Reply #6: This is "nothing," huh?

[jmowreader]

You're a hot dog magnate. You run a thousand carts, and they average $2000 per day per cart. Your sales are $726 million per year. Your cost before wages is maybe half that, or $363 million per year. (I was going to use $3000 per cart-day, but figured that most of y'all wouldn't buy off on a guy selling a billion dollars worth of hot dogs a year.) And by "costs" I mean everything you need to sell hot dogs, from the cart itself to the food and electricity.

If you ran these carts eight hours per day at total personnel cost of $20 per hour (I did a real loose calculation and figured $12 per hour to the employee and $8 to the government), you're spending $160,000 per day for all your cart operators. Remember you're only spending $1 million on food every day, so you're taking $840,000 PER DAY back home. If half of that was divided between taxes (remember, you get to write off the entire $1 million in cart operating costs), license fees, support staff, facilities and everything else you need to run a big business, you get to go home and put $420,000 a day in your mattress.

Most of the people who live in New York City don't make $420,000 a year. You do it in one day. And okay, $12 an hour isn't much in NYC, but it's better than many of us make.

This particular firm wasn't paying its employees $12 an hour. They were probably hiring illegals and paying them $3.

Now let me see...the difference between $12 an hour and $3 per hour, times 1000 employees, times 363 days per year of operations...$26,136,000 in ill-gotten gains.

If $26 million is "nothing" to you, is the place you work at hiring?