The real question, of course, is the purchasing power represented by that minimum wage. If you compare standard of living in Sydney to Atlanta you see that it is about 40% more expensive to live in Sydney. And when you look at comparisons of standards of living between nations, the US ranks above Australia.Overall, when cost of living is factored in, the Australian worker is little further ahead than his American counterpart…
What is also striking is that the number of minimum wage workers in Australia (1.5 million) is approximately equal to the number of minimum wage workers in the United States (1.52 million) though the US workforce is orders of magnitude larger. The implication in this number is that the artificially high minimum wage has acted to stultify upward mobility in the work place. If anything, it looks as though the price of the Big Mac works independently from the minimum wage…
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