Quoted:
Similarly, minimum wage laws help ensure that businesses pay their fair share of production costs. When a minimum wage worker can not make ends meet on his wages, he will need to rely on social services to provide for himself and his family. He will generate costs to society since he can't cover it with his wages. The total economic cost of keeping this worker alive and in working condition exceeds the wages that he is earning, so the employer is in effect getting subsidized by our tax dollars. They get to pay their workers less because they know that the government will cover the rest. I don't know how many of you are in favor of corporate welfare, but I'd say subsidizing cost of labor would definitely fall under it.

Quoted:
The true economic cost of maintaining that worker will remain the same. The only difference is where it will come from, the price for the goods you buy or the taxes which will pay social benefits to cover what the worker's wage didn't. What will you prefer? I think this shouldn't be a hard question for a true conservative.

Quoted:
How many people are at the minimum wage today? I think I seem to recall that it was like 3% of the working population.

Quoted:
Labor Union contracts are often indexed (among other things) to the minimum wage.  This is why Dimocrats and Labor always want to raise the minimum wage although they always cite the poor and down-trodden !

1) The myth of a family of four struggling to make ends meet on a minimum wage income is just that, a myth.

2) To anyone actually trying to raise a family on minimum wage income, I suggest better family planning, more education, and a better job, in that order.

Quoted:
First, the economic arguement that minimum wage reduces employment, this only happens in theory. In reality, it only reduces employment marginally because

The implicit assumption in your argument is that the owner truly deserve that 500 dollars.

I work with several guys with young children that don't make much more than minimum wage.  Many of them are former police officers that didn't make much more than minimum wage when they worked for a small town.  I personally haven't made much more than that in years.

Family planning?  You sound like a liberal.  Are you really going to tell a married couple that they can't have kids?  You going to suggest mandatory abortions for married couples living off of minimum wage?  A better job

But you can similarly argue that the government demanding a company cleanup after its mining or logging operations illegitimate use of governmental power.

My arguement is grounded on the basis that private enterprise should cover the true economic costs of their operations from the revenues generated from their operations, including such externalities such as environmental costs of pollution or the social cost of inadequately paid workers. If their cost structure can not allow that all of the costs of operations be covered from revenue generated by operations alone, then in the long run they will have to go bankrupt. Such is the nature of capitalism.

Who do you think should be responsible for the social costs of the unlivable wages of the working poor? The taxpayers or the business owner? (As I've said, in a civilized society where we don't practice strict social darwinism and let the poor starve to death, the poor can not bear this cost)

Quoted:
yes, let's also allow the marketplace to set how much our welfare payrolls subsidize businesses.

There isn't a perfect solution to this, but it has to be addressed.

For those of you who are in favor of abolishing both minimum wage and social welfare, how do you propose the working poor survive? Certainly their wages don't cover costs of living.

Quoted:
Since part the cost of revenue came form the tax payers in your example, I don't think the owner deserves all $500 of profit. He should payback the portion that came from the taxpayers or alternatively, pay the workers more so they don't have to use taxpayer funded social benefits. Eitherway, the business owner should pay his own costs.

Quoted:
But if the worker has to rely on family, friends, private charity, or the government, regardless, it's an external cost not factored into the cost of revenue. Yet the costs of living to just make the worker available for work another day exceeds the income of wages. This is a negative externality to society because the business does not bear the full costs of its input, society picks up the balance.

Quoted:
.......let's also allow the marketplace to set how much our welfare payrolls subsidize businesses.

Quoted:
AlClenin, I never said they deserve the government handouts, but for all practical purposes, we can't just let them starve. It's a matter of practicality, not principal. In principal we shouldn't have to give them anything they didn't earn.

Quoted:
I'm far too tired of seeing "poor" people on welfare (including some distant relatives) with cell phones and DVD players paid for by my tax money (and, yes, I'm serious).

HUNGER IN AMERICA

By Kurt Saxon

Last week PBS aired a weird program entitled "Hunger In America". It was weird because not one of the families shown as examples of hungry Americans were destitute. They all had living quarters, some had jobs and even land and each had the money or food stamps which should have provided them with a more than adequate diet.

The commentator was in full sympathy with those hungry people and lamented the fact that nothing more was done. I watched this bizarre exhibition of the helplessness of the otherwise able and heard the pity of the "there but for the grace of God go I crowd". I harked back to tales of other starvelings.

In 1845 the Irish potato blight raged and hundreds of thousands starved in the resulting famine. Yet, it was found that on farms where whole families had starved, the barns held corn, oats, rye and barley in the cattle feed bins.

In France and Belgium, millions were starving after WW I. America sent boatload after boatload of corn and the people were insulted at being sent food for horses and cattle.

Stalin deliberately starved millions of kulaks in the '30's. When his henchmen moved in to cart off the bodies of the rebellious farmers, there too, was found plenty of grain in the feed bins. Of course, the livestock had been eaten but the livestock's food was not considered fit for humans to eat.

That people would starve to death before eating corn is a misleading concept. Had the corn been ground and made into cornmeal mush those people would have survived. But they simply didn't relate to corn as food.

Of course, you've heard of the African Bushmen and the Australian Aborigines. They can thrive where Europeans wouldn't see any food at all. But that is an extreme. The point is that people tend to see as food, only that which they are accustomed to eating.

The people on the program were accustomed only to prepared foods bought at the supermarket. One couple with four kids got $390.00 a month in food stamps. The man was an auto mechanic who had quit work since he couldn't afford his wife's medical expenses and his loafing would entitle her to Medicare.

They had four children and lamented the fact that the $390.00 in food stamps were all used up before the next month's dole. Oh, you know food prices today and how $390.00 for a family of six doesn't go far. I don't suppose they spent every bit of it on TV dinners and in the deli section. Nonetheless, to a Survivalist family, $390.00 would buy about four months' food for six; maybe more.

That reminds me of 1967 when I was a bum in San Francisco. I was living in a $10.00 a week sleeping room and worked off and on as a fry cook and a freelance house-painter. For a no-sweat $5.00 a week I was selling my blood and so contracted infectious hepatitis...

but why would you oppose it given your personal experiences?

HOW IS THAT MY PROBLEM?!?!?!...FAMILY PLANNING, meaning, PLAN before they have kids they can't afford, OK?