the tariffs, then keep prices high because that’s how it works when people accept new normals (and boyyy have we Americans proven great at accepting new normals). Then fund some campaigns/events/PACs/whatever with a slice of the money as thanks, keep the good times rollin.]

[Edit edit: looks like when this would take effect is spread out so long anyway that it just gives plenty of time to do what I’m describing and I guess you were worried about too maybe. Lovely.]

Payroll is only the fraction of the price for any product or service.

If you raise your payroll, it only raise the price for your product or service by the percentage of the payroll cost for your product or service.

So yes, things will cost more, but the employees pay will raise more than the price of the product or service, giving more buying power to the employees.

This is a really dumbed down explanation. There are other factors to consider when pricing something. But considering that payroll is only a portion of the price equation, any increase in dollar per hour is beneficial to the employees and will outpace the increased cost of the product or service.

A question to add on to yours is: If inflation is defined (simplistically) as too much money in the system chasing too few products, then wouldn’t taking money out of the system via taxes have a rate limiting effect on inflation?

Being that if minimum wage increases would an increase on taxes for wealthy citizens slightly offset this increase?

It does tend to be a push pull system, but with capitalism it is really the only thing that can be done, inflation will always go up and wages will always follow, often there is a lot of lag though. It’s kinda like playing catch up, if we find a living wage that works it will only work for a while then the purchasing power of that wage will slip.

What we need is a system that adjusts every year that way the corporations would have to find a more sustainable method to address earnings, because they would not have the lag between cost of living and minimum wage.

if companies chase the same profit levels, then yes. that is the inherent flaw with the state of capitalism in today’s world. it requires the working class to get exhausted so the rich can have a greater unnecessary level of wealth and corporations can return profit to shareholders.

Yes it may have an effect on prices, but there are second order effects. One example is that it would also have an effect on a huge number of people’s ability to pay those prices. A customer base that can afford goods will likely increase sales. Increasing sales can increase revenue.

Markets are complex dynamic systems and often the key to getting a healthy economy is removing choke points where money doesn’t flow. Not paying people enough kills demand. An economy with low demand is dying.

I thought voting was important?

How is this a great idea? I think the point is that they are center right who won’t pass anything that’s actually going to solve wealth inequality