Bret Devereaux

Another way of articulating my point might be that the current federal wage is so bad that it makes $15 *in 2025* seem a lot more unreasonable for South Dakota than it actually is. Minimum wage workers are starving there too.

I mean, sure. The perpetual danger with price floors on labor is that you risk closing out low productivity workers from the market, which blocks them from becoming high productivity workers.

In essence, the 'sawing the bottom rungs off of the ladder" problem. That problem is going to be a lot more acute, obviously, in parts of the country where people start lower on the ladder in absolute dollar terms by virtue of the local economy.

We've already gotten a far-too-big divide between regions with lots of economic dynamism and regions with very little. I worry that raising the minimum wage so high will make this problem worse and as a result, not help all of the people it should help.

By contrast, a big boost to the EITC would put money into those economically weaker regions of the country, potentially helping them to become more economically dynamic and successful.

But, I mean, let's not fool ourselves. We're not doing minimum wage because it's the smart intervention. It isn't and never was. We're doing minimum wage because the costs with it are politically invisible and fall heavily on marginally politically involved (poor) people.

We *could* raise taxes and do income support, but we're not going to do that because it means raising taxes on the urban professionals who make up part of the core Democratic base.

At this point, I'm pretty open to the idea that a less-than-ideal intervention like raising the minimum wage is better than no intervention. But we need to be honest that the minimum wage is on the table because of a political calculus that is not great.