1)You raise the cost of hiring workers,
2)This raises costs to produce goods.
3)This means enterprises that are only marginally profitable go out of business entirely. (The economy suffers)
4) Eventually the higher costs leads business to raise prices so they can stay in the black

Tadah, you have CPI increase and economic stagnation.

Did the gap between median wage rate and minimum wage rate simply grow larger? If so, then adjusting the 1969 minimum wage for median wage changes might not be valid.

Worker productivity gains between 1969 and 2009 should have increased mean compensation and perhaps median compensation. Not all of that real gain was allocated to wages. A significant portion was allocated to benefits increases. But I think real wage rates still increased for the median worker.

The unskilled, inexperienced worker – the one likely to be earning minimum wage – probably did not realize productivity gains which would have allowed employers to increase his wage rate. Bus boys, lawn care workers, and hospital orderlies are doing their jobs in much the same way today as they did 40 years ago.

Assume that unskilled workers realized no productivity gains while almost everyone else did. The real gap between median wages and the minimum wage would surely have grown.

Oh, good God! No! AGW is because we don't give enough corporate welfare to GE and ADM, and other corporations that make products deemed by His Holiness: The Divine Prophet Algore I to be vital to the survival of Mother Gaia.

Learn it. Live it. Follow the teachings of the Divine Prophet, and accept The Almighty Obama as your Savior, or the planet is doomed to be consumed by Hellfire. Cardinal Yasafi Torquemuirduck: Grand Inquisitor of the Church of AGW is watching you.

You have been warned.

For my trouble, I received anonymous snailmail scolding me for being greedy and heartless. Well excuse me, I didn't advocate anything, but merely wrote to inform or remind readers of this cause-and-effect.

Seems that some individuals cannot get simple principles to take hold in their heads.

Or do you also believe that lack of pirates is what's causing global warming: http://seanbonner.com/blog/archives/001857.php

When nominal minimum wage was high we had no major crashes. Again the data is not onkly lacking but countering the libertarian position.

These people knowingly or not are simply asking for greater inequality, greater injustice, greater market ineffeciency and a more dreay Dickinsonian future.

Prices are signals. Malarky! In the modern Wall Street manipulated market such a belief is nothing but blind faith.

I urge Congress to take up the Minimum is Really Minimum fight. It's the only honest thing to do with legislative efforts to force a “living wage” for entry/low level employees. The wage should be tied to standards of education or competence so that it is completely “fair and equitable.”