Minimum Wage, Taxes and Poverty

The following is a response to this comment in a discussion of raising minimum wage.

Costco has a good business model. No dispute there. But that doesn't mean every company will or should operate that way. Costco's business model is based around a very specific market need (high volume non-retail distribution). Not very many other businesses enjoy the perks that come along with that market. For instance, it takes much less energy to operate one gigantic freezer than a hundred little ones...And so on. Business decisions are MUCH more complicated than wages and prices.

Questions about sweat shops and child labor are absurd, of course I don't support those things... people should open their minds enough to realize that there are perfectly viable options BETWEEN slave labor and a $22 minimum wage. Thinking in black and white "there's my way or the wrong way" will never accomplish anything. A well balanced combination of regulation and freedom is in everybody's best interest...When the scale tips too far to one side or the other, everybody gets screwed.

No, I don't believe corporations should pay taxes...Here's why: They don't anyway...Yet they waste billions upon billions of dollars every year just trying to comply with tax codes...Business decisions are based on how to minimize taxes, operations are moved overseas because it's cheaper to do business there because of oppressive tax compliance costs almost as much as the taxes themselves, which aren't coming out of a company's profits, they're coming from the consumer anyway. Corporations are nothing more than a conduit through which tax money flows and gets wasted in the mean time.

/that's the end of my response in that thread....

Going on, Karena is quite wrong in saying I see minimum wage as a tax. It isn't...It's a governmentally imposed lower limit on what an employee can be paid. The other major difference is, taxes are not voluntary. Minimum wage is. Any employer can refuse to hire someone, and thus not have to pay them anything. With a higher minimum wage, more employers will do this to keep their costs down, increasing the workload on the employed, and reducing the number of available jobs. The idea that "if the federal minimum wage were raised, nothing else would change" is atrociously ignorant, naive, or both.