With higher minimum wages, I think what you will end up having is a gradual trickle up.
Min wage workers will get more pay. It will cost more for businesses to run, businesses will pass the cost onto consumers, who in turn (if they work in the services business) will raise their costs to make up for the difference. Gas, housing, medicine, legal, every service industry… And from all this increased costs, local,state,federal will get increased revenue from taxes. So almost everyone will benefit who provides services.
The only ones I can think of that will get totally screwed are tech workers. Because only in the tech industry will you have a situation in which while everything else around them is going up in price/cost, tech is getting cheaper even in today’s (non-inflation adjusted dollars)…And since every other thing that goes into producing tech (minus labor) will cost more, and since you can’t really raise prices on tech, that will put downward pressure on the cost of labor….
I mean, just look at what happened to TurboTax. Intuit tries to raise prices by making features that were once available in TurboTax Deluxe now only available in TurboTax Premier, to force people to pay more the features…and they get an earful for it such that they have to backpeddle and give a bunch of customers that feature for free….Absurd. I mean, people can’t complain when a gallon of ice cream is now 3 quarts for the same price…Or when a small box of Cheerios is now the same price as once a large box… But ohhh no.. Take out schedule D from turbo tax deluxe and make customers pay an extra $20 to upgrade turbo tax premier… That’s heresy! (Ok, I shouldn’t be one to talk because as an ex-Intuit guy, I still get my turbotax for 1/3 retail cost from friends, or for free for the ones that don’t bother to ask me to pay them back)…
Anyway, that why engineers and tech workers should take note. While your compensation might be great, you shouldn’t count on it all your life. There will be a point in time when others in other service industries will make more than you, simply because their wages adjusted for inflation while yours stayed stagnant….There will be some point in time in which that cashier register clerk at McDonalds will make more than you trying to write sql statements and enterprise java beans… Or even Android!
HA!
That’s why this engineer is also an aspiring slumlord….Because my rent prices will most likely rise much faster than my salary + bonus + stock grants.
