Facts are facts.
Labor is a commodity, nothing more than that.
It IS NOT and CANNOT be valued higher merely because humans provide/produce that commodity via human effort.
The cost of all the commodities used to produce, package, distribute and sell a given good or service determines its market price – the price the consumer pays.
When businesses are hit with higher taxes they are rightly passed onto the consumer, as they MUST be.
Who pays the “Corporate income tax?”
We do, as consumers. It's actually a "stealth consumer tax."
When the cost of steel or plastic goes up, so do consumer prices.When the cost of labor goes up, so do consumer prices.
Even if a large business, say GM made $12 Billion in profits the previous year it would be foolish to even suggest that they take in less profit in order to absorb jumps in commodity prices (oil, plastics, labor, taxes) so that consumers could pay the same price they did before the increases.
Profits, aside from going back into the business in the form of R&D and expanding production (jobs creation), also reward investors with things like stock Dividends.
If a company fails to attract and keep investors (Capital) it won’t be able to expand and compete in the marketplace. Businesses NEED investors. Anyone who’d even suggest that business should take less in profits in order to keep prices lower for consumers as their costs go up, as opposed to attracting/rewarding investors, would be guilty of the worst kind of GREED – that of seeking "something for nothing."
No, as commodity prices increase, so must consumer prices, often companies must even add a little extra padding for increased ancillary costs (additional accounting fees, etc).
That subsequent consumer price inflation impacts the lowest wage earners the most, basically nullifying any increase as their new wages are now paid in dollars worth less than they were when the increase was negotiated.
There’s no way to “help the poor” from the outside,” by giving them more money. I don't even like the Earned Income Tax Credit - bottom line, it's a form of welfare, as people earning less than $32,000/year pay zero income taxes anyway.
Poverty is caused by a dearth of marketable skills, or the inability to maintain gainful employment, usually as the result of a variety of self-destructive behaviors.
No, the only person who can help the poor individual is THAT poor individual him/her-self...and the only way that individual poverty can be remedied is via developing more valuable and marketable skills.
There is no “higher wages” solution to poverty.
That’s just the way it is. It’s like gravity, it’s not going to change simply because we don’t like it.
It's also part of the reason why poverty is such a difficult problem to address. It just doesn't respond to simplistic "solutions."
