St. Louis will drop minimum wage from $10 to $7.70.

[fatslob-:O]

Pemalite said:

I live in a country with a $17.70 minimum wage.

People do generally have more "disposable income". And can afford to buy more. Or buy higher quality.

I don't even know how someone even survives on $10 an hour.


You need to take a look at countries that actually have a high minimum wage, what it means for their living standards and how it affects their economy. And in general, the examples all around the world is generally a positive one.

In Australia our mentality is very much a "You work to live" and in America it is "Live to work".

Your country also has lower purchasing power relative to it's nominal GDP so having more 'money' does not necessarily mean you have more buying power when we consider the fact that as wages grow so will the demand for goods and services. The cost of goods and services will normalize with respect to the amount of bank notes that are available ... 

Maybe in your country you can't live off of $10/h but in America you can make ends meet in the right places and most residences have 2 people living together ...

I do take a look at countries that have higher minimum wages than us but it seems to be somewhat offset by the fact that most of those countries have less buying power per capita than their nominal GDP per capita aside from an oddball like Germany which has a relatively strong export based economy and a strong manufacturing sector too ... 

High minimum wages have an affect alright, at least a negative effect in productivity when we consider that China is the biggest winner in terms of net exports so their nation as a whole reaps massive profits. If you wanted better living standards you would've asked for more available goods and services instead of cash since money is not a fixed value asset ... (same goes for just about any assets too I guess but at least with more goods and services living costs would be cheaper when printing twice the amount of money means your cash is now worth 2x less than it was before)

Money is like a placebo to drive our growth in productivity and I guess that's what it was intended for when it was invented ...