The Celebrating pointlessness: minimum wage edition thread has been going on strong for over two weeks. Can we turn the fire into a raging inferno?
From today’s Huffington Post: Minimum Wage, and Controversy, Reaches Distant U.S. Islands, on a Government Accountability Office on the minimum wage which was released today. A PDF of the study is available here. h/t: Bruce Bartlett.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Why does our socialized country have crappier job stat, according to another thread, than our often Neocon neighbours?
As a poverty reduction vehicle, min wage depends on the nature of the safety net. If it is there, raising minimum wage reduces the poverty of some workers. If no welfare state, raising minimum wage kills people in the winter.
There is a poverty level, call it the safety net wage, for a given set of plebe giveaways (welfare, EI, health insurance, personal finances IQ, food banks/stamps, personal health behaviour, abusive employer Human Rights legislation, free prothetics, etc). For minimum wage increases and decreases…you need to know the average unskilled wage and underemployment level to know how marginal is the debate…
Basically when you raise the min wage you get some people out of poverty who are working poor, and you consign some to poverty who fall through the safety net. And if you raise it too close to the median unskilled wage I’m guessing you have to start subsidizing their wages too in a graduated way. GAI much simpler, if only to deprogramme a few more Neocons.
One way to think of the effect of the dollar minimum wage on the Pacific Islanders who are forced to use the US dollar as their medium of exchange is to consider what would happen if an isolated corner of the continental US had spent the last ~ 75 years not receiving any of the massive amounts of new dollar money and credit that the FED has caused to be created. Even if the isolated corner uses a totally common currency with the rest of the US, it is inevitable that lower dollar prices and wages must be associated with the much lower money supply per capita, to the extent that it cannot be offset by the movement of both goods and people.
The minimum wage by itself is a crime, but applying the same number of dollars as a minimum wage to the Pacific islands is genocide. Why might setting a minimum wage of $75 US dollars an hour in Detroit not be such a good idea?
Regards, Don
A minimum wage can be useful if it leads to productivity boosting investment, or as a demarcation between welfare and work, but those are pretty limiting and probably wouldn’t apply here.