The minimum wage is not meant to be a living wage. If you are trying to support yourself on minimum wage, you are an idiot.
Ok, so let's raise it to $10 per hour. What will happen to the labor force? More teens and minorities will lose their jobs.
But if $10 is good, wouldn't $20 be better? How about $30? If you are insisting on it, why not go all the way?
Ekim, your ignorance is appalling.
Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy
Then what is it supposed to be? There are many adults who can get no work other than minimum wage. The art of setting the minimum wage is to set it as high as possible given the current elasticity of low skill labor that the net welfare increase more than offsets the small hand full of lost jobs. And recent statistical experience shows that is without exception what has happened when the minimum wage has been raised.
Also consider the plight of mid skill employees in rural areas with high unemployment. I can find file clerks here in my small town all day that will work for $7.50 even if I didn't provide insurance. Given the generous health care benefits I give my employees (fully paid for by the company), many would take the job at half that, especially those single mothers with children. So I pay minimum wage, at least when they start off. But if the wage is raised to $10 or even $15, I still need two file clerks. Hell, I'd have to pay them if the wage was $30/hr. That's true with almost every other minimum wage, or near minimum wage job in town. Somebody has to flip burgers, be a cashier at the dry cleaners, check groceries, work the counter at the bus station, etc. And in my small town, any job that can be eliminated already has been. But now, with a higher wage, all the people in town will have more money to spend. (Remember, I live in a town where the median
household wage is under $25,000.
That's half the households living on less than $25,000. Also just a tad under 60% of the population has a HS degree or less. Only 9% have college degrees.) Here, many are living on minimum wage and increasing it 33% would be a huge economic boost, even if 10% of the jobs vanished. (And I'll bet not 1 job in 100 would vanish.)
You people who live in urban areas have no idea what the rest of the world is like, especially in poor communities. And we have some substantial oil and gas activity in our county. If you take a similar county with no mineral wealth, these numbers will be worse.
Idiot. When you increase an employer's labor costs, the employer has two choices. Raise prices, or reduce costs by laying people off. In this economy, raising prices is not the best idea, so you can expect more unskilled laborers to be laid off if the minimum wage is increased.
Who does this hurt? Young minorities mostly, and the young, unskilled and poor in general.
It's basic economics. No wonder you don't understand.
Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy
Actually there is a third choice -- reduce his profits. That's what would happen in my case. I'm still going to take as many cases as I have time to handle. And I already charge as much as I can (or as much as the market will bear, to use the language of supply and demand) to maximize revenues. In a contingent fee case, the percentages will remain the same. On those occasions I work by the hour, do you think a corporation will pay me more because two file clerk each make $100 more a week??!!! I'm upping my hourly rate from $600 to $602?
Indeed classic economics suggest that your profits will be lowered by the inverse of the elasticity of demand for your product.