What is the MAIN reason for MINIMUM WAGE?

leprechaun9 | leprechaun9

[leprechaun9]

In this campaign season, there is a lot of rhetoric about MINIMUM WAGE. I have a strong belief that a simple explanation exists for the support of this initiative, and it is not to help low wage earners!

[leprechaun9]

I would like to hear other points of view on the MINIMUM WAGE. I will later post my position.

[Texaggie79]

Minimum wage is a carrot for the uneducated voter, which makes up quite a bit of the middle-lowerclass in America.

One could only support minimum wage if they were uneducated in economics.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Unions are the major proponents of the minimum wage. The higher they can push it, the higher the wages they can demand for their members.

[justshutupandtakeit]

It is a sop to the stupid democRAT voter. He is so brainless that he believes the gov. can repeal the law of supply and demand.

[Weimdog]

Larry Elder on the minimum wage

http://www.larryelder.com/economics/minimumwage.htm

Minimum Wage, Maximum Stupidity


Warning: Over certain issues, otherwise intelligent people may, repeat, may suffer instantaneous, and often irreversible, brain-freeze.

Take the minimum wage. The City Council in Santa Monica, California, a town also known as "Moscow on the Pacific," just voted unanimously to consider a minimum wage of $10.69 an hour. Plus benefits!

California’s $5.75 hourly minimum wage already exceeds the Federal rate. Not enough, according to Santa Monica Councilman Michael Feinstein, "Trickle-down economics don’t work. They’re violent to people." And, an activist with something called "Santa Monicans Allied for Responsible Tourism" blasted the hotel industry for failing to increase the wages of its workers. "Those people we are seeking to help are already hurting. It’s time for Santa Monica to get on the living wage bandwagon."

Santa Monica, decades ago, passed extremely stringent rent control laws. The effect? An increase in homelessness, a disincentive to create new housing, and a greater rental population percentage of middle- and upper-class residents, crowding out people lacking the guile or contacts to finagle a below-market apartment. An old story. The poor and blue-collar workers, whom the rent control laws presumably intended to help, suffered the most.

This same logic applies to minimum wage: One interferes with the free market at one’s own peril.

A recent editorial in "Investors Business Daily" put it this way: "Minimum wage laws, an icon of the political left, are particularly damaging to low-income workers. Many are locked out of jobs. The Employment Policies Institute figures that the first 50 cents out of the $1.00 hike in the minimum wage in 1996 through 1997 cost 645,000 jobs."

If the simple waving of a minimum wage wand cures poverty, why set the rate at $10 an hour? Why not make it $50 an hour? At $50 an hour, everybody makes at least $100,000 a year!

Rarely do economists agree on any given issue. But here, however, almost all economists agree: Minimum wage hikes destroy jobs. And they hurt the very people that the victicrats purport to help—women, minorities, and teens. Most minimum wage workers are not heads of households, attempting to raise a family on $5.75 an hour.

But, suppose that the typical minimum wage earner were a married man with a two-child family. Can we agree that one should defer producing a child until one can feed, clothe, and educate that child? Shouldn’t a minimum wage person have a minimum family, at least until skills, and therefore, future prospects, improve?

Recently, a major newspaper ran an article bemoaning rising rents, and how this affected a particular "working poor" family, a family, mind you, which includes three children. The husband holds down a minimum wage job as a chef-assistant, and his wife works as an Avon saleswoman and baby-sitter. Three kids? What’s the bare-bones cost to raise one child in this country? Depending upon the local cost-of-living, the price tag probably averages about $10,000 a year for one child.

Newspapers often write sympathetically about the travails of a poor family getting by on a husband’s minimum wage. Never mind the mom-and-pop hot dog stand, with a couple of minimum wage workers, scratching out a living against tremendous competition. A Santa Monica dentist said of the proposed $10.69 minimum wage hike, "This isn’t a living wage; this is a death wage." And, a Santa Monica hotel manager said, "People making $10.69 an hour will be happy at first, but then they’ll realize the work they’re doing is for two or three people."

A recent "Investors Business Daily" article explained how minimum wage hikes kill jobs, "It’s clear to everyone but the most diehard socialists how this happens. Employers who can afford to pay four workers $5.00 an hour can’t afford them all at $6.00 an hour. Somebody has to go. So, three are marginally helped—a fourth is simply without a job. And the fifth, sixth, and seventh don’t get hired in the first place."

Is it possible for so many people who support the minimum wage to be so wrong? A recent Montreal Expos-San Diego Padres baseball game perhaps provides an explanation. With San Diego batting, Montreal recorded three outs, and should have headed towards the dugout. But the apparently brain-frozen Expos remained in the field, and the next Padre batter ran the pitching count to 2 and 1 before somebody woke up. Montreal should be especially embarrassed, since the umpire’s gaffe stood to cost them more. Sixteen thousand people attended the game, yet the home team, the visiting team, the umps, and the fans all sat, nobody screaming, "Wait a second. There are already three outs!"

As to the minimum wage, its damage is documented, the lack of beneficial effect well known among economists. How, then, can so many otherwise normal, intelligent people be so wrong? Ask the Montreal Expos. It happens.

[Arkinsaw]

The average person thinks the minimum wage is good for all and do not think of entry level jobs not created because of it. Thus it is an easy issue for Democrats to mischaracterize.

Secondly, the unions like it because it narrows the gap between union and non-union wages and keeps low cost workers out of the market. It helps get their troops stirred up for pay wages also, making them more reliant on the unions.

It keeps low-wage entry level jobs from being created and thus keeps poor constituencies on the government dole and dependent on the Democratic plantation system.

It harms small businesses which are traditionally Republican and conservative in their outlook.

[pettifogger]

Unions are the major proponents of the minimum wage. The higher they can push it, the higher the wages they can demand for their members.

Exactly.

[cynicom]

Minimum wage is a very necessary evil.

[My2Cents]

Democrats refer to a "living wage," and tie that concept to the minimum wage. But the minimum wage was never meant to be a "living wage," as one is never meant to make burger flipping a career. Of course, with the dumbing down of America by the leftist/Democrat education cartel, burger flipping is all that a good number of high school graduates are qualified to do.

[PawPaw2]

The wages of many union workers are some multiple of the minimum wage, i.e., 4 times, 5 times the minimum, etc. Proposals to raise the minimum wage are a way to buy union votes.

[snarkpup]

The minimum wage deal is: "Vote for me and I'll take money from somebody else and give it to you." This is, of course, very attractive to many people.

[tcostell]

Please define "very necessary".

[freedomcrusader]

Unions are the major proponents of the minimum wage. The higher they can push it, the higher the wages they can demand for their members.

Don't some unions have contracts that set wages at a multiple of the minimum wage? Thus, increase the minumum wage and presto! -- raises for the union's members...

[Atlas Sneezed]

A minimum wage is as close as the Rats have been able to get to Communism.

[ServesURight]

It's evil, period...it isn't necessary at all.

[Physicist]

The purpose of the minimum wage is to throw poor people out of work surreptitiously. This increases their discontent, which can be manipulated by politicians and exploited on election day.

[balrog666]

Union contracts are typically linked to the minimum wage instead of specific dollar amounts. Increasing the minimum wage means an automatic increase in pay for most union workers and increased dues to union "organizer" coffers.

[FreeTally]

Minimum wage is a very necessary evil.

Yeh, because without it, all those evil capitalists would colude and make everyone in the country work for $1.00/Hr. /sarcasm

[cynicom]

tell...

Firstly in a capitalist society, supply and demand should regulate commerce. However, we do not live in a perfect society. Without a minimum wage we would soon drop back into third world status, with the few very rich and the many very poor.

Henry Ford brought out the ire in the robber barons by paying his workers a decent wage. He was the first large employer to realize he could make more money by sharing with the working class.

[Atlas Sneezed]

Here is Thomas Sowell's take on the issue from 25 years ago, and still pertinent:
http://www.amatecon.com/etext/mwe/mwe.html

Also from Sowell: "What is the minimum wage law but an unfunded mandate imposed on private organizations? It is like impulse buying and charging it to somebody else's credit card."