HouseofNo, it was an economics professor, whose course in college I earned an A in on the way to completing a B.A. in Poli Sci, who convinced me of this and explained that it's the consensus view of academic economists. Now, if a company can't afford to pay workers much more than the min. wage b/c their bus. model doesn't allow that, this is usually, in large part, b/c they don't want to charge customers a high price. So yes, there often is way companies could adjust their business model to make it so they can pay higher wages: charge customers way more, then cross your fingers and pray that it doesn't cost you in business volume. But if other companies that sell similar goods and services don't increase their prices, then by increasing yours you will surely lose business volume. This is why being a min. wage worker is not a good career plan.

PREACH! 💜

"I believe people who have been professional economics for decades over comments." 1: That is itself a comment. It's not much of an argument against a comment to point out that it is a comment, via comment. 2. Many professional, highly regarded economists do in fact agree w/ me on this, e.g. Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, Mark J. Perry, many, many, many others. 3. My claim is not that inflation will not happen at all if we don't raise the min. wage, and I agree that non-zero inflation is likely anyway. The point I'm making is that inflation will happen to a greater extent than it would have, that it will cause a non-zero rate of inflation to be higher. 4. If that last point does turn out to be true, as many prof. economists say, than in some sense it will make the problems of poverty and near-poverty even more painful for those at or near the bottom. It is a medicine with some good effects in the short term, but some bad side effects over time.

Brett, the question is not what percent of workers earn the min. wage, the question is: for companies that employ them, is it often the case that, within that company, every dime which they have to pay for labor matters a lot for where they need to set prices? Any business person would tell you that it matters a great deal for the question how much they have to charge customers.

I read it's the overpaid CEO's of companies which contributes heavily toward inflation..not the minimum wage worker. I love your statement..TRUTH!

Have you ever done the math on a real company, to get a rough sense of what a firm could do if they gave all of the exec compensation instead to the rank and file workers equally (emphasis on that last word)? Well people crunched that number for WalMart in 2019: WalMart spent about $470M on all exec compensation (counting all salaries and benefits for CEO, other major execs and board members), but divided by 2.7 million rank and file workers. It turned out that the $470 M in exec compensation, if distributed equally between 2.7 million rank and file workers, is something like $170 per worker per year. That's all that the pay increase would be! If you want to increase worker pay, not by $170 per year, but say $10,000 a year, for WalMart that's 2.7 million X $10,000 = $27 Billion more! Sorry, but even WalMart doesn't have that kind of cash sitting around. This is how the numbers are for many big companies: the exec comp, spread to all the rank and file, is still tiny per person.