It's a vicious circle. Increased wages will result in increased consumption and contribute to making the rich richer while flooding the poor with goods with built-in obsolescence. It would be much better to learn living with much less than we do now and teach the one who try to deprive our workforce that they are dependent form us.
mtgx|10 years ago
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-americans-cant-handle-a-500...
Obviously if you have more money, you will increase consumption, but the more money you make, there will be diminishing consumption. It's not like people making $30 million a year spend 95% of it at Walmart. The more money you make the more you either invest or save (as a percentage of your income), even if the total consumption increases as well. In other words, having more people with more money is not a "bad thing" for the economy (or their personal lives). Quite the opposite.
Second, if there's a stronger middle class, it means the money paid to businesses will be much more distributed. When people have little money, then they can only afford to spend on "necessities", which by default shrinks the market to a handful of business categories, which means only a few will be able to get "richer".
It's also likely that only the biggest such businesses will survive thanks to better economies of scale and people's price sensitivity due to the very low incomes, which means there will be higher inequality and less competition in the market.
When more people have more money, they buy all sorts of stuff, giving life to all sorts of new businesses and because consumers aren't as price sensitive, competition will be higher as well.