In case anyone loses sight of what these republican cocksuckers want

[Tiberius]

You're missing my point. You are assuming that a business WILL hire more people if wages decrease. A decrease in wages will increase profitability however it has no effect on demand. If you lay off than 5 ppl making $2/hr so that you can hire 9 ppl making $1/hr you've increased the work force but reduced aggregate demand. Businesses are trimming payrolls not due to high wages but excess capacity.

You're missing my point. The "demand" mentioned isn't concerning the product / service, but rather the business' demand for workers. True, in most cases a business won't hire 2 people for half the price, but this is only true when considering non-minimum wage jobs. The point of jobs that are minimum wage is that practically anyone can do them, so the level of skill required is non-existent.

Take for instance, a McDonald's cashier as an example. I don't know how much they are paid per hour, but let's assume for this example that it is a minimum wage of $5 an hour. If the minimum wage is abolished, McDonalds could simply reduce all wages to $1 or even $0.01 an hour. It's highly likely they would do such a thing, since people tend to value even that kind of work at higher wages. Say that McDonalds is able to hire people at $1 an hour though; they could continue to serve people at the same rate perfectly well, but they could increase profit by hiring more workers who can do more work.

Like I said before, this doesn't always work, especially in non-minimum wage jobs where a certain degree of skill is required, usually because you end up with scenarios where there is simply too much interference (the old phrase "too many cooks spoils the broth" applies here). However, with low-skill jobs, efficiency is increased if you hire more workers at lower costs, simply because it is (a) easy to train them, and (b) the work is done faster since not much collaboration is required.

This would have no effect on profitability as your labor expense has not changed. You are assuming that by hiring 5x the people that you would have 5x the productivity. That is a huge assumption. Most businesses maximize profitability by increasing efficiencies. In your scenario, the company would prefer to hire 1 person at $1/hr to increase profitability.

Again, we are talking about minimum wage jobs here. If you have a large amount of a certain resource, and all workers do the same thing, then the more workers, the more productivity. Using the McDonalds example again, if I had 5 servers, a queue of 10 customers, and operate under the assumption that each customer order takes 1 minute, then those 5 servers would have all the customers served in 2 minutes. Add more servers, and the same amount of customers are served in less time.

Yes, it is an assumption, but one that is perfectly reasonable to make when talking about minimum wage jobs.