please tell: how can raiisng the minimum wage ruin the economy? i dont want to start a fight, ive never taken an econimics course so i really dont know and im curious

No, no, you’re completely fine! I don’t have a problem with people who are curious. I only get angry when tumblr doesn’t bother looking at real arguments of conservatives, and instead makes up crap that makes us out to be selfish, greedy prats. I’ll do my best to explain.

I do want to say that conservatives do understand the struggle that people working low-paying jobs have. It’s not that we don’t care: we want to help them, it’s just that evidence shows that raising the minimum wage won’t help them in the long run, so it’s not a solution to the problem.

First, one has to know that minimum wage jobs were never meant for full-time careers to provide for families. They were originally instituted in order to keep employers from scamming people (particularly young people). These type of jobs were seen as especially for teenagers and young adults, so that they could employ themselves at low-skill jobs to make money on the side while at the same time gaining experience and references for future, more skilled jobs. However, as time went on and higher education became more expensive, more people found themselves unable to move up the ladder due to lack of skill to stage 2 and found themselves stuck in the “first, no-skill job” rut. Jobs for those with only highschool degrees became harder to find, as specially as their number began to grow. Companies and businesses with aforementioned jobs find no shortage of people who need them. So basically, because people (a) can’t afford to get a degree or (b) get a degree that’s useless, they have no skill that is in demand by higher-paying jobs, so they have to take what they can get at the bottom. Suddenly people are relying on minimum-wage jobs for a living when they were never meant to be lived off of.

Now that you understand the beginnings and original purpose of the minimum wage, we can get into why raising it would hurt the economy. For explanation purposes, I’m going to use an analogy. Let’s say you decide to open a food truck, and you get two friends to do it with you. You are the one who bought the actual truck and all the tools, and run the business (budget, taxes, etc). Friend1 is the cook, and friend2 is the cashier. Naturally you wish to make a profit off this investment, and rack in about $500 bucks every week. Your friends both make minimum wage ($7.25), which they agreed to when they signed up for the job ($250 a week). Suddenly, a new law is passed that raises the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15.00 an hour. Now your friends are making more than twice what they did, $525 a week. Even if you changed it so you made zero profit from the foodtruck, you would still have to jack up prices of the food in order to cover the cost of the newly doubled employee play and bare product cost. And making zero profit off it sucks for you, as you can no longer afford your rent, so you have to raises the prices even higher in order to make ends meet.

The thing is, the same thing happens to every other shop, business, store, and anything else with employees. Prices go up everywhere because this sudden increase of payment due to employees, even to completely no-skill jobs like that of a janitor and dishwasher. At first, everyone who was struggling financially on the minimum wage rejoices, because more money! They can afford more things! But then the prices catch up. Stores don’t raise the prices because they’re mean- they do it to make ends meet and pay their employees. So minimum wage worker’s pay checks get bigger, their receipts get bigger too.

There is literally nothing gained by raising the minimum wage. All that happens is that the price of products will rise with it, and people struggling paycheck to paycheck will be right back where they started. Even worse, people who were formerly earning $15-$18 an hour, who formerly enjoyed financial stability, will now be struggling too. Raising the minimum wage will suck more people into bad financial situations, the opposite of what is promised.

This is not all just guesswork and “well probably this will happen”. It’s already happening in places when the minimum wage is changed.

A lot of people (especially the kind of tumblr) will grind their teeth at this, and loudly exclaim that raising the minimum wage would work if greedy corporate business men would quit giving themselves massive paychecks and redirect some of their already-plenty income to their workers who need it more. However, while it could be argued that this is true, large corporations wouldn’t be the ones to suffer from an increase in minimum wage– it would be the small business owners. The entrepreneurs (I spelled that right first try hehe). Gigantic multi-billion dollar companies may be able to afford a doubled expense on employees, but do you think that little bakery down the street, which has been in a family for generations, can? Or that newly-opened restaurant from an old Vietnamese couple? What about the young lady who just made an investment in her own, first ice cream shoppe? Do you think dollar stores will still be around?

Not only that, but if a business has to pay someone 15 bucks and hour to do a low-paying skill, do you think they’re going to hire a young teenager with no experience, or the grown man with three kids to support? As I said earlier, minimum wage jobs are crucial for teens and young adults to get a foothold in the jobfield– without that opportunity, it’s going to make it even harder to get started young.

As a result of an increased minimum wage, businesses lay off a good chunk of their workers because they can’t pay them all the new wage. This means– you guessed it– less companies will be hiring, which means, oh boy! less jobs for everyone. Some companies are already beginning to experiment with replacing humans with robots as employees (such as McDonalds, which is abolishing the cashier job and replacing them with ordering machines). Because in the long run, they’re starting to look cheaper.

In all, raising the minimum wage doesn’t help anyone. It just damages the economy overall, will make it harder to find jobs, and will make everything even more expensive than it already is. Which would you rather have: more people hired but only making $7.25, or a lot less people hired and still making the same equivalent to what they’re making now?

This all raises the question of how we get people out of the minimum wage rut and into better paying jobs in the long run. I really love Marco Rubio’s stance on this: lower college costs by making the higher education field much more competitive (driven by encouraging more low-cost online classes, which will make the traditional colleges need to compete); make it required for colleges to show a student how much (on average) the degree they want will make them in the real world, so that they are better educated; and lower taxes on the middle class; lower taxes on small businesses, so that they can then higher more people and make better investments. (I also like Rubio because he understands what living paycheck to paycheck means- he grew up that way, and only just finished paying off student loans himself. A relatable person.)

Now you know. There’s lots of great books and articles online about how raising minimum wage will hurt the economy rather than help. Sorry this was so long, but I wanted to make sure I thoroughly explained.