How do you think they're going to pay for it? Higher taxes and when they can't squeeze more money out of people, hyperinflation and more borrowing, you have people cheer leading this but they have clearly never considered the mathematics behind this.
Actually, when you consider the mathematics, if people are being paid more, it stands to reason that more tax revenue would be generated. You wouldn't need to raise the levels of tax. Also, the more disposable income people have, the more they will spend, hence more money circulating in the economy.
All this Austerity nonsense we have at the moment is contributing towards the stagnation of our economy. If people are relying on food banks because they can't afford to buy food, that means less people are buying food. Less money being spent means less money circulating in the economy. While a wealthy minority (who wouldn't be able to spend the same proportion of their overall wealth if they tried) just end up accumulating and hoarding their money, so again there's less money in circulation.
A healthy economy doesn't have skyrocketing disparity between rich and poor. If you think the current "trickle down" theory we use today actually works, you've got it all backwards, I'm afraid.
When have I ever said I support trickle down economics? Way to go with your rant against an imaginary version of myself, do you even understand how money printing works? In an economy where we don't have money printing yes, tax revenue would go up, but the point is people barely have any money as it is now, if you raised the minimum wage then the government would be forced to print more and devalue the currency to support it. Then that would push up the prices of everything, then that would mean that the minimum wage raise would do absolutely nothing for your average person and in fact make their lives worse because you just pushed everything up and made them have to work longer for less.
This isn't a matter of 'tax the rich' and to be fair, I don't really give a crap much about corrupt and rich CEO's, they're a different matter entirely, what I'm talking about are the average businesses out there that are struggling, if the minimum wage was raised and they couldn't afford it, they'd be put out of business and that's a mathematical fact, you can't ignore that just because it's inconvenient to your world view.
As I said before, your conclusion completely ignores hyperinflation, you need to go and read up on it, as for trickle down economics, that's just made up bullshit created by Aristocrats and Oligarchs to justify them stealing from people through hyperinflation and they've used tricks like this for centuries, it's the equivalent of having a feast at a table and then giving their employees the leftovers and saying that their employees are benefiting from their kindness while of course always keeping the majority of the food for themselves.
They didn't have to print money out of thin air to introduce the minimum wage in the first place, nor did they have to increase taxation. Your argument that more money would have to be printed in order to raise it is a reasonably baseless assumption. Also, I don't it's logically possible to occupy two stances at once by saying that the current system we have boils down to stealing using hyperinflation, while also stating that doing the opposite and transferring wealth back down to the bottom of the pyramid would cause hyperinflation as well. Which is it? Or do you think hyperinflation happens either way? I'd argue the current system is more likely to cause hyperinflation because it effectively excludes people from the economy by pricing them out of it.
As for SMEs not being able to afford it, I'm sure I recall hearing the same argument every time someone proposes a raise to minimum wage (although obviously the figure of $100 in the OP is silly). A larger amount of capital flowing around the system effectively pays for itself. More people with disposable income means more consumption. More consumption means companies make more money. When there is less consumption, companies need to raise prices to continue to make the same amount of money. The more people we drive into poverty, the less consumption there will be and the higher prices will get. Ergo, higher base wages would cause the exact opposite of inflation.
Who's 'they'?
I'm hoping we're on the same page here. I'm talking about the same 'they' as you are. I'm working under the assumption that you're talking about your own domestic government, or at the very least governments in general:
How do you think they're going to pay for it? Higher taxes and when they can't squeeze more money out of people (...)
That 'they'.
And it's not a baseless assumption it's a fact, because America doesn't have another source of income to tax as they've raised the taxes as high as people can pay without just making everybody unemployed, other countries have managed to install a minimum wage because they've mathematically calculated what they can actually afford, mind you, the situation is still fucking ridiculous and hasn't stopped them from printing money to pay for everything.
When it comes to your comments about consumption, no, more consumption doesn't make more money, especially if a government is using a devalued currency in order to get people to consume because that means that the company is actually earning less since the prices for everything they're going to buy rises. As for your comment about my two stances? It is actually exactly the fucking same, I make no distinctions between the wealthy and the poor, stealing is stealing, I don't care if you borrow, print, tax in order to do it, in the end your just stealing from both groups and if you don't think it's stealing then it's clear you're just going to keep talking to yourself for the next several pages.
Perhaps I'm not explaining this right. I'll give it one more try before giving up. If someone is making $50,000 a year, that person will be paying a larger amount in tax and will have more disposable income to spend than someone making $10,000 a year. There would be no need to increase taxes or dilute the value of money by printing more. It has nothing to do with 'stealing' from anyone. It's called paying people a fair wage for the work they do. People who earn a decent wage will pay a higher amount of money in tax and spend a higher amount of money back into the economy than those on very low incomes. Are you with me so far?
Right now you have an increasing number of people falling under the poverty line. Those people are not able to put a great deal of money back into the economy, but it is pretty much the entire proportion of what little income they have that gets fed back into the system. They're not holding on to any of their money because they can't afford to.
Right now you have an increasing number of millionaires. The definition of a millionaire is someone who has at least $1,000,000 in their possession. It doesn't mean someone who
had a million and then spent it back into the economy. They're good at holding on to that money and finding creative ways to pay very little tax on it. Millionaires are only spending a small proportion of their overall worth. The rest of society and the economy in general doesn't receive a great deal of benefit from this.
That's not a recipe for a healthy economy. What you actually need is more people making a good, solid, average wage. Not so much that it creates excess extravagance and not so little that someone can't afford to live. A rise in minimum wage would help slow the rate at which more people are falling under the poverty line, which in turn means more people would have a disposable income to spend back into the economy and generate more tax money for infrastructure. It has nothing whatsoever to do with money printing. That's a completely separate issue and it will continue to happen anyway, whether you raise the minimum wage or not. You can easily have higher wages without printing money. That seems to be the point we're stuck on here and I'm sorry if you can't see that.
Finally, there seems to be some confusion here on the difference between
asset inflation and
wage inflation. These two are separate things. You already have increasing asset prices, but not a corresponding increase in wages to support it. If this continues, the outcome will unequivocally be more people falling under the poverty line because they don't earn enough to be able to pay for the things they need to live. That means less taxes are collected and there will be less spending back into the economy. Wages need to increase to make the economy sustainable for everyone, or all that will happen is an increasing burden of poverty and economic stagnation.
If that still doesn't make sense, then yes, I'll agree that I'm clearly talking to myself and I'll move on.
//EDIT: I'll leave this here as well as a final thought:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM