But these areas are already large urban areas which are easily capable of a drastic increase or have higher wages already.įrom there the base wage would increase by $1 per year until it reaches the national base amount.

In the bigger areas that have higher locality adjustments a stepping approach might be warranted. Such a process would raise the effective minimum wage to between $8.40 and $10.25 immediately. This would serve to increase the wages of most employees in this country.Īs for the phase-in of such a plan, it could start with just adding on the locality adjustment at first. Imagine you are working at a middle wage and you see the minimum wage employees get a raise, are you going to standby and not demand an increase? If not the company would risk losing employees to a company that does bump up the salaries. As for the business that say, “we can't afford it”, if you can only exist by paying poverty wages your business model is not viable.Īn often overlooked benefit of the increased wage is the downstream wage increases. People prefer to spend money locally but if they can't afford to they won't. One of the big “arguments” is the CBO report that says raising the wage will cost jobs, but it does not consider that if people have more money to spend they will do it locally.

If challenged on the high minimum it creates, they can point the finger to “those OPM idiots”. One nice thing about this that may appeal to the moderates is the ass-cover it provides. While some may feel that some wages that result are not enough, it is still significantly better than before. They have a very convenient county by county breakdown of the locality adjustments.

The GS locality adjustments are public record, but I prefer to use.

Paradigm shift comic