this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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I say minimum wage should be set at the first level subdivision, but as an annually readjusted calculation, where one month's wages is no less than is necessary for the state/province/territory/etc.'s average rent to be at most 40% of that minimum wage.
The reason I say 1st level subdivision instead of nationally is because setting it nationally squeezes rural wage givers unnecessarily while making wage earners in urban centers starve.
By operating at a more localized level, you're less likely to run into this issue, and also it creates a gradient of wage markets which will naturally incentivize the creation of single income rent supporting jobs in economically underdeveloped regions, meaning that you can actually use the difference between the highest and lowest minimum wage in a country as a metric on income equality and equality of development opportunities.
Federal government workers in the US generally have a "base salary," which stays the same across all regions, so you can easily compare. And then they get a regional adjustment, based on where they actually live, called "locality pay." I think this is recalculated annually based on the specific areas. It's almost certainly more complicated than that, but I think that's the gist.
I agree with you, and my point is that the US government already does this! So if it's fine for government workers, just apply that same algorithm to a federal minimum wage, peg it with some inflation index, and we've ~~solved~~ made the minimum wage issue a whole lot better, so we can focus on other issues that don't have huge supermajorities of support.
That's kinda why I suggested the average rent as an index, since unless we do some Nordic style price adjustment control that limits how much prices can go up in a year or such, that will probably be the best indicator of the actual inflation that the average consumer is experiencing in any given year.
(use median rent rather than average rent)
How about whichever is higher? I feel like circumstances could lead to either causing wages to be lower than they would be if pegged to the other instead.
If some clown wants to charge $3B for rent in a hovel in the backstreets of Idaho, mean rent might not make a lot of sense.