Michael Hiltzik, a columnist and Los Angeles Times reporter, wrote an article titled "Does a minimum wage raise hurt workers? Economists say: We don't know."
Uncertain was his conclusion from a poll conducted by the Initiative on Global Markets, at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, of 42 nationally ranked economists on the question of whether raising the federal minimum wage to $15 over the next five years would reduce employment opportunities for low-wage workers.
The Senate Budget Committee's blog says, "Top Economists Are Backing Sen. Bernie Sanders on Establishing a $15 an Hour Minimum Wage." It lists the names of 210 economists who call for increasing the federal minimum wage. The petition starts off, "We, the undersigned professional economists, favor an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour as of 2020." The petition ends with this: "In short, raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour by 2020 will be an effective means of improving living standards for low-wage workers and their families and will help stabilize the economy. The costs to other groups in society will be modest and readily absorbed."
The people who are harmed by an increase in the minimum wage are low-skilled workers.
Try this question to economists who argue against the unemployment effect of raising the minimum wage: Is it likely that an employer would find it in his interests to pay a worker $15 an hour when that worker has skills that enable him to produce only $5 worth of value an hour to the employer's output?
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3 comments:
Keeping people in poverty and making the taxpayer subsidize billion dollar corporations to pay welfare to their employees is the issue.
Its time to start paying people a livable wage.
Okay this is common sense and nothing more. When the government forces business owners to do anything short of keeping employees safe, you are asking for trouble. Big trouble. The private sector has the choice to hire or not. Plain and simple. When the minimum wage goes up, people get laid off, hours scaled back or prices of goods and services go up -- or all three of the preceding in some combination.
Here's an interesting factoid. In Seattle, Washington, when the minimum wage was raised, many workers opted (yes OPTED) to have their hours cut because with their wages going up, they no longer qualified for all the freebies they got from welfare. Imagine that. Here liberals scream they want more money for the downtrodden, yet their base wants less hours because they don't want to live without the cash cow of welfare altruism.
Forced altruism - aka Welfare -- never works and incites so many more problems than it ever can hope to solve.
Minimum wage was designed for entry level employment! it is a starting point wage. These jobs were not meant to be career positions i.e. food service, construction laborers, sales, etc. It is a stepping stone until a person educates and develops skills that promote higher wages. For example a private in the military should not rate the same pay as a Corporal; you work your way up the ladder in order to receive higher pay. Mandatory minimum wages will force employers to higher less workers or increase prices to their customers. If you don't want minimum wage pay, improve yourself and work to better yourself. You have a right not to work for minimum wage if you don't want, but don't force your employer to compensate your for your lack of employment skills or aptitude.
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