Legally Raising The Minimum Wage In The US Is Pointless

"1) Businesses will move offshore because they will no longer be competitive due to the increasing cost burden of the minimum wage. This argument is flippant, at best." Yes, it is flippant, because business has already moved offshore gradually over the last several decades for a multitude of reasons. You may have noticed that I established that already, if you'd read my opening argument. "2) People choose to work in unskilled jobs and therefore it's their fault if they earn low wages: should I even dignify this ridiculous statement with an answer?" It's your ridiculous statement. I didn't inject any of these ideas into this debate so you're not going to earn any points by colorfully dismantling them. No one's asking you to dignify your made up question with an answer. The bulk of the first half of your post was about why good average wealth is a good thing for the economy. The reason for this is obvious; how you call this proof that a legally imposed minimum wage is the only way to generate wealth in the middle class, though, is beyond me. Raising the minimum wage is raising the quantity of dollars given to people with zero regard for how that will impact the quality of those dollars. Wealth can't be measured by the quantity of dollars a person is legally required to be paid, because the worth of those dollars is relative to what commodity prices are. Raising minimum wage does nothing to prevent the market from continuing increasing commodity prices, and probably does a lot to cause it. The many factors that made it possible for these companies to produce multi-billion dollar quarterly profits, instead of competing with each other, have been introduced gradually over the nearly a century. It's no wonder people find it so hard to grasp the real issues. I touched on many of them in my first post, but you wouldn't know that. The imposed rules of this market resulted in the ceaseless raising of commodity prices, increased taxation, trade advantages of foreign industries due to obvious unequal government imposed operating costs, market-dominance strategies including legal force to squelch competition, and the profiteering from ever-growing debt that generates an unending growth of immaterial dollars that can be used to buy material things. The economy will always seek to take as much from the consumer as possible while keeping operating costs at an absolute minimum. That's actually a legal obligation for corporations. Go ahead and legally impose greater operating costs without legally limiting profit margins, and see what happens. You'll need to do it again shortly, but not until more permanent wealth has been generated at the very top in the form of new equity or profitable debt taken from the people during the period of high earnings imbalance. Raising the minimum wage under these conditions is not a solution. It's a tried and proven method of winning votes and keeping people's eyes off of the underlying issues. A minimum wage increase will get peoples' heads above water long enough for them to get enough oxygen to live through the next dunking. I look forward to hearing your response to round one. You have some catching up to do.