> What's wrong with making the playing field even by taxing them?
This turns the low paid workers into unemployed workers.
I'm fascinated that people honestly think it's better that people make $0/h than $10/h while "exploited".
This turns the low paid workers into unemployed workers.
I'm fascinated that people honestly think it's better that people make $0/h than $10/h while "exploited".
Most studies that have been done on minimum wage found no correlation to unemployment rate. The economics you learned in high school can rarely be applied perfectly to reality. There are plenty of countries with minimum wages with no significantly different unemployment rates in the service industries.
This makes it very hard to measure the effect with any precision. You have to remember that wages are not 100% of the compensation for employees. So if MW increases from $10 to $10:50, fringe benefits may be cut from $2 to $1:50, and you end up with no measurable effect.
> But the reality is that these shops need the workers regardless.
If their expenses become higher than their earnings, the shops will close. Maybe that at least is an economic fact we can agree on?
For what it's worth, here in Australia there's only around 10% less McDonald's stores per capita to the US, despite a $20 minimum wage. All these workers can afford to eat and live in some of the most expensive cities in the world and the country isn't collapsing under unemployment.
If I was emperor, abolishing MW would be my first and most obvious reform to help the poor.
> All these workers can afford to eat and live...
But the problem is the people who can't get work because on MW!
Citation needed. In fact, I did a quick Google search and found out that several US cities/states have increased minimum wage this year and they've seen NO significant job losses. In fact, in some cases these states have seen more growth in low-income jobs than states with lower minimum wages.
Minimum wage takes money out of the pockets of the rich and puts it in the pockets of the poor. Half the time the rich people would have spent this money on luxury goods instead of spending this money on everyday things anyway. As such, in many cases you end up seeing increases (or at least no impact) in the numbers of low wage jobs because of the increase in demand of the products of said workers.
Or they could raise their prices. That’s what normally happens in my experience when a small business faces an unavoidable and significant increase in one of its input costs.