Higher minimum wage is a great idea. People making minimum wage will spend every penny on what they need. That stimulates the economy, creates jobs and promotes the general welfare. Happy people commit less crimes.
Prices at Walmart, fast food, etc are set by the market. Plus, minimum wage people shop at Wally World and Mickey D's. Their business will improve based on higher volume.
Minimum wage earners buy very few expensive cars, etc.
False in many material understandings of economics. I have many economics degrees.
Minimum wage should be totally abolished. It HARMS low wage earners in many ways.
1. It drives up costs and overhead, which are either passed onto the consumer in higher prices, or businesses stop hiring low wage earners and replace them with automation.
1A. Passed on costs. Ever notice prices increase and/or package sizing or quality decreases? Much of that is due to the increase is operating expenses. Money isn't free. To compete, businesses have few options. A) Cut costs or B) Raise prices. Raising prices eats away at all perceived gains in minimum wages.
1B. Cut costs includes lowering quality (meat substitutes, lots of food fillers, overseas production, etc.), or sizes (ever notice many product sizes are much smaller today?) Or hiring freezes, firing people, cutting benefits, automation, sending jobs overseas, etc.
2A. Killing the goose that laid the golden egg = Automation. This is what killed the Detroit auto industry. Once the 5th most prosperous and desirable US city, with some of the wealthiest zip codes in the entire US, unions demanding unreasonably high wages for workers forced the auto industry to automate. This ended low skill and high paid work in the industry, and gutted Detroit. Detroit is now one of the least desirable and poorest cities in the nation. You can thank unions and greedy demands for too much money. This is playing out around the nation, as stores move to self-checkout and self-bagging, killing off millions of low-skill cashier and bagger jobs. Fast food restaurants are also moving to automation for ordering. Self-driving cars will likely be replacing driver services (taxis, uber, etc.). The trucking industry will probably be next when self-driving truck technology arrives, and will destroy one of the largest good paying careers for men. In the aggregate, this harms our nation.
2B. Closing businesses, or exporting jobs. Congratulations NAFTA, you destroyed the American working class by sending much of our factory jobs overseas so we could buy cheaper products. Entire American industries were killed because workers wanted too much money for low-skill work. Businesses answered by shutting factories and plants, and sending jobs overseas and investing in China and Asia and S. America, etc.
3. Harms higher income brackets. The tier of employees who have worked hard for a long time to get merit pay increases, or have careers in the lower and middle classes, do not typically get commensurate pay raises. So a minimum wage increase, actually HURTS these wage earners. Suddenly, they lose ~5% of their buying power when min wage goes up 5% and all costs go up 5%. These increases eat away at the lower and middle working classes the worst. For example, Susy starts at Walmart in 2010 at Min Wage at $6 per hour. Suzy works hard for 11 years, in all positions, goes to night school, and becomes a floor manager making $20 per hour. Suzy is very proud of this and finally getting ahead in life. The stroke of a pen raises minimum wage triples to $18 per hour. A new hire now makes nearly what it took Suzy 11 years of hard work to earn... and Suzy probably will not get a commensurate 3-fold pay increase to $60. So now Suzy took an effective 2/3 pay cut.
In summary, raising wages for low-skill workers harms everyone in the lower and middle class by destroying jobs, automation, increasing costs and/or reducing quality or size of products...
If one wants a successful economy, drop this MIN WAGE NONSENSE and let businesses compete. If you still don't understand, let me try this logic example. If the answer is raising minimum wage, why don't we just raise Min Wage to $1,000,000 per hour so every poor person can become a millionaire? Using that example, it's plainly obvious that you cannot "min wage" the economy to lift poor people up. There's no free lunch and it doesn't work that way. There are basic economic principles at play and it's sad so many just don't get it.
