Howdy Folks...
We’re often quick to blame something or somebody for an error or wrong they had little to do with. It’s that way with minimum wage legislation.
It’s easy to recall radio commentators excoriating the jump in minimum wage from 45 cents to 65 cents an hour – (and there were some before that … from 25 cents to 35 cents.) One wag said: If that’s all it takes – passing a law, let’s make everyone’s minimum wage $50 an hour.
Now nobody wants to be ‘hard hearted’ and begrudge a hamburger flipper extra money in his take home pay – but the problem is when wages are raised artificially – that is by fiat… the Congress merely saying what *will* be paid, the first to get hurt are generally the people who most need the help.
In cutting and pasting a chart for a client back in the sixties, on compensation. It was very easy to tell when new minimum wage legislation passed the Congress. At first wage rates of were quite comparable – but as higher and higher wages were dictated the gap between white and black youths widened. It really wasn’t the differences in their abilities – it came down to what employers were willing to pay – and that related to how much money each group could bring in. When white youths were valued as car hops or store clerks their wages went up and vice versa.
It’s an irrefutable economic law that the workers valued the least in terms of what they can earn get the lowest wages and are usually the first to be let go – and the last to be hired.
The Minimum Wage is generally ineffective in setting wages -- it also discriminates between males and females in most jobs.
Far too often those seeking to help, end up hurting the ones they want to help by ignoring and being heavy handed in their efforts. We’ve got a long way to go.
Cordially, IN HIM
Jack
“JUST A MINUTE”
LOOKING FOR WORK?
Just A Minute – Turns out it wasn’t the greedy oil companies or history’s most over-hyped recession that caused unemployment to jump by point five percent in a month… It’s six hundred thousand students suddenly looking for work -- students in April became unemployed in May. How did it happen?
Look under the Capitol dome. Last year dim-bulb Democrats and rocky-brained Republicans passed the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 – beginning a phased-in increase in minimum wages from $5.15 to $7.25. It isn’t rocket science to figure out there’ll be an unemployment spike among those lowest on the wage scale.
So pizza parlors, municipal pool employees, apprenticed house painters are shut out because businesses encounter big cost increases which they can’t afford – so -- voila! Unemployment -- the logical result of government set labor prices. That hits the most economically vulnerable every time. Surprised? Sorry … King Canute couldn’t command the tide to hold back either.
<> I’m
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Jebco Editorial Service
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Audio link: http://www.jebcovoice.net/audio/jama06-10-08.mp3
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