There you go using logic & math again ...

@ 2
You are 100% correct. Wal-Mart can afford it because they have a massive operation. A small business doesn't and they can't just cut stock dividends to make up the difference.
Want an America full of nothing but Wal-Marts and McDonald's? Support a higher minimum wage!

And it also should be noted that the only reason Wal-Mart is this big is because government has done nothing but support it through tax credits and using eminent domain laws to let them steal people's property and build those ugly big boxes in their place. In a real free market system Wal-Mart would not have their government given edge and would have to compete with smaller, more agile competitors.

Current minimum wage is $7.25; raising it to $10.10 would be an increase of $2.85

The basics of the math are that Walmarts labor cost would rise and profits would fall by an equal amount - some of that extra labor cost would be offset by smaller profits. There is an increase in payroll taxes as well on that new salary.

But let's say, it adds up that the overhead on this new wage is 50% of the wage - essentially that the $2.85 bump equates to $4.28 in extra costs to Walmart. However, some of that increase in cost is offset in a decrease in taxes on profits - let's be generous and say that tax rate is just 15% (the low end of corporate tax). So we reduce the extra cost by that 15% and arrive at a figure of an extra $3.63 per minimum wage hour - less for employees making between the federal minimum and between 10.10 already.

This implies that Walmart employs about 55 million minimum wage hours per year. There are ~4,000 Walmarts in the US, so that's 13,774 hours per store; 264 per week; or about 9 minimum wage workers per store (working an average of 30 hours per week).

A Forbes article cited 1.4 million low-wage Walmart employees; so that $200m in extra costs works out to just $168 per employee per year, or about $0.10 per labor hour.

Anyways. I'm no economics expert. But that's my back-of-the-envelope math.

@6
That is indeed, unfortunately, the truth. Whether willingly or not, people like Goldy are the useful idiots of corporatism.

That's why so many corporations donated to Obama's campaign, but none donated to Ron Paul. Liberalism is always MUCH better for giant corporations than real conservatism or libertarianism ever is.

@5, you are also forgetting that minimum-wage earners, including Wal-Mart workers, will spend more because they will have more income, thus increasing Wal-Mart's sales and profits (and a lot of other people's). That's the whole basis of our economic strength -- buying power in the hands of the masses. Henry Ford understood that a hundred years ago.

Yes, yes. Every asshole and his dog in this country is a small business owner, and regardless of how badly that asshole and his dog run their respective businesses, it's the government's responsibility to make sure those businesses never go under.

For my part, if a $10.10 or $15 minimum wage drives a stake through the heart of the types of businesses that get featured on Kitchen Nightmares, I am completely okay with that.

Given that the minimum wage would be $10.50 an hour had it kept up with inflation, bootstrapping American "small business owners" have been getting a free ride for far too long.

So, it doesn't come out of corporate profits, and the 1 percenter's pockets?

SHOCKED, I and absolutely shocked!

You actually have to change the tax system, and take the money to run the government directly out of corporate and 1 percenter's pockets, and completely eliminate all taxes (state and local) for people below the poverty line.

The state could refund all of the sales tax to people making below the poverty line, have people submit their completed federal income tax forms to the state, the state issues a check.
If the state needs more money, they have to look elsewhere.

Raising prices a penny on things that 1 1-percenter infrequently buys is not particularly effective.