Make the minimum wage $15! We need the spending money!

If there’s one movie to watch in 2021, it’s going to be Joe vs The Volcano II.

Hey! It's gonna be sensational!


And Joe is in his 80s, and has already coming out flying like Superman.

He’s firing edicts like they were going out of fashion, aiming to save humankind from everything that’s gone before it in the last four years

Man, he's Delware's Caped Crusader. He wants more money into the little people’s pockets to help with the disaster of COVID-19, he wants to save the environment from the evil oil drillers who continue to turn our beautiful Mother Earth into a lady who’s just had a battle with a drunk plastic surgeon’s knife, and he wants to renunite the families. And he’s already told his office that if they bitch at each other, they going to the pound pretty quickly. Hell, he’s Superman without the great chest and cape. We're so excited.












And despite his wish to have everything super and tremendous and united, he knows that The Volcano – full of Q and T – won’t let his idea of a $15 minimum wage pay off.




He's basically saying: "Yeah, you might think I'm Superman, but the Volcano's going to be Kryptonite for me, so watch out". And he's doing it weirdly in face-to-face interviews rather than, you know, Twitter.




But I've got a question for guys in the Volcano, who seem ready to spew lava at any second and blow society to Kingdom Come.




Why in the heck would you not want there to a be a $15 minimum wage?




Yes, we know that it's not within your sensibilities to let Socialist Joe get one over the Volcano, but listen to me, a good capitalist.




If you pay them more money, they will spend more money.




A richer minimum wage worker will be inclined to spend more money on stuff they simply don’t need. It's a mixture of feeling wealthier and keeping up with the Joneses. At the start, it’s the local McDonald’s where two Happy Meals can become the Big Mac Meal. Then if this continues, McDonald’s becomes Applebee’s, which becomes a couple of prime-time movie tickets and some soda. And if they save a bit, it'll mean bigger meals, bigger buying power, and less on credit. They'll pay more bills, have to fight less with landlords, and things like schools and local services will be made better. That happens when people get lifted out of poverty.




And when the money starts pouring in from sales tax revenues, the senators who make this happen will look like God Himself or Herself, because they ignored the suits paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour by the companies to tell you: “Hey, you pay poor people $15, it’ll be bad for local jobs. ” But if they aren't from your state and living below the poverty line, they probably aren't worth listening to.




Also - and I'm sure you know this - it's not going to be a politician who gets people cut, it's because the stock price is in the nosebleed sections, and the shareholders are getting tetchy.



And if the companies are in industries where they want people to spend their $15-an-hour with them, then they should be going for it to. Because with the extra cash, companies can give their valued employees the spiel about buying shares in the company to give the family a long-term future. Some employees will blindly do that (and good luck to them), which helps everybody. And also, it's great PR to go and do that, because it means that employees will be more interested in staying loyal.







Now, we get why the restaurant businesses are clearly against it. Higher wages hurts Big Corporate's margins, which in turns hits their incomes, and there’s a risk that Big Corporate’s share price might fall and get the aforementioned shareholders tetchy.




So they'll get their hired suits to scream that a higher minimum wage increase will take away the fact that the local workers probably earn more money out of tips than they do actual wages (Of course, those are on good tables. What happens when they are stuck with the church crowd who just want to give you a Bible verse and stiff you for the other $200 that they should be getting as a generous, non-encforcable tip?).



So why don’t one of the Volcano members say: “Hey, but if the minimum wage is $15, then more people wanting to spend money who don’t normally spend it are going to come to your place feeling rich and will spend it at your place? And in turn, that’ll help Big Corporate’s income and help you play nicely with your shareholders?”



It’s not like America’s not got a track record on spending stuff. Remember how poor everyone felt in the Great COVID Recession of 2020? Well now everyone’s talking about the “surprising endurance of the American economy,” which in laymen’s terms meant: “Everyone was so bored playing with the cat that they spent more than they should have on shoes and gym equipment.”



And if you give a country’s citizens a green-light for more spending more money, what’s going to happen? Your state's gonna be printing green!




The answer is probably that Joe's right. The answer will be Kryptonite, because sense doesn't happen when the conversation's being had in a nice Washington DC restaurant between a Senator who's getting his stomach and liver expanded by a suit who works for The Alliance To Keep America Poor Again.