Wages track prices both directions, but the inverse isn't stable. If prices go up and wages lag, company is extra profitable. If prices go down and wages lag, the company goes bankrupt. Negative profits doesn't mean less production, it collapses to 0 production.
That's meaningless since almost nobody makes the federal minimum wage. The main impact of not raising it is the number of people making it has cratered.
Consider yourself lucky to be far enough removed from that life to be able to believe that nobody makes the federal minimum wage. A lot of people definitely do.
No, they don't. 1% of the country is on the fed minimum wage. Most states have higher minimum wages, and most companies that pay that don't exist very long.
So, I know your username is telling, but 1% is of workers, not the entire population. It's more like 1.6 million. And no, that's not a lot as a fraction of population nor does it account for who those people are/what their situation.
Anyway, you're digging hard for relevance in an extreme outlier, far away from the point I made.
You ever hear the old Stalin line "one death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic"? It describes how the sheer volume of people makes us numb to their suffering. Without a doubt, 1.6m is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall population. Without a doubt, they're outliers.
They're also still people with full and complicated lives. People like the OP you were responding to are more readily able to keep that in mind, but strategically-oriented individuals like yourself can struggle with that. I'm suggesting to check yourself to ensure that doesn't happen.
Because what we've experienced recently wasn't actually inflation by the definition that matters. Real inflation is our currency losing value. The "inflation" that happened with covid was all the corporations working together to raise prices across the board on everything but labor. It was just flat out theft. Going in the other direction would actually benefit real people.
But we still havent hit the price points we were at before covid jacked all the prices up. They never came back down (and wages didnt go up) so it wouldn't technically be deflation until it past that point would it.
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u/PiperUncle 5h ago
Prices going down includes your labour