It's all about control and redistribution of wealth.

"Observe that any social movement which begins by “redistributing” income, ends up by distributing sacrifices" Ayn Rand

Anyone thinking about this issue needs to watch this video: http://www.ted.com/talks/leslie_t_chang_...
I stumbled on it this am and found that it made the point that wages were none of the government's business better than anything I had ever seen or read. As I watched, I really did not know where it was going but by the end I realized that "exploiting" factory laborers in China is going to lead to explosive capitalism in China and left unchecked it will change the world more than the experiment in America in the period between the Civil War and 1913.

Australia has a minimum wage on hospitality workers, i.e., bartenders, waiter/waitresses, and you have to stand in line to order your food even at a fancy, like yacht club, to eat. Very minimal staffing.

Every time they bring up a "minimum wage", I think we should say "oh YEAH, let's pass a law that makes everybody rich, that's a GREAT idea!!! I propose minimum wage of $250 per hour."

Then make the stupid liberals explain why we can't do it.

SeaTac near Seattle already put in the $15.00 an hr minimum wage experimentally. Many business owners have already said they will be cutting staff, reducing benefits and raising prices. Give it a while and it will show itself for what it is, a Disaster.

Imposing minimum wage = imposing more unemployment
This has been demonstrated mathematically and in the real world. If you have to double everyones wage, or at a minimum increase it by a significant amont (say 30%), you will not be able to raise prices to cover that so you (a business owner) will cut costs where possible. That is usually staff (real honest to g_d people will be let go.

Since when did working at a minimum wage job become a 'career' choice? Whatever became of taking a job for experience and work credentials and then moving on, the same way building your credit works. You don't start with a high limit, you earn it. Same with pay. Of course the cola has gone up, but again, minimum wage jobs are not intended to be the end of ambition, but the start of your working life. And who out there actually thinks the business is going to absorb the cost of these wages? Either higher product prices, fewer employees, or shorter working hours to offset benefits. Why does simply math elude so many liberal minds?

One problem is that people who have never been in business often haven't a clue as to how hard it is. Many times even those with lots of money to invest find it a struggle to survive. They picture the business people who have made it big and assume that because you own a business, you are, at the very least, making lots of money. Then there are the people like me who started on half a shoestring, working long hours, on holidays and weekends. Struggling to pay bills and have enough money at the end of the week to pay personal obligations as well. In my case, eventually, the struggle paid off, but many others fell by the wayside. When others were willing to give up, my wife and I just worked harder. The result is that I am retired and my wife, always a girlie-girl, became an Avon lady as more of an avocation than a vocation. Putting a company name on a door front did not automatically guarantee anything, let alone success.

I was talking about this with some coworkers this morning and thinking about the logical outcomes of this and in my head and discussion it happens exactly like in AS. They increase minimum wage, people start losing their jobs, the government tries to prevent businesses from letting people go, and finally after this we have a train wreck in a tunnel. :)

What amazes me is how the people that propose this can't do any math.

It's pretty simple really. If you raise the cost of the inputs (labor is an input), you must raise the cost of the output as well. So those $5 value meals become $6 - not because the meal got any better mind you, but because the person behind the counter somehow merited the raise just by being there.

What the economically clueless don't understand is that the minimum wage has two significant effects: it increases the basic cost of nearly all goods (again - to cover the rise in input costs) called INFLATION and it puts the unskilled out of jobs.

Oh, and if someone points to some studies which purport to show that raising the minimum wage had no effect, please ask them to cite their studies. More than 80% of Economics textbooks cite these studies to be discredited reaffirm the points that raising the minimum wage is far more detrimental than beneficial.

This world operates on the principle that whoever has the superior might has the superior rights. In the last few decades, the wealth of the elite has increased between 300-400% while the wealth of the upper/middle/lower working classes has decreased between 50-70%. In a world where our government protected every human's equally endowed rights, this would not happen. A strong man may have the power to force a child to choose either slavery and life or freedom and death but the strong man does not have the right. All humans are endowed with an equal right to life and the things in creation that sustain that life such as air, water and food. Society does not have the responsibility to provide those things but no individual or society has a right to deny any individual access to those things. Someone can do the work of collecting and compressing air and then selling that air at what ever price they choose but they do not have the right to gain a monopoly of all air and control who has access to that air. All humans have an equal right to the life sustaining resources that the Creator has created. In an equal rights just society, an employer will not have the right to demand that a worker accept slavery or die. If an employer cannot afford to pay a living wage to another human, the employer does not have a right to that labor. The creation witnesses that like a farmer an employee who sows/works more should justly reap more. In a world where equal sowing results in equal reaping, the elite would reap 1/1,000,000 of what they reap today and the upper/middle/lower working classes would reap 10 times what they reap today. The elite do not work that much harder or add that much more value to the world's wealth pie to deserve 90% of the pie. The poor must be protected from being put into a slavery or death choice.

I guess the reasoning is that business owners are lying always. So a higher minimum wage cannot *really* affect their businesses or the amount of employees they use.