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Obama and the Minimum Wage
Rightwingpatriot.com ^ | February 22, 2014 | Rightwingerpatriot

Posted on 02/22/2014 10:27:44 AM PST by rightwingerpatriot

If there's one thing that liberals are great at, it's not understanding the basic workings of an economy. They love to push fairy-tale dreams of everybody getting cauldrons of gold whilst doing no real work (but pursuing their dreams of being an interpretive dancer or a poet that only writes on aluminum scraps because of the message, man!) and the economy just hums along quite nicely. They ignore basic factors such as supply and demand and labor in favor of the hard science of "does it make me feel good." This leads us to President Obama pushing for increases to the minimum wage.

Liberals literally foam at the mouth whenever they get to bleat about raising the minimum wage. They pull out all the tired old tropes that they love to use: it's not a living wage, there are millions of people in poverty who only get the minimum wage, and increasing the minimum wage is compassionate and makes everybody wealthier. To these ridiculous arguments, I can only sigh in the manner of an adult trying to explain to a toddler that money just doesn't magically appear in daddy's wallet or mommy's purse.

First and foremost, the minimum wage is not designed to be a living wage. It's designed for those people (teens) just entering the work force who do the lowest level jobs but gain work experience, and it's for those who are looking to earn some extra cash on the side, such as retirees. If you're 34 and the parent of a child or two and you're still making minimum wage, then you're a loser. I hate to be cruel, but you've made some bad decisions in your life. Every industry has a ladder you can climb, whether it's fast food or supermarkets. You don't have to be a burger flipper forever, you can rise to being a shift manager, then store manager, then regional manager, and so on. There's no excuse for you to be earning minimum wage if you've been working at a place for years.

Raising the minimum wage does not make people richer. The cost of goods rises in proportion to what the average person makes. If you raise wages across the board, then the price of gas and food will rise as well. Every first year business student learns that. Too bad that our elected officials seem incapable of digesting such facts. The fast food workers in NYC that wanted the minimum wage to be raised to $15 an hour were absolutely insane. If McDonalds had gone along, the dollar menu would have become the four to five dollar menu.

Another fact to consider is that raising the minimum wage costs jobs. The biggest cost for any business is the workforce that they employ. If they have to pay their employees more, then something is going to be cut, normally hours and jobs. I'm in my early 40s but I can still remember seeing lots of ushers in movie theaters when I was a kid or gas stations with school kids working there, pumping gas and checking your oil. Now those sights are extinct now as the minimum wage has risen considerably over time. Unskilled, entry level jobs get cut and the remaining workers have to shoulder the load. The current unemployment rate for teenagers is over 20%, and minimum wage is a big part of that.

The weakest part of my argument about the minimum wage is that I'm using facts, which are as alien to liberals as hygiene is to Occupy Wall Street. No matter how many facts you tell them or charts showing economic changes that occur due to specific decisions, they will just ignore them and follow that warm fuzzy feeling that they get in their belly whenever they recite the (false) joys of social justice and redistribution.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Government; Politics
KEYWORDS: jobs; minimumwage; obama

1 posted on 02/22/2014 10:27:44 AM PST by rightwingerpatriot
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To: rightwingerpatriot

They don’t get the economy,but they sure understand class warfare and politics


2 posted on 02/22/2014 10:53:29 AM PST by ballplayer
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To: rightwingerpatriot
"If there's one thing that liberals are great at, it's not understanding the basic workings of an economy."

Minimum wage jobs have always been a place to learn and develop skills necessary to move up and make a person valuable to future employers.

As it is now, the bottom rung of the economic ladder is often an open door for immediate employment for the uneducated, unmotivated and self mutilated. When the wage rises causing the available jobs to lessen, the competition for those jobs will increase. We are likely to see mature citizens reentering the workforce to put their talents and customer relation skills to work, thus eliminating opportunity for a growing number of young people who will be left with dwindling options for feeding themselves.

I assume liberals see this as good, somehow.

3 posted on 02/22/2014 10:59:29 AM PST by Baynative (Got bulbs? Check my profile page.)
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