A new report shows minimum wage increases have had little effect on the number of jobs in Maryland and nationwide. While the rhetoric around increasing the minimum wage often comes with the caution it will reduce low-wage employment, a new review of decades of research showed most studies found no job losses after the state or local minimum wage is raised. Ben Zipperer, senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute and the review's co-author, said raising the minimum wage has unquestionably benefited workers. ...
  • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
    21·
    3 months ago

    Yep.

    Give a rich man a dollar and all you’ve done societally is remove a dollar from the economy. If you instead make him give that money to his employees things change, but cause poor people actually need money and will spend it.

    You give a poor person that dollar through increased minimum wage and they spend it at a business. That business now makes more money, which is passed on to its employees through the increased minimum wage, and they spend that dollar again.

    And again.

    And again.

    That dollar you took from the rich and gave to the poor drove a lot more than a dollar’s economic activity.

    OH - and it’s also taxed every time it changes hands, so it also brings in more than its initial value in tax revenue.

    • bufalo1973@lemmy.ml
      2·
      3 months ago

      Maybe an analogy makes it clearer: the economy is the blood flow, formed by services and products. Money if the fat in the blood. It’s necessary for the system and without it it doesn’t work right. But if it forms a clot then there a problem.

    • flashgnash@lemm.ee
      17·
      3 months ago

      I’m not sure how true this is, the rich still invest huge amounts of their money in businesses, while they shouldn’t have that much to begin with it’s still in the economy for the most part

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
        5·
        3 months ago

        Well, there are three points on that:

        • Business investment doesn’t need money from the rich, it just needs any money, resources and manpower. Shareholding means lots of non-rich can supply the money (it’s not the rich that are needed, it’s the money) and structures like Cooperatives mean that many businesses can be made by people just pooling their work and resources. Theoretically at least mass Shareholding should make for a more robust business environments because many people investing should have a lot more variety (hence making the whole more resilience to the kind of unforeseen changes that cause Crashes) in terms of what’s invested in and the investment objectives than just a few people.
        • The money being too concentrated together with the current Ownership Laws (mainly Land Ownership, though in some areas also Intelectual Property) actually crowd out most news businesses because of how expensive it is to launch most business ventures, not just directly but even in terms of the founders themselves being able to afford being out of work whilst they launch a business. Notice how even in big cities but especially in smaller cities and even towns, stores are closing and those spaces remain closed for months or even years. The money and property concentrated in fewer hand has the leverage to demand huge rents from the rest of Society to be able to use those thing they’ve locked-in through ownership and that’s killing lots of business at the start stage and even stopping the business ideas themselves from ever being put in practice. It’s “funny” that the rich having all the money creates a situation were so much money is needed to launch a successful business that it can only work with funding from the rich - nobody is going to create, say, a large restaurant chain from the humble beginning of a single venue in a small town when the necessary realestate to expand or even just start costs many times more to rent or buy than it did back in the 60s and 70s when so many of todays big name such chains started just like that.
        • The actual value of more investment depends on were the bottleneck is in the Economy: supply side or consumer side. There is no point in adding more businesses (i.e. Production) if there’s a lack of demand (i.e. Consumption) because median incomes are too low. If you look around (just notice companies nickel & diming customers) we currently have a lack of demand, not of supply, so money going into investment just makes the problem worse whilst money going (via better wages) into consumption would help.
        • flashgnash@lemm.ee
          1·
          3 months ago

          This was not at all my point though, I’m not saying billionaires are needed I’m saying they do actually put their money into the economy, most are not just sitting on a dragon horde

          • Aceticon@lemmy.world
            1·
            3 months ago

            True.

            It is, however, on the wrong side of the Economy (at least at the moment) and as I pointed out they distort the Economy itself in negative ways mainly due to how much easier it is for them to leverage their footprint for rent seeking and crowding other investment out.

            And don’t get me started on how they use their money to buy the political power in Democracy, corroding it, which also feeds into distortions of the Economy via the Lawmaking process.

            The rich merely sitting on their horde would’ve actually been less negative for the rest of Mankind.