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 ...
Looks like he’s dealing with the world as it is. The minimum wage is one of the third rails of politics. It’s not going away no matter what you, I and Dr. Krauthammer think of it.
“I disagree. The USA is all about measuring productivity....except for government workers.”
It is for jobs where productivity can be measured; for things like customer service, it has become a very low priority.
“IBM recently caught some flack for specifying in job postings that they wanted new college graduates. They had just laid off people in those same jobs so it’s hard to see this as anything other than an effort to replace older, better qualified workers with low paid, low knowledge workers.”
It is visible everywhere. Anyone I know who lost their job in the last 10 years and got another is making less money (even if they are doing the same work); companies simply reduced wages, re-set the clock on vacation time accrued, etc. If the older worker couldn’t deal with a 25% pay cut, then a younger person got the job.
what’s a breadwinner anyway?...do we really want 16 yro girls to get pregnant so the baby daddy can be called a “breadwinner”?
I’m sorry! I was not directing that at you at all, I should have been more clear.
I totally agree with you, Krauthammer’s idea is communism pure and simple.
One time a while ago I remember reading something he wrote about this movie and how great it was, so I rented it and Mr. P and I watched it. Yikes. Partway through the movie, he turned to me and asked me why on earth I rented this thing, and I told him Charles Krauthammer said it was an excellent movie and he loved it... we had a good laugh and decided to never again trust a movie review from this guy.
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