Originally Posted By: eljefino
Imagine if society was full of people making at least $15 an hour. Just imagine what they would do for your business... buy from it. Who cares about the people, but, man, their flush wallets would be nice to have around.
Someone running a business assuming they can't compete with the guy across the street is ignorant of the macroeconomics of wages being not just an expense but a source of income.
Hogwash. $15/hr is $30k/yr if you work a standard 2000 hours. What are they buying and what should they be buying? Certainly not wasting money in restaurants or buying high profit margin trinkets.
That's why this is self limiting anyway. If people want to be idiots and play the "I deserve" game, making $7.50 or $15 or even more, go ahead. But it's really poor budgeting and is going to catch them or limit them severely when they realize how many hours they have to work to feed their families Big Macs (which will, increase in price). $15/hr is not "making it", but it does topple a lot of the cost structure of the labor component of many businesses. Which means less opportunity as it all flushes out.
It's just a low-tier wealth redistribution. A feel good thing where everyone thinks they'll have twice as much money... Until they don't, or their job is just gone A company could have two $7.50 employees for the price of one $15 employee. Business efficiency dictates the best of all worlds is to get a $7.50 employee to do the job of two people, and gain cost efficiencies. What will happen is that this will be stressed much further, and only the best employees will be retained in jobs (even if they then pay a bit more than $15), and the opportunity at the bottom will be gone. This is because some people are just harder workers than others, some people are smarter than others, and so besides automation and whatever, it will simply drive management and owners to stress the better employees further and remove opportunity for the lowest.
