Dragonlady
Designing Woman
If poor people produce so little, and it's of such low value, how can a company like McDonald's be one of the most profitable companies in the USA? How can they afford to pay the CEO over $21 million dollars per year in salary, since their entire front line work force is composed of minimum wage burger flippers and counter kids.
How is a company like Walmart, one of the most profitable companies in the USA, and paying the highest dividends in their history, when their workers are receiving $9 billion a year in food stamps, MedicAid, earned income credits and other social assistance, and the Walmart family the wealthiest people in the country, if their workers create so little value.
Walmart could afford to pay all of their workers $100 a week more, and still be a highly profitable company. Their profits would be reduced by 1/3, so they would still be very profitable, but they wouldn't be one of the MOST profitable companies. If they were to pay their workers $100 a week more, US taxpayers wouldn't be giving Walmart workers $9 billion in social assistance.
You keep railing against low wage workers and "rewarding them" for their low skills, but even if everyone in the USA were to go to college and acquire better skills, you still need people to deliver pizzas, pick up the trash, clean toilets in office buildings, and work in the fast food industry. What you are saying is that these people should not be paid a living wage, and that American taxpayers should have to subsidize these people.
Wages as a percentage of costs, is now at the same level as it was in the Guilded Age of the Robber Barons. Worker anger at this inequity, as well as worker safety issues, gave rise to the union movement.
Such rationalization ignores the very basic fact that government assistance is expensive. To give someone a $100 food stamp supplement, the government has to process an application, look at the applicant's income and facts presented, collect taxes, pay them out to the state, where they are deposited to the recipient's electronic debit card. Government worker wages are paid at every stage of this process, and are ongoing. If you eliminate the government and have employers pay their workers more, the workers have more control over what they do with their own money, and you eliminate all of the government workers and expenses of running the food stamp programs.
The low wage workers become tax payers, taxes paid to social programs are reduced, the number of government workers employed processing applications and payments are reduced, and government gets smaller and cheaper. Better yet, since the worker wages are tax deductible, every $1 of additional wages corporations pay only costs that corporation $0.78 because it reduces the corporation's tax burden, and 22% of their profits go to taxes.
Yet fools like you continue to believe that raising the minimum wage rewards lazy people with no skills and harms people like you. There is no cure for stupid.
