It’s fine for someone to reasonably disagree with the ‘conservative’ arguments against raising the minimum wage — but you actually have to understand the arguments first. Jon Stewart does not.
On Thursday night’s “Daily Show,” Stewart rebuked a number of business and economics commentators for what he described as “entertainingly sh*tty” opposition to hiking the federal minimum wage, currently $7.25 per hour. One such individual was CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, who characterized an increase in the minimum wage as a form of “government assistance.”
“Government assistance?” Stewart asked incredulously. “How is that government — ‘Yeah, I’m sick of these welfare queens suckling at the teet of the employer they work for …’ The government’s not kicking in the extra money!”
True. If the government raised the minimum wage to $10 per hour from $7.25 per hour, the government would not ‘kick in’ the $2.75-per-hour difference to minimum-wage employees. That would be a form of direct government assistance. It’s entirely wrong, however, to say that a minimum wage hike wouldn’t be a form of indirect government assistance. By raising the minimum wage, the government would be compelling employers to pay certain employees a wage above what they would otherwise pay. This is called setting a ‘price floor’ — the minimum wage itself is a price floor, in that it forbids employers to pay employees anything less than a certain wage.
That, by definition, is government intervention. And the money doesn’t have to come from the government’s pockets for it to be a type of ‘assistance.’
Stewart leveled another ‘critique,’ if you want to call it that, against CNBC contributor Carol Roth.
“I’m a big fan of empowerment over entitlement — and these minimum wage jobs are not supposed to be life-long jobs,” Roth said in a clip Stewart played Thursday night. “You’re supposed to get your foot in the door and get skills …”
The Daily Show host mocked that point of view, saying, “So it’s like a starter kit. A fryer’s apprenticeship, if you will. A grill squire.”
Nowhere was there an actual rebuttal to the point Roth was making. The more ‘entry-level’ jobs at a fast food restaurant, such as tending to the deep fryer or manning the cash register, are frequently transitional jobs or provide supplemental income to a household. They’re often occupied by younger Americans, such as younger Americans can find work nowadays; part-time labor; workers transitioning in the jobs sector; or people helping support a home, not provide for it all alone. Supporters of a minimum wage increase don’t say this explicitly, but they imply it with the way they frame their positions: They equate these jobs with a standard desk job, which a person works for 30 years and retires with a golden watch (maybe one with golden arches, in this instance).
That’s not the case. And as such, these jobs are appraised at a relatively low wage for the relatively basic and replaceable skills they require. If they required more advanced skills that were more difficult to replace — and, correspondingly, lent themselves to longer tenures — they’d pay more. Advocates of a minimum wage hike want the fast food type of employment at the center of this debate to be more economically valuable than it may actually be.
Roth added (in a portion of her segment Stewart didn’t air) that the greater focus needs to be on helping individuals acquire more skills — so the jobs sector can compensate workers based on what they can do, not based on what the government says they should be paid.
“We have a skills gap and a skills issue in this country, so we need to foster having more jobs and we need to foster innovation,” Roth said.
Members of Congress have advanced proposals to help do that: a novel tax and education plan from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), and a bipartisan proposal from Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Michael Bennet (D-Co.) to improve job training programs are two.
Stewart has tamped down the seriousness of ‘hard news’ on his show in the past, saying during the “Crank Yankers” era, “The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.” But for an issue that is getting so much play, causing such rancor, and influenced by such incomplete arguments, it’s still important to make the conversation clear.
