This study probably just investigates the effect of minimum wage increase and not the increase that all employees have to see, if a manager is making $15 an hour currently and now a new employee makes the same, well, there's no incentive for that responsibility anymore, so originally he/she was making double the min. wage, so they're going to want to see a significant increase as well, so if you pay managers $30 an hour now, the district manager who makes $30 an hour is going to want more, and it moves straight up the ladder.
I'm for getting everyone to a point of living comfortably, but at that same rate, it's going to increase the cost of living by increasing everyone's wages and companies have to cover their overhead and that gets built into the pricing of goods. So if the cost of living climbs, then that $15 is no better than that $7.25 people were making from the start.
Also, companies are more concerned with bottom line, so at $15 an hour per employee, you could reduce your labor in half and effectively be paying $7.50 per person, but still expect the same results, from one employee as you would from two. Justification? You're making double the money, you should be capable of producing double the work.
Cost of living doesn't decrease by increasing wages, it comes from efficiency of producing goods/services/food. Reducing bottom line allows companies to sell at a lower rate and increase sales to people who wouldn't have normally bought the product to begin with.
You want everyone to have a living wage? Increase the efficiency and productivity of existing companies to reduce the cost of goods and services, not raise their bottom line.
Since wages have been divorced from productivity for a long, long time I don't see how your argument will do anything to improve the lives of anyone but the elite.
Goods would be cheaper while the elite would make the same % profit. That said, an ideal situation involves both. Cheapening the cost to produce and the price to buy goods through efficiency along with rising wages doubly improves the average Joe's buying power while allowing company to maintain similar profits, if not improve them through economic health.
It sounds lovely, but again we haven't seen this. Productivity has skyrocketed, living costs have risen consistently and wages have stagnated or declined for all but the top 10%. Labor is now being treated as a fungible cost rather than a necessary investment. So again, I don't see how this argument will improve the lives of anyone but the elite.
I assume you're still talking about the7egend's initial post, since I just argued for increasing wages and cheapening goods. (not sure how you could see that only improving the lives of the elite)
What he's (I believe) trying to get at is just increasing people's buying power without increasing their wages. I think its only half a solution, especially since its already happening everywhere. The price of a 50 inch TV is less today than its ever been, even without inflation adjustments. So while increasing people's buying power wouldn't only benefit the elite, its a bit of a half measure for a healthy economy.
The problem I have with this is that progress has been uneven. The price of luxury goods like a 50" television has dropped like a stone, but the cost of living is still rising. It's those daily costs that are killing the middle class. How do we drop those costs? Increasing productivity hasn't done the job or costs would have dropped consistently, making our wage stagnation less of an issue. So again, with wages disconnected from productivity we find ourselves in a world where the only people really benefiting are the elite. The middle class has cheaper toys but that doesn't help with the way wages have not kept pace with the cost of living.
My take on it is that wages are divorced from productivity because, increasingly, companies divert money to shareholders at the expense of the people who actually work to provide their profits.
Right and the argument being made is if the progress were more even that would help. You're locking into the wages and productivity being disconnected, and we're saying that it can be acceptable as long as buying power is evenly increasing. We know its not happening now, that's why everything we're talking about is prefixed with "we should" and not "we do."
So how do we fix this? As you say, we're discussing what should happen but it's not. /u/the7egend seems to be arguing that all we need to do is increase production and the wealth will trickle down. Certainly we've seen some benefits such as in the electronics industry but that still hasn't helped the disparity in the overall cost of living. So what's the solution?
I'm pretty sure most people already know my answer, but since socialism is still dismissed by invoking the military dictatorship variety I'm looking to see the capitalist answer to income inequality. So far the only answers I've seen are "give it more time for the wealth to trickle down" and "the poor are poor because they do it to themselves," neither of which are solutions.
Its not easily fixed, and I'm perfectly willing to admit I don't have any concrete solutions. I can however, identify the main blockers. First, companies can and do tell us to fuck off when we try to regulate them by force. The only way to get them to cooperate is to massage the system in such a way that their greed can only be satiated by a successful, well represented middle class. I don't know how the hell to do that, but in our current world enacting socialism would unfortunately destroy our country economically as companies flee our shores for more business friendly countries. We'd have a great moral and humanitarian victory to show, but we'd all be extremely poor, just equally poor.
Enacting socialism would destroy our country economically? Companies would flee our shores? These are the sort of myths that continue to block progress. To counter them, let's look at what has been successful at creating the middle class in the past and what is currently working to protect the middle class in other industrialized nations.
The economist and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich outlined twelve steps to restoring our economy and saving the middle class based on these lessons. They're worth taking the time to watch the videos or read the transcripts.
It is not a myth that a corporation gives zero fucks about its host country. A corporation is not a person, it's a terminator whose goal is profit rather than the death of Sarah Connor. Every. Single. One. of those ideas appeal to me on a moral level, but I can't see them being successful on a practical level. Here is my only link to contribute:
As long as we're the strongest economy in the world, we can get away with a lot. The post war period showed this in the surest fashion. When there is no where else to go to make money, a 90% tax rate is acceptable. The raw truth is that we're not the only game in town anymore, and the shipping of various things overseas (jobs, production, entire companies) is a reality we have to contend with now. As much as I want all those things listed and see the truth in his reasoning for why they will work, I just think that is a huuuuge dice roll to make. In 1950, I'd say fuck it, go all in. Now, there are just too many other markets available to start agitating our resident parasites that also happen to keep us in our tedious position as number #1
The myth is that businesses will flee the country if they aren't coddled. We can raise taxes, strengthen regulations, support unions and all those other "socialist" activities that free-market activists swear will drive businesses away without hurting our economy. Both history and current events demonstrate that companies that do this will be in the extreme minority and will be more than offset by the benefits from such policies. Economies are driven by both supply and demand and right now demand is severely stifled. McDonalds isn't going to pick up their ball and take it home because we won't play by its rules. They'll adapt just like the twenty-two other times the allegedly economy-killing minimum wage was raised.
@Orestes910 technology is not the same as food. Technology is made by robots and once they moved labor to China for cheaper wages the price of things in technology went down. A 50 inch TV set made in the USA in the 1980s will cost more than one made in China today. Food is grown by farmers on farms and then sold to places like McDonald's it is based on the cost of gas to harvest it and ship it. They add in costs to cover the salaries of the people at McDonald's and the utilities, etc.
A TV set is made in a factory in China and then shipped to the USA, people in China don't earn $15/hr or even $5/hr they earn pennies on the dollar to work in a factory for 18 hours a day 6 days a week. So comparing a TV set to a Big Mac is an apples to oranges comparison. If you paid the Chinese workers $15/hr then the TV set would cost a lot more to sell.
The corporate tax raises $250 billion per year, or 1.5% of GDP, which is one of the lowest tax revenues in the world. And, the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. If that’s not enough, compliance costs are huge and the corporate tax is a job killer.
U.S. corporate taxes also apply to world profits, not just profits earned in the U.S., which makes an inversion cost-effective for an American company operating abroad. Anyone who is watching these inversions happen and still believes that tax rates don’t matter is living in a parallel universe.
Tell me, who wants to work when 100% of his income is taken away and he's an outright slave? That's right, no one. Now tell me, who wants to have 50% of his income taken away? That's right. NO ONE. We pay taxes because otherwise we go to jail. (Want to help The Poor®? -You could do that voluntarily too!)
Now if you can choose between having ~40% of your profits taken away, and wasting lots of money on "compliance" and having say, ~15% of your profits taken away and not having to deal with bullshit regulations.. which option would any sane person choose?
And to support your argument you link to a propaganda site. Thank you for your contribution, but I have no interest in arguing your religious beliefs.
Another load of bullshit. It's not a propaganda site just because you declare it one. Surely you must understand that much, at least?
Look, you can actually check if the US has super high corporate taxes or not. I haven't checked, but I'm willing to take the article's word for it. I have read that they actually do tax worldwide profits too, which is just fucking insane, and onerous. The US has shitloads of regulations too.
Considering that kind of stuff was what the article brought up as the reasons for why companies are leaving the US, it's obvious that it's not a propaganda article, but one that describes reality instead. In other words, you, Sir, are either full of shit or a complete idiot.
Ah, yes, because companies will certainly lower their prices if they could find a way to reduce costs. They wouldn't take that extra profit and say "Nah, we don't need this."
Unfortunately, the only way to get everyone to a living wage is to enforce everyone having a living wage.
Companies reduce the price of things all the times when their initial investment has been returned or they can source cheap materials to produce the same product. Most commonly you see this in the electronics sector. They are keeping the same profit, a company is designed to make money, but they're reducing the cost be it through manufacturing efficiency, reduction of costs through new material contracts, etc. The lower they can get their cost while retaining their same profit the better. If they can cut a $100 item by $50 while still retaining the same profit margin, they're going to do it, because more people are going to buy at $50 vs $100. That's just basic stuff. If you can sell a 1000 units at $100, or 10000 Units at $50 with the same profit margin, which one are you going to do?
They would sell 10,000 units at $100 if they could. The only reason they sell for $50 is not because of any reduction in the manufacturing cost but because of competition.
Enforcing it is fine, but you have to take into account the inherent evil/apathy in modern companies. Enforcing doubling the minimum wage sounds fantastic to me, but I know that companies will either lay off half their staff to compensate, raise prices, (this decreasing the buying power of those people who just got the pay bump) or both. Because they're shit and they only care about money. You could then try to enforce price locks, and not allow them to lay people off. Good luck, they'll go to another country. They have so many options that the average person doesn't have for skirting around the rules its baffling. I think we can all agree that the goal is to stop middle and below class citizens from being screwed over, but that's a problem much larger than the minimum wage. Tackling it in the wrong order will do nothing but fiddle around the numbers in people's bank accounts while they continue to live in a state of financial anxiety.
Enforcing doubling the minimum wage sounds fantastic to me, but I know that companies will either lay off half their staff to compensate, raise prices, (this decreasing the buying power of those people who just got the pay bump) or both.
Fair, but given the current number, an increase to $10.10 is significantly more feasible than $15. On top of that, as you've mentioned before, it hasn't kept pace. So yeah maybe raising it in the past hasn't caused disruption, but that's almost certainly due to how comically low it was both before and after the increase.
I'll gladly change my tune if the McDonalds situation proves me wrong, but again, stagnant wages are a symptom, not the problem.
You could then try to enforce price locks, and not allow them to lay people off. Good luck, they'll go to another country. They have so many options that the average person doesn't have for skirting around the rules its baffling.
That sounds like you'd actually prefer a tyrannical Command Economy? .. The Soviet Union is out of business already, but you could still visit Venezuela and see how well it's working out for them.
You want everyone to have a living wage? Increase the efficiency and productivity of existing companies to reduce the cost of goods and services, not raise their bottom line.
Or just stop intervening in their lives and let them produce goods and services subject to free competition? Remember, a government can't force anything good to happen.
Justification? You're making double the money, you should be capable of producing double the work.
I bet that was a large part of why you got so many upvotes.. :p
But it's more like when you're selling half as many burgers[1], you need half as many workers too!
[1] Naturally, if the wages are doubled, there's a hefty increase in prices too, which lowers consumption, which lowers revenues, so.. Yeah.
The moral of the story is: you can't force prosperity to happen. Quite the contrary, you have to LET it happen.. but our rulers prefer just looting us as much as possible, and there we go.
It could be used as an argument against raising the minimum wage. After all, the money has to come from somewhere, and customers wouldn't be willing (or even able) to pay a lot more for their Big Macs.
That's the problem with supply-side economic thinking: you ignore the fact that if people don't have money to buy your product then all the supply in the world won't bring customers to your door.
I'm actually not ignoring anything. You might be ignoring that if customers aren't willing to pay higher prices, then businesses can't just double the lowest-paid employees salaries either. It's not that complicated.
You might want to argue that the execs or owners should just take lower salaries to compensate for the higher costs of paying higher low level salaries, but that's not your decision. Here in the real world, they will just do whatever they see fit. If the business owner wants to take out as much money as he possibly can, it's his prerogative, because he actually owns the company. He started it and worked really fucking hard to make it successful.. and so on.
Note that even a filthy rich company owner is actually giving people jobs and livelihoods with them. How many people have you employed lately?
So the workers will make $15 an hour, the manager will make $30 an hour, and everyone above that will have their wages adjusted accordingly. I'd submit that the wage increases of management would have a comparatively small impact as they make up only a small fraction of the company workforce relative to their minimum-wage workers. I'd be happy to sacrifice a fraction of my comfort if it means that a great many people could have a greatly improved quality of life.
there's no incentive for that responsibility anymore
That's a rather large and broad assumption. Assuming it was 100% true, it doesn't necessarily have to remain so going forward. There's always benefit to having more control over your situation, and ideally responsibility should be paired with parallel authority.
This study probably just investigates the effect of minimum wage increase and not the increase that all employees have to see, if a manager is making $15 an hour currently and now a new employee makes the same, well, there's no incentive for that responsibility anymore, so originally he/she was making double the min. wage, so they're going to want to see a significant increase as well, so if you pay managers $30 an hour now, the district manager who makes $30 an hour is going to want more, and it moves straight up the ladder.
This doesn't sound so much like an argument against increasing the minimum wage as an argument for paying everyone at least a living wage.
I'm for getting everyone to a point of living comfortably, but at that same rate, it's going to increase the cost of living by increasing everyone's wages and companies have to cover their overhead and that gets built into the pricing of goods. So if the cost of living climbs, then that $15 is no better than that $7.25 people were making from the start.
Also, companies are more concerned with bottom line, so at $15 an hour per employee, you could reduce your labor in half and effectively be paying $7.50 per person, but still expect the same results, from one employee as you would from two. Justification? You're making double the money, you should be capable of producing double the work.
Cost of living doesn't decrease by increasing wages, it comes from efficiency of producing goods/services/food. Reducing bottom line allows companies to sell at a lower rate and increase sales to people who wouldn't have normally bought the product to begin with.
You want everyone to have a living wage? Increase the efficiency and productivity of existing companies to reduce the cost of goods and services, not raise their bottom line.
Since wages have been divorced from productivity for a long, long time I don't see how your argument will do anything to improve the lives of anyone but the elite.
Goods would be cheaper while the elite would make the same % profit. That said, an ideal situation involves both. Cheapening the cost to produce and the price to buy goods through efficiency along with rising wages doubly improves the average Joe's buying power while allowing company to maintain similar profits, if not improve them through economic health.
It sounds lovely, but again we haven't seen this. Productivity has skyrocketed, living costs have risen consistently and wages have stagnated or declined for all but the top 10%. Labor is now being treated as a fungible cost rather than a necessary investment. So again, I don't see how this argument will improve the lives of anyone but the elite.
I assume you're still talking about the7egend's initial post, since I just argued for increasing wages and cheapening goods. (not sure how you could see that only improving the lives of the elite)
What he's (I believe) trying to get at is just increasing people's buying power without increasing their wages. I think its only half a solution, especially since its already happening everywhere. The price of a 50 inch TV is less today than its ever been, even without inflation adjustments. So while increasing people's buying power wouldn't only benefit the elite, its a bit of a half measure for a healthy economy.
The problem I have with this is that progress has been uneven. The price of luxury goods like a 50" television has dropped like a stone, but the cost of living is still rising. It's those daily costs that are killing the middle class. How do we drop those costs? Increasing productivity hasn't done the job or costs would have dropped consistently, making our wage stagnation less of an issue. So again, with wages disconnected from productivity we find ourselves in a world where the only people really benefiting are the elite. The middle class has cheaper toys but that doesn't help with the way wages have not kept pace with the cost of living.
My take on it is that wages are divorced from productivity because, increasingly, companies divert money to shareholders at the expense of the people who actually work to provide their profits.
Right and the argument being made is if the progress were more even that would help. You're locking into the wages and productivity being disconnected, and we're saying that it can be acceptable as long as buying power is evenly increasing. We know its not happening now, that's why everything we're talking about is prefixed with "we should" and not "we do."
So how do we fix this? As you say, we're discussing what should happen but it's not. /u/the7egend seems to be arguing that all we need to do is increase production and the wealth will trickle down. Certainly we've seen some benefits such as in the electronics industry but that still hasn't helped the disparity in the overall cost of living. So what's the solution?
I'm pretty sure most people already know my answer, but since socialism is still dismissed by invoking the military dictatorship variety I'm looking to see the capitalist answer to income inequality. So far the only answers I've seen are "give it more time for the wealth to trickle down" and "the poor are poor because they do it to themselves," neither of which are solutions.
Its not easily fixed, and I'm perfectly willing to admit I don't have any concrete solutions. I can however, identify the main blockers. First, companies can and do tell us to fuck off when we try to regulate them by force. The only way to get them to cooperate is to massage the system in such a way that their greed can only be satiated by a successful, well represented middle class. I don't know how the hell to do that, but in our current world enacting socialism would unfortunately destroy our country economically as companies flee our shores for more business friendly countries. We'd have a great moral and humanitarian victory to show, but we'd all be extremely poor, just equally poor.
Enacting socialism would destroy our country economically? Companies would flee our shores? These are the sort of myths that continue to block progress. To counter them, let's look at what has been successful at creating the middle class in the past and what is currently working to protect the middle class in other industrialized nations.
The economist and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich outlined twelve steps to restoring our economy and saving the middle class based on these lessons. They're worth taking the time to watch the videos or read the transcripts.
http://robertreich.org/post/118372382285
http://robertreich.org/post/118451954660
http://robertreich.org/post/118958136170
http://robertreich.org/post/119312658065
http://robertreich.org/post/119531027110
http://robertreich.org/post/119938747675
http://robertreich.org/post/120107784670
http://robertreich.org/post/120693077100
http://robertreich.org/post/121116739240
http://robertreich.org/post/121924725970
http://robertreich.org/post/122118187155
http://robertreich.org/post/122221596470
It is not a myth that a corporation gives zero fucks about its host country. A corporation is not a person, it's a terminator whose goal is profit rather than the death of Sarah Connor. Every. Single. One. of those ideas appeal to me on a moral level, but I can't see them being successful on a practical level. Here is my only link to contribute:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/...whopping-amount-of-money-by-moving-to-canada/
As long as we're the strongest economy in the world, we can get away with a lot. The post war period showed this in the surest fashion. When there is no where else to go to make money, a 90% tax rate is acceptable. The raw truth is that we're not the only game in town anymore, and the shipping of various things overseas (jobs, production, entire companies) is a reality we have to contend with now. As much as I want all those things listed and see the truth in his reasoning for why they will work, I just think that is a huuuuge dice roll to make. In 1950, I'd say fuck it, go all in. Now, there are just too many other markets available to start agitating our resident parasites that also happen to keep us in our tedious position as number #1
The myth is that businesses will flee the country if they aren't coddled. We can raise taxes, strengthen regulations, support unions and all those other "socialist" activities that free-market activists swear will drive businesses away without hurting our economy. Both history and current events demonstrate that companies that do this will be in the extreme minority and will be more than offset by the benefits from such policies. Economies are driven by both supply and demand and right now demand is severely stifled. McDonalds isn't going to pick up their ball and take it home because we won't play by its rules. They'll adapt just like the twenty-two other times the allegedly economy-killing minimum wage was raised.
@Orestes910 technology is not the same as food. Technology is made by robots and once they moved labor to China for cheaper wages the price of things in technology went down. A 50 inch TV set made in the USA in the 1980s will cost more than one made in China today. Food is grown by farmers on farms and then sold to places like McDonald's it is based on the cost of gas to harvest it and ship it. They add in costs to cover the salaries of the people at McDonald's and the utilities, etc.
A TV set is made in a factory in China and then shipped to the USA, people in China don't earn $15/hr or even $5/hr they earn pennies on the dollar to work in a factory for 18 hours a day 6 days a week. So comparing a TV set to a Big Mac is an apples to oranges comparison. If you paid the Chinese workers $15/hr then the TV set would cost a lot more to sell.
Myths? What a load of bullshit.
http://dailysignal.com/2014/08/10/seeking-lower-taxes-companies-flee-the-u-s/
Tell me, who wants to work when 100% of his income is taken away and he's an outright slave? That's right, no one. Now tell me, who wants to have 50% of his income taken away? That's right. NO ONE. We pay taxes because otherwise we go to jail. (Want to help The Poor®? -You could do that voluntarily too!)
Now if you can choose between having ~40% of your profits taken away, and wasting lots of money on "compliance" and having say, ~15% of your profits taken away and not having to deal with bullshit regulations.. which option would any sane person choose?
And to support your argument you link to a propaganda site. Thank you for your contribution, but I have no interest in arguing your religious beliefs.
Another load of bullshit. It's not a propaganda site just because you declare it one. Surely you must understand that much, at least?
Look, you can actually check if the US has super high corporate taxes or not. I haven't checked, but I'm willing to take the article's word for it. I have read that they actually do tax worldwide profits too, which is just fucking insane, and onerous. The US has shitloads of regulations too.
Considering that kind of stuff was what the article brought up as the reasons for why companies are leaving the US, it's obvious that it's not a propaganda article, but one that describes reality instead. In other words, you, Sir, are either full of shit or a complete idiot.
I don't see how an argument does anything at all.
Ah, yes, because companies will certainly lower their prices if they could find a way to reduce costs. They wouldn't take that extra profit and say "Nah, we don't need this."
Unfortunately, the only way to get everyone to a living wage is to enforce everyone having a living wage.
Companies reduce the price of things all the times when their initial investment has been returned or they can source cheap materials to produce the same product. Most commonly you see this in the electronics sector. They are keeping the same profit, a company is designed to make money, but they're reducing the cost be it through manufacturing efficiency, reduction of costs through new material contracts, etc. The lower they can get their cost while retaining their same profit the better. If they can cut a $100 item by $50 while still retaining the same profit margin, they're going to do it, because more people are going to buy at $50 vs $100. That's just basic stuff. If you can sell a 1000 units at $100, or 10000 Units at $50 with the same profit margin, which one are you going to do?
They would sell 10,000 units at $100 if they could. The only reason they sell for $50 is not because of any reduction in the manufacturing cost but because of competition.
Enforcing it is fine, but you have to take into account the inherent evil/apathy in modern companies. Enforcing doubling the minimum wage sounds fantastic to me, but I know that companies will either lay off half their staff to compensate, raise prices, (this decreasing the buying power of those people who just got the pay bump) or both. Because they're shit and they only care about money. You could then try to enforce price locks, and not allow them to lay people off. Good luck, they'll go to another country. They have so many options that the average person doesn't have for skirting around the rules its baffling. I think we can all agree that the goal is to stop middle and below class citizens from being screwed over, but that's a problem much larger than the minimum wage. Tackling it in the wrong order will do nothing but fiddle around the numbers in people's bank accounts while they continue to live in a state of financial anxiety.
http://www.dol.gov/minwage/mythbuster.htm
That one is #2.
Fair, but given the current number, an increase to $10.10 is significantly more feasible than $15. On top of that, as you've mentioned before, it hasn't kept pace. So yeah maybe raising it in the past hasn't caused disruption, but that's almost certainly due to how comically low it was both before and after the increase.
I'll gladly change my tune if the McDonalds situation proves me wrong, but again, stagnant wages are a symptom, not the problem.
$10.10 an hour is still far below the curve and doesn't begin to address the need for a living wage for families.
That sounds like you'd actually prefer a tyrannical Command Economy? .. The Soviet Union is out of business already, but you could still visit Venezuela and see how well it's working out for them.
Or just stop intervening in their lives and let them produce goods and services subject to free competition? Remember, a government can't force anything good to happen.
I bet that was a large part of why you got so many upvotes.. :p
But it's more like when you're selling half as many burgers[1], you need half as many workers too!
[1] Naturally, if the wages are doubled, there's a hefty increase in prices too, which lowers consumption, which lowers revenues, so.. Yeah.
The moral of the story is: you can't force prosperity to happen. Quite the contrary, you have to LET it happen.. but our rulers prefer just looting us as much as possible, and there we go.
It could be used as an argument against raising the minimum wage. After all, the money has to come from somewhere, and customers wouldn't be willing (or even able) to pay a lot more for their Big Macs.
That's the problem with supply-side economic thinking: you ignore the fact that if people don't have money to buy your product then all the supply in the world won't bring customers to your door.
I'm actually not ignoring anything. You might be ignoring that if customers aren't willing to pay higher prices, then businesses can't just double the lowest-paid employees salaries either. It's not that complicated.
You might want to argue that the execs or owners should just take lower salaries to compensate for the higher costs of paying higher low level salaries, but that's not your decision. Here in the real world, they will just do whatever they see fit. If the business owner wants to take out as much money as he possibly can, it's his prerogative, because he actually owns the company. He started it and worked really fucking hard to make it successful.. and so on.
Note that even a filthy rich company owner is actually giving people jobs and livelihoods with them. How many people have you employed lately?
So the workers will make $15 an hour, the manager will make $30 an hour, and everyone above that will have their wages adjusted accordingly. I'd submit that the wage increases of management would have a comparatively small impact as they make up only a small fraction of the company workforce relative to their minimum-wage workers. I'd be happy to sacrifice a fraction of my comfort if it means that a great many people could have a greatly improved quality of life.
Can we call this the "trickle up economy?" ;)
That's a rather large and broad assumption. Assuming it was 100% true, it doesn't necessarily have to remain so going forward. There's always benefit to having more control over your situation, and ideally responsibility should be paired with parallel authority.
Manager's at the fast food place I worked at were making only about $2 more than the minimum, not twice ($9.50 compared to $11.25 ish).