When will liberals accept the reality that raising the minimum wage to $15/hour will destroy jobs?
Let's take one of the biggest profiteers in retail today: Walmart. I'll walk you through the math step by step in case you never thought of it to begin with. Walmart has 2,000,000 employees. Average employee makes $8.81/hour. Paying $15/hour would give a raise of $6.19/hour, which would cost Walmart an additional $12.4 million/hour. This would cost Walmart an extra $99 million per 8 hour day, which would cost Walmart an extra $36.15 billion per year. Walmart profited $16.8 billion last year. This would cause them to lose $19.35 billion. Walmart, just like any other business, would now be out of business. You have successfully laid off millions of workers. Congratulations!
Why don't liberals understand that raising minimum wage just raises the cost of goods?
The recent push to increase the minimum wage from the fast food workers actually does point to a much deeper concern for the state of the US economy today. We have to remember that it wasn't too long ago where fast food workers were the bench mark for high school and college students employment opportunities. In many cases the money earned went for petty things like Friday's date and then again to augment student expenses on campus. In both cases the money earned wasn't earmarked for mortgage, utilities or even child care. That responsibility was on the shoulders of parents. Boy, how things have changed. Today, fast food workers are not the Soda Jerks of a bygone era but now are parents themselves many of whom have lost their main source of income only to find work at Mickey D's.But, this latest effort to have the minimum wage increased is a bit short sighted. In many cases everything is relative. Take for instance when the Alaska pipeline was being built, to attract workers meant that wages was the bait that lured so many to Alaska. But the catch was the overall cost of living only increased relative to the wages that were being offered. The same thing is happening in North Dakota today where the oil boom is in full swing. Everyone wants a piece of the pie sort of speaking. But when wages increase without safeguards in place to insure that inflationary trends don't settle in to the cost of everything else, the people receiving those higher wages actually loose.Today, the balance between wages and the cost of living is way out of line. That is one of the key factors as to why the United States has the highest wage disparity gap in the world. But, lets but this case of our fast food workers in perspective. Today, the employment opportunities are not readily available with corresponding living wages. The United States has lost millions of middle class wage jobs that are most likely not ever coming back. Corporate America has literally turned it's back on the middle class job opportunities for the past 25 years. The United States economy has shifted from a strong manufacturing base to one of today a service and technology base. The hard cold reality is the fact that 90% of service related jobs of which Mickey D's is pay just a little more than the minimum wage set by the state or Federal government. Another sobering statistic is that the national unemployment rate is much higher than what our "most trusted" news and governmental officials keep emphasizing.
Why doesn’t minimum wage keep up with inflation? Shouldn’t it rise when everyone else gets a COLA?
Companies love finding ways around the government to screw employees, if there was a another Boston Tea Party; they’d throw their own employees into the ocean!If you mandate employee health insurance: they make them independent contractors or give less than 30 hours (or both.)If you raise the minimum wage: they install $100k kiosks to replace employees (that's the cost of McD kiosks, $2.8 billion for 3–4 in each location they are putting them in.) McDonald’s and Walmart are 2 of the biggest employers of minimum wage employees, and this is what both are doing.My advice to the government is to give a payroll tax credit for paying above minimum wage company wide, the higher the minimum; the higher the payroll tax credit. It should start at $12 and another bonus at $15, and mandate 90%+ of hourly employees get a minimum of 30 hours a week average to qualify.I can’t say whether this would be sufficient, it would have to be studied and make sure there are things to protect against loopholes. But, I will say; Donald Trump offered NASA unlimited funding if they could get a man on Mars within 2 years (just to make him look good.) My point is, I said the same thing; so I already have ideas in common with the greatest president ever!
Do conservatives think the minimum wage shouldn't be adjusted for inflation? If so, why?
With one or two exceptions these answers simply fail the reality test. Of course, ideology fails the same test. What is missing is the working poor, a consequence of having a large service sector that pays minimum wage but would likely pay less for some positions if it were legal. Like libertarians who talk a good game but wouldn’t actually enjoy living in their theoretical world, having no minimum wage would increase significantly the number of people who work but are still poor…as in poverty.In the U.S., poverty for an individual is an annual income of less than ~$13.5K. This would be $6.50 per hour for full time employment. While these individuals have no income tax liability, they do have payroll taxes taken out. So the minimum wage puts someone more than a couple thousand dollars above the poverty line. Unless they can’t obtain full time work, which is very common in the service industry. Individuals with so little income also qualify for government benefits, so corporations basically shift the burden for working yet being poor to taxpayers.Conservatives have a lot too say about how things should be, but little or no interest in what that actually means for tens of millions of citizens. They are simply wrong on the minimum wage in concept and in practice. We’ll just add that to the long list of what they get wrong with their ideology and its application. There’s simply no humane rationale for no minimum wage, and not much more for never increasing it.Eclectic Pragmatism — Eclectic PragmatistEclectic Pragmatist — Eclectic Pragmatism – Medium