Wouldn’t raising the minimum wage grow the middle class?
Yes! Emphatically YES!!!!Raising the minimum wage would at the very least, decrease the 40 year long relentless downward pressure on Working Class wages that has been responsible for the extinction of the US Middle Class.Fair wages and benefits are, or should be, determined by the ability of the worker to negotiate with the employer. In the United States, corporations who control our government, have over the course of the last 40 years, relentlessly stripped our Working Class of the right to negotiate with employers over wages, benefits, and working conditions. This has resulted in a 40 year period of wage stagnation for our Working Class. Because of inflation over that same time period, the US minimum wage has actually decreased in value. The US minimum wage of today buys much less than the minimum wage of four decades ago would buy.What will happen when the minimum wage is increased, is that the gigantic population of workers who work for wages that are in between the former minimum wage, and a practical living wage, will also demand wage increases. This will increase the prosperity of our entire working class which will actually cause economic expansion and job creation.This is so painfully obvious that it amazes me that some people are not capable of grasping this simple reality. If you want a decent economy, you have to have decent wages for the Working Class, because the Working Class make up the vast majority of the consumers in the domestic economy.Isn’t this obvious?It remains to be seen I suppose, whether the once fabled US Middle Class will ever reemerge. Those days when an average Working Class wage was not only enough to live on, but was also enough to be relatively prosperous, might never come again. But there is absolutely no question that suppressing wages for 40 years has taken its toll on the Working Class in the US. These ruinous policies of tax cuts for the rich, financed by increasing the National Debt that the Working Class is saddled with, has only transferred “Middle Class” wealth away form the Workers, and handed it over to the rich and the corporations.
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.
For the people who agree with Bernie Sanders' plan to raise the minimum wage to $15, why don't you want it to be even higher than that?
I'll not answer your question directly, since I don't agree with Sanders on this point, but ...Rather I'd like to chime in on the side of the questioner, and perhaps further advance this excellent question! ...If $15 per hour is so good, why not make it $20? Why not make it $50? Why not make it $100?If the minimum wage gets raised to $15 (say about 50% higher than it is in many places), and then the inflation this causes makes prices themselves rise 50%, then what? Differently stated, if a decent hamburger costs $10 now, and you have to work an hour to gain one; and in, say, 3 years you're making $15/hr, but hamburgers cost $15 now ... then what's the point?As an additional aside: Many of the people who want higher minimum wages also want additional deficit spending by the government, to "prime the pump", or "invest in the future", or "create demand". If borrowing and spending $500 billion is such a great idea, why not spend $1 trillion? Why not spend $2 trillion? Why not spent $5 trillion?Likewise, Bernie wants the government ever deeper into tertiary education, yet the government has been spending ever great sums on this (in the form of grants, subsidized student loans, direct loans to universities, research grants, etc, etc, etc, there's been tons of goodies) for many, many years ... and the cost of university has been raising far, far faster than inflation for many years. The government has subsidized the cost of university out of many people's reach. Why subsidize it even more? The grand-daddy question that ties it all together: Why exactly do people think they can vote themselves rich? If being rich was simply a matter of an electoral, or legal, change; Don't you think it would have already been tried?Please Sanders supporters, let us know, because I'm dying to understand what my lack of empathy clearly wont allow me to see.
Does raising the minimum wage help cost of living?
No it does not, the “cost of living” will increase as a result of a price floor on wages.A price floor on wages implies that any worker incapable of producing sufficient output to justify his employment will not be employed.This implies an attenuation in the amount (and quality) of consumer goods produced in the economy. All else equal this implies that prices of goods will increase (some more than others, also relative prices will change).
Why do democrats think raising the price of American labor to at least $15 an hour is a good idea?
This is a “no brainer”What those geniuses who oppose a “living wage” for all of our workers are not capable of grasping, is the reality that the US working class citizen is the backbone of our domestic economy. If we are so shortsighted and ignorant that we think that keeping those who work for the minimum wage in poverty will get lower prices for us, we are sadly mistaken. Another reality that many working class people don’t grasp is that even if we don’t make the minimum wage ourselves, since that is the standard by which our own wages are measured, keeping the minimum wage workers in slave-like poverty also has the effect of suppressing our own wages.Another reality is that working class people spend the majority of their wages. If they can live on their wages, versus the poverty imposed on them by our shamefully inadequate US minimum wage, they will have more money to spend buying the products that the rest of us are involved in producing. Raising the minimum wage would have an immediate and sustainable positive effect on the economy.There are of course those who will ignorantly justify the poverty of the US minimum wage by attacking the character of the low wage worker. “They should go to school get an education, work their way up the ladder, blah blah blah”. What those who discount the minimum wage worker don’t realize is that because our own economy is so lopsided in the distribution of wealth (95% of the economic gains over the last 30 years have gone to the 1%), the US economy doesn’t produce very many good job opportunities. People with college degrees quite commonly end up working for that minimum wage, because our economy doesn’t offer anyone very many viable alternatives.So, raising the minimum wage is just good sense, and good business.