Be careful what you wish for!

Yup, never got that. Raise minimum wage and everything else goes up. What's the point?

Prices go up regardless as do executive salaries. You have to level the playing field at some point. Why would anyone that works be against that?

Well it also makes us less competitive around the world where the cost of living is much less and the employees do not get paid that much. Wonder why Ford moved to Mexico, and everyone in the US is hiring contractors from India? How good is high minimum wage when you ain't got a job?

Greed. Plain and simple. Wages CAN go up for regular workers. They don't and jobs move offshore so companies don't have to pay living wages or health benefits to gain more profits.

Should we become a third word nation while shareholders and executives continue to see gains? Does that seem right? The best country on the planet and we compare ourselves to slave wage nations? Why? We don't have to. We're better than that.

You failed to see my point. Read my question again and do some more thinking. How are we going to remain competitive on a global economy? How is minimum wage going to impact that? You may think that raising minimum wage has no impact on inflation? Do dome research, you will find out that what you think does not matter, inflation has 2 major contributors which are scarcity and the drop in value of the capital. When your money loses value, so does your purchasing power. You may hate share holders and executives, but they keep the nation employed, and growing. Please, please, please educate yourself, and stop watching tv, it is cancerous.

The middle class is essential to jobs. Not the wealthy. Watch this video. I promise you it's not cancerous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBx2Y5HhplI

This video is about job creation and taxing the rich, with anty Trump emphasis about the tax cuts. A bit out of context I will say when my initial question about global economy. About jobs leaving the US and about large companies hiring the contractors from India while small business here fail to grow because they can't barely pay minimum wage to their employees because it is already so high and many of them are closing out. Look, the big companies have no issues with minimum wage increase, they will replace the employees with machine as they are doing right now. It is the small to medium business that are struggling to keep up with higher minimum wage and the many regulations set by the republicans and democrats. That video, is ok, the guy brought references that had nothing to do with the context of this conversation. His point is clear that he is pist at Trump.

If you can't pay people LIVING wages then you don;t have a viable business model.

And the video was made a few years ago....way before Trump was a factor.

Did we see the same video, because I watched it till the end and clearly the Trump factor is there. Also again you keep dodging my questions that are within the context of this meme. I am starting to believe you have no notion about what context is or means. " If you can't pay people LIVING wages then you don;t have a viable business model." What the heck does that means? As a business owner it is NOT your responsibility to pay someone a living wage BUT their market value, it is up to the individual to get the skills and training to find a job that pays him a living wage. Minimum wage jobs are not intended to support a family, yet people supporting families are too lazy to get out of their minimum wage job and all the do is complain about it. Dude wake up, you sound like an enabler for lazy people.

Chinese sweat shop workers make $3-8 a day. And no, the cost of living does not balance out for them. They're dirt poor and get treated horribly. Meanwhile the rich Chinese are moving to the US and jacking up prices for the rest of us because they're willing to pay inflated prices...

Why don't they move to Switzerland, as many describe as a better country than the US, but instead they move to US?

How about we get rid of minimum wage and we go by market value. After all work is a product as service. You make accordingly to the value you bring to the economy?

No, the answer is no. But people must get paid their market value not a minimum wage. You should get paid what value you provide. Isn't that simple?

Your argument is invalid and out of context. You are comparing Oranges to rocks from the planet Mars, laonsite. Context is not strong with this one.

Because I work a salaried job.

It's great that governments can pass regulations that require employers to pay hourly workers more.

However, when prices go up and my pay stays the same then my purchasing power has decreased while the hourly worker's stays the same (no real increase). If you do that to enough people then you create a recession.

and ultimatelly that is what happens each time minimum wage is increased, those not making minimum wage their salaries stay the same... Thus adding to the problem.

That's already been happening for years. The problem has never been higher wages for workers. Look at the 1950s. High taxes for the wealthiest, strong Union jobs and expansion of the middle class driving the economy.

In the lasy 30 years we've seen record worker productivity, stock market highs, as well as CEO and executive salaries while regular wages stagnated. The wealthiest have been getting wealthier and the poor have been getting more poor while the middle class shoulders more percentage of the burden relative to income while taxes are dropping all over but relatively more for the Wealthy.

The money is there to pay workers more. Greed has shifted wealth from the middle to the top. It's not laziness. You have been programmed by the wealthy to fight their battles.

Watch this video. It's pretty good. (But I am biased)
https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_the_pitchforks_are_coming

Who is going to help small to medium business owners that can't afford to pay more? What can be done about that o liberals of great knowledge?

Raising the minimum wage is a good way to get poor people to like you while screwing them at the same time.

The point is to provide a reasonable standard of living for minimum wage workers according to CURRENT PRICES. But in capitalism, having things like weak workers laws, weak competition laws and weak laws against profiteering, results in companies laying people off and raising prices in retaliation, even though they comply with the minimum wage hike. So in essence, forcing people to comply with one law makes them break others. It's basically one way to inflict inflation upon one's own nation. There is a point, overall, to help the poor and struggling citizens, like myself, who is self educated because I can't afford an education, yet my self education cannot serve as a foundation for getting a job that requires a university degree, which is the catch 22 in itself. In Capitalist countries they do raise the minimum wage periodically, but then loopholes in the system allow for companies to just raise prices, which is against socialist type laws like competition laws which prevents monopolies and price fixing cartels(especially by multiple large corporations which end up influencing the prices of other large, medium and small businesses across the board due to the mechanics of macro-economics), rent control(which prevents landlords from hiking rent by more than say a few percent annually, because there have been cases where people would pay say $1500 a month all of a sudden next year they hike that tenant's rent to $3000 a month because of huge demand in the area and people willing to pay increased prices, leading to people becoming homeless because they didn't have enough time or notice to financially plan to move or get another place in time or were barely making ends meet already and had debt), so on and so fourth, while legal bribery like campaign contributions and "lobbying" have a huge influence on keeping these laws weak, yet in place, so people can't say wait a minute, we don't have anti blood sucking laws, to which the corporations and government would say: Yeah we do. It's right here. And that would shut people up, even though the laws themselves are weakly enforced or not enforced at all, and for a country like the US that prides itself on being an effective police state(check the statistics in terms of percentage of white males over the age of 12 having been arrested), it's unusual not to enforce something when you have an unhealthy obsession with "enforcing".

So instead of addressing these issues as well, people tend to be happy with the minimum wage hike, because in our oppressive society that's considered a generous reward, and they hope that people overlook all these other issues that lets robber baron employers get away with blood sucking practices, and the majority of people do overlook this, and that's enough, because the minority who don't overlook it, like me, tend to be either silenced or ignored, either through no reply from the government after sending letters or petitions, or vague responses that say they're sorry to hear about my situation or that they're aware of something in the community or that they're doing everything they can or most likely just a summary of a new law they proudly put into place, like me asking them ok you increased the minimum wage but now people are getting laid off and the prices are getting raised what are you doing to stop them instead of just collecting fines? They'll reply to that with a summary of the new minimum wage law, and how they hope that the letter was satisfactory, or some professionally written BS stone walling or avoiding like that.Or they'll put up beaurocratic obstacles, like long waits for responses, or lack of information in the letter or something stupid, and make you give up. Or worst case scenario they'll label you a political dissident and randomly send the police to your door a few times a year to "question you" about your neighbors complaints, or write up bogus search warrants, harass you, arrest you, raid you, shoot your dog, shoot your retarded son, then apologize for botching an investigation and tell you it's a false report. You sue them and after 8 years of legal nonsense only get $20,000 in compensation for your son's death. In the mean time they set up good old boys companies to work contracts for the government, prolong things like construction projects for as long as possible YET get paid on the clock instead of per job completed, and it turns out the construction company was your sister in law's boyfriend's cousin's and the millions of dollars they owe you for your cut would be suspicious if paid in cash so they just put it on the 9 year old poodle with the hip problems' name and that they don't have time to walk so the poodle at age 9 looks like it's 26 years old and even though it's white it has even whiter hairs from stress so it dies soon.

and of course the poodle's will is written by it's owner and it says the inheritance all goes to the politician that gave them the contract to work, in terms of campaign contributions, or that politician's personal charitable foundation. So now not only do you get paid millions of dollars in stolen money, you do it in a way that the public applauds you like idiots and says "what great of a country that we live in, while other politicians in other countries are dictators and steal from their people while their people starve and they all have companies, ours are just humble public servants who give all their millions left over from campaign contributions to charitable organizations". Of course, your charitable organization has a fee that they collect for administrative costs and overhead and whatnot, which could be anything they want, from 1 cent on the dollar to 99 cents on the dollar. But they'll probably collect something like those commercials with the sad woman singing a lullaby in the background while a rich guy in khakis goes around a poor village with his camera crew filming people dying and making a sad face and telling people they need our help and how you should donate, and then you check the website and it says that 80 cents on the dollar goes towards the charitable causes, which is reasonable. That means out of 2 million dollars, they only collect $400,000, and $1.6 million goes to charitable causes. Now because the US' modus operandi in terms of stealing money and oppressing people and basically everything has to do with statistical science more than anything - you multiply 5 dollars by millions of people and you're instantly rich. When it comes to politics, multiply millions of dollars by multiple contributors, and you don't have to worry about that 80 percent of actual charity as long as you line your pockets with the millions of dollars in fees you collected in your charitable organization. People don't complain when there's charitable money being spend charitably, but when hundreds of millions of dollars in tax money that could've gone to save lives and help the poor gets misappropriated? And unspent? That's a problem.

Even now I'm still satisfied with what we have, because it could be alot worse. It could be alot better, yes, but given the other choices at the moment I'm satisfied with what we have. And yes even your free market American capitalism isn't all that free market. Capitalism is a form of anarchy. A completely free market means no financial regulations, no anti monopoly laws, no rent control, no laws against price fixing or insider trading, and no minimum wage, and under a government, you would only pay taxes to the government for keeping people from killing eachother - nothing against minimum hygiene standards and there would be no things such as a trade embargo or arms embargo or
economic sanctions, which committed by the US on Russia, for example, is a form of fascism or authoritarianism, which again, goes against the free market. So if during the Cold War the debate between Communists and Capitalist was not only an economic one but an ideological one, then the US supporting sanctions against Russia would be a very anti-capitalistic move, but that is also a matter of perspective, as economic sanctions can also be considered a form of...economic warfare? Such as say a hostile takeover of a company in American capitalism, or teaming up to take on the competition until they go bankrupt like Sears did or aquiring competitors.

It seems like the things that go up the most are the ones the minimum wage workers need. Like convenience stores and fast food. I see guys in the early morning buying red bulls and food and think "if they bought a cooler and brought these same items from home they would save half at least". My wife made me bring my lunch once we started dating. And she put out so I did whatever she told me. I bet no one reads this far into the comment, but she was a little tart.

I don't know about these though.

Your point is totally valid though - I take a twelve pack of Diet Coke to my office every week or so. No way that I'm paying vending machine prices.

I keep it in my desk drawer and chug it at room temperature. No way I'm trusting it in the fridge with the other cretins that I work with.

The first thing I told my chief when I got selected for my current job is that i was going to keep a dorm fridge in my office. Keep the neanderthals from putting their dick-beaters on my food.

nope

Just sme of the words & phrases you used made me think that.

I work with guys who go out during lunch and pick up food that they've ordered. That's got to be pretty expensive. Or they go out and get coffee during their fifteen minute breaks. There's free coffee on premises. I just don't get it. I bring in lunches that my wife or I put together (usually leftovers) and I bring a thermos for my coffee from home. When I run out of coffee I pour some free coffee from the shop in there.

i did make a mistake one time and bought 4 pounds of olive loaf from BJ's. I had olive loaf sandwiches for a month. AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

Lol.

Yep.That's why I don't support it & I only make minimum wage myself.

Liberal Redneck gets it: https://www.facebook.com/attn/videos/1608672675834852/

inflation, aint it a b&*#$ ?

So true. And kiosks have been getting installed because automation makes it easier for jobs get cut (or hours to get cut to part-time) to save money.

Right? Did you hear what happened in Oregon recently? It used to be against the law to pump your own gas, no self serve. They just changed that on the first. Coincidence?

Wow, I didn't even know Oregon had a law against self serve. That's the only shocker about the story though. Not surprised by the switch to self serve. I'm sure the unemployment line is filling up with former gas station employees, who are getting screwed by "cost-cutting."