comment: >
  
  Minimum is $15 for federal jobs, but that’s not what you mean by federal minimum wage, right?
context: The last minimum wage increase phased in over three years, ending in 2009. Democrats lost the House in the 2010 election and didn’t get a trifecta back until 2021. The GOP won’t increase minimum wage. 
  The Fight for $15 movement started in 2012 and achieved notable success in getting states to increase the minimum wage. 
  Covid caused a big shift in the labor market. Workforce participation has gone down and megacorps like Amazon have a virtually unlimited need for labor, so what they offer has increasingly become a defacto minimum wage. >
  
  ... until they take it away because they can. >
  
  Really curious to see if places will actually drop their wages from $10-$15 down to $7.25 (or what the state minimum wage is) during a sustained recession to cut costs and avoid headcount reduction but then say "look, see we didn't have to lay anyone off!" >
  
  They can and they will, if we ever enter a situation where job supply drops and demand increases. Those were the market conditions when I left college. I took a really hard retail sales job and got paid $9.25 plus commission that amounted to a few bucks per month.
  The kicker was that I was actually expected to wear a 3-piece suit. I couldn’t afford dry cleaning on my wage and I had 3 roommates. 
  I don’t expect any job to piss on their employees to this extent in today’s economic climate, but one day mass unemployment will return… and companies will once again start treating us like we’re lucky to have a job at all.
  Enjoy it while the gettin’ is good. >
  
  The main reason it passed last time was Democrats conceding to tax cuts being passed with it. It was also added to a military spending bill, to make sure no one would vote against it.
  Democrats would have to win a super majority or concede to something huge to get it passed now. >
  
  Add in that people actually making minimum wage in this country is pretty minimal. 1.4% of all workers make minimum wage and the demographics of those earners are like half being sub 18 years old. 2/3 of all hourly wage workers are also tipped workers (see: not making minimum wage). 
  There's just no political pressure to raise a minimum wage because virtually no one is making the true minimum wage. The labor market basically has taken care of that on its own. >
  
  Question: would raising the minimum wage not help those making barely above minimum? For example, in my state minimum went up to $13, as I was making a little above that they adjusted my wage (let’s say for the sake of this, if I was making $13.50 they bumped me up to $14.50), or is this not common place? >
  
  Has anyone else noticed a complete lack of engagement by conservative users on these basic, mainstream subreddits? I know they are on reddit… >
  
  It's because their ideas are unpopular and fare poorly in places like reddit where they don't control the mod team.
  The system hides their comments and throttles their posting frequency because they get mobbed with downvotes for advocating incredibly unpopular (putting it kindly) policies. The people who keep commenting in the face of that are usually trolls and/or psychotic true believers, and that shows through on a lot of the convervatives who actually show up in the comments here. >
  
  I mean if they were extremely unpopular they wouldn't win 50% of the votes. They're just unpopular on reddit, which is a good deal to the left of mainstream America 
  Example: on reddit people shouting ACAB is perfectly acceptable. IRL it's a very unpopular statement >
  
  They don't win 50% of the votes, though. They sometimes win 50% of the seats because their voters are concentrated more heavily in rural areas/states that get systemic advantages. 
  Also, ACAB isn't exactly popular on reddit outside of very lefty subreddits, which really says a lot about the biases you hold as well. Statements critical of policing are popular - 1312 is a different story. >
  
  Democrats since Bill Clinton have become
  Incredibly gunshy about market interventions that don’t directly benefit capital. Republicans have regressed fully to pre depression economic policy. Further our economy is almost fully finaicilized with the only real growth happening in cutting costs. On the social front every major network is millionaires carrying water for their billionaire owners. >
  
  Who was it who observed the RW media is a bunch of millionaires working for billionaires by telling thousand-aires the hundred-aires are coming to take their money? >
  
  I dunno, but they said it perfectly. >
  
  Citizens-f***ing-United. Recognizing corporations as people and money as speech basically guarantees that corporations and their paid cronies will obstruct any attempt to raise wages on a federal level. >
  
  And for the millionth time that case did neither of those things. Corporate personhood goes back to the 1600s and joint stock companies sponsoring trade expeditions. It didn't say money is the same as speech, but it did say that money facilitates speech, and that putting a cap on money you spend to facilitates speech is just another way of limiting speech.
  How much could you get your message out if you tje government banned you from buying ads on the radio or online, or any of the other ways money is used to spread a message. 
  Imagine if the Youtube algorithm dictated what speech you could be exposed to. Sure the video isn't being taken down, but its harder to find. That's not per se being censored, your metaphorical newspaper press (computer) isn't being confiscated and destroyed, but you would be really stupid to say there is no suppression of speech from Youtube.
  That's viewpoint discrimination, and the government isn't allowed to do that, at all, as that would violate freedom of speech, because its a negative right.
  Alternatives to Youtube do exist, they might not be great, but good luck trying to run from the government. >
  
  Ok, so rich people have more freedom of speech than poor people?
  Did I get that right? >
  
  No. Same freedom, just a different capacity for projecting that speech >
  
  Sounds like 
  
  both Usain Bolt and man driving a Maserati are competitors in the race. >
  
  Probably not much pressure on the representatives to change it. It doesn't apply at all to most states because the state minimum wage is higher. And of the states where it does apply the vast majority of voters will be far from the wage level where an increase of the absolute floor will be felt.
  So weak pressure from that direction. Some counteracting pressure to keep it low from those who struggle to enter the workforce. And massive pressure from businesses who want to keep it low. >
  
  The short answer is that half the body politic of America went completely insane. Republicans, as a National party, have largely rejected the notion that Governance is the purpose of Government, and instead view it purely as a vehicle to gain, maintain, and utilize power over other people. They justify refusals to increase the federal minimum wage with insistences that it’ll cause inflation, when really it’ll benefit and improve the lives of the poorest Americans, because if it improves the lives of poor Americans, it could enable some to leave poverty behind, thus depraving Republicans and the economically well off of labor, and thus, power.
  Throw in that the last three presidents have been two Democrats and Donald Trump, and Republicans have had no desire or design to enable the function of Government in any way, shape, or form. >
  
  What happened is that blue states figured out that they can just raise minimum wage on their own; they don't need the federal government to do so.  I don't know if there was a specific catalyst, but before ~2000, states didn't tend to set their own minimum wage.  Now they do.
  And now that we have blue states setting their minimum wage to whatever they want, there's really no pressure to set the national minimum wage any higher.  Californians already have their $15/hr, they're not going to start protests to get Georgians $15/hr too. >
  
  A major issue is most economists think the best minimum wage is no minimum wage because it allows maximum employment/productivity including for people on the margins. >
  
  I think you're misunderstanding most economists. What you said only applicable in theory assuming a completely liquid labor market. This doesn't work in our current economy because our labor market is not completely liquid l. The vast majority of people have to work for a paycheck to get their basic needs met which means is no base level of subsistence that would allow for the discovery of a natural wage for a given job. >
  
  Such economists never got past their freshman courses where the focus is on THEORY - including the most absurd "condition" that there exists an Economic Man who has perfect knowledge of markets and total mobility to move about and maximize personal gain. Sorta like the Communist Man who willingly gives all they can and takes only what he needs - a total fiction used to support a fairytale to win over feeble minds while you enslave them. >
  
  The fact our inflation is so high already, giving people more money would only lower the value of it. The fact it hasnt changed in so long is an achievement. >
  
  What they leave out is repealing the Reagan taxscam, i.e., removing the incentive for those who divide the profits to just keep it all for themselves and give the workers NOTHING. There is no need to increase prices to support the higher wages because the wages translate into greater sales which are made with goods produced at higher quantities with the same Capital which means LOWER unit prices. When that higher demand exceeds current physical capacity, new and more efficient productive facilities are created with a totally separate part of Corporate finances - the Capital Budget - and have no impact on the Operating Budget which include the cost of labor and upkeep of existing capital resources.
  GOPers survive because so few of their lemmings understand the actual workings of their employers' finances and accept fairytales about how Affirmative Action and Immigrants are WHY said lemmings haven't gotten a real wage increase since the late 70's and will NEVER get as far as their fathers got in their careers. >
  
  I honestly think that workers, as a bloc, do not have the same voice in the US as they may have decades ago, so raising the minimum wage federally won’t be seen as an immediate issue for politicians to weigh on. Second, outside of early in Obama’s first term, there hasn’t been a huge majority of Democrats in Congress that could pass raising minimum wage federally. A lot of legislation under LBJ got passed because the democrats had a HUGE majority in Congress. These days I don’t know if we’ll see one party have a supermajority in Congress because of how divided the country is. Third, this is just a guess, but I wonder if those who believe that minimum wage should be elevated on a state by state basis (federalism) have won. Lastly, I believe if the minimum wage will be raised on a federal level, it would have to be like at $10 or $11. I just feel like $15 is a nonstarter because states where their economic situation isn’t as great won’t go for it. >
  
  The political reason would probably be the wage that is being asked for. 
  1981 to 1991 it went up from $3.35 to $4.25 almost $1. 
  1997 to 2007 it went from $5.15 to $7.25 about $2. 
  The recent pushes to increase the MW have been to set it at $10.10 $11, $15. At best it is a $3 raise at worst it is doubling the MW. The larger the increase the harder it becomes to achieve. Yes there are different timeframes for when the MW would hit that target. 
  The CBO projecting job loss and lower income as a result of the increase does not help. Even if other data after MW increases says the opposite. 
  Has raising the MW ever been a politically easy thing to do? >
  
  One party has a large group of supporters whom don't hold their politicians accountable and consider "sticking it to the libs" as political accomplishments even if it harms themselves in the process. The other party have made the argument to increase it for so long that there original minimum wage discussion numbers are now too low. States have taken up the issue to rectify the lack of action. The problem is the party that prevents action. In the event Democrats ever have a super majority they should tie federal minimum wage to their own salaries. The only way Republicans in Congress will pass a minimum wage increase is if they directly benefit from it. >
  
  I think it has to do with the increased power of corporations and the erosion of labor unions. Corporations have much more power to influence the political process than workers do, because they have a ton of money to throw at lobbying, etc. Unions are the traditional counterbalance to corporate power, but their numbers have been declining for decades, so the balance of power has shifted away from workers and towards corporations. So, it's not too surprising that we don't see any progress on the minimum wage front. >
  
  I don't think that there is much pressure to increase the minimum wage, because most people are not working anywhere near the minimum wage. The federal minimum wage limit is kind of irrelevant right now. The unemployment rate is so low, that companies need to fight over the "low skill" workers with money. 
  If you are already making $20 an hour, do you care if the federal minimum wage is $7 or $15? As long as unemployment is low, and wages of the low end are relatively high, I don't expect the federal minimum wage to really mean much to anyone. I think the people most invested in increasing the federal minimum wage are people absolutely nowhere near the federal minimum wage, and who are more interested in the subject out of a sense of principle, than personal need. >
  
  Since Citizen united ruling , you have a system that slowly was controled by coorporations and personnel interest . Universities did studies showing how  a  law favourite by public doesn't increase it's probability of passing but at same time show a law favourite by rich and influential  have much higher probability to pass . 
  Wage suppression  have been ungoing in US for quite a while and even now while you have workforces shortages . Raising minimum wage isn't in interest of corporations or any laws that  protect workers or breakup  corporate control or monopolies . So they going to support Lawmakers that block any such laws . >
  
  Not much really. It’s been abysmally squalid for most of its history.
  The ongoing cause has been a bipartisan contempt for the poor. >
  
  A lot of voters in this country don’t want it to go up because it might make some rich guys mad. >
  
  It's always amusing when people mindlessly parrot that raising the minimum wage is destructive without even knowing the context of what you're talking about. Federal? State? County? Only in one city? Their mind just automatically goes to regurgitated talking points that only refer to the raising the Federal minimum age without even knowing that's what their repeated talking about are referring to.
  Then people have no response when you ask what's so special about the current Federal Minimum wage or whatever minimum wage you're talking? What is so special about whatever number it just happens to be at and when was it changed to that and why that date was special? >
  
  States can raise it locally if they want to, no reason to have a fed one at all actually. >
  
  That Republicans are completely polarized and unreasonable. They don’t compromise, and don’t follow economic research. Prices are 7.5 times greater today than average prices back in 1970 but our pay hasn’t kept pace. In 1978 $4.03/hour would have the same purchasing power as $23.69/hour today. Maybe the minimum wage should be $24.00 and hour so we have the same quality of living as our parents or grandparents or whatever. >
  
  GOPerLords ordered their vassals in Congress to stop mandatory wage hikes. they did this whenever they could in the House, and ALWAYS in the Senate with the Filibuster. Without a government mandate, the Corporate Oligarchs have been able to hand out the profits only to the top 10%, with almost all going to the top 1%, thanks to their rigging of the game via the tax code.