There are better ways to lift peoples' fortunes than micromanaging the labor market.
The debate over raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from the current $7.25 heated up last week with the publication of a Congressional Budget Office study, which estimated that total employment would likely be reduced by "500,000 workers" if the hike were implemented.
While the CBO's scenario made sense, a truly substantive debate about the minimum wage would start with the merits of abolishing it altogether, while seeking to help poor people through more direct means. Instead of decreeing that the unskilled can't accept certain low-wage offers, thereby condemning many to joblessness, allow them to consider all of the potential options. But to the extent that low-paid workers are part of poor families—and many are not—help them in other ways.
Ironically, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, an advocate of hiking the minimum wage and critic of the CBO report, sensibly opined in his textbook Economics that "the minimum wage is not a good way of trying to deal with problems of poverty." His point: Since many minimum-wage workers aren't poor, this is yet another case of the government trying to solve a problem with a blunt instrument. The same CBO study he criticized bears him out, estimating minimum-wage workers' median family incomes at $30,000, which shows that most live in families well above the poverty line, given that many have multiple workers.
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4 comments:
More stupidity. Of course they live with their families. They can not afford to live on their own at MW.
To say that those making MW are not poor is just ridiculous.
A hike in minimum wage would be the only way Labinal workers on Civic Ave. can get a raise.
I worked for $8/hr and got help from Shore Up.Many workers there are on some form of public assistance.
"A hike in minimum wage would be the only way Labinal workers on Civic Ave. can get a raise." So, the problem is not the minimum wage; the problem is employers like Labinal. Even if they raise the MW, Labinal will still be paying MW, but probably to less people. If you keep your job, within a year your purchasing power will be the same.
Minimum wage hikes --kick in Union pay raises and a 10% increase in an Autoworkers 50$ an hour is way more than the 73 cents your Coffee Barrista will make-- they are after a 20% like DC already mandated-- city workers get an automatic pay raise-- Progressives are never about the people --they are about patronage and self
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