| sc94597 said: The biggest issue with minimum wage is that no employer is going to buy labor that isn't worth that minimum. Meaning that the unskilled go unemployed, and the moderately skilled are in lower-paying jobs than what they'd otherwise have in a market without the price-floor. This is economics 101. |
Not really. I mean, there's a certain level minimum wage where you would start to price work out of the market, but businesses only hire the labor they need to get the job done in good times or in bad, especially businesses hiring minimum wage in the first placce (the low-end service industries). Labor costs going up by 20% is not going to slow business by 20%, and in most restaurants and stores you're already running as bare-bones as you can without severely impacting customer satisfaction (my gas station could cut to one cashier at a time, but the lines would stretch around the store at times). Whether you're paying $5 an hour or $15 an hour doesn't affect the number of customers you get, at least not directly, so in the $5 an hour scenario they won't have on cashier standing idle because there isn't enough business, they'd send him home for the day whatever they were paying him. Conversely in the latter scenario (though there's a harder cap on it as you slide up the scale), if you *need* two cashiers to keep things running at an acceptable pace, you're going to pay two cashiers, whether that's $40 for a day's work or $120 for a day's work.
And this, of course, ignores the fact that if the other cashiers are also making $120 instead of $40, they're going to spend that $80, and probably spend it right away (because the marginal propensity to consume for the poor is very high), so that money is going to go to you, even if you have to raise prices a little to compensate.
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
