Home

Minimum Wage Increase: Perfect or Horrible?

posted over a year ago
I was listening to an interesting discussion today about the increase in the minimum wage. Is this the perfect timing for the increase, or is it the worst possible time they could have picked?

If you think about the fact that there are many people that will be getting $0.70 per hour more, that could mean millions of dollars being pumped into the economy. Might I also add that those millions wouldn't have to come from the government. I am sure that many families and individuals are glad for this wage hike since it may loosen up their budget.

On the other hand, there is an ugly side to the equation. How many businesses are on the brink of shutting down? How many of these will "kick the bucket" when they need to pay their employees more? When a business shuts down, jobs are lost, and the employees are in worse shape than they were before they got their "raise".

There's something else too. Take a pizza shop, for instance, that employs quite a few people at minimum wage. It could cost the owner around $15,000 per year more just because of this wage hike. I think we could all assume that pizza shop owners don't make enough money to just write off $15,000. So what happens? The owner jacks up the price of the pizza. People buy less pizza at his establishment. The owner doesn't have work for all his employees anymore. The employees get laid off. Back to square one.

So, while there are some pretty good arguments for the increase, I'm gonna say that they could have picked a better time to do it.

The Bizfisher
6 Comments

Leave a Comment
Your comment will be posted as bizfishing.com. If you would like to have your name displayed with the comment please sign it at the end of the comment.

comment