On January 1 2020 the minimum wage goes to $15 per hour in 24 states and the DoC.

I think a pile of people will be losing jobs for a Christmas present, others say it won't happen.
In our small town most of the family owned diners have already closed, Walmart and the other chitt stores are already understaffed and over burdened with
regulations, patience are short, anger abounds and I don't see the up side to any of it.
Fast food places are going to be the first to really take a hit.

How about your towns? Any of you getting your paycheck doubled next year ?

They tried it in New Zealand.

Inflation, taxes, and just regular old price increases took away all the gains.......and then some.




A 15 dollar minimum wage is to the benefit of unskilled labor as NAFTA was to the benefit of manufacturing jobs.

One of my peers at work has a project for this coming year that will take labor out of a large fast food restaurants kitchen and be replaced with automation in a factory. If those workers making minimum wage think they can't be replaced by machines, they're wrong.

There is no up side to it. That is by intent.

Demoncraps care nothing for those they claim to. They want people to lose their jobs so they can decry the evil business man and have more people dependent on the State and them.

And it will work. Mostly because everyone not demoncrap is a blind coward.

It wipes out entry level jobs. The Democrat idea of a "living wage" for minimum is nothing but socialist propaganda. Many young people need to "learn to work". They need to start somewhere. Make it easy for them to get any first job and some experience.

Those making far more than minimum wages are also getting replaced by machines.

That is why the elite wants to trim the population drastically so the angry hordes don't knock down their defenses and kill them.

We seem to have a generation or two that find actual "work" quite demeaning and unnecessary, I don't believe we can tax the workers we have to make up the difference.
Our economy runs on consumer spending, and the lack of disposable income will in turn lower per capita spending.

Spreading the hurt seems to be the plan, grow the government and spending on the lowest producers among us.

Anything that moves away from free trade towards government decreed wages and production (communism) is a huge mistake and should be fought to the death of one or the other.

My question is what does a business do with a person that has been working there for a couple of years, worked his way up to making 15 or 16 dollars an hour and over night is making minimum wage? What about a fast food restaurant where the manager is making 35k a year and now the fry cook/garbage can hauler is making 32k? I'm sure it will all work out with time but there is going to be a lot of pain for people in the lower income brackets.

That's not true but a common misconception.

These states are adopting the $15hr minimum wage target. It sets a mark to where these states will graduate to $15hr by raising their minimum wage in yearly increments until they eventually hit $15hr.

Examples:

New Jersey enacted AB 15 in February, which will gradually increase the minimum wage rate to $15 by 2024. (The minimum wage for tipped employees will increase to $9.87 over the same period.) The schedule of annual increases was delayed for certain seasonal workers and employees of small employers, and a training wage of 90 percent of the minimum wage was created for certain employees for their first 120 hours of work.

Illinois enacted SB 1 in February, which will phase in a minimum wage increase to $15 by 2025. The measure also adjusted the youth wage for workers under age 18 (it will gradually increase to $13 by 2025) and created a tax credit program to offset labor cost increases for smaller employers.

Maryland's legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto to enact a measure (SB 280) that phased-in a minimum wage increase to $15 by 2024 (with a delayed schedule of rate increases for smaller employers) and eliminated and the state subminimum wage for employees younger than age 20.

New Mexico enacted SB 437 in April, which will raise the state minimum wage to $12 by 2023. The measure also established a training wage for high school students and slightly increased the tipped minimum wage.


Best I can tell this is current for 2019

Bernie Sanders has received 4 million dollars in donations to his presidential campaign, idiots abound !

i had a friend who at one time owned four or five burger kind franchises. I asked him about a minimum wage increase. His comment was you can only price up the price of a burger so much, the easy solution is to go to part time, and fewer employees, or automate.
which is what generally happens.
You can price a person right out of the workforce.
flopping burgers was never meant to be one's lifetime employment.

Hahahahaha more fake news on this site...

Well here in Washington state, seattle has been the test tube baby. The lib's are eating it up.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/13/20690266/seattle-minimum-wage-15-dollars

Laboratories of Democracy: what Seattle learned from having the highest minimum wage in the nation
The city adopted a $15 minimum wage four years ago. Here’s what happened.

By Matthew Zeitlin Updated Jul 22, 2019, 9:07am EDT
The Highlight by Vox logo
Looking at the nation’s most intriguing experiments in local policy.

The policy: $15 minimum wage

Where: Seattle, Washington

In place since: 2015

The problem:

A Taco Bell in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle shut down a couple hours early in the spring of 2013. All three employees and one off-shift worker walked off the job to protest low wages and work conditions. One of them was Caroline Durocher, a 21-year-old Taco Bell employee, who said the decision was “easy.”

“What we’re getting right now isn’t fair and not right,” she told the Stranger, in reference to her wage of $9.19 an hour, then the city-wide minimum wage. “It’s easy to not think about the person serving you your food.” The very next day, a Burger King, two Subways, and a Chipotle all shut down after employees continued to walk out.

Durocher was part of a nationwide wave of labor activism among the traditionally scattered and disorganized fast-food workforce, made up of largely low-wage workers at the mercy of fast-food franchise owners who set their schedules and pay. The walkouts would eventually help lead to Seattle passing a historic policy that continues to serve as an example to politicians and researchers to this day.

Seattle’s minimum wage hike, which would jack up wages to $15 an hour by 2017 for companies with more than 500 employees, was passed five years ago by the City Council. By 2021, at which time the $15 wage would be phased in for all employers, it would be the highest minimum wage in the country, well north of Washington’s already relatively high wage of just over $9. “Worker voices and folks taking to the street shifted the conversation about it and made the policy feasible,” Rachel Lauter, the executive director of Working Washington, an activist group that helped organize the protests, said.

Today, Seattle’s wage is at $16 for large employers, and $15 for all other employers (unless they provide a certain level of medical benefits or employee tips, which allows them to knock it down to $12 an hour). It remains one of the highest in the country, and a useful case study as we head into a presidential election where a higher minimum wage has become the standard policy position for Democratic candidates.

At the time the Seattle bill was passed, the federal minimum wage had stagnated at $7.25 since 2009, where it still is today. While minimum wage increases are generally popular with voters, they also tend to kick up extreme opposition from business owners, who warn of massive job losses and killing off new businesses. It’s one reason why the minimum wage has stayed so low nationally.

Seattle was a natural place for this progressive policy to pass. It is both a very wealthy city with fairly liberal politics — ranging from socially liberal businesspeople to a democratic socialist on the city council — and a high level of union penetration and a history of disruptive labor activism that goes back to its 1919 general strike. But the bill faced a fair share of opposition. Employers, like restaurant owners, raised the alarm that the new wage would force them to close businesses, raise prices, fire workers, or move their businesses outside of the city limits.

When the policy went into effect in 2015, Seattle’s minimum wage became not only the highest in the nation, but likely the most studied. A group of researchers at the University of Washington, with support from philanthropic groups, have been examining the effects of the wage increase on workers’ hours and take-home pay as well as business closures and the price of some goods like groceries.

What the researchers have found over the last few years is quite a mixed story.

How it worked:

Policymakers are still looking at Seattle as a case study in how a high minimum wage could actually work in practice. The results are complex. But here’s what happened.

Generally, those business owners who threatened to leave Seattle to evade the new wage haven’t been following through. “The restaurant industry moans and groans about minimum wage increase, but the Seattle newspaper every month has a story about 40 new restaurants opening,” said Jennifer Romich, a University of Washington social policy researcher. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of jobs in restaurants and bars in the Seattle area has grown from 134,000 to 158,000 since 2015.) Surveying employers, Romich and other researchers found the most common response to the wage increase was to raise prices or fiddle with workers’ hours, and a “very small percentage were thinking about withdrawing or leaving the city.”

The story for employees is much more varied. The minimum wage for some large employers jumped from $11 to $13 from 2015 to 2016. The economists observed the impact of the hike in 2017 and found it had dramatic effects on the low-wage workforce and employment.

Not all of them were good. They found that the policy “reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by 6-7 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by 3 percent ... consequently, total payroll for such jobs decreased.” That means the total amount that employers paid to workers was less with the new minimum wage in place than projected payroll if the policy hadn’t gone into effect.

The data, researcher Mark C. Long explained, suggested a “tipping point” between $11 and $13 “when it becomes less tenable to keep work in the city.” (Critics were quick to point out that this likely wasn’t solely due to the minimum wage policy — Seattle’s labor market continued to heat up during that period, reducing the number of low-wage jobs compared to high-wage jobs overall.)

But a year later, the team published another paper that complicated their findings. They looked at the same time period and same wage increase, but this time broke down the actual take-home pay of workers. They found that workers who were already employed at the low end of the wage scale in Seattle “enjoyed significantly more rapid hourly wage growth,” following wage increases in 2015 and 2016.

Those who were already working more hours before the wage increase saw “essentially all of the earnings increases,” while the workers who had fewer hours saw their hours go down, but wages go up enough so that their overall earnings didn’t really change. They theorized that a slowdown in new hiring for low-wage jobs could explain their earlier findings that overall payroll had gone down.

Ultimately, workers already employed either saw their take-home pay go up or stay roughly the same while working fewer hours.

Critics of the UW researchers have seized on Seattle’s uniqueness to discount the UW findings. Ben Zipperer of the liberal Economic Policy Institute wrote that the UW research is based on a “flawed comparison” between Seattle and the rest of the state. He argued that the decline in low wage jobs was due to a hot economy boosting low-wage jobs into high-wage jobs, not the new minimum wage. The data did show, Zipperer argued, that all of the workers they studied were “better off after the minimum wage increase” — higher-hour workers earned more with a higher wage while the low-hour workers got the same pay for less work.

There are still questions about the policy’s impact that are harder to observe, such as new employees who may or may not have been hired had the minimum wage been lower. And of course, the question of whether this would work in any other city remains. “I take this research as a cautionary tale for other cities like Seattle,” Long said, noting that Seattle’s booming labor market, especially at the high end and in technology, “is a very particular thing.”

What all sides would agree on is that the people advocating for a higher minimum wage — those among the already employed like Caroline Durocher who went on strike six years ago — were right to do so.

Matthew Zeitlin is a journalist in New York City.

I don't think that there are many things more important than instilling a good work ethic at a young age, I believe that's what's lacking in our youths of today, they were never taught to work or the rewards of hard work.

It’s been ongoing here for several years. It ain’t turned out too well.

Fewer jobs, places closing, any benefit is minuscule in comparison to the cost of living increases in the area.

When a MC Donald Hamberg goes from 2.00 to 5.00 and a Big Mac 4.44 to 9.95 you will see how smart the DEMORATS PARTY OF IDIOTS ARE. PEOPLE START AT TOP AND WORK THE WAY DOWN

Were that written in Yiddish it would have had a yielded a bit of useful information, a small bit, but a bit just the same.

But if young people learn to work, how will they forever vote Democrat?

But it can be.
Many fast food stores are paying in excess of $10 an hour just to get anyone to take the job.
But like you say, its almost all part time work due to employers insurance requirements for full time employees, 30 hour weeks are common in many lower level jobs today because of this.

So take a young couple right out of high school that have zero experience but they have the desire to work.

So a young guy should be able to work 2, 30 hour a week jobs with flexible schedules.

That makes him good for a solid 60 hours a week.

If his girl friend or baby momma or god forbid his boy friend can pick up another 30 hours a week, they are good for a combined 90 hours a week @ 10 bucks an hour that's $900.00 a week aka $3600 a month flipping burgers.

Even after taxes that pays the rent and then some in the areas where fast food pay's these rates.

Furthermore, the idea is not to STAY at minimum wage. Anybody that starts at minimum wage, shows up on time everyday, actually works while on the job, and can pass a drug test will get moved up the ladder fast enough. Do those things and within a year or less they will get a raise, OR have solid experience for a resumé to apply for a hirer paying job elsewhere. Job experience counts in hiring!

Damn I would get a raise.

Good money for putting a pickle on a bun. Getting a kid to do manual labor will cost 30 an hour.

As of October 2019, average rent for an apartment in Seattle, WA is $2221 which is a 2.79% increase from last year when the average rent was $2159 , and a 2.43% increase from last month when the average rent was $2167.

One bedroom apartments in Seattle rent for $2071 a month on average (a 2.61% increase from last year) and two bedroom apartment rents average $2851 (a 2.6% increase from last year).

The upside to raising minumum wage is that far fewer people will qualify for food stamps, HEAP, WIC, etc. etc.... I think that is the goal here in NY. Right now there are ALOT of folks working full time factory jobs that still qualify for and are receiving gov't handouts to make ends meet..

I dont see that happening.


How can you yell Tag You are It and not expect anyone to run?


Inflation and price hikes will ensure that the taxpayers make up the shortfall.

You bet, in short it can be easy for kids today starting out if the are will to work a few hours.
I was still working 100+ weeks when I retired so 60 is cake walk...

I use this fast food math every time I have people telling me how hard it is to make it today..BS....

A subsistance wage will always be that. There is a bottom on prices set by the cost of production.

What is needed us a minimum skills law

I think it will actually make it harder in the small towns.


Like where there are no jobs you know, except for the grocery store or the C store.


Any young people left in the country will be driven out and pushed into the cities with these laws.

Well then you're blind because it is already happening. Wages have been going up for several years here but the requirements to qualify for gov't assistance have not. The result is fewer people collecting assistance.

It has been argued that Min wage laws are a barrier to unskilled workers entering the job market.


With a 15 dollar min wage and "free" (mandatory) college.......the yuppies will be competing for the burger jobs.........Lamont will be SOL.

That might mean they dont qualify. That does not mean that they shouldn't qualify.


Personal debt is at an all time high.


Your tax dollars will be used to correct the situation.

No they shouldn't qualify. Our tax dollars should not be helping support the workers of companies that are making huge profits while we feed their workforce.

There is absolutely no reason for wages to keep up with the rate of inflation. If they do, it takes away the money needed to maintain those indexed pensions for politicians and upper level bureaucrats.
I have never understood the antagonism toward lower level workers. At the same time, there is a lot of support for those who spend their time producing absolutely nothing and contributing absolutely nothing and essentially laundering money. People denigrate the laborer on a construction site and rever the lawyer who secures the building permits and earns ten times as much. Yet it is the laborer who has a real hand in producing the product. The investment advisor who recommends his client invest in a fast food chain is a valuable member of society yet the food servers are the scum of the earth.
One thing which is absolutely true is that an increase in wage has no effect on work ethic. People work hard because they work hard and not because the monetary reward is greater. Still, perception is what it is and the perception is that people who prepare and serve food, who clean houses and workplaces, who handle shovels and hoes, who harvest crops for wages, are worth very little to society. GD

A friend tells me that the whole truth of inflation and cost of living can be told by the price of weed, and price of weed hasn't changed in years, supply and demand you say, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of drugs or drug dealers.

I'm sure how much home stone effects this equation as far as rural and city folks go.I would think rural areas grow more per capita than their city counterparts.

The loss of benefits seems like progress on the surface.


That is until they find themselves paying 1600 a month for health insurance and 500 bucks for groceries.



These are not linear problems. A few dollars increase in wages can mean a couple thousand dollars increase in costs.


People find that they cant afford these new, fancy, high paying jobs. Cut your hours and gain some welfare.



The "Huge Profit" companies, Wall Street and your Conservative and Liberal lawmakers will be making sure your tax dollars will cover the shortfall.

Yep, exactly and that needs to change. We've got a ton of folks that really don't do shyt making big bucks while the people who actually work/produce don't make enough to live on. Something very wrong here.

Weed is not any kind of indicator of inflation or cost of living.

Especially today with quasi legal marijuana being commercially grown.

We are not all equal in the IQ department, and that's not any different than wishing you had blue eyes, it's just a fact of life, ditch diggers are hard workers but the track hoe has made is we don't need so many as day ago, yet with regulations and bureaucracy the demand for lawyers has increased and so have their fees.
And just a bunch of bureaucrats passing a law that says we need to pay a bunch of people more money for no more productivity simply will not work as intended.

Yeah, the labor laws get more complex and numerous every year.


Just one more law..........

Oh it certainly is, no man will buy weed before he can afford doritos or skittles !

I will not buy another bag of Skittles until they schit can the green apple skittle and bring back the lime skittle.




Doritos and weed? Sure. Skittles no. Its a matter of principal.

Those lime ones might have been the ones that made Trayvon so angry......

One thing is sure, at least in the 50+ years I've been working, given an increase in the minimum wage (or stagnation of such) ..................

None of these folks will lose a minute's sleep over their wages being lowered.


Or even over how much an increase in the price of a Whopper will affect their monthly budget.

Geno

I perfer original Mike and Ike's.

Geno

]

I agree in principle, but 60 hours in fast food can’t be done due to the scheduling of those type of jobs. A few hours here, an hour there, and having to be on call and available when not working.

At first I bought into this concept that the raising of the minimum wage being raised to $15 an hour was going to cause najor problems in the economy...

then I recalled this little site, I've used just for fun....

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

In 1969 & 1970 during my senior year in High School, and the summer before starting college
I lived in Northern Virginia... minimum wage was $1.65 an hour...
I worked a job or two at that wage, such as at our local hobby shop..
When it snowed, or the summer time, I worked as lawn maintenance at a Town House Home Owners Association
that paid $2.00 an hour....

The summer after graduating high school, they raised my wage to $2.25 an hour....

Now plug those numbers into the inflation calculator from 1970 at compare to 2019...

$1.65 translates into about $11 an hour in 2019 money...

$2.00 an hour translates into $13.25 per hour in 2019 money.

$15.00 an hour in 2019, translates into $2.26 an hour in 1970 money...



So is $15 an hour minimum wage really going to destroy the economy in a lot of small town America?

A lot of people are freaking out, and closing businesses etc

in 1970 was our nation going to have a financial meltdown if $2.26 and hour was made minimum wage?
Sounds kinda stupid don't it???


This entire reaction is showing how our society is programmed to listen and believe all the death doom and destruction
the lame stream media keeps feeding us so they can keep ratings up....

If $2.25 an hour didn't destroy our economy in 1970..... $15 and hour in 2020 won't destroy it either....



heck, I got off of active duty in 1979, and started a job in sales....my first full year, I made $50,000....
that translates to $156,000 in 2019 money....not bad for being fresh out of the Army..

the following year, I increased my income to $63,000 that year...or $178,000 in 2019 dollars..

heck, I was making a lot more in my younger years than I am now... a lot more...

I know that Post Falls and Coeur d'Alene Id. are having labor issues because labor can drive to the Spokane Valley or Spokane Wa. and make more money than working in Idaho.

I don’t think a $15 minimum wage will be the job killer a lot of folks think it will. In many places employers have to pay that already to get entry level workers due to the tight labor market. Obamacare was far more destructive, it made many lower wage jobs part time so many had to take second jobs. Automation is going to happen no matter the minimum wage, Walmart could pay $2 a hour and it would still be cheaper to replace them with machines.

I had a kid living with me that was going to school and working at McDonalds.
His schedule was regular as clock work, I had to take him to work, I know this for a fact.

He would have had zero problem adjusting his work schedule to accommodate an additional job.
It could have been a direct exchange for the hours he spent at school.

There are a lot of people doing this today, it's not a original idea and it's not just fast food.
It pretty much started when employers had to start providing insurance for full time employees, 30 hour weeks became quite normal.
Employers are use to it, they adjust to fit a employees availability or the employee goes else where.

This thread illuminates why all of us boomers will be smothered in the nursing home beds,.....by millennials making $8.50 an hour.

If anything automation is being driven faster by the undispleadened and undependable work force, watch the videos of fighting, spitting on food and refusing to serve cops and it's plain to see that there needs to be a better way. Really is anything more suited for robotics than fast food, grilling burgers and deep frying french fries is not exactly as in depth as calculating burn speeds and seating depths, of course asking politely if you would like an apple pie with that adds a whole new dimension to the equation, right Alexa ?

The customer may also become automated...

Once my self driving car drops my kids off at school why not have it grab me a couple of egg McMuffins from Micky D's before it returns to the house.....

Making 15 dollars is not a bad thing.


The trick is not letting anybody know that you are making 15 dollars.


A Minimum Wage Law lets that cat right outta the bag.


Uncle Sam and Cousins Warren and Jeff find out you got a little more bread in your pocket?


Yeah.....they just gonna let you keep it! Ha!

Your cousin is Warren Jeffs?

Always get a kick out of these liberal "studies". They never last longer than a cup of coffee. Never a long-term picture.

Haha!


We dont talk about that........

Mormons up your way?

I thought y'all just had Hutterites.

Well, it is a "free" country, right.

Geno

Early '70s. I was bringing home $110 a wk. I cashed my check at my bank, so $10 deposit each week.
$100 covered my rent and bills. 3 paychecks left to party etc. Life was good.

Loaded up with them.


They brought them up to irrigate and run the dairies back in the teens and 20's.

Then the U and I Sugar company moved a factory in.......owned by the LDS Church.


They transplanted them from Utah and Idaho to the valley up here.


What a terrible trick!

If our min wage went up to $15,
There would be a lot of people here getting a raise.

Our per capita is $24k, median family, $48k.

Heck, I work at one of our top employers, our bottom starting
level is $13-14.

Yeah.
I make nothing now and I expect at least twice that much next year.

Trudeau (Liberals) did that here Canada.

Did work fer $hit.

Medium Tim Horton's coffee, went from $0.96 to $1.60 or some such crap.

Not that I'll drink that sewerage water !

Average student employee was making about $10/hr - slam wages up to $15 & you've increased your labour cost by 50% !

Phouccing retards !

Jim,
That's OK, most of them LDS folks are OK with me

them missionary fellas ride their bicycles all the way out to your place?

Haven't seen any out my way, no Witnesses either.

I'm just happy the snowplow makes it out in the winter.

Geno

Tim Hortons has to be the worse coffee on the planet !

The Witnesses only stop by every 20 to 30 years or so....and only when they know we are gone.


Had some LDS folks stop by the house we rented in college a couple times. Not after we started answering the door naked however.




I like the Mormons I know.

Hard working and they take care of each other. Bunch of em I know joined the military instead of going on some goofy mission to Sweden or some such place.

Well, I have nothing against joining the military.

However, I question the wisdom of joining to avoid "missionary" duties in Sweden.

If I was a young clean cut kid, I'd go check out some of them Swedish gals, figuring I could at least find a couple that needed some missionarying.

Geno

Yeah....the black tie, bicycle, back pack and thick glasses are a real turn on in Sweden........

You are thinking of the wrong missionary position.....

Ricky,

I disagree. The Dims really are this stupid.

In most fast food joint in Washington, it's food order by Kiosk. Most restaurants, you pay your tab at your table through a terminal...keeps wait staff from wasting their time taking payments. For dairies, robot milkers are forthcoming. We are not far from robot apples pickers, proto models are already being tested.

Politicians seem to think they have the power to alter the rules of economics. If labor is not paid or paid enough, it seeks work elsewhere. Capital is the same, it's wage is return on investment. If capital is not paid or it can earn more somewhere else, it will seek out different employment

It literally pays more starting at McDs in Helena than pulling green chain in Townsend... That's all sorts of F'd up.

control immigration and minimum wage takes care of itself with a tight labor market.

the minimum wage should be what the market will support based on the labor market.

imagine what employers would have to pay if we didn't have 20m illegals in the country working unskilled labor

never understood why a guy making a sandwich deserved schit pay when a guy putting lug nuts on a car on an assembly line was any more competent or capable and making $20 an hour.

The difference is you can ship out the lug nut job to mexico, while we bring Mexico to the sandwich shop.

Region means everything, never understood the regionally bound.

....or the CEO and top executives get bigger bonuses and more stock options while pensions are being robbed. 😉

All I know about $15 min. wage is what I read and most of it has been negative. Such as employees having to start paying for parking, uniforms, lunches; reduction in work force; businesses closing; zero overtime, etc. I have also read where employees stated that they were worse off, because of the raise, and wished they had never gotten it.

Flipping burgers for min wage was never meant to be a career choice. MIn. wage was implemented to be a stop gap measure while one pursued better opportunities.

true but no one imagined the manufacturing and high paying service jobs not being available to Americans. Our public education system is geared toward producing people who have a skillset to do those types of jobs - those are mostly gone or require a much higher skill level leaving low skill service sector jobs.

As I said earlier, putting a dash in a car on an assembly line takes no more skill, education, effort or dedication than flipping burgers, yet no one balks at an assembly line worker making a living wage.

yea, I agree but I'm against any measures where our government sets a ceiling on pay for a CEO. Who is failing are the board of directors of companies that allow this to happen as opposed to holding these CEOs responsible.

It will take time, but imo it will eventually just make 30K per annum the new poverty threshold

Not arguing here, just throwing some random thoughts to your comment out-

The guy flipping burgers has the right to go install car dashes and make more money. The guy buying a car has the right to buy a new car to support the dash installer, or can buy a 20 year old car for cheaper money and not employ a new dash installer. Nobody is forced to do anything. If a car company wants to pay big money to dash installers and a fast food company wants to pay low money to fry cooks and the customers are happy and people are lined up filling out job applications, why should we interfere?

"Living Wage"-what is that exactly? Is that a 900 square foot house on postage stamp lots? Is that 3000 square foot on acreage? 6 bedrooms and 3 baths? or 2 bedrooms and 1 bath? Hot water system installed? Or heat water on the stove? 75" TV in the living room with 45" TV's in each bedroom plus a cable subscription and Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Prime streaming movies? Smart Phones for surfing the net? It doesn't take much money to live. All the add-ons to living are what have the potential to cost a lot of money.

We are paying $15 dollars already. As several have alluded to, minimum wage workers that are adults get government benefits due to their income. We are subsidizing Walmart et al. I have had working adult acquaintances and even relatives that were pulling in thousands a year in benefits such as food stamps and medicaid. I have been told that the average single woman with 3 children in this state can pull in about $28K if all benefits are counted. I don't know that to be true, but it sounds plausible. I am betting if a raise in minimum wage cuts these benefits that these folks will cut their earned income to stay on the benefits.

?

I'm not exactly sure what you are saying, but there are good paying jobs out there, if you want them. It may mean moving (I done it), it may mean going to night school while working (I done it), it may mean career changes ( again, I done it). With a few exceptions, if you want a job that pays more than min. wage and are willing to go for it, the jobs are out there. Of course, with the exception of some union jobs and politics, you have to be willing to work and that is where lots of people fail.

In the short term, all sorts of things will happen when you interfere with the market for labor.

In the long run, however, if you make labor more expensive, the market will turn to capital to replace the labor.

Really, when labor is cheap, you can afford this:



When labor is expensive, capital (equipment, automation, mechanization of all kinds) becomes more attractive. The problem with cheap labor is that you can get things done cheap without investments, so there is not much of an incentive to INNOVATE. Innovation almost always is driven by a strong need such as cost or scarcity of one kind or another. Make labor expensive, and innovations to replace that labor will accelerate. Innovation is a pretty good things, mostly.

When I go into one of those fast food places with the Kiosk, I walk right by it and to the counter and when they ask if I want to use the Kiosk I tell them "I don't work here" and I want to order dinner. I make them take my order. Same thing at Home Depot or Wal-Mart or any of the other stores I go into that has the self checkout.