eLeCTRIC PENCILS

andrchelsea:

I make about 13 per hour and I can barely afford to eat, much less do anything else. I’m fully insured and still can’t afford co-pays or specialists… I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d love the minimum wage to be $9 per hour and I know that would help a lot of people. Let’s not pretend like this is some bold new poverty-eradicating idea, Obama. Spare me the “no one who works full time should have to live in poverty” bullshit. 

Here is the the reason why raising minimum wage doesn’t really fix anything. That money has to come from somewhere, right? Ideally, we would like to think that these billion dollar companies would cut into their billion dollar profits and pay employees a little more and then there’s more money to spend and the economy gets better…

However, what happens is the people who are already rich say, “We have to pay employees more? Fine. We will raise the price of our products because we’re not giving up any of our money.” And then the cost of everything goes up and people now making $9.00 an hour still can’t afford the things they couldn’t afford when they were making $7.50 an hour because all of those prices were also inflated.

So, unless the rich folks actually are willing to sacrifice some of their money to even out the distribution of wealth, any minimum wage increase is nothing more than blowing smoke up our collective asses.