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I was meaning it more to mean any wage that is less than what a person can fairly live on.

Some people have 10 kids. Should they be paid more than someone with none?

If a job isn't worth paying a human being a living wage to do, then you shouldn't be paying human beings to do it in the first place.

So if a high school student wants to flip burgers part time for some extra spending money, that should be banned, since they can't live on it?

By raising the bottom rung of the economic ladder, you are just making it harder for people to reach that bottom rung. Getting a job, any job, is the first step out of poverty. The actual wage doesn't matter so much, because anyone willing to work hard is going to quickly move up.

Key facts about the minimum wage:
1. The average household income of a minimum wage earner is $53,000 per year.
2. Only 2 percent of full-time workers earn the minimum wage.
3. Two-thirds of minimum wage earners receive a raise within a year if they stick with the job.
4. Only 9 percent of adults living below the poverty line work full time.

Most of the benefits from a hike in minimum wages goes to people that are not poor. Efforts to help the poor should focus on getting more people into employment, and focus less on wages that jobless people don't earn.

What of people who were doing everything "right" who got derailed by circumstances beyond their control?

An obvious way to help these people is to make it EASIER for employers to hire them and give them a chance to turn their lives around. For instance, the EITC is an effective program that has helped millions of people earn enough to support their families.

But Bernie's poverty tax does the exact opposite. It penalizes companies for hiring the people most in need of a job. It is an insanely stupid proposal, and I can't believe that anyone takes it seriously.

It is a myth that "low pay" is a significant cause of poverty. The real problem is NO PAY. Only 9 percent of adults living below the poverty line work full time.

If Amazon hires a poor single mother, it is idiotic to say that somehow Amazon "caused" her to be poor. The truth is, that by giving her a job, they are helping her take the first step out of poverty. Punishing them for doing so makes no sense.

Poverty is a difficult societal problem, and we should all bear the cost of alleviating it. Dumping the cost onto the companies that are providing much needed entry level jobs, and thus disincentivizing them from doing so, is counter-productive.

Very few. Most poor households have zero full time workers. Most people earning minimum wage are 2nd or 3rd earners in middle class households.

That's a pretty bold claim. How about some evidence?

Citation #1: Income inequality by household demographics

The average household in the bottom quintile had 0.43 people earning income. The average household in the top quintile had 2.04 people earning income.

Citation #2: Key facts about the minimum wage

The average household income of a minimum wage earner is $53,000 per year.

Only 2 percent of full-time workers earn the minimum wage.

Two-thirds of minimum wage earners receive a raise within a year if they stick with the job.

Only 9 percent of adults living below the poverty line work full time.

Increasing the minimum wage rather than the EITC has the benefit that more money is paid in taxes

Except that you are taxing the creation of low wage jobs. That is probably not smart policy. People are poor, not because of low pay, but because of NO pay. Most poor households have no earned income at all.

those who do have a minimum wage job ... typically are poor, and it's ridiculous to assert otherwise

Claiming that something is "ridiculous" does not make it untrue. Most minimum wage earners are not rich, but they are not poor either. Their average family income is $53k. Citations:

Very few minimum wage earners are the sole providers for a family
Typical Minimum-Wage Earners Aren’t Poor
most minimum-wage earners are young, part-time workers and relatively few of them live below the poverty line
Minimum wage myths

On Washington State "thriftiness"...
http://www.washingtonpolicy.org/Centers/government/policybrief/08_guppy_piglet.html ...
Legislators work in a world of unending spending requests. When there is no countervailing pressure for tax-cuts, it is often easier for lawmakers to just say "yes" to the special interests. As The Seattle Times reports, "Since 2005, lawmakers have spent or allocated nearly $270 million on earmarks in the capital budget... That's more than the previous 15 years combined."[ii] The following chart illustrates the long-term trend. ...
Washington is one of the most heavily-taxed states in the nation. In all, residents pay more than 50 different kinds of taxes at the state and local level. The large number of taxes, combined with a growing economy, is why a record level of revenues is flowing into the treasury. ...
In historical terms, Washington's level of taxation is perhaps the highest ever. Today, Washingtonians pay more in taxes than they do for food, clothing and transportation combined. ...
Suquamish Inviting House, Longhouse and Museum
$2,550,000
Just one pork item, like $2.5 million to benefit the owners of a wealthy tribal casino, represents the entire yearly tax contribution of 1,059 Washington taxpayers. ...
The Ship Nobody Wants
$4.5 million ...
Battle Equipment the Army Can't Use
$6 million ...
Ending wasteful spending at Washington State Ferries
$9.6 million ...
Tacoma Narrows Bridge Lights
$1.5 million This earmark is to provide tax-funded night-time lighting decoration for the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge. ...
Hiawatha Artist Lofts, Seattle
$1 million

One million dollars is devoted in the state budget for 61 units of living/work spaces for artists, plus five commercial storefronts for artist-related businesses.[xix] ...
"SayWA" Tourism Campaign
$442,000 ...
Money Stolen from the Crime Victims Fund
$431,376 ...
Animal Massage Practitioners
$142,000
Medicaid Checks for Services to Dead People
$44,687
Pension Payments to Dead People
$254,694 ...
Local Community Projects
$132,619,000
(long list of things like $130k for an opera house). ...

Governments always wave the baby in front of the budget cut gun. But the reality is, they are sitting on a rich leather $750 executive chair behind a $10,000 desk while they do it.

The "Washington Policy Center" (a right-wing thinktank) and TCS are cynically taking advantage of anti-Microsoft sentiment.

It's insulting. I bet they know very little about why many of us dislike Microsoft.

The model is also called the Circular Flow Model.

Here's a picture of the Circular Flow Model.

With our trade deficit in the negative for decades now, we are leaking far more than we are injecting. Offshoring is another type of leak.

forgetting that the government lives off of us.

Remember that when the government does anything, they pay for it via forced confiscation of people's income. That's a perfectly reasonable (or at least unavoidable) thing to do for many things

For a variety of reasons, whenever the government does something, it generally costs more than it would if the private sector did it. For instance, schooling. So, even if the government funds the project only from those whom it would benefit, everyone would most likely pay more.

For myself, I'd like to save that sort of magic for the important stuff that wouldn't otherwise happen.

Are voucher systems somehow the silver bullet

They sort of are.

The real silver bullet is an effective system of negative feedback. When the schools do a bad job, they need to be punished, and when they do a good job, they need to be rewarded. A simple idea.

Simple, yes, but hard to do in real life. Teachers' unions, educational bureaucracies all the way up to the federal level, politicians making promises... all of these things can complicate the school system to the point where incompetence isn't punished, nor excellence rewarded. And attempts to use standardised tests to guarantee that kids are taught well, just mean that teachers will wind up "teaching the test".

The best thing you can hope to do is to allow parents to move their kids around to the best schools. This will not, itself, fix the problem instantly; but it will introduce an element of feedback into the system. Over time, this will inevitably force the schools to improve.

If a restaurant has poor food, people will take their business to other restaurants. It doesn't matter what kind of union the cooks have, it doesn't matter what kind of promises politicians might have made, etc. If the customers vote with their feet, the better restaurants will prosper and the worst ones will have to close. The same thing would happen with schools, but it would take longer (people eat several meals per day, but they would probably leave their kids in any particular school for at least a few months before deciding to move the kids somewhere else).

I have debated this issue in the past with some people who claimed that parents must not be trusted to choose schools for their kids. That's lunacy. There will be a few bad parents, but by far most parents really want what is best for their kids. The parents and kids together are the best judges of how well a school is serving them.

Note that middle-class and upper-class parents already have some freedom to pick schools; I know my parents, whenever we moved, would carefully consider what the schools were like, and they would only move someplace where the schools were decent. The poorest people, who are trapped in the bad part of town (no money to move somewhere else), those are the ones who really want school vouchers.

By the way, public school systems spend a lot of money per student. The vouchers are generally for less than the public school system would have spent on a student. If a student takes a $3000 voucher and goes to a private school, that is usually a net profit for the public school. In my state, the average per-student spending is $9,454 per year.

For more on vouchers, click here: http://www.cato.org/research/education/vouchers.ht ml

steveha

Primaries don't count because you only select from a subset of all the candidates and only from one party. If I could vote in both primaries it wouldn't be so bad...

There's considerable feeling here that the declaration of a political party should not be a requirement for participation in primaries. Though it's too late for the 2004 cycle, there's some support for a "Louisiana style" primary- which is a runoff system where a general primary is held where all candidates (regardless of party) are placed on a single ballot and the top two candidates advance to the general election - regardless of whether those two candidates are the expected one D and one R, or two Ds, or two Rs, or 'third party' candidate(s).

This would presumably avoid the First Amendment conflict as such a primary would not formally be for a Party's candidate, and it's currently in use in Louisiana (Admittedly, Washington's prior system had been in use for 68 years, so the fact that a state has been using a primary system for a long time is no guarentee that the Feds won't intervene yet again.)