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. ...
People are bad at saving money, increase minimum wage and they’ll just spend the extra, increasing companies revenues, allowing them to pay the higher minimum wage.
Even the most skilled money saver in the world, when their income is barely above their necessary life expenses, will fail to save much. Savings is a luxury only the rich can afford much of.
But you’re right, putting money into the hands of people living paycheck to paycheck, or barely able to save is great for the economy as well as those people personally. Even if they save 10% and spend 90%, it’s tremendously more beneficial than that money going to a wealthy multimillionaire who won’t even notice saving it. For everyone except the multimillionaire, who really isn’t negatively impacted.
Even when putting more money in the hands of people who make way more than what they need to afford the basics will result, in most cases, in them spending it instead of saving. You see it very clearly in regions that rely on industries like mine, people’s personal finances boom and burn… Them have jobs making 150k/year and but a big house, a truck, a quad, a snowmobile, a sports cars, motorcycles, name it, the second things slow down they can’t afford to make payments on any of that because they never saved a cent.
Or the working class can’t afford everything it needs. So a raise goes towards buying more necessities.
It’s kind of hard to save when every dollar is accounted for in food, shelter, and utilities.
And these necessities are very often procured from stores that pay their employees minimum wage, so it all comes back to what I was saying… But even for people who get paid way more than minimum wage, a significant proportion is living paycheque to paycheque or close to it.
People are coming at you because it sounded like you were saying the poor were poor because of bad financial skills.
If you look at my message I’m clearly painting a broad picture, “people are bad at saving money”, I never said it only applied to people with lower income. I’ve known of engineers making 300k/year panicking because 200$ were missing from their paycheque and they wouldn’t be able to make their payments… They just own a bigger house and a Porsche instead of renting an apartment and driving a Civic, in the end they have 0$ set aside and if their income goes up they just find more stuff to purchase…
well the best way to make money in America seems to be to have money. The more money you already have now the more you can use it to make more money.
Thats probably why poor people stay poor. Not enough to snowball, its all gone ever day.