Jester,

Some thoughts on both your posts today.

The economic reality for many segments of the population remains markedly mediocre to outright bad, depending on what demographic we are talking about.  Things are improving in a painfully slow fashion with little prospects of accelerating. The elderly and middle to lower classes have tons of impediments to a decent standard of living.

It is because of this reality that the economy will only grow in the low 2% range.  

A push for better wages is IMO, not a bad deal given how stagnant they have been for decades.  It may not be intuitive but it offers Wage Inflation and likely more money to flow throughout the economy.  Given where this economy is at now, this may not be such a bad thing.  It will allow people some additional breathing room, so long as inflation does not run out of control. There are questions of course: Is it going to create more loss of jobs?  I do not  have a categorical answer . As you know, conservatives insist higher wages do lead to higher job losses, but liberals offer studies that contradict that.  I would guess the truth is somewhere in the middle.  In addition to globalization, I think technology has been as big a culprit in job losses in the past 30 years.

The push for higher minimum wage in California will take until 2023 or 7 years.  I am not an economist, but that seems to be a reasonable time frame for business to prepare and adjust for the higher cost. Maybe, just maybe, contrarian thinking is the way forward?

LT, I just think there's no such thing as a free lunch, and mandating by law that kind of wage growth is one more example of the Govt thinking things are free. I mentioned the situation of workers being funded by tax revenue. I seriously doubt that taxpayers will vote in higher taxes, which means there must be job losses there and with it a reduction in services for the public for the same tax burden. With Walmart, we saw profit target cuts, store closures and layoffs, and we can expect the same of this elsewhere in the economy because there's no such thing as a free lunch (inb4 Yellen...). None of this addresses the real problem anyway: the wealth divide, the loss of better paying jobs, and the anemic rate of job creation. We have so many working poor now, seven years into the "recovery", because of all the globalization and policy errors of the last decade, and I fear that forcing such earnings growth by law leads to other short term consequences, and that they'll be equally poor in a few years time. Getting paid $15 in 2022 is not going to mean they'll be living the California dream by then. Hell, that's nowhere enough to live the California dream now.

I agree that anything the Government mandates is not necesarily good, in fact it typically has unintended consequences. I am not exactly a liberal, rather center right.  However, minimum wages have been regulated for many decades.  I believe this is so because those workers with the lowest skill set enjoy this wage protection, a social net so to speak, I am not against that.  Afterall, there are no completely free capitalistic societies, there are always some degree of socialistic checks and balances.

In today's environment, after so many decades of depressed wages, I believe a push in that direction is not necessarily a bad thing, within reason of course.