Quote (Thor123422 @ Jan 27 2015 06:22pm)
It's not that simple.
My rent is going to go up exactly zero dollars if the minimum wage is raised to 10$/hour. Why? Because there's nobody at my apartment complex that makes below that.
The price of McDonalds will go up, but it will go up less than the cost to raise the pay of the employees. It will also go up less because as spending power of the lowest class goes up, so does the amount bought at places which employ minimum wage workers. Minimum wage workers at wal-mart going to 10$ an hour are going to spend virtually all of it on wal-mart products for their families. This means, in reality, wal-mart makes a good chunk of it back what they were paying extra. Henry Ford understood this and is why he paid his employees much higher wages than everybody else. Because higher wages means less turnover (saved cost for the business) more worker productivity (higher income for the business) and higher revenues (higher income for the business). Overall it has been studied and turns out that raising the minimum wage to a reasonable level grows the economy. Obviously if we raised it to 50$ an hour it would hinder, but a gradual raise to 11$ an hour over 5 or so years wouldn't have catastrophic effects, and this is generally agreed upon as evidenced by a letter sent last year including seven nobel leaureates in economics and seventy other economists urging the united states to raise its minimum wage.
The only sources which say that a gradual raise in the minimum wage would destroy business are right-wing funded sources that fire anybody who disagrees or produces results which don't just happen to benefit their donors. It's not hard to spot bullshit trying to pass itself off as legitimate papers, and Heritage, CATO, Liberty University, etc. stink to high heaven.
So there's a magic cut-off point where mandating minimum wage would in fact hinder the economy? You seem to assert it's 50$, why aren't you comfortable with 15$?