Isnt' the issue about raising the min wage to a "liveable wage"?
So far, we've seen no consensus on what level this is....quotes ranging from about $9/hour to $26/hour.
AFAIK, the only person who's suggested $26 per hour was you, and only to reject it as unreasonable. I smell a straw man.
Just raising it a little to below what the market is already paying would do neither harm nor good.
But raising it above market levels would have some deleterious effects on poor performers.
You've repeated this assertion several times, but you still haven't given an explanation for it. If you want me to take it seriously, you'll have to provide some actual support.
... especially since when we unpack it, there's a decent package of assumptions in it.
Implicit in your assertion is the idea that there is a cadre of workers who would have a job under the status quo but who wouldn't have a job if minimum wage was raised. But just which workers would these be?
It wouldn't be the workers doing jobs like Rick touched on earlier in the thread, installing light fixtures in homes or whatnot. If a marginal employee can only install 10 fixtures in a day for minimum wage, he's going to be out on his butt when an employee comes along who can install 15 in a day. In that case, this worker's job is doomed regardless of what happens with the minimum wage: no matter how much you pay your employees, an employee who can generate more profit to you for the same expenditure in wages is going to be preferable. The only protection the worker could hope for is if there isn't anyone else who could step in and do his job better: either unemployment is so low that decent workers are scarce (which sure as hell wouldn't be the status quo these days) or the employee is already maximally good at his job, so nobody else could do it better anyhow... IOW, the limitation is one of the job, not the worker.
So... the job of a marginal employee in this sort of case is a sunk cost: regardless of what happens with minimum wage, his job is gone. It's not a rational basis to use to judge between raising the minimum wage or not, because the same outcome is common to both scenarios.
So what kind of job could be susceptible to these effects you describe? It would have to be one where the intrinsic qualities of the job limit its worth to the employer: if you're a worker on an assembly line, there's a ceiling to how much you can be worth to the company: once your work quality is good enough that your work products aren't being rejected by Quality Control, then you can't make yourself worth more to your employer: you can't make the line go any faster, and you can't decrease the raw material cost or increase the price that gets charged for the finished product.
IOW, in the cases where people could lose their jobs because the minimum wage went up, it wouldn't be because these were marginal employees that just weren't very good at their jobs who got replaced with people of higher worth; it would be cases where the employer decided that it would be better to eliminate the job altogether if the minimum wage was raised.
So... in these cases:
- the business would have to be generating an acceptable return sustainably under the status quo (because if it isn't, the job is gone anyway).
- the business would have to not be able to generate an acceptable return with the minimum wage raised (because if it can, then the job is safe).
- the business would have to generate more or better jobs than some other business would be able to generate with the same capital (since you've argued that businesses' growth is being constrained by availability of capital and financing) - since if it isn't, then that business shutting its doors would actually be good for job availability overall, because it would allow some other business to offer more jobs than the original company could have.
Do any such companies exist?
You've gone from arguing that there's a possibility that some workers might lose their jobs to arguing as a fact that some workers will be disadvantaged. Since you've gone from "what ifs" to declarative statements, presumably you have some concrete examples in mind. Please provide them.
