What harm do minimum wages do?
(can&#x27;t read the article, but I&#x27;ve read and thought a lot about it)<p>I&#x27;m on the fence about the net cost&#x2F;benefit of localized minimum wages. I think that a federal minimum wage (or at least, a high one), and to some extent, state minimum wages, are a bad idea. The Fight for $15 movement came from expensive cities, and it might be the right policy for those places. But it would severely distort and crush lower-cost cities and states. The right policy for San Francisco isn&#x27;t necessarily right for Birmingham. It&#x27;s one thing to have uniform national laws for human rights. But the nominal value of $15 means something very different in different parts of the country.<p>It seems to me that the right policy to increased pay for low wage jobs would be to set the minimum wage so a full time job at that rate puts you at some multiple of the metropolitan&#x2F;micropolitan area poverty line. Wages would automatically increase with costs in a predictable way, and local economic conditions determine the rate. State or federal minimum wages could set a floor but acknowledge that regional differences matter in economics.