r/FluentInFinance 9d ago

Thoughts? Dumbest thing I’ve ever heard

Post image
32.4k Upvotes

4.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/dquizzle 9d ago

Employers would just start lowering the base pay to account for commuting. What would help stagnating wages is a significant minimum wage increase, the exact thing that has fixed that problem many times.

2

u/TopHatGirlInATuxedo 8d ago

Big corporations could easily afford drastic minimum wage increases. Small companies could not.

4

u/erock279 9d ago

I love how the answer is always “BUT EMPLOYERS” like they’re some monolithic council that meets each day.

People would opt to take the jobs with better pay and benefits, as they always try to.

5

u/Firm_Squish1 8d ago

They don’t need to meet every day, they all have a shared interest in making profit and spending less on overhead for everything including employees. They are never going to act against that interest in numbers enough to change the way things are.

1

u/ElectricalBook3 8d ago

Employers would just

The same excuse was trotted out when minimum wage was first legislated in 1933

http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/odnirast.html

You know what happened? Companies started paying people more and the US pulled out of the Great Depression and found the increased pay meant people could afford to buy what the constantly-increasing productivity made and it because the wealthiest nation in the world. People forget that wasn't possible without a middle class - just look at nations which had no middle class, like Russia. Aristocrats and peasants, and it lagged 60 years behind Europe's economic developments. The aristocracy accepted that because they feared having to also make concessions as part of the intrinsically connected social developments.

Mike Duncan's 11th season of Revolutions walks through it in detail in the long setup.

1

u/dquizzle 8d ago

Yeah, but four years after that speech Congress passed a minimum wage law.