Comments by "Digital Footballer" (@digitalfootballer9032) on "What's the Right Minimum Wage? | 5 Minute Video" video.

I live in NY, where the $15 minimum wage law was passed a few years ago. Where I live upstate it is being phased in, and we are at $13.25/hr now I believe. What I have noticed is happening in the service industry, which is mainly made of people at or around minimum wage, is they give hardly any hours to the employees, and work the salaried managers about 80 hours a week so their hourly equivalent is much lower than minimum wage. You go to any store, whether that be a fast food restaurant, a grocery store, a retail store, or whatever, and there are usually hardly any people working, things are a mess, and the lines are long.
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Gay.
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I have argued a similar point for years. The bottom rung of the economic ladder is still the bottom rung, whether you pay them $1 an hour or $100 an hour. Artificially inflating wages for labour that is worth a lesser amount solves nothing. All it does is devalue labor of higher skilled jobs. When the minimum wage was raised from $9.25 an hour to $15 in NY State, what happened to the people making $16 an hour? They still make $16 an hour. But people with lower skill jobs below them got a nice raise of over 50%. It is an absolute fact that consumer pricing has risen as a result. It is most apparent in retail food outlets. A "value meal" that was $2.99 a couple years ago is now $5.99. So while the minimum earners now have over 50% more wages at their disposal, prices have risen so they are no further ahead (not to mention most have had reductions in hours worked). But it's the people who were once comfortably ahead of the minimum, that are now just above the minimum, who suffer. The dollar is not going as far as it did a few years ago, yet their wages have stayed the same. And I am not talking inflation in terms of the overall value of the dollar. That has been minimal in recent years. I am talking the rise in cost of certain consumer goods due to the artificial inflation of wages for low skilled labour.
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I don't agree with a complete abolition of the minimum wage, but I also don't agree with artificially inflating it based on emotional responses either. Ideally it should be tied to some sort of economic index. Such as a percentage of the mean wage nationally, and allow for small regional variances based on cost of living indices.
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Minimum wage isn't meant to be a living wage, it is meant to be an entry level wage, mostly for young people still living at home. You must work your way up to earn a living wage. Yes, some people get dealt a bad hand in life and either lose their job and are forced to take lesser pay, or just don't have the skill sets to move up. For people like that, this is why things like Earned income credit, Medicaid, and other types of assistance exist.
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