I disagree with this pretty much in its entirety. I’m not sure where your statistics came from but a quick google search will tell you that the number of households who don’t pay income tax is about 40%. Also, this information doesn’t add anything to this particular discussion. I, unlike you, have lived in a minimum wage household as well as worked minimum wage jobs myself. I can assure you I paid income tax. I was able to get the majority of that refunded come tax time, but it was still income that would have served me better throughout the year versus in a lump sum at the end. Read more
To your point that “raising minimum wage only makes goods and services more expensive, inflating the economy, which is not something that I want.”
This isn’t a 1+1=2 equation. Many things factor into inflation and I would argue that by paying people a more livable wage would actually stimulate the economy due to more people having the means to purchase more. If you are barely scraping by to meet your basic needs you’re not able to stimulate the economy beyond that. However, we live in a consumerist society focused highly on leisure, comfort, and entertainment, all three of which lose out to food, water, and shelter. But if more people can afford those basic needs and come out with a surplus afterwards, they will more than likely pump whatever is left back into the economy for those creature comforts. If CEO’s could see past their greed for a minute, they’d realize that if they lowered the salary of their top paid executives by just 10% and spread it evenly amongst the rest of its employees, those employees would offer more stimulation to the economy, which would in turn cause sales to rise and eventually the executives who took the initial cut would would be back where they started or even better off due to the increase in revenue. On average, CEO’s make 344 x what a regular hourly employees makes, compared to 1965 when they made 21 x that of a regular employee. This is the cause and effect of the perpetual cycle of corporate greed.
