California and New York now both have $15 an hour minimum wage bills signed into law. This is great, but I think in most of the urban areas of those states you need at $25 dollars an hour just to get by, but I doubt that will happen anytime soon.
Already there are company CEOs, such as Andy Puzder, of Carl Jr. Burger, saying that he now wants to eliminate jobs with automation as a counter against the minimum wage.
The real thing that the wealthy do not like about the minimum wage, other than taking money out of their own personal profits, is the impact it will have on inflation. For many business, especially, I would imagine, fast food, the biggest expense is labor cost. Labor cost increases mean that businesses would have to charge more for goods and services in order to see the same level of profit. Also workers will have more money to spend making more of a demand for other goods and services and their prices will go up. This will start a rise in inflation, and if you like to gamble on the stock market like many wealthy people do, you will have a harder time borrowing money because inflation will ultimately make interest payments go up. The stock market won't get the infusion cash it needs and stock prices will ultimately go down, making it very hard to make easy money with stock investments. This why stock markets tend to drop in value when investors hear that the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates.
Andy Puzder is a long way off from Henry Ford, who wanted to make sure his employees made a fair wage in order for them to afford the cars that they were building in his factory. A well paid employee is actually good for business and good for making the economy grow. Poor and middle income people who have money are more likely to spend the money they earn because in many cases they have no other choice, while wealthy people can horde their money in offshore banks that will do no good to anyone other than the bank and themselves. Henry Ford understood Keynesian economics, and I think the wealthy business owners understand Keynes as well they just choose to ignore him for an economic policy that says that they get to keep all of the money.
I just cannot believe how callous wealthy people can be to the common man. The minimum wage increase helps make their lives more comfortable, but this is unacceptable to the wealthy just so they can make greater profits and fatten their own wallets.
