Should There Be a Minimum Wage?
Minimum wage laws are defended on many grounds: reducing poverty, offsetting employers’ bargaining power, boosting consumer demand, cutting reliance on welfare, and more.
This discussion collects every argument for the minimum wage, one per idea, so each can be criticized on its own merits. If a pro argument is missing, post it as a new idea; if you think a criticism fails, reply to it.
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A minimum wage reduces poverty. Nobody who works full time should be poor, yet a full-time minimum-wage earner with two kids still falls below the poverty line. Raising the minimum wage would lift the incomes of millions of working families.
Barack Obama made this argument in his 2013 State of the Union address, declaring that “no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.”
Nobody who works full time should be poor
Why shouldn’t someone who works full time be poor? This idea assumes that working full time entitles a person to a certain income, but on what grounds? I could work full time doing something nobody wants to pay me for. Why would the hours I put in entitle me to pay above a government-set floor?