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I know this won’t be popular but minimum wage shouldn’t exist. Basic income, sure but not minimum wage. Every discussion of minimum wage blames employers for so

I know this won’t be popular but minimum wage shouldn’t exist. Basic income, sure but not minimum wage. Every discussion of minimum wage blames employers for something that is completely out of their control: inflation. When the price of gas, housing and food rises the business where you work doesn’t suddenly have more money to hand out. If anything their costs have gone up too reducing what they can afford to pay out. It blows my mind that people continue to act like rising costs are the fault of their employers, who have no control of it at all. No doubt, this exec in particular was a moron who deserves to be fired for even suggesting what he did but the overall sentiment just doesn’t jive for so many businesses that are getting squeezed harder and harder everyday.

tssva 5y ago
Hmmmm, how could a business possibly compensate for increased costs including labor costs?
- brightball 5y ago
  By raising prices and further cementing inflation across the board, which will be passed on to other people and other business to persist the effect even further if they don’t lose customers because of the price increases. It sounds so simple to just raise prices, but if it were that simple it would have happened long before. Especially on the lower end of the consumer goods and services market the price sensitivity of people is sky high. In grocery stores companies chose to shrink their products and hope people didn’t notice rather than increases prices for that exact reason. It gets passed along somewhere and in the end the more people who decide to “just raise prices” the worse the problem gets.
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  Go under and close?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
account42 5y ago
I agree that UBI would be better than minimum wages. Until we have UBI though (and it does not look like that it will be a reality anytime soon if only because those with wealth really don't like wealth redistribution schemes) minimum wage is the next best thing we have.
- brightball 5y ago
  With UBI the entire conversation around inflation would shift to increasing UBI to compensate, which is a federal problem that would directly tie inflation to higher taxes. IMO it puts the conversation in the proper venue.

tssva 5y ago

Hmmmm, how could a business possibly compensate for increased costs including labor costs?

brightball 5y ago
By raising prices and further cementing inflation across the board, which will be passed on to other people and other business to persist the effect even further if they don’t lose customers because of the price increases. It sounds so simple to just raise prices, but if it were that simple it would have happened long before. Especially on the lower end of the consumer goods and services market the price sensitivity of people is sky high. In grocery stores companies chose to shrink their products and hope people didn’t notice rather than increases prices for that exact reason. It gets passed along somewhere and in the end the more people who decide to “just raise prices” the worse the problem gets.
tick_tock_tick 5y ago
Go under and close?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

account42 5y ago

I agree that UBI would be better than minimum wages. Until we have UBI though (and it does not look like that it will be a reality anytime soon if only because those with wealth really don't like wealth redistribution schemes) minimum wage is the next best thing we have.

brightball 5y ago
With UBI the entire conversation around inflation would shift to increasing UBI to compensate, which is a federal problem that would directly tie inflation to higher taxes. IMO it puts the conversation in the proper venue.