If the goal is higher take-home pay, wage subsidies beat wage mandates — without putting mom-and-pops out of business or marginal workers out of a job.

If all goes as supporters intend, a measure to raise the minimum wage in the nation’s capital to $25 per hour by 2029 will appear on city ballots next November. It’s not an isolated occurrence. From New York City to Honolulu, proposals for a spike in the minimum wage have become ubiquitous among progressives.

Saru Jayaraman, the president of One Fair Wage, cited as justification the affordability crisis. “We’re going to…demand what we really need,” she told The Washington Post, “which is a living wage, a minimum wage that meets the cost of living.”

Simplistic though it is, I’m sympathetic to the reasoning. As a freelance writer, I’m far from a member of “The 1%” myself. Meanwhile, some celebrities, athletes, and executives rake in over $50,000 per hour.

Money isn’t everything, but it is something. And this gap between wealth and poverty, or in my case modesty, has diverged for decades. Technology has created an environment for extreme outperformers in a variety of fields to leverage success in ways that did not exist before. Even so, both my life experience and my economics education ring alarm bells in my head whenever I hear plans to raise the minimum wage.

In 2018, a health crisis prevented me from working for much of the year. I had to slowly ease myself back into work mode. This included a part-time job at a department store. I monitored security cameras from a room while communicating with a security team and store employees about theft or suspicious activity.

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