1. First, again, no study that hasn't been financed by a right wing/libertarian think tank (CATO, Heritage, AEI, etc...) has shown that minimum wage laws have caused an increase in unemployment. In fact, the period of history in the U.S. when the largest segment of population joined the middle class was during the New Deal period (1930s to 1960s) where such beneficial employment legislations took root.
2. To the individual who claimed he's replaced American workers with offshore workers — (a) I doubt they were minimum wage workers and (b) by bringing them back as temps you've engaged in corporate welfare, being that their health care is going to be now paid by other taxpayers, so in effect it is a subsidy. Now a minority of you believe that health care is not a right, that if you are sick, and you don't have the money to pay for health care, you should shrivel away and die — but most Americans take umbrage at that notion.
3. Cost of labor will always dip to next to subsistence level, no matter the level of technological prowess or industrialization. Just examine the factories of Asia, where young women work from sunup to sundown for pennies, and are locked into their "work stations", and must face abuse such as rape from their superiors. Labor is not the most significant cost — for instance, it costs about a dollar to manufacture a pair of tennis shoes that sell for $50 or greater in the states. And recently, tomato pickers in Florida had their **wages doubled yet the net effect on the subcontractor (to Taco Bell) was 300K dent out of 6M in annual profits**.
4. Interesting that many on these boards wish not for open borders, which would facilitate freedom of labor in a sense (labor free to migrate to best deal offered) whereas no proclaimations are forthcoming regarding inhibiting freedom of capital to move to locales where labor laws are non-existent and a company can buy into the legal racket with a small sum and guarantee themselves a national police force that serves the company's interests, not the worker (or citizen's) interests.
5. Outsourcing has many hidden costs — spreadsheet MBA jockeys never take into account the multitude of additonal costs, mostly because they are ** externalized ** to the public. For instance, Bank of America outsources its customer service positions to India, saving money for them, increasing profits for executives and those fortunate enough to own significant allotments of stock (but those are rarely passed down to workers or community, other than token charitable contributions). However citizens of the U.S. take it in the shorts, for the increased risk of identity theft and the fact that their personal information is accessible in nations with no protections (though those are being eroded away here) and $25 will get a nefarious agent a long list of SSN, credit card account numbers, etc.... Who pays for that? You do in more than one way — even if the bank bears the brunt (read the recent bankruptcy legislation enacted to see where they are dodging out of this too...) your credit report takes a hit, and you have to prove you're innocent of unworthy credit label wrongly affixed.
6. Shocking that people still don't learn from history. Economics is a more complex subject than simply an occasional read of WSJ or even a subscription to the Economist. If enough American workers get the boot or see significant earnings decrease, that in turn will lower demand for the consumer products that fuel our robust economy. That in turn, will drive us to the bottom, with the exception of luxury items for the upper 5% of us who profit while the bulk of Americans suffer financial pain. See the Gilded Age and the Great Depression for such examples. Revisionist historians have twisted the historical record, but even such notable conservative economists like Milton Friedman recognize the power of consumer spending (thus his negative income tax proposal). Of course, conservative these days means *neo-conservative* which means corporate welfare, not individual welfare, bloodlust and empire over fair trade, secrecy over openness, etc..
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