It's not nearly that settled
It's "debated" because raising the minimum wage hikes usually come out of profit margins: https://cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2013-02.pdf
If there's one thing the business community and the econ think tanks it funds can all agree upon it's that any policy that involves sacrificing profits is Bad. Global warming denial and this both come from the same source.
Same for your water example. At some point, water stops being healthy, without knowing at what point, you can't just ask people to just drink more water, otherwise they may die. In fact people have died for that reason.
At some point, increasing minimum wage will cause unemployment and destroy companies. Maybe we are at that point, or maybe not, without a bound, there is no way to tell.
It is a curve, and price discovery is definitely a thing that the government can’t ignore. In Seattle they are in the awkward phase where the politicians admit the problem but walking back the minimum wage policy, which ratchets upward every year, is not something they want to consider politically.
I have close friends in the food service industry in Seattle that have become quite against the minimum wage increases (which they earn as base pay) because it is costing them a lot of money in real terms and they foresee future reductions in employability, which puts them at risk economically.
This coming from an era when competent service employees were so in demand that employers would make concessions that even tech employees don’t get. They weren’t paid as much but they were given flexibility that most people would envy.
When lending costs were near-zero, housing was doing "great". That doesn't mean it's a smart or sustainable policy, even if we had gotten used to that as the norm.
I sometimes wonder if the same applies to restaurants. Consumers got used to lower prices predicated on lower labor costs. Many got used to eating out very often and to a certain extent the economy responds with more restauranteurs. But it couldn't sustain that once the service cost "bubble" popped. Maybe those low labor rates are not the norms we should accustom ourselves to.
Also, holding up restaurant workers as the token reason for opposing living wages for all workers is a bit disingenious. Like using family farms to argue against inheritence taxes.
That’s ridiculous on its face because there isn’t any higher level of productivity so someone in the economy is eating that loss.
Because Dube, Lester, Reich says that they don't exist. Businesses pay for almost all hikes by dipping into their profit margins. A small % raise prices. A negligible number let people go.
> The biggest expense Rubio’s has been facing is debt — a burden that has grown since the chain was acquired in 2010 by the private equity firm Mill Road Capital
There’s an argument to be made that maybe the number of jobs in the fast food sector has decreased. But that’s also a myopic view since we need to know the labor situation statewide. Someone not in a fast food job might have found employment elsewhere which isn’t a bad thing, especially since the workers who do have those jobs are being paid a livable wage.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-06-12/the-fast-f...
Then why not just make minimum wage $100/hour?
There are tons of things people will just immediately stop doing if the prices go up to support labor that expensive.
This doesn't actually bear out. Minimum wage increases really don't have a history of making minimum wage employees unemployable, or destroying the companies affected. In fact, the opposite tends to happen, as these businesses tend to be frequented by other minimum wage employees as customers, so it ends up being a rising tide that lifts all boats.
> Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
I'd argue that you can't just airdrop these companies into another country and have them be as successful as they are. Even with much stricter monopoly laws, there is a LOT about America that incentivizes these companies to locate there, and frankly I'm not convinced they'd move.
And as a Canadian, I don't even want Big Tech to be American. =) The US is only part of the world, as you said, but your lax and corrupt legal system is polluting the world with these dangerous megacorps.
Don't get me wrong, we're none better, our system would allow for nearly the same abuse, were it not for the fact that our whole country is smaller in population that California. But the point remains that there's a lot of the world that is looking on in horror at these rampaging monster companies and is not in any way assured by the "at least they're American" defense.