Uhh, well you make a few wild assertions, like raising wages will:
1) Lower the cost of the burger;
2) Increase revenue to the employer;
3) Increase profits to the employer;
4) Increase revenue to the government;
5) Decrease welfare costs; and
6) Give millions of workers "dignity."
Unfortunately you fail to cite any analysis, or evidence, as to WHY any of this will happen. Let's look at each one individually:
1) Lower the cost of the burger. Well, assuming that the MIT flips 65 burgers per hour, and all the other factor inputs (meat, elecricity, etc.) remain the same, the cost looks something like:
Old scale: $7.05 per hour + 38% fringe benefit * 8 hour shift / 520 burgers = $0.15 per burger labor cost.
New scale: $17.05 per hour + 38% fringe benefit * 8 hour shift / 520 burgers = $0.36 per burger labor cost.
Now, the average burger costs $1.00, so one of three things happens, either:
a) the price of the burger increases to $1.21, to reflect the higher cost. This is unlikely, though, because the pricing of the burger is based on competition and the elasticity of demand-- I won't go into a complex explanation but you can figure that the burger corp has done extensive market research to ensure that their burger price is at the level where it will maximize profits, which is defined as the maximum point on a curve whose points are a plot of the price per burger versus the quantity consumed. In simpler terms, the burger price CANNOT rise or fall from this equilibrium point, because a price change would mean less profit;
b) the price of the burger remains the same, which erodes the margin from $0.85 to $0.79, or a 7% decrease in gross margin; or
c) the price of the burger goes DOWN, because with increased wages, more people have discretionary income to spend on luxury items like burgers, and there are more dollars available to purchase burgers in the economy, resulting in startup competition that floods the market with burgers, resulting in a price decrease, and a further erosion of gross margin.
Which is most likely, in your educated opinion?
But we already know that the burger is priced at the optimum level, so any decrease in price results in less profit to the burger firm, which may mean they stop producing burgers entirely, and focus on other things with higher margins and lower-cost factor inputs, like salads. Which may mean that they don't need EITHER burger-flipper, because salads can be packaged by automated machinery in a processing plant, resulting once again in the substitution of capital for labor.
Now, let's look at the "increase revenue to the government" claim. The government ALWAYS gets their piece, remember.
$7.05 * 40 hours * 50 weeks = $14,100 gross. Standard deduction of $9,700 = $4,400 AGI, 10% tax rate, total federal tax = $440. Effective rate 3%. Weekly take-home pay $262.
$17.05 * 40 hours * 50 weeks = $34,100 gross. Standard deduction of $9,700 = $24,400 AGI, 15% tax rate, total federal tax $3,302. Effective rate 9.6%. Weekly take-home pay $608.
Well, you just put another $2,682 in the government's pocket, and another $346 per week in the employee's.
Now, according to the Department of Labor, there are approximately 612,000 fast food cooks (MITs') in the United States.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ocwage.pdf
Since you raised wages without raising productivity, we know that the businesses can't continue to employ those workers. So half of them get fired. Nice job, Superman. You'll be busy writing 306,000 notes of apology for a while, might just cut down an entire timber forest for the paper. Each fired worker goes on welfare.
So your precious government made $2,682 * 312,000 or $836,784,000 in additional tax revenue. You LOST $137,280,000 in revenue from the job losses. That's about $700 million in higher revenue for government. Now, the maximum food stamp benefit in Oregon is $160 per household per month. Let's generalize that to the rest of the country. . . you pay out $599 million in food stamps, leaving you with $101 million in incremental revenue. Divide that by the rest of the population you abandoned: $27 a month left over for housing assistance and job retraining. That's not going very far, so my guess is you end up spending more.
DIGNITY? You did a NICE job on the dignity of those people. Empower some at the expense of others, raise living standards for half the population and make the other half wards of the state.
Why do you pro-government types get off on doing that to people?
Does it give you a sense of power over peoples lives?
You can't even do simple math, you want to have power over the lives of people who have nothing to sell but the labor of their hands?
You know, as a Capitalist I believe in RESPONSIBILITY to workers. I believe that the decisions I make have a genuine impact on peoples lives, and I put everything I can into making smart, rational, economically sound decisions so that businesses can grow, wages can rise, and people can move up from generation to generation.
YOU, on the other hand, believe that you can compel people with force or violence (don't believe me, watch what GOVERNMENT does when someone doesn't pay their taxes) to work to fund YOUR stupid social experiments and budget initiatives.
Well guess what? The Great Society ISN'T. All your attempts to drive up wages here have resulted in the OFFSHORING of manufacturing jobs to lower-wage economies! By raising taxes and increasing wages without corresponding increases in productivity, you have contributed to the United States being at a competitive disadvantage with regard to the rest of the industrial world!
The economy was not created as a toy for you to play with. Stay the hell out of our business.