A new report shows minimum wage increases have had little effect on the number of jobs in Maryland and nationwide. While the rhetoric around increasing the minimum wage often comes with the caution it will reduce low-wage employment, a new review of decades of research showed most studies found no job losses after the state or local minimum wage is raised. Ben Zipperer, senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute and the review's co-author, said raising the minimum wage has unquestionably benefited workers. ...
Oh jobs are replaced by machines, it just has almost nothing to do with minimum wage. Machines cost pennies on the dollar for production value compared to humans. The human wage is pretty meaningless at that point, even forced labor is less profitable.
I think part of the issue is how business accounting practices work. When you buy a machine, you can call it a capital investment and count its value as an asset. When you hire a person and cultivate them for years, from an accounting perspective their salary is strictly a liability / expense. Even though that person is an asset in every other way, our standard accounting practices don’t reflect that.
Accounting practices reflect exactly what is relevant to profits within the desired time frame. There are no laws that make employee seniority valuable within the business cycle, so it has no value to account for.
The investment that business sees is like you spending a thousand dollars a year for a century in order to make a million dollars. Sure it’s a 10 to 1 return on investment, but you’ll be dead, so is it really worth it?