MINIMUM WAGE

The President has proposed that the minimum wage should be raised to $10.10 over a period of three years.  Of course this has raised a big hue and cry.  What doesn't seem to get mentioned is that the minimum wage is a "level playing field,"  something that business used to wish for during most of my life.  Yes, you have to raise the wages of your employees for your restaurant, but so does the restaurant down the street.  Yes, I presume that places like restaurants will have to increase their prices by a bit to accomodate the increase.  but it shouldn't be enough to discourage people from using restaurants.

All sorts of misinformation goes on in the news media.  I heard one person in an interview say that a  jump from $7.25/hr to $10.10/hr is too big of a schock.  Yes, that is why it is stretched over three years.  But the interviewee was not corrected.

Some have proposed that this increase will goad small business owners to pursue automation, e.g. ordering your meal from your iPhone, but isn't there an incentive to do this now?  And of course, there are many restaurants that are highly automated already, consider the fast food restaurants.  And then are cafeterias where you grab a tray and select items to eat from a server.  Then there are automated machines where you select an item, put your money in a slot and out comes your selection.  some of these even serve sandwiches.  There are things like coffee machines where you have many choices about how you want your coffee or hot chocolate or even soup in some cases.  But resturants still exist that use table service and people go there even to just get a cup of coffee.

There is an area of unfortunate concern.  Caregivers of the elderly and infirm that work for caregiving companies earn close to minimu wage, even if they have worked for the organization for many years, and the cost the patient pays is much higher, perhaps close to $20/hr.  So to raise the minimum wage for them by $1/hr increases the expense of caregiving by $365/yr so raising their wage from $7.25/hr to $10.10/hr is an increae of $1040.25/hr of the person being cared for.  If the need is for round-the-clock service, you are talking about an increase of over $24,966/yr.  Many people in need of caregiving will not be able to afford this increase.  And there may be others in the organization earning minimum or near minimum wage too, increasing the price even more.

It turns out that bank tellers earn minimum wage or clse thereto.  I'm uncertain what bank will do.  Perhaps they will cut back on tellers even more than they have done.  But I once used a bank where you paid $0.50 cents to use their autotelle outside the building, even though the cost of a person using it rather than a teller was miniscule.