It’s basic economics that when you make things more expensive, people purchase less of them, and when you make them cheaper, people buy more of them.
Everyone acknowledges this, from liberals who want to tax junk food to discourage people from using it, to liberals who want to subsidize green energy to stimulate its usage. There is only debate over the basic fact that making things more expensive makes them less desirable is in the minimum wage debate. Labor has a price too, which we call it “wages” instead of “prices.” If someone doesn’t have enough skills to produce enough for a company to justify the current minimum wage level, they won’t be employed, unless that particular business is in the business of losing money.
It’s undeniable, but don’t take my word for it, here’s the late Milton Friedman, who won the Nobel Price in economics in the 1970s.
Poverty in America isn’t a wage problem, it’s an employment problem. In 2013, the percentage of full time workers who earned an income below the poverty line was just 2.7 percent, while overall poverty rate (for all Americans, employed or not) was 14.5 percent. It’s better to have a low paying job than no job. Period.
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