06-07-2015, 09:46 PM
(06-07-2015, 09:24 PM)Benton Wrote: In most of new York or California, that's enough to cover not much.
While this is mostly accurate, it ignores many other benefits available to them such as subsidized housing, food stamps, etc.. If we're going to talk about a living wage to the exclusion of other transfer payments, then cuts (or basically lower spending) to those programs should accompany wage increases.
Otherwise, it's just a shell game moving money from one bucket to another. All else equal, I think I'd favor higher wages and inflation and lower taxes and lower transfer payments. But what's optimal could be something more in between.
Part of the problem here is where are we headed and really accomplishing? Because you can literally create more or less poverty simply by changing how you define it. Point being, wages and transfers are mechanics not solutions...and there's no discussion without context of what poverty really is, because debates about increasing wages or decreasing transfers are, at the core, debates about our target poverty level being too high or too low. And no one likes to talk about the poverty level because whichever side you come down on, you offend people either for being poorer than they thought or not poor enough.
