all 0 minimum wage increases in the last decade. too aggressive. we need to be TAKING money from min wage workers.
this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2025
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the economist is the voice of london bankers, they mean the national minimum wage in 
oh excuse me
guessing this drivel isn't about the US
Remember when they aggressively increased the minimum wage from $7.25 to $7.25? So crude and unreasonable! How will Bill Gates afford to eat now?
I'm astonished we actually got $15 to pass here in Florida (currently $14 moving to $15 in Sept)
Whoever seriously wrote this should be beheaded
i never got why its called beheaded. beheaded should be when you have a head. deheaded should be what we call being beheaded
"beheaded" means deheaded? What a country.
:doctor-nick:
ysee i reckon it's cause once they do it to ya you just be a head
There is no such thing as minimum wage under neoliberal capitalism, minimum wage is zero since you can be involuntarily unemployed, it's not a meaningful floor wage.
That's an amazing point.
Thankyou for sharing.
I'm gonna try this one out on my libs.
Every windfall the working class gets is immediately under some form of erosion by the machinations of the owner class. They raise the pay Monday and the rent on Tuesday. And then they use the smallest portion of that profit to pay some dipshit columnist to write an article like this.
I remember under Trump 1 there was a point where wages for most people started to very slightly uptick and the stock market immediately went into a panic over inflationary fears. It's almost like the stock market is incompatible with a more equal society.
They build payday loans and pawn shops and auto dealers in concentric rings around poverty, like a series of increasingly fine filters, making sure every ounce of capital gets wrung out of a given place or community.
The authors of these pieces can get in their fucking cars and see these lots, these buildings, they can look at the fucking city permits, the proof of what is taking place is overwhelming.
And yet they go “rAiSiNg wAgEs? HoW dOeS tHiS eCoNOmy?!?”
wasteful tool for redistribution
You don’t want any redistribution, you twats. Redistribution is inefficient according to your dogma. Stop pretending you want poor people to have more money.
I haven’t read the article, though, so they may address this by saying that the poor should be ground into a slurry and used to fertilize crops or something. Apologies to the editorial staff at The Economist if this is the case.
billionaires are a crude and wasteful tool yet the economist can't stop singing their praises 
There is a pro-labour case to be made against the minimum wage. In many jobs it can end up as a de facto maximum wage. It also puts future wage developments in the hands of shifting parliamentary majorities.
Unions in places with high rates of unionisation are often not happy about statutory minimum wages as it removes the incentive to join the union and risks jeopardising the bargaining power of the union.
In general I think a system of strong unions and a functional minimum wage created by robust and safe unemployment benefits is to be preferred over a statutory minimum wage.
It goes without saying that statutory minimum wages are always a better idea than whatever the sociopaths catered to by The Economist wants.
Yeah, like IIRC doesn’t Sweden technically not have a minimum wage and unions make sure the ruling aren’t the sole deciding factor in wage?
Like yeah, in burgerland for most folks the minimum wage will pretty much be the maximum wage. Yeah, not good anywhere but for major cities in particular you can expect the people doing a lot of the work to make the place run are either lucky enough to be crashing with their parents at best or having two shitty full-time service jobs at worst unable to do anything else.
Nordic countries don't have statutory minimum wages and I think that most of the time, the worst paid Scandinavians are better off than the worst-paid Americans.
But the system has its obvious flaws. Not all workers are covered by collective bargaining. Unions and employers alike love to hand-wave it away by pretending they are all high-paid professionals like lawyers or engineers who doesn't need a minimum wage and while that is true for many un-unionised workers, the category also covers the absolute shit-tier jobs with shit-tier employers.
Often the people working these jobs are ethnic minorities or otherwise marginalised. Unions are more concerned with the interests of steadily employed unionised workers and do little for these marginalised workers as they are often not union members. When they do care about improving their conditions it is usually because they are competing with unionised workers.
The Nordic model might relatively speaking be in the good end of the spectrum of working class conditions under capitalism but it definitely has it's flaws.
a journal that speaks for British millionaires
13:12 All Crapitalists Are Bastards
Coincidentally, one of the largest but certainly the most elitist newspaper in Brazil also printed an editorial against minimal wage increase (in Brazilian Portuguese, of course) today.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/11/20/why-governments-should-stop-raising-the-minimum-wage
I love how it's paywalled
spoiler
It is easy to see why politicians like raising the minimum wage. Short of cash yet keen to fight inequality, they have seized on a tool of redistribution that costs governments little and wins votes. In its budget on November 26th Britain is likely to raise the minimum wage, which sits at 61% of median income, up from 48% a decade ago. Germany introduced a minimum wage only in 2015; by 2023 it had crossed 50%. And although America’s federal rate of $7.25 an hour has not changed since 2009, many states and cities controlled by Democrats have raised their pay floors far higher. The average effective minimum wage is around $12 per hour; the highest is over $21.
Chart: The Economist
In one respect the surging minimum wage is a triumph for economists. Having originally been sceptics, they embraced the policy around the turn of the millennium, arguing that wage floors did not eliminate jobs as they once feared—a finding that the experience of the past two decades seemed to confirm. Yet as we report this week, just as governments are championing the consensus, scholars are getting cold feet. A growing body of research suggests that minimum wages distort economies in ways that do not immediately appear in jobs numbers.
One worry is that it takes time for minimum wages to kill jobs. Evidence from a big hike to Seattle’s pay floor in 2015 and 2016 suggests hiring at the bottom end of the labour market slowed by 10%, even though existing workers were typically not laid off. Another is that higher minimums degrade jobs rather than destroy them. When employers must pay more, but can still hire easily, they may cut corners elsewhere. New research finds that big increases in the minimum wage are associated with shorter or less predictable working hours, more workplace accidents and fewer perks such as health insurance.
A final risk is that early success breeds overconfidence. Moderate minimum wages can, counterintuitively, make jobs more abundant, by offsetting the bargaining power of big employers, who would otherwise restrain hiring to suppress pay. But the more governments embrace big hikes, the more likely they are to eliminate jobs—just as a big enough tax rise will reduce revenue. One recent peer-reviewed estimate puts the average American minimum wage that corrects for employer market power at under $8.
Beyond that, the minimum wage is a crude and wasteful tool for redistribution. Many minimum-wage workers are not poor, but live with higher earners. And when firms raise prices to offset their steeper costs, it is the poor who suffer most—more so than from sales taxes, according to one paper.
Politicians should beware these effects. Although raising minimum wages invariably polls well, electorates everywhere are also angry about soaring prices and a crisis of affordability. There is a danger of a doom loop in which employers’ higher costs are passed on to consumers, making life still less affordable, including for the very workers governments are trying to help. Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York, has promised to raise the minimum wage from $16.50 today to $30 by 2030. Prices would rise significantly as a result, making an already expensive place to live even dearer.
There are better ways to help low earners. In-work tax credits are better targeted towards the poor and, if paid for with growth-friendly taxes, less harmful to the economy. They may lack the appeal of minimum wages, the costs of which are well hidden. But after a decade of aggressive increases, the responsible option is not to go higher still. It is to stop. ■
Tldr: Quantity Theory of Money bullshit, that capitalists will pass through 100% of wage rises as prices, there is no room for output for expand, no room for higher productivity, no room for profits from greater sales, no room for higher employment.
A final risk is that early success breeds overconfidence. Moderate minimum wages can, counterintuitively, make jobs more abundant, by offsetting the bargaining power of big employers, who would otherwise restrain hiring to suppress pay.
Yes which is why there needs to be a job guarantee at the said wage. And direct public sector hiring so wages all along the scale.
But the more governments embrace big hikes, the more likely they are to eliminate jobs—just as a big enough tax rise will reduce revenue.
Laffer Curve crap.