I have a liberal friend (yeah, I know, shame on me) and made the articles point about minimum wage and how it actually hurts jobs. He actually responded with “that’s a really good point that I never thought of”. I am going to flip him some day or another. Haha.
“As it stands now, the federal wage law tells workers that unless they can find a company willing to pay them at least $7.25 an hour, they can’t get a job.”
The system encourages job hunters to walk away from perfectly OK jobs (very likely a foot-in-the-door) if employers don’t offer the current minimum wage.
THAT is idiotic. Everyone has to start SOMEWHERE... and if you get into a place, there have to be opportunities for industrious and responsible employees no matter at what level they started out.
If nothing else, you can get some contin. ed, night school or whatever, and move to other and better paying jobs down the road. There is no limit to what you can achieve if you just BEGIN working and applying yourself.
Sitting around on your duff waiting for the gov’t. to subsidize your indolence and expecting a big time position out of the blue, is just plain ignorant!
This line of reasoning, while 100% correct, is becoming irrelevant. Today’s chronically unemployed make more by not working than by taking minimum wage jobs. There is only one viable solution to this dilemma. Reduce benefits, or put work requirements on them, or put lifetime caps in place, or do all of the above.
Underdiscussed: the dollar is on a mundane-labor standard. Minimal-effort/labor/training/talent work has an exchange rate of 8.28 minutes to $1. The marketplace equates $1 to 0.30 gallons of gas. No matter how the government defines the dollar in terms of value of minutes of work, 8.28 minutes of anyone-can-do-it labor will buy about 0.30 gallons of gas. Raise the minimum wage to $72.50/hr, and gas will soon cost $32.70/gallon.
The only benefit minimum wage has to the poor is the delay between pay increase and cost of goods/services. The economy takes some time to adjust prices to match payment, so there is a brief boost in buying power. Well, at least for those who manage to keep their job instead of having it cut because the work isn’t worth the price and automation is cheaper.
In the long run of increasing minimum wages, the ratio of wages to cost of living remains constant, and jobs are lost because the value of a job is not defined by fiat, motivating job reduction in favor of efficiency improvements, automation, or elimination of features & services.