In his latest Washington Post column Charles Lane makes a proposal I can support wholeheartedly:
We need a more intellectually honest minimum wage debate, one that acknowledges both the intuitive moral appeal of preventing exploitation of the least-skilled, lowest-paid workers — and the countervailing risk of a wage so high that it harms the very people it’s supposed to help.
and then proceeds to surround it with a barrel of claptrap, starting here:
The goal: a relatively objective process, as opposed to just picking a number that sounds good to Bernie Sanders or, for that matter, the restaurant lobby.
Undemocratic, you say? The author of the federal minimum wage, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, believed that this was an issue best left to technocrats. His first proposal for a minimum wage called on the Labor Department to fine-tune it, industry by industry.
Congress rejected that idea, sparing the country a bureaucratic nightmare while creating a political one: a federal minimum wage that can be changed only if lawmakers act.
FDR’s methods were clumsy, but his instinct was sound: If government is going to make a rule for the labor market, the least it can do is base it on facts about the labor market.
Congress should benchmark the minimum-wage level to historical data, then connect it to an independent adjustment factor, so that when it rises, it does so consistently and in response to shifts in the economy — not the political winds.
A basic fact about the “labor market” is that it doesn’t exist. What exist instead are multiple labor markets. Just as housing costs, health care costs, energy costs, and the price of an avocado vary from state to state and from county to county within states, so do labor costs.
Another basic fact about the price of labor: it varies based both on supply and demand.
Sadly, there is no practical, objective, non-political way to determine a just minimum wage for the entire country and simply trying to do so is simultaneously fatuous and itself an exercise in politics and posturing.
Let me propose a radical alternative: allow cities and counties to set their own minimum wages. That, too, will be agenda-driven fraught with bias, politics, and preconceived notions. That’s how it is when such things are set by human beings rather than archangels. The best you can hope for is that when there are multiple minimum wages, set based on local conditions, on average they will be just based on local conditions.
The political system assumptions in that piece are discordant as well:
“It would require Republicans to make a huge ideological concession. But the payoff for them would be significant: the immediate, and permanent, defusing of an issue that naturally favors Democrats.”
There is no way Congress can permanently take this issue out of politics, any more than it can permanently decide tax rates. And where is the evidence that Republicans are actually hurt by this issue? Which Congressional seats would they have captured by supporting it? TO the contrary, I think it is a popular issue that exhibits low voter intensity, probably because it actually helps very few voters.