EE PatronJan 11th 2021, 19:37:09
Originally posted by KoHeartsGPA:
You know, I really don't understand you guys on the left anymore, you say you support the little guy yet your policies reflect that the real winner is corporate America, if you believe raising the minimum wage hurts corporations you're dead wrong, they're equipped to handle it, they'll raise the price of their goods and services creating a chain reaction, I don't know why you pro minimum wage increase people don't see this, it is in plain sight, in early 90s the minimum wage in California was 4.25, gas under $1, I can buy a snicker bar for .35¢, minimum wage goes up, couple days later gas is $1.50, snicker bar .50¢ and my wage only went up by .25¢ and all of a sudden the "extra" money I make from my minimum wage going up gets me less than before....you can check and compare the cost of living before and after every minimum wage movement, wether you want to acknowledge it is up to you, corporations never lose, the cost of doing business is always passed on to the consumer, real loser is you, me, and small businesses.
Inflation and minimum wage aren't as tied as you think they are. Inflation is a product of a bunch of fluff including interest rates and mortgage markets, GDP, stock values, liquid assets and cash on hand. Minimum wage is merely a factor in it. And the fact is, inflation is still occurring. You could lower the minimum wage to $2 an hour right now, and houses wouldnt get cheaper, gas wouldnt get cheaper and a snickers bar wouldnt get cheaper. Ideally you have a growing GDP in a growing economy driving inflation, not worker wages.
If everyone makes a living wage relative to what a living wage actually is as a minimum, inflation would continue rising at 1% as it is. It's a balance you have to take into acct for sure. When min wage was set to 7.25 in 2009, in the ten years since inflation has gone up 17%. As in minimum wage then was worth $8.40 now. As an adjusted dollar factor, it's less than a third of the buying power value than it had in 1968 when the previous change was made. If min wage people physically have less buying power than ever, how is it that inflation is still occurring? By your logic, people having less buying power than ever, and physically being able to purchase less goods than ever, should have driven prices down, correct? That's not so. Clearly. Things actually just get around 2% more expensive every year of economic growth, regardless of what our minimum wage is.
The minimum wage has actually been going up slower than inflation for nearly 80 years, and yet inflation persists... It's amazing, when we made our first minimum wage increase in nearly 40 years, inflation had been happening those entire 40 years individually. Quite literally never had a negative year. A good economy tends to have a good rate of inflation. If you raise the minimum to be stable with a certain dollar amount of buying power, it shouldn't have any affect on a stable inflation rate, it just raises income equality within a continuously expanding economy that contains twice the people it did when I was a child. More people = growth = more demand = inflation. In fact, it might just make inflation more stable to have a consistent minimum relative to economic growth i.e. a living wage.
Even in the wreck that was 2020, we saw record unemployment, a GDP shrinking to 2/3s of the size it was, no raising of the minimum wage, and yet we still had a positive rate of inflation. Snickers bars did not get any cheaper. In fact they're about 1% more expensive than they were last year anyways.