Minimum Wage

[Akira110]

A study has shown that there are 10 million people that work a full time job and can't pay all their bills and survive. Now, I'm a liberal, I'll be upfront and admit that and I support a minimum wage increase, if only because you have people going out there, getting Doctorates Degrees in Medicine and other medical fields and flipping burgers at McDonalds. And before anyone accuses me of this, I've held a conversation with a guy at the burger king near my house and I asked him what his education was, he went out to his car, brought in his degree and showed it to me. The man was a doctor, flipping whopper patties at burger king. Now I think it's unfair for someone to go to medical school for 8-12 years, get out of college and never be able to pay the bills. What are your thoughts?

[Zylver]

Now this is a very interesting topic to discuss
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to express all my thoughts on the matter, but here is the first thing that came to my mind:
the question of raising the minimum wage is determined mostly by the country we are speaking of and mostly of it's economy.
For example I assume you are talking about the USA, Akira, from which I heard it has a strong (??? info might be out-dated) economy with very high wages in the competitive economy part (especially in the educated workforce part of it). Whereas in a small country like mine, raising the minimum wage increases a lot of concerns about taxing, state and small/mediocre enterprise expenses. Also, our country and therefore it's economy is not only small, but also very fragile due to currency changes and different other factors.
So, I don't know how much it would change, raising the minimum wage in the USA, but since the "fiscal cliff incident", I think you could just do it and make it fine.

[TinyVoices]

Standard of Living (SOL) depends on where you live, so it should be agreed on that minimum wage ought to be a regional thing. A baseline should be set, and it should be noted that living somewhere expensive is pretty risky when living off of minimum wage. Overall, the wage is a regional thing, but some range of consistency should exist.

(Arbitrary numbers) If a job in Nevada pays $17 minimum wage, but the SOL 2 hours drive away in a city in California is $10 minimum wage, then we're gonna see some of the smarter (or perhaps luckier, etc.) workers commuting that distance.

It should also be noted that SOL increases or decreases with inflation/deflation changes. At 3% inflation, $1 USD buying power today is equal to about $1.13 in 4 years. Which means you need to make a little more each year, in order to stay at the same buying power. Pennies saved today are dust in the wind tomorrow. Especially if you just keep them in that tip jar.

However, I feel like a brute force "just raise min. wage to $X" is just as bad as people saying that it shouldn't change ever. I can't recall how often it generally changes, but a quick google check finds that the U.S. Federal Min. Wage is dependent on whether or not Congress and the president can agree on something. As for, say, California:

Effective July 1, 2014, the minimum wage in California is $9.00 per hour. Effective January 1, 2016, the minimum wage in California is $10.00 per hour.

Which, without acknowledging where those numbers stand with respect to the SOL, that rate of change seems pretty fair. Note the 3% inflation rate example I previously mentioned. The inflation has a noticeable increase in the long run, but $1/hr more every two years should fill the gap.

The SOL itself is a tricky monster. Like I said, it shouldn't be too flat or too sporadic when looking at it from a regional scale. Which can be pretty rough. You can keep areas like NYC or Silicon Valley secluded away as "rich" neighborhoods, but then we have this growing dichotomy of rich vs. poor. And then you get this fairly popular video mentioned again.

I've heard it argued among my IRL friends that Obama is to blame for the ~3% inflation rate we've seen. That his federal budget and national debt blunder is to blame for our college's tuition raising by 4% this year. Mmmm, not really. Without delving into that too far, the federal budget/deficit could be $0 as far as the inflation rate is concerned. Yes these play a decent role in it all, but the Goldilock Zone for inflation is roughly 2-4%. Deflation (a negative inflation, if you will) lead to the house market crash, which affected a number of industries including construction, banks (and all those can-o'-worms), and of course the federal income. Because a good part of that income comes from estate taxes.

Capitalism lives off of live money; money not lying stagnant in some coffee jar somewhere. So it's no wonder that when people notice the price of things going down, they stop buying things. Why buy that house today, when in a few months its price will drop? Something along the lines of this, anyway.

But inflation is dependent more so on the supply/demand aspect of things, along with a number of other monstrosities. So, inflation is about where it needs to be, and "Obama and his monkeys," as my friends put it, aren't exactly to blame. We just need to be smarter about minimum wage.

And that does mean that we need to go out there and try to find a fair but practical and economic, standard of living.

[DarkTheImmortal]

I assume you are talking about the USA, Akira, from which I heard it has a strong economy with very high wages in the competitive economy part.

Not really a strong economy here. Fairly high unemployment (with all those illegal immigrants getting all our jobs, homes, discounted college, drivers licenses (in case you haven't noticed, I don't like Illegals)). And our government is trillions of dollars in debt

I am also going to assume you're talking about the USA, but really it doesn't matter where we're talking about.
I first want to say I do not pick a side for this topic, for there are good and bad things about it.
And before I get to what I see as pros and cons, I want to say a few more things.
1) Fast food (and pretty much anything that considers giving minimum wage) was not meant to be a career. It is mostly for teenagers to get into the workforce and help pay fees
2) The Doctor at Burger King should have had a better job than fast food to begin with. That is a case of it being hard to find a job, and nothing to do with wages. I don't know if the demand for his degree was low or if he didn't even try, but there is always places for Ph.Ds to go. And even then there should be good backups, like myself. I am planning on getting a Ph.D. in Astrophysics, and with includes Physics and Astronomy, so if astrophysics were to fail, I got 2 pretty good backups

now time for my list, it may be small, but I can't think of others right now.
pros of increase
1) Easier for people in those low paying jobs to pay bills

Cons of increase
1) Less money for the company, which will lead to lower hiring and higher firing, possibly making our economy even worse
2) Why get a higher paying job when you can get by flipping burgers?

Now I may have more cons than pros, I'm still impartial. I also hope that it won't even affect me and that I will be making a 6 digit salary, instead of a few bucks.

[Akira110]

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1) Fast food (and pretty much anything that considers giving minimum wage) was not meant to be a career. It is mostly for teenagers to get into the workforce and help pay fees
2) The Doctor at Burger King should have had a better job than fast food to begin with. That is a case of it being hard to find a job, and nothing to do with wages. I don't know if the demand for his degree was low or if he didn't even try, but there is always places for Ph.Ds to go. And even then there should be good backups, like myself. I am planning on getting a Ph.D. in Astrophysics, and with includes Physics and Astronomy, so if astrophysics were to fail, I got 2 pretty good backups

I should've named this minimum wage and unemployment because the two are sort of big topics. But teenagers aren't working these jobs anymore, in fact, teens and unskilled workers(me) are the most unemployed people in the country. My case for a higher minimum wage isn't, "Let's make these people make a lot of money so that they can afford TVs and video game systems and computers." My case for it is, "Allow these people to be able to at least survive." I told someone this before, yes, you could feasibly get by on 7.25 an hour, and any doctor will tell you that you should be dead of malnutrition within 3 months because of this. And before anyone says, "You can eat at your job." Yes, you can, but getting 1000 calories a day isn't enough, you also need to get enough vitamins and minerals that your body requires to survive and in a lot of places(especially where I live where the minimum wage is 5.15 an hour, which is [censored] up), it's not going to allow you to get the proper nutrition.

Also I'm somewhat of a moderate in this sort of thing, I hit a middle ground. 10 dollars across the board. Especially since flipping burgers isn't the only minimum wage job, as far as I know those guys at your Lowe's that take the boxes off the trucks(HEAVY boxes I might add) get paid bare minimum despite doing much more strenuous work than say, typing on a computer or flipping burgers. Also depending on the region, those guys can quickly suffer from sunstroke or heat exhaustion. So I think certain jobs like that which are currently minimum wage jobs should get paid MORE, because the work is not only harder, there are actually more risks.