Eugenicists and racists, mostly Democrats, crafted the original minimum wage idea to harm the same people that our modern-day Democrats now claim would benefit. Their ideological forebearers had it right, so are their 21st-century social re-engineers ignorant, stupid, or evil?
Related: Response to Natalie Kelly on ‘The Minimum Wage’ – You Are an Economic Illiterate, and Selfish
I’m inclined to think a little of each, depending on the Democrat. They are the traditional party of racism in America. Two of their presidents (Wilson and Obama) used a few short years to reverse decades of gains.
They are currently promoting a program that favors segregation and systemic race-shaming.
Their social policies have trapped people of color in generational dependency and poverty, surrounded them with violent crime, and disarmed them for good measure. Killed millions of their babies. Black on Black crime is endemic.
And they have promised to make economic matters worse with their demands for an arbitrary minimum wage hike that will do more harm and no good. Many people of color, especially in liberal-run cities, need entry-level wages to gain skills to escape the trap of generational dependence on the Government (and Democrats). Raising the minimum wage will keep them unemployed because those jobs will cease to exist.
Adding insult to injury, the few people who do retain employment will likely see no improvements in their lifestyle while also harming everyone around them.
Eben Macdonald (great last name, by the way) has an excellent piece at Mises.org, referencing more recent data on mandatory wage hikes in places like Seattle.
A few highlights.
- The City of Seattle enacted a $13 minimum wage in 2016, resulting in a fall of 9 percent in hours worked among these jobs.
- The city’s less experienced minimum wage workers saw no net increase in payment.
- Seattle’s policy reduced low-wage employment by 6–7 percent, and due to the reduction in employment, workers in this category actually saw a net decline in pay.
- Literature suggests that raising the minimum will correspond with an increase in cost of living, due to businesses offsetting higher labor costs
- the average childcare worker in the United States earns $11 an hour—… a higher labor costs will simply mean an increase in the cost of childcare.
- One estimate found that this policy would cause, on average, childcare costs to rise by 21 percent in the United States.
- [H]igher labor costs will simply mean higher inflation in the price of food, which will clearly affect low-wage workers more than high-wage ones.
- [O]ne study conducted by the University of Zurich found that all the income gains made by workers who had enjoyed a minimum wage increase were simply offset by higher grocery prices.
- [A majority of minimum wage workers] come from families with a median household income of $66,000
We’ve made a few of these points in many of the 450 or so articles we have published (so far) on the topic. The loss of hours, loss of jobs, increased cost of living, wage compression, decrease in entry-level jobs, the decline in skills accumulation, increased poverty, and dependency, as well as the social re-engineering upon which the idea is based.
We’ve also noted, more than once, that New Hampshire (which does not have a state-mandated hourly wage) continues to have some of the highest average hourly pay in the region, above-average standards of living, take-home pay, better health outcomes, and quality of life, compared to all states, without any broad-based sales or traditional payroll taxes. And very few people actually work for the minimum wage.
More importantly, a minimum wage increase never lifts anyone out of poverty; like the welfare state, it tends to drag more people into it.
None of this evidence is capable of penetrating the thick-skulled left, which begs the question once again. Are their party leaders ignorant, stupid, or do they serve a greater evil?
There’s no reason not to think it can’t be all of the above.
HT | Mises.org
