Sounds nice. I'm all for it. It's better than nothing. But here's the problem:
How will we ever eradicate poverty as long as our economy depends on the poverty wages of low-skilled labor? Who will wash the dishes? Who will clean the hotel rooms?
This is a crucial element of the "poverty cycle", in which social misfortune drives people into accepting careers of poverty. This creates property markets that segregate entire neighborhoods of people who make low wages, as well as struggle with social issues. Their children then go to school together, where their high stress levels and lack of preparedness compound the struggle to get educated.
Some will always make it out. But they are the outliers, and give lie to the idea that the system is fair or functioning. Worse, they allow us to ignore the fact that we all depend on poverty wages. Efforts to enforce minimum wages that would eradicate poverty are met with an argument that jobs will need to be cut. Even if true, this is an indictment of the economic system.
Truly eradicating poverty and the social ills that it perpetuates requires eradicating our systemic reliance on a low wage underclass. Do that, and you no longer need the plethora of band-aid interventions we've been trying for over a century - charity, jobs programs, education reform, social work, criminal justice reform, drug prevention, etc. You can't create a system in which social ills get condensed, enhanced, ingrained and perpetuated, and then expect to be able to come up with solutions to help people "rise out of poverty".
The obvious difficulty is how to do this. How do we change such a large system? Raising the minimum wage will indeed limit job growth - at least, as far as I know, and it makes sense. What would it look like if businesses were all required to raise their wages to $20 an hour, effectively doubling or tripling the labor costs in industries that rely on low wages. Hotels, fast food, groceries, retail, restaurants - all of these would be severely hit. They would have to raise prices. But now the $20 an hour worker has to pay a lot more for everything. The raised income, in effect, becomes regressive.
Or so goes the argument, and I'm no economist. But suffice it to say this stuff is really tricky. But "tricky" is not an excuse for maintaining the status quo, and continuing to relegate millions to lives of poverty, and exploiting a system in which social ills create an underclass of low wage workers.
We need to find a way to make every job a non-poverty job. Dishwashing. Picking vegetables. Cleaning toilets. Manning cash registers. Mowing lawns. Stocking shelves. Do that, and the problem goes away. School test scores skyrocket. Families bounce back from hardship. Stress levels in families plummet. Social ills like crime and drug abuse drop. People can afford to live in nice neighborhoods (actually, most neighborhoods become nice). Racial resentment ends.
Sounds nice. But how do you do it? This is the question that needs to be answered. It is a hard question. But it is the only question.
