In Lake Wobegon, everybody is above average

As trump continues to merrily sail with the supporting white supremacist winds (thank you, New Yorker) it is not only his adopted party folks who are trying to figure out how to deal with him and their own political futures--the Democrats are seemingly having a tougher time figuring out what message they want to convey to voters in 2018 and 2020, other than being anti-trump.

The temptation is to go uber-left.  After all, that was Bernie Sanders' platform, and of Elizabeth Warren's too.  I hope better sense will prevail.

Take for instance the case of minimum wages.   It is tempting to think that we can make the lives of the lower-income households by simply mandating higher wages.  If only the world were that simple:

There is new evidence that raising the minimum wage pushes business owners to replace low-skilled workers with automation. And it shows that old, young, female and black low-skilled workers face the highest levels of unemployment after a minimum-wage increase.
Economists Grace Lordan of the London School of Economics and David Neumark of UC Irvine studied 35 years of government census data for their working paper, which was released in August, titled "People Versus Machines: The Impact of Minimum Wages on Automatable Jobs."

After a long gap, I recently went to Target.  I was shocked that even that store has introduced self-checkout counters.  Which is exactly what happens when we make labor more expensive:

These automatable jobs include positions like supermarket check-out clerks, who can be replaced by self-service checkout cashiers, and assembly-line workers in manufacturing plants, who can be replaced by robotic arms. Low-skilled workers, for the study, are defined as those who have a high school diploma or less.

As Catherine Rampell writes:

It’s easier, or perhaps more politically convenient, to assume that “pro-worker” policies never hurt the workers they’re intended to help.

Or, as I learnt in graduate school, the road to hell is paved with good intentions!

More from Rampell:

We’ve already seen preliminary evidence that raising wages in Seattle to $13 has produced sharp cuts in hours, leaving low-wage workers with smaller paychecks. And that’s in a high-cost city. Imagine what would happen if Congress raised the minimum wage to $15 nationwide.
In West Virginia, the median hourly wage is just $14.79; in Arkansas, it’s $14.48; and in Mississippi, it’s a depressingly low $14.22. A $15 minimum wage could be binding on more than half of jobs in these states. In fact, in every state (not including D.C.), it could cover at least a quarter of positions.

Two years ago, I wrote in an op-ed about the minimum wage increase in Oregon:

Be careful what you wish for, we are advised. But then we don’t follow that advice anyway.

This guy gets pissed off that I always critique without offering solutions.  I will once again say the same thing: We work out the solutions politically.  Unlike a challenge of how to get humans to the moon and back, or how to vaccinate people, these are not technical issues.  In a democracy, we are, therefore, at the mercy of voters and politicians.

On this issue of minimum wages, all I can state with certainty is this: We do need to increase the federal minimum wage from the pathetic low of $7.25.  (States can have their own minimum wages, but it cannot be lower than the federal minimum.)  What is more urgent is the need to strengthen the safety net for the workers--from health care to child care to affordable housing to ... The new social contract that I have been arguing for years.  A new contract for which those with earnings that are way higher than the minimum wages have to pay higher taxes.  This much I know for sure.  The rest is up to the Democratic Party in 2018 and 2020.