Angles: Minimum Wage
Posted Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 11:29 am
• Over at Peaks & Pacific, Wordcat writes about the recently failed Senate bill to raise the minimum wage because of attached legislation to secure a permanent estate tax break for the wealthy.
• At HispanicPundit.com, he offers some facts that challenge how much a minimum wage increase will impact the poor.
• And at the Acton Institute Powerblog, they also slip in a little opinion about the minimum wage entitled, “Denial of Freedom & Duty” that addresses more of a faith view on government-inforcement of biblical values.
• And on a related note, from Jeremy Del Rio’s blog, a post from last month about the ghetto tax. Very good.
Check ‘em out. All very different angles.
August 16th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
Disappointed that you would intro Hispanic Pundit’s stuff as “facts.”
I especially enjoyed the following comment: “The minimum-wage job itself is, for most Americans, the first step on a long and successful career path.”
Nobody disputes that poor people get good experience that helps them in low wage employment.
And nobody disputes that most poor people rise above the 5 dollar an hour level eventually.
But when you start at 5 an hour you can get quite a few bump ups and still make so little that you can’t support a family. Wouldn’t it help most poor folks if they started at $7 an hour? Hard to believe that case has to be made among believers.
Why would a Christian person support a policy that would consign a huge number of people to pauper’s wages in the midst of the most productive economy in history? And when the gap between the well off and the poor is greater than at any time since the Gilded Age?
The Acton Institute stuff–which I’ve read before–strikes me as cartoonishly moralistic and abstract. Government is evil, personal responsibility is good, let folks pull themselves up by the bootstraps so that their souls will be safe, yadda yadda.
August 17th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
Tom - sorry about the “facts” intro. I was just trying to use his post title. While I don’t buy all of his argument, I do have some resonance as it relates to part-time labor and youth. Maybe its the Milenial generation thing, but the entitlement to high-paying, entry level work is pretty shocking when I hear some of my students talk about finding work. That probably has more to do with the attitude than what is a just wage.
As far as the Acton stuff, while I don’t think simplisticly that the gov’t is evil/bad, when a minimum wage increase is attached to a eliminating a permanent estate tax for the wealthy, it does cause me to wonder how equiped the political system of the US is to regulate wages. I know that makes it complicated - and once again, the poor get the short end of it - but that is where I resonate with the idea of limited gov’t.