Can someone answer my question about the minimum-wage hike?

[MH1]

86. Okay, I just described ECON 101 Demand-side economic stimulation. What

do you offer as an alternative? Supply-side?

It's not "plausible", it is REALITY, that as I said, for low income workers, "every additional dime that come in, gets spent".

What you are arguing, is WHERE it gets spent. You do have a point that the economic effect is complicated by the internet and online retailers. So that person who is living on a shoestring may be ordering from Amazon instead of purchasing in the local economy.

Well I am going to throw your own argument right back at you. "Just because something's plausible doesn't mean it's connected to reality". The idea that a person who is barely surviving, will spend a raise at Amazon rather than the local grocery store or Wal-mart, is plausible, but not realistic in any large way. If you believe that is truly what happens, please show some hard evidence. To me, it does not make sense that someone who barely has enough to eat or feed their kids, is going to spend their raise on new headphones at Amazon. Yes, maybe a small amount gets spent on something celebratory. But overall, they're going to spend it on groceries and other essentials. Which are more easily procured locally, for people at the margins.

Remember we are talking about MINIMUM WAGE here. Minimum wage workers are not putting much if anything into retirement accounts, even if they get a raise to $15 an hour. Because THEY CAN'T AFFORD TO.

To your point "businesses might just as easily cut hours and lay off workers to compensate for the higher wages" --- not if demand is rising. That was what my whole previous post was about. On a MACRO level, demand increases if you increase minimum wage. SOME individual jobs may be lost for the reasons you cite, in businesses that are not responsive to the type of demand that is increased by this policy. But overall there will be MORE JOBS in the economy.

(Not sure why I have to argue demand vs supply side economics on a supposedly liberal web site. It's ECON 101.)