the money is there
its just being spent by some rich starfish for a forth yacht in the caribbean
Okay, let me do the math for you really quick:
McDonalds alone employs 1.7 million people. At minimum wage (for estimation let's use $7.25 per hour) that's easily $13 million that is going towards raising the wages of all of the McDonalds employees. Now, that sounds like nothing compared to the money McDonalds gets in profits every year, but you have to consider the fact that it is a franchise. I.E., a single person buys a building and runs a McDonalds under McDonalds' branding.
Now, these 1.7 million people are the restaurant employees and the businessmen who actually run the franchise itself, plus all the people they employ for their Ronald McDonald House Charities, etc. It would be silly to think that there are 50 people employed in each of McDonalds' 34,000 restaurant locations, and many people work part-time at McDonalds, so 20 people working at full-time is a much more realistic figure. Each employee is paid a base yearly wage of around $15k (40 hour work week, 52 weeks in a year). Meaning that my guess is that it takes $301,600 a year to pay everyone who works at your McDonalds.
Now, if you raise the minimum wage to $15/h, the amount you're paying out to your employees is more like $624,000. Even if you're a fairly wealthy person who owns a McDonalds, this is a
massive financial issue for you. The kind that puts you out of business. This means that the owner has to either sacrifice most of their profits to keep their restaurant crew employed, or fire a bunch of people. Which means that you end up with 50% of the people who actually /had/ jobs now left unemployed.
(These are not real figures, they do not account for tax or inventory costs or anything like that IRL. By those standards I'm probably giving a conservative(fairer) estimation than what's actually true. The point is that raising the minimum wage by a factor of 2 is really really bad for people who own businesses)
