".........Raising the minimum wage increases the standard of living for workers at the bottom of the pay scale and saves taxpayers costs associated with public assistance programs, such as food stamps. The majority of food stamps go to the working poor.
The liberal Center for American Progress found that increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour nationally would save taxpayers $4.6 billion in spending on food stamps alone.
Under the current minimum wage, highly profitable companies such as Walmart tell workers to apply for food stamps so they can afford to eat. Walmart and other minimum-wage-paying companies argue that if they had to pay employees a livable wage, then consumers’ prices would rise.
That argument amounts to a strange form of socialism whereby government protects the uber -rich from having to pay the cost of doing business and protects consumers from having to pay the actual cost of goods. We find it disturbingly hypocritical that conservatives rail that individuals should live from the fruit of their labor and not from government handouts, yet they support a minimum-wage policy that forces government to pick up the costs of private business in order to maintain corporate profits and hold down consumer prices. (A UC-Berkeley study on the effect of raising the minimum wage to $12 found that the average shopping trip to Walmart would cost 46 cents more and the average cost of a Big Mac would rise by a dime.).................."
