Bruce, could your employer afford to give everyone a $6 an hour raise without raising prices?

That's a $12,480 a year raise. Per person.

The prices will rise....they have to. But the prices for all businesses will rise on even ground. That means that a 5 Guys burger will rise from $4.50 to $5.00. I am not a liberal I am very conservative. Many of these workers are not just kids working after school. They are husbands and wives trying to support their families.

A guy who does home repair for us works two jobs. He has his day job and his home repair job he does on nights and weekends. His wife also works two jobs. She works at a Wendy's in the morning and then drives to a Taco Bell for the evening shift. She sleeps in between jobs in her car. I wonder how much help and supervision their kids are getting with their homework at night when they are both out working.

Maybe if the minimum wage went up to an acceptable level the mother could then give up her second job and be home at night to make sure the kids did their homework and graduated from high school, stayed away from drugs and did not become gang members. Maybe the kids would not get thrown in jail and the public would not have to pay $20,000 a year to keep him in prison.

When I was young I worked at a Burger King. Terrible job. I came home smelling greasy. I have such compassion for people who work at fast food places. But it is a job and you do what you have to do to support your family when you have no other options.

How does a forced raise, that affects most salaries across the board, help te bottom income earners and not just raise the cost of living an equal percent?

|Money doesn't magically appear.

Not according to my ex..Key word being "ex", though.

That's a classic false dilemma. With a side of... oh, that's two false dilemmas.

Raising prices may result in fewer customers, or, it may not. This forum is replete with integrators saying they raised their prices and got no push back, if less questioning of their rates. Or they lost bad customers and got more good ones. So the raise rates = lost biz - always true notion is bunk.

There is also no consideration of scale or increment. If you raise your prices 100% you will probably lose customers. If you raise them 1% they may not even notice. If you and all your competitors raise your prices 5%, you may not lose any customers... or lose very few.

False dilemmas are a rhetorical tool, not a critical thinking tool.
 

That's not the right question to ask. Our business model allows us to charge for services to the top 5% of the population, and most of us live in the median wage sector supporting them.

The Min Wage affects the bottom levels of the population.

Giving that sector a pay raise of essentially 30% over 7 years is significant to them; much less significant to us in the higher levels, as we may have to pay another 10 cents a burger. To the people we serve, it's totally negligible.

But to answer your question, even though I think its a rhetorical one: if all integrators in the Seattle and Redmond markets had to pay their employees 12k more a year, there would be bitching from the 1%ers. And they would still be writing the checks.

What's ironic is the standard conservative logic of 'low taxes = more tax revenue' is, applied herein the inverse, correct. The lower tiers of the economy have more $ to use, which increases tax revenue and lowers the need for support services, which lowers the need to increase taxes for support services.

So if you want to reduce government, pay the poor people better. Duh.

We're not talking about giving everybody a raise. Only the working poor. So it's not a serious point to consider if we all got raises.
 

One Year Later, Here's What San Jose Looks Like After Raising the Minimum Wage

What Happened to Fast-Food Workers When San Jose Raised the Minimum Wage?

What happens when the min. wage increases at a faster rate than the middle class wage? Eventually you will be able to earn as much at taco bell as at being an accountant or a CI even. Hell, if I could make my current wage working fast food, I would be all over it. :)

Hahaha! Amen to that!!! I think women are the only reason men are motivated! Otherwise we would all be sitting around drinking beer and chest bumping!

What ever happened to actually making yourself more valuable to the employer thus EARNING a damn raise?

Instead of rewarding hard work, efficiency and effort, arbitrary wage hikes reward the inverse of that behavior. You can't just subsidize people out of poverty, you have to give them a ladder to climb out of poverty and let them work hard to climb the ladder.

I kmow of no accountants earning $15 hr.

The increase would not be overnight. We are talking abouta ramp up over years. I earn a salary already that exceeds minimum wag.

Lets face it. The minimum wage is too low and has been for decades.

I know a lot of younv people and elderly who work their asses of for minimum wage. Are you stereotyping them to all be lazy and uneducated?

Go to a starbucks or Walmart... youll see a lot of struvgling single moms or widows forced to do their best to survive. And those businesses are profitable beyond belief. Or how about the eldery cashier at the Chevron station.This is long overdue and Im trying to understand why it has tKen so long.

Would you believe that some kids are so stupid they choose to be born to morons who don't teach them work ethic. Those same morons go to underfunded schools that teach them nothing valuable and offer them no direction.

You would think that by now those dumb loser embryos would make better decisions.

At some point you have to take personal responsibility for your own life and quit worrying about how the man is keeping you down.

Raising the minimum wage removes the vital entry level opportunities for teens to actually learn how to work and build a work ethic.