Better pay at the bottom increases purchasing power, lowering prices due to competition and even if it is a wash, more people get paid a "living wage".
Do you resent good, hardworking people making a "living wage"? What do you believe is a "living wage"?
I bet you are totally opposed to any socialist programs also. You hate SOCIALISM, right?
You may not realize it, but if we were to take away our socialist programs, we are back to "slavery". Do the maths! Trump does and he manages to not pay his taxes to boot and use your taxes to secure personal gain or political advantage.
You may not mind that, I do.
Better pay raises the cost of doing business, which is always passed on to the consumer through price increases. This means that your "living wage" (whatever that means) is, at best, temporary, requiring unsustainable runaway inflation to maintain. The idea that wage increases can somehow cause lower prices while being a greater burden on the employer is contradictory. A business cannot pay more for labor and reduce prices at the same time. Due to the small percentage of people earning minimum wage, any increased volume of sales cannot even temporarily offset higher labor costs.
In 2017, 80.4 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.3 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 542,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 1.3 million had wages below the federal minimum. Together, these 1.8 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 2.3 percent of all hourly paid workers.
-
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2017/home.htm
That's 0.01% (2.3% of 58.3%) of all workers, meaning 99.99% of all workers only see price increases, without any pay increase. That's a net loss of purchasing power that cannot possibly be made up for by 0.01% of workers.
Why are the facts of basic economics a moral issue for you? All labor in a free market is voluntary, so people only get paid minimum wage because they choose to and/or cannot offer skills that are valued higher. Anyone is capable of changing the latter, if not also the former, which would require widespread cooperation. If minimum wage workers dried up, businesses would be forced to either raise wages, seek alternatives, like automation, or go out of business, like many under mandated $15/hr minimum wage. And if a person learns a new, marketable skill, they offer more value.
Doesn't matter what I think of socialism, when it does not offer a viable long-term solution. Making people, like yourself, feel better by "helping" in ways that ultimately cause more harm than good, like Scandanavian socialist attempts:
“Whatever you think about Sweden and what we did, you have to realize that we had a great society first,” Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian, filmmaker, and Cato Institute senior fellow, said in a recent lecture titled “No, Bernie! Scandinavia Is Not Socialist!”
“We were incredibly wealthy, we trusted each other socially, there was a decent life for everybody.
That’s what made it possible to experiment with socialism; then it began to undermine many of those preconditions,” -
https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/07...ebunks-myth-of-nordic-countries-as-socialist/
A voluntary free market is never slavery, and that notion is beyond silly. Tax law that provides breaks for loses, to offset tax burden, is a problem with tax law, not the taxpayer. Just like Bernie Sanders saying "
I paid the taxes that I owe", while accepting tax breaks he voted against. And Sanders, who has never worked in the private sector, unlike Trump, is one of the 1%. So who has enriched themselves working in government? Biden?
Biden Inc.
Over his decades in office, ‘Middle-Class Joe’s’ family fortunes have closely tracked his political career.
