Doubling the Minimum Wage Actually Hurts Employees

Heather Ginsberg

12/22/2013 10:00:00 AM - Heather Ginsberg

Following protests earlier this month by many fast food workers across the country, it seems necessary to once again look at the economics involved with the minimum wage. Unfortunately the left has forgotten that this is an important step for employers when deciding employees’ wages.

Well the author of an article previously written at the Huffington Post didn’t really do their math. The author claimed that if McDonald’s doubled its employees’ salaries, it would only increase the price of a Big Mac by 68 cents. And then they continue by saying that will only lead to an increase of 17 percent in costs. ONLY?!

But what the author doesn’t seem to understand about economics is that when prices increase, people are not going to want to buy as many of the product. So therefore the owners will not be able to profit as much because not only is their demand going down, but their cost of employment is doubling!

This quite possibly could lead to companies, like McDonalds, to turn to machines to do the work instead. Fast food chains like Sheetz and Wawa are already doing this. They have machines where the customer puts in their own order. And there are even some scientists working on creating a robot to replace chefs. Pretty soon it would be more cost effective to replace employees with machines. Is it all worth it?

Now, if the Huffington Post wants to start arguing about raising the minimum wage by a dollar, that’s a different story. But why on earth would a restaurant like McDonalds choose to double the wages of their employees? Have we never studied economics or the idea of supply and demand? If the left wants to have a serious discussion about the minimum wage, perhaps their ideas shouldn’t be so extreme and maybe they should think about the math behind such issues before spewing such unattainable goals.