Which is a healthy cleanse of an exploitive economy, and America definitely has an exploitive economy, make no mistake.
A minimum wage is a decision a society makes, that says "this is the minimum market rate for a human that we consider non-exploitive", it's not an economic decision made to maximize GDP or profit. If a company can't afford to operate in a way that's non-exploitive then it needs to reconfigure or die out, because it doesn't belong in your society.
Why not have the government subsidize purchases at the business, if the goal is to have as close to 0 pricing as possible and ensure the business survives regardless of its utility?
People constantly argue for the rights of businesses which pay incredibly poorly, as if that is effecting mom and pop shops which are by and large already closed and gone, and when they were around ended up paying a bit more. Maybe a community is better when there’s a collection of local businesses moving money locally instead of a big nowhere-place off the turnpike paying slave wages and moving money back to corporate HQ? America’s business climate is pretty sick compared to so much of the world.
I think the problem may also be that mom and pop shops are taxed much more heavily than big multinational corporations, that pay very little tax and thus have huge competitive advantage over small local businesses.
I would think that any government caring about the local population would look into getting those companies to pay their fair share.
The areas where people vote for less and less government tend to be the places that have the most minimal services. I have yet to see an area that truly attracts business because of having low regulation and taxes, they all seem to have absolutey no businesses because there is no infrastructure to build upon, nor an existing business community to interact with.
The problem is that in most places the general population is absolutely fine for being fleeced. They pay 30%-40% tax for a privilege of working for a big corporation that only contribution to their society are the salaries they pay. All the rest gets siphoned out to tax havens.
So far neither the so called left nor right have a clue how to fix this.
That is a next level entitlement for corporations to expect people build infrastructure for them for free.
This isn't correct. The amount of costs passed along to the consumer depends on the supply and demand elasticities of each particular market. That's Econ 101.
First, inefficient employers like McDonald's have an entrenched position in the industry because of their massive scale and their real estate holdings. A new entrant in the market already has an uphill battle - if they don't want to rely on government subsidies (e.g., because they want to attract employees who would rather be paid directly for their work), their task is even harder.
A free market in the sense Adam Smith meant it - not a free-for-all, but free to enter - would treat it as a policy goal that new companies would have a fair shot at competing.
I'd understand the argument that government welfare and a low minimum wage are important to support new entrants, by making it possible for them to compete against the entrenched companies. But that's not what's happening; it's the entrenched companies that are effective beneficiaries of these policies (cf. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...).
Second, passing the costs along to the consumer along with raising wages has the effect of increasing the purchasing power of low-income consumers. If the minimum wage goes from X to 2X, which causes the cost of items at McDonald's or Wal-Mart to go from Y to 2Y (which it won't, because labor costs aren't the entire costs, but for the sake of argument assume they are), then people being paid the minimum wage are in basically the same position for their everyday purchases: they get twice as much money, but they spend twice as much money. But they've also got larger expenditures - renting or buying a home, buying a car, paying medical bills, etc. The cost of emergency surgery isn't going to double just because the minimum wage goes up (even though much more of the cost is labor) - surgeons are paid way above the minimum wage already.
What this means is that people being paid a high minimum wage are equally able to live their ordinary lives, because they can afford the increased cost of goods made by other minimum-wage employees, but they are more able to make expenditures that improve their lives (e.g., more able to deal with medical issues before an emergency) - and more able to make purchases that stimulate the economy. Instead of buying N hamburgers a year and a car that costs Z which they use for five years, they can now buy the same N hamburgers a year and a car that costs 1.2Z.
As long as government policy continues to enable both wages and prices remaining low, the economy is stuck.
(It does mean that the relative purchasing power of rich consumers goes down - they can buy the same number of vacation homes, but they can't buy as many McDonald's hamburgers - but that hardly seems like a concern. You can only eat so many hamburgers, and they're probably not buying very many hamburgers from McDonald's anyway.)
