Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
We are debating two things. A group of people believe - against all evidence to the contrary - that most people earning minimum wage are adults trying to raise a family. I've said repeatedly, and so have others, that there should be income supplements for the small fraction of minimum wage earners who are adults raising children. But raising it dramatically across the board will almost certainly result in the loss of many part-time and entry-level jobs for young people, which carries with it serious long-term consequences, not only the viability of a lot of businesses with low profit margins, but the long-term employment prospects of those same young people.
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Exactly. The talk about "respect" and "living" wage is a bunch of sound-bite crap. Minimum wage jobs are that because literally anybody can do them - the consumer can do all these jobs, so the consumer is paying for the convenience to have someone else do it for them. The wage such a job garners is subject to two major forces (simplistic - I am sure there are more subtler ones): (1) from the low end, it has to pay enough that someone will want to do it; (2) from the high end, it has to be low enough, so that the "product" of the business is cheap enough that the consumer will choose to pay for the service, rather than do the job himself/herself. Thus, in a reasonably free economy, the market will dictate a tipping point where the jobs are mostly filled and consumers mostly can afford the product. In boom times, if you will recall, it was tough to fill these jobs, so you saw Tim's paying $16/hr to counter staff, and anybody willing could get a construction job. Now, the trend is obviously in the opposite direction, as there are plenty of people looking for work and plenty of consumers cutting back, so raising the minimum wage to an artificially high level will result in the destruction of a certain number of businesses/jobs built around menial tasks. Hence... idiots.