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Regarding your mom and pop store example: some businesses should fail. If they cannot afford to keep full time workers out of poverty, they cannot afford to run

• Infinitesimus 12y ago
  But when that happens, we have both the owners of the stores and their employees joining the unemployment pool. Then what?
• talmand 12y ago
  You seem to be assuming that it is the decision of the business to keep the employees in poverty. They might be able to afford to run a business that employees fewer workers, which is the opposite of the intent. It's one thing for a business to fail due to market forces or poor choices by management/owners. It's another for a business to pushed into closing, thus employees losing their jobs, by a government mandate that attempted to make the employees' lives better. That's the initial wave of negative consequences that I said would have to be survived before the positive results would come to fruition.
• ufmace 12y ago
  >full time workers What if somebody doesn't want/need a full time job, or to hire a full time worker? That's one of the things that bothers me about boosting the minimum wage. Force all businesses to pay enough to raise a family of 4 for every job, and people who don't have a family and don't need the money will now have a harder time finding jobs that meet their needs, because nobody can create a job unless they can afford to pay somebody much more than they need.