Minimum wage is a bullshit metric anyway. Very few people stay at minimum wage for very long, and it only applies to unskilled labor.
Economies are interacting systems. When the government subsidizes something, it impacts everything in that sector or indeed the whole economy. Failure to recognize this is one of, if not the key conceptual failures that lead to the greatest tragedies of market manipulation.
If you are going to argue that minimum wage doesn't impact the labor market we are at an impasse because it's obvious that it does. The people who support it know that it does or they wouldn't support it. Those who oppose it know that it does, or they wouldn't oppose it.
General wages are effectively indexed off of minimum wage. In my direct experience, changes to minimum wage result in an immediate impact all the way up through the pay scale. Higher wages lag of course, and the minimum wage increase itself is inflationary, with the typical result of squeezing the middle class wages.
All but very few use such jobs to gain work experience or use the income to pay for living expenses while being trained for skilled (ie much better paying) jobs.
And...those things aren't important? They don't matter for the economy or people's individual situations?
Besides, minimum wage laws only really serve to price out young and especially minority unskilled people keeping them off the first rung of the ladder. Minimum wage should be $0 (partly because that’s really what it is anyway) because it shouldn’t be illegal for someone to agree to work for less when their labor really is worth less.
I agree completely. We are discussing the real world and the real US economy, and not a theoretical world. Here in the real world, minimum wage has been law of the land for over 85 years.
Two salaried professionals can generally afford a house within commuting distance of pretty much anywhere in the US
For certain definitions of salary, certain definitions of "house", and certain definitions of "commuting distance" and certain definitions of "anywhere", true. All of these factors are changing unfavorably. People are moving around the country at an unprecedented rate trying to find those high paying jobs with affordable houses within reasonable commute distances.
Not every high paying job requires a degree
I never said they did. I said "more jobs than ever before, including modestly paying jobs which previously didn't" require degrees. And costs of education have also increased massively. Which is indisputable.
Because you can fond a counterexample is not an argument that a trend doesn't exist.
