Walmart:

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2005/10/wal-marts-perverse-strategy-on-the-minimum-wage

http://mises.org/daily/1950

McDonald's: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/04/mcdonalds-ceo-minimum-wage-hike_n_5445539.html

I was ill-spoken when I said McDonald's/Walmart will pay higher wages, I mean they could accommodate the increased costs better (usually by investing in labour-saving tech, as you stated), and, ultimately, it would result in increased profitability for the companies as it's an easy way to crush smaller competition.

This is such a simplistic naive argument. One that I would expect my 7 year old could foil.

No not everyone can have the "better" jobs but everyone can excercise good judgment on living within ther means, saving, focusing energies on improving ones situation etc. And I find it completely disingenuous how people so overstate the problem of those living on minimum wages. A majority of working people (which is at an all time low atm in the US) make higher than the minimum wage. Most people who have a basic work ethic stay on minimum for less than a year.

Perfect equality doesn't need to enter the equation because its a myth and pipe dream. And so what if the guys on level one are happy or not.. At what point did they become obligated for other peoples happiness? Do you allow other people to dictate your happiness or contentment with life? If so I'd say that is one sad exsistance, hombre. Life is full of level 99 guys who made it to level 1. And so what if many other people don't make it to level 1 what about levels 98 through 2?

I lived on minimum wage. While I was single, had no kids and didn't have any bills. I also worked four jobs simultaneously. I worked fast food joints, delivered newspapers out of my 20 year old Honda Civic, and voluntered for the fire department. Other people can do that too. But when minimum wages go up those extra jobs start to go away until everything goes back to homeostasis within the economy and by that time the new minimum wage is now the old not high enough minimum wage.

Guys the only way to get out of poverty is through self regulation, hard work, perseverence and saving your own damned money. Think abut this everytime you spend your money on stuff, you are enriching someone else. You are enriching those evil greedy corporations owned by those peeps on level 1 that you all hate so much and who don't care enough to pay all of their workers $100/hr.

You were single, had no kids, and no bills?  Congratulations, you must know all about the struggles people in poverty deal with every day.

Sorry to be so dismissive, but to be fair, so were you. ("a 7 year old could foil" that argument?)

The fact is, minimum wage must rise.  Not to 15/hr.  That's ridiculous.  But it must go up because prices go up and the cost of living goes up.  People fight so hard against raising minimum wage while supporting policies that intentionally create inflation.  If you're going to force inflation, we MUST tie minimum wage to inflation.  It's not fair otherwise.

It's hard to imagine too many people supporting policies that lead to inflation, not knowingly, anyways.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing

In modern economic theory, mild inflation is considered "healthy" for an economy - we actively make sure it doesn't fall below a certain point.  Around the 50s-70s inflation was conidered irrelevant to economic health, and it was allowed to increase unchecked.  Maybe in a decade or two people will come up with some new theory.  But at the moment, our government wants inflation and is printing money to make sure it continues at the rate they want it to continue.  So unless we can fix minimum wage permanently by tying it to cost of living, we will continue to have this debate because it needs to be increased in order to keep up with inflation, but every time we do some people are going to be 100% opposed to any increase.  People living on or near minimum wage are the most succeptible to the inflation that our government insists on maintaining.   We have to raise minimum wage and create laws that continue to adjust the wage - without this debate that just hurts those already hurting the most.

You said "people supporting policies that intentionally create inflation".

I understand what QE is. Most people, if they knew what it was, would not support it. Politicians, their cronies, and state-funded academics support inflation, people don't.

QE distorts the market, as does minimum wage legislation. If you want to have a debate about something, debate fixing the problem at its route cause with QE, don't debate advocating for more market distortion.

Market distortion is a sugar rush, a heroin injection, it feels great at first, and it seems like it's working, with time it'll rot the very core of the economy and the only way to keep feeling normal is to distort the market by larger and larger degrees, killing off more and more of the core, until it all just packs right in.

I do know about the struggles of poverty. I am the product of tow drug abusing parents, one of which abandoned us leaving the other to draw welfare, food stamps, WIC and live in shelters from time to time. I know I have related this story befoe here but while I was in Jr. high I had to catch the school bus less than a block from the Salvation Army shelter we were living in. I would walk a mile in the OPPOSITE direction so no one would see me comingfrom the shelter. So yeah I think I know a little about poverty. And thanks for the congrats. I worked hard to get where I was economically viable.

The fact is when the minimum wages rise so will prices and those businesses seeking to offset that sudden and arbitrary uptick in wages will either freeze hiring or layoff workers in order to afford it. Mandating a minimum wage is an exercise in futility and tomfoolery by those who just don't undertsand how our economy works.

Instead of raising minum wages we should be raising awareness and education on how to become economically viable through earning, saving and investing. We don't even teach check writing or budgeting in schools anymore.

The key is that personal responsibility doesn't fix the macro problems facing the economy. In a down market, we can't all be winners, period. Some folks are going to have to fill the margins, and some folks are going to have to be on the outside looking in. Macro solutions are needed.

It isn't a distortion, it's a correction.  Regardless of why we have inflation, as long as we have it, we need to continue to correct minimum wage so that people don't fall into poverty simply because their paycheck isn't worth as much as it used to be - even though the dollar amount is the same.

There's a lot of truth in that!  Nobody teaches common sense anymore.

It does not, however, negate the need to adjust wages with inflation.  It's simply a necessity of an economy with constant inflation.

The question here is what can you do at the micro level that will enable you to survive through the changes at the macro level? I pointed those out (saving, self regulation etc.) And evven in an up market we can't all be "winners" a you say but we can all be economically viable and self-sufficient.

There are a multitude of forces that affect our economy at every level and one arbitrary change in the dictated minimum wage won't fix the fact that there will be folks on the outside looking in. We've had a minimum wage in this country since 1938 and yet the gap between rich and poor continues to grow and poverty still exsists. When will the benefits of mandatory wage floors start to take effect on the issues that minimum wage proponents rail on about?

The answer is never.