I did many years of payroll for my family's business. As many as 225 on payroll at one point in our business. The effect of a minimum wage for regular wage earners is minimal, as most full-time jobs today pay at or near that. Assuming Bernie doesn't change the lower tax brackets rates, most people who earn that money will get the majority if not all of their taxes back in their refund depending on their deductions and credits. The area where it creates the most problem will be in retail, and in service-based industries that tip---like restaurants. The current tip credit rate is about $2.13 per hour, which is really meaningless to most restaurant servers as they make by FAR the vast majority of their wages in tips. On top of that, very few servers claim cash tips, most will claim a token amount to appease any audit that they might get from the IRS, which happens occasionally but usually not a lot. With the new minimum wage, I assume that they are going to raise the tip credit rate also. So now every server MUST claim enough tips to cover the difference between the minimum rate of $2-$4 per hour, or $13-$11 per hour. If you do not claim enough, the employer HAS to cover the difference. On top of that, if they work overtime, the employer has to cover that amount at the 1.5 rate, or about $20-$18 per hour. This is a HUGE expense for service industry jobs that rely on tips. The kicker is that a large portion of this industry already makes this on paper, even though they rarely claim all of their tips. So now the employer has a dilemma. There is no way many of the smaller businesses, and even some of the smaller chains, would survive this kind of hit to their business. They would pressure their employees to claim all of their cash tips and probably get rid of those who consistently abused this. I had an employee once who was a Jehovah's witness. Great employee, not knocking her, but she, because of her faith, would always claim every cent she made. There was at least a little bit of tension with other employees as the difference in earnings was tremendous. She would make at a minimum $20 per hour, and on good days it was not uncommon to make $30 to $35 per hour. This was about 25 years ago. So the net effect in a large industry is to not only to effectively raise the taxes on a large portion of the lower base of wage earners (because they will be forced to claim all of their tips or lose their job) but also to decrease employment in these companies by effectively forcing employers to hire more close to 40 hours per week employees and letting go any part-time employees. Those part-time employees who could usually make decent wages in far less time, say 25 hours, who might need this because of commitments like child care, will become unemployed. Any employment they would get that wasn't tip based, would now be at the $15 dollar per hour minimum (assuming fewer jobs in the tipped business). TLDR, full time tipped employees net less money for longer hours, and part-time employees make a lot less money at the new minimum wage or become unemployed.

Now, how does this affect non-tipped retail? Again, most full-time career jobs in retail, which are much larger and more viable than many are led to believe, the new $15 dollar per hour minimum becomes the standard. Brick and mortar companies, especially small businesses that are already under intense pressure from online retail such as Amazon, will outright fold. This is happening today already in both tipped and non-tipped retail due to higher wage pressures caused by low unemployment and a booming economy, so this minimum wage will be the final nail for many. Now while this is in some way good as these cycles often clean out bad business practices, the usual winners are the large companies like Amazon who will easily fill in the gaps of these losses. Amazon gets bigger at the expense of the small businesses and chains that cannot compete anymore, and their increasing emphasis on assembly line operations means fewer workers earn that same $15 that Amazon already pays its workers today, with more competition for those jobs from the loss of businesses in the smaller shops, and the consolidation of employees in the tipped industry. TLDR, more workers available for fewer jobs means more pressure on existing employees to perform and a larger pool of available workers to hire from if you don't. The little guy loses again.

So, who does the tax really affect? I see that The Burnie's plan, when you use his website and the average cost of healthcare that he provides, for a single filer your net income starts going negative at about $79000. For a married couple filing jointly, the number is a little more than $156000, or $78k each. This is much less than the 10 million that I hear from some sources saying the tax would affect. The only real beneficiaries of Barney's tax plan are those that make between $25k and 78K per year, since most people who make less than 25K either don't pay or pay very little for health insurance now. While not an insignificant portion of the population, this is much more people than the tax the rich millionaires and billionaires that seems to be the logic of his argument. And about those millis and billies? Their marginal rate, above the 10million, goes up by 15%. While not an insignificant number, a person making 20 million per year would pay an extra 1.5 mil in taxes above 10 mil, and probably around another 750k below the 10 mil, for a total of about 2.25 million more on 20 million worth of income. So what do you think most of them are going to do? They are going to defer compensation, probably by using instruments like stock options and similar and wait for the next political cycle. If the plan fails, and the politics cycles again to conservative, the tax rates will change again and the deferred income will be taken. One positive may be more capital investment in our country, but it is just as likely that businesses will move investments and jobs overseas to avoid the higher income and corporate taxes. In the end, the net effect is that eventually for the plan to work, the 79k threshold will have to be lowered, probably much lower into what would be considered lower middle-class wage rates. This would have a devastating effect on the economy with the reduced cash flow from not only the top end, but from the middle also. And on the lower end, a double whammy of the reduced incomes in the service sector combined with more job competition will further serve to lower economic prospects. None of this takes in to account the probable 1 to 2 million new immigrants per year who most likely will serve to only widen the pool of job applicants. If the net effect of a minimum wage is to lower the available jobs, then a vast majority of these usually unskilled immigrants will go on welfare and receive 100% free healthcare and housing, all at the expense of current US citizens.

So what is my point in all of this? My point is NOTHING is ever free, if you think you are not going to be paying for it, then I submit in one way or another you will, and it is almost inevitable that the little guys are the ones taking the brunt of the deal. There is a reason the wealthiest countries in the world have capitalist economies. There is a reason that these countries consistently have the highest per capita incomes in the world, on all levels of class. You only have to look to Venezuela, once the 3rd richest country in this hemisphere, but because of greedy politicians who wanted to take over the country and become rich themselves, utterly devastated an economy that is now considered one of the poorest in the world. FREE is NEVER FREE. If you pay nothing for something, the ultimate result, in the end, is that you eventually get nothing and give up everything you had in the first place. It's already been done many times, let's not do that here.

That is all