A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news

That's a true statement, but there's no logic here or reasoning as to why that makes it okay.

1. Not all first world countries have minimum wages. Scandinavia is an example of an entire region that doesn’t have them, yet still has generous safety nets.

2. The assumption that minimum wage jobs are dead-end by default is decidedly not true. Even the most menial minimum wage job provides people with employment history, which is very important for the poorest people in society to establish in order to get other jobs.

3. The logic here assumes that everyone who is displaced by the high minimum wage is capable of becoming a higher skill worker as long as their current employment opportunities are taken away from them. This is may be true for teenagers who are still in school. This is very much not true for all sorts of other minimum wage workers. Such as:

* Old people who are working to get a little extra money during their retirement.

* Single mothers, who often choose to take lower-paid work because many jobs have more flexible scheduling.

* People who have already been displaced from another high-skill job mid-career and have no where else to go to make ends meet (e.g. factory workers).

* People with disabilities that prevent them from pursuing high skill work.

4. The logic here also assumes that, even if someone does improve their skills, that there are enough high skill jobs that exist to employ all of these people. Higher skilled workers tend to be more productive than lower skilled workers, which in turn often means there are fewer high skilled jobs available than lower skilled jobs.

5. The problem with a large social safety net is that it acts as an alternative to working. You might find that trade-off to be acceptable, but you need to be aware that the likely choice many people will make isn't going to be to go to their local lending library to learn Javascript; it's going to be to stay home and not work. It's not because they're lazy or whatever people say; it's because the structure of the benefits incentivizes not-working over working for $X/hour or $Y/year. The values for X and Y go up when the safety net becomes more generous.

That becomes a moral judgement and doesn't follow from logic. Other alternatives also flow from moral judgements. There is no logical basis for taxing people on a fixed amount of a fixed percentage either. All of them appeal to a sense of fairness which is not a logical construct.

This is a widely debated topic that usually devolves into an argument about whether property is some sort of natural right or if it is a societal construct. Even on the natural rights side of the argument you will find adherents that believe any taxation is a violation of their natural rights.

I'm pretty uninterested in traveling the paths of Hobbes and Kant on an internet forum, so suffice it to say that its pretty clear to most people that there is a societal benefit to taxes and a societal desire to make those "fair". Arguing over what is more fair is unlikely to be resolved by logical proof but a lot of people think quality of life impact is the fair option.