Colleen27
DIS Legend
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2007
- Messages
- 24,190
Seattle has been in growth mode for quite some time. Lots of tech & skilled labor jobs.
And yes, it does stand to reason that an influx of $ would help the economy, but where will that money originate? So, now it becomes a catch-22.
Nobody can afford to eat in my restaurant because wages are so low.
I can't afford to pay my staff better because my business is so slow.
Without some new source of revenue, major wage increases for the bottom will just result in higher unemployment.
But the thing is, a higher minimum wage is in large part a new source of revenue for communities. Everyone focuses on small businesses, but the net effect of a minimum wage increase is new dollars flowing into the community from the national corporations that represent the largest part of the retail and food service sector in most localities. A mom & pop diner paying more may just be shuffling dollars from one place in the community but Walmart, McDonalds, and Dollar General paying more absolutely is adding new money to working class communities that never would have landed there as spending/investment.
But Colleen, (and out of the utmost respect from a fellow Michigan girl):
I know Detroit very well having lived most of my first 35 years there and all my family lives in the area (my father still lives in the city limits in the house I grew up in) and I know that even at $15.00/hr, there is still going to be very little disposable income left at the month for a family of 4. They will basically be replacing their food stamp, medicaid, and SNAP benefits with the increase in pay, leaving them no better or worse off than before. (the taxpayers might be a little better off, but that is a different topic in this debate so I won't get into that on this post).
Except with the way those programs are structured now, with a gentle phase-down rather than hard cutoffs, the idea that recipients "can't" make more for fear of losing benefits is largely a myth. What is lost is less than what is gained, on a dollar-by-dollar basis, except in very specific circumstances.
And you're right about downtown thriving because the suburbanites aren't afraid to go there any more. That's definitely part of the story, and IMO, a part that supports the case for demanding a higher minimum. Suburbanites spending is driving more jobs and higher pay for Detroiters. Why wouldn't the influx of money that corporations are, at this point, unwilling to pass along to workers have the same effect?
All of the arguments against a higher minimum wage sound to me almost worshipful towards "the job creators" and Wall Street as existing beyond the reach of the social contract that built this country. We're told workers shouldn't expect to see higher wages even in times of record high profits, that they should quietly accept abuses like mandatory off-the-clock work duties, widespread abuses of overtime rules, constant insecurity in terms of hours, absolutely no respect for family, society, or the environment, etc. At the same time, we're told our communities should be ponying up tax dollars to compete for those low-wage, low-quality jobs, essentially getting hit from both sides. And when the little guys try to organize to stand up to these things, they're slapped down as undeserving of a better wage, entitled, lazy, incompetent, and generally sub-human. It goes against some unspoken American gospel to suggest that the benefits of capitalism should be shared across the wage scale (not equally - which is always the ridiculous counter to that point - but still shared), that if declining profits or productivity are reason to cut wages, increasing profits and productivity should be reason to increase them, and that economic prosperity needs a broader definition than the Dow hitting 18,000.