No shortage of anything: Or, why raising the minimum wage isn't going to hurt the economy.

In this economy we have more REAL deflation than inflation. This doesn’t show up in the official numbers, of course - they always tell a tale of inflation - but the key indicator of where we are is how much money is chasing the goods that are available. In short: are we seeing a shortage of ground beef or a surplus?

We have more homes available that are vacant than we have homeless people, we have consumer electronics sitting on shelves waiting to go on sale, and food is going unsold and being wasted up the wazoo - to the tune of millions of tons per year - because no one can afford to buying it. Likewise the economy sees countless numbers of surplus cars (cars sitting on the lot but no one buying them), iPads always in stock, and so on. Speaking of ground beef, for all the input costs that are supposedly rising, you’re going to find it very hard to find an American supermarket whose meat section is in any way close to bare: a lot of that food will expire and get thrown out because no one has money to afford it. The truth is, aside from oil, almost nothing is even within sight of shortage. The only shortage America face is money in the hands of the working class.

Giving the working class more wages is going to drive them to buy up this excess stuff and actually justify its reason for being on the shelves-equivalent in the first place. We literally do not have any shortage of goods at all in this system. We waste a lot, we produce a lot that no one can afford to buy. Raising wages at this point brings us closer to equilibrium, not into imbalance. Not even close.