They are masters of the farcical, these congressional Democrats who propose to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 this election year while calling Republican resisters Scrooges and painting themselves as heroes to the helpless. Clearly, this is the crowd that ought to be running the Senate and the House.
Not to be impertinent, but I can’t help wondering why their eye is trained on so tiny a percentage of the American work force, many of whom are hardly poor.
Of all America’s workers in nonexempt categories counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those receiving exactly the minimum wage comes to something less than 1 percent. Most are under 25, and many are in households with a number of jobs and an average total income in all the households of $40,000. A significant percentage are waiters and waitresses who get tips on top of their pay.
It is true, of course, that those affected by an increase would not just be those making the minimum wage, but all those between the old minimum and the new. It is also perfectly obvious, however, that the closer an hourly wage gets to the new minimum, the less affected the worker will be by a congressionally mandated hike. The consequence at any rate will be that many of these low-paid workers will lose their jobs.
As much is amply illustrated by a long list of highly reputed studies over the past half-century and more, although the Democrats prefer to rely on a few contrary studies that were done of a slice of one industry in several states using questionable methods. The Democrats gloss over this point made by some critics and ignore the fact that the vast majority of economists agree that minimum wage hikes cause at least some degree of unemployment.
What is even more dangerous, the Democrats pretend not to get it that mere statutes can never undo the economic law that sayswhen the supply of something (unskilled workers, in this case) is a great deal higher than the demand, prices (or wages) will come down. Businesses themselves must abide by this law one way or the other if they want to continue operations, and if the Democrats really don’t understand as much, why don’t they hike the minimum wage to $100 an hour? Clearly, businesses would go belly up all over the land.
The facts of the matter have perhaps never been expressed more clearly than by Murray Rothbard, a deceased, libertarian Austrian economist. While scouting various commentaries, I came across this quote from his work:
“The law says: It is illegal and therefore criminal, for anyone to hire anyone else below the level of X dollars an hour. This means, plainly and simply, that a large number of free and voluntary wage contracts are now outlawed and hence that there will be large amount of unemployment. Remember that the minimum wage law provides not jobs; it only outlaws them; and outlawed jobs are the inevitable result.”
The really, truly sad thing — first off — is that a large number of scaredy-cat, me-too Republicans are perfectly willing to abandon free-contract, constitutionally grounded principles to join with the socialist Democrats on a hike of some size or the other, and — second off — that neither party is adequately addressing an issue that would do far more to raise the wages of unskilled labor: Stop the annual flow of hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens to this country, thereby lessening a supply of workers who view $5.15 and even less as a marvelous amount.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies.
