Re: McDonald's boss says he's "proud" of wages as thousands of workers call for a ris
The restaurant business has the highest failure rate of any small business. The government has already crippled it with insurance costs and more restrictive dram shop laws. Adding additional labor costs is just going to cause closures, as it has in Washington. Increasing the minimum wage is a bad idea.
I'll be the first to tell you that you know quite a bit more about the restaurant business than I do - no argument there. Thing is, the fact that you know more about that business doesn't mean that you have a better understanding of the overall economics of the minimum wage hike.
I'm going to go into generalities here, and I can well understand if you take a truly dim view of what I'm saying. In my experience - and remember, this is generally speaking - conservatives have a great eye for detail. If you want something run as efficiently as possible, get a conservative - whether for business or mechanics or whatever. Conservatives are better than liberals for correctly interpreting what's right in front of them, and conservatives look at liberals and wonder "how the heck couldn't you see that for what it is?" This is one reason why (and again, this is IMO) a lot of conservatives see snow and believe that's proof that global warming is a crock - they see the here and now and could give a tinker's damn about what's going on on the other side of the planet.
Liberals, however, are generally better at big-picture concepts, and hate nothing more than getting lost in the details. Sometimes that bites us in the ass, true, but we also find that sometimes, paying too much attention to the details keeps one from getting a better grasp of the whole - not seeing the forest for the trees, as it were. That, and money seems to mean less to us than it does to conservatives. This is why we tend to take lower-paying jobs such as teaching or scientific research or social work. It's what we like to do, even when it pays less.
Where I'm going with all this is that you know better than I do how it affects your particular industry...but your industry, as big as it is, is but a small part of the greater whole. What we liberals see is if the entry-level workers in every industry (and not just the restaurant industry),
they will still spend almost every penny they get - all the money will still go back to the stores, the restaurants, the entertainment industry, whatever. The businesses will pay their entry-level staff more, but there are more people with money who are spending that money. Will businesses automatically raise their prices in consonance with the pay raises? Sure, some, perhaps most will...but then there's that little thing called 'market forces' at work, and those businesses that figure out what corners can be cut, how to run things more efficiently, will refrain from raising their prices too high...and competition does the rest.
A rising tide lifts all boats...and we've seen it before. This minimum wage hike isn't much different from raising taxes - it's still a form of monetary redistribution (which words makes conservatives hurl). But again, it's not as if the extra money these entry-level workers are getting paid is somehow being poured down a pit - they spend almost every penny, and it's the businesses they go to that are the beneficiary. Including your own.
And if you need to see proof of this, just compare the first-world democracies to third-world democracies. The first-world democracies all have high effective minimum wages (except for Germany, which has very strong unionization)...and they are all (even Greece) retaining first-world status after five decades or more of this kind of economic model. Third-world democracies have no significant minimum wage...and as a result, their workers are paid not much more than starvation wages - I've seen it with my own eyes.
So...yeah, you might be dismissing all this with a disgusted
ha-rumph, but that's what I see...and the economies of all the world are my proof.