$15 minimum wage is way too much. Supply and Demand should decide wages not the government
This is a bad post. I went yesterday to Target to get deoderant and soap and it cost SIXTEEN dollars. Costs are high.
I do not think policy should be decided by how we should best pay tribute to The Invisible Hand. If it's invisible it can do what it wants and it shouldn't care what we think of it. The minimum wages should be enough for people to pay for things and live a life with some degree of dignity. I've met people who like to see other people suffer to get their jollies and I just think there's too much of that. If you can question whether or not I care about how the minimum wage affects the economy I can certainly question whether or not you ACTUALLY DO want to see people in servitude. Look at all the Youtube videos of people screaming at kids working the register at Taco Bell. People can be really bad people.
Best policy would be a form of UBI (or BI) as it wouldn't impare business hiring. However, unfortunately politics usually doesn't allow for best policies.
There are political drawbacks, but there is also a massive fiscal issue with UBI, at least in the current economy - in a futuristic, mostly automated economy, I think it would make sense, but currently you're talking about an enormous undertaking.
A proper, genuine, across-the-board UBI would be extremely expensive compared to just about anything else the government spends on. Let's say $1500/month for every American of working age, doing some back of the napkin math here, you'd be looking at just under $4.88 Trillion
per year. For context, total federal government spending is $6.27 Trillion in FY 2022. Even with claw backs (for example phasing out food stamps), as well as potential savings in other aspects like healthcare and public safety, you're still talking about an enormous undertaking that would require massive tax increases on a permanent basis.
Now actual UBI advocates aren't as generous as I was, Yang advocated for $1000, and a lot of UBI (or BI as you rightly differentiated) advocates want a different program that isn't universal but gets clawed back with income. You're probably familiar with the pilot project Ontario did under Kathleen Wynne, it was $1500 phased out at a 50% of income ratio after a certain cutoff. That does bring down costs - the PBO estimated that, extrapolating the Ontario UBI proposal to the national level, as of 2020, would cost $46B CAD
over a six-month period, so really, $92B a year, in Canada, on a permanent basis, and ideally rising with inflation.
That helps on the cost front, but it takes away from the universality aspect, and it's still bloody expensive. In other words, a means-tested Guaranteed Income takes away the unique benefits of UBI and just makes it a generic, means-tested welfare program. The more means-tested it is, the more it takes away from the unique benefits of UBI - the less means-tested it is, the less financially feasible it is.
