Posted on 01/04/2014 5:20:41 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
Speaking on Fox News recently, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer proposed what, to many, might have sounded like a rather novel compromise on the minimum wage. His idea? We should have two of them, a higher minimum for "breadwinners," and a lower minimum for everybody else.
Here was Krauthammer's thinking, paraphrased. It might be hard to feed a whole household on $7.25 an hour. But raising the minimum is most likely to hurt teenagers and minorities who rely on low-paid, entry-level jobs to get a foothold in the working world. So how do you lend a hand to hard-pressed families without penalizing the young? Force employers to pay the "breadwinners" more, and everybody else less.
He called his two-tiered solution "a reasonable answer that Republicans and conservatives could offer."
Already, Krauthammer has gotten a bit of pushback. "Proponents and skeptics of a higher minimum wage can agree that Krauthammer is wrong about this," Slate's Matt Yglesias quipped on Twitter. The Washington Examiner's Philip Klein argued that figuring out who qualified as a "breadwinner" and making sure employers paid them appropriately would be a regulatory headache. But more importantly, he says:
...the economic effects would be most detrimental for those Krauthammer's proposal is intended to help. Under Krauthammer's idea, businesses who want to avoid paying the higher minimum wage on breadwinners have an easy solution: Shift toward hiring more teenagers or other nonbreadwinners.
Klein is right that that whole "breadwinner" concept would probably be more trouble than it would be worth. But what if we tweaked the idea just a little bit, and based the minimum wage on something more straightforward, like a worker's age?
We wouldn't be the first country to try it....
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Not necessarily.
What about the 35 year old housewife who’s husband dies? Suddenly she finds herself with no work experience and an outdated education, caring for two or three kids. She’s got to start from the bottom like everyone else.
Of the infantryman who gets out of the army at age 28 with a medical. There’s not too many job openings for a sniper in the civilian world.
Sometimes life plans change and the path you were so sure of takes an unexpected twist.
These people may bring a maturity and discipline to the workplace that an employer may see as worthy, but they’d have to sell themselves.
It's worth noting that this kind of overbearing government policy only works in welfare states where it is impossible to fire people once they are hired.
The idea doesn’t deserve debate. The minimum wage is a bad idea. Raising it is a worse idea. Tiering it won’t turn it into a good idea. Krauthammer knows medicine but is a left wing idiot on economic issues. He’s a moderate Democrat posing as a neocon Republican.
When I worked at Alen Wood Steel, (remember american steel?) I typically worked 16 hour double shifts, and did so 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
Government EPA and other regulators ended american industry just as intended...
Since when does America operate like this?
The Housewife has skills. She must have skills to manage a house.
As for the Military person, he shows he has commitment. He see a job thru no matter how much it sucks.
Too bad Obama crashed the job market so bad that these sorts of people have to fight against College educated people who are vying for the same low paying jobs.
Wasn’t it great? When I do it, my eyes hurt like hell, and my legs are sore from running all night. Part of me feels like I am killing myself. But a bigger part of me feels so much joy knowing I am buying freedom, and making the future safer for the family.
Good for you! I bet you are so proud of that time.
And you hit the REAL problem right on the head. The economy. In a thriving economy, employers are competing for labor, not the other way around.
I’m praying for the next oil boom and a new administration.
Big Krauthammer fan. Very dissapointed in him on this issue.
Anyone but the brain dead can see that raising the minimum wage to $97.63 per hour would be absurd but the same people cannot realize that a minimum wage of $7.35 helps no one in the long run and raising it to an even $15.00 per hour will help no one. They will argue all day about doing things that accomplish nothing but will not even consider removing the real obstacles to prosperity.
Find it interesting that the Third Way always involves a compromise that swings the country further to the left, i.e. socialism lite.
If the GOP was conservative, the compromise would be a tilt to the right.
I was referring to SKILLED workers.
In this economy, people who spent years learning skills are finding them useless because that type of work has been shipped overseas; it isn’t necessarily their fault.
Sorry, but I do not agree. The young people I worked with were addicted to dope, cellphones, and excuses. They didn’t even deserve minimum wage.
how to encourage 10+ kids ...
The “Third Way” is just cutesy way of saying Nazism/Fascism while hiding behind “compromise”.
Not entirely accurate try getting a job as an entry level worker these days... Thanks to the miserable economy most can’t get a job because folks who should not be working entry level have been forced to.
Thanks 2ndDivisionVet.
A policy like this could really promote the conservative philosophy.
Wages—any wages—need to be determined between the employer and employee, the buyer and seller in a transaction for purchase of the employee’s time. Government intervention only distorts the transaction. If enough of those transactions get distorted, the system caves in.
I can hear timbers groaning under the weight of distortion now.
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