JeffWartman
Senior Member
Redhots said:And lets not forget about what happened to the UK after they made the mistake of putting a minimum wage into effect back in 1999.
The number of jobs grew.
Which has no correlation. The number of jobs grew not because of the small increase in real wages that the British workers realized, but because other, more major economic reforms that were passed in Britain around that time were more substantial. Read BaronVonBigmeat's post on the previous page, he is exactly right:
That's somewhat true, but that's because they didn't go over the market price of unskilled labor by much. ie, if the true market wage for a burger-flipper is $5 and you set the minimum wage at $5.25, then you may not see massive job losses. You also won't see any significant benefit to the remaining workers. Set it to a real "living wage", say $12/hour, and you'll see problems. The market price of basic labor at Wal-Mart, Home Depot, etc. and especially in big cities is already at $7+, so if this passes you might not see much happen. Rural areas with lower living costs and wages would be effected more.