$20 Minimum Wage will leave many unemployed and business closures!

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(06-24-2024, 07:26 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: The problem, as it seems to me, is that too many grown adults are content to work minimum wage jobs hoping to make a career of it. Minimum wage jobs are just that, jobs that most anyone can perform.  While many minimum wage jobs are stressful and high paced, the skill level at which to perform the basic duties is... minimum.  A lot of those people should consider expanding their skill sets to include a marketable skill that is worth substantially more than minimum wage.

There isn't enough non-minimum wage jobs for everyone to do that. Nor is everyone capable of expanding their skills sets. Think about the intelligence level of the average adult, and then realize that half of people are dumber than them.

Plus if zero adults did those jobs, everything would only be open from 4pm to 8pm during the weekdays, because the non-adults have school and child labor laws limit how many and what hours they can work. Every grocery store, restaurant, fast food, etc, would be open for fewer hours than banks.... you'd also not have enough workers as there's not enough working age kids to fill all those jobs.

Now I don't think that $20/hr isn't the answer either, because if you're increasing the wage of everyone in the chain, that's just going to increase the costs at the end and essentially wipe out the gains in wages. I do think that if someone works a 40/hr week job that they should at least be able to neither be homeless or hungry. So I have been leaning more and more towards the idea that we need a Universal Basic Income. 

Nothing that would make you be able to get the newest iPhone or Swift tickets or anything, but at least enough to offset the difference between what 160 hours of minimum wage in a month (40/hr per week x4) and how much a person reasonably needs to have a place to live and food to eat cost-of-living-wise. Perhaps enough that if you had two people combining their money that they could also raise 1 child. It would likely also replace most of the various welfare programs.