1) nonny, first of all, you should be being paid more than $15 an hour for being a nurse. If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation right now it would be around $22 an hour. It hasn’t. It’s $7 an hour. The problem isn’t paying people as much as you, the problem is you are being underpaid. The good news is if your employer wants to keep educated people like yourself, they will have to increase your salary because you will have other options out there that pay better than what they’re giving you if the minimum wage goes up overall.
b) There is no evidence that increasing the minimum wage will increase the cost of living. Cost of living is about the price of groceries, rent, medical care, etc. Rents are already insanely high in the US and that’s because people lost their homes in the 2007-2008 crash. The rental market got flooded with people and rents skyrocketed because demand was so high. There’s a strong possibility that a higher minimum wage, bringing people to a more stable income threshold, will increase home ownership, reducing the number of renters and bringing demand down, also bringing rental costs down too.
Medical care costs are now being controlled thanks to the Affordable Care Act, meaning increasing minimum wage will not increase the cost of health care. There is a chance that increasing the minimum wage could result in slightly higher costs for groceries and dry goods, but the cost of groceries is already going up thanks to the massive drought in California. It is unlikely that a higher minimum wage will push the cost of groceries out of reach for anyone, though. (See the quote below.)
iii) If you by chance meant that “inflation” will rise, not cost of living, it won’t. There is no evidence anywhere that minimum wage increases cause big explosions of inflation. Check out this summary:
Past research on how business costs rise with minimum wage hikes indicates that a 10-percent minimum wage hike can be expected to produce a cost increase for the average business of less than one-tenth of one percent of their sales revenue. This cost figure includes three components. First, mandated raises: the raises employers must give their workers to meet the new wage floor. Second, “ripple-effect” raises: the raises employers give some workers to put their pay rates a bit above the new minimum in order to preserve the same wage hierarchy before and after minimum wage hike. And third, the higher payroll taxes employers must pay on their now-larger wage bill. If the average businesses wanted to completely cover the cost increase from a 10-percent minimum wage hike through higher prices, they would need to raise their prices by less than 0.1 percent.[1]A price increase of this size amounts to marking up a $100 price tag to $100.10.
Finally, the Department of Labor sums up the situation:
Since 1938, the federal minimum wage has been increased 22 times. For more than 75 years, real GDP per capita has steadily increased, even when the minimum wage has been raised.
Every single time a raise in the minimum wage has been proposed, Republicans have screeched about inflation and lost jobs and how it will devastate the economy and it has never happened.
The real problem here is you are being underpaid and your college costs, like mine, were too high. Requiring people who do the work you and I do not want to do to suffer shit wages for doing that work helps nobody.
Every time you make a comment about how fast food workers shouldn’t be making the same as/more than you, you are doing exactly what the system wants. You are 1) devaluing the lives of others, and 2) paying more attention to them than to the upper class. This is the 21st century and it is downright unacceptable to choose not to take care of each other when we have the means.
