I will try to answer these with, what is for me, uncharacteristic brevity.
So someone, living by themselves, should, whatever they do, earn enough to keep a family of 4 above the poverty line. As should their future spouse, I suppose. So every couple, eg a pair of 17 year olds in their first jobs, who both want to work, should earn enough between them to keep a family of 6 to 8 above the poverty line?
We don't want 17 year olds to trying to support themselves by working. We want them in school or apprentice programs.
We don't want businesses that can only survive by hiring teenagers at low wages. The vast majority that do pay the lower wages do it as way to increase their own profits, not as the only way that they can survive.
Why not distribute that living wage through a "citizen revenue" directly from the state. ...
Because our system works the best when people work. When you support working people with government programs you create friction with the people who don't receive the government benefits, friction that politicians line up to exploit. And in spite of all of the protests, you are subsidizing the businesses that pay the lower wages. The employers would be able to pay the lower wages without the government programs.
There's the argument that it would simply eliminate any reason to work, and people would become lazier. I haven't seen any evidence for that though.
People will still have to work to earn the living wage. This is another reason not to subsidize the lower paying jobs with a guaranteed national income. I would prefer a program of a guaranteed minimum wage job to do "good work" like volunteers do now.
I do believe that it is a bit disingenuous to brand an entire group of people with the failings of a few.
Given a civilized society, set up for the benefit of all its members, the question of a living wage shouldn't even come up. It should be a universally accepted condition. Perhaps, given genetic diversity, with only a small percentage of 'deviants' howling their outrage at the fairness of it all....
Yes, it shouldn't. The fact that the US is the richest country in the world with the highest per capita income and yet we still tolerate the poverty of a substantial number of our people should tell us all that we need to know about our pro-poverty enthusiasts. They either see some personal benefit in supporting the continuation of poverty or they have been deluded by those who do.
Well I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a 17 year old couple with 8 kids, but if such a thing were to happen? Both of them working full time and able to keep those kids off of government assistance and out of poverty? Yes. I think they should earn that much.
Again, what's the problem?
The alternative is two 17 year old parents of 8 kids who live in subsidized housing, cash a shitload of food stamps every week, and the brats grow up not seeing their parents work hard, but learn to become dependent upon the state.
Third choice, we want 17 year olds in school, not married with children trying to earn a living. Isn't anything that prevents this desirable?
Well obviously I wasn't implying those 17 year olds have 8 children. I was pointing out that by your definition of living wage, most people, doing the most basic of jobs, would be earning 4 or 5 times what they need to live (and so presumably those more qualified would be earning even more, and so on).
You are talking about something other than a living wage, "4 or 5 times what they need to live (on)." Petty much I think that everyone here except you is defining a living wage as the minimum that someone needs to live on.
There will still be self selection. Most people want to earn much more than a living wage. A few maybe happy with it, even if it doesn't mean that they can have a family.Freedom to choose means that we have to live with some bad choices, in order to get the good. But first we have guarantee that most of the choices are good.
I trust the system to work it out. I don't trust the system to automatically provide a decent wage when powerful people profit from paying low wages. You can't get past the low ambitions of the few. I am concentrated on the low ambitions of our current system. It can do better distributing resources to all of the members of society than it does.
Now put yourself in the role of employer just starting a business. Do you really think you can afford to pay a 17 year-old school leaver with no experience enough that he could support a family of four, if all he is doing is eg photocopying, stuffing letters in envelopes and other such tasks - bearing in mind that you will need to pay people with more demanding tasks a commensuratedly higher wage? If so, I suggest you go and start a business right now, as in the current climate, with the current employment and wage laws, you could be a multi-millionaire in a few short years.
Another example of you accepting the sins of the many, the established businesses that pay substandard wages, to provide for the few, the startups that struggle to pay wages. This can be worked around much easier and cheaper than accepting the government programs that are currently required to support the lower wages. I would give graduates a bonus capitalization grant to use their education and enthusiasm to change the world, instead of saddling them with a huge college debt weighing them down when they are just starting out. Hey, that is just me.
if you are an employer and you can't pay a living wage, you shouldn't be an employer
Yes, we want to force the businesses making a profit by paying a substandard wage to have to servive by paying a decent wage. We don't want them to be put out of business, there is a demand for their products or they wouldn't be in business now. We just want them to carry their own weight.
This is the same thing that we have done repeatedly in our economic history. We told busineses that relied on slave labor and child labor, that polluted the air and water, that ran unsafe workplaces, that sold dangerous products or relied on unsupported claims about their products, we told all of them, no, you can't do that. And in spite of all of the people who told us that we would destroy the economy it survived.
And you also shouldn't set labor policy based on extreme hypotheticals.
Yes, economic policy acts on the average and it should be set that way. We have to trust the system to take care of the extremes, to eliminate them or to pull them closer to the center.