Because you don't want to pay $1000-2000 per night for a hotel room.
Minimum-wage laws are inflationary. A mandatory ten-fold increase in wages can only be dealt with by means of generating a nearly ten-fold increase in the revenues needed to pay it -- meaning that we lay on a nearly ten-fold increase in prices to consumers.
They don't really help the people they're intended to help. No one really benefits any from raises in the minimum wage for low-end wage earners except for low-end landlords (most often, slumlords who shouldn't be allowed to be landlords, at that) - the rent goes up to wipe out the increased income of the low-end tenants.
The minimum-wage model is not a good model at all to insure a living wage for workers at the lower end of the pay scale.
Here, try this instead - I bet it would work:
Pass a law that provides, that, whenever a person applies for any form of public assistance, and is found to qualify for it, every one of his current employers are taxed and billed for the entire cost of it, plus a twenty percent premium.
All of them. (And keep the laws in place forbidding discrimination against anyone with a history of receiving public assistance.)
If she's unemployed, then the last employer, unless that last employer can show cause why they shouldn't, gets billed for all of it.
If she's currently employed working two jobs to make ends meet and still qualifies, both employers -- each of them -- are taxed for the whole of it, plus twenty percent.
If he's working at a plant through a staffing agency, and he still qualifies for food stamps, or Medicaid, bill the plant for the whole of it plus 20% -- and bill the staffing agency for the whole of it plus 20%: we'll let the food stamp or Medicare agency collect twice, and let public assistance become self-funding.
Nothing burns my butt quite like seeing people getting something for nothing . . . except for maybe people working full time (often more than full time, at two jobs), and putting forth the effort, yet having nothing, and still having to beg for public assistance, and welfare, and alms.
Anyone who works full time should have enough to cover all of their fundamental needs like food, clothing, shelter and health care. Why should I have to pay so that Burger King or Wal-Mart can have full-time help at a cost to them that doesn't cover those needs of those people? You know, when you do any hiring, that anyone who shows up is going to need adequate food, shelter, clothing, and medical care for themselves and their families. That’s why people work. Duh. But they want to pay as little as they can and still get anyone at all to show up (usually, out of desperation), then let the taxpayers pay for the rest.
Do that, and I could support the elimination of minimum wage laws, altogether.
You could also eliminate unemployment insurance: employers would be a little less causal about firing people without some really good justification. (Or keep it. People who collect unemployment are scrutinized for eligibility -- the loss of your job has to be no fault of your own, you're ineligible if you did something to bring getting fired and thrown out in the street on your own head -- and are required to look for work and take some vocational training. So, let that be the safety valve for employers who feel that having to reimburse the government for benefits is an undue or undeserved hardship in the case of a particular employee.)
Everyone would have decent jobs (and not need but one, full-time), and public assistance programs could be self-funding -- perhaps even with enough left over to balance the federal budget -- and the problem would take care of itself.
Originally appeared on Quora
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