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As for minimum wage, dude, really? Being told you can't work if you cannot produce labour of X value or greater isn't oppression to you? You think businesses don't pass the costs of that price floor back to the consumer somehow? If it's such a good idea, why not $100/hr? Or a $1000?"

Price is set by supply and demand. If the cost is passed to the consumer, the consumer will not purchase the product and the business will collapse. The issue here is not about anything else other than who gets paid how much of the profits. When a CEO awards himself a bonus or a multi-million wage increase, right-wing apologists never ask how much of that will be passed on to the consumer. No. Its only if the people making the burgers get another $1 an hour that that particular question gets raised.

The answer is that management needs to stop taking such a large share of the worker's labor and return more to the worker. If the management is so greedy as to say "no, I cant take any less to pay my workers better", then and only then will the cost be passed to the customer. And as I said, he does that at the peril of losing his customers.

The reality is that the 1% are taking from their workers, they are taking from their suppliers, and they are taking from their customers. Thats how they get richer and richer every year. By screwing everyone else involved. Customers, Suppliers, and Workers.

Its not that (Customers+Suppliers+Workers) = fixed% of the profits, and that to increase one, the other two must be shortchanged. NO. The big problem is that (Customers+Suppliers+Workers) is getting an increasingly small % of total profit, with management taking a bigger and bigger portion every year.

Minimum wage is effectively a form of redressing this balance such that the 90% get higher wages and thus consume more and grow the economy. Currently, too much of the wealth is locked up in vaults and is not circulating in the hands of real people. THIS is why the economy is in the situation it is in.

If you doubt me, look up Henry Ford's words on paying wages. Ford realized that paying his workers better made him wealthier. Todays leaders have lost that concept. So instead of gaining a middle class, we are losing it.