Where do you think the money comes from? It comes from a business owner who makes the evaluation: can I take the labor produced by person X and sell the output for enough to pay person X and make a profit. If the answer is no, then the business owner doesn’t fill the position. Except for government jobs program jobs, that’s how the economy works. |
Oh please! The vast majority comes from people like me, making around 200K. Everyone knows your trickle down economic BS has never worked. |
I don’t know anything about trickle down theory. I do know a couple DC restaurant owners who either have or are expecting to go out of business with the min wage hikes. There’s a limit to how much they can charge for meals and the business breaks. |
Let them go out of business. Not everyone who can't afford to pay a living wage to the people they employ needs to stay in business. As I said before, when the owners don't pay, we all do with our tax money. |
If the employees had employment options that paid better they wouldn’t be working at the restaurant. Now you’ve put everyone at the restaurant out of I job. I’m not against any minimum wage. I just believe that above a certain level it breaks business models and leaves otherwise employable people without jobs. I believe 25 bucks and the numbers from the last ballot measure were above that level. |
No. Probably not. But it depends on the availability of skilled labor. For difficult and thankless skilled labor jobs that people aren't crazy about doing and only do for the money, there will be an exodus to easier jobs given the newly higher min wage, and the rates for such jobs will have to go up. Outside of that? No -- rate will not "automatically increase" for skilled labor. I've been through this with what my peers and I considered to be a pretty decently paying job for a job that required skills but not a degree or extensive experience. In 2015 when I began this work we were making $19 per hour, and min wage was $10.50 at the time in DC. We now make $25 per hour and min wage is $17.95 per hour. I doubt we would get much of a raise with a min wage going to $25. We'd get one, probably, but it would be nominal. It's a desirable job for many reasons, so there wouldn't be a lot of quitting, even though we'd all talk about it. Wages, any rise in min wage, and the employment rate all work together in fascinating ways. But changes will never be completely predictable (or even decipherable), even by top economists. |
The small business owners always cry wolf but then they adjust. No business owner wants to be told how much they must pay their workers. |
+1 The idea is stupid. It's for people who don't know the first thing about economics. |
If we paid dishwashers a million dollars an hour they'd still be poor, because the prices of everyone else's labor, and all the things that everyone buys, would go up by the same amount. |
| This is a ballot initiative, and you should always be very suspicious of ballot initiatives. Usually things become ballot initiatives because the people behind it tried to go through the normal legislative channels and were turned down. They went to the mayor and our uber liberal city council and they both said "hell no." They probably didn't initially take no for an answer, and they tried and tried and tried. When all the elected people turn you down for the ninth time, your last resort to go to the ballot initiative where you'll just have some dumb bumper sticker slogans about why your idea isn't stupid and pray that voters don't think more than two seconds about whether it's a good idea. But remember: the only reason why this is a ballot initiative is because our elected leaders thought this was a stupid idea. |
| A perfect example of why Washington DC folks are out of touch with many American workers. First year teachers, nurses, and social workers in most places don"t make that much. |
I can assure you that in the District, which is all that we are talking about here, both DCPS first year teachers and new grad RNs make significantly more than that. |
Tell that to hard working American voters and see who gets elected President next time. |
What does that even mean. People in Iowa will elect a president based on how much the min c wage is in DC? I assure you that people in DC making min wage are barely scraping by and are not out of touch with the same kind of struggle in other parts of the country. |
In every state that had a ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage, it passed easily. Red and blue. Progressive economic ballot initiatives win in every state or municipality. |