About minimum wage

[Aractus]

Raising the minimum wage by the proposed 66%-107% would cause an increase in the price of nearly everything. Which means the cost of living goes up nearly  in proportion to wages i.e. not much changes.

Right, that's a completely fallacious argument. Even if we were to assume the price of commodities and manufactured goods increased linearly with minimum wages, it would still work towards closing the gap in income inequality: those who are the lowest wage earners can still purchase the same amount of goods and services, and those at the top can purchase less. The cost of many other things that directly impact living such as power, rent, rates, etc cannot linearly increase with minimum wage. For example, the price of crude oil is determined by agreements made between oil-rich sovereign states. The cost of supplying petrol to customers might increase slightly with higher wages, but the cost of the commodity remains the same. Similar thing with electricity: let's say you have a town supplied by hydro-power. That's an easy example: the cost of water doesn't increase due to wages. The infrastructure includes the dam, the transformers, the polls and wires is already there.

Australia has one of the highest minimum wages in the world, but I think more needs to be done with taxation policy to target the wealthy - and in particular I'd like to see a progressive corporate tax and another tax bracket for people earning in excess of $360,000 - even if it's just 3-4c per dollar on top of the $180,000 tax bracket.