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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

This is a reason why increasing the minimum wage or providing health coverage for low-wage workers is a great way to improve everyone's situation. Sure, Walmart has to pay their workers more, but every low-wage worker who works for someone other than Walmart suddenly has a lot more money to spend... at Walmart. On net, companies like Walmart will benefit far more than they lose. But they aren't willing to unilaterally increase wages and benefits, reasonably enough. That's why you do it across the board.

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> This is a reason why increasing the minimum wage or providing health coverage for low-wage workers is a great way to improve everyone's situation.

We got here by setting policies based on the bottom rather than the middle. The problem isn't that the bottom 5% needs a modest raise, it's that the middle 50% should be making enough to afford to buy a house and they're not.

Price floors don't change that. If anything they make it worse, because most of the new cost of that comes from the middle class in the form of higher prices.

What we really need is to do something about the cost of housing, education and healthcare. And not just subsidizing it -- that's how we got into this mess to begin with. Actually reducing the underlying cost.

The alternative would be combining significant inflation with high interest rates, so that asset prices don't rise from the inflation because of the high interest rates, but wages do.

I imagine raising the cost of labor in the U.S. would only encourage more outsourcing.

Maybe entrenched parties with lots of cash need special incentives to spur investment. I don’t know what those would be, but if all this cash is not being used to invest in public projects or new ventures, we may be witnessing the beginning of a huge socioeconomic shift.

Remember war bonds? We need road bonds. Bridge bonds. Something.

How do you outsource a Walmart shelf stocker?

Labor saving devices / robots. If not to do the whole job (because robot shelf stocking is too much right now), then to reduce the amount of people time needed. Better ways to get the goods close to where they need to go and let the workers move it onto the actual shelf.

Or outsource to the shoppers: just drop the palette of stuff where it should be and let the customers find what they want.

Is that not Amazon?

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