As others have mentioned, you need to read and understand your own cites if you want to have a real life discussion.
Here, for instance, is some commentary on the cite you found.
The Congressional Budget Office is generally considered a bit less partisan than Berkley, and they say -
Cite.
Most of the research that shows little or no impact on employment is probably affected by the fact that increases in the MW do not happen in a vacuum.
Cite.
Regards,
Shodan
I do too, because I took the advice and benefited from it. I’m grateful that I had the opportunity. Not everyone does, especially due to recent scheduling trends. You simply can’t put in six 12-hour days when you’ve got scheduled-yesterday split shifts a 50 minute bus-ride apart.
No one suggested that, so you’ll have to love that somewhere else, I guess!
Help me out: it looked to me like that’s precisely what Ruken was suggesting. Wha’d I miss?
I was suggesting that MW workers are not limited to $15k annual income.
Again, most MW workers are not living in poverty. If our intention is to help poor people, there are more direct methods.
Since when does “healthy, young” = “poor”?
Alternatively, point to the part of “Working two jobs will boost this. Any healthy young person can put in 70 hours. Finding the work with compatible schedules is challenging.” where the poster mentions “poor”?
Gotcha. Thanks, gents.
With respect, Ruken, it did sound a bit cavalier. Given that half of minimum wage employees are over 25 per the BLS, we’re not really just talking about young people.
Hey now, I’m still young 
But yes, they’re not all kids; and they’re getting older.
I’m not going to pretend nor attempt to read a bunch of financial journals I am not going to comprehend. If you want to try and put it in layman’s terms, somewhere between a widget and Ed < 0 or linearity of elasticity I will be glad to respond with my opinion or reaction. As it stands now it seems to be nothing more than Journal A says 1234 and Journal B strongly disagrees with some of the findings.
If we were starting from scratch, I’d be agains the MW. As it is, it’s not going away so let’s just deal with it. As I’ve said before, one thing it has going for it is very low administrative costs. So, let’s set it and index it to inflation and be done with it.
I don’t think a Federal MW is of much use, since it really has to be set at the lowest level. Works OK for Mississippi but not so much for Massachusetts or California. But states can set it higher.
Of course you are, Gramps. 
Are you saying you only want to engage at a level that doesn’t reduce your ignorance? Surprise, the world behaves differently than can be explained in layman’s terms!
Really, your first thought as an entrepreneur is that you can hire no one and will have to go out of business? I see multiple options here:
1.) You raise the cost of widgets to $1.15.
2.) You innovate and change the process of assembling widgets so that the average worker can now assemble 30 widgets an hour. You employ half the number of people but those people all make 15 an hour.
3.) You find a cheaper supply for the production of widgets, lowering the cost per unit to .90.
4.) You find a way to address some wasteful spending elsewhere in the company - you switch to a different brand of office supplies, you change phone or internet providers to lower that bill, you change the thermostat setting up or down a degree and install automatic lights so you aren’t paying for wasted electricity, etc. to make up the difference.
5.) You design a “luxury widget” (you add stripes to your normal, stripeless widget) and sell them for $1.75. It isn’t really any different than the others so it costs no more to make but increases your profit margin significantly.
That is just off the top of my head. Any of these options, or a combination of them, would more than make up for the extra cost of labor and they don’t even begin to mention the potential of a reduced tax rate (both as a business and an individual) because the government now has reduced food stamp, TANF, welfare, section 8, and other need based expenditures because some of the people receiving them are now making enough to come off of those programs.
If you don’t read your cites, and you won’t read my cites, and you don’t like my simplified example, then it’s hard to see how your opinion or reaction is something that we can debate.
All other things being equal, raising the MW will increase income for those who are already working, providing their employer can or will accept increased labor costs. The people who get hurt are the ones who get fired, or who don’t get hired, because their employer cannot or will not accept the increased cost of their labor.
Do you understand that?
Regards,
Shodan
Seconded.
As has been pointed out, I would have done all those things already, in order to maximize profit - no sense in waiting for the government to put on the squeeze.
Of course, there is another option - move the business to China or Mexico. Kind of sucks for my US workers, but after we cut expenses to the bone, and nobody bought our striped widgets, what choice was there?
Didn’t read the OP, did you? They mentioned people who wanted reduced hours so they would not come off these programs. Also, could you please run the figures and show how many people need to come off welfare before the government can cut taxes due to the reduced welfare rolls? Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Shodan
Actually, the whole problem with the scenario is that labor costs take every penny made. There’s no money for rent/mortgage, office supplies, utilities and so on.
Not very realistic.
No, I’m saying I’m not going to pretend to understand complex terms that I don’t actually understand.
You’ve already done all of these things to maximize profit. No other way for you to make so much as one thin dime of additional money? Then you have nowhere to go as a business but down as inflation eats up your profit and you will go out of business.
And sure, you can move facilities to another country, but if you have already done everything to maximize your profit surely you’ve done that long ago too, right? Why would you leave the jobs here if there is so much more profit in moving them? This sort of thing reads like blackmail. “Let me pay my workers the lowest possible amount even if it isn’t a livable wage or I’ll take my ball and go elsewhere!” And as other companies are finding moving all the jobs overseas now means huge swaths of the country don’t have enough money to buy widgets the way they used to and the ones that do are pissed off because any time they have a problem with their widget they can’t understand the widget support person trying to help them on the other line. A quick google search will show you that there are lots of companies bringing jobs back from overseas because they’ve found that the quality of work is lower, the customers making use of the services are unsatisfied, etc.
And I did read the OP. I understand the problem they are having with people not wanting to come off of welfare rolls, but I’m not talking about the people who have most of their household income coming from government assistance. That will require a staggered approach to reducing benefits so earning 28k a year doesn’t cost you 34k in benefits. What I am talking about is people who are on only food stamps, or only food stamps and TANF, those people who have two working adults in a household who each go from 30 hours a week at $9 to 30 hours a week at $12 no longer require those benefits. I am talking about the people on the waiting list for section 8 housing no longer needing to wait for that benefit so taking that future expenditure off of the books. I don’t have any numbers handy, but I just felt like your example of your business that is going to be utterly destroyed was the most nonsensical thing I’ve seen posted in a long time and that you might need to see some alternative options to offshoring or sobbing into your hands while the bank hangs a big cartoon “bankrupt” sign outside of your widget factory. I would bet good money that if someone posted a thread about how their rent is going up $100 a month and they can’t afford it so they will obviously be homeless soon you would respond with perhaps finding a different apartment or getting rid of cable TV or other things that might help them meet their needs so they can continue having a place to live instead of sleeping on a park bench so why is a business any different?
People earning 28K get benefits? Damn, the “poor” must be living better than I ever have, and 100% of their income is disposable!
Sucks to be a responsible tax-payer saving for retirement…