2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Bernie Sanders, Automation, and the Fate of the US [View all]paulthompson
(2,398 posts)Sanders, Clinton, and others are proposing raising the minimum wage by various amounts. I think that's a good idea in the short term. If people have a full time job, they should be paid a living wage. But at the same time, the more the costs of labor goes up, the more businesses will have incentive to automate more jobs.
There's no easy solution for that. But I also think it's kind of a moot point. If a job can be profitably done by a computer or robot instead of paying a worker at $15 an hour, then it's just a matter of time (and probably not very long!) before that job will be profitably done by a computer or robot instead of paying a worker at $7 an hour too. Automation is going to get cheaper and cheaper at a startling rate. Trying to lower human wages to compete is a losing battle. Besides, it's not practical to lower wage below what the minimum wage already is now, because people can't survive on such little money. That's why an entirely different approach is needed, such as the UBI (universal basic income).