The Minimum Wage | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    It is clearly time to increase the minimum wage. How can anyone be expected to live on the paltry minimum currently in force.. They really can't. Even if they add the Earned Income Credit to their meager wages, "getting by" will likely be pretty tough. Add food stamps. Add "Obama phones" (free). Add CHIP medical support for the kids. Add school lunches. Add Medicaid. Still tough. But don't mention any of this stuff when you are campaigning for the increase lest you weaken your argument.

    Just think, if we can get the minimum wage high enough, to where people will be able to support a family, maybe we can get rid of all those other things. (Some hope.) Factor in the Keynes "multiplier" and we have the makings of a complete recovery from the recession. Surely filling all the entry level jobs with permanent employees will reduce poverty. I don't recall just how Keynes accounted for the multiplier effect that didn't happen when the folks from whom the money was taken didn't spend it. There was some talk about "propensity to save". Well, maybe - that accounted for some of the confiscated money but surely not all.. And there we have yet another reason to inspect every assumption (usually unstated) made by the liberals in arriving at their conclusions..

    But wait. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report (Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers: 2012).

    "Minimum wage workers tend to be young. Although workers under age 25 represented only about one fifth of hourly paid workers, they made up about half of those paid the Federal minimum wage or less. Among employed teenagers paid by the hour, about 21 percent earned the minimum wage or less, compared with about 3 percent of workers age 25 and over."

    So whom are we "helping" when we mandate an increase in the minimum wage?? Could it possibly be the "low knowledge" voters that can be convinced to come out and vote to keep the ever more generous Dem. gravy train on the tracks??

    And then there's this: Reportedly only about 11% of those who would gain from a federal minimum wage hike come from so called "poor" households. And that's before anyone even begins to discuss the amenities that we find in the so called "poor" households (e.g. Computers, Cable TV, frequently more than one car, and the like).

    And yet a recent ABC poll reports that 66% of those polled support increasing the minimum wage. (31% opposed and 2% were unsure). I suppose it just sounds good - especially as long as the money is coming out of someone else's pocket. We can only wonder how many of those folks would be willing to pay an extra 25 or 30% more for their Big Mac or their Whopper or a bucket of KFC fried chicken, or Pizza, or whatever - because those are the sorts of places where the minimum wages are the most prevalent.

    So from whence cometh the folks who are so vocal about the need to increase the minimum wage?? They come from two fairly distinct cohorts. According to Milton Friedman, the two schools of thought involved are the so called "do-gooders" (my term) and the Unions.

    I subdivide the "do-gooders into real do-gooders and faux do-gooders. The real do-gooders earnestly believe in what they are preaching. It sounds like a good thing to do, so they support the notion. Their only sin would be that they don't seem to have really thought through the implications of what they are supporting or even bothered to identify the so called "problem" or defined its real magnitude. They are told (sometimes only implicitly) there is a serious problem and they accept it at that. The faux do-gooders tend to be Dems. who cynically make the proposals in the hope the Reps will vote against them thereby garnering votes from a lot of "low knowledge" voters who would otherwise not bother to vote. If they are able to pull that off, they would seemingly have a fairly good chance of retaining control of the Senate and making some gains in the House in the 2014 elections. As long as the Reps. Continue to allow the Dems to control the subject of the conversations they are in trouble. The Dems will likely try to cement their strategy with the demand for another "temporary" extension of the unemployment insurance that was allowed to expire. But that's another subject for another day. Suffice it to say that it begins to look like getting laid off is really the doorway to permanent retirement as long as the Dems. remain in power. It would seem doubtful if there are any politicians (especially the "career" politicians) who have even the slightest idea (or really care) what "temporary" means when it comes to "buying" votes.

    And then there are the Unions. There are a lot of folks who believe they have long since outlived their usefulness. They certainly seem to have been losing membership - and as a result - their clout - for the last few years. Even the normally strident Boeing machinists defied their union a week or so ago by accepting the Boeing offer. Better to "give back" a little than be out of a job or have to relocate. It would seem that they figured out that a little bit of something (in a manner of speaking) is better than all of nothing. Surely the people of South Carolina would have welcomed a "NO" vote on the new contract. The machinists knew that. It wasn't clear that the Unions did.

    So how do you tell who is behind the "worker uprisings" including those we have seen demanding higher minimum wages for fast food workers?? Easy. Look at the signs they are carrying. If the signs are hand lettered (and generally look it), the protestors are likely "the troops". If the signs look like they came from a printing company somewhere (surely a Union Shop) the "protestors" are more than likely surrogates of a union or some other left wing group. It is likely that many of those surrogates are being paid to be there. When the Unions are reduced to trying to organize fast food workers, you can only wonder just how much trouble they are really in.

    About the only thing that can be done about the Faux do-gooders and the Unions is to expose their campaigns for what they are: In the case of the faux do-gooders; a cynical way to get votes. In the case of the Unions; an equally cynical way to increase the amount of money flowing into the Union treasury..

    That leaves the real do gooders. It doesn't seem as though these supporters of a so called "living wage" have bothered to take a critical look at the situation.

    Lets start with the premise that minimum wage jobs are typically "entry level" jobs. Of course they are. They are the kinds of jobs where people who have never worked before learn what's involved. Typically, they must learn to get up in the morning (whether they feel like it or not), groom themselves (to some degree or other), report to work on time and do what they are told to do after they get there. The more quickly they learn to do those things and the better their performance in what are normally not very demanding jobs, the more quickly they advance out of the minimum wage job. That's the way it is. That's the way it has always been. That's the way it should be.

    So what happens when we increase the wages for those so called "entry level" jobs to the point where they pay enough to become "career jobs"?? Before long they get filled by people with little education, and not much ambition. They will be content with the work but will not likely ever be satisfied with the pay. They youngsters will no longer have a place to learn what it is to have a job and experience the satisfaction of having money to spend that they themselves have earned.

    I rather suspect that if Harry Reid and Ms. Schumer's boy, Charlie, thought they could get away with it, they would be telling us that we would be better served if we would hire the high school educated among the inexperienced youngsters directly into $50 or $60K jobs, they would be pushing that idea. But then that might be too much of a "reach" for even the "low knowledge" voters to go for. Maybe...

    D'ya Think??