Quote:
Originally Posted by Schneed10
Absolutely. But when poorer or working class workers get a raise from $7 to $10, or from $9.50 to $12 as you're noting, there's a much higher velocity of money with working class folks than there is with higher income folks.
Meaning when a working class person gets a bump from $9.50 to $12, that money gets spent almost immediately, mostly in the communities in which they live. Which helps offset some of the concerns we're talking about here with unemployment and higher costs to consumers. When higher income folks get a raise, it tends to go to savings or get invested, which doesn't directly help the communities in which they live.
There are winners and losers, for sure. But overall minimum wage hikes are not damaging - you can go back and look at unemployment statistics and inflation rates shortly following each minimum wage hike in the past, no significant damage shows in the data. That really is the end all be all to this discussion - if you can't show that unemployment or inflation was impacted by minimum wage hikes, then you have no argument. It's all there on the Bureau of Labor and Statistics' website, have at it.
The bottom line is the minimum wage is there for a reason, to enable a person to get by with the most basic of necessities. The minimum wage has historically been worth anything between $6 and $11, in today's dollars. The current wage is on the low end. It needs to be brought up so that these folks don't have to be subsidized by the government in the form of food assistance.
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This imo is the strongest argument for the a bump in the minimum wage...I made a similar argument a couple years ago. It feeds the tax base and a lot of times big companies (McDonalds, Walmart, etc) get that money back in retail sales. Consumer economy folks