The increase proposed is reasonable. It is to be phased in, so it will not reach $15 until 2025, after Covid is gone. It will help a huge section of low paid workers and their families. Workers living partly on tips now have a $2.13 minimum wage and this will also be increased gradually. The big cheap-labor-employing companies like Walmart and McDonalds can easily afford this, but they will not necessarily find it easy to raise prices. Many other companies will also gradually raise wages just to keep their employees (who are now paid at or above a $15 minimum) and to maintain an appropriate “ladder” of wages. There will be some negative features for small businesses and some minimum job losses, as from automation — which is increasing in any case. Everything I’ve studied tells me this sort of increase is overall worthwhile and overdue, though of course not a panacea.
Finally, this is now a popular idea ... even in red states. Working-class populism is likely to help carry this through Congress, or at least make something like it possible. Other more direct government economic assistance to poor and working people is also now called for.
Once again your opinions don't align with facts
100% of Walmart stores are corporate owned
80% of mcdonald's is mom and pop stores/small business/ low profit margins
So you're wrong
The increase proposed is reasonable. It is to be phased in, so it will not reach $15 until 2025, after Covid is gone. It will help a huge section of low paid workers and their families. Workers living partly on tips now have a $2.13 minimum wage and this will also be increased gradually. The big cheap-labor-employing companies like Walmart and McDonalds can easily afford this, but they will not necessarily find it easy to raise prices. Many other companies will also gradually raise wages just to keep their employees (who are now paid at or above a $15 minimum) and to maintain an appropriate “ladder” of wages. There will be some negative features for small businesses and some minimum job losses, as from automation — which is increasing in any case. Everything I’ve studied tells me this sort of increase is overall worthwhile and overdue, though of course not a panacea.
Finally, this is now a popular idea ... even in red states. Working-class populism is likely to help carry this through Congress, or at least make something like it possible. Other more direct government economic assistance to poor and working people is also now called for.
People making $15 an hour today won't make $30 tomorrow they will lose purchasing power. Instead of making twice the minimum wage they will make a few dollars more, and that's just socialism when 40% of the workers make around minimum wage
I’m not sure what you are saying. First of all, McDonalds fast food restaurants are tightly franchised by the corporation, and their shift leaders and managers & franchise “owners” will — one way or another — be provided more income if this giant corporation wants to stay in business. Since all the labor cost increase generally
cannot be past on in higher prices, corporate profits might suffer — this I grant you. If prices do go up it might paradoxically help some tiny family restaurants compete. In general McDonalds and Walmart are precisely the kind of giant super-profitable corporations that should be targeted.
As for your second comment, truly skilled workers, technicians and semi-professionals will always make more than unskilled workers precisely because their skills make their labor more valuable — raising minimum wages to $15 will not bring U.S. society anywhere near a situation like “socialism when 40% of the workers make around minimum wage.”
Indeed, in recent decades private stock ownership — our modern form of “capitalism” —continues to be one of the main contributors to inequality and working-class immiseration. Stock values (not counting dividends) are artificially inflated by Fed backstopping of the economy, growing faster than their historical average, which itself allowed for more than doubling every ten years. Capitalism is safe. Many non-workers indirectly share in its bounty. The paultry savings of lower-paid workers meanwhile pay practically nothing. Nobody worries about stock market gains being too high or “undeserved.”