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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

Prices constantly rise faster than wages all over the world, there is actually zero reasons to believe that prices would only rise as much as wages, because they usually don't.

Companies that trying to sell you stuff don't look for an equilibrium it's not like they are saying you have to buy milk, apples, and bread so lets see how much you make to maximize profits if they are the ones that selling you milk and bread they'll charge you as much as "humanly" possible to the point of forcing you to give up on the apples.

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You only have to look at long-term trends to see what nonsense that is.

Since you mentioned milk, let's use that. In the UK, in 1914, a pint of milk cost 1d, and the average wage was 16s 6d for a standard 58 hour working week.

That's an average wage of 198 pints of milk per week, or 3.4 pints of milk per hour.

In 2016, a pint of milk is 45p. The minimum wage is £7.20, or 16 pints of milk per hour. If you buy your milk in four-pint bottles (economies of scale not available in 1914), your wage doubles to 32 pints of milk per hour, a nearly 10-fold increase on a hundred years ago, and you're only working two-thirds of the amount of time per week, too!

To be pedantic there is no reason to believe increasing the minimum wage to 15 usd will increase prices proportionally to the increase in wages.

Ex. Someone who would be making 9 would see 66% increase in wages but because wage earners as a whole would only be earning a little more so the increase in prices would be proportional to the overall increase not the much larger individual increase.

Suppose that wages earned only increased 6%. The individual would easily see a great increase to his standard of living despite a small bump in price.

Also note there is no reason to believe that costs of businesses that rely on minimum wage work would go through the roof. Imagine 30% of their costs are labor and 2/3 is minimum wage work. 20% of their cost then double it perhaps and their costs increase 20%.

Note we are talking about an atypical service oriented business dominated by minimum wage labor.

This means that your taco costs a few more dimes but the dude making it doesn't need food stamps and welfare on your dime.

Prices constantly rise faster than wages all over the world

Perhaps you made a typo, but if not, you just said something that's exactly the opposite of reality.

Do you have any data that even slightly backs up what you just wrote?

http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@dcomm/@p...

Also googling "prices increasing faster than wages"...

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