In the real world, no liberal has ever bought a McDonald’s franchise and paid the workers $15 an hour
Recently, Huffington Post published an article about how easy it would supposedly be for McDonald’s to pay its’ employees $15 an hour. Soon afterward, they took the original article down, and replaced it with this article, which admits that the original article had been wrong.
But I knew they were wrong before they admitted it. Having read the original article, one thing I noticed was that it wrongly assumed that the demand for McDonald’s food would not go down, even though the article did say that there would have been an increase in the prices that customers paid. In the real world, people respond to incentives. When the price of something goes up, the demand for that something does down.
If it were possible for McDonald’s to pay $15 an hour, I would think that some liberal somewhere would have already purchased a franchise and paid the workers $15 an hour.
Critics of McDonald’s complain that you can’t raise a family on what McDonald’s pays. They cite various examples of people trying to raise children on what McDonald’s pays.
But this misses the point. I have always viewed a McDonald’s job as something for a young person who is till in school, and still living with their parents. A high school student who wants to earn money for the prom, for example. I was raised to believe that you are not supposed to have your first child until after you have obtained a good education, gotten a decent paying job, and gotten married.
The fact that unmarried high school dropouts are having trouble raising their children on a McDonald’s salary is not the fault of McDonald’s. Instead, it is the fault of the two people who chose to drop out of high school and make a baby out of wedlock.
Apparently, McDonald’s critics don’t seem to understand why McDonald’s pays much higher wages to its accountants, computer programmers, and lawyers, than it does to its burger flippers and cashiers. What these critics don’t seem to understand is that these people who receive higher wages get those higher wages because they chose to put in the time and effort to acquire better education and better job skills.
If these critics want McDonald’s burger flippers and cashiers to earn more money, then instead of suggesting the totally unrealistic idea of McDonald’s paying them $15 an hour, I suggest that these critics do more to teach people about the concepts of long term planning and delayed gratification.
