Nothing in this article about raising the minimum wage is in any way support for the move. It doesn’t counter it either, unless you want to make logical inferences into the facts. It’s mostly a “this won’t do much” fluff piece, with a little bit of touchy-feely goodness masquerading as business sense. As such, it’s important to ask, if raising the minimum wage is so irrelevant, why bother? To feel good about ourselves? That’s not wise business.
A couple of morsels:
“When you let the minimum wage fall as low as it’s fallen, it becomes almost irrelevant,” said Harry J. Holzer, professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a former chief economist for the Labor Department. “This is an attempt to make it somewhat more meaningful, but not so meaningful that it destroys a lot of jobs.”
Wait, it becomes almost irrelevant? So the greedy capitalists don’t sit around trying to screw their employees out of wages, instead paying market wages above the minimum required by law? Who would this benefit? The answer, of course, is new, unskilled entrants into the job force (teens) and older workers, presumably staying active with employment. They need more why?
Also note that this attempt would not be so meaningful that it destroys a lot of jobs. A few jobs is acceptable, as long as we’re doing something that feels good. I bet the unemployment line won’t feel good to those (few?) who lose their jobs or don’t get jobs because they’re not created.
Carlos Castro is another area employer who said he won’t cut workers if the minimum wage goes up. As the owner of Todos Supermarkets in Alexandria and Woodbridge, he pays a starting wage of $7 an hour for cashiers, stockers, meat cutters and cooks — well above the $5.15 minimum in Virginia.
“You just can’t get by on minimum wage these days, and I don’t want to force my employees to have to get a second job to support themselves,” Castro said.
Castro said that if Congress increases the federal minimum wage, he will probably raise his pay to keep it above that — precisely what the EPI anticipates happening around the country.
This is the perfect way to see that increasing the minimum wage cause arbitrary, artificial gains for employees. It’s central planning at its ugliest. Who is going to pay for that increase in wages to stay a specific dollar amount above minimum wage? Rather than understand that the market already takes care of the problem in setting wages, the busybodies want to make sure that those few who are near the current, allegedly outdated minimum will no longer be harmed. Except they will be harmed, as prices increase to offset the new expenses. This is not a hard concept.
Rather than tie up business in endless regulation, government needs to get out of the way and let the market, powered by human creativity, solve whatever problems exist that harm the working poor the government so dangerously cares about.