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$70k Salaries Didn't 'Backfire'; Gravity Payments' Profits Have Doubled (inc.com)
AmiMoJo writes: In April, Dan Price, CEO of the credit card payment processor Gravity Payments, announced that he will eventually raise minimum pay for all employees to at least $70,000 a year. The move sparked not just a firestorm of media attention, but also a lawsuit from Price's brother and co-founder Lucas, claiming that the pay raise violated his rights as a minority shareholder. But six months later, the financial results are starting to come in: Price told Inc. Magazine that revenue is now growing at double the rate before the raises began and profits have also doubled since then. On top of that, while it lost a few customers in the kerfuffle, the company's customer retention rate rose from 91 to 95 percent, and only two employees quit. Two weeks after he made the initial announcement, the company was flooded with 4,500 resumes and new customer inquiries jumped from 30 a month to 2,000 a month.
When you're paying $70k a year, you have your choice of thousands of highly qualified, extremely productive, workers to choose from. This is not the sort of situation in which a lazy employee is likely to survive at a company. You get what you pay for - at both ends of the spectrum.
Oh, and as far as Communism is concerned,the old USSR was organized very much like a single monopolistic employer paying everyone minimum-wage. (Or paying them artificially large amounts of worthless currency.) The joke Russians then is the same that applies to minimum wage workers today: "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."
Add on top of that, the modern day US teabagger's belief that you can slash taxes (to the megawealthy) with no loss in government services, and you end up with a classic example supporting the horseshoe theory (which states that extremists on both lunatic wings resemble each other far more than they do the center). In this case, both Communists and Teabaggers think you can violate basic economic principles, and get free goods and services from the government, simply by voting for it.