For those of you that don’t know me personally, I describe my political leanings as “eat-the-rich-liberal”.  I come to it honestly, from hippy parents, public high school in northern California and the UCLA School of Fine Arts.

So, you should also know that I’m all for everyone making a basic living wage.  I’ve even spent time trying to work out how much the guy that mows our lawn makes, knowing little to nothing about his business aside from what we pay him.  I worry. 

For myself, I never expected to even make the kind of living I make now.  It’s a blessing, I guess to have the bar so low that I can hurdle over it with just a few lucky breaks.  It periodically strikes me that I might be able to retire one day.  We’ll see about that.  As my wife jokes of her brother’s insistence that she get an IRA; “I’m a comic.  I’m just gonna die.”

Funny.  ‘Cause it’s true.  Our expectations are low.

So, without further ado, here’s my proposal to replace the current national minimum wage laws with a Local Minimum Wage

I assume that only a very small percentage of the population commutes more than 25 miles for a shitty job; the kind of jobs that might be affected by changes to the minimum wage laws.  So for the sake of simplicity, let’s say that people generally live where the work.

Our US Census Bureau is a shining, glittering facet of our national government.  They gather and publish a vast wealth of information.  One of the points of data that the US Census Bureau can extract is the cost of living in any given area.  (In fact, here’s an interesting chart regarding each state’s median housing costs!)  Some elements of our standard of living vary quite a lot from place to place (like housing), and some things are largely the same no matter where you are in the US (transportation).  Everything else is somewhere between (food, medical expenses, clothing).

County by county, or even neighborhood by neighborhood, we could calculate just how expensive it is to live and work there.  That number can then be used to establish a nationally mandated, but locally derived minimum wage.

So here’s the rub; I would expect a locally derived minimum wage to be quite a bit different in many places than the current minimum wage.  Places like LA, Manhattan, Boston and San Francisco may see their minimum wages increase, while many other places around the country (like northeast Mississippi, where so many of my own relatives live and work) would find their minimum wages decrease.  The former would suck for small businesses in expensive cities and the latter would suck for the people that have crappy McJobs in the poorer quarters.  To offset the shock, we would need to build a transition period to change things slowly; a 20% step toward the new process every two or three years should do the trick.

The upside of the plan is that areas of the country that have been poor and undervalued for so long will become more attractive to industry and jobs.  As jobs move to those places, those places become more desirable places to live, as people begin to migrate there for the jobs, costs of living rise. 

Meanwhile, back in the overcrowded cities, McJobs get replaced with better opportunities as the crappy jobs go away and the real-estate gets recycled by local businesses that know their markets and know what can be sold or what services can be supplied to the people that live there.

Over time, jobs spread out more evenly across the country.  Some places will always be more expensive, and some places less expensive, but the natural flow of industry will find its level, and the basic minimum wage will allow everyone, no matter where they are, a strong, foundation for building careers and creating more businesses and jobs.

Again, feel free to poke holes in this crackpot theory. 

Next up:  Maximum Wage Laws!   (Eat the Rich!)