Why should employers bear the burden alone?
Because, generally speaking, "employers" are the people who reap the most benefits from modern economy, and asking them to give something back makes perfect sense if you're concerned about common good.
Then tax them in other ways that don't discourage them from hiring people as the minimum wage does. Economically, that's all the minimum wage is, a tax linked to a welfare benefit. Of course, it has the advantage (from a politician's POV) of not showing up on the budget.
So you're perfectly okay with Wal-Mart helping its employees fill out food stamp, HUD and Medicaid applications to supplement the inadequate wages they are being paid?
Yup. I'm not against there being a social safety net. I just think that the minimum wage is not a particularly good net.
Do you see the problem here?
1. Local government gives Wal-Mart enormous tax abatement and/or incentive package to locate in their jurisdiction.
2. Wal-Mart opens. People working there make minimum wage.
3. Wal-Mart workers cannot pay for housing, food or healthcare with these wages and require public assistance.
4. Government must provide public assistance.
5. Since Wal-Mart got major tax break, Wal-Mart is not contributing much to this public assistance. Instead, that burden falls on small businesses and on individual citizens.
Devil's advocate: Wouldn't the people at Wal-Mart either be working a minimum wage job or not working at all if Wal-Mart wasn't there? Wouldn't it make Wal-Mart moving there a positive improvement?
No. It is at best a desperate effort to keep from falling behind even faster.
Many businesses fold after Wal*Mart comes in and undercuts them. People working in those retail businesses are out of work, and many go to Wal*Mart. The businesses that remain in business are in activities that Wal*Mart avoids -- like tote-the-note car lots, fast food, rent-to-own rip-off emporia, video rental places, and lodging. People who work at Wal*Mart sell the goods but cannot afford them. Maybe on their meager wages they can share some house or apartment with co-workers.
Worse, Wal*Mart has led the drive to send manufacturing from America to the Third World -- and the people who used to work in manufacturing are out of work.
Ask yourself -- would you rather have high wages in a union plant and pay full retail, or would you rather be destitute and occasionally get a bargain from Wal*Mart? Where I live, agricultural labor has replaced factory labor as employment. If that is progress, then 78-rpm records are progress from compact disks.
