Why $15 an hour minimum wage SUCKS

[Spongebob]

Fact of the matter is that any policy change benefits some and come at the cost of few others—you’re probably rarely going to have a 100% utility across the board—what is important however is maximizing the number of those benefiting and minimizing those that may have adverse effect.

Government is not in the business of ensuring equal quality of life for every single citizen—it doesn’t have such resources and no one can do that—what it can do however is to effect changes for maximum number of people while keeping the door open for those who may be affected to improve.

Bottom line is we need to rely on economic data to gauge impact and not few anecdotal cases and go from there.

Well said, and this was the vision of the nation's founders and early Presidents.  Those who have the most sway over those in power tend to have the most influence on policy.  I would wager this isn't the common worker in the US.  Ironically, Trump actually did have a large percentage of common wage earners as his base, but because he has no true vision (economic or otherwise), there's practically no way to translate that support into policy.  And of course, he was rarely pulling the strings on policy anyway.  That distinction goes to McConnell in the Senate.

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It just occurred to me that the issue at hand here isn't really the intellectual difficulty of a job but rather the supply of workers for a given job.  That's a major distinction and it really cuts through OLB's ideology.  Here is a short list of menial jobs that actually receive pretty good pay and it's all due to the nature of the job making it undesirable:

Diaper service worker $50,000
Slaughterer $60,000
Hair removal $60,000
ROUGHNECK $100,000
CONSTRUCTION WORKER $49,517
Exterminators $50,920
Firefighter          $49,620
Garbage collector   $30,182  (that's just under $15/hr)

This is just a few, of course, but all of these are well over the $15/hour (except garbage collector).  They have high demand because not many people want to do the work.  That's economics at work there and it's worth acknowledging that there's probably a near endless supply of people willing to flip burgers, so that's the main reason the wages can be so low.  It has less to do with the nature of the work itself.  It is easy work, but it can also be stressful.  I'm not sure how many people consider that.

We also haven't talked about innovation.  I fully expect the food industry to innovate a lot of these jobs out of existence.  Truck driving is well on its way out and I prep doesn't require as much labor as it once did.  Automation is the biggest job killer of them all.  I should know; its what I do for a living.