Posted on 07/04/2011 11:09:32 AM PDT by Kaslin
Michele Bachmann has drawn some media flack about her views on the minimum wage.
She has said that the minimum wage is a bad idea and that getting rid of it would bolster employment.
Despite a considerable body of academic literature and a whole lot of common sense that supports Bachmann’s view, some reporters seem to have a hard time with it.
A Washington Post columnist blogged about a recent exchange between Bachmann and a morning talk show host on this subject with the headline: “Michele Bachmann’s radical position on minimum wage.”
Here we sit today with over 9 percent unemployment, two and half years after enactment of the largest government stimulus spending bill in our nation’s history. There are a million fewer Americans working today than when the stimulus was passed.
Yet, I recall no Washington Post or New York Times headline which read: “Obama’s radical idea to borrow a trillion dollars to create jobs.”
I made the point in my book Uncle Sam’s Plantation, originally published several years before Michele Bachmann arrived in Washington, that the minimum wage, like most government programs targeted to low income Americans, hurts the very communities it purports to help.
By government setting a floor on the wage that an employer is permitted to pay, individuals whose employment value falls below that wage simply will be unemployed.
Rather than generally lifting wages at the bottom end of our work force, which is the supposed objective of the minimum wage, it simply creates unemployment. A wage of $6.50 an hour, 75 cents less than today’s minimum wage, isn’t much, but it’s a lot more than zero.
The last round of federally dictated minimum wage increases occurred just as we entered the last recession. So its perverse effects were magnified.
The minimum wage was increased in three steps from $5.15 an hour before July 2007 to $7.25 an hour in July 2009.
When the first increase occurred in July 2007, black teenage unemployment was at 30 percent, 25 percentage points higher than the then 5 percent national unemployment rate. After the last increase to $7.25 an hour went into effect in July 2009, black teen unemployment reached 50 percent, 40 percentage points higher than the national rate.
Regarding the impact of minimum wage increases over this period, the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University observed, “Instead of hiring a dozen teens to work a popular summer restaurant or theme park, a company would hire six or less. Instead of filling positions that required no skills, companies were making due with what they had. In the long run, this hurt young, unskilled workers.”
A study from this Center estimates that the minimum wage may have led to elimination of 550,000 jobs.
This is one study, but there are others. And there are many economists of note, including Nobel Prize winners, who have written about the perverse effects of the minimum wage.
Economics has been called common sense made difficult. In the case of the minimum wage, you don’t need fancy models to draw the logical conclusion of what to expect.
Just think how any business owner will behave when the government sets a floor on how much he or she can pay workers. It’s obvious that those at the bottom of the scale will get shut out.
It should be equally obvious that those shut out are the same ones that in all likelihood have dropped out or will drop out of school and whose life can be changed dramatically by having the opportunity to work and acquire skills and build a resume.
If there is anything radical about Michele Bachmann’s stand on the minimum wage, it’s not what she has said, but that she has had the courage to say it.
Some say that without it, employers will exploit workers and drive wages down. Although there may be some that do, I don't that the end result will be downward.
Employers want and need the best employees possible to be competitive. If my competitor down the street makes more for the same goods or services, I may want to hire his people. The most productive workers make money for me and they are the ones I want no matter what it costs to get them. A poor explanation but you get my point.
“That fact alone, shows why this country is doomed. “
Not necessarily...but it will take some skill and persuasion.
Yes, she is correct per usual.
Wow, You must be smoking some really good stuff.
Personally, I'm all for dropping minimum wage laws all together for anyone under 20 years old since they don't bring skills or knowledge to a employer.
They should take a lower wage to learn skills and knowledge so they can be a profit center rather than a liability
I did the same thing to get a job as a deck hand.
Tell a kid today that they will work for nothing for a couple of month before the make good money and they will laugh at you.
Doesn’t surprise me.
If you “got” the “Tea Party” revolution you would not be saying “she hasn’t even distinguished herself as a Congresswoman”.
You don’t get it.
I used to be surprised at the number of FReeper posts that read like the Tea Party does not exist and never happened.
If any place should understand politics through the prism of Tea Party, I thought it would be here. I was wrong.
But SOME of us here do.
This has been studied quite a bit and numerous such studies support Michele’s position on this issue. Here is a 1998 Policy Analysis by the Cato Institute: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa106.html Numerous other free market think tanks have reached similar conclusions.
Sometimes I believe you have to throw liberalism in the face of liberals to get the result you want.
Republicans should advocate for a living wage. Make it an absurd amount like $50 an hour.
All the Republicans would have to say is “you liberals think forcing employers to pay $8 an hour is good for the economy, then why not $50? why not $75 why not $100?
And then have a national debate on it.
People will then come to realize that a living wage or minimum wage doesn’t work.
Employers who support the Democratic Party would be then forced to confront their hypocrisy. Force socialists to deal with their socialism.
I think absurdity and irony are effective tools that could be employed to defeat liberalism.
People may think I am nuts for thinking this way, but so long as liberals are spending other people’s money and not feeling the effects of their own stupidity, nothing will change.
“If you “got” the “Tea Party” revolution you would not be saying “she hasn’t even distinguished herself as a Congresswoman”.
What does the Tea Party say about her record as a Congesswoman?? Like I said, I love what she says and how she says it, but IMO she is lacking in other areas.
I, too, am against the minimum wage both on principle and for economic reasons.
But I do recall that even as the minimun wage was becoming a “fait accompli” in our society, there was still an effort to exempt entry level workers, or teens in summer jobs, etc. When even that failed, I knew we were headed for trouble.
Rather than age-based exemptions as you suggest, I would prefer “inexperience” or “entry level job” or something like that as the exempt category.
But be that as it may, we agree it is a wrongheaded idea.
Early on within the company from which I eventually retired, I received permission to come back in without pay to help another department that was understaffed but an area in which I really wanted to work. A year later when an opening was posted, they asked me to fill it and I did.
Why don't media people and talking heads get it?
I will explain.
I thought it was self-evident but I was wrong.
The Tea Party is something she was and is a leader of.
The Tea Party is mainstreet Americans stepping forward and saying the ruling class, including far too many Republicans, have virtually destroyed this country. We mainstreeters now have to come forward and take our country back for the average Americans.
The Congress has virtually destroyed us. The Presidency has virtually destroyed us. These people have to be stopped by outsiders, which are actually the American People themselves from mainstreet America.
The ruling class cannot be left to themselves to continue ruining us until we are no more.
Michele Bachmann is in the Tea Party mode. To claim that someone who hasn’t risen in the insider ranks of the Congress to become acceptable there, is therefore lacking, just shows an incomprehension of the Tea Party.
Also, you have accepted the fiction that she has no other accomplishments.
That just is not true.
I have researched and found out what she has done that is good experience for running and serving, but I am tired of doing other people’s research for them. I have posted information about what she has done, and I am fed up with having to explain what she has done and why it matters, to people who simply hate her or who just blunder on in willful ignorance.
But it does help the UNIONS whose contracts are often based on an increased percentage of the prevailing minimum wage. That is what minimum wage increase are all about!
I have been to several Tea Party functions (no local, must go to nearby city) and Glenn Beck's too. I follow the Tea Party and admire and subscribe to their tenets. But this is a terribly important election coming and we need both a conservative and a leader wrapped up into the same person to pull this off.
Palin signs minimum wage bill - KTVA
Full story: KTVA Anchorage
Governor Sarah Palin has signed into law Senate Bill 1, which will increase Alaska’s minimum wage for the first time in more than six years.
I'm one of those who haven't done any research on Bachmann, not to say that I never will. Current impressions are I like her, but I also like Cain and Perry, who I think has the best chance of beating Obama.
Since she's evidently your first choice, and you HAVE done the research, why don't you just "cut and paste" that information on threads where it's appropriate.
Many of us don't read every thread, every day and we could benefit from your efforts.
Just a suggestion.
Star Parker is a truly gutsy lady, and would be an asset to the conservative movement wherever she wants to be. Just sorry I wasn’t able to vote for her last Nov, but she gave a good account of herself in a heavily D-rat district.
Doing away with the minimum wage is a good ideal, the day after and not one minute before the last illegal is out of the country, claiming you should have a free market in labor while the chamber of commerce wants to promote unlimited illegal labor, is about the same thing as the cotton plantations. And any one that believe that is a good ideal, would fall in the owner category.
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