Yes it does idiot.
You say minimum wage does not increase pay for low income people, does not reduce income disparity.
I say you are wrong and support that with CBO's findings.
Now how the hell could you possibly read that as not contradicting you??
Ah I see. Instead of being needlessly insulting, you should have simply explained that.
I never said that raising the minimum wage does not increase the wages of those who are still working.
What I said was, that it does not decrease income disparity.
Those are not mutually exclusive. Both can be true.
How?
Because there is a particularly important group of people that is not included in those CBO findings.
Yes, again... the people who are still working...... earn more.
What about the people who are not working anymore? Huh?
See all that CBO data, excludes the people who are affected the most by these policies. The people who are now unemployed.
If you includes those people, into the equation, of the disparity of incomes..... then disparity is worse, than before you increased the minimum wage.
And honestly, I have never understood why those statistic magically exclude the people who are earning zero. Because logically.... if you are going to measure the effects of the minimum wage, wouldn't you include the people who are affected the most?
Think about it.... who is affected the MOST by the minimum wage?
I was working at McDonald's in the 1990s, when Billy boy Clinton, raised the minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.15.
The first thing that McDonald's did, was lay off 3 part-time employees. Now why part time employees? Because all the rest of us full-time employees were already making $5/hour or more. Minimum wage, even at the fast-food joints, is usually reserved for people who are part-time or bran new employees.
I didn't get any increase in my pay whatsoever. Now a few people, who were new, but full-time, they immediately went to $5.15/hour
So let me ask you.... Which people were affected by the minimum wage the most? The few people who gained $36 a week in pay? A gain they would have gotten anyway after being on for a few weeks?
Or the people whose income dropped to zero, because they were laid off?
And yet, those people whose income dropped to zero, are not included in those CBO charts of the affects of minimum wage. The people who are affected the most, are not on the charts of the effects of Minimum wage.
And here's the other side to it........ long-term verse short-term.
The CBO numbers only tend to look at immediate effects. What about long term effects?
Even those people who get the pay raise, eventually that store has to pass that cost on to consumers. By raising and raising prices to cover those increased costs.
But slowly over time, sometimes even years..... consumers start to move away from those expenses.
As the market slowly dwindles, the store owners eventually realize it isn't worth it anymore, and close the store.
That could be 5 or 10 years later that the store closes, without anyone, not even the store owner himself, realizing the trigger was the raise in the minimum wage.
Same is true of inflation. Inflation does not happen in an instant. The CBO numbers do not look at inflationary effects over a long time period. The much higher cost of rent in 2012, could be, and likely is, a result of a minimum wage hike in 2007-09.
This is why increasing the minimum wage, only results in more demands to increase the minimum wage. It is no shock to me that after the large hike in the minimum wage from 2007 to 2009, resulted in a demand for an even larger hike in the minimum wage just a mere 3 years later.
Yes in the extreme short term, you can see a tiny bump in incomes, and a small amount of job loss, and a small amount of inflation.
But if you look at the long term, including all those job losses immediate and future, and the inflation immediate and future, it all balances out, and you are no better off, and in some cases worse off.
Again, all the minimum wage hikes around the world, have not had good results. And equally you look at some of the best economies of Europe, and most have, or had until only recently, no minimum wage. Germany, the economic power house of Europe, never had a minimum wage until 2015. The economic leader of all of Europe, no minimum wage until just recently. That should tell you something.
(and as a side note, it was workers who complained that refugees were doing their jobs for a cheaper wage, that prompted the minimum wage law. The whole point was to exclude refugees from the work force.)
And lastly, the idea that this is a solution to wage disparity is still ridiculous.
To get into the top 5%, you need to earn $215K a year. You think that Adding $2/hour to your income, at $7.25, to $9.25, is going to make you anywhere close to parity?
Besides that, living a better life, is more about being wise with your money. I know people who literally earn double my income, and live impoverished, while I have money in my pocket. It has more to do with spending less than you make, and investing wisely.