BUT IT IS FOR INEQUALITY! AT WHAT POINT DO PEOPLE STOP EXPONENTIALLY DOUBLING DOWN ON STUPIDITY?

CLUELESS KENNY

Instead of taxing the rich to help the poor put there by the rich, we should do something different. Raise minimum wages to match inflation, ban tax rebates while employees are on welfare, the list goes on. We must have equal power to negotiate or we will lose every time.

Here is an argument for raising minimum wage that does not involve bleeding heart rhetoric.

People on minimum wage spend everything they earn to survive. They cannot thrive because the opportunities to improve their lot take capital they don't possess and never will at their wage level.

We want the economy to improve. Raising wages will accomplish this goal on a macro economic level. After all, if the majority of your employees don't earn enough to buy your own products you have limited your consumer base. If this wage level is industry standard, then most other companies pay their employees insufficiently to buy your products as well. Pay them enough and they will have the choice to buy your products, go to school for an education, earn even more and buy yet more products. Do it for the economy.

ME

A tad more than 5% of all hourly-paid workers get paid an hourly wage at or below the minimum wage. That is a scant 1% of the total U.S. population!

You would have us believe that raising the wages of 1% of all Americans who have the lowest incomes is going to do anything?

Do you not see the absurdity of your beliefs, how silly-minded your beliefs are?

The Federal Minimum Wage is $7.25. One percent of the U.S. population is 3.139 million (2012).  Full-time work amounts to 2,080 hours a year. The 2012 U.S. GDP was $15,680 billion ($15.68 trillion). So if all 1% of Americans who minimum wage earners worked full-time, they would have earned a scant 0.30% of GDP, that is ZERO POINT THREE PERCENT. Said another way, that is three-tenths of one percent.

If Congress doubled the minimum wage to $14.50 an hour and all minimum wage earners worked full-time for a whole year, they would only have earned six-tenths of one percent of GDP! If Congress tripled the minimum wage to a whopping $21.75 an hour, the do-you-want-fries-with-that workers would only have earned about 1% of GDP (0.996%)!

So rather than calling for minimum wages to rise, people who barely buy anything, why don't you call for the pay of CEOs to be increased one-hundred fold? After all, rich people buy the most stuff.

Why are you calling for wages to rise for people who have limited wants rather than calling for wages to rise for those with insatiable wants, those accustomed to spending much and often?

By your thinking, giving people more to spend causes more trade and thus creates growth in what most call the economy. So why anoint those least capable of knowing how to spend to do the task?

Either way, merely injecting more cash and consumer credit does little more but to raise prices. Scholarly men have known this since the late 1690s at least (John Locke, Sir Dudley North). Why don't you know this?

Giving people more cash does not increase production. With a few extra dollars each week, the poor suddenly are not going to call for new Cadillacs and Lincolns to get manufactured.

The poor won't eat more pasta nor more bread nor will the poor drink more milk merely because they have a few extra dollars each week to spend. Giving the poor a few more dollars will do nothing but raise prices. More cash chasing the same output results in RAISING PRICES ONLY.

All prices conform to the one, true , infrangible law of trade — the Law of Prices, which holds the winning bids of purchase and sale in the face of what is on offer sets the price.

If minimum wage were the answer, why hasn't it ever been the answer? In the United States, statutory minimum wages were first introduced nationally in 1938.

In a whopping 76-year trial run, minimum wage never has alleviated poverty. SEVENTY SIX YEARS OF MINIMUM WAGE LAWS have done nothing.

Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), later renamed AFDC and later still TANF has been around since 1935! In a 79-year trial run, welfare never has alleviated poverty.

So, why should 77 and 80 years suddenly be the turning point years for those failed programs, the expression of failed thoughts and false beliefs?

CLUELESS KENNY

But, but, but ... What about the children?!

ME

If you want to see a righteous rise in wages, you should call for an end to minimum wage as well as an end to specific welfare. The combination of minimum wage and welfare amounts to a subsidy to employers whose capital structure gets predicated on using minimum wage workers on the whole.

No one would work at a loss (wages - living expenses). It is only because of subsidy of welfare that many choose to be workers at minimum wage.

The right move is the end minimum wage laws and all political interference in trade. That idea frightens more businessmen to a greater degree than it does the people as too many businessmen fear authentic, manly competition.

Another right move would be to restrict immigration for the next 10 years and perhaps longer as all net population increase in the USA since 1980 or so has come from immigrants and their descendants. In conjunction, if the Congress could evict the 20 million or so illegal aliens residing in the USA, a significant chuck  of the pool of low wage bidders would be erased. That would go far to pressure wages upward for no-skill workers.